Tag Archives: Private Lives

10 of 12 rehearsal for Private Lives

Leave a reply

If you are in the theater, you know what a “10 of 12” is. For those who are fans of theater, but not practitioners, it is one very long day allowed by Actors Equity and the other trades, when all the designers, cast, crew, and director try to work through adding the technical aspects of the show. We work ten hours of a twelve hour span.

This Sunday we started at 10 am with a ‘paper tech’, where the stage manager (Julie Pare), lighting designer (Eric Marsh), sound designer (Yezzmine Zepeda) and sometimes the set designer (Dylan Marks) collaborate on the cues for light, sound, and special effects. Both designers had previously built their individual plots in their respective computers, so it was a melding of the two into the stage manager’s call sheet. The company manager, tech director, and senior tech joined us. I always choose to be there, but the director is really extraneous at this point if communication has been good throughout the process. Because Private Lives is not a particularly tech heavy show, (aside from props) we were able to finish in a little over an hour.

Actors arrived at 11:00 am for what should have been a costume dress parade, where I get to see the costumes under light and work with the costumer to make notes on what needs to be adjusted, completed, or added. Our costumer was not quite ready and begged an extension, so I spent an hour giving actor notes from the last two rehearsals. Crew members and interns were also called for 11, and the stage manager worked with our newly assembled stage crew to walk through the major set turnover between Acts I and II and the prop changes between Acts II and III.

I assigned my iPad to my directing intern Isabelle Rogers, who played photographer during the whole long day.

By 12 noon, we were able to take a quick break and begin tech rehearsal. Often this is when we use the actors as props and just move from cue to cue rather than actually playing the whole scene. It’s beneficial to the technical staff  but doesn’t help the actors very much. But because the lighting cues are generally long and slow progressions of light and the sound cues are very specific in timing, we were able to work through a run of the entire play, including set turnovers by 4:00 pm, when our dinner break was scheduled.

Some of the crew chose to have a pot luck/take out picnic in the green room. A number of us walked over to a little French crepe restaurant in the Village and spent our break together, then wandered back to the theater at our leisure.  At 6:00 pm, we started all over again from the top of the show. During the second run, we stopped only occasionally to work out a rigging problem that we had discussed, to work business with a break-away prop, or to adjust the actors positions to be better lit, etc. During the act breaks I consulted with the prop master about a punch list of final props that are still outstanding and fabrics for reupholstering the furniture.

We finished a little after 9 pm. Light and sound designers were able to leave, knowing my technical notes would come to them from my stage manager. The set designer and shop crew worked to resolve a few issues and the running crew began to organize the back stage storage of furniture and props while I gave actor notes. When I finished shortly after 10 pm, we had almost an hour in our scheduled 10 of 12 rehearsal to work or rework some scenes, but I chose to let everyone go home a little early, knowing the set designer was waiting to continue painting the floor and we would be sharper and more creative in our solutions after some rest.

All in all it was a very successful tech. But it does bring home how close we are to opening the show.  Our first preview audience will join in the fun next Sunday, July 14 at 3:00. Hope you will consider joining us.

For more information and to buy tickets call 713-524-6706 or go online to www.mainstreettheater.com

 

Notes on “Private Lives”

Leave a reply

When I last directed Noël Coward’s Private Lives in 2008, I wrote the following article for the program notes. When Shannon Emerick, Main Street Theater’s Marketing Director reminded me of it, I decided to republish it here. What I wrote eleven years ago, is just as true today.

A Deeper Look at Private Lives

In many ways Private Lives is an extraordinary play. The Twentieth Century equivalent of the Well-Made Play, it is elegance personified. There are only a few characters, each representing a specific social type while remaining quite believable. The characters of the play are from the wealthy leisure class. Although not specifically aristocratic, they are quintessentially British upper class. No mention is ever made of professions, work, or money. Yet everything indicates a life of privilege; the 1930’s version of the Jet Set.

Ironically, the play opened only weeks before the crash of 1929 which ended the world it documents.

Private Lives is written in brilliantly caustic prose. The language is erudite, intelligent, and delightfully witty. While working on it, certain lines find their way into daily conversation because the characters speak with a wit and charm to which we can only aspire. The language is not only charming, it is as profoundly challenging for an actor as Shakespeare or Shaw.

The entire plot revolves around a specific premise: what happens when two intelligent but volatile personalities meet years after they were madly in love? Act I establishes the characters, the relationships, the conflict, and the EVENT. Act II explores the relationship in the light of their actions and the mayhem that ensues. Just as things become explosive, their actions catch up with them in the form of their abandoned spouses. Act III is the charming and witty ‘resolution’ of their dilemma. Coward moved in such circles. He was a popular addition to many a ‘weekend house party.’ He was an integral part of the coterie of young people sometimes referred to as the ‘bright young things,’ a group represented in more recent fiction in Brideshead Revisited.

Historically, this is the generation that was ravaged by World War I. Many young Englishmen died in the war, but an extraordinarily high number of young aristocrats did not return. World War I was also the first war to be declared on the civilian population. Battles were no longer only fought on battlefields between two armies. Suddenly, death rained from the skies and poisonous gas drifted from battlefields into communities. Out of the randomness of that war and the ensuing ennui came new ways of looking at life as expressed in a variety of philosophies and artistic and literary movements, including Expressionism, Symbolism, and Existentialism. Writers such as Hemingway, Beckett and Sartre found their own ways of expressing these ideas.

It may seem odd to compare the seemingly ‘trivial’ and superficial comedies of manners that Coward wrote with the writings of Hemingway, Sartre, and Becket. But in a very real way Coward documented the same questioning melancholy that found expression in contemporary society as agnosticism, lost faith, and a rejection of more traditional lives and societal roles. He chose to write in a more familiar and recognizable style, with humor, wit, vivacity, and charm, but his characters express the same doubts and questioning with an elegance that is inevitably entertaining and astonishingly memorable.

Claire Hart-Palumbo, director (Summer 2008)

For information about my new production of Private Lives at Main Street Theater in Houston, go to MainStreetTheater.com.