More Notes on Acting

by Kirk Woodward 

[My friend Kirk Woodward has contributed well over a hundred posts to Rick On Theater since I started the blog—at his suggestion—back in 2009.  He’s covered many subjects over those years, from personal reminiscences, play and other performance (most notably, pop music) reports, some history, and lots and lots of theater.

[As readers of ROT know by now, Kirk’s a multi-hyphenate theater person—a playwright, director, occasional actor (see below, for example), composer and lyricist, instrumentalist, theater and acting teacher, theater historian, reviewer and critic, and general commentator.  He’s blogged here in all those capacities.

[He’s also, since his younger years, a journal-keeper.  Not a few of Kirk’s posts have been based on diaries and journals he’s kept, some dating from as far back as his army service in the early 1970s, and even before.  “More Notes on Acting” is one such post.

[Also as ROTters will already know, Kirk, who lives in suburban New Jersey, is very engaged in the life of his community, including, perhaps even especially, the theater life, which is especially rich in his Jersey region.  He has written for, directed, acted in, composed for, musical-directed, and accompanied many area productions for numerous local troupes.

[Kirk’s contributions to ROT are too many to list in their entirety anymore.  So I’m going to cherry-pick the posts that cover acting specifically one way or another.  (Most of Kirk’s posts on directing, a long list in itself, also make comments pertinent to acting—so do his play reports—but adding them to the upcoming list would extend it to an unmanageable length.)

[Here, then, are Kirk Woodward’s acting posts in Rick On Theater:

·   “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” (1 June 2011)

·   “Reflections On Directing: Actors” (17 April 2013)

·   “Creative Dramatics” (30 September 2013)

·   "Reflectionson Theater Etiquette” (11 February 2014) – less about acting than about actors

·   “Memoirs of a Desperate Actor” (3 March 2015)

·   “Simon Callow” (23 June 2015)

·   “Four Actors” (30 January 2018)

·   “Notes from a Sometime Actor” (27 December 2019)

·   “Acting Class (On-Line Edition)” (4 August 2020)

·   “The Method – a Review” (12 March 2022)

·   “Acting Notes” (27 April 2022)

·   “Bombast to Beckett” (13 January 2025)

[Interested ROTters can find all of Kirk Woodward’s posts by clicking on his name.  There are also more articles on ROT about actors and acting by other authors, including me, in those links.]

I have written in this blog before about my experience as an actor in a production of the musical Follies in 2024 directed by the very talented Kristy Graves (“Performance Diary: Follies, Part 1” [15 December 2024] and “Part 2” [18 December 2024]). This year I was cast in the musical Little Women, also directed by Kristy.

The musical is based on the well-known 1868/1869 novel by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) about a close-knit family of four daughters and their mother (with the father remaining offstage) with music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein, and book by Alan Knee.

Little Women was performed on Broadway for a modest run of 137 performances in 2005. It toured extensively and has been produced numerous times since. It is a “chamber musical” (a small-scale musical theater production characterized by a limited cast, small orchestra, and intimate venue setting) with a cast of ten playing eighteen roles, although it can also be performed by a larger cast.

Our production, like last year’s Follies, was presented at the Women’s Club of Glen Ridge, New Jersey. It had two performances, on April 9 and 12, 2026. I played the small role of Mr. Lawrence in the play.

Our rehearsal period had its ups and downs, like pretty much every production. The “downs” are not my subject in this article, but I will briefly summarize some of them:

·    Space availability was a problem, apparently the reason we gave only two performances. Since the space was available for rental by outside groups, we frequently had to clear the space completely after a rehearsal, which led to some late evenings. Also because of space availability, we had to hold the earlier rehearsals in the director’s living room.

·    We performed the show in a lovely second floor ballroom, with the stage area on one of the shorter walls, and the small orchestra located outside the room beyond a side double door. This was an excellent setting for the home scenes which made up most of the play, but since we were in a room, not on a stage, the backdrop could not be changed when, for example, the characters were on a beach, indicated by their sitting on a blanket.

·    Acoustically the room was close to an echo chamber. No amplification was necessary (or affordable), but voices bounced around the room. Visually, since the room was a ballroom with a level floor, visibility from the rear seats was limited. (As a result Kristy did her best not to have characters sit if she could avoid it.)

·    As always, actors’ time was limited, making it difficult to schedule rehearsals. Kristy had to make major overhauls of the rehearsal schedule twice due to shifting commitments. She held up under the strain, but it must have been difficult.

Offsetting these difficulties was the nature of the “family” in the show – all high school students, plus Kristy as the mother (Susan Knight Carlin provided a second directing eye). Every one of the school-age women was talented, skilled at singing and dancing, and thoroughly professional at things like learning their lines and being on time. [Susan Knight, as she prefers to be called professionally, is mentioned in “Performance Diary: Follies, Part 1” and “Acting Class (On-Line Edition)” (4 August 2020).]

They were a delight to work with and a challenge to us older people. They made me feel there was hope for the future. During one “notes” session I glanced over the shoulder of one of the students, who was doing her Physics homework on a tablet. Physics!

I played Mr. Laurence, the crochety grandfather of one of the boys in the play, and it’s my experience in that role that I’m writing about here, because it taught or reminded me of a number of things about acting.

I should explain that directing and playwriting, not acting, have been my major interests in theater. I took acting classes and did a moderate bit of performing onstage in the 1970’s, but little acting after that until recently. I did however teach acting, and I’m happy to report that I’ve found the things that I taught to be sound.

However, doing them is something else, and here I will describe mistakes I made (that I know of) and things I learned, or re-learned. I suppose and hope that professional actors know all these things already, but actors at my level and non-actors and non-theater people who are curious about the work might find this interesting.

IMAGES – When I was asked to play the role of Mr. Laurence, I did exactly what I’ve told acting classes for years not to do. I read the play hunting for the scenes I was in (there were five), basically ignoring the rest. I had never read the novel and had only the vaguest idea of its story, and I never really caught up with the plot until the first run-through.

That is bad enough. Not yet having the script, I skimmed through the play online, hunting for the scenes I was in. But there’s worse. Gathering that Mr. Laurence was a difficult, cranky old man, I immediately formed an image of what a difficult, cranky old man would be like. (I had little problem with the “old” part.)

What’s wrong with that? The question is, what’s right with it? Over a hundred years ago, the director and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938), followed by numerous others, stressed the importance of the actor’s developing a character “from the inside,” from what the character wants and what the character does to get what it wants.

To ignore this – to begin with an “image,” or in other words a cliché – is to turn a specific character into a generalized, unmoored notion of an unspecific person. If we think about it even a moment we realize what a bad idea this is. My two grandmothers and grandfathers were utterly unlike each other. We are all individuals. That’s part of what drama often wants to teach us.

I ignored it and spent most of the rehearsal period trying to undo the image and work from the specifics of my character.

ONE THING AT A TIME – As a director, a few years ago I began to believe it’s important that actors be given a goal for each rehearsal (or section of a rehearsal), something they can focus on, such as “Tonight we’ll only be working on the words of the script,” or “For this run-through please just concentrate on in-the-moment contact with the person you’re talking to.” [Kirk addresses this same practice from a director’s point of view in “All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes, Part 2” (29 November 2025).]

The effect of this approach is to reduce strain for the actors, keeping them from trying to do everything at once. Practically speaking their acting improves a great deal under these conditions, because they’re not worrying about it – their focus is elsewhere, on whatever the director has pointed them to.

Given the role of Mr. Laurence, though, I completely forgot this idea, and tried to do everything at each rehearsal. I should have applied what I learned as a director and set myself a goal for each rehearsal – “this time just focus on your lines,” “this time really listen to the other actor.” I finally caught on, but late in the process.

This approach reminds me of what I’ve read about the film directing technique of Clint Eastwood (b. 1930), who dislikes re-shooting a scene and has been known to film a scene’s rehearsal, unbeknownst to the actors, and use it in the finished movie. He wants to remove the stress of acting from the performers as much as possible, and the same is true of the idea I have described here.

The next points are common currency, but I again saw their importance and I feel they’re worth mentioning.

KEY POINTS – My daughter Heather tells me she realized this idea in drama school; it came to me much later, and yet surely it’s obvious: an actor should identify which points in a scene must be made clear to the audience, so it can follow the story with security.

Sometimes these moments are difficult to miss – “I’m going to kill you someday,” that sort of thing. Sometimes they are quite subtle, and yet the play may not make sense without them. It’s best, I’d think, to start from the obvious and work to the more hidden. At the back of an actor’s mind should be the need to make sure the points are clearly made.

I’m guessing this idea is probably not taught in many acting schools, where the emphasis may be on what the character is feeling and wanting. That’s fine and important, but somewhere along the line the needs of the play and the audience ought to be addressed. Once the “plot points” are identified by the actor, they don’t need to be dwelled on – just presented clearly.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED? – Many scenes grow out of some earlier scene that the audience doesn’t witness. Those earlier scenes are fuel for the actor. In my first scene in Little Women, I have just seen, out my window, one of the girls next door chopping down one of my trees and dragging it into her house for a Christmas tree.

This fact should be – and was – enough to send me charging into the next scene, in which I confront the family and the girl, who is standing next to the tree. A piece of cake! – if I’ve made the preceding moment clear to myself, and refreshed it just before I go on stage.

DISCOVERIES – Because as actors we learn lines, we subconsciously come to think of a scene as a series of things that inevitably have to be thought or said. At least it often feels that way. However, for the characters in the play, none of those things have happened yet, and many of the things that characters do and say are motivated by discoveries, new realizations about something.

There may be only a few of those discoveries in a scene, or as many as several times in a single line of dialogue – it all depends on the play. If as actors we identify those discovery moments in advance, then when they come up we can let the discovery “hit” us as though for the first time, think our way through it (very fast, usually), and respond more freshly than we otherwise would.

Because we had a week-long break in rehearsals due to school vacations, I had leisure to go over these points using the script and to try and get them into my mind. I tried to work methodically with these points in mind, and found it difficult to stick to the program – my acting habits, as opposed to my directing habits, were deeply ingrained, or, possibly, just needed developing.

(On the other hand, I can’t help thinking these limitations in my acting skills have helped me as a director, because I seldom if ever have the impulse to show an actor how something should be done, a practice that is widely frowned on today. I do like the story about the director George Abbott (1887-1995), who, criticized for giving an actor line readings, replied, “How else will they know what I want?” [See “George Abbott” (14 October 2018).])

A few more observations:

Kristy, our director, has a remarkable ability to work on many things at once. As a result she at least visibly takes calmly things that would drive me to distraction. As I’ve already said, she is an excellent director, with a creative approach to a script, a fine visual sense, and a straightforward way of working with actors. I’d enjoy seeing how she directed under relatively calm conditions.

Possibly because of time constraints, there was relatively little feedback on performances up to the last couple of rehearsals, not a lot of comment on how things were going one way or the other. I had no idea whether people thought I did a good job or were just putting up with me. However, I realized that I was happy not getting specific praise because I felt it would make me wonder whether I could repeat that good thing I’d done, or not.

Final rehearsals went the way they usually do – the lights were a day late arriving, we tried to work straight through the show each night but had to stop to fix things, and the focus became more and more on opening night and not on that particular night’s rehearsal.

On the daily schedule updates that Kristy sent out during the last week (“production week”), the last item read “Clean (?).” I assumed that meant straightening up the mess that always accumulates backstage in theater productions. I should have realized that what she meant was, “Clean up whatever small problems remain to be fixed.”

I adopted two mottos for keeping myself in focus during our final rehearsals. The first was “clarity and calmness” – that is, focus on what my character was doing, and breathe.

The second came when my friend Janet Aldrich, who has had a major theater career including Broadway, walked by muttering to herself, “In the moment.” That’s a phrase that actors often use; it means to be there each moment in a scene, not thinking about something else. Like everything else, it takes work to get in that frame of mind, but it definitely helped me concentrate.

One thing I made it a point to do was to thank the orchestra and the lighting operator for their contributions. I’ve played in the orchestra for a couple of high school shows, and we had no connection with the casts of those shows at all, which I don’t think is a healthy condition. The people who support the production should not be taken for granted.

My friend Annie asked if I felt jitters before performances, so I tried to understand how I actually did feel at those times. On the surface, my principal feeling was curiosity – I wondered how it all would go. Underneath, I suspect, was a deep reservoir of panic, but if so it never became conscious. I knew I had worked diligently on the project; I just hoped that was enough.

Hopefully there comes a time when a difficult task turns into an enjoyable experience. A great deal of the satisfaction of theater comes at the end of it, after a great deal of work. On the day we opened, driving here and there, thinking about the show, I found myself thinking, “I love this!”

I didn’t love, quite as much, the mistakes I made in the first performance – two involving lines, and one when I took off a costume too soon and couldn’t sing onstage in a chorus number (I sang just offstage). The second and last performance, I was almost letter perfect. That’s show business!

Staged Readings

by Kirk Woodward

[My friend Kirk Woodward’s back with a new post: “Staged Readings.”  His last contribution to Rick On Theater was the two-part All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes on 26 and 29 November 2025. 

[Play readings, or just “readings,” most ROTters will know, are sessions in which actors (usually) sit or stand and read the text of a play, either with or without movement, using primarily their voices to convey the meaning of the words.  There are many different kinds of readings, as Kirk will explain, depending on what the purpose of the reading is.

[Staged readings are usually the most elaborate of play readings, and are often performances in their own right.  As you’ll read, staged readings can be almost fully produced entertainments, with costumes, blocking, sound and lighting effects, music for musical plays, props, and even some scenery.  Others are stripped down, and some are in between, like the example Kirk starts off with, the famous Broadway performance of Don Juan in Hell in 1951.

[Kirk will outline some of what defines a staged reading, but his main subject is how they work and what the participants have to do to mount one.]

Over the last few months I’ve attended or participated in a number of readings of plays, and I want to share some thoughts about what are often referred to, correctly or not, as “staged readings.” (As we will see, for some readings little or no “staging” is necessary.) To begin this discussion I present three statements that I believe are true:

1.      Nothing in theater is as simple as one thinks it’s going to be.

2.      The success of a theatrical event can’t be predicted from its rehearsals.

3.      Actors will do their best to get something acceptable on stage, no matter what.

There are exceptions to these statements, as with probably every guideline or principle in theater, but, I claim, not many. We will return to those statements, and with these thoughts in mind let us look at “staged readings.”

An alternative word for such performances is “readers theater,” and Wikipedia has a useful article under that heading, including an account of perhaps the best known of such events:

In 1949, a national readers theater tour by the First Drama Quartet—Charles Laughton [1899-1962], Agnes Moorehead [1900-1974], Charles Boyer, [1899-1978] and Cedric Hardwicke [1893-1964]—appeared in 35 states, putting on 500 performances. Their presentation of Don Juan in Hell [the third act of the 1903 play Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, who lived from 1856 to 1950] was seen by more than a half-million people. Columbia Masterworks recorded a performance, which was later re-released in .mp3 format by Saland Publishing. The Wall Street Journal described it as “No set, no props, just four actors in evening dress seated on stools placed behind music stands, reading Shaw's words out loud.”

[The Wikipedia reference to a First Drama Quartet tour in 1949 is misleading. Laughton toured that year in solo readings of a range of texts, including the Bible, works by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)—notably The Pickwick Papers—and contemporary humor by James Thurber (1894-1961). He also included passages from William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Shaw. He obviously didn’t tour as the First Drama Quartet, the idea for which didn’t occur until 1950, which is also when he decided to do readings of a single play, settling on the third act of Man and Superman. The performance of what came to be called Don Juan in Hell played at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway in 1951, toured to several U.S. cities, and returned to Broadway (with a slightly different cast) in 1952.

[The WSJ article quoted above is “A Tour of ‘Hell’ in Evening Dress: How Charles Laughton taught America to love Shaw” by Terry Teachout (1956-2022), the Journal’s late drama reviewer. It was published on 6 February 2010 and if you are a WSJ subscriber, it’s accessible on the paper’s website. If you have access to any of several ProQuest newspaper databases, it’s also accessible that way in several different formats; on ProQuest Reference Library, it’s available as a PDF of just the article.]

Today, however, I gather the term “readers theater” is generally restricted to plays written for the purpose of being read aloud, often at schools, in order to enhance reading skills and expose students to new subject matter. The emphasis in such productions, a Google search suggests, is recreational and educational.

There is no need to be strict about definitions, but for this discussion I want to focus on plays that are read aloud for audiences for theatrical purposes. The operative word here is “staged.”

Even in theater, a simple out-loud reading of a play (sometimes called a “table read” when a cast reads a play aloud at the beginning of rehearsals for a production) is not a performance; it’s an experience that allows the people involved to hear the play spoken by the actors who will perform it.

A staged reading, on the other hand, is performed for an audience. The key word is “staged,” and it can contain numerous approaches. For example:

•        It can be as simple as all the actors sitting in chairs facing the audience and reading. This is probably the most familiar idea of a staged reading. However, it barely suggests the possibilities available.

•        It can utilize music stands for the actors to put their scripts on while they’re reading. Again, this is a standard idea, not particularly imaginative, but what are the alternatives? Either actors put their scripts on something that enables them to read effectively, or they hold their scripts, inevitably in different ways – folded over, folded back, underlined or not, and so on.

•        It can include movements into different groupings of readers, with simple or complex “blocking” of the movements. For example, actors may sit when they’re not involved in a scene, and when they are, they may step to the front. This again is the simplest choice. An example of a variation is that the actors readjust their reading positions depending on who they’re talking to in the scene. This needs to be choreographed, since now the actors are moving around.

•        It can be simply or elaborately costumed. Among the alternatives are “street clothes,” clothes appropriate to the character, costume pieces, and actual costumes.

•        It can include background music (recorded or live), or complete songs (again, with either recorded or live accompaniment, by a solo instrument or multiple musicians. Of course, with readings like the Encores! concerts, the songs are paramount and the dialogue is cut or omitted.

•        It can be a “pretend” reading – that is, the actors can in fact have memorized their lines while they act as though they are participating in a reading. (In the Encores! and TACT presentations, identified below, the acting has been so fully realized that it’s been clear the actors were not reading, even though carried scripts.)

We can also look at staged readings in terms of their purposes. Again, there are many possibilities. Among the more interesting:

•        They can be used in educational situations, as noted above – helping students learn to read, to express themselves aloud, to master unfamiliar languages. Normally these are not public readings, but they can be, and in any case the fact that they’re heard by others adds to their educational value.

•        They can be done practically anywhere, anytime, for entertainment value. For example, a theater company may use one or more staged readings to enrich or fill in a season.

•        They can be used for commercial entertainment, as in the case of the First Drama Quartet noted above. In late 2024, for another example, the comedian John Mulaney (b. 1982) starred in the Broadway production of All In: Comedy About Love, staged readings of short stories written by Simon Rich (b. 1984).

•        They are often used at the regional theater level as a way of “workshopping” new plays, reading them before audiences in the hopes of finding ways of making them more effective.

•        They can be an effective way of presenting older material to new audiences without committing to full staging. From 1943 to 1989 the Equity Library Theater served this function with plays, as did The Actors Company Theater (TACT) from 1992 to 2018. Similarly the Encore! series, which began at the New York City Center in 1992, has served the same function with over 100 highly staged “readings” of musicals.

Theatrical ingenuity being what it is, these examples don’t exhaust the possibilities for a staged reading. The point, though, is that inevitably the more features that are added to a staged reading, the more complex will be the rehearsals.

A clear advantage of a reading of a play, regardless of its complexity, is that the actors don’t have to memorize lines – they are reading. This is important. In an ordinary theatrical production the rehearsal experience can be divided into two sections – before lines are memorized, and after.

A digression: occasionally a director insists that actors know their lines by the first rehearsal, one example being the playwright/director Noel Coward (1899-1973), We should note, though, that Coward’s actors didn’t always comply. Other directors emphatically do not want lines memorized until rehearsals have begun and issues of character and plot have begun to resolve themselves.

Theater people smile when non-actors ask them, “How do you remember all those lines?” To my mind, however, that’s a reasonable question. How do we learn all those lines, and why do we worry so much about it? (At least I worry, and so do many other people I know.)

One answer is that an actor uses one or more approaches to memorization. Examples include:

•        Simple repetition – say the lines over and over, anything from word-to-word to whole speeches.

•        With electronic assistance – recording lines on a cell phone, tape recorder, or other device.

•        Learning the lines by repetition in rehearsal. This will happen to some extent normally, of course. However, relying on this approach doesn’t usually work, to the frustration of many directors.

These approaches and others help answer the “how” question of memorization, but for me the fact is that line memorization nevertheless is close to a miracle, and if there’s a coherent explanation of the way the process works I don’t know it.

There are people with photographic memories, of course, and a certain number of people whose minds simply retain lines easily, but most of the actors I know have to spend a great deal of time “getting the words down,” and stories about performers “going up” – forgetting their lines – are legion, even with great actors. 

So which is better, that the actors memorize their lines or that they read them? Obviously there’s no “better” – the two are very different processes. A reading of a play skips the “memorization” step entirely, so some difficulty is avoided, but, as already noted, there can be more, lots more to deal with – and a “cold reading,” with no preparation at all, is hardly desirable.

What’s more, as a general rule, the more familiar actors are with their lines, the more confident their delivery of the lines will be.

Back then to “staged readings” – no matter how straightforward the material may be, and what freedom may be gained by reading instead of memorizing, a director still needs to run down a mental checklist to see where problems may lie, even it the answers to many items on the director’s mental “checklist” turn out to say “Not Applicable.”

Any director, with any play, needs to spend initial time with the script, absorbing it, analyzing it, getting to know how it works. A director might feel tempted to skimp on preliminary script work in a staged reading, but it’s a director‘s responsibility to be as prepared as possible, and who knows what may be revealed by study and analysis, even for a simple reading.

Script preparation begins with the question of how much of the script to read when it’s performed – one act? Selected passages? The whole thing? Cuts may be necessary. Even in a straightforward staged reading there are decisions to be made, including items like confusing or antique passages, inappropriate language, and moments which may be unclear when read.

Then there are decisions about how things look and sound. What kind of space will the reading take place in? Is a backdrop necessary? Will the actors use music stands to put their scripts on? Will they be sitting when they’re not reading? Will the actors relate to one another? 

Are musical cues desirable, and if so will they be live or recorded? Are there sound effects? Will stage lighting be necessary? Will the actors need amplification, and if so, who will control sound levels? If the answer to any of these is “yes,” there will have to be equipment, people assigned to it, and cue sheets to specify when things will happen.

Even in a simple staged reading, the actors’ movements are not automatic. Do they enter as a group? Do they exit, either during the play or at the end? How do they exit – bow? Wave?

Do they sit until they have lines, and when they do get up, which reading stand do they go to? It may be advantageous for two actors to stand in particular places at a given moment, next to each other or at a distance, for emphasis. Do they always go to the same stands, or is there variety?

Some plays have vocal effects and these must be identified and specifically rehearsed. For example, there may be crowd noises when a door opens, or a moment when all the members of the family are talking together. If the script calls for special effects, many of these may have to be simulated or suggested rather than realistically acted out.

The items listed here are samples that apply for any production, staged reading or not. There are also questions that are specific to staged readings. For example, how much narration must be supplied for the audience?

I have a strong prejudice against reading any more than the minimal number of stage directions in a staged reading. To hear someone read “He crosses left and opens the window” drives me crazy. (“He opens the window” might be necessary.) “He exits” isn’t a lot better.

As a general rule, it seems to me, a play should be intelligible through its dialogue alone, and if you can’t tell what’s happening through the dialogue, it’s probably either not a good play or not an appropriate play for a reading.

After all this preliminary work, a director must cast the reading. No matter the type of production, casting is a vastly important decision. Some years ago I participated in a staged reading where the two lead female roles were drastically miscast – the actors should have reversed which role they did. As a result the play lost a great deal of its impact.

The audience gets a reduced amount of information from a staged reading, particularly one that’s staged simply, so the appropriateness of the actor for the role matters a great deal.

Even in the simplest staged reading there are elements of acting that a director will want to work on. “Cue pickup” is one – in other words, in general a line of dialogue should begin the instant the previous line ends, which means an actor must have “higher cue pickup” – the actor must register what the previous line means while the line is just starting, rather than when it’s ending.

Robust cue pickup is one of the easiest ways to assure an audience that it is in good hands in a reading, or in any production.

A director must also work on overlapping lines – when two actors deliberately speak at once – and, as noted above, with crowd effects. A play may also have “specialty effects” – songs, chants, or deliberately varied styles of speaking. Each of these must get its own rehearsal time. Extensive singing, of course, definitely requires rehearsal.

How much rehearsal? I imagine any director would say, “As much as I can get.” However, because it sounds easy to do a staged reading, the temptation may be to go for minimal rehearsal time. And, in non-commercial productions, depending on who is cast in the reading and what their schedules are like, there may not be much time available. 

One more characteristic of a staged reading that needs attention, and is often overlooked, is the issue of where the actors’ attention should be focused during the reading.

Here’s the problem: in a rehearsal for a staged reading, all an actor has to do is read. But the dynamic changes when an audience is present. To what extent is the actor “playing to the audience,” to what extent is the actor working with the other actors, and to what extent is the actor simply reading, with primary attention to the words on the script?

The answers might seem simple, but what often happens is that a cast finds its attention divided when it faces an audience. Who am I playing to? A director will do well to sort this question out in advance, so the actors are prepared as well as they can be.

For a specific example of the issues involved in a staged reading, I will use one in which I recently participated, a staged version of the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which has become a standard for viewing at Christmastime. The three numbered points at the beginning of this article all come into play in this example.

1.      Nothing in theater is as simple as you think it’s going to be.

Our director, the very talented Kristy Graves, visualized an extensively staged reading, but immediately ran into scheduling difficulties, both with actors and with the venue (the lovely auditorium of the Women’s Club of Glen Ridge, New Jersey).

[It’s a Wonderful Life Radio Show was presented by the Drama Department of the Women's Club on Sunday, December 14, 2025, at 5 p.m.]

The holiday season magnified these difficulties. Kristy had to be resourceful. Often there were times when principal players simply weren’t available.

We ended up rehearsing several times at Kristy’s house, including an initial read-through and work on several holiday songs that were to precede the show itself. I believe we only had two rehearsals on the actual stage, and the second of those was the afternoon of the performance. So Kristy had to repeat some instructions in multiple rehearsals

Music offered special challenges. We wanted to perform the pre-show music as close to the recorded originals as we could. However, the vocal lines for the backup singers weren’t published, or at any rate weren’t available to us, so we had to learn the parts by ear. (I never got mine completely right.)

Because the presentation was in “radio show” format, live sound effects were crucially important. Finding a good way to replicate, for example, the sound of someone falling off a bridge into the water, turns out to be quite difficult, particularly if the effect has to be amplified, since sound adds another dimension of complexity.

Speaking of sound, the actors all spoke into microphones that suggested those used in old-time radio studios, and for whatever reason, some mics tended to be “hotter” than others, more receptive to sound, so adjustments in volume had to be made by both actors and the person on the sound board.

At the first of the two rehearsals we would have in the venue, we realized that the way the play was lit, the stands on which the actors would put their scripts were in relative darkness! There was no way to redo the lighting. The solution was to round up reading lights for each stand. Nothing is simple.

2.      The success of a theatrical event can’t be predicted from its rehearsals.

Thank goodness for that! In our production of Wonderful Life we never had an uninterrupted read-through, never had all the sound effects in place, and only fitfully had all the actors present at the same time. Nor did Kristy have much time for character work.

We were changing movements and even occasionally line assignments up to the last moments of rehearsal. Kristy apologized for the lack of rehearsals, urged us to do our best, and told us the result would be fine. What else could she say? And there’s always the hope that . . .

3.      Actors will do their best to get something acceptable on stage, no matter what.

This principle, which I have seen justified many times, does not mean that the production will be “good” by any reasonable artistic standard. It may not mean more than that the actors do not make fools of themselves. However, that’s something, particularly from the actors’ points of view.

One of the principles of acting is that if an actor focuses strongly on something in a play, the audience will focus too – even if it’s the wrong thing! This simple fact has redeemed much bad directing and inadequate rehearsal time. Our direction was fine but we certainly didn’t have much time. But everyone came through.

Obviously the risks of disaster are fewer in a staged reading than in a full production, because the script is always present for security. In fact a good staged reading might be the preferable way of experiencing some plays.

An example might be those plays written in other eras which are considered unstageable today, like Queen Mary (1875) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), a verse drama which is said to have points of interest but is seldom or never performed. In fact a good staged reading might be the preferable way of experiencing plays not written to be staged, but to be read as literature (called “closet plays” or “academic plays”).

One final thought about readings, and about theater in general – if the story is strong, the audience will follow it, regardless of whether they’re attending a reading or a memorized performance. I saw this demonstrated recently in a reading led by a team from the Royal Shakespeare Company, at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.

The team led a two-week acting workshop with college juniors, ending with a staged reading of the play Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) that succeeded as well as any production of the play I’ve seen, and better than most.

The reason was that the actors had fully committed to the story. The fact that actors didn't have to focus on learning the lines in rehearsal and then remembering them in performance gave them more freedom for making everything, including its language, take its place within the narrative. The fact that the actors carried and read from their scripts made no significant difference that I could tell.

Ultimately theater is storytelling, and the more effective the storytelling, the better. Using that criterion, with effective use of the tools of theater a staged reading needn’t necessarily feel inferior to fully staged productions, and occasionally might even be preferable.

[Something came up while I was working on Kirk’s “Staged Readings.”  In some of my exchanges with Kirk, I think I occasionally used the term "oral interp" in our discussions of readers theater.  I remember back when I was growing up, when I was in elementary and middle school, I occasionally heard people mention Oral Interpretation as a class offered in high schools and, sometimes, colleges.  I was never at a school that had that in its curriculum, and I think few schools in my day did.  But I know I heard people talk about it.

[I looked it up to see if it was real, or if I invented the memory.  It was part of the Elocution or Rhetoric programs that most schools had in the late 19th and early 20th century—before Speech or Communication programs became current.  Theater or Drama classes weren't common because training in the arts—or, really, any vocation—was spurned by most educational systems.

[That's where readers theater really came from—dramatic reading was a way of teaching elocution, verbal expression, public speaking, argument and debate, and so on.  If anyone’s ever been to one of the many forensic competitions, when students (almost always high schoolers) present monologues, sometimes 2-person scenes, debates, and other oral presentations, those are remnants of the elocution programs, now relegated to competitions rather than instruction.

[I differ with Kirk’s definition of “readers theater” as “plays written for the purpose of being read aloud.”  I’d say the distinction isn't in the play, but the production.  Consider Don Juan in Hell, which he led with and which is an excerpt of a play meant for full staging, and Under Milk Wood, originally a radio play. 

[Before Laughton produced Don Juan in Hell as readers theater, he toured with readings from the Bible, prose works, poetry, and essays, as well as excerpts from other plays meant to be staged in full.  The plays presented by TACT and Encores! were all originally staged in full productions.

[Kirk insists that “today . . . the term is used for plays written specifically for teaching children to read, with no particular intention of producing them.”  Maybe that’s correct and I’m working from an era that’s passed.  Kirk references a recent Broadway production of readers theater (2024’s All In), followed by a current successor (2025’s All Out, running through March 2026), but there’s a dearth of recent staged readings on the model of DJiH, which would make his definition of readers theater more likely to hold than I thought when I raised my protest.

[I can't think of any recent readers theater performances around here (that is, New York City) lately, other than TACT, which ceased production in 2018, and Encores!—I actually missed the announcements of All In and All Out.  (Encores! is currently finishing its run of 1964’s High Spirits, a musical adaptation of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit [1941], on 15 February 2026.)   I don't know about the regional repertory companies, which may have presented some.

[I think there’s something fundamental hidden in the various approaches to staged readings Kirk enumerates—if one also considers readings for workshopping purposes, where the significant listeners are the playwright, director, producer/artistic director. and/or dramaturg. 

[In a performance reading—and even in a rehearsal reading and a reading as a “test run” for potential future production at which are either subscribers to the theater and/or invited members of the public, then the focal point is not just the text alone, but what the actors can do with it—that is, “acting.” 

[When the focal listeners are the staff professionals who are assessing the play, then the focus is what the playwright wrote, without the enhancements brought by the actors and the director.  (In the future, AI robots might do this job with their “acting” algorithms turned off—no “oral interp.”  Getting an actor not to act may be impossible!)

[In the list of memorization approaches that actors use, Kirk left out actors putting the script under their pillow and sleeping on it.  Of course, he omitted that because it’s a joke . . . but I’ve met some actors who actually tried this!  Some of them believe it worked.  (It doesn’t.)

[As for "stories about performers 'going up,'" in the ROT posting of the Stephen Colbert interview of Tom Hanks, The Late Show host asks Hanks about going up on lines he, himself, wrote, and on Broadway World, George Clooney speaks about getting lines wrong in Good Night, and Good Luck.  I also told a tale on myself—at a very young age—in the afterword to Kirk’s “Theater for Young Audiences.” 

[In his discussion of issues that require script preparation when Kirk writes about “moments which may be unclear when read,” I’m reminded of an instance I recounted at the end of the afterword to “Dispatches from Spain 11: Northern Spain” (11 October 2015) by Rich Gilbert.  I wasn’t working on a reading, but an acting class scene; nonetheless, it’s a case in point.  This one has to do with humor literally lost in translation:

[W]hen I was . . . studying acting, my scene partner and I were assigned a scene from the 1935 play Tovarich [by Jacques Deval (1895-1972); French playwright, screenwriter, and film director].  Now, Tovarich is a comedy, and after my partner and I got the scripts, I discovered that it was originally a French play [1933].  I got the French text from the library . . . and found that the scene my partner and I were assigned was light and amusing (which wasn’t obvious from the English translation), but it was based on a French pun.  The joke was built around the similarity of the phrases fond d’artichaut, or ‘artichoke heart,’ and fond d’argent, ‘money fund.’  There was no way in the world we could make the pun work in English (if there had been, I suspect Robert E. Sherwood [1896-1955], the English adapter-playwright, would have used it)—it was just lost.  All we could do with our knowledge was lighten up our approach to the scene since we now knew that the characters, a husband and wife, were having fun with one another.

[As for theater being “storytelling,” as Kirk observed, in “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011), I stated:

one of humanity’s earliest impulses was to communicate, to teach or explain events of import to the community.  That impulse predates written language so it was channeled into two other outlets: art and performance.  The first theatrical performances must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire to replay for the rest of the clan the day’s success.  This surely led ultimately to modern theater, and, eventually, film, television, and even YouTube . . . .  

[(I derived this remark from a similar one I had made in “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” a class paper I wrote for NYU in 1986 and posted on Rick On Theater in 2009.)  

[In “The Tip of the Iceberg: Creativity and Repression in the U.S.,” in an essay published in the Performing Arts Journal of September 1991 (13.3: 25-41), director Leo Shapiro, about whom I’ve posted many times, wrote: “Culture is a story told around a fire.”  That was his metaphor for theater.]

'All’s Well That Ends Well' Production Notes, Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward’s “All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes,” drawn from his production journal, continues below with Part 2.  If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on Wednesday. 26 November, I strongly recommend going back and picking that up before starting Part 2.

[The conclusion of Kirk’s account of his work on this Saint James Players production picks up right where the first part left off—with Kirk returning from his family vacation in North Carolina in mid-July and rejoining the cast and production team in rehearsal for Shakespeare’s All’s Well, already in progress.]

Back from the beach, I watched the next rehearsal, a run-through, and read lines for the missing actors – actually there were as many missing as there were present, which made the rehearsal uninspiring and also meant that occasionally we had to skip scenes because none of the actors in them were present, or only one.

I felt that Colleen had done a fine job of basic blocking, and she had a couple of ideas (the opening parade; a wedding performed as background; a funny bit with the children and a drum) that were spectacular.

We agreed that I’d take the acting scenes for the next few rehearsals, while she worked on the peripheral framing of the play. I was itching to do just that, without knowing whether any of my ideas would work – they seemed to me to be funny but crazy.

Colleen liked my suggestion that I tell the cast, when I was working on scenes, that we were “playing,” and that Colleen would review them to see what we would keep.  We hoped this would keep the actors from wondering which director to listen to.

So Colleen didn’t come to the first rehearsal on 20 July after my vacation. I worked on nine scenes, many of them short and transitional, trying to find “angles” for them that would interest the cast and provide some vitality. It was fun directing scenes again; I hadn’t directed in a while. I ran out of energy with about twenty minutes to go in the rehearsal, and we basically pushed across the finish line.

Rehearsal the following night was cancelled – too many people who were scheduled to be out, and one with a sick child. Colleen and I used the time to talk through costumes, which turned out to be less complicated than we had feared. We decided to go with basic black clothes, enhanced by accessories that we hoped would be emblematic and maybe funny.

Continuing to work on scenes in the next rehearsals, I learned something about myself as a director: when I start to run out of energy I talk too much. Time to stop, so I ended one rehearsal about 10 minutes early. The next rehearsal ended at 8:30 for the same reason.

But on each night we worked through all the scenes we’d planned to. Colleen worked one scene where she had a definite idea on how it should go. So it was a productive period.

Looking ahead to August, though, I saw an impressive number of schedule conflicts – sometimes half the cast Run-throughs were almost impossible. The best we could think of was identify the scenes that most needed work, identify the scenes it was possible to do, and match them up.

Actually at the next rehearsal we had a good percentage of the cast present, and since we had announced that the rehearsal would be a run-through, I told the cast the rehearsal objective for the evening would be continuity.

I had them think through the script in their seats, asking them to narrate to themselves the sequence of events in the play.  This is difficult because there are so many short scenes and I knew Colleen and I had a hard enough time keeping track of them.

Then on Sunday, 3 August, we ran the play from beginning to end, telling the actors they could act or not, work with the script or not, whatever they wanted, as long as they were where they should be when they were supposed to be there.

I think it’s important for each rehearsal to have an explicit goal, especially in early rehearsals, so the actors don’t try to do too much at once. On this night there was some excellent acting, particularly by the two leads. But there wasn’t any pressure for them to do that – it happened as a by-product of reduced stress.

We had few people for the next two rehearsals and only worked for about an hour each night. Colleen solidified a tricky piece of staging, and I worked with two actors, aiming to add more variety and movement to a few scenes and speeches. I hoped that the actors would retain the work.

I was particularly happy with one small blocking change I made, where a tiny “cross” by one actor and a “counter” by the other (one takes a couple of steps in one direction, the other adjusts a little in the other direction set up the rest of the scene with clarity and zest. Little things!

It struck me that in this production the play had two elements, an envelope and its contents. The contents were the scenes. The envelope was the apparatus around them – the children bringing out costume pieces, the location signs, the music, and so on. Colleen specialized on the envelope.

The actor playing the King had been on vacation for several weeks. When he returned we devoted the next rehearsal to his scenes. He had worked on his lines while away and the rehearsal went well until we reached the last scene of the play, which wasn’t blocked at all. Colleen and I had each assumed the other had staged it!

The scene has all the major characters and a lot of activity in it. I had worked out on paper some blocking for the scene, which is fairly complex, weeks ago, but for some reason I assumed that Colleen had staged it while I was on vacation, and she had assumed I’d handle it.

So I went ahead and blocked it now, and we got it done, although this made the rehearsal run half an hour later than we had wanted (9:30 PM instead of 9 PM).

Our next rehearsal, a run through, was the last for two weeks because of a holiday weekend (Saturday, 30 August–Monday, 1 September 2025) – no sense trying to get people to rehearse on Labor Day! Colleen and I gave notes afterward, the first time we’d been able to do that, and the rehearsal felt productive. I have to say, this show was work!

Colleen and I sat down one evening and ordered from Amazon the costume items we needed and were happy with the results.

We prepared the following “director’s note” for the program:

If you haven’t seen “All’s Well” before, you’re not alone – few people have! There’s no record of its production in Shakespeare’s time; its initial appearance is in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. That script could be a first draft! The directors of this production have edited it to one act and about 70 minutes, but we think it’s a fair representation of the play. Its theme is Shakespeare’s great interest, love, but this time it’s love of every kind but ordinary romantic love. Our heroine is in love, and as you’ll see, she has quite a problem to solve. We think the play is wonderfully funny and have tried to bring that aspect out. The cast is a delight and we’re excited to share this Shakespeare rarity with you!

After a two-week layoff for the Labor Day weekend, and with memorized lines due, the next rehearsal was awful. Sticking to the principle of one purpose per rehearsal, I told the cast the rehearsal was entirely about lines and not to worry about anything else. In most cases the actors had done a good, if often incomplete, job of memorization. Not much else was good, though, and I had to remind myself that I had told them that would be okay.

I had thought we’d be able to get through the whole play; in fact we barely got halfway and continued from there the next night, which went much better. The cast seemed more attuned to the play; the level of memorization of lines wasn’t bad; a few scenes genuinely clicked, with the actors relating well to each other.

We distributed the costume accessories we had ordered, such as sashes, medals, hats and crowns, and even fake moustaches for the children in one scene, and the cast seemed to enjoy them. Colleen reworked a bit of the last scene and improved it.

Meanwhile it appeared after all that I would be the one to play the role of Lafeu on the next to last performance, so I had to learn the lines. I used a portable tape recorder (primitive technology, I know, but convenient), taped all the scenes I was in (five altogether), and started listening to it every chance I got.

Then I discovered an improvement to that method. After each line of my own on the recording, I left a space for me to repeat the line – just like learning a foreign language. No sooner had I started on that method than the assistant pastor of the church volunteered to play Lafeu for the one performance. So I discovered a useful memorization method and was off the hook.

Denise, our trained opera singer in the cast, who was playing Lafeu, told me another interesting method of line memorization that she used. She learned her lines word by word – literally one word at a time. She’d memorize one word, and when she had that one down she’d memorize the next, and now and then she’d review the whole speech. Slow, but possibly effective. I intend to try that approach sometime.

Two rehearsals to go before the final week of rehearsals, 21-25 September. At the first we had several absences that made it difficult to organize scene work. Colleen used the performance space (the church sanctuary) with the four children, and I took everybody else upstairs, told them we were going to “play,” and led exercises on monologues and scenes based on training procedures I’d seen used by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Working together, our actors ran through the material once, then paraphrased it, then did it in the original text making a physical move for every noun or pronoun, then once more to see if anything had changed. In every case it had – the work was fresher, more fun, with better communication

After the rehearsal I asked one of the actors how she thought it had gone, and she said it was good but “I didn’t like it at first” As an actor I don’t enjoy this sort of work either, although I’ve taught “theater games” for years. In a production of a play I want to work with other actors to develop a role, and that’s all.

But the need for “games” arises when the language of the play approaches the “poetic.” American actors, raised on modern plays, approach them through the emotions, and American acting training is based on that assumption.

For example, Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) of the Actors Studio taught actors to reach into their own emotions for experiences they could then apply to basically realistic plays.

On the other hand, it’s generally necessary for actors to approach poetic drama – for example, the plays of Shakespeare – through the language, or they’ll have little idea what is going on in the play.

English actors traditionally have been trained in this approach, which helps explain why American actors often think of British acting as dry and even mechanical – the English are accustomed to approaching the play through its language.

I described this idea to the actors at the following rehearsal. We also talked about the fascinating fact that although the actors know what will happen in the whole play, the characters have no idea, and we tried to apply that insight to our script.

Over the next break between rehearsals, Colleen, one of our performers, and I tried to drum up business at a “sidewalk sale” on the church’s street. We were able to pass out more postcards for the show than I’d expected. Some people took them readily; some tried not to look me in the eye, perhaps because I was wearing a sort of Viking helmet with two big horns – a Shakespearian look, you know.

“Production week,” 21-25 September, leading up to opening night, began on a Sunday night after the usual week’s layover, and I told the cast that we didn’t expect full performances, we just hoped to get the show back in focus. Good thing – there were parts that went smoothly, but the beginning and the end were a mess, and lines were erratic all the way through.

I was “on book” prompting, and Colleen took notes. We agreed that there was no cause to panic, although deep inside I suspect we were both panicking – I found myself recalling many other shows in which, at one point or another, I had vowed never to direct again. But it was a useful night . . . I was pretty sure.

The next night we’d gotten the sound going and the costumes and props were handled pretty well. The run-through matched the previous night’s pattern of starting slowly and gathering momentum as it went along.

It struck me that each actor in the play had a different style of acting. Putting them all together – who knew? Hopefully it would be fun, but at this stage I couldn’t tell. Line memorization was still sketchy this night – lots of stopping and starting – and Colleen and I decided not to offer prompting of lines the next night . . . .

Which worked fine. There was still some stumbling and ad-libbing, but the story was clear and mostly interesting, although focus weakened again at the end. I had a page full of notes and hoped that people listened to them. I will say, it definitely felt like we were seeing signs of hope.

Another rehearsal, the 24th, more progress. The play, with a couple of exceptions, moved swiftly from scene to scene, and I thought it likely that the audience would respond to that.  The whole presentation ran an hour, faster than we had figured.

We started that particular run-through late because the church had double-booked the space until 7:30, and we used that time in another room to work on the last scene. It definitely improved. Dress rehearsal on the 25th was even better – about three major glitches but all easily avoidable.

And then, finally . . . opening night, Friday, the 26th, was a joy. An audience of about 35 saw a fast-moving play that told its story clearly and well and featured some excellent present-moment acting, which I define as the actors seeming genuinely to be talking and listening to each other, rather than just saying words – which makes the work fresher and more fun. Colleen and I were thrilled. I said to her, “There’s a possibility we actually know how to direct.”

With some friends after the performance, I was asked, “Is Bertram [the central male character] really as horrible a person as he seems to be in the play?” I told them that was exactly what Shakespeare had written. My friend Martha Day pointed out that if Shakespeare had weakened Bertram’s “badness” in any way, there wouldn’t have been any play – the whole story is that of a woman who loves a man who has absolutely no use for her at all.

The second performance, the following night, would have shaken my confidence if what happened hadn’t been predictable. Although some performances were solid, much of the show was just a little “off,” and one actor forgot chunks of his speeches. Colleen went backstage during the performance – something I don’t believe I’ve ever done as a director, but she was right to do it – and calmed him down.

The next performance, the Sunday matinee, before the show I said to the cast:

There were some really good things last night, but as you know we had some problems. I think the reason is that we were trying to answer the wrong question. We were asking, “How do we repeat what we did last night?” That’s never the right question. We can never repeat a performance. We can only move forward. The question we want to ask ourselves today is, “How do we tell our story this time?” If we do that everything will be all right.

“Tell a story” is more and more my idea of what a play does. I don’t know if what I said had anything to do with the performance, but it was fine. The story was told clearly, the play moved speedily from one scene to the next, and the audience – our biggest so far, seventy-five people – seemed to enjoy it.

I should add a note about our sound effects, because I was in charge of them. There were only three, at the beginning, middle, and end of the show, all music cues. I ran them from my cell phone over speakers. And I messed them up in just about every way I could. I neglected to test the equipment before a show not once but twice, and each time there were problems. Once I forgot to plug the amplifier in. Twice I was just plain late. A fine showing from the director! Mr. Professional . . . I hate tech.

After a several day layoff, many of us met the following Thursday to work with the actor who was going to play the role of Lafeu the next night. He was in a tough spot because actors often accomplish a great deal of their line memorization through rehearsal, and he only had this one. We agreed that he would use his script in performance and not worry about it.

The nicest moment came after rehearsal when Colleen, who was going to be travelling, said goodbye to the cast. Their affection for her and their gratitude for her work was lovely to see.

The Friday night performance of the following weekend, 3 October, was a pretty good show, and since I knew several of the factors involved – the cast hadn't done the play in five days so they were out of practice with the language, and someone was reading one of the roles as a substitute – the cast had a right to be pleased with themselves.

Our “ringer” paraphrased one line in a way that has made me laugh a great deal since. His line was, “Helena, that's dead: such a ring as this, I saw upon her finger.” What he said, in a furor of exuberance, was, “That ring! I saw it on Helena’s dead finger!”

I think one thing in favor of our production was that almost no one is familiar with the play, so they were wondering what happens in it. (I did meet one man who went home and read it when he saw the poster.) Anyway, I was happy . . . and relieved . . . and tired. Colleen, as I mentioned, had flown the coop, traveling to a wedding in Maine. Two is definitely better than one, if it's the right two.

The final performance on Saturday night, 4 October, was alive and lively, an excellent ending. Facts and figures: we performed for about 250 people (“houses” of around 35, 55, 75, 55, and 35 over the five performances), and took in $1,466 in contributions, well over our expenses, which didn’t reach a thousand dollars.

As my friend Dan Landon, who worked for the Shubert Organization, says, “One dollar over the ‘nut’ – it’s a hit!” (The “nut” is expenses.) We were a hit!

Looking back, I was happy with our production. It didn’t do everything we wanted it to do – its style was neither purely ’30’s slapstick, Monty Python, or graphic novel, but we did borrow from all three.

We also didn’t emphasize some themes that are present in the script – the role of Heaven in the story (the play has a deeply spiritual side), the theme of Honor that Auden emphasizes, and many of the bawdy sexual references.

But we told the story of the play in an entertaining way. I believe that those who weren’t familiar with the play before they saw it (a category that included virtually the entire audience) left with a solid grounding in the play. The show moved fast, with one scene finishing while the next was coming onstage.

Having two directors could be a problem, I’m sure, but Colleen and I were proud of the way we worked together. One thing we were able to do was to bounce ideas off each other. I believe we both tried to reach for the best decision each time, rather than insisting on our own ideas. I’d cheerfully do it again.

At the cast party one of the actors said to me, “I like working with you – you’re so easy-going.” I thanked him politely and thought to myself, “You should have seen what it was like inside me.” No two directing jobs are the same, ever. Colleen and I compared ourselves to ducks, calm above the water and paddling furiously underneath. But that’s part of the fun.

[The first recorded production of William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well didn’t occur until 1741 in London, 125 years after the Bard’s death.  The last New York City mounting was in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park from 6 June to 30 July 2011 by the Public Theater for Shakespeare in the Park.  It was on Broadway only once at the Martin Beck Theatre (renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003) from 13 April to 15 May 1983 in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by RSC artistic director (1968 to 1986) Trevor Nunn.]

[The Saint James Players’ production of All's Well, codirected by Kirk Woodward and Colleen Brambilla, took place on 26, 27, and 28 September, and 3 and 4 October 2025.  Performances were held at Saint James Episcopal Church, 581 Valley Road in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.] 

[Near the end of this installment of Kirk’s All’s Well journal, he recounts: “At the cast party one of the actors said to me, ‘I like working with you – you’re so easy-going.’  I thanked him politely and thought to myself, ‘You should have seen what it was like inside me.’”

[One time—and only one time—I had an almost identical experience.  (The complete tale is related in “The Importance of Being Earnest and the Big Bluff” in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories“ [6 December 2010].)

[After I finished my acting MFA, I meticulously avoided trying to direct.  My two brief experiences in the director’s chair had convinced me that it wasn’t for me.  Eventually, however, I found myself accumulating stage experiences I wanted to apply on the other side of the footlights.

[I’d been working for an Off-Off-Broadway company for about a year or so, and I eventually asked the artistic director to let me direct something there.  One evening, he called to tell me that the cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, had fired its own director!  They’d become frustrated with him because he hadn’t blocked the show, hadn’t given them any character notes, and, despite fervent requests, hadn’t made any cuts in the script.

[The artistic director asked if I’d consider taking over the production. I agreed to accept the job, my first professional directing gig.  In addition to not wanting to upset the cast any more—they acknowledged that they were floundering—and not wanting them to see that I didn’t know what I was doing, I consciously chose actions to appear more secure and authoritative than I really was.  

[I decided, first, not to tell them that I’d never directed pros before, then to make very specific decisions about text cuts (that was the straw that caused the rebellion) and tell them exactly what was in, what was out, and what we could discuss.  I made some specific blocking decisions, worked out some physical business to insert, and made some very specific character notes.

[I deliberately selected these actions so that I’d seem to be in charge and on top of the situation (even though I wasn’t).  It was all a choreographed act I figured would carry us into the rehearsals far enough until the work itself became a focus.

[One thing that worked in my favor that I couldn’t have known was that the cast was so desperate for some guidance and direction that they glommed onto my efforts like Velcro!  The bluff worked, but mostly because the cast was really ready for it.

[Here’s the bit that parallels Kirk’s anecdote: after the play opened, and we had our opening night party, several of the cast, drunk by then, very forcefully said they’d work with me anytime again and that I was a real “actors’ director.”  That’s when I told them that this had been my first professional gig.  They were shocked—and I was delighted!]