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Jan 23

Posted by DCA Theater on January 25, 2010 in January-June 2010 Season, INCUBATOR Series: Wishbone Theatre Collective

by Kimberly Van Ness, Wishbone Company member and actor in the ensemble for Spandex

With one rehearsal standing between us and the showcase on Monday, it was time to put the shoe leather to the road (or noses to the grindstone or whatever the metaphor is).  On Friday, we spent the better part of the rehearsal just writing, trying to fill in the gaps that our improv explorations had left us with.  For two hours, everyone in the ensemble went to their own little corners (like that Cinderella song, the people version, not the cartoon) and wrote furiously.  For the last hour, everyone shared their pieces and the main throughline of the show started to take place.  From this exercise, we discovered our superhero’s name, the relationship of the characters to the environment and the purpose of the villain.

After this exercise, several ensemble members (fueled by massive amounts of caffeine and sleep depravation) sat down to make sense of this wide assortment of people, places and things that all of our exercises had left us with.  On Saturday, we sat down as a group to work through our first three scenes.  It is pretty amazing that within the course of a few days, we were able to go from a pile of odds and ends of information with no idea how to string them together to having a defined storyline, named characters with backstories and our conflict.  We worked two of the three scenes vigorously and wrote and rewrote many lines until we were satisfied.  Never having been blessed with patience, this part of ensemble developed work is always difficult for me but the end product is always worth it.

The last scene of the day provided a bit of a challenge.  As we worked through it, some of the dialogue didn’t feel right, so the two of us acting in the scene asked Jeff if we could use the existing script as a guideline for an improv scene.  Through the improv, we were able to fill in some of the conversational gaps and flesh out the characters.  I have learned that improv is an excellent tool to use if some parts of a script feel like they could use more detail.

Stay tuned for our last blog post of this project!