The Green Light

Lear has been approved for next season! Now that’s it’s gone from daydream to reality, it seems even larger and harder to wrap my brain around.

The board only raised one concern about the production, and it has nothing to do with the play per se: they warned me about the timing of the rehearsal period (November to February), pointing out that it is difficult to rehearse a large and complicated show over Christmas. In effect, they said, I’ll have to break from rehearsing after about three weeks, and resume another three weeks after that. That’s an obstacle, all right, but definitely negotiable.

There are (at least) two ways to handle it: either spend the first block doing text work, and then get on our feet in January; or else block the play like a speed demon without pausing to worry about text, intentions, relationships, etc. The latter would actually be more conducive to memorizing lines over Christmas—once you have the blocking in your “muscle memory,” it’s much easier to the lines into your head as well. But it expect it would make those first few weeks confusing and frustrating for the actors, especially those who are new to Shakespeare, and don’t have a firm grasp on the language yet.

The first alternative—“table” work in November—would be a much more gentle way to ease an inexperienced cast into what is (let’s not kid ourselves here) a very unsettling play. But it would make the second leg of rehearsals more hectic, as actors struggled to learn lines and blocking at the same time—scripts in hand, stumbling over their own feet, trying to use too many parts of the brain at once—I’ve seen it before, and it’s just as stressful, although maybe more familiar (some types of stress just come with the territory).

Hmm...I wonder if there might be ways to work memorization exercises into the text work? A couple of years ago, I discovered a wonderful book called “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates, which revealed secrets of memorization that go back to Ancient Greece. They are designed to activate the imagination by associating words with images, and by placing a series of mental rebus puzzles within a familiar architectural environment. For instance, you close your eyes and “walk through” the house where you grew up, and as you enter each room, there’s a sort of pictogram waiting for you that prompts you to remember your lines.

It sounds terribly obscure, but I might be able to adapt it into some sort of rehearsal exercise. Lear is so jam-packed with visceral images, it seems foolish not to use them, somehow.

Well, lots of time to mull that over later. For now, I need to start collecting a crew, starting with a production manager and a stage manager. And I need to start reading. So much has been written about this play, I’ll only be able to get through a fraction of it before rehearsals.