Directing Existing Work...

These were the guidelines Scott gave us for our final project in Directing Existing Work...but it's also a good list of "ways in" when given a script to direct...

Directing Existing Work – Final Project Guidelines. Use what’s useful.

1. First response: What was your initial response to this play/script? Gut-level. Love it? Hate it? Indifferent? Why? What did it do or not do for you? What specifically engaged you—viscerally, intellectually, emotionally, Did you see images? Hear music? Did you easily visualize it in your mind, see it clearly on stage in any way? Where did it live in your imagination as you read it or saw it? What kind of emotional journey does the play evoke for you. What moods and tonalities does this play suggest to you?

2. Summarize the story briefly, defining it in terms of its key events.

3. Text: theme, language and structure: What kind of play is it? Can you characterize it by genre or not? Is it a translation or adaptation? What themes does it examine? What broad questions does it raise? In what ways are its time and setting operative? What sort of reality does it suggest? What’s the nature of its language? Its musicality? In what ways is language operative? How are character voices differentiated? (as in Shakespeare, for example: prose vs verse) Is the language lyrical? Heightened? Stylized? How “self-conscious” is the language (as in Marisol, where the diction always implies a kind of awareness of itself and thereby plays a critical role in establishing the the play’s fractured universe). What is the play’s sense of urgency?

What is the play’s central event? How is it introduced, developed, defined? As with a scene, is there a significant initiating event or action? A series of rising actions? Complications, turning point? Are these of sufficient urgency to compel a clear trajectory of action (or story line) for each character? Consider the ways structure works to generate and support the emotional arc. Break down the scenes or components of the play and visualize what must happen as a series of events. If each event has a title, can you tell the story by listing the events in sequence? This will help you to see the play as a framework of actions, and determine how it must move in space or on stage. This leads to crucial storytelling awareness, and is also a good step in developing a ground plan and other basic scenic ideas.

4. Character breakdown. 1) Describe each character as you see her/him imaginatively : physical characteristics, behaviors, etc. Get all the adjectives out of your system, and then 2) describe each character by how she/he behaves: Pick a scene or episode that you think is defining for each character, and describe what the character does. State the facts in the simplest way you can. By defining character through a paradigm of action, you invited the kind of inference that is open-ended and useful (to an actor, a casting person, etc) rather than asking to see certain emotional qualities played or imitated. This process also gives you a jump into a framework of objectives and actions.

5. Audition sides: Choose one or two scenes for each character. Will you be looking for a range of behavior? Then choose accordingly. Choose acive, climactic scenes with strong events and clear, playable objectives. How do you see the character’s essential demeanor? Can you find an audition scene that will elicit that, and then another that will ask the actor to make more urgent choices? Think about scenes with contrasting objectives rather than different emotional qualities. What will you want to see in a first audition vs a callback?



6. RESEARCH
With what aspect of the play are you inclined to begin your research? Its setting? Its time? Its literal subject? (i.e. marriage, liberation, infanticide, war, etc.) Are you drawn first to critical texts? To visual imagery? Music? Does the play exist in a natural world, a city, a dreamed world, a historical world? What would it look like? Can you Trust what engages you, let the research lead you, but ask at some point in the proceedings, preferably before you have become completely overwhelmed, if you see any relationships among the items you are most drawn to? Do they begin to suggest patterns of ideas, thoughts, etc? Do they spring discoveries, “eureka” moments? Do they propel you back to the text in any way? Do they begin to arrange themselves, juxtapose themselves? If they don’t, you are having a good time anyway; maybe go back to the text for more inspiration. Show this stuff to a designer, or an empathic relative. Better still, take a nap, listen to some music or clean your house. Hokey as it sounds, trust your unconscious; it’s all in there, and when you least expect it something will emerge. Even if not, you have a lot of stuff to share. And at least you’ve begun the process of elimination. You guys know how to do this stuff. Think about kinds of spaces, sounds, light, movement, dress . . .

7. DESIGN
Depending on your proclivities, you may or may not want to take a stab at developing rough designs for your projects. You might want to track one character’s clothes, for example; or arrange a series of images of different spaces, or even moods, or examples of light or music, in ways that suggest a sequence determined by the play (not literal images of the play). For our purposes, I am less interested in ideas about specific sets, costumes or lights than in how you begin to pull the research together to suggest a world of spaces, moods, tones and relative values that can guide you and form a basis for discussions with all your collaborators.

8. SUMMARY: Look at where you started. Look at where you are after all this. How has your thinking developed? Is your gut response to the play enhanced? Altered? Do you still want to work on it sometime? What’s the next step?