…Till opening night.

Starting this entry sitting on the ocean cliff, finishing a picnic on our sabbath. Once a week, some day, we require ourselves to take a day when the sole acts allowed are what’s pleasurable, creative, or otherwise energizing. The sea is a good place for that.

And for assessing where we are right now in this voyage.

The Tempest is indeed a play about voyages: a tormented exile, brought about by Prospero’s neglect of his own dharma, and Alonso’s trip to contract the political-convenience marriage of his own daughter. But for all the characters, and for us, a much larger voyage of discovery.

Thursday, our first rehearsal with the full (five-person) cast. A read-thru, then launched into blocking the storm scene. We have only six rehearsals in July, so it was both exhilarating and anxiety-provoking to get a concrete sense of the task ahead.

The read-thru reaffirmed my sense that what’s truly “magical” about this play is the characters’ epiphanies of amazement. For Miranda, the discovery of her whole past, the nastiness of the real world outside her narrow confines, the sudden lightning-stroke of love, the vision of “how beauteous mankind is.” For Ferdinand, the horror of loss, the panic of stepping into kingship, the joy of resurrection and, likewise, love. For Prospero, his first coping with truth-telling and with political decisiveness, his own culpability in neglecting his duties, his acceptance of his own darkness, and the terrible pangs and joy of forgiveness.

And in another vein: For Caliban, the possibility of freedom and its paradox, belonging. For Stephano, the brief window of power. For Trinculo, not being the lowest man on the totem pole. for King and courtiers, the dawning that chases “the ignorant fumes that mantle their clearer reason,” and the discovery of true selves after a madness, in the words of Gonzalo, “when no man was his own.”

It’s a voyage, as a film adaptation is aptly titled, to a forbidden planet. Forbidden, because our daily life shields us from this magic, the discovery of our true natures and wills. Not everyone returns happier from the voyage: Prospero sheds the hope of his most intense epiphanies—his very control of the elements—to take up his mundane political duties, where “every third thought shall be my grave.” Caliban sheds his prospects of liberation and goes off to make the bed and dust the window sill. Ferdinand and Miranda go forth to find a renewed world of love and union; and yet, somehow, the ensuing four centuries of blood and atrocity undercut, for us, the promise of this new Eden.

Still, the amazements grab our hearts.

•••

So this week:

• Our first of a total of 32 3-hour rehearsals total. Good start, with everyone about 3/4ths off book. Some trepidation as I see how cramped the stage space will be when we get five bodies moving in it, with puppets in front of’em. We need to do a lot of work, apart from the puppet manipulation, in sensing each other as dancers would, in using the dynamics of the space—contact improv without the contact. Good starts with the characterizations, though there’s a tendency to rush; and actors are still very much acting behind the puppets rather than through them. That will come.

• Finished mask fittings on everyone. Cut and did the first dyeing of the muslin for the set; after flame-proofing this week, we’ll hang and dye-paint the muslin. With David the costumer, we went through fabric, managed to get about 1/4 of the total selected. We’ve gone through three drafts of thumbnail sketches for the costumes, pretty solid now on most of them, still a few up for grabs. Ariel is giving us fits, and I think we’re not going to find the right line for him until we suddenly come across the right fabric—making a trip down to fabric stores in San Francisco this week.

• Hair now on five of the puppets, no headgear yet; still, they gain new life.

• Started experiments with video filters for approximately 20 video cues, and with Elizabeth finished talking through sound/music cues, about 90 in all. She has first drafts of four of the songs. She’s been struggling with our new sampler, an old model that works only with SCSI connections, so the process of interfacing with one of our old computers and old drives has occupied much time, but most of the bugs have been induced to depart.

•••

In the midst of all this, we’re preparing to attend the Puppeteers of America’s National Festival in Atlanta, GA, the week after next, and rehearsing a five-minute piece for their late-night cabaret. Using a couple of rebuilt puppets from RASH ACTS, plus a new dragon puppet who inexplicably pops up at the end. We’ll also teach a workshop there on dialogue-writing.

And after returning from the ocean, we drove to Santa Rosa to see the new Pixar film, UP—lovely animation, and in my humble opinion, a brilliant script. If you don’t like sentiment, well, it’s not for you. But to me it’s very much like Chaplin: rooted in reality, honest, funny, speaking to adults and kids alike—drawing the adults into child fantasy, stretching the kids into an adult world,—and replete with the same epiphanies of discovery and wonder that make The Tempest blaze.

Peace & joy—
Conrad