That's all folks

Final performance, done and dusted. Photo call a bit of a scramble. Lots of hugs after it was all over - I feel quite deflated now, but my poor wife is really unwell....

last lap

Two performances yesterday and the last performance this afternoon - phew!

nearly done

The weather was not great again tonight, but the show went on, and the house was respectable, if not spectacular. There were again some people from the Shakespeare Festival, and the man who was down to direct the play originally (that story is too large and complex for this blog). I was very pleased that he came, and touched that he brought flowers for Barry and for me.

There were back-stage conversations about the fact that we have not seen our director for a week now, and other murmurings about the auditions which have been taking place this week for next term - I'm really not involved in either of those issues.

What I do find interesting is that there were, apparently, some hiccups tonight in some scenes. I was quite unaware of them. But I did hear a cell phone go off, and we did have the (to my mind) inappropriate laughter at my non-fall from the cliff....

Middle School

That was interesting - they were not as lively as some groups I've worked with, but they had probably had even less sleep than I have had. We talked about whether or not I screamed enough when my eyes were being gouged out, and they may well have a point - on the other hand, as I observed, Shakespeare keeps giving me lines....

The show DID go on...

... and I thought it was a good show. The weather continued to be awful, and I turned down an invitation to an after-show party, because I wanted to get home - it is not a long drive to the campus, but conditions were very bad.

I've just phoned the Middle School, and they are open today, but 16 of the group could not get to the play last night. I'll see what the rest have to say about what they saw when I'm there in an hour and a half....

Weather...

It is snowing hard again now, with just three hours until the show goes up.

I am due to speak to a Middle School tomorrow morning, but I wonder if their group will get there tonight, and whether the school will be open tomorrow?

on the brink

The forecast said that there would be 10 inches of snow overnight - we got maybe three: not enough to close the university, but will it keep our audience away tonight?

Flat

I'm feeling a bit flat, and I'm glad we have a line rehearsal tonight to get me back in the mood.

We were out for supper on Sunday with friends who had either seen the play or read the review (or both) and that was very reassuring. We watched a film on Monday evening, and went to the equivalent of a pub-quiz last night, but I still feel a bit down today. It may well be compounded by the fact that the audio-book people have not get back to me, so I'm guessing I did not get that job....

There is an after-show party on Sunday night for Lear and Alice, but I'll give that a miss - I've not been to an after-show party for about thirty years!

The review is in

I am pleased by what it says, although I can imagine that the students playing the Fool, Kent and Cordelia will be disappointed not to get a mention...

February 20, 2011

By Bill Varble

for the Mail Tribune

"King Lear" is a play you don't want to mess around with. Its world is so pitiless, its action so dark, that the kind of tinkering that often goes by names like "re-imagining" would risk dampening its signal effect, which is a certain dread.

The new production that opened Friday night at Southern Oregon University, directed by Brent Hinkley, is a sprawling, take-no-prisoners version of Shakespeare's most nihilistic play, propelled by Barry Kraft's fine performance as Lear.

Hinkley and Kraft are professional actors at SOU's neighbor, a little thing you may have heard of called the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Although OSF actors often contribute work to SOU plays, I don't remember seeing one in a leading role at the college. One surmises that there are payoffs for theater arts students in working with the equity actors, and perhaps trade-offs, as well. You don't have a chance to play Lear, but you get to work with a master.

From the audience's viewpoint there's no downside; the presence of the pros lifts the whole thing. To see Kraft, as Lear, struggling to come to terms with his own foolishness on SOU's big Center Stage, transformed by scenic designer Sean O'Skea's magic into an impressionistic ancient Britain with massive, moveable flats, is such stuff as a lot of theaters' dreams are made on.

This is a big undertaking in every way. In an era of the two-person play, there are 30 actors and 14 speaking parts. There is the old king himself, one of the greatest roles in world of drama. There are swordfights, a raging storm, lightning and thunder, murder, madness, mayhem, body parts rolling around. The whole thing is listed at three hours and ran closer to three-and-a-half.

Kraft commands the stage when he's on, which is much of the time. Early in his imperious stage he wears a crown, the upthrust of which may remind you of Glinda the Good Witch. Crowns symbolize power and glory, so maybe the steroidally exuberant headgear suggests the old fool's inflated opinion of himself before his betrayal and fall. Hats aside, as Kraft descends into madness and gropes for some kind of redemption, this is a powerful, affecting Lear.

Gloucester, compellingly fleshed out by Geoff Ridden, anchors the lively sub-plot. When Lear and Gloucester meet on the beach at Dover, one mad, the other blinded, it is heartbreaking.

Zach Myers and Blaine Johnston shine as Gloucester's odd-couple sons Edmund and Edgar. Myers is oily and repellent as cardboard villain Edmund, and Johnston is noble (despite the play's misogyny) as the selfless Edgar, and weirdly believable in his sequence as whacked-out Tom O'Bedlam.

The other villains, Mallory Wedding as Goneril, Chelsea Mia as Regan and Levi Goodman as Cornwall, are thuggish and brutal and go about their dreadful work with relish. Cornwall's eyeball scene with Gloucester includes the plucked orbs squirting onto the floor, where in a nice touch they're later picked up by one of Cornwall's mob — a minor bit of housekeeping, don't you know.

It is moving in Lear's death scene to seem him grasp at straws as he tires to convince himself that Cordelia lives. But in his world there is no redemption, unless you count a certain splendor in the ashes.

What warts there be on this no-nonsense "King Lear" are minor. There are moments when some of the actor's speeches can't quite be heard, moments late in the play where the pace lagged. But this is a fine go at a monumentally challenging play — with all those young actors.

I never go to "King Lear" without wishing on some level, just for an instant, I could just be seeing "Twelfth Night" or something instead. But if it's good you wind up being touched, if not uplifted. It's a feeling a bit like having your eyes snap open at 3 a.m. to the sudden feeling of a bleak, indifferent universe.

two for the price of one

Having two different shows running at once has been a challenge. Alice is scheduled to open at 7.00, although a group arrived late and delayed it until 7.15 last night. It still means that they are all done before we have even got to our intermission. We have two different shows coming out of the backstage speakers and the result reminds me of a devised piece called 'Will Alice Play' that I worked on with Alan Knight back in the early 80s, and which was revived by him for the Chesil some 10 years later.

There has to be a word for it...

.. for that phenomenon whereby inanimate objects bug your performance.

I was doing OK tonight: there was a reasonable sized audience, with only a couple of people laughing at what I thought were inappropriate points, and then I tripped on the handle to one of the trap-doors (just before the intermission, to make it worse) and, in the second half, when blind, pulled out of my pocket not one but two purses, which had linked themselves together.

Maybe I really do need a break! We do our next performance on Thursday: I calculate that we will have less than an hour between finishing the matinee on Saturday and being signed in for the evening performance.

second night

There are all sorts of advantages in having Barry in the cast. He is a terrific actor, and we all learn a great deal from him. He is a lovely person, and fun to be with. His name brings in an audience, and he has friends who will come to see the show, who would not normally come to a University theatre. We've had quite a few members of the Shakespeare Festival in already, and that has to be good for the student actors - they are getting a chance to showcase their talents.

I was quite pleased with how it went tonight, but I shall be even happier at this time tomorrow, when I can look forward to having four Lear-free days.

PS

By the time we have completed tomorrow night's show, we will have run the play on 13 consecutive days. It will be good to have a short break before the final five performances....

found the script

I went in and retrieved my script - it was much easier to locate once the room was empty.

Tonight and tomorrow, there are two shows running in the building, so there will be more pressure on space backstage.

We came down at around 11.20 last night - too late in Winchester for a drink after the show, but not here, I'm glad to say!

We did it!

A great first night! It was mostly students, for whom it was an excuse to get dressed up and enjoy reduced ticket prices, but they were certainly enthusiastic (even if they laughed rather more than maybe we expected). The cast and crew worked their socks off and thoroughly deserved the applause and the plaudits at the end. I seem to have mislaid my script somewhere in the chaos of the opening, but I dare say I shall get it back....

Now we just wait for reviews, photos, and to sell tickets for the rest of the run.

Many of the cast are auditioning next week for the plays to be staged here in May: I won't be doing that, and I may not be doing another play for a while. But I do have the possibility of recording an audio book, and I audition for that this afternoon.....

slightly disappointing

We had quite a small audience last night  - perhaps 35 at most - and this was disappointing. I am getting the sense that some of the staging is perhaps too ambitious for so short a run, especially the complex light and sound plots and the scene shifting. The problem with such a large crew is that people can get in each other's way. We'll have to see how it goes tonight with what promises to be a much larger house. 

when to end a blog....?

It's the first preview tonight, the Gala tomorrow, and the official first night on Friday.

Maybe I'll end there, or when the reviews come out.....?

second dress run

That went pretty well too. Tomorrow we have a preview which is free to Theatre students.

We actually had a celebrity watching tonight - Bill Rauch, who is the Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I guess he came to see Barry and to see Brent's directing, but he stayed to the end, although not until the very end of the session (we spent quite a long time rehearsing the curtain call - why is that always so hard?). We started at running time and had the full intermission and came down at 11.15, which is pretty good.

I had fewer problems with props, but the syringe did not fire properly in the blinding scene, and the first cue light for Kent and myself did not go on at all.. 

First dress

That was different!

There was a costume staff of around ten, including three members of the faculty, and a couple of make-up people. It was a more relaxed set-up than I am used to, in that it seemed to be quite OK if decisions had not been finalised about how your costume might be changed for different scenes. I had some problems with my cape/cloak and these were addressed in the intermission, when we also took a view on whether my hat should stay on all through (no!) and whether my tunic was too tight to allow me to be blinded and wander on the heath (yes!).

I had some problems with props - my flaming torch broke in half, and the blinding scene became just a bit too complicated: I have a syringe of water (for blood) and two different bloody eye-cloths, one in the scene itself (the one that XXXX forget to bring on last week...) and the other that goes on between that scene and the one immediately after. It is the one for the scene itself that is the problem - I cannot guarantee to get it on right in the time available, and do the syringe and act the scene.....

answers on a postcard please.

Oh -and the run went very well indeed!

Weekend

It is strange how my misgivings on Friday somehow disappeared....

When I checked in on Saturday I was expecting negative notes from the director, but he was full of praise for my work on Friday, and hadn't noticed the problems with the blinding at all.

We had a very long day of tech, pinned in a small communal area which looked like a high-class refugee camp, what with all the blankets and laptops. There is another show running right now, so they had the make-up room and green room. I think some of my qualms on Friday resulted from the fact that there are a couple of people in the company who were irritating me - I've now found tactics to avoid them, and, on Sunday, we established a separate 'quiet' room where I think I can spend my off-stage time from now on.

It has got to that time when the tech people are working frantically to get their bit right, and the actors have to be patient with them. There were some tense moments on Sunday when different people wanted to assume control of the moment, but we did get through it all, and I think we are in good shape for the first dress run tonight. 

much better

OK, it's been a long day but I feel much better now, much much better

Bound to happen...

Last night was a poor one for me: I think I was actually doing better two weeks ago than I am now.

I'm not really helped by the line notes after each rehearsal - they are making me over-anxious about whether it is 'that' or 'the', and I'm not convinced that this is really so important....

The big problem over the past two runs, however, has been the blinding scene, with the young man who stands beside me forgetting both times to give me the bloody cloth: the first time the adrenalin got me out of it, the second I got unprofessionally annoyed and had to work very hard to get the rest of my scenes on track.

I didn't sleep too well last night.....

Getting very close indeed

The set is almost there, the fights are looking good, and we have pre-show publicity out:

http://www.dailytidings.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110210/ENTERTAIN/102100313&cid=sitesearch

We did a full run last night, halted only by the arrival of the biers for the corpses of Goneril and Regan.

It went very very well, but I am really tired, and the prospect of 5 hours tonight, 12 hours tomorrow and 6 on Sunday does not look appealing....

Losing track of the days

Not a lot of social time now at rehearsals - it's pretty much work all the way. Tonight that meant a fight call for 6.30, and then running the second half twice. I got some lines wrong, but (apart from one totally dropped line) I know the show would still go on even with the errors I made. Tomorrow I will get the MP3 player going again and again and again.....

We've got some nice stuff going with the Fool's hat, and I finally did persuade everyone who is with me in Acts Four and Five that I really cannot see anything after I am blinded - the bandage and the absence of my glasses means that my last three scenes are an extended trust exercise. Edgar almost let me walk right off the stage at one point (before I told him how little I could see), and Lear cleverly toyed with me as I tottered on the edge at another. I also got hit by something in the fight between Edgar and Oswald, and I trod on something (a knife?) being led off after the blinding scene. Scary.......

routine

I now have a post-rehearsal routine.

I drive home, put the garage in the garage, lock the door, close the garage door, take my vitamins, turn off the lights downstairs and retire to my study where I check my emails and unwind for an hour of so before creeping in to bed.... 

a game of two halves - actually the same half twice...

I can't quite understand why my knees hurt tonight. We did the first half twice, and I don't get to kneel at all in that part of the play.

I need to work on lines again - I took it too easy today, thinking that I only have to move the plot along a bit in this section. In fact I have quite a bit to say, and I was not on top form.

We also have a sick member of the cast, and so we had an understudy in tonight - she did very very well.  

I really liked this publicity shot of Barry on the university web-site

Luxury

I realise that I am the only person involved in this project who has no other commitment except the play. OK, I have domestic things, and a few university-related and choir-related activities, but the play is my prime activity until the end of the month. The student members of the company have classes, and Barry and Brent are involved in other plays, but I can, for the most part, rest during the day and think about my role.

getting close

The set is taking shape rapidly now, with most of the big panels in place, and about a third of the steps.

This week 'Alice' is running in the small theatre, so we have to be careful not to intrude into their space.

Last night's rehearsal took place without Lear, and was very fluid in its structure. Brent gave very full notes to the cast as a whole on the run-through last Friday. These were very helpful indeed - they took over 90 minutes. We then spent time on particular moments, trying to tighten up entrances and the taking-up of cues. 

I think I'm starting to get it, at last, how this theatre thing works.

Acting and singing are so much related. Brent wants us to know the lines, but also be prepared to un-know the lines so that we can say them differently in the theatre from the way we learned them at home: just like we learn the score in the choir. And he wants us to learn how many words we can deliver in a single breath - just as Paul, our choir director, wants us to do with the notes. They really are very similar activities.

Sunday free

The run on Friday went well, despite the fact that Edmund slipped down some steps while carrying swords, and that Lear had to sit for a while during the second half....

I have some concerns about the length of the show, but, thankfully, that is outside of my brief.

We had Saturday calls for work on some particular scenes, and it was very rewarding to work with Edmund and Edgar individually and to resolve some problems.

We have had some toing and froing over the schedule for the immediate future. We are off today (something called the Superbowl...?) and Barry is prevented by Equity rules from working tomorrow - but we will work around him, and start back on full-scale rehearsal on Tuesday

Getting tense

I'm getting tense in what I hope is a good way.

I had some frustrations yesterday before I got to the rehearsal - some to do with academic issues, some arising from a meeting about the choir - but the physical choreography of the blinding scene helped dispel those quite quickly.

Running the scene itself was certainly a complex procedure, and I am reliant on others to tie me up, to untie me and to give me the props I need. I could do it all pretty well last night, just doing that scene on its own, but I'm worried about how it will work in a full run - we shall see tonight. The big thing for me to get right is to sit properly and not to cross my feet while I'm being tortured....

The posters are up, and the scenery is starting to take shape....

seeing it differently

No call for me last night, so I got a whole day off. I did some housework, sat in the sun and read a mystery novel and had a couple of beers with a friend, then a leisurely dinner with Terry and we watched 'Nowhere Boy'.

Oh, and I thought about Act Four Scene Three. It's a short scene, and very very rarely staged, yet it has some of the most beautiful lines in the play - those describing Cordelia finding out what has happened to her father. Sadly, those lines have been cut, but the two actors in the scene were struggling with it on Tuesday, and asked me, if it was so rarely staged, why it was there at all. I thought about this, and wrote to them - it seemed to me that Shakespeare needed to assure the audience that they were not about to see the King of France onstage invading Britain. One of the actors in the scene got back to me to say that she had been working on the fear and urgency behind her involvement in the action: just goes to show - I think about why the scene is in the text, she thinks about what to do with it....

More work on the blinding scene tonight - I'll there there from six onwards.

Notes from the cliff

I feel very fortunate.

My cough is still an irritant, but I can do something about that. I feel a little stiff and sore, but I'm otherwise in good physical shape. The skies are clear and it is going to be another beautiful warm day. And I get to work on what is probably the best scene in Shakespeare, and maybe the best scene in drama - the 'cliff' scene in Lear.

We worked on it last night, and I learned so much. Shakespeare very often has his actors paint a verbal landscape (Gloucester does this in evoking the heath at the end of Act Two, most of the characters in Act Three develop this, and, at the beginning of Act Four, Gloucester describes the cliff he is seeking  at Dover) but here Edgar describes a landscape which does not exist, in order to deceive a blind man. Then Gloucester steels himself to commit suicide, only to find that he survives the fall, and has to still have that rage inside himself even as he swears that he will be patient in future. Then Lear comes on having lost his mind.... wow!

My job is to get the audience to believe in Gloucester's anger and despair, to make them believe that this man has lost the will to live and to deliver that one single speech with everything I can give to it, so that, as the director put it last night, Barry stands waiting to come as as the mad Lear and thinks 'How do I top that?'
I'll give it my best shot! This is such a privilege and I must not blow it.

Back on the heath

More intense and intensive work tonight.

I had a little back-twinge over the weekend, but it has passed now: maybe I just got over-anxious, having read that Sher book. Barry, however, really is moving quite badly, despite wearing a knee-brace - he's considering a cortisone injection. I should probably get some cough-sweets: my cough gets worse in the theatre and it irritates me, so it has to be annoying the rest of the company.

We got behind schedule - those mad scenes take work! - so I spent a couple of hours waiting to go on, and the net effect of that is that I get anxious about lines then: one of the reasons I feel happier about doing an actual run is that I get to speak very early on, and that helps my confidence.

It's good being off the book, but I realise how heavy these torches are: it's like doing weight training. And I have to work on not getting the torch in front of my face.

I got two words wrong, so I'll need to concentrate on lines again today - and the people from the Food Project did get back to me a while back to say that they did not see a link-up with the play being viable: their concern is food rather than shelter...