Made it through

Well, the first day was relatively painless. Actually, much to the contrary. We accomplished a lot in our tight schedule.

Firstly, we were able to get through all the characters and map out the accents for each. This is a pretty complex task considering there are so many of them. There are over 40 characters in the show (which is a little cut down from the full book), but not all of them have lines. In “full” productions of the play, there are usually extra lines written for these smaller characters to flesh them out, but we haven’t done that here in an attempt to be as faithful as possible to the original. I then got a chance to test out each one of them and figure out how much practice I’ll need to get each up to speed.

Then we worked through Stave 2 and the apearance of the first ghost. We had a bunch of discussions about the fourth wall and trying not to look too schizophrenic while switching characters. I think the whole performance will be like riding on top of the edge of a long razor, balancing each character and exchange with delicate equanimity.

We have a press preview on Monday night at the publicist, Kim Taylor’s house. Since I’m only doing 5 performances, it’s a great way for the press and special invited guests to get a sneak peek (about 10-15 min) of the show. Kim saw the need to assign me the task of bringing a dessert for the evening (I know she’s overwhelmed with preparations, but aren’t we all… ???) and it should be something authentic to the period. So I’m going into a Zen-dessert-making mode on Monday for a few hours. I’ll look at it as a therapeutic session to focus on my lines while I bake…