How to Rehearse a Play

A Practical Guide for Directors

Damon Kiely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351053754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Based on interviews with over forty award-winning artists, How to Rehearse a Play offers multiple solutions to the challenges that directors face from first rehearsal to opening night.

The book provides a wealth of information on how to run a rehearsal room, suggesting different paths and encouraging directors to shape their own process. It is divided into four sections:

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• lessons from the past: a brief survey of influential directors, including Stanislavski's acting methods and Anne Bogart's theories on movement;

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• a survey of current practices: practical advice on launching a process, analyzing scripts, crafting staging, detailing scene work, collaborating in technical rehearsals and previews, and opening the play to the public;

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• rehearsing without a script: suggestions, advice, and exercises for devising plays through collaborative company creation;

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• rehearsal workbook: prompts and exercises to help directors discover their own process.

How to Rehearse a Play is the perfect guide for any artist leading their first rehearsal, heading to graduate school for intense study, or just looking for ways to refresh and reinvigorate their artistry.

Chapter 1

Introduction

I love rehearsal rooms: groups of artists trying to unlock a mystery together.

Long before everyone gathers to work on the play, a director sits alone with a script, dreaming on the production. In my first book, How to Read a Play, I outline the many ways directors prepare for rehearsals and design meetings. Some read the play from beginning to end over and over, while others dissect the script beat by beat, cataloging events and given circumstances. Directors research the world of the play and the writing style of the playwright. They search for answers to the riddle: How does this play work?

Once a director develops some ideas, they gather designers and start a new discovery process. Teams of artists make sketches, craft models, test cues, and write casebooks. The group pores over research, maps the action of the script, and seeks inspirational images and music. As a team, they imagine how this particular production will play. The director casts a group of actors they believe will match an evolving vision for the production.

In this book, I focus on rehearsal: the electric moment all the artists come together.

As soon as the cast meets for the first time, a clock starts ticking down to opening night. With a limited amount of time, the director communicates a shared vision to the actors and seeks their input on how the play works. The director coordinates the vision for the production, helps analyze the text, guides staging, and delves into the details of scenes. When technical rehearsals begin, the director facilitates the synthesis of actors and designers in a short creative period before spectators arrive. Lastly, they listen to audience reactions and steer the entire team toward opening the production.

A director offers direction: a way forward, a line of thought, guidance. But how?

I wrote this book for anyone approaching directing for the first time. How do directors launch an exploration? How can you work on text with actors? What methods create dynamic and clear staging? What tools unlock the mysteries of a complex scene? Rather than outlining one way to accomplish these tasks, this book challenges directors to discover their own methods. Take this book into a scene study class to deepen your process or keep it in your bag as you head into rehearsals for your first play.

I also wrote this book for any directors entering graduate school. Artists who’ve experienced challenges while running their own rehearsal rooms may want to take a moment to examine their proces deeply. You’ve directed actors—do you always have the language you need? You’ve crafted scenes; Do you want a fresh look at how to create truthful moments? Is it time to shake up your thinking?

Finally, I wrote this book for my colleagues in the field. We’re in a lonely business. Actors watch each other work all the time. Designers collaborate with their colleagues show to show. Directors almost never have a chance to observe how a colleague gives notes, listens to preview audiences, or works with a playwright. This book offers a peek behind the curtain.

The heart of this book is the Workbook chapter. These twenty-one exercises and prompts won’t tell you how to direct a play but rather provoke crucial questions: What is a rehearsal? Why do we conduct them? How do we start with some words on a page, or a group of actors, or an idea—and end with a thrilling, live performance.? The workbook starts with preproduction, moves into the first day of rehearsal, and covers text work, staging, and scene work.

The other chapters provide context and stories to flesh out those practical exercises.

The Survey of Current Practices delivers ideas from my interviews with forty working directors. I talked to Tony Award–winning artists, radical experimentalists, university professors, and storefront theatre warriors. I spoke to directors on the West Coast, those working regionally, New York based directors, and those working in my hometown of Chicago. I traveled to Russia and England to gather more perspectives. I asked each director practical questions: What is your first day like? Do you spend time at the table analyzing the script? How do you stage a physical moment? What does scene work look like for you? How do you collaborate with actors?

The Survey of Current Practices takes readers through all the common tasks directors tackle in a rehearsal process, from the first read through to opening night. In each section I lay out competing ideas, encouraging you to find your own path. Some directors like to spend at least a week sitting at a table, poring through the script with their cast, learning the rhythms of the play. Others immediately jump on their feet, staging the first day. One director will run their play up to a dozen times in a three-week rehearsal process, while another will still be crafting the last scene just before technical rehearsals begin. What methods work for you?

Where I think it will help, I offer my own experiences from twenty years working as a professional director as well as my current position as the Chair of Performance at DePaul University in Chicago. I’ve observed thousands of hours of rehearsals by MFA Directing students, learning from their trial and error.

In the chapter on Rehearsing a Play without a Script, I offer Notes on Devising. I interviewed a diverse group of artists who create their projects with an ensemble in a room rather than starting with a written play. How do they develop ideas? What methods do they use to generate material? How do they refine and focus their projects? What role does audience feedback have in the final product? This chapter should inspire artists interested in company created work, while offering new ideas to those who work on established plays.

In Lessons from the Past, I highlight six representative thinkers, writers, and directors from throughout history. Their ideas echo throughout the book, providing context for my interviews with directors working now.

What are some lessons from the past we can use today? Let’s take a look.

Chapter 2

Lessons from the Past

I teach a class called Directing Theories with a reading list that is measured in feet.

I challenge student directors to read stacks of classic texts penned by influential directors and thinkers. Once a week we dissect the theories of thought leaders such as Russian acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski, German revolutionary Bertolt Brecht, and American experimentalist Anne Bogart. One student engages us with the director’s biography, and another will illuminate important historical and artistic movements of the time.

Then we probe: Why did they make theatre? How did they make theatre? What did their theatre look like? What ideas did they reject? What new ideas did they foster?

Why did Stanislavski create what he called a grammar of acting? What was he reacting to in Russian Theatre at the turn of the 20th century? How did Brecht create what he called Epic Theatre, art that actively criticized the political corruption in Germany post World War I? What is Anne Bogart’s theory of stimulating actors through movement exercises?

During the weekly class discussions, students wrestle with competing theories. Are they interested in the psychological reality that Stanislavski was seeking, or are they intrigued by some sort of heightened acting style? Do they want to clearly underline political and sociological messages as Brecht did, or do they want to uncover more human moments in a subtler fashion? Do they believe the most effective way to create a tight acting ensemble is through physical exercises, as Anne Bogart writes, or will intellectual pursuits yield better results?

As a final project, I challenge students to write their own manifestos. I encourage them to interrogate themselves: What will my theatre look like? How will I make it? Why do I direct plays?

In this chapter, I highlight six authors who exemplify different tasks that directors encounter. For each writer I’ll give a quick background on their life and times, and then focus on key ideas that we will explore throughout the book. Here’s our six:

• Aristotle: Plot Master
• The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen: Deep Reader of Texts
• Konstantin Stanislavski: Acting Coach
• Bertolt Brecht: Crafter of Details
• Peter Brook: Instigator of Improvisation
• Anne Bogart: Physical Ensemble Maker

One could write a detailed history of directors and theatrical essayists, covering hundreds of writers. I picked these six because their formative theories guide us through the rest of the book. As you read about each thinker, ask yourself, is this a technique that I embrace? How can working with this approach change my own process? What practices still resonate hundreds or thousands of years later?

Our first thinker, Aristotle, didn’t write or direct plays, but he lectured about theatre during a pioneering moment in the Western world. His descriptions of classic Greek tragedy have influenced theatre makers ever since.

Aristotle: Master of Plot

Born in 384 bce, Aristotle lived when Greek thinkers and politicians were developing the core institutions of Western democracy.

Aristotle studied under master philosopher Plato for twenty years, learning and experimenting with his theories of discovery through dialectic. When his mentor died in 348 bce, Aristotle founded his own school. He taught kings, philosophers, and scientists. He lectured on such far-ranging topics as botany, government, geology, psychology, and dance. He loved to classify the observable world; often his goal was to discover the “best” form of something.

When Aristotle writes about Politics, he asserts that the best possible society is his own society, the Greek City State. He goes on to describe what he believes is the best form of government: an aristocracy where the benevolent elite care for the masses. When Aristotle writes about Ethics, he seeks the ideal way for people to live. He asserts that ethics teaches us to live well, or in his words choose to do the right thing for the right reasons.

He never wrote about plays. An unknown student compiled Aristotle’s notes on dramatic poetry and created The Poetics. True to form, the philosopher delineates the ideal form of theatre:

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration, effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions.¹

Aristotle was describing a very specific form of theatre, the Greek tragedies written by playwrights such as Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. These plays often put a great person in the center of a crisis, depicting their eventual downfall. Aristotle believed tragedies were well-suited to both entertain and educate audiences about morality and human behavior. Unlike narrative or epic forms, which only describe human action, tragedy shows people making choices live. Want to learn about how humans behave? Best to see them in action.

Aristotle lays out six elements to any tragedy: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. He crowns plot the most important element. He claims a well-made plot could make you cry if somebody told you the story from beginning to end. By watching a tragedy, we view a representation of that plot, played out by act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Lessons from the Past
• 3 A Survey of Current Practices
• 4 Rehearsing a Play Without a Script: Notes on Devising
• 5 Rehearsal Workbook
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• List of Interviews
• Biographies of Interviewees
• Index