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Seanachai Rehearsal Update

Written by J David Moeller (playing Frank Coin)

Rehearsals for “Scenes From The Big Picture” (August 30 – October 5 at the Storefront Theater) are well underway. Actors are almost completely off book, blocking is solidifying, and transitions between scenes are being worked out. Talk about traffic jams.

Tonight was the first rehearsal (called a stumble-thru) where we actually incorporated the transitions (scene changes) into the action. All twenty-one of the actors in the show sit around the outer edge of the stage…literally as audience members…moving into the action as their scenes come up.

Transitions are the setting of scene pieces: chairs, tables, a desk here, a tavern there. Here a shop, there a bench, and a shovel or two just for good measure. Each actor has a specific job to do between the scenes and tonight’s adventure was almost reminiscent of the old silent Keystone Kops movies. No one was quite sure where they were supposed to end up. Of course, professionals that we are, everything ended up where it should have.

“Scenes” takes place over a 24 hour period in modern Belfast. It’s a story of relationships and how the lives of the city’s inhabitants intermingle with one another, and then go on their separate ways. It’s sometimes touching, other times raw; and, yet, interlaced with a touch of humor and some requisite pathos.