Opening weekend under the belt

I owe a blog- I'm not going to mention how long I've owed this blog.

So opening weekend went off I'd say wonderfully. Sometimes I go into opening night worrying about 100 things, sometimes I feel completely confident and worry about why I'm not worrying. The Bacchae marks my first opening of just going into an opening night. I was too busy wondering if I was getting it to be woryring.

I am working with Meg who is a director I have always and will always trust, and four other actors whose work I have either admired for some time now, or just had the pleasure of getting to admire during our five weeks of rehearsal. A beautiful part of being a member of the chorus for this piece was getting to watch rehearsals- actively, and as a Bacchant (not how I watch most rehearsals I sit in on), -but still constantly watching and getting to see how each actor and character has grown throughout the process. It has been so exciting to see that I wanted to be able to sit outside myself and watch myself to see if I was doing the same, because there was so much exploration for me personally in this piece that I never noticed if I was growing or just finding many paths to explore without connecting them. I was warming up on opening night going over some new things Meg and I found in a one-on-one rehearsal the day before and thinking, "okay, things are starting to click for me now internally as weel as externally, and I think I am getting it and evolving into what our goal is" but I still wasn't completely sure when the lights went down and we started if my journey was clear to me.

One preview and four shows later I am now confident enough to say that this piece really has clicked in me. I found myself and my fellow actors finding new things each performance and building a tighter show. I've also been learning a lot from our audiences at our talkbacks. I can't wait to see what The Bacchae has evolved into by closing night. I believe this is a production I could revisit in rep for years and benefit from the learning experience every time.

"Somewhere, Euripides is smiling."

So, our first review is in, and it's a doozy!

Come see if you agree with Louise...

First photos

We've actually had some press in already, so hopefully you'll soon be seeing these pictures in print in a variety of local papers, but here are a few glimpses at the show.

Open!

Tech week somehow got away from us with no updates to the blog, but we're open, so I'm back.

Opening night was a little hectic - due mainly to the fact that Jerry Springer: The Opera was opening the same night and a slew of members of America Needs Fatima showed up to protest. Not the most effective protest I've ever seen - in fact I think they did more to boost tickets sales for the show than anything else, but still.... it is odd to show up for work with a slew of bored-looking nuns and children holding up signs praying for you.

But, on to our opening.

So far we've had a lovely first few shows, with very interesting audience response. The difference in having the audience in the room has been palpable: it always is, but Greek theatre is so much about public speech to the polis and engaging the audience in the arguments at hand that the effect seems magnified this time. I'm interested to watch this develop over the course of the run - to see how the actors develop and grow their connection to the audience as well as to each other.

I've also been very interested by the post-show conversations we've been having with our audiences - what they've latched onto and what they feel the play is saying. Please feel free to stay for the conversation after the show when you come to share your thoughts with us.

A good way to spend my lunch break...

I figure I can get away with blogging at work if I do it on my non-breaklike lunch break (meaning I sit at my desk and shove food in my face while still working)...and so...

Hello! I'm Melissa. This is my first show with Whistler in the Dark (well...not entirely true...I did perform in Feverfest '08, which was produced by Whistler...), I'm pleased as punch to be part of such a fantastic group of artists (Really...not to get all frou frou la la...everyone involved with the show is really wonderful. Truly talented, and supportive and just delightful...). This show, and the process of creating it has been really something (more on that in a minute).

What else do you need to know about me? Well...I hail from a tiny town in Connecticut, I moved to Boston almost ::gulp:: 8 years ago to go to school (at Suffolk University), after having enough of school, I stayed in Boston, and I now work with some pretty fantastic small theatre companies (Imaginary Beasts, National Theatre of Allston and now Whistler). I've always known that I was going to do theatre (except for a few months when I was 9 and wanted to be an archaeologist...) of one type or another...it's just something that's been in me since I was born. That may sound like a cliche...and it is...but that doesn't make it any less true. What else? Oh! I speak (and obviously type...) in run on sentences...and I'm very fond of ellipsises (ellipsi?)...though I don't think I use them the way they are meant to be used...

So, on to more interesting things. The Bacchae! How awesome is that? We are doing the freaking Bacchae! Seriously...awesome...

So, several weeks in to rehearsals now...it's a fascinating process to be a part of. The show is very physically demanding...I won't lie the first week was downright painful! On top of the physical stuff, it's emotionally draining (I mean really...it's greek tragedy...what did I expect?), it's exhausting to inhabit this world...but exhausting in a way that's really pleasant most of the time. I expected all of this going into rehearsals...Meg did kindly warn us that we'd be in really good physical shape by the end of the show...she wasn't kidding! Anywho...somehow I was still surprised by how drained I was at the end of each night...I'm better now (thanks for asking!), after three weeks (four weeks?) I finally find myself capable of inhabiting the world of the show, and my own world...though not concurrently...

I've learned a lot about a lot of things these past few weeks, and I expect to learn much more...sadly my lunch break is long over...so you'll just have to wait to hear about that!

Gotta love a cliffhanger.

Counting Our Stock

There's a wonderful section in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia where the young and mind-hungry Thomasina is lamenting the loss of the great playwrights. Her tutor, Septimus, reminds her to count her blessings that some were saved. And to remember that all that is lost may be found, or created, again.

THOMASINA: Oh, Septimus! - can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides - thousands of poems - Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

As I've been working in rehearsals over the past few weeks, this passage keeps ringing in my mind. How lucky we are that of those 19 plays of Euripides that we have, this is one! The beauty of the language, the drive and passion of the story, the strange humanity of all the characters, even those who appear for a brief 15 lines - in my mind, this is the culmination of what Greek tragedy was working towards.

Euripides wrote this play in exile. Towards the end of the Peloponnesian war he found himself at odds with the Athenian leadership and took himself North to stay with the Macedonian king, Archelous. During his exile he wrote The Bacchae, a play that serves as a warning that the life force in people cannot be bottled up and codified completely, and that if our societies reach a point where we try to contain that life, something - Dionysos - will emerge: a lifeforce so strong that it can upend the natural world and turn mother against son.

Euripides died before his play was performed. He died in a way befitting a character in his play: torn apart by the dogs of the king, whether by accident or by design is unclear. It was his son who brought the play to Athens and watched as it won first prize at the City Dionysia - an honor only bestowed on four of Euripides' other plays.

As we work on this play, I sometimes think of that audience - the first one who watched Pentheus rail against a God and be destroyed by it. This afternoon, we worked the Messenger speech - perhaps the most powerful monologue in the canon - and I thought briefly of what those Athenians in 405 BCE thought as they heard of Agaue and Ino and Autonoe tearing apart their young kinsman. And what our audience will experience as they experience the same speech, over 2400 years later.

It's about bloody time...

... that I write a post. Shakespeare's language has got nothing on the Greeks- as far as my understanding of it goes! No, in all seriousness this has been a great and exciting rehearsal process so far. I walked into the space two plus weeks ago apparently not remembering how to speak and convey words unless I yelled or used what has become known in our world as "the god voice". But through a deep analysis of the text at rehearsal and on my own I am remembering how to love the English language that we are so casual and sloppy with in our real lives.

On another "way past the moment meant to write about this right after rehearsal" thought but kept procrastinating, working with the mask on the first day we had it in the room was very mind altering. The first time I put it on I felt euphoric, partially from my poor breathing in the moment prior to me putting on the mask, but partly I think because I was taken aback at what it feels like to be in the mask. It has been quite a while since I have done mask work. I forgot those first moments of feeling disjointed from my own body as I explore another one, and unlike a class where you get to play in front of mirrors and take your time I was just jumping in. Not very much more to say about this except I am excited to further play with and meet Dionysos.