Tech Week

Yesterday morning I found myself sitting at my dining room table, shoving aside scraps of velvet and silk lining and strips of custom-made bias tape so I could take a scalpel to Twelfth Night. It is Tech Week, and it is the time to face up to the fact that the show is too long, yea, even if we were fully-memorized professionals speaking at 1.5x normal speed. We are not fully-memorized professionals (though we're not far off, if I may brag on my actors), and we've had far fewer weeks to rehearse, six hours a week until now, than professionals who can be in the theater eight hours a day. I'm proud of my cast and their efforts, and it's my job now to cut away the dead weight so they can fly.

The first thing to go was the music. I worked hard on adaptations of the songs in the script, but they've always been superfluous, though fun. This is no time to succumb to the Sunk-Cost Fallacy. We shall sing them loudly at the cast party, maybe, or perhaps their main purpose was to give me experience for future shows. This wins us an easy five minutes of run time, and uncomplicates a few scenes.

Improving the pace of a show is not about cutting all slower scenes. Many of these are crucial for character development and for the tempo of the play. Rather, I look for areas that bog us down. Feste the Clown's lines are full of speeches like this -- stuff that was effortlessly funny to Shakespeare's audience, and means nothing to us any more. I kept a few notable examples of Feste's characteristic wordplay, and cut everything else, especially lines that we were still struggling with. Some conversations I trimmed down to their main thrust, keeping the first lines and cutting the excessive flowery stuff which had always weighed us down. I did not lose any of the famous quotes ("If music be the food of love", "In nature there's no blemish but the mind", "Some are born great..."), but let's face it: there's a lot in Shakespeare that's forgettable, unless uttered perhaps in the mellifluous tones of Patrick Stewart or Kenneth Branagh. If it was unmotivated verbal set dressing, out it went.

It was a painful process, but cathartic, I guess. And it was not as hard to implement at rehearsal as you might think at this late stage of the game. We simply stopped fighting with lines we had been banging our heads against since the beginning. The result is a funnier, faster-paced show with more comfortable actors. We're still not at 100%, but we're much more likely to get there by Friday night than we were before.

One more element that will gain us some peace of mind and help the show keep moving: a prompter. At least one character will be walking the stage during performance with a book, and that is perfectly fine with me. But many of us might need a boost during the show. Having the safety net of a prompter allows us to take risks and go bigger than we could if we were still clutching to the lifeline of uncertain memory. I want a show that is emotionally truthful, not technically, desperately line-perfect. 

I also want sleep, but that will come after this weekend. Until then, Illyria!