Dan’s directing again….

So, I’ve just cast another show that I’ll be directing and I’ve been thinking about attempting to keep up with this blogging thingie again.  Meh.  We’ll see.

Anyway, I’m directing this great play called Erratica, by Reina Hardy.  I directed one of her other pieces that was in development with Babes With Blades and she apparently liked the work I did and recommended me to direct this one!  I was able to cast my very best friend in the lead … not because she is my best friend, but because it is as if the role was written FOR her!! 

The show is being produced by a newish Chicago theatre company called American Demigods. 

I wrote during the Vanishing Points casting process about how ridiculously heartbreaking that process was for me…this one was no different.  I had to turn away three people who I LOVE for roles that they absolutely could have played…but were just not the right fit with either the people they read with or the vision that I had for the role.  It is very hard sometimes to separate “God, I love this person” from “God, I love what this person brings to this role”.  For example, two of my very best friends have actually performed together in a couple other things I’ve directed…they’ve always been great together…in this instance, the characters need to have an awkward romantic energy between them which really drives the action of their characters’ relationship….the reading was great, but the romantic spark just wasn’t there…from either of them.  If I could have overlooked that, everything else about the audition was great.  I just couldn’t.  It caused me some sleeplessness, but in the end, “the play’s the thing”. 

So, my lovely and talented cast for the show will be Lisa Herceg (my very best friend and very talented actress who I’ve directed many times in the past!), David Wilhelm (a company member of American Demigods, with whom I am very excited to work!), Kelly Yacono (who just brilliantly played a crazy woman in the piece I directed for Appetite Theatre in the fall!), Victoria Bucknell (who was also in my cast of Vanishing Points and was one of a couple critically-acclaimed scene-stealers in that show!!), and John Luzar (who I just met at auditions, was absolutely not what I pictured in the role at all, but who was so perfect nonetheless that I couldn’t possibly NOT cast him!!). 

I have a certain love of exclamation points anyway, but I seriously am THAT excited about this show.  The script is delicious, the cast is delicious…I just can’t wait to get started!

Anyway, happy holidays to all of you who read this (or just Morgan!).  I look forward to blogging about the new project!

- Danta Claus

Cuz you said you’re still coming here…

Hi Morgan!!  Wish you were coming to see Sherlock with us tonight!!!

The day has arrived

I apologize for not continuing to blog my rehearsal process.  Work and rehearsals got in the way of it!  But this process has been challenging and rewarding.  Last night’s final dress rehearsal went fairly smoothly.

Now, the show’s not mine anymore.  I am putting it into the hands of a very talented group of people…my lovely cast, my amazing stage manager, and her incredible assistant.  It is always bittersweet for a show to open, but this one has been especially hard for me.  I really don’t want to let go.  This has been my baby for such a long time.  But now it belongs to….

Rachel, who has kept me sane and, more importantly, kept me organized for the last couple months.

Derek, who has jumped in to help out whenever and however he is needed without ever once complaining (and he sure could have!).

Tony, who has grown and improved so much in this process…and whose rides home were HUGELY appreciated!

Mark, who makes an awesome nightmare meanie!

Rick, who can simultaneously make me laugh and drive me crazy!

Chris, who I wish was wearing the tiger striped under-ensemble in the show!

Morgan, who has moved me with her performance since the callback!  (From Mitsy to Fran – Wow!!)

Annie, who I am so thrilled to be working with again after all these years!

Victoria, who I’m VERY grateful made the choice to do our show!

And Stacie, who has been such a joy to direct in such a tough role!

I love you all and hope that this experience has been even half as fulfilling and enjoyable for you as it has been for me.  I thank you so much for all of the hard work and dedication to this project … it means so much to me!

And to everyone else:  buy your tickets for the show here:  http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/99135

See you at the theater!!

Tying it all together….

I had a theatre-free today yesterday…which included not blogging about it either. 

Wednesday night’s rehearsal was lovely.  Stacie, who is playing Beth, was the only person called.  She opens and closes the show with monologues and has a couple others through the course of the show, so we worked those.  It was really nice to get a frame for the show created.  I think Stacie, Rachel, and I all made some wonderful discoveries, shared our thoughts about the character and show, and did some serious work on the monologues. 

I may have mentioned this before, but I was really scared about casting someone I’d never worked with nor even seen in a show in this really challenging and amazing role.  Stacie was a “gamble” that I’m very happy I took!  In the first two weeks of rehearsal, she has done some really incredible work with the role.  I’m excited to see where she goes with it in the next four weeks! 

On another exciting note, my apartment is no longer a rehearsal studio!!  Starting Sunday, we start working in rehearsal spaces.  I can stop apologizing for the fact that the cast is working in a space that is 4×8 instead of 14×14.  And we can start to actually work in some blocking and movement!

Wow…just, Wow!

Last night was an awesome night for the Vanishing Points  team.  Many of the designers met before rehearsal to check out the performance space at BoHo.  We nailed down some specifics on some props and, most importantly for me, the set!  We simplified it a lot and minimized pieces that need to be moved, which makes me very happy!  I’d forgotten how much I love that little space, but after being in there again I am super psyched to put this show onto that stage.

Then Rachel, Derek, and I headed back to the current rehearsal space (aka my apartment!), had some MUCH-needed beer and waited for the actors to arrive.

Stacie and Annie worked their asses off last night…and the results were pretty amazing.  One scene brought tears to my eyes.  I was really impressed with what they did with the direction they were given. 

Looking forward to working with Stacie alone tonight.  She has a couple monologues and then we’ll discuss her character’s complicated journey.  It should be a laid-back night…and hopefully we’ll end a little early.  Too many nights of less than 5 hours of sleep this week!

Redemption…

I think that last night’s rehearsal redeemed what I felt was a less-organized one the night before. 

Ran two-character scenes between Stacie and Chris.  They were just a joy to work with…thoughtful answers to my questions, smart questions for me…overall, some really really good work.  They have some pretty intense scenes together and we made some fun discoveries with them last night. 

Rachel and I also had a great pre-rehearsal meeting with our Set Designer, Brian.  He’s an ambitious young designer…very artistic…and has some great ideas.  We scaled back a few to keep things a little simpler, but all-in-all, I think he is doing a great job.  I look forward to seeing what he does with the slides he is designing as backdrops for the show! 

Tonight, we get to start the evening by meeting all the designers at the performance space to take a walk-through before rehearsal.  Then we work on scenes between Stacie and Annie!  I’m looking forward to seeing them work together.  I’ve never directed Annie before but know that she’s a joy to work with as a scene partner!  It should be a lot of fun.

Feeling Disorganized!

Yesterday, I had what felt like a bad rehearsal.  Not bad because the actors weren’t working hard…they were great.  Bad because I didn’t feel like I knew what I wanted.  I went into rehearsal confident that I knew what I needed to do and just couldn’t focus in and get what I needed.  I felt like crap for the rest of the day because I felt like I wasted people’s time…one of my BIGGEST pet peeves.  I do think that we got some good work done and, for one short scene in particular, we created something pretty damned cool…but I just hate not knowing exactly what I want from something. 

I have the day off today for MLK day and am having some breakfast at McDonalds (healthy, right?).  I’m supposed to be working on a training demo that I have to do for work on Wednesday, but I may instead have my script open working on thoughts for tonight’s rehearsal.  I just can’t have two bad rehearsals in a row…

Thank God I have an awesome cast, who just goes with the flow and gives 100% whether I seem to know what I’m doing or not! 

Tonight will be better.  Tonight we start working on the two character scenes (most of the scenes in the show are two character scenes…I made the mistake of starting with a five character one!)…tonight we start with Beth and her boyfriend, which are really great scenes…one very fun and flirty, one pretty dark and tense…then move on to a really intense scene between Beth and the crazy snake-loving mountain guy (played by the same actor who plays her boyfriend).  It should make for an awesome evening. 

Keep your fingers crossed that I have a better night tonight.

Coolest Show and Tell Ever!

No blog yesterday because we didn’t rehearse on Wednesday night.  Instead, I went to see my friend Kelly in GayCo’s The Audacity of Nope which was a lot of fun.  Sketch comedy is always one of those genres that can be tough…I have seen some really bad sketch comedy and I’ve seen some shows where I’m seemingly the only person in the room who doesn’t think the whole thing is hilarious.  In this case, I found the show to be hilarious and most of the cast to be really brilliant.  If you get a chance to see the show, its playing at the Annoyance on Wednesday nights…and it is a lot of fun!  (Kelly as a skydiving lesbian bride was pretty damned awesome!)

But back to Vanishing Points – Last night’s rehearsal started with some open discussion about the time period in which the show takes place.  Rather than just lecturing to everyone about things like the politics of 1972, I asked each actor to bring in a couple items from 1972 that would have been of interest to their character/characters.  I’ve given this kind of “homework” to actors many times before…and with varying results.  It is actually a great test of how invested in a project an actor is…this cast did not disappoint.  All eight actors obviously put time and thought into the exercise and it made for a really interesting 45 minute discussion of events, music, television, films, and culture of the early 70s.  Victoria brought in a cd with a song she’d burned that she thought one of her characters would enjoy, a few of the actors brought in images printed from the internet …it was a really successful exercise.   Some people even brought in extra information:  including Rick bringing in a photo of the bike he had in 1972, Chris sharing some information about rattlesnakes (its appropriate to his character), and Mark giving us an education on Fellini. 

We then did a second read-through of the full script because this was the last night that the entire cast will be together until we start doing full runs of the acts on February 1. 

Sunday afternoon we start doing scenework and really delving into the characters.  I am so excited to see what these actors can do with this script.  Its going to be a lot of fun!

Whodunit?

Last night’s rehearsal was spent talking mostly about the real people and the real crime on which Vanishing Points are based.  Some of the theories are really fascinating.  Some police in Nebraska believe that it was a murder/suicide orchestrated by the mother (I find this theory to be hard to imagine and some blame this on a lazy police department).  Another theory focuses on the father’s military intelligence background.  He spent some time in Budapest about a year before the murders.  There could potentially be some political motivation behind the murders.  Another far-fetched idea attempted to link the murders to a Chicago-area Manson-esque clan called De Mau Mau.  They were responsible for some similar murders (families shot in their own homes at close range without any apparent intent to rob them) in the Chicago suburbs around the same time as the murders of the Peaks. 

The cast, Rachel, and I had a lively conversation about the events and the people involved.  We’ll now take what we know about the real victims of this crime and decide what we will incorporate into the characters we build and the story we tell.  The play contains quite a lot of “dramatization” of the events.  This isn’t really a story of a murdered family, but more of the journey of one of the surviving family members to cope with the loss and move on with her life and her art. 

Tony, one of the cast members, asked me a great question last night…he wanted to know what my “elevator speech” was to describe the show.  I’d been focusing so much on the peripheral aspects of the process recently (worrying about set, costumes, research of the murders for the cast and crew, etc) that I’d lost sight of that simple 1-2 sentence description of the story we’re trying to tell.  I appreciate that Tony brought me back to the place I needed to be.  A director’s job (especially in smaller companies) often takes him/her off in multiple directions at once and a gentle reminder from time-to-time that the basics cannot be forgotten is much appreciated. 

No rehearsal tonight.  I’m going to see my lovely and hilarious friend Kelly in GayCo’s sketch comedy show The Audacity of Nope tonight.  Then back to VP tomorrow night…where we’ll start with some fun facts about 1972 and then hopefully work in another reading of the play before we start scene work on Sunday!  That’s when the big fun begins!

Read-through Brilliance

Last night’s read-through of Vanishing Points was great!  The cast seems to have great chemistry and everyone gets along really well.   We all introduced ourselves, a couple of the designers talked about their ideas, we all grabbed a beer, and then we did a reading of the script. 

I am always concerned, as a renter in a condo building, about noise from rehearsals being bothersome to the neighbors.  I try to be respectful.  My new upstairs neighbors are the most obnoxious I’ve ever had.  One of my first nights sleeping in the new place, I was subjected to the loudest love-making session ever…he is apparently very good!  At least, that is the impression I got from all the moaning and the screaming.  Well, last night I had 14 people in my apartment and we were being overpowered by the noise from upstairs…at one point, it sounded like someone was just pounding on the floor repeatedly with a hammer.  I don’t know if there was some kind of sports event they were watching or what, but it sounded like they had 40 people up there.   And apparently the walls and floors are THIN in this new building.  Luckily only a few more rehearsals will need to be held at home. 

Tonight’s rehearsal is about the Peak family.  I received, about a year or so ago, some great information from a reporter in Nebraska about the murders on which this play is based.   While the playwright takes dramatic license with a lot of the story, there is a real tragedy at the foundation of this piece.  One that I want the cast to know about and understand before we start to create characters who are based on these real people.  So, it won’t be a particularly happy discussion tonight, but it is an interesting case and story so I hope I’ll keep the cast’s attention while I talk about it.  I happen to be fascinated by unsolved murders and the theories behind them, so hopefully I can keep it interesting. 

More to come…