Theme Song: "Behind Blue Eyes" - The Who
Hot off the heels of our first collaborative directing projects, Chris has finally given us the news we've been eagerly anticipating and dreading all at once: "For your final project, you will direct a contemporary 10-minute scene or one-act on your own. You will have five weeks from concept to performance." Make it work!
CHOOSING A PLAY
Given my luck, there are 14 people in our class but only 6 books of 10-minute scenes available in the library, all of which have been checked out. CURSES!! Desperate to find a play, I manage to borrow a book from Amanda entitled, Showtime 1994 Act One Festival. As I flip through play after play, I only find two of them remotely interesting: Wish Fulfillment, a scared teen's over-the-top visions of coming out, and The Other Five Percent, a Halloween tale of an overprotected girl's horrifying night in the big city.
After my 1st choice is taken (ARRGH!), I start looking for the layers of meaning in Bryan Goluboff's The Other Five Percent. What originally draws me to the play is its OPENNESS, its lack of explanations, a veritable tabula rasa w/ room for experimentation. Being a fan of surrealist art, I decide to go the artistic route. I originally envision a theater with 15-foot strips of caution tape hanging from the rafters, colored light fixtures, and a fog machine (to create the illusion of a manhole) to create a whimsical feel--a blatantly fake aesthetic to create a Manhattan backstreet that could only exist in a nightmare.
THEMESWhen explaining the gist of the play to my directing comrades, I hold up a Guy Fawkes mask (from V For Vendetta) as my main image. I feel that the play's biggest message is about false appearances, and the about the power of the mask; it not only gives people something to hide behind, but also emboldens them to do things they would never do normally. Along the same lines, the song that sums up my play would probably Behind Blue Eyes by The Who, a song about deceptive appearances. Seen in countless novels/films, the play centers around the classic conflict of appearance versus reality.
CHARACTERS / CASTING
AMY, the defenseless pussycat, strikes me as a naïve teenage girl trying to grow up too fast. She’s overprotected by her family and she wants to prove that she can take herself; she doesn’t need her brothers to hold her hand and take wherever she needs to go. Although Hughie recognizes her cluelessness and attempts to save her, he fails. Originally, I went into the final director's meeting wanting to cast Catherine, the only girl who explicitly read for that specific role, in the part of Amy; however, when I looked back at my audition notes, I kept coming back to another actress: Sneha, "bubbly, innocent, lively." Although Sneha auditioned for a comedic scene, I'm confident that she will put an interesting spin on this "Amy" character.HUGHIE, despite his illness (which I can only assume is HIV), still has a faint light in his face, a reminder of his former handsomeness. From the middle of the play, he knows he is going to die on the streets—he just doesn’t want to go alone, which is why he is so willing to sacrifice his own life to protect Amy. Dragged to the auditions by his roommate, newcomer Seth actually impresses me with his "strong sensitivity" during his readings. Recognizing the natural chemistry between him and Chase, I immediately know that they're my male leads, and they were the only ones I ever considered.
Last but definitely not least, JIMMY is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He masquerades as a police officer so that he can get away with murder. Although he puts up a tough front, behind those mirrored sunglasses (his trademark), he is actually hypersensitive. Unlike Amy, when he realizes that Hughie is sick, Jimmy immediately him a place to stay; he is extremely and offended when he discovers that even though they sat together every day at lunch for four years, Hughie doesn’t remember him at all. After talking to Chase in the green room, he tells me that he's always wanted to play a bad guy; even though, at first I'm skeptical (he's a good guy), I think it would be a good challenge for him as an Improv actor.
REHEARSAL PROCESS
Unfortunately, Easter Break hits as soon as we've chosen our casts; luckily, I've managed to get the scripts out to all of them before they left. Despite my busy-busy schedule filled with night labs, dance practice, etc, somehow we all come to agreement on meeting four times a week, Sunday through Wednesday. Surprise of suprises, my ENTIRE cast lives in the same building (Rice Hall) together. So-wEEt. Now they can practice 24/7. ;-)
For most of the early rehearsals, I'm just supervising the read-throughs and fielding story questions--not surprising since the material is so incredibly dark and depressing... it's hard to make a play about deception, murder, and rape up-beat. However, we are having SOOOO MUCH fun at rehearsals, with all of us bursting into hysterics at the extreme level of drama in this play. To this day, I still crack up at the image of Chase lunging at Sneha ("Rawr."), Sneha's delayed fall (SILENCE *Sneha looks down at script* Oh! *falls down dramatically*), and of course, Seth's creepily stroking her leg like it's a wooden paddle. XD Crazy peeps.
COSTUMESFinding costumes for this show was the bane of my existence. No exaggeration. Although I made detailed sketches what I wanted each character to wear, it's next to impossible to find these items (in the correct sizes) in the costume closet. The script explicitly says that Amy’s a pussycat, Hughie’s a skeleton, and Jimmy’s a cop for Halloween. However, this calls for way too much effort in April, because there are no Halloween stores open—it’s more difficult to find comfortable costumes and makeup during spring.
One of the biggest challenges, in general, was trying to make Sneha look like a slut. SERIOUSLY! We tried everything: caking on tons of dark eye makeup, a low-cut black top and skirt, hooker high heels, devil horns, even a PINK FEATHER BOA, and yet, she somehow still looks so innocent. At the end of the day, I'm looking at her all-dolled-up, thinking, "Who's my adorable little slut? You are... Yes, you are, Yes, you are... Now come over here so I pinch those adorable little cheeks!!" It cannot be done. XD But during the actual show, Sneha's childlike appearance makes the play more disturbing because she looks so young and is being subjected to sexual brutality. She reminds me of Iris (played by Jodie Foster), the child prostitute in Martin Scorcese's 1978 film, Taxi Driver (1976).
LIGHTING
For the play, I reeeeeally wanted to use colored light, but unfortunately, the resources weren’t there. Colored light played a big part in my preliminary sketches. Amy was associated with white light (innocence), Hughie with dark blue (enigmatic), and Jimmy with green (envy).
Originally, I wanted the stage to be saturated with red light when Jimmy shoots Hughie in the head (similar to the lighting used in Broadway’s 2005 take on Sweeney Todd); however, since we did not have red light available, I used a quick blackout and then, brought up a dim blue for the final scene. On the same note, I was originally going to use lights to make the play more whimsical and dream-like, but without those effects, I had to go for more realism.
SETS
In the end, I made a last minute decision to use the projector (just because I wanted to experiment) to establish the setting and to use the black curtain as a “mind-screen” (ie. Hughie’s visions of the mansion and of Rachel), a technique seen in many of Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological horror films.
SHOWTIME
Given my last minute vision changes, I'm just as nervous as my actors when performance night arrives. After Brian's play ends, the theater goes pitch black, Michael Jackson's Thriller starts playing, and scenes from the annual NYC Halloween Parade are projected onto the back curtain. Sneha ("Amy") enters to Oakenfold's Faster Kill Pussycat, a song about a man-eating seductress, the kind of a woman Amy believes she is.
The exchange between Sneha and Seth goes beautifully, except that the DVD screensaver appears at some point--not sure how long it took for me to catch it. Once Sneha leaves the stage and Chase takes her place, things get kinda hairy. Chase has been wonderful throughout the entire rehearsal process and has been my "right hand man" with lots of good input and Seth has gotten better and better with each rehearsal, but now, I'm afraid that due to nerves/stage fright/temporary memory loss, the audience won't recognize the hard work that we've all put into this production. But I'm one to talk! Things get even crazier during the murder scene, because at that point, I can't hear the whispers on stage and end up playing gunshot effects straight out of The Soup.
At the next directing class, I'm prepared to be burned at the stake for my misguided, perhaps OVERLY ambitious attempt at a small-time play. As my boyfriend often tells me whenever I do something... questionable, "It's a good thing you're cute." In the case of my play, the special effects and the aesthetic were "amazing" (in the professor's words), BUT the sets upstaged the acting, which isn't good... even though the visuals were pretty damn fabulous.
Even though I understand some of my peers' comments on the performance, I truly am PROUD of each and every one of my actors: they took the challenge, put weeks of work into the production, didn't CRACK UP LAUGHING during the performance (which is always a plus), and they all came SUCH a long way since our first Meet-and-Greet.
That said, Chase, Seth, Sneha, it was a pleasure working with you guys; I'm sure if we had more time to refine everything, our performance would've been even better, no doubt. Good luck in future gigs, y'all! =D
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