Back from the Atlanta puppetry festival on Monday, jumping into intense tech work the next day. It was with some anxiety that we took a week out of production work to attend this, but it’s felt worthwhile. Not anything specially learned from seeing or conversing, but just an opening of the vision. The pressure of production tends to force a progressive narrowing, an attention to detail, that makes it very difficult to step back and see things with fresh eyes. Of course The Tempest was always in my mind, but being unable to take the narrow focus—e.g. gluing on Ferdinand’s hair—I think I started to feel more viscerally the intense swings of the play, its musical balance, and the need to find how the audience can be drawn into intense connection with Prospero, not just watch the old fart emote.

We now—thank ye, o gods—have a Stage Manager, starting Aug. 3. A standard practice for our SM is to have a daily “note sheet” that has little boxes for Things to Do: if, during rehearsal, I mumble, “We need to widen Trinculo’s neck” or “So there’ll be a special down left when you enter,” the Stage Manager notes this in the box marked Puppets or Lights (or Set, Costumes, Audio, etc.) and then hands me the sheet at the end of rehearsal so I remember everything that’s come up that needs to go on the worklist.

So here I’ll use this structure as a way of reporting not what we need to do, but what we did this week:

SET
Finished the 14 pieces of text fragments, projected onto pieces of canvas, which were then inked in, the edges frayed and then burnt with a butane torch, then appliqued onto the set by strips of heat-adherent. A huge task of dye-painting the set still remains, but this is the start of it.

Elizabeth worked on the track for the rear curtain, but we found that there was some glitch in its smoothness, causing the curtain to jam, and so the whole thing has to be taken down and rebuilt. And then a pulley system built. She’s not happy about this. She can recall countless experiences from early childhood where she’s taken on tasks that seen insurmountable, impossible, and she goes through a hell of anxiety … and then figures it out. That’s the way it works.

For myself as well. I finish the appliques, then look at the whole set and think, “I haven’t even begun.” I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing next. I’ve decided to do the whole set painting with dye, and that’s unforgiving. I’ll figure it out next week.

COSTUMES
David brings in the first costumes: Boatswain, Ship Master, and Caliban. Good start. The process of “fittings” with puppet costumes is unique. They don’t have to fit the body—the costume itself is the body—but finding exactly the right place for the slits for the puppeteers’ hands, and how the neck relates to the shoulders—these are tense moments. We work stuff out.

Next up will be the costumes of the Neapolitan court, but also Prospero’s dressing. We’ve come to agreement that the puppet Prospero (“island Prospero” we call him) will be light in color, very plain, and the “magical garment” he asks Miranda to remove (after the Tempest) will be a hood with magical symbols. But this is not his true magical garment. That’s the robe of the live-actor Prospero, the same dark gray that’s the basis for Caliban’s clothing. It’s a heavy, hooded ceremonial robe, plain in the front (offering a neutral background for the Prospero puppet) but with a back covered with magical symbols.

The costuming design is by necessity collaborative, as we’re creating both heads and bodies of our characters. So we’ve gone back and forth with thumbnails, influencing each other. And as I email a scanned image of my ideas for those magical symbols, I suddenly see these as mirrored on the rear curtain that opens to reveal the video projections. We see those symbols first on this curtain, then on Prospero’s back as he conjures up the Tempest, and recurring through the play.

What do the symbols mean? Well, the caduceus is the most important for me, and it has to do with balance & healing. Visually, it presents a powerful spine. For the rest of it, the figures are taken from alchemy, and for all I know, they say “Drink Coke” or “Eat at Joe’s.” But for me they have a form that’s true.

PUPPETS
All but three puppets now have hair, and what a difference it makes. I love Alonso.

Miranda’s hair will be mostly hidden by her cowl. Ferdinand’s is just adapting an existing wig, main challenge being to keep it full and romantic but not to make it too feminine. Got a start on this about an hour ago. Prospero is the demon: I have a perfect match for my own hair—he’s intended to look exactly like me—but it’’s not on a wig cap, just on some kind of cord, and adhering it will be utter hell. So I’m procrastinating.

The other vast challenge, already procrastinated upon, are the five Ariel heads. The first stage here is to find the right head-dressing, and this week things have started falling into place. Our costumer Dave brought in some cheap China-made plastic grass-shoots of various ilks, and combined with thin foam-rubber cut-outs, I think we’re onto something. A trip today to craft stores yielded a bunch of great stuff. Now I’m faced with the problem of how to adhere it: epoxy glue won’t adhere to the kind of plastic these are made of, so we’re plotting exotic combinations of epoxy and hot glue, maybe combined with fervent prayer.

And two of the Ariels have been completed: the Sea Nymph and the Harpy. Their plastic foliage gives a wonderful movement, the Harpy suggesting flames, the Nymph a kind of slow undersea quality.

CAST
Two rehearsals this week: schedules make possible only six in July, so I’m trying to tackle the scenes that offer the biggest challenges. Best to start out being stupified rather than wind up being stupified.

One night devoted to the accumulated throng of Act 5, the problem being how to gather 12 characters on the stage when you have only 5 puppeteers. The other, the enchanted masque of Act 4. What’s this all about? Why does Prospero suddenly end it?

Some discoveries. Having the detailed scenario (see previous entries on this blog) has been absolutely essential. But of course when you actually go into rehearsal, it’s a new ball game.

• Great potential power in moving from the puppet Prospero to the living Prospero. This movement within the “revels” speech, as he follows the logic of what’s intended to be a speech of comfort into something as dark as Beckett.

• Choreography of the clowns as the dogs attack, quite absurd until we see that there’s real pain involved. They wind up in a heap, with sudden jerks as of electroshock. Just finished building the dogs: silly and horrific at the same time.

• Sketched in the barest start of the masque. Starting just with hand shadows for Iris, then a full-scale shadow of Ceres appears on the screen, then a dance between Juno and Ceres. Ceres disappears, Juno turns, and for the first time we see (in shadow) that she’s pregnant. She stoops as if to deliver, and the shadow of Caliban’s head rises up. This all assumes that we take Prospero literally when he explains that the spirits “enact my present fancies.” His fancies and his nightmares.

We’re beginning each rehearsal with the actors’ exploring their own puppet characters, focused on making them breath, giving them a sense of independence, and developing a characteristic gestural vocabulary for each. These puppets live in the dynamic between head and hand, and while gesture must be sparing, it must be very specific, not the vague, generalized emphasis-wave that most actors indulge in. We each work privately for five minutes, then show what we’ve come up with, trying to integrate it with the voice and the phrasing.

So it’s Monday evening and time to go back to gluing Ferdinand’s hair.

Peace & joy—
Conrad