A Crackin' Day! Tues. July 20th

A big day- we went through most of the choral sections of the play, making leaps and bounds forward in our exploration and there were some very exciting moments.

Here's the company rehearsing a scene from the play- when the people of Thamesmead learn about Smackheaded Peter's vision of bringing peace on earth with low-cost heroin... (A little disturbing to rehearse this section in a church?)



This is a big, beefy beast of a play and it's challenging us all: creating physicality for the drug sections, playing large Choral scenes, taking heroin on stage... I'm also taking a conceptual approach to the play which, on a new play, is unusual for me...More about that later. The main experience from yesterday is that the "we're beginning to get there" feeling was emerging ... Yee Ha!

We had the full company together for most of the afternoon and it was delight to have the energy, focus and expertise of everyone in the room. Great strides, great strides forward.

We've moved into the church sanctuary this week: an accidental double-booking at the church. Although it's got it's challenges, (water dripping through some light fixtures and sometimes-smelly AC) it's also lovely to have the light from the stain-glassed windows in the room. It's a little odd to be rehearsing a play with a messiah-like figure in it, inside a church, but it may be helping...

Here's the Holy Family from Parkdale United Church



Lots of producing things to work on in the evening-

A cracking day!

Heroin and baby steps

Day One, Week 2

Slowly slowly, baby steps-

That's what I kept telling myself as we were working on the first two of three heroin hallucinations today.

It's a challenge to bring the experience of this drug



coursing through someone's veins into a theatre experience...

One of the fascinating things about this play is that a couple of the drug sections shift from an external perspective to an internal one- and while the person is hallucinating, there are plot points that happen, moving the character's emotion journey forward in the play.

Today we spent time exploring how to make the shift from the external perspective to the internal, how to show/share the sensations that Peter, (the heroin user) is experiencing and how to balance the interplay between his physical experience with his emotional progress during the hallucination.

Through the patient, slow exploration we arrived at what I would call 'a sketch' or an outline of the different components that will make up the first hallucination scene. Next time we'll explore each component more fully and then put the pieces together. It really is over an hour of rehearsal for each minute of stage time... Slowly, slowly, baby steps and trusting that the layers of investigation will accumulate into a rich, dynamic interpretation of the scene.

That was one portion of the morning. To finish the day, Bryan and I spent more time on another drug section.

This hallucination begins with a monologue that has a number of plot points, it also has a different feeling than the first hallucination and Peter narrates a large part of the 'trip', after shooting up on stage. However, what he's actually doing is recalling a hallucination, not experiencing for the first time; he is telling us about the experience and showing it to us at the same time.

I'm aware that there are traps to avoid; both the language and the physicality can quickly become redundant: we want the body and text to be communicating different parts of the story at the same time. Another trap to avoid is known as 'telling, not showing': if he stands there and narrates, that may not feel very interesting. On the other hand I don't want us to do us some bad physical impression of a heroin overdose... So, we explore the practicalities of shooting up, the sensations of a heroin high, we try physical work in silence, we try just letting the text do the work...It becomes a 'pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time' kind-of game and then, after about an hour, we arrive at 'a physical sketch' for this section. We'll come back to it again soon.

There's lots more to do on these parts of the play.

Day 3- Drugs, themes and possibilities

We start the day with the two drug sections that Andrew and I investigated yesterday. Just a small group of people, me, Richard Stewart and Bryan Demore. Lauren Williams, our stage manager is there as well.

We hop in the pool and swim around with the conversation that happens between Peter, (when he's experiencing heroin for the first time) and a character that called "The Voice" in the script. I've asked Richard to be the lead speaker for this character- and I also believe that we're going to involve more of the company to create this scene.

We have lots of imagining and debate about what and who the character of The Voice is...and we arrive at a fascinating option: The Voice is The Voice of Invisible Possibilities, Wisdom and Forces that exist in the universe, unseen. It seems quite a grand idea to arrive at while still sipping on coffee, but it also seems to make sense. And Peter, (who is 14 year-old boy at that point in the play), is too frightened to grab onto the 'tail of opportunity', so it leaves. Until a couple of days ago I'd always thought The Voice was just the voice of Heroin... but this new interpretation makes more sense, considering the themes of freeing the poor and social revolution that are in the play... For a social revolution to take place, we need to believe that change is possible. And sometimes, in struggling with poverty, change just doesn't feel possible.

We've talked a fair bit in rehearsal about the physical experience of poverty- what does 'grinding poverty' feel like? I've had the experience of working with teens in under-privileged areas in the UK and it's awful when you meet young people who feel trapped by a lack of possibilities in their lives and trapped by a lack of money... This feeling of being trapped, being stuck in the 'sweet and sour misery' is one of the themes of the play... And freeing the poor from that dis-empowered misery is another.

So, we power through the second drug hallucination and it's all making sense now! We're ready to get this mamma of a scene on the dance floor and shimmy, (but that rehearsal is for another day).

The afternoon is more fun with Paul Tessier as Pollack the Lawyer- Pollack visits his client Smackheaded Peter in Wormwood Scrubs Prison. It's an old Victorian prison, in London, notorious in the UK for overcrowding... here's a picture from the Victorian era; the cells are still the same size, but have (at times) had four men in them, 23 hours a day.



After the scene work we have some excellent free play with Bryan's monologues (as Smackheaded Peter) and before we know it- it's time to go home.

A thought-provoking day...