Illustration by Kristof Goeser
How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Editor's note: Damon Beres, our Prague Zombie, is currently adventuring around Europe on his fall break and is not writing this week. Natalie Zutter, out theater editor, is taking his place to talk about the thrills — and quirks — of directing a play at NYU.
I was writing about Theater (with a capital T) years before I thought of actually writing it myself.
But this December, I'll go one step further when I direct a one-act play called "Twits" as part of the Gallatin Theater Troupe's Brand Spankin' Showcase. So far, being a playwright has been a strange and revelatory experience.
Two weekends ago, I left the WSN theater meeting to attend what I was sure would be, at best, a tense and awkward negotiation, and, at worst, a bloodbath. Five other student directors and I were armed with notebook pages scrawled with heavily circled names. We were going to fight over which actors to cast.
I feared that, being without directing experience, I would be edged out of the conversation and guilted into not getting my first choices. But the group impressed me by calmly and respectfully debating which actor would work best in each cast, with playwrights often vouching for one another's work.
In some cases there was a perfect match: One writer had a vision, and to place the chosen actors anywhere else would be obviously detrimental. But one director who lacked a string of second choices caused a spider web of crossed commitments. I felt as if I were participating in a tightly wound Pokémon card trade. Our simple lists devolved into scratchy diagrams tracking three different possible casts.
Still, in the end, my play was populated with the actors best-suited for each part, and I had taken a huge leap toward getting my words into people's mouths.
Cue the first rehearsal. Overseeing a table-read is like running a WSN arts meeting: You distribute pages. You pray that even the lamest part will get picked up. You match up schedules and settle on deadlines. One member of your group is always missing, but you still move forward.
It gave me a thrill to see my cast together two weeks after callbacks. The faces and voices fit better than I remembered; already, in the first read-through, I heard unexpected inflections. My play is about Twitter, and I was shocked to learn that nearly half of my cast knew nothing about the social networking site. (To be fair, I didn't know much about it myself until I started doing field research.) As a demonstration, I tweeted about our rehearsal.
The sudden hierarchy established between myself and the actors was — and still is — somewhat jarring. It's a feeling that recalls my very first WSN theater meeting: a vague bemusement as to how I'm expected to order around people my age or older.
The play is about numbers, and the numbers going into production are starting to look a bit scary: only four weeks to put up this show; costumes for five distinct characters; 22 pages worth of blocking. But already I'm realizing that this process is a collaborative one. I may be the only director, but I'm far from being alone.
