TUESDAY JULY 17

Just so that everyone is clear, if you are in the cast of Our Town, you are called for all rehearsals from now on. For the last two weeks, I didn’t want to have all of you sitting through 3 hours of rehearsal just to deliver one or two lines of dialogue or to stroll across the stage. But at this point, it’s imperative that you bring your best game to Grover’s Corners! In Act I, I need lots of school children to create the impression that Wally, Emily, George and Rebecca attend a decently sized school that exists somewhere stage left. In Act II, the wedding of Emily and George needs to look well attended with orderly rows of chairs. In Act III, Emily’s funeral should be populated with a few more people than just her parents. Ladders get moved on and off stage. Likewise tables and chairs. These are all things which everyone (the ensemble) must do in order to create Our Town. I apologize if I didn’t make this clear earlier.

Tonight, we take publicity pictures from 7:00 to 7:30 (George, Emily, M & Webb, M & M Gibbs, and SM.) Act II commences at 7:30.

Here are some refresher notes on entrances and exits for the wedding.

On p 58, the following people enter:

From SR

Doc Gibbs

Mrs Gibbs

Rebecca

Mrs. Soames

Simon Stimson

Const Warren

From SL

Wally

Sam Craig

Desi (create your own persona!)

Emily Morris (ditto!)

Howie Newsome

Prof Willard

On p 59, Mrs. Webb enters from SL

On p 59 at the bottom of the page, the baseball players enter DSR:

Shaun

Gia

Sophia

Estus

Here’s how I’d like the baseball players lines split out:

#1: (Sophia) Hey George! George! How are ya!!

#2: (Gia) Woo hoo!

#1: (Sophia) Look him guys! He’s scared to death!

#2: (Estus) Oh, George!

#3: (Sophia) George!

#2 (Shaun) You don’t have to look so innocent, you old geezer! We know what you’re thinking!

#1: (Estus) Go to it, big boy, you old geezer you!

On p 60, George enters from house right.

On p 61, Emily and Mr. Webb enter from house left.

According to my notes, I should have everyone here tonight except Doug and Gia. Plus Katie is in Chicago at her Comedy Sportz tournament. (Go, Katie!) see everyone at 7:00 or 7:30.

Fun Fact about Our Town #6: On p 69, Sam Craig looks at Farmer McCarthy’s grave, recalling that he did chores for him after school as Farmer McCarthy had lumbago. Lumbago is merely a vintage term for lower back pain. It could be anything from a strained muscle to a herniated disc. So the next time you have a backache, I challenge everyone to walk around your school or office saying “My lumbago’s acting up.”

Hands-on History!

Hey folks!

For those of you who want to experience some of the play's time-period firsthand check this out! It's a discount on tickets to Houston's Museum of Printing History. They may have a press like the one that would have printed Grover's Corners Sentinel. Here's a link for a discount from Living Social.
http://www.livingsocial.com/cities/7/deals/397748-museum-admission-for-four-and-two-t-shirts

Another good idea would be to visit an antique shop. Most dealers will label items with their era. You may see and touch a turn of the century stove, toys, books, furniture, clothing, etc. Make mental notes of weight, space taken up in your hand, texture, etc.
Getting a chance to see these items can improve your imagined reality and help your pantomime skills.

See you tonight!

FRIDAY JULY 13

Thank you Whitney, LD, Jeff, Rita, Sarah, Patrick and Katie for braving the flood waters to rehearse. I'm really pumped at what I'm seeing onstage. Everyone is committing so much to this story; you're going to have audiences eating out of the palm of your collective hands.

Tonight, we touched on arranged marriages. While Doc Gibbs seems to imply that he "married a total stranger," I think he was using symbolic language to convey the fear and anxiety he felt on his wedding day rather than factually relating a bartered marriage. 

Grover's Corners is a small town- only 2642 people when the play opens. When Frank Gibbs and Julia Hersey were courting, there had to be even fewer people, perhaps 2000. The town was full of Herseys and Gibbs. They had already lived there for generations. So their extended families likely knew one another. Wilder also implies that Frank and Julia are nearly the same age, unlike Charles and Myrtle Webb. So they were probably in school together, perhaps separated by just a year or two. It seems unlikely that they had never laid eyes on one another.

Now let's look at what Doc Gibbs says:

"I was the scaredest young fella in the state of New Hampshire. I thought I'd made a mistake for sure."

If this was an arranged marriage, he would have said something along the lines of "I thought they'd made a mistake for sure." But it was his choice to marry Julia. He compares his fear to someone who might be marrying a total stranger. After all, how well DO you know your future spouse? How well CAN you know them?

Emily echoes these sentiments in the moments before her own nuptials. She's alone, she's frightened, she bargains with her father to get out of the marriage. George likewise harangues his mother because everyone is pushing him when we know good and well he chose Emily and asked her to marry him.

I think what Wilder is getting at is that the walk down the aisle is more scary than joyful. Hollywood would have you believe that you float a few inches off the floor in slow motion as rose petals swirl gently down from heaven. Real life is far more traumatic: you question the choice you have made, nothing seems right, you'd do anything to just walk away.

But as Emily and George discover, if you take that chance and commit to someone, you do experience joy. It happens not only at soda fountains, but also at kitchen tables and in bedrooms and nurseries and on back porches. This is the same joy that Emily longs for on the day of her funeral.

Thanks again for embracing this wonderful story. Be sure to take a moment to linger on the joy in your life.

Here's a wedding photo from 1890, around the time Frank and Julia Gibbs married.

Katie's Comedysportz, Audition and 1901-1913 Images

Hey y'all!


ComedySportz Houston
Come see me at ComedySportz this Friday at 8pm and in Ampersand at 10:30pm. Both shows go up at the ComedySportz arena. Check out the website for directions and more information. The upcoming tryout date is on there too! The 8pm show is family-friendly 6 and up. The 10:30pm show is 17+. www.comedysportzhouston.com
Check out www.stubdog.com for discount tickets! 
  
Audition
If you are interested in working with the Houston Grand Opera as a supernumerary or a lightwalker check this out! Both positions are paid. Take a minute to look through the “Season Overview” and fill out the “Participation Form” by Friday, August 3, 2012. They can be found online by going to http://www.houstongrandopera.org/supers.  

Our Town Images
Here's information on Ice Cream Soda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_soda
 
 


Here's the wiki page on Heliotrope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliotrope_%28color%29
 
Here's Burdock. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdock
 

Here's a Butternut tree.
 


Here's an ice box. This handle is different from the ones I've seen.

THURSDAY JULY 12

How appropriate that the night we work on the rainy wedding scene, Mother Nature cooperates and provides us with the real thing. There's a pond in front of my house which has left its banks and threatens to overtake the one road out of my neighborhood. It usually takes a major hurricane to make that happen, so I think I'll be OK.

Just to be safe, unless you are STAGE MANAGER, EMILY, DOC GIBBS, MRS. GIBBS, MR. WEBB, or MRS. WEBB, stay home tonight. And stay dry. (Matt has a conflict related to his new job.) If you find that you are trapped by rising waters, call 9-1-1 first and then shoot me a text.

I'll try and keep it quick tonight. We've worked portions of this Act already, so it shouldn't take long to iron out remaining details. Maybe by next week it will stop raining.

Fun fact about OT #6

Here's a few pictures of everyone's favorite- Mount Monadnock. At 3,165 ft, it's the tallest peak for 20 miles. In 1800, local settlers set fire to it in order to clear the lower slopes for pasture. The mountain was burned again between 1810 and 1820 to rid the area of wolves. This completely destroyed the top soil and the upper stretches are, to this day, denuded of trees. Its name is derived from a Native American word meaning, get this, "mountain."

Mount Monadnock is second only to Mount Fuji in numbers of annual hikers: 125,000 people.
That's almost 350 people a day!

This is Troy, NH at the foot of Mount Monadnock.

Just had to include this which highlights the gentle slope of this ancient, eroded mountain.

WEDNESDAY JULY 11

This show has taken a while to completely cast. For starters, the casting panel faced a formidable array of talent during auditions. There was no shortage of actors for all of the roles. 

But when the cast was announced, a number of actors dropped the show. Since Our Town is an ensemble show, there are numerous parts with only a few lines; not terribly appealing for someone who may be driving 30 minutes just to get to rehearsal. I've noticed that playwrights today rarely write walk-on or "bit" parts. It's simply too expensive for the larger union houses to cast a variety of equity actors just because the playwright wanted a street full of people milling about.

But we have, at last, arrived at a complete cast (with the minor exception of poor Farmer McCarthy who simply sits in the cemetery in Act III):

Patrick Barton- Stage Manager

The Gibbs Family

LD Green- Dr. Frank Gibbs

Whitney Zangarine- Mrs. Julia Gibbs

Matt Elliott- George Gibbs

Peyton Crenshaw- Rebecca Gibbs

The Webb Family

Jeff Brown- Mr. Charles Webb

Rita Hughes- Mrs. Myrtle Webb

Sarah McQueen- Emily Webb

Samuel Irving- Wally Webb

Shaun Furter- Joe Crowell, baseball player

Mario Garza- Howie Newsome, dead man #2

Matt Hudson- Professor Willard, dead man #1

Mike Roberts- Simon Stimson

Michel Stevens- Mrs. Soames

Reid Self- Constable Warren, Joe Stoddard, Man at back of auditorium

Gia Ochsenbein- Si Crowell, baseball player

Doug Pfaffenberger -Sam Craig

Emily Morris- Woman in the balcony, dead woman #2

Sophia Slabic- baseball player

Estus Stephens- baseball player

Desi Stephens- Artistic lady in a box, dead woman #1

(And all of you can be in the choir!)

Beginning next week, it will be critical for all of you to be at rehearsals for every Act in which you appear. Katie and I want you to learn how to get on stage, how to get off, and what reality you create while you're there. OT is an ENSEMBLE show- that means EVERYONE is important! Even if all you're doing is ad libbing "Good night!" or "See you tomorrow," you are what makes the audience "see" Grover's Corners.

Speaking of Katie, thanks again for the great mime exercises! With your help, the cast is taking a simple gesture and creating an entire world.

Fun Fact about Our Town #5

We talked a bit about moveable type last night. So how did Editor Webb create The Grover’s Corners Sentinel twice a week?

The invention of moveable type (around 1000 AD in the East and 1450 AD in the West) allowed writers to print relatively inexpensive books, papers, and pamphlets. Very handy when you’re trying to accomplish a Renaissance or Reformation.

But letter stamps (called “sorts”) had to be selected by hand, one at a time, from a tray. Try this: Put both hands in your lap. Raise your right hand and type the letter “T.” Put your hand back in your lap. Raise your right hand again and type the letter “h.” Let me know how long it takes you to type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

But in 1886, after some amount of trial and error, Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine. This allowed a typesetter to create an entire line of text (line-o-type) using a keyboard, which dropped sorts into a frame. The entire frame was then immediately cast in hot metal and the sorts returned to their trays so they could be used again. When the hot metal slug cooled, it was used to print on paper and then re-melted and used again.

Before Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine, no newspaper in the world had more than eight pages. (!) So only the most important ideas and events ever made it on paper. But thanks to linotype, Mr. Webb was able to publish the details of everything from birth announcements for twins to details of drunken Polish men who fell asleep in a snowdrift. 

Although I haven't actually researched this, my guess is that the Linotype machine allowed the creation of larger newspapers, which then had space to fill during slow weeks. And this, in turn, created a new job: the reporter.

Look at the keyboard: the keys on the left type lower case letters; the ones on the right are for uppercase letters.

TUESDAY JULY 10

I was very pleased with rehearsal tonight. All of you are working so diligently on the characters that you're creating. Don't be too hard on yourselves during the process; you're trying to read lines, mime 15 different things at once while relating to another actor on stage and trying to remember where you exit. I may sometimes push you to "overdo" some aspect of character development and then pull it back later. Or maybe I'll have you try different sorts of delivery for some lines. This is all part of the process of defining your character. Well before we open, you'll have a crystal clear picture of who you are on stage and what you should be doing. Right now, I love that you're all being flexible.

By now I think everyone has noticed the subtle differences between the Gibbs and Webb families. Keep in mind that one is not better than the other; they're simply different in how they communicate and relate to one another. Both families managed to produce two lovely young adults (in addition to Wally and Rebecca) who fall in love in a very healthy and normal way. Like most families, they're basically successful even though they are sometimes a bit dysfunctional. It will be beneficial to exaggerate these differences for a time before dialing them back again. Knowing the extremes of how your character might act will help you discover how they might behave on a typical day.

I'd like you to be off book for Act I by July 18,

for Act II by July 23,

and for Act III by July 30.

I'd rather have you calling for lines after those dates than to keep trundling around with a script in your hand. I always try and keep someone on book for you; my usually policy is no more than a week of calling for lines before I make you struggle through it with no help at all. For most actors, this is more than enough time to memorize. As you well know, the sooner you get that book out of your hand, the better your performance becomes.

Fun Fact about OT #5

On p 42, Dr. Gibbs tells Mrs. Gibbs that George is upstairs shaving. He likely would have used a bristle brush to make a soap lather (no shaving cream in a can) to apply to his face. And he would have attacked his beard with a straight razor. Safety razors were invented in 1880, but the blades still had to be sharpened by hand. This was no easy task and many men resorted to taking their safety razor blades to a barber or other professional to be sharpened. For many, it was simply easier to stick to the tried and true straight razor, which could be sharpened with a leather strop.

It wasn't until K. C. Gillette came up with the idea for a disposable razor blade in 1901 that safety razors began to appear in wider use. (Gillette sold the actual razor handles at or below cost, but marked up the replaceable blades appreciably, thus ensuring a healthy profit.) 

The proper way to hold a straight razor.
Free advice: if you drop this,
do NOT try and catch it!

Can you fathom starting off
every day by dragging a well-honed
piece of steel across your throat?