The Edge of the Wedge

Whew! Well, the first rotation is over. With such a short rehearsal period, there’s almost no time for reflection within the process. So I have some time for that now – after it’s up and running. I am Lab Producer for the second rotation, and so unlike my colleagues, I don’t go immediately into rehearsal for another show.

This first rotation I directed a play called "Language of Angels", by Naomi Iizuka. The play takes place in the cave country of North Carolina and centers around a young woman’s disappearance. When I first saw the Wedge, I thought this would be a great show for the space – the nooks and crannies and rickety architecture seemed perfect for the environment of the play. The first section of the play consists of a series of monologues describing the young woman’s disappearance. She disappeared in one of the hundreds of miles of caves, and was never found – her ghost and her death haunt the group of friends who were with her that night. The characters are in a variety of locations, speaking to unseen listeners, with the exception of one character, who is narrating his return to the cave and site of the girl’s disappearance. I wanted to use the whole space of the Wedge, with all its levels and entrances for the first section, so that all those moments take place in the cave. The play is an exploration of the dark corners of the past, and the way our choices haunt us for our lives, as much as it is a ghost story. The endless tunnels of underground caves of Appalachia are both the physical and the metaphorical setting for this play, and I wanted the environment to surround the audience, with entrances and voices coming from all around them, from unexpected directions. I wanted to use shafts of light to illuminate the speakers, as well as candles and flashlights. These choices presented a number of rehearsal challenges. We worked in a studio that was about half the size of the Wedge, and, of course, lacked a balcony. The very nature of my approach to staging made it an exercise in spatial imagination – as we didn’t have the levels, or the nooks and crannies, it was very hard to visualize how the staging was coming together, and the relationship of the stage picture to the audience.

Spacing and tech both addressed these challenges and increased them. We had limited time, but we could finally place the staging in context, and I changed a number of things to suit the actual space (which differed in numerous small ways from my imagination of the space) as well as the limits of the lights. We had a few “shafts” of light, but they were less shaft-y than I hoped, and were limiting the staging possibilities. I wanted to use the far corners of the Wedge, but there was no light there. So we moved a few moments, and added actor-driven lighting (flashlights) for a few additional moments deep in the cave. We rehearsed in the studio when we weren’t slotted for tech time in those last few days before opening. It was so exciting to get into the space, and so frustrating to then be parted from it! We had plenty of work we could do, some of which was restaging a large chunk of the second section to better suit the space, now that we’d actually been in it and seen the tricky sightlines. But this is usually the stage of the process where you’re polishing the show, working to make rhythms precise and tight, making sure the spacing is exactly what it needs to be, and these were things we couldn’t do in the studio! It meant that dress rehearsal, as well as the first performance, remained shaky, and where the technical staff as well as the actors were making the mistakes they would ordinarily have made earlier in the process. While I was ultimately pleased with the show, especially given the challenges of the short time, and the space, and enjoyed the environmental use of the space, I do think that ultimately the first part remained a little messy, and wished I could have found a way to keep the staging as environmental and space specific without the stuttering rhythm we occasionally ended up with. It was also an exercise in understanding that that is the nature of risk: you have to give up a little bit of control, in this case, over the perfection of the event, when I made the choice to ground all the staging in the specifics of the space.

"Language" was a great lesson in trying to make space-specific staging outside the space. Knowing what I know now, I also would have used even more actor-driven lighting, which we then could have rehearsed outside our limited tech time. But while the results were a little shaky on opening, particularly in the first section, it was also exciting and rewarding to commit so fully to use all corners of the space as it is, and I think I did achieve one of my big goals: to invite the audience into the world of this play, engaging all their senses in their experience of the play. It was worth it, even though I still struggle with, and will continue to struggle with, what I feel to be the technical sloppiness of the first part of the play.

One of the great joys and success of the process as well, has to do with my collaborators. I worked with a wonderful group of actors who managed to turn in fully realized, committed performances in an extremely short period of time, and a design team who worked heard to capture the physical and emotional world of the play, and kept perfecting things up to the last minute.

Can't wait to do it again!

Tamara