Knock Knock - An Actor's Journey -Chapter 4

Last night we started getting Knock Knock on its feet.  The set crew must have had a busy Tuesday because we had some walls up which I did not expect but was grateful.  There’s a kitchen, albeit a kind of low third-world kitchen but a kitchen we can play with.  Right now we have a short stand of shelves for a stove and a 3 foot step ladder for a refrigerator but that’s really all we need at this point.  Imagination comes before reality or, in our case, illusion.

Costumes came first last night. The cast brought some of our clothes to see if they would work for costumes so Carol Browning our costumer would know what else she would have to find, buy or invent.  Thrift shop exist for the sake of theatre.  Little known fact. 

Nancy Winker who plays Joan of Arc had to be fitted with armor and chainmail befitting JArc (as she will be affectionately know) and apparently that was not something already in her closet.  The best part was when her chainmail pants kept falling down around her ankles.  Heavy suckers.

Blocking.  We started blocking act 1.  For anyone who might not know, blocking is essentially setting traffic patterns.  Unfortunately, if you put a group of people into a confined area and tell them to go and do anything they want whenever they want to do it, you end up with a bloody mess.  Blocking is choreography on a less balletic scale – it’s setting a traffic pattern so the actors don’t bump into the furniture or each other.  But it's also a fluid structure that provides a framework but allows for the flow of a performance.  Live theater, remember, every performance is different in some way.

I don’t know what technique our director Frances McCain uses to plan her blocking.  When I’ve directed I like to designate different chess pieces as different characters and move them on a piece of cardboard with the future and doorways drawn on.  What is consistent in almost all blocking plans is that when you actually put it on its feet, something won’t work.  You adjust on the fly and now the actors are your chess pieces.  Theatre, the ultimate collaborative art.

Blocking is laborious.  There’s no getting around it.  But it is incredibly essential.  Sometimes you will see a play and there is a scene that just seems awkward physically  -- too many people on one side of the stage so the stage is not balance visually, one actor blocking  or upstaging another, seeing a character perform an unnatural turn or (my personal irritation) actors in a straight line across the stage who aren’t Radio City Rockettes about to break into a kick line. While in some cases it may be that an actor made a mistake at a particular performance, chances are the director did not give enough attention to blocking and should therefore be shot.

So Act 1 is blocked, framework established -- subject to change.  Tonight we’ll run Act 1 again to drive it into our feeble brains and start blocking Act 2.  Two acts left to block.  Then we get all the lines in our heads.  Then we have fun.