11:11 Theatre

So okay The Seagull is coming up.  I wish we had documented this whole process a little more.  It’s been really fascinating.  I actually wish there was footage for all of it, from the first read through on.  We are now at a point where new ideas and concepts click together for the cast and come out like a barrage of epiphanies.  Everyone is connected.  Even offstage actors are just leaning in waiting to see what happens next. That is where we are now and it seems as though if you were to just watch it, that the cast had always had that kind of connection.  It did not.  Our first read through was really good.  But we were all not really sure where to go with this mammothly great play.  There is a sense with the classics, almost a Catcher in the Rye syndrome, you’d have to either be brilliant or insane to think you can pull it off in some sort of new and interesting way.  I think we were definitely neither.  We knew the play was funny.  We knew the play was dramatic.  We knew we had a budget of under a $100 to do it.  I have always wanted to do this play, but directing it sort of fell into my lap at the last minute.  We have approached The Seagull in an odd way, by not making it an elephant of greatness we have to carry around the stage.  Our Seagull is simple.  There’s no big concept.  We’re just telling a really good story and hoping we tell it really well.  Many Seagull productions are a graduate thesis wrapped around some actors.  This is not.  I think our set is for the most part, four benches.  The costumes are garment district specials.  Nothing glamorous.  To be honest, I don’t think I would know how to direct a big production, I don’t think its in my skillset.  The whole production has been going okay, solid, cool, but nothing to write home about.  Good actors doing somewhat predictably good things.  I was a little nervous that we weren’t going to make it interesting.  So the other night we got kicked out of our random classroom of our random college.  So here we were on the night where all the actors had brought in every costume and prop they had from their living rooms and basements.  It looked like Salvation Army blew up, on top of having snuck in four wooden benches.  We have moved all the chairs to the back wall to make room for our makeshift set.  We get kicked out because a giant sorority council has a meeting.  So we’re like “oh fuck.”  So we moved all our shit, which is like collassal, out into this random hallway in this big campus building and start doing the Seagull.  Gaggles of sorority girls stream by the whole time coming from and going to this meeting.  All of them are loud.  They each stare at us, sitting in the hallways on these friggin wooden benches, in period costume . They do not stop screeching and chatting, they just stare.  Half way through, right as Constantine pleads to Sorin that theatre needs new forms, the sorority meeting lets out.  Imagine for a moment the sound and image of seventy almost identically dressed and sounding girls pour out of this room at once.  The noise is deafening.  The movement is deafening.  Security guards and cleaning ladies scurry back and forth.  And this is the moment where the cast, especially Constantine, decides to connect.  Over the din of these girls, Evan just lets loose.  And I can’t take my eyes off them.  And there it is, in the most random spot you could imagine, our cast finds the truthful voice of their characters, how they really sound, how they really feel.  So they’re there now.  I guess the job is to keep that momentum going into next week at the BCA and whatever that brings.  We’re lucky to have some really good actors this time around.  We got Wayne, whose only work I have seen before casting him, was an exceptionally tall Marcus Lychus for Boston Theatre Works.  He seemed an odd choice, but he had a really good audition, and makes for a fantastic Trigorin.  Lorna, our Arkadina, is awesome, both as a person, and to watch.  You can tell she enjoys acting.  You can also tell she can tear the roof off the stage with her acting if she wants to.  But she’s humble.  We got a lot of guys in this cast who were in Panoply, our last show.  They’re a good rowdy bunch.  All peeps you love to work with.  Funny and energizing.  This is a show where the actors are worth the price of admission.  All of them.  They got a show.  We’ll see what we do with it.