A Directing Experience, Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater for the concluding instalment of Kirk Woodward’s “A Directing Experience,” his account of serving as associate director for Upper Montclair, New Jersey’s Saint James Players’ first-ever production of a Greek tragedy. The play was Sophocles’ Antigone and the SJP production ran from 15 to 17 and 22 to 24 September.

[If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 13 October, I recommend that you go back and pick that up before reading Part 2.  Kirk’s report is continuous and the second half won’t make much sense if you don’t know what happened from the start.

[Kirk reports that Director James Broderick attempted to give the theatergoers at SJP’s Antigone a taste of the performance Athenians in the 5th century BCE might have seen.  For ROTters who are interested in what we know of the performances of ancient Greek plays, I’ve added a brief description of how classic Greek theater worked after “A Directing Experience.”]

SCOPE OF THE PRODUCTION – As the weeks went on I started thinking of the show more as a musical than as a play. Actually, the more elements involved in a production, the more it resembles a military operation. There’s a senior officer (the director), a number of staff officers (the sound, set, costume, lighting, and front-of-house chiefs), and a lot of troops whose activities need to be coordinated.

ATTENDANCE AND LINES – Attendance is often a problem in community theater rehearsals. Not only do people have excused absences for vacations during the summer, but sometimes people just don’t, or in our case wouldn’t, show up, and we’d scrape to find pieces of the show that we could rehearse. (Our long rehearsal period probably contributed to this.)

We didn’t find such scrambling as much of a problem as one might think, because our show was made up of so many component parts that if someone who needed work wasn’t there, somebody else who needed work probably was there.

The opening circles I mentioned included vocal work led by the chorus leader. Vocal work is of obvious value, probably for any play, considering our ordinarily lazy American diction, and certainly for this one. The sanctuary where we performed requires clear and purposeful speech.

Actors are often asked, “How do you remember so many lines?” Actors tend to smile at the question, but in fact the process is remarkable – in some cases, almost miraculous.

Ordinarily, actors have successfully memorized their lines well before the show opens, but a pressing question is “when” – at what stage are they “off book” and able to function smoothly without glancing at a script (or reading from it) or asking for help.

We were no exception. Ordinarily it doesn’t do any good to fuss at people for not knowing their lines. They know they don’t, and the rest of the cast sees it too. Jim was patient. My style too is to assure the actors that they’ll have the words down pat soon, and to congratulate them when they get anything right.

There’s no great way to deal with problems of line memorization as far as I know. A director can’t get inside someone’s head. What’s more, even when the actors can make their way through a rehearsal without reference to a script, they still may indulge in any amount of paraphrasing.

Again, a director has to decide what attitude to take toward this problem. Often the stage manager may be asked to keep notes on inaccurate speeches and to discuss them with the actors at the end of rehearsal.

One of our casts learned their lines fairly promptly. The other did not, with both major leads struggling visibly with them until the final dress rehearsal. These actors, note, were among the more experienced and “professional” of the cast. Hard to understand. I felt that the uncertainty about lines in that cast never entirely went away.

Halfway or a little more through rehearsals, the cast was asking if the show looked like it would “work.” My reply was that Jim had designed it in a particular way. I think it’s safe to say that his entire approach was new to us. Although nobody used the word, he had a “style” in mind for the play.

It involved lots of things happening on stage, often at once, and a delivery of lines as though they were being announced, slowly and clearly. He told one chorus member that their delivery of a speech had “a lot of 2023 in it” – it was too “modern” for the concept. He gave many line readings to the cast, and they were always much more stately than everyday speech. That was his intention. 

The chorus held to Jim’s approach. However, the lead actors increasingly did not, instead talking with each other in a more “modern” way, and I believe this worked to the play’s advantage, providing variety and a bit of what the audience was more used to, particularly in contrast to the chorus.

METHODS – As rehearsals went on, I came to believe strongly in two directing principles: 1) Don’t speak unless you have something to say, and 2), if you do say something, make it something the actors can use – something they can put into practice.

I hit this particular nail on the head once in these rehearsals. As actors try to get “off book,” so they can rehearse without their script, sometimes they have to stop for long pauses while they think of the next thing to say, and sometimes these pauses become habitual. Asking one actor to close up the gaps in his words, I said pleasantly to him, “It’s called ‘acting,’ not ‘pausing.’”

TOWARD THE FINISH LINE – As we approached the Labor Day weekend, more and more cast members requested that weekend off, including a few who weren’t coming to rehearsals anyway. Jim tried to schedule extra line rehearsals but got little response, so we began the final six rehearsals with a great deal to pull together. Jim wrote the production team a summary which included the following concerns: 

     We have actors playing leading parts who have not appeared at rehearsal for almost a month. It's possible these people will return not being fully off-book.

     We have actors playing supporting parts who have attended few rehearsals and were not even close to being off book when last they rehearsed.

      The musicians are adjusting to a last-minute departure. We've never [had] even one runthrough of the music. At most, we'll have the musicians for Monday night and Tuesday night. [Fortunately we had music for the two last final rehearsals as well, thanks to the musicians who made the time.]

      The opening scene -- with the Master of Revels -- is still...well, let's call it a "work in progress." [As noted, this scene was ultimately dropped.]

     Many of the light cues have changed.

     The blocking at the end of the play has been changed but never rehearsed with the full cast.

    We don't have ushers -- I can live with that (I'll manage the house). [Thanks to our stage manager, a high school student was ultimately recruited to usher.]

    In short, we're simply not going to get to that place we all hoped we'd get to. In fact, it now seems certain that we won't have a single full-cast rehearsal before opening night.

     I ask you to bear up, and soldier on, in the face of what could be rather daunting adversity this next week. There are some factors we can't control (other people's behaviors and responses) but please try to be patient with each other (you always are, by the way -- this is just a reminder!!) upbeat and supportive with the many cast members who have worked hard, and try to help out in any area where the ship is listing (lend a hand with the costumes if you have a minute, help an actor run lines, etc.)

     We're all going to see things that don't work, but as much as possible we really can't change things at this late date. We've got to build up at least a little bit of muscle memory, so let's learn to live with the imperfect (I'm saying this to myself!) 

     We need to focus this week on traffic control -- getting people in position to enter their scenes on time, listening for cues, and making sure people are arrayed in costumes and with the right props when they need to enter. The niceties will either take care of themselves. Or they won't.

His list looks daunting, but in fact most of the things in it were manageable, and most got handled. To illustrate what did and didn’t, here’s an email I wrote Jim after opening night:

Hi Jim,

I'm so glad for you about last night, because it really is vindication that what you envisioned can be achieved. Excellent. We'll work hard tonight and see how it goes.

I had a very few notes - possible thoughts. For the Saturday cast:

* The Sentry shouldn't wrestle Antigone onto the stage the second time he brings her in. The point is that she is resigned to her fate. It was like a wrestling match.

For the Friday cast:

* A big gap after the Orator's speech. Something should happen immediately.

* I imagine you've fixed this already - the gap before the first Chorus appearance - maybe a cuing problem? Or too much music?

* Creon's first entrance - can Jamie and Sharon start entering on the second verse of the "triumphal music", so he and she aren't just standing there so long? Last night they came in as soon as the music started, and there's lots of it.

* Again, something you may have fixed - on "O fate of humanity," should a couple of lights go out to emphasize it?

* Need a fast blackout after "Like the fairies." She might not have been able to hear the cue.

* Haimon should exit on the floor exit. (We talked about this last night.)

* When Sharon asks Jamie what's happened, saying that she can take it - can he briefly turn away from her, to motivate her asking the sentry?

* Jamie is clearly "dying" and dead at the end.  Is that what you want?

* As you know, that curtain call has got to be virtually continuous. Colleen and I stopped clapping long before it was over, and we're staff! 

* Curtain call - some on the floor can exit at the stage left door to help people get offstage faster.

* Can the backstage hall light stay on, or should it be off during the show, and if so, can they see?

FINALE – The sort of items on that laundry list will look familiar to many directors. The fact is that the first weekend of shows went much better than I would have predicted. So did the second. The audience response at the end of the performances was enthusiastic, and there were few technical glitches. A “talkback” with the cast after the Sunday matinee showed a great deal of intelligent audience interest.

One cast still had to ask for prompting at its final dress rehearsal. Nothing of the sort happened in performance, but as noted above I felt there was a subtle hesitation here and there that had an effect on its performance days. Learning lines may not be the be-all and end-all of acting, but it’s important.

The adventure wasn’t over yet. One actor, from the “Saturday” cast, had never actually quit the show, but also hadn’t actually attended a rehearsal in weeks. Finally, between the two performance weekends, he resigned because of illness. It seemed difficult to get another actor to replace him – although he was only in one scene, it was a long one.

Jim’s solution was inventive – turn that scene into a dream sequence in which Creon imagines the voice of his son (the missing actor) arguing with him – an argument carried out on the son’s part from a microphone offstage, reading the part. “Brilliant,” I told him.

However, an actor playing Creon recruited a replacement, so we’ll never know how the last great experiment would have worked out. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Jim emailed me, “and upheaval is the father of anxiety.” The replacement actor was excellent.

FIGURES. By my very unofficial count 285 people saw the show over six performances, which is excellent for the St. James Players. There was no admission cost; the show was free.

My friend Dan Landon, for years a theater manager for the Shubert Organization, says, “One dollar over the nut [the expenses], it’s a hit.” Again by rough estimate, the show probably cost under two thousand dollars, the largest part of that for costumes. Audience donations will probably bring in just under two thousand dollars, plus a substantial amount from program ad sales. It’s a hit. Profits will go to a charity.

SUMMARY. Unquestionably the show was a success in just about any terms. How, considering the considerable obstacles during rehearsals? Some answers:

Antigone itself, as written by Sophocles, has well delineated conflict and vivid characters. Jim’s considerable script revisions added to the script but didn’t detract from its core. The story line remained clear.

Very few people have seen a Greek tragedy performed (a statement based on audience comments). They didn’t know what to expect but had a feeling it was supposed to be important, or “good.” It had cultural cachet.

The principal character is a strong woman, an appealing feature for many, including me.

The staging was unusual – formal, often ritualistic, with some naturalistic acting within those limits, performed in the beautiful front of the sanctuary of the church, which added a seriousness that a regular set probably would not have provided no matter how well it was designed and executed. 

Formal ritual is not often an element in many plays performed in local and regional theaters. Jim insisted on retaining or imitating as much of the original religious purpose of Sophocles’ play as he imagined and could incorporate.

A number of dances, musical interludes, and other elements within the play, plus the long opening sequence(s), were dropped during the rehearsal period, making the play leaner and perhaps easier to follow than perhaps would have been possible otherwise.

The whole experience was unusual for the audiences, as well as one could judge. Novelty itself was enough to carry a great deal of interest. The dancing, chorus, and music really were “cool.”

Rehearsals had been scattered throughout the summer, but in the final continuous six rehearsals the cast did have an opportunity to pull the show together. At the opening the production was “tight” – as noted, more for one cast than for the other. At the last performance, the casts were evenly matched.

The actors really did hold their own. Whatever the appropriateness of the acting choices they made – a variable  – they doubled down on them and were consistent in them. Some of the acting was quite fine – the last scene of the “Friday” Creon was as fine as I can imagine it could be, rivaled by the last scene of the other Creon.

On stage the cast was committed to the play, and that commitment carried through to the audience. Even with only six performances, I did note that the determination to make the play “work” weakened a tiny bit as the casts felt more secure. If we had had a large number of performances, this might have been a problem.

Although I believe Jim visualized “platform” acting as described above, in practice the actors of the principal roles moved more and more into a “naturalistic” style of acting – real people talking to each other – and this contrasted well with the formal elements of the play and probably made it palatable.

Many of the elements that might have been expected to make the staging of the play seem diffuse were removed during the rehearsal period.

Ultimately, credit for the success of the show goes to Jim, who had a vision and stuck to it, and to the cast and crew who brought it to fruition. Jim had ideas, whether I tumbled to them or not, and having ideas carries a lot of weight. The choreographer and chorus leader pulled off what Jim had imagined in their areas.

Theater is full of surprises – one of the reasons that many of us find it enormously rewarding. Our production of Antigone proves the point. One feels even Sophocles might have been pleased.

[Theater, which was an integral part of the culture in ancient Greece from 700 BCE, was centered in the city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious focal point.  I think, in light of Kirk’s report above, it would be of interest, especially for readers who aren’t theater scholars, to have a gloss of what we know of this origin of our modern Western theater.  I’ll be brief, and anyone with further curiosity can look up additional details in the many sources available, both in print and online.

[Ancient Greek theater developed in the Classical Period of Greek history, the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and lasted into the Hellenistic Period, 336-146 BCE.  The great classic tragedies, including Sophocles’ Antigone, were composed in the 5th century; the oldest surviving text is The Persians by Aeschylus (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE), first performed in 472 BCE.

[(Aeschylus’ next surviving play was Seven Against Thebes, first performed in 467 BCE.  It tells the story of the Theban civil war in which Eteocles and Polynices, Antigone’s brothers, slew each other, setting up the story Sophocles recounts in his tragedy 26 years later.)

[I’m not going to give a summary of the history of classic Greek drama because I want to focus on the production methods that we know of or have deduced from such sources as the surviving plays themselves, Aristotle’s (384-322 BCE) Poetics (335-323 BCE), accounts of contemporary historians such as Herodotus (ca. 484-ca. 425 BCE), hints and clues from examining the surviving theaters of the era, and modern archeologists like Luigi Bernabò Brea and Madelaine Cavalier, who discovered a cache of models from the 4th to 3rd century BCE for theatrical masks in 1973 (the so-called “Masks of Lipari”).

[One historical note, however: Greek drama developed from chants in honor of Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), the god of revelry.  (Why director Broderick of the SJP Antigone made Zephyr, a god of wind, the “Master of Revels” is unclear, but since that sequence was dropped before performance, it’s also irrelevant.)  

[Because of this association, theater in ancient Greece was sacred to Dionysus.  For this reason, the most important festivals in which dramatic competitions were held were the Dionysia, and the premier theater in ancient Greece, built on the Athenian Acropolis, was the Theater of Dionysus (completed in ca. 325 BCE).

[The Dionysian chants were later adapted for choral processions in which participants would dress up in costumes and masks.  Eventually, certain members of the chorus evolved to take special roles within the procession, but they were not yet actors in the way we would understand it. 

[According to tradition, in 534 or 535 BCE, Thespis, a poet probably born in the early 6th century BCE, astounded audiences by leaping onto the back of a wooden cart and reciting poetry as if he was the characters whose lines he was speaking.  (In other accounts, Thespis is said to have introduced the first principal actor as distinguished from the chorus.)  In doing so he became the world’s first actor, and it is from his name that we get the world ‘thespian’ as a synonym for ‘actor.’  (The International Thespian Society is an organization for high school and middle school theater students.)

[Little else is known of Thespis or his acting, but he started a trend.  In about 471 BCE, Aeschylus introduced the second actor, and around 468 BCE, Sophocles brought on the third individualized performer.  They played the roles Kirk refers to as “named characters” played by “actors with character names.”

[Plays in ancient Greece were performed during late winter and early spring, perhaps because of the hot climate. The theaters were outdoors and open to the elements, and the plays were performed in daylight.  The actors, who, incidentally, were all men (as they were in Elizabethan/Shakespearean times as well), wore heavy costumes (another possible reason for performing in the cooler seasons) and masks, and performing required strenuous physical and vocal exertion, which would have been impractical in hot weather.  Each play was usually only ever performed once (until later in Greek theater history, during the Hellenistic Period, when it became permissible to perform older plays).

[Greek theaters were huge. The Theater of Dionysus could hold 15,000 spectators.  The audience sat on seats carved out of a hillside (or man-made berms in regions with flat terrain). This seating area, called the theatron (‘place of hearing’), encircled a round playing area called the orchestra (‘place of dancing’) where the chorus performed.  At the back of the orchestra was the skene (‘tent’ or ‘hut’). This was a stone building that acted as a dressing room and was where the actors made their entrances from and their exits to.

[The actors performed in front of the skene, which was unchanging—except, perhaps, with some paint.  (It’s probably obvious, but this is the Greek word from which we get the modern word ‘scene’ and, by extension, ‘scenery’—though there was none in Greek theater.)  On either side of the orchestra were the paradoi, two stone passageways through which the chorus made its entrance and exit.

[There was also some form of crane-like stage machinery that facilitated special effects—such as the entrance of a god from above—but we are unsure as to exactly what this machinery was or how it worked.  It’s been dubbed deus ex machina, Latin for the Greek term apo mekhanes theos (‘god from the machine’), used metaphorically today to mean the sudden or abrupt resolution of a seemingly unsolvable plot problem by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. 

[(There’s a terrific example of both applications of the deus ex machina in a play at least partly by William Shakespeare—Pericles, Prince of Tyre [published in 1609].  In a report for ROT of a 2016 production I saw, I wrote that in order to resolve some intractable plot complications [sense #2], Diana, Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt, appears “raised up high [sense #1] behind a scrim and intoning in an otherworldly voice in an honest-to-goodness deus . . . er dea ex machina.”)

[Because of the size of the Greek amphitheaters, plus the lack of walls or ceilings, and despite excellent natural acoustics, hearing and seeing were problematic.  The elaborate costumes and masks were aids to the latter, of course, intended to make the actors more visible.

[The basic costume was the common garment worn by ancient Greeks, the chiton, a draped, shift-like tunic.  There were differences for men’s and women’s chitones which were replicated in the theatrical costumes for each gender and the chiton was accessorized for character reinforcement.  Actors playing female characters also wore prostheses to give the impression of breasts and soft, rounded abdomens.  They wore a white body stocking under the costume as well, to make their skin look fairer.

[Male characters in tragedies also usually wore kolthornoi, calf-length boots with thick soles to give the actors more height for both stature and visibility in the large theaters.  Female and comic characters wore sykkhoi, soft slippers or ‘socks’; because the kolthornos was often translated as ‘buskin,’ we have the expression “sock and buskin” as a metaphor for the world of theater.  (On 25 and 28 May 2014, I posted a two-part piece on actors who were spies; it was entitled “Sock and Buskin & Cloak and Dagger.”)

[As for the speech, we believe that the actors spoke in stentorian tones—what I think Kirk meant by “platform acting”—and may even have sung or chanted the lines.  We don’t know how the actors related to one another in a scene, but the common belief is that they didn’t play off one another as modern Western actors usually do in Realistic dramas or comedies, and may have all faced out toward the audience.  Gestures were probably few and big.

[The masks were elaborately carved or assembled by skilled mask-makers.  Paintings and vase decorations indicate that they were helmet-like, covering the actor’s entire face and head, with holes for the eyes and a small opening for the mouth, as well as an integrated wig.  They were made from organic materials, which is why there are no extant examples, as they would have decomposed over time.

[The masks were probably made of light-weight materials such as stiffened linen, leather, wood, or cork, with the wig consisting of human or animal hair.  It was once thought that they served as a kind of megaphone, but the mouth holes are too small to serve such a purpose, but they may have functioned as a resonator.

[An artfully created mask can appear to change expressions when it’s activated by a really experienced and talented masker (see my post “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011).  The masked actor can make the mask seem truly alive by the angle the audience sees and the play of light on the frozen expression.  But the Greek masks restricted vision, another reason that the actors probably didn’t move around the stage much; they would, however, still have moved their heads and angled their bodies for effect.

[The masks, of course, made it possible for one actor to play multiple characters, including women, in the play.  Remember that there were, at most, three actors to play the named characters; in Antigone, there are at least seven, including three women.  Some of the masks represented single characters, with recognizable iconography to identify them, but most were generic—a young and beautiful woman, a crone or witch, a heroic warrior, and so on.  Small changes, such as a different wig or beard, and voilà, a new character.

[As Kirk states above, the plays of ancient Greece were performed at festivals in honor of Dionysus called the Dionysia.  (There were other festivals dedicated to Dionysius in and around Athens, such as the Lenaia, but for the drama, the Dionysia was the important one.) 

[There were two related Dionysia in Attica, the region around Athens, each lasting seven days.  The older one was the Rural Dionysia, held around the time of the winter solstice, so in December or January by our calendar.  It was very ancient, almost certainly predating the invention of tragedy, and probably celebrated the cultivation of the grape vines.  (Dionysus was the god of wine.)  It started with a procession, probably followed by animal sacrifices, a ceremony honoring worthy citizens, and other rites. 

[These were followed by competitions in music, singing, dancing, and choral chanting.  After the middle of the 6th century BCE, plays may have been performed—first tragedies and satyr plays, then comedies as well—but they would most likely have been plays that had been performed the previous year at the newer festival in Athens itself.

[That would be the City Dionysia, established by the Tyrant Pisistratus (ca. 600-527 BCE; Tyrant of Athens: 561 BCE, 559-556 BCE, 546-527 BCE).  (The first dramatic contest was held in 535 BCE, when Thespis won the first prize.)  It was here, around the vernal equinox (that is, March to April), that the great dramatic competitions were held: tragedies and satyr plays from the festival’s inception, comedies from 490 BCE. 

[Three selected poets each presented three tragedies and a satyr play.  (When comedies were added in a separate competition, comic writers also presented three plays, but no satyr play.)  The three plays may or may not be thematically linked, and the satyr play would be connected somehow to the tragedies.

[The satyr play, only one of which has survived in its entirety, Cyclops by Euripides (ca. 480-ca. 406 BCE), was a ribald drama having a chorus of satyrs, creatures associated with Dionysus.  The satyr play’s mytho-heroic stories and the language style were similar to those of tragedy, but its plots, titles, themes, characters, and happy endings were reminiscent of comedy.  The chorus of satyrs’ costumes focused on the (permanently erect) phallus, and their language used wordplay and sexual innuendo.  (Aeschylus was noted for his satyr plays, but only one fragment survives.)]