Well, the read thru went very well thank you much. Then, the next night, we started in on ACT I. Slight problem: I got more involved. Kinda like a three-year old with a puppy I tried to play it to death. Or trying to swan dive into the kiddie pool. The actors were superb and listened and did their best to play along as if I actually knew what I was doing. In a sense I did. In a sense I know these characters like an old lover and I was visiting a pair of prostitutes trying to turn them into the girls who got away. There is a dance and no matter how much you may want to lead you just can’t dance a tango while the orchestra it tuning up.
That aside we got quite a bit of work done. We laid out some skeletal blocking. And I believe we did establish some baseline for the characters.
In my defense it was my hope that, rather than force feeding character upon the actors and by doing so limiting them to the straitjackets I was fitting them for, that my input would offer them a springboard from which they could safely jump off from. We were at an airport, on that I think we can all agree. And while we were all staring at the runway, where I thought I was showing my pilots where their flight plans might take off from, they were hearing me tell them where to land.
I think the biggest problem is you need to take the plane out of the hanger before you fire up all the engines.
So, we’ll return to taxiing on Monday.
Directing Hamlet 