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Week 3

by Vance Smith, director

With the structure of Act 2 now in place, I went back to previous drafts, and made a list of lines and ideas cut along the way that I thought perhaps merited another try.  We have a week left in the Incubator, and this is the perfect opportunity for us to take one more shot at some things we were not sure about.  Steve and I met outside of rehearsal and discussed my list and some changes he wanted to make based on Sunday’s run.  The resulting draft will be, minus a few tweaks, the version we present at the reading.  Then we can let the audience help us determine what should stay and what needs to go.  After fine tuning the first act on Wednesday (1-21), we devoted Thursday to tackling the second, which in spite of having come a long way, still needs more work, largely since so much of it is new.  We started running it with the staging, and two things quickly became apparent: first that some of the new material was not really resonating with the performers yet, and second that the blocking was really really bad.  I staged this section organically with the actors last week, partly because I had myself only just received the new draft.  But as it turns out, there are simply too many people onstage and too many things happening for that to be successful.  I would have to go home and figure this out by myself.  So we stopped the work-through, sat back down at the table and had a discussion with the actors about the new material, and then broke for the night.