(no subject)

[my_window_seat]

I've pretty much locked myself in the house for the last few days in a desperate attempt to complete the Directing Analysis for - of course! - Directing class.

I'm at a roadblock so massive I don't even know how to tunnel under it.

The teacher for this class is - she's -
I'm fairly certain she's a good director.  What little I saw of her style when I sat in during auditions a while back gave me positive ideas of what she's like when she's actually, you know, practicing the craft.

And as a person, I like her.  She's very approachable.  She's taken time of her own out to talk to me about the difficulties I'm having in the class, and she's cut me such an enormous amount of slack it's fairly obvious I'm something of a teacher's pet.  The assignment I'm working on right now - is already late.  And she's already given me an extension to finish it, ungrudgingly.  I know the lateness will affect the grade - it's how it has to be - but when I told her on the day it was due that I didn't have it finished, although I could see the disappointment in her face, all she said was, "You've been working on [name of show I'm doing props for], right?  [I nod, babble some]  Have it in by Tuesday."

She's a very decent person and I think she's probably a very good director.

She's crap as a teacher.

The assignment I'm working on - is complete insanity, as far as the stated objectives in relation to the time frame of the actual project.  The details are boring; suffice it to say, the entire class has been letting her know, in increasingly less subtle ways, that they'd like to see her head on a stick outside the castle walls.

The worst of the worst -
I'm realizing that the biggest problem I'm having with the assignment has nothing to do with the assignment itself, or my teacher's lack of actual teaching ability.

The problem is - I picked the wrong play for my final project.

And I'm fucked now.
Because I've already got a cast, and we're already committed to the project.

In the rush to just pick SOMETHING, ANYTHING to get started working on, I picked a play I've read before.  Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, for any of you who might be familiar with it. 

It's an okay play.  Hellman was considered to be one of the great playwright's of her time, and it's a classic example of "the well-made play."  The teacher even seemed very pleased when I finally told her what I'd picked.  It's a familiar show to anyone who's got a background in the biz.

Problem is - if I'd spent more time really thinking about what I wanted to do - if I'd HAD the fucking time to do that, which I didn't when the choice-making needed to be done - I wouldn't have picked this play.

Variety of reasons - the main one being, the play, overall, is more two-dimensional than I realized before this in-depth analysis.  Another reason - the scene that has the most dramatic potential from my perspective, I couldn't do for my final scene - because for the final scene, the teacher was very specific about it being one where we demonstrate our ability to work with at least 4 actors, in a variety of visual positioning.  4 actors - on stage at the same time.  So, the scene I would have been able to really sink my teeth into - the one where there are 4 actors, but only 2 are on stage at any given time - wasn't an option.

Anyway - long story short - I'm working on a scene that I don't have my heart in.
I'm going through the motions, because it's just not that good of a scene.

This is an artistic project, and without that - what? - that feeling of arrrrgh, YES! that makes it something that I can dive into completely -
I feel like I'm standing next to a big fucking rock that I don't have any real motivation to do anything with besides kick it.

I have a great cast.
One of my actors is so amazing, she's like the Holy Grail of a director's pick.
She's also a teacher.
She also owns one of the few independent theatres here in town that I'd actually want to direct a show in.

With this scene, I've got the potential to - maybe not impress her with my Uber Directing Super Powers - but I'd have at least been able to work with some of the greatest raw material any director would kill to get their hands on.

And I'm sitting here just trying to muster the energy to divide the scene into actable units, organize my thoughts into a coherent vision so that I can finish this fucking assignment AND walk into our next rehearsal (tomorrow) and give my actors what they need.

And folks -
I got nothin'.

I've got no taste for this scene.
It's not coming together in my head.

The passion I had for my midterm scene?  Even after three rewrites to get it down to the correct time frame - I was invested in it.  I loved it so much there wasn't any other than momentary hesitation here and there about how it should look and sound and feel -

This one - is like a big black blank space in my head.

The class aside, I've got four actors who are donating their time and energy to get this put together.
Our last rehearsal was little more than a train wreck, because once we got past the initial part of the scene and into the part where there's more traffic to manage and much less of the decent tension that made the first part more interesting  -

I had nothing to give them.
They were moving around onstage in purposeless knots.
They kept looking at me, waiting for me to tell them what to do and where they should go -
And because I didn't have a coordinated vision to work from, I didn't know what to do with them.

Because I don't care enough about this scene, it isn't drawing itself in my head.

And I still have to work with it and make it reasonably good.

I am in deep shit.



In other news - I cooked a turkey today, and if nothing else, I'm still one bad-ass mofo in the kitchen.  The bird is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, the gravy is everything that gravy should be (savory, just the right consistency and lump-free, bitches), and the mashed potatoes would make a grown man weep.  And it didn't take more than a couple hours to whip that out.

I can still cook, even though I'm fuck all as an artist at the moment.

Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck.




Back to homework....

Comments

[jaberwockynmt.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure directing scenes well that you aren't very interested in is an important skill to learn because every show will probably have at least a few bits that don't "get you going," but even these must be made to shine for the audience.

I don't know the play you're working with (I'm not terribly well read and most of the shows I've worked on were the various big musicals high schools and colleges without theatre departments put on) and this is too late to be helpful, but might it have been possible to stage the scene you really liked in a way that kept all of the actors on stage at once? I can picture a generic scene with characters going in and out of the foreground, with the charcaters that aren't in the foregound on stage but in their own separate side-scenes doing whatever they would do between entrances and exits. I can also see this being distracting and detrimental to the foregound scene, so it definitely can't work in all cases. There are likely terms for the above stuff, but I don't know them since I'm a former set designer/construction master/sound designer that never took a class in any of those things.

[kamarie.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm... perhaps some of your observations can be weaved into your final paper? IE: The playing being two dimensional, you never would have picked this play for this kind of work but didn't know it until after you'd done some analysis, etc. Maybe... it's worth seeing how it fits into your paper.

As for the scene... do something strange to it to bring it back to life. Direct it ala: Kabuki! (Or something equally fun and possibly ridiculous.)

I make these suggestions, of course, blindly. I'm hoping they inspire something.

And as for me, I must get back to rewriting an entire play in an hour.