Story and Photos by Milo Zinser-Trudel
@milozinser
Monday: Casting
When I first arrived at the Powerhouse Theatre, it took me two minutes to find the door. This was apparently a common problem. The Powerhouse was originally a furnace building for Waveny House, and if that seems like an unusual place to hold a theatre performance, that’s because it is. The entire building could probably fit in most high school auditoriums, and the stage is so close to the audience that you can hear the front row breathing.
I was there, with about three dozen other people, for Dramafest, NCHS’ annual showcase of plays written, directed, and performed entirely by students. I had submitted a script with my friend Ari in December, and to our surprise, it was accepted. We called it “F+O,” and it was a short sketch about an impossible physics problem. Now, on Monday, we had exactly four days of rehearsal before performing for an actual audience.
After a brief orientation from Theatre Coordinator Chris Myers, we plunged headfirst into casting the plays. With the other six directors, I had to sit in the theatre and watch as the student actors (including Ari, who has a level of confidence on stage that I can’t fathom) read excerpts from the various plays. This wasn’t an experience any of us enjoyed. But after two hours, we had the casts put together.
Tuesday: Rewrites
Easily the most surprising thing about Dramafest was the sheer number of decisions that needed to be made each day. As soon as Tuesday afternoon rehearsal started, I had to decide on a.) costumes, b.) furniture, and c.) lighting. The only common element of those three things is that I know nothing about them. I still don’t know if I made the right choices.
So by the time we reached the actual rehearsing part of rehearsal, we were halfway through our allotted time. We were only able to read through the script once, but that was enough to realize that large parts of it needed to be changed.
When you write words on a piece of paper, they only need to sound good in your head. When people read them aloud, that changes completely. Every little flaw jumps out. I realized that I’d failed to separate stage directions and dialogue (not great), used the word “relativity” about ten times in a minute (worse), and written a monologue that would’ve been impossible for Ari to memorize by Friday night. And that was just a small sample of the issues.
I spent much of Tuesday night (and technically Wednesday morning) removing and replacing the offending passages. No, I will not be answering questions about my sleep schedule.
Wednesday & Thursday: Dress Rehearsals
Our Wednesday and Thursday rehearsals followed roughly the same schedule. We started at the top of the show and performed it as we would for the actual performance. The goal was to get through it without the actors forgetting their lines or the stage crew having any mishaps.
Our group didn’t do that. Ari was still (understandably) struggling with his two-page speech, and we wound up rewriting it in the dressing room after both rehearsals. Other than that, every play’s cast had their lines memorized. The real trouble came from blocking. As it turns out, it’s very hard to choreograph movements so that they look natural, while also being simple enough to memorize. I resorted to telling my cast to improvise, thinking that as long as they were mostly in the right places at a few key moments, everything would go fine. More on that later (spoiler: it didn’t).
Side Note: If you bring a camera to dress rehearsal, you’ll see quite a few middle fingers pointed your way. I would like to publish those, but the Courant has “standards”.
Friday: Poems About Decapitation
Apparently, actors warm up with a poem about having their heads chopped off. I learned this when I entered the dressing room an hour before our first show. I was greeted by twenty people chanting, in a huddle:
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock,
In a pestilential prison with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.
Following that initial surprise (theatre kids are just going to be theatre kids, I guess) everything ran mostly without a hitch. Everyone ate, got dressed, and was ready to perform at 5:00.
I don’t really remember any of the first three plays from that first performance. I was too busy panicking about mine. In the rush of rewrites and dress rehearsals, the preshow speech that each director had to make slipped through the cracks. After writing one on my phone in a rush, I stepped onstage to say it, and totally bombed. But, enough about that. The audience was there for the actors, and my speech didn’t matter nearly as much as the show.
That show was messy at best. One missed line early on snowballed into my actors missing cues, which in turn caused the lighting team to miss theirs. Also, remember how I told my cast they could make their own blocking decisions? That was a bad idea. The play was okay, but it came off as confusing and weirdly paced.
I can, however, say that the last two plays were very good. Following those, Ari and I held an emergency cast meeting to try and set up blocking for the second show. There was a general feeling of anxiety: the first audience had been mostly students, the second show was the one our parents would see. We tried to bring out the parts that had gotten laughs in the first show, particularly an improvised fake slap. I told Julia, the actress who came up with it, to do it again, and to try and drag out the scene more.
Our second performance went a lot more smoothly, up until the slap. The lines leading up to it were fumbled, and the scene looked like it was falling apart. Then Julia came through, improving on her improv from the first show. And then she reached the fake slap… and didn’t fake it.
Supposedly, the magic of live theatre is that something different will go wrong every time. I don’t think I believe that. To me, it’s what made the couple of seconds after Julia’s slap incredibly nerve-wracking. For a moment, it looked like most of my cast was having trouble staying in character. In the video, you can see them start to laugh.
Thankfully, they managed to pull it together and finish the sketch. I was too focused on worrying about actors breaking, but I watched the NCTV recording of the show and was surprised by how good the whole thing looked. For nearly an hour, the crew held together an almost completely seamless performance.
Anyway, now it’s time for the obligatory shameless plug: NCHS Theatre is incredible. Even if you’ve never done any kind of performance before, give it a chance, onstage or backstage. You might be surprised.
