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A Streetcar Named Desire rehearsals - Week One
Posted by Rehearsal Room on 27th Jan 2012 at 13:00 | 0 comments
Stephen Fletcher here. This is my first blog. There will be many to come throughout the run of A Streetcar Named Desire. We’re into week two already, and things are looking good.
So far we had the obligatory and nervy first day’s ‘meet and greet’. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the first day of a rehearsal process, this is the day where all of the theatre staff come out to say hello, and to meet the visiting company of actors and members of the creative team. Each says their name and their role within the building, and then every one of us, without exception, forgets what we have just been told. It’s the first day! Thank God there isn’t a test.
We then headed into the rehearsal room (now the darkened Studio space at the top of the Playhouse) and settled down for the readthrough. This is the first hearing of the play and a chance to listen to the ‘orchestra’ of actors’ voices. It was a great readthrough, and really exciting to hear it as if it was a radio play- and a gripping one at that!
We moved onto some table work on the script for the next few days, where we answer any questions we may have regarding the script. It’s when we highlight things like the timeline, to get a feel of the flow of the play, what happens when, and to answer anything that is unclear, colloquial to the piece, or any specific words that need defining. We read each scene in turn and then went back in detail over anything we were unclear about. “There is no such thing as a stupid question” was comforting to hear from our director. Gemma then spoke very passionately about Tennessee and his background, and how much of his work is peppered with influences from his own life. He sounded like such an interesting man. I’m hooked, anyway.
Onto getting it ‘up on its feet’- a statement most actors fear as it is such a leap of faith. When taking your performance from the comfort of your seat around a table and then into the space of the rehearsal room, having the script in hand and a bag of sweets and coffee at arms’ length is sometimes a much nicer place to be.
So, onto rehearsals, learning to “tawwwwk laaaaaaak thiiiyysss” in New Orleans, and take this amazing play onto the next stage.
More soon.
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