Starting Work

I am going to work with Mitch, Blanche, Stella and Stanley for two weeks before adding the other actors. My hope is to focus on the details of their circumstances, environment, objectives and also to get the senses and the imagination involved. I'm using a mixture of various physical exercises, improv, table work, and working through the scenes. Last night:

1. 7pm Spent an hour doing Lee Breuer's "Walk Through Your Life" exercise (courtesy of a workshop I took with JoAnne Akalaitis). The actors walk through the space focusing on an image from each year of their lives. It takes one minute per year. The aim is to connect with your past, seeing images from it and feeling changes in the body. It took 34 minutes, since the oldest actor is 34. Then I had them write in journals about how something they remembered from their own lives might connect to their characters.
2. 8pm An hour writing and discussing basic character info: from script, inferred, or invented. Things like name, age, family history, occupation, etc. We also made a stab at identifying a superobjective for each character.
3. From 9-10:30pm, we went through scene one, skipping the Eunice/Blanche scene. We tried to think carefully about things like time of day, characters' mood before the scene, reaction to environment and each other. Closed by writing down objective for that scene.

Tonight I will do some exercises to start establishing physical contact and trust among the characters, then tackle another scene.