Cold Reads and Rehearsals

I suppose any time someone else reads your work, it's bound to create a certain amount of drive and inspiration, but I just had a cold read for the first time since I've been writing plays these last few years. It was a revelation. Certainly, there was a rush at hearing my words spoken for the first time. But very quickly I became focused on all the things I wanted to fix. The transition between scenes, for one thing, are too much like television. The play was much, much too long. I had read in a book that I should count a minute a page, but it's actually between 1.5 and 2 minutes a page, and doesn't that make a difference. The play being read, The Pharisees, had some universality to it, but also some grandstanding on my part. The grandstanding isn't funny, so it's a candidate for the cut. The actors got the characters really quickly. But the actors laughed during the reading, laughed several times in each act. They all said it was good as soon as we were done. The reading of the lines was very close to my intention, generally speaking, which was a surprise, so it's written fairly tightly. I learned a great deal about pacing -- parts of the play dragged, others didn't. I also discovered I had a certain amount of judgment about this situation. I found that in some scenes, the actors could get into a rhythm, and then I saw why comedy has to be precise: to work, it has to be like a pinball machine. I have great admiration for the actors' gifts, and their generosity with their time. Let me thank here, publicly, Karen Maki, Glen Graham, and Paul Gosse.

And now, the hatchet has to come out and I've got to cut and rewrite.

I have also attended the first read-through and the rehearsal for a musical being produced locally. The casting is particularly good, and I'm looking forward to watching the performances develop. It's a large cast and I'm learning a lot about the range of people and actors -- I tend to see the characters in my head when I write and I now have a greater range to choose from. I take it from the casting that the auditions must have shown the director how good they could be, and it's interesting to see people working from the start.

I also got a reply from the reader service offered by the francophone association, and I'll be mailing out my French-language play today, along with a cheque. I'll be getting more and more feedback, that will be great. It's nerve-racking, but hugely helpful.