November 3, 2008: “Unde te duci tu, Ano” – Rehearsal One

Dear Friend,

Throughout my college career, especially during my freshman year, I would find myself waking up in my dorm room with the anxious thought that I wasn’t waking up at home. The speed of memory is fascinating, because once I had that anxious sensation – I’m not at home, where am I? – my memory would instantaneously remind me that I was at college. Two realizations that had really great impact on my mornings: I’m not home; I’m at college. Not that being home was a bad thing, but realizing that, in the course of my growth, maturation, and life I somehow, by the grace of God, managed to find myself out of high school and in college. A blessing, certainly like one I’d never experienced before. I’m in college, which provides me endless possibilities. Thank you, God!

Well, this morning I woke up with a similar anxious thought, only arguably more anxious than the one mentioned above. I woke up and realized that I was neither home nor at college. I was, in fact, not even in the United States! I was in Romania. I probably had this thought in London, but I can’t remember. This morning I clearly had the thought, finally after more than two months, that I wasn’t at home, I wasn’t at college, and I wasn’t in the United States. I was in Romania! How did I get here? Recount the circumstances, retrace the steps, remember Providence and you have a working explanation for how you are where you are, and in light of my going through this equation, the answer was quite humbling. As during my freshman year, I experienced the thought, then asked how it was I got there. That is to say, I asked myself, “What did I do to deserve this? What did I do to be granted this amazing opportunity?” Food for thought.

This upcoming Wednesday, A.R.T. Fusion will perform another forum theatre piece. The rehearsals are tonight and tomorrow night. I’ve been asked to sit in and share my thoughts. The play is called “Unde te duci tu, Ano” – “Where are you going, Ana?” It’s about volunteering. Specifically, it’s about Ana, a high school student interested in going abroad for a volunteer training convention. Volunteering is, as I’ve mentioned, not highly praised in Romania, so the oppressions are likely to come from many places. The play shows that while Ana’s friends are marginally supportive, her mother is not invested and concentrated on her own work, her brother is belittling, and her teacher downright opposed to anything that would take Ana away from her studies.

I had the opportunity to make suggestions during the rehearsal. The staging seemed very crowded in some of the scenes, to I helped by giving direction to the actors in hopes that the scene would appear less crowded. I also introduced the staging convention of “offstage focus.” Offstage focus is a very theatrical form of staging (academics would call it “presentational”) where actors interact with each other and other characters by looking offstage instead of at each other. The actors face the audience usually and pick a point in the air where they direct their focus. This “presents” the actor to the audience, it “presents” the interaction between characters. If two actors are onstage using offstage focus to interact with each other, for instance, the audience still knows that they’re interacting with each other, even though they aren’t facing each other. I suggested this as a way to clean up some blocking in the last scene, where one person was being upstaged by the other no matter how they tried to fix it.

I also gave some actor coaching by telling everyone that simply entering and exiting the stage isn’t enough. Instead, each actor had to find within his or her own character goals and objectives reasons for why their character is coming or going. These goals and objectives can be found in the script. For example, Horatio doesn’t enter onstage because the script tells him to. He enters onstage because Hamlet is onstage and he needs to tell Hamlet that the dead king appeared to him and the guards last night. Sounds simple, but when applied to everything a character does onstage it gets rid of a lot of extra and unnecessary movement.

The rehearsal went very well, and I felt pretty good about speaking up and giving advice. The others were also very pleased with my advice. I had been sitting off to the side during the run of the rehearsal, like a director, observing the movements and interactions through the movements more than the dialogue. Tomorrow we’ll get to see if these notes helped.

Blessings.
Kailen