As he prepares for load in and technical rehearsals at the end of this week, director and designer David Hanzal reflects on the rehearsal process for The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood:

I can’t believe that four weeks of rehearsal have come and gone! We’ve sweat, we’ve fought, we’ve cried, we’ve re-thought and re-written the opening and closing scenes more times than we can count. We’ve had nights where our experiments have failed, and nights where I have thought to myself, This devised new work thing is too hard! This is the last play I’m ever going to direct! But then we pick ourselves back up and go back into the rehearsal room the next day, and it always gets better and we always discover what the play was meant to be. We move forward. We revise. We refresh.

We have two days of rehearsal left, before we take a couple of days off for the Thanksgiving holiday. But even though we’ll be “away” from the rehearsal room, I know that my director-designer-creator brain will still be firing away at top speed: Am I taking care of the audience? Are all of the dramaturgical systems tracking? Will we ever find the “right” ending? Is the play compelling… and complicated? Are all of the visual and design elements working together to evoke Beauty’s visceral/creepy/magical/sexy dream world?

​When we come back the day after Thanksgiving, we will be loading into our performance venue, adding technical elements (lights, sound, costumes, and set), and adjusting our blocking and choreography from small rehearsal rooms to the vast scope of the Red Eye Theater’s stage. It’s quick, it’s stressful, and it’s exhilarating. (Coffee helps.)

Even though rehearsals for a new, multi-disciplinary, ensemble-driven play are never easy, we’ve emerged stronger, more articulate artists, and we are now more specific and more intentional about the choices that we are making as storytellers. From questions come conversation and exploration, which breeds a product that is richer and far more complex than what we could have created all on our own. I’m proud of the work that we’ve created together, collaboratively, and I can’t wait to share it with an audience, starting December 2.

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​So, please – join us for this new, never-before-seen, original work of theatre before it’s too late. Because, after we close on December 11, this magical world that we have created will cease to exist forever.

​i’m doing edits.
 
we had a read-through at our first rehearsal,
which of course disturbs your perception of the play and makes you see and hear all kinds of things you haven’t seen or heard before.
 
the fact that you’re hearing it spoken, instead of reading the words
or looking at paper instead of a screen
or hyper awareness of the other minds and eyes and voices in the room,
encountering this thing you wrote for them for the first time -
whatever alchemy it is, you walk away with edits.
 
i see my edits as separate from rewrites.
i have rewrites to do, too, post-read-through, but i’ll get to those. (tomorrow).
edits aren’t about story or pacing or tone or character arc
they’re mostly about rhythm
sometimes they’re about rhyme.
edits are analogous to line notes, except the correction is both for and from me, my ear telling me that i wrote a line wrong,
that there’s a better way for it to sound.
 
one of the edits i made tonight was to change the word “truly” to the word “so.”
you’d think that wouldn’t be madly important, but.

 i’m bad at writing about writing. absolutely terrible. to me writing is this secret sacred silent thing that you just don’t discuss. progress, you can talk about. process — i have no idea. i daydream till i panic, then i write. 

but editing. editing makes sense. i hear a line and it sounds wrong. it needs a tweak or a tune or a rhythmic shift. maybe i can’t articulate this any better than i can anything else about writing. so here’s an example:

​another thing i’m really interested in when it comes to writing is notation, arrangement of words on a page.
 
i feel like the same applies for line edits. tonight i made a document, that i hope makes intuitive sense, in terms of what changes have been made to lines and how the new ones will read. will it make any sense to the actors? this and more highly self-conscious ramblings on the process of play-making, coming up!