Rehearsal Report--6/16

Tonight we focused on the A-plot.  The duping of Falstaff by Ford (Brooke) and the merry wives.  This is a great groups of experienced actors with a mix of exposure to playing Shakespeare.  They took to it very well.  I had abandoned the concept of reading through scenes first at the previous rehearsal and we jumped right in.  We got a fair amount accomplished.  In fact we were just one Falstaff/Quickly scene and one Falstaff/Ford scene away from doing all of their blocking.



I wish that I had time to repeat it, and I am nervous that will come back to haunt me in the upcoming week.  I have the utmost confidence in this group of actors but repetition is good for the soul.  However, I had to postpone a one on one meeting with one of the actors and I wanted to have time to get to that.

I worked with the actor for over an hour, and I think we left it in pretty good shape.  He was nervous about tackling Shakespeare for the first time, and to do it with such a pivotal role.  His instincts are dead on; he just needs to build his confidence and learn how to play the punctuation.  By the end of the night he was nailing some of the bigger soliloquies and we had started to move past just playing the punctuation and adding layers of art to the performance.  It was time well spent.

Issues raised:
--Meg Page raised a question about a bit of verse.  In Act IV, Scene 2, she is left alone on stage and has a short soliloquy that starts in prose and then switches to 4 lines of rhymed verse.  Worse than that, it is a pair of rhymed couplets.  The speech reads:

Hang him, dishonest varlet! we cannot misuse him enough.
We'll leave a proof, by that which we will do,
Wives may be merry, and yet honest too:
We do not act that often jest and laugh;
'Tis old, but true, Still swine eat all the draff. 

Obviously switching to verse heightens the situation and tells the actress to pay attention to those lines.  She did, and that's where the question lie. Couple that with the deliberate rhyme scheme and we almost have a 4-line song right here in the middle of the scene, at the height of the anarchy.  Being put on the spot is never my strong suit.  We parsed out the language and figured out all that it was saying, but the question remained, why?  I likened it to the end of most Shakespeare plays when a character will come out and do the epilogue, essentially begging the audience's pardon and asking for their applause.  Here she's stating that she and Alice will show that women can have fun and keep their integrity, but no matter what they do, Falstaff will always be a pig and they won't succeed in changing him, but they also won't have to change themselves.  We're playing it directly to the audience and we'll see how that goes.

To prep for next time:
--More closely review the scenes to try to find those moments where I will get hung up.
--Figure out the use of the Garter Ensemble in the Garter scenes.