A productive workshop Sunday. Eight actors in our chilly studio amid the debris of Rash Acts, opening in a bit less than three weeks.

Warmup with actors in duos doing leaderless mirror exercise, vocalizing the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. A tendency to pull back from the vocalizing, but when it’s given full rein it informs the energy of the physical action, which reciprocally extends the voice into more radical expression. For this production, we need to get past the preconception that a full vocal expression is somehow fake or stagey; it depends entirely on whether or not the expression is grounded in intention and interaction.

We continued into a sound/movement exercise within the 8×10 ft. stage frame, first with the actors in groups of three, then with the actors carrying puppets — the puppet as an extension of the actor, his center of consciousness. It’s freeform movement with the simple direction that every impulse must come as a response from another’s starting or stopping, and exploring the gravitational dynamics between the actors and the empty space. It’s a bit like a time-lapse billiard game, and the intent is to build an instinct for finding organic unity, as if the whole stage were the window into a single dream. We add vocalization, and then direct the actors to be conscious of their stage as a picture-frame, with the puppets aware of the special energy of frontality, as if the front were toward the sunlight, upstage toward the dark.

(Note: All the puppets pictured here are from old productions, used here for rehearsal but not as those we’ll actually use.)

My hope is that by the time we get to actually blocking out the movements, the actors can instinctively make responsive adjustments in relation to one another. We’re also expanding the puppets’ movement vocabulary, allowing them to swoop, to fly, to skate and dive. Shakespeare’s scenes must be based in real behavior, but in a way analogous to his use of the variants to iambic pentameter: we can make sudden swoops away from it into broad metaphoric extravagance, as long as we return home to the real.

Then we spent about an hour reading the first Prospero/Miranda scene. Irrespective of gender, we each, around the circle, read a line or two or three or four, whatever formed a coherent unit, with focus on a verbal paradox. On the one hand, the lines must be read so as to flow coherently, often through many convolutions, to a clear point. On the other hand, there’s a reason for line divisions: for sometimes landing squarely in iambic pentameter, other times hitting a stress on the first word of the line or ending on an unstressed word, even on a preposition. As a reference point, we used Peter Hall’s suggestion that there’s a pause at the end of each line — or maybe the better term is an impulse, a catch-breath, a micro-beat, a caesura or prolongation, something however small that makes the line division clear.

The point of this rather arbitrary notion is simply in what it can reveal. Suddenly, you become aware of the extra kick this may give to the start of the next line, or the change of timbre or inflection required to mark the end of the line and yet still preserve the flow of continuation.

And in the process we became fully aware of Prospero’s obsessive through-line of narrative, paradoxically jolted by his equally obsessive digressions. And the strong rhythmic linkages between the characters wrought by one’s response completing the other’s metric line. This is hardly a scene about a loquacious Prospero and an inattentive Miranda: both are keyed to the extreme.

In the final hour, we explored staging the scene. A dilemma: in puppet theatre, you’re carrying a puppet, so before you’ve memorized the lines how do you carry a script? Today we tried a new method. I rewrote the entire scene in eight lines:

-Father, stop the storm.
-No problem.
-Please.
-They’re safe. I need to tell you now.
-What?
-I was Duke of Milan. My brother overthrew me. We escaped here.
-That’s terrible.
-I shipwrecked the conspirators. Now sleep.

Shakespeare did it a lot better. Still, getting past the urge to burlesque it, this follows the frame of the scene. Again, we divided into duos, everyone allowed ten minutes to stage the scene, memorize the lines, and then present it.

It’s high pressure work, but unthreatening: no one expects a final product. We look at the work to see what seeds are there that might be nurtured. And we found a lot, sometimes images, sometimes questions. A few of these seeds:

* Have they both been looking at the tempest together? Has Miranda been forced to watch, as she’s forced into the company of Caliban?
* Her extreme shock at the sight. She’s not a weeping willow bemoaning the poor souls; she’s almost lightning-struck, with powerful, stark gestures.
* Prospero tries to soothe her with words, but never looks at her. He is always dominant, never speaking to her as a peer, but rather obsessed by his own memories and intended scenario.
* It’s in response to her trauma that he is moved to narrate his story. He knew it must happen but perpetually postponed it. Now he’s exhausted, and it’s the wrong time to tell it, but it must be told.

* When she first approaches him, he’s still in the last throes of his magical concentration. She’s horrified that she can’t seem to get his attention. When she collapses in despair, he finally becomes aware of her.
* They rarely touch, and when they do it’s charged with special meaning. As the father of an adolescent girl, hyper-aware of her sexuality, he would restrict himself rigidly. In this scene, perhaps not until the final moment, when he conjures her asleep.

* At the end of the scene, Prospero suddenly senses the imminent presence of Ariel and must therefore put Miranda to sleep: magic is not for her to see.
* The moment of putting her to sleep: he grasps her forehead, slowly lowers it into sleep. It’s a loving and tender gesture, but also creepy in its distance and dominance.

So we go forth.

This week, I put together a prototype of a new mode of puppet head that we’re likely to use for The Tempest, a papier mache casting that allows the whole fist to go into the head, with the puppeteer’s wrist serving as the character’s neck. It’s very light, and the head has exactly the same mobility as a real head on a neck. And also I’m in process for a prototype for the Spirits’ masks, modeling one on my own plaster face cast to get a sense of how to place the eye sockets and the mouth opening. Haven’t started yet on the three lumps of clay our intern Danny has put on the modeling stands, but they’ll soon start sprouting into Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian.
Well, and then there’s Rash Acts, opening in two and a half weeks. Starting to look interesting.

–Conrad