From the wings, before the cast got into costume

Last night was our Tech Dress (aka Technical Dress Rehearsal), the cast’s first run in full costume! They look truly amazing, Judith has done an incredible job. Today we’re working out some technical details on stage and then tonight is our final dress rehearsal before we get our first audience on Tuesday. It’s been a long week for everyone but spirits are high. I think all will much appreciate a day off to rest.

Evan makes a truly gorgeous woman and Ann-Marie is stunning as a blonde! The show is a real treat; it’s funny, touching and wonderfully bizarre.

This morning started with a costume quick change rehearsal. Megan’s got some really fast changes in the first act – her costumes are truly incredible and she looks fantastic.

We’ve been in the theatre for three days now. The first day was just working through the show for spacing, with everyone getting used to their new home. Yesterday and today have been spent doing a Q2Q (that’s “cue to cue” in layman’s terms).

The days are long but everyone is in good spirits and the show is looking just wonderful. Tomorrow we’ll do our first run in the theatre, something we’re all really looking forward to.

Ben's new haircut (Evan seems to like it)

Early Saturday morning started with Ben getting a new look: he’s had a radical new haircut for the show. Meanwhile the rest of the cast ran lines, or as Evan put it, “It’s too early to remember things.” Next up we reviewed songs (by composer Paul Sportelli) and the musical staging.

Tomorrow is our last day in the rehearsal hall, and Tuesday is our first day on stage! We jump right into tech. Moving on stage is always exciting and scary – it will be great to be in the space and adding all the design and technical elements of the show. Judith and the rest of her design crew have been in the theatre all week getting everything ready.

We’ll be doing two more runs of the show from start to finish this afternoon and tomorrow morning, before a well-deserved day off.

We started the day today with notes. Typically, this would involve the director giving us the notes from the preceding run – things that were good, things that didn’t work: a kind of tuning, tweaking session that would be adopted and put into the next run. Notes can sometimes be horrible experiences, with the director raging and insulting, and the cast cowering with guilt and shame.  I didn’t expect this notes session to be terrible; I thought yesterday’s run had gone fairly well, with some great new discoveries by everyone… but we didn’t get notes. Instead, we talked about those moments in the play that are fulcrums for our characters – actions that irrevocably change their world.

It was a very funny discussion. I’d meant to write down some of the pithier comments, because it’s a very smart cast (some of us being positively sesquipedalian), and the conversation moved from suicide to masturbation to the phallic construct of the first act to the fact that characters don’t “enter”, they “come”. There were observations about sexuality, and politics; the quality of love and the fact that we must evolve or die. We spoke about the enormous responsibility of the theatre itself – and that a bad film is merely a waste of two hours, but a bad play – or a bad production of a good play – is the breaking of a covenant. We resolved to be very good.

The more we work on this play, the more moving I find it. Act I is so dysfunctional – the characters are bound by societal expectation, the rule of convention and the fear of discovery. In Act II, we see that the old world has been laid bare – the centre of the patriarchal system cannot hold, and has broken. There is a kind of “queering” of the world: a recognition of unconventional love, and a diversity of family. This doesn’t make the world any easier to live in, but it makes it a somehow more valid place.

The trick is that not only does the style of writing change, from Act I to Act II, but so does the style of acting. Finding that balance is difficult, but will be rewarding. In the end, we have a character embracing her younger self, in an act of forgiveness, understanding and acceptance. Isn’t that something we’d all like to do?

We proceeded to review Act 1. We’ve been working through the act in detail over the last few days, looking at what the engines of the characters are, and where their turning points occur. We now have very clearly drawn characters. Next we’ll be honing in on the central story lines and really clarifying the action for each character. We are getting clearer and clearer about what the relationships really are.

In the afternoon we concentrated on Act 2, and then capped it off with another invigorating session with John Stead, our fight director. What an exciting way to end 2009!

Happy New Year!

John Stead demonstrating fight moves

Yesterday most of the cast got to play rough with John Stead, fight director extraordinaire.  It started off with Ann-Marie (playing 9-year-old Edward) getting the brunt of it, tussling with Evan over a doll and then receiving convincing slaps from both Evan (as mother Betty – note the ever-present heels) and Megan. Then it was David’s turn to give Ann-Marie a nice smack across the head.

Ann-Marie MacDonald and Evan Buliung rehearsing

Ann-Marie MacDonald and David Jansen practicing

The best was saved for last, with Evan and Megan (as Mrs. Saunders) giving “cat fight” a whole new twist. Blair finally got into the action, trying to tear the two of them apart.

John Stead supervising Megan Follows and Evan Buliung's cat fight

Time to pull Evan and Megan apart

Ann-Marie MacDonald channeling nine-year-old Edward

On the Sunday rehearsal before the Christmas break, I dropped everything I had been doing with Betty, my second act character. I sensed that my vocal placement had become a mask, in a bad way – more of a barrier to who she is, than a portal. I also know – or think I know – where all the laughs are, and while that is very important ultimately, it had become a liability for me. I felt like I was doing funny-voice acting. All I needed was a funny hat to go with it.

So I dropped it all…and went denuded into a run of the second act. I felt awful. I wasn’t doing anything. I had nothing to hang on to. I sucked. After the run, Alisa, the director, congratulated me on my giant step forward. She said she had never seen me be so brave. “Brave,” I thought, “yeah, a euphemism for, ‘you sucked, but with dignity this time.’” I didn’t know how I’d get through the week’s festivities with the shadow of my total failure hanging over me. At the same time, I recognized that self-loathing conviction as a spasm of strategic self-preservation. But which “self” was it preserving? The skeptical one, the guarded one, the one that doesn’t want to make a fool of itself.

So here I am back in rehearsal after the break, unsure of who will emerge tomorrow when we return to Act 2. Part of what’s weird is that Betty is much closer to me in many ways than is Edward, my character in Act 1. Edward is a nine-year-old boy who is struggling with his identity and sexuality, and going through some formative – and deforming – experiences. He feels like a much shorter walk from me than Betty. And yet Betty is only two or three years older than I am. Plus, she’s a woman. And yet, I had felt the need of an almost Are You Being Served?/Hiacynthe Bucket/Thames-side/Ealing Studios/Brit-comedy take on her to get any traction.

Here’s the thing: I know I’m going to tunnel my way back to her voice, her hat, her teetering poise, and my hope is that when I finally recover these holy grails, they’ll be invested with soul. But it’ll be like digging myself out of Stalag 13 with a spoon. Truth and self-exposure are like that. Makes me want to run silently-screaming to the privacy of my lair and start writing something. And of course, that’s when the snake starts devouring its own tail: beginnings are easy, exciting. First paragraphs are always brilliant. Funny voices work a treat for the first week of rehearsal. Then comes the art part. And as always, I say to myself, I says, “Self? This is too hard.”

David Jansen as five-year-old Cathy

It’s early days of rehearsal, but David Jansen is getting right into character. In Act One he plays the patriarch of the family Clive, and in a brilliant bit of casting (suggested originally by playwright Caryl Churchill, and embraced by director Alisa Palmer) he plays five-year-old Cathy in Act Two. She’s a tyrant of another kind; David says his favourite line so far is “I want my beads!”

Blair Williams rehearses his part with Yanna McIntosh at the piano

This morning started with a music rehearsal; our wonderful composer Paul Sportelli wasn’t in today, so Ben Carlson lead the cast through a vocal warm up. Then Yanna McIntosh took a seat at the piano and led everyone through their individual parts. Staging for the songs is the next challenge and we took a bit of time today reviewing some ideas we thought would work for specific characters.

So far in rehearsals we’ve touched on all the scenes at least once. So the rest of the morning we spent working through the play from the beginning.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve already been rehearsing for two weeks – it’s gone so quickly. It’ll be good to take a hiatus over Christmas; the time off will let everyone review the work we’ve done and try a few new things on our own.

I knew the play was fierce, with a kind of gritty, intentionally flat use of language that is mercilessly naturalistic with none of the embellishments of American naturalism – say the self-conscious cadences and cut-offs of Mamet, the lyricism of Tennesse Williams, the tragic earnestness of Arthur Miller. Then, just when I’ve decided the language is brutally spare, the play breaks into soliloquy. I look closer, and find the punctuation is…punctilious! The words are set as precisely as music, the punctuation an unerring clue to the pace and state of the speaker. I circle the “and’s” in my text. I circle the “very’s”. I count the number of lines until there’s finally a period and the stakes become clearer to me. I knew the play was funny when I heard us read it. Irreverent. Wicked. Packed with laughs of recognition and horror. And I’ve come to understand that the humour is both immanent in the situations, and deftly crafted in the lines themselves. I knew the play was the opposite of sentimental. Today I realized that it’s also terribly sad. I’ve gotten choked up at unexpected moments. Evan is the tallest and muscly-est person in the cast and he’s wearing high heels, and a gown with a corset (we’ve all made the inevitable jokes and continue to mine the endless possibilities for ridicule which will only deepen and get richer as we begin our backstage life together after opening) – he plays a woman whose ability to appear convincingly helpless is her bread and butter. When he/she stands on stage, alone, waiting, and watching, it’s heartbreaking.

Working through a play is a forensic process, and table work is the first step. The next step is getting up on our feet, which takes us deeper into it. And that’s how we’ve spent the last few days.

The first thing the actors did is just warm up the space a bit – trying to discover how to use it, and figuring out where everyone gravitates to naturally. Today they made nice, light passes through the scenes and let the relationships start to take shape. We’re all discovering what their characters want, what is energizing them, what their appetites are.

Cloud 9 is a wonderful challenge; its transgressions and its boundary-less quality, I think, is what will be the greatest provocation to an audience.

Cloud 9 is a comedy about family, it’s about people trying to connect with each other. It’s filled with people overwhelmed with desire, with longing, and usually completely estranged from themselves. And like any great story, it’s about identity: how will I fulfill who I am?

Cloud 9 is an adventure too – the play and the production. And Alisa has gathered a cast of fantastic actors to go along with her on the adventure. The room has been full of laughter and engaging conversation.

So far we’ve been working through the play at the table, tomorrow we get up on our feet. Will be exciting to see where that takes us next…