Starting in mid-March, the actors were rehearsing quite regularly, and I attended essentially every rehearsal, with the exception of one that I skipped early on for the purpose of getting some rewrites done, and one later that I opted to skip in order to give myself an evening of rest from the work. I met a lot of interesting challenges while in the process of rehearsing the play. In practically every rehearsal there were problems I had to address – lines which simply weren’t working; moments where the actors may have been confused about the subtext; alliterations which unfortunately turned into tongue twisters; and so on. Most of these things were fixed very quickly and easily. Erin, our stage manager, was there at every moment with her script in hand, noting every little change. She was very important for my work, and I was extremely fortunate to have her there doing that.
Amongst the many small, easily fixable problems with the script, there were also a handful of potentially large, frustrating ones. The scene with Charlie and Madeleine which I rewrote fairly early on was one of these problems. Several more followed later on in the process. One of the first issues I tackled involved the scenes between the characters of Grace and Walter. Walter’s character began as not much more than a romantic foil for Charlie. The actor playing the role had the unfortunate challenge of trying to shape Walter into someone with a sense of dimension and humanity, and it is a testament to the hard work and talents of Chris D., who did take on the role, that Walter ultimately did have those things in abundance.
Chris, Ryan Hemphill, Kirsten S. – who played the role of Grace,– and I spent a lot of time working on the relationship between these two characters and on the scenes which shaped that relationship. I found that the original scene I wrote between the two of them was too long and often contained superfluous material. We spent an entire rehearsal dedicated to that scene at which time I was able to cut a large amount of text and clean it up a lot. At that rehearsal, I revisited the idea of writing an additional scene between Grace and Walter to place earlier on in the play. I wasn’t sure if that scene would contain some of the information I had cut from the already existing scene, or if I would write it entirely from scratch, but I did know that I wanted it to be there.
I ultimately ended up writing something completely new, which I placed in the middle of the first act. It helped to better illustrate the evolution of their relationship, and it also gave Walter a little more stage time, which I thought was important if he was really going to be considered a significant presence in the play. The rehearsals that we spent specifically on those scenes, plus the time I spent on revisions at home, truly improved that aspect of the play immensely.
Just as they did for the Grace and Walter scenes, Ryan Hemphill and the actors offered me a great deal of inspiration and ideas with the majority of the other moments that I “fixed” in the play. I was able to shorten several scenes significantly based on the work that Dan, Evelyn, and Andrew H. were doing in their scenes together. Watching them over a period of time really helped me figure out the moments in their scenes which really worked and the ones which absolutely didn’t.
The trickiest parts were those which sometimes seemed to work and sometimes didn’t. Andrew, who played the role of Joe, had a good majority of the jokes and one-liners in the play. He had a lot of responsibility in this way, because so much of the humor was coming from his character. Therefore, it was really important for me to keep a close observation of his work in order to figure out which jokes were winners and which were duds. There were certainly a few duds, and I was more than happy to get them out of there. At certain times, I found myself having to cut jokes which were actually very funny, but simply weren’t serving the scenes other than making them longer. One of the major things I tried to do throughout this process was trim down the script to the fullest extent possible. There were many things I liked which I had to concede were not necessary within the context of this particular play. After all, I could always save them and apply them to another work in the future.
Ryan Hemphill 