"Go to sleep. Morning is wiser than evening."

One of the characters in The Antipodes is given this advice (from an unlikely source) and it's pretty good advice in general -- it's particularly good advice for a director staring down the last week of rehearsals before Opening.

As a performer I certainly come home from rehearsals and replay notes et cetera in my head, but I'm not sure that that generally compares to a Director's swirling thoughts after each rehearsal as Opening nite gets closer and closer.

For many of us involved in theater in the area, our time in the actual performance space is limited, and for Shakespeare 70 at the College of New Jersey, it's no different. We've been rehearsing since late January -- and 6 of our cast went thru' 6 weeks of rehearsal in 2020 -- but we moved into the theater on Sunday, so as of this writing, we've had 2 rehearsals in the space.

Everything that the production team has discussed and planned now is tested in reality, and the talented and inventive cast test everything they've been doing in small rehearsal classrooms -- to see what works, what doesn't, and what could but just hasn't gelled yet.

So there is this late-in-the-game new and necessary period of discovery. One wants to be strong enough to trust the creative process, especially here, where (as I mentioned in my last post) looking at the creative process is clearly a part of this play.  

But it certainly can be difficult to be sanguine about it as we rush headlong now toward our goal.

This moment once again asks a lot of the actors, and what it asks of the director is once again to try to see this play through the Audience's eyes. Through the eyes of someone who doesn't know about our (seemingly) endless conversations about characters or what we're after, who may not have read the play ahead of time or seen it before, who doesn't know Annie Baker -- or the playwright's instructions here to suggest all transitions, any movement forward in time from scene to scene, solely through the actors' physical choices, and not with the use of light or sound... 

So, not knowing any of that, what does our Audience need us to focus on, to hone, in this next week, so that they can enjoy and be fully engaged in this unusual play?

That is the question and that is our task over the next week, before we open on Wednesday March 22nd, and are finally able to take you all on a 100 minute journey with us -- a journey that we've been on in one way or another for just a little over 3 years...

~Janet Q
Director, The Antipodes 
3/14/23