Only three more weeks before we start rehearsals, and I’m up to my armpits in essays about Pinter, essays by Pinter, essays for and against Pinter – and chafing at the bit to get started.

But first I urgently need a production meeting.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had recruited not only the cast but also the crew.  Along with the all-important stage manager,  I also have lighting, sound, set  and costume designers, and it’s high time I put them all in the same room.  Here are some of the challenges that I’m relying on their combined talents to solve:

1) Set. The action of Betrayal takes place in six different locations: a London pub, a Venetian hotel room, a living room, a study, an Italian restaurant and a flat.  Somehow we have to show these on a very small stage, with an even smaller budget, and no wish on my part for lengthy scene changes which spoil the pace of this kind of play.  I need a few key items of furniture and simple but telling adjustments or additions to them, to clearly imply a location without furnishing it in every detail.  Lighting can also help enormously with challenges like these, and my sound designer may have something to say on the matter too.

2) Lights. Broadly speaking, the story goes backwards in time, but the play isn’t entirely linear.  Some scenes follow the one before, some predate it.  The convention, therefore, is to show the audience the date at the start of each scene, usually through some kind of lighting device, although my creative team may have other ideas.

3) Costumes.  Despite the many different settings and dates, there won’t be time for the actors to switch costume between scenes, even if the budget allowed for it.  As with the set, we need small costume changes – hairstyle, scarf, jacket, shoes – that can indicate both the period and the ways in which the characters age (or in this case, lucky things, grow younger).

4) Music. Music can be critical for setting the mood and period of a play.  I learned a lesson from my last show, in which I used achingly beautiful, mood-enhancing, time-appropriate Schumann Lieder to underpin the emotions of the Van-Gogh-doomed-love-affair story.  I felt really pleased about my choice after I’d made it; surely no one could fail to respond to it in the way I hoped!  “Why German music?” asked my friend afterwards.  “I thought the action took place in France?”  And he was quite right.  I need some London-in-the-1970s music, relevant to the characters and fitting to the mood of the story.

And lastly,

5)  The golden rule. Set, costumes, props, lighting and sound all need to follow  Pinter’s unwavering approach to his work:

If it doesn’t make a statement about the play, it shouldn’t be there.

74 days until Betrayal’s Opening Night.  Last week, I was somewhere else, but that’s where I am now.

Yesterday I finally ironed out everyone’s rehearsal conflicts and put together a schedule.  In case you’ve ever wondered, the rough rules of thumb for a rehearsal schedule are:

Step 1:     Always start with a read-through, preferably around someone’s kitchen table.  This is important for lots of reasons:

- It brings everybody together into the room for the first time, in a relatively informal, unpressured kind of way.  If they haven’t met before, it helps the actors to relax and get to know each other.  And if they have met before and either a) loathed each other on sight or b) were awestruck by another’s previous performance, it gives everyone the chance to get past their concerns and move on.

-  It allows everybody present to hear the complete play out loud.  All kinds of discoveries can be made at this point which may have been missed on the printed page.  Since it will be some time into the rehearsal process before the whole piece is heard again, this is a vital step to launch the ship on the right course.

-  A read-through gives the director the opportunity to go through various other bits of essential business. This might begin with his or her Vision (“You’ll all be wearing black silk, darlings, with a blood-red set and nothing but a zebra-striped couch and a matching pair of mirrors”), but really needs to include all the practical bits and pieces too, like how to find the theatre and whether there will be cookies at each rehearsal and why anyone running late must communicate with the stage manager.

Step 2:      Rehearse each individual scene a minimum of three times.  It takes at least this long if everyone is to have the chance to explore the text, take a rough stab at the blocking, find key moments in the script, revise the blocking, refine the scene, revert to the original blocking, and try to hold onto those moments once the scene gets pulled back into its dramatic context.

Step 3:     Rehearse an act, or a cluster of scenes, to see how the transitions between each scene are accomplished.   If Mary runs out at the end of one scene to meet Bert, and the next scene begins moments later with Mary running towards Bert, the actor coming in needs to look like the person who just left, only more out of breath.  If Bert was violently angry at the end of a scene, it’s no good if he starts the next scene whistling All I Want for Christmas without an apparent care in the world. And if the knife was hidden under the rug at the end of scene 4, it had better still be there at the top of scene 5, unless the first thing Mary says as she walks through the door is “You know, it’s a funny thing, but yesterday as I was hoovering, I found this knife right there under that rug.”  In which case, she will almost certainly be brandishing it, and someone in scene 4 will need to scoop it out from under the rug in the blackout and hand it to Mary in the wings.

Step 4:      Run the play.  Even if it’s a “stumble-through” and people aren’t really off-book and they’ve forgotten the blocking for that scene because you last rehearsed it two weeks ago, run the play.  It’s the only way to reveal the arc of the drama and the development of the characters, and check that both are psychologically and dramatically consistent and therefore credible.

Step 5:      Run the play again.

Step 6:     Run the play again.  

Step 7:      Keep running the play until the tech people tell you to stop.  Because unless you have several months of rehearsal time, which no one ever does, there is almost no such thing as too many run-throughs.  Although you do probably want to schedule the odd day off too, to give everyone a break and stop the whole thing from becoming stale.

Then come four more key dates on the schedule which look like this: Tech week, Dress rehearsal(s), Preview and Opening Night.  All of which deserve their very own blog entries, and will get them nearer the time.

So now I have sent the schedule to the cast and stage manager, and all I have to do is sit tight until someone tells me that they have an additional subsequent conflict or I’ve  inexplicably missed out the third rehearsal for scene 8 or someone else has just remembered his mother’s birthday…. and then I’ll get to do the Rehearsal Schedule Version 2.

And you know, that’s OK.  We still have 74 days.

PS If you’re with me so far, please note the additions to this blog.  If you go to the top where it says ‘Home’, you’ll see that I’ve added some more pages, with details of the show and where to buy tickets.  We may not have had a single rehearsal yet, but as from today, folks, we’re LIVE!

The show-before-Betrayal has come and gone.  Ideas have been tested, new connections made, and as always, lessons learned.

I keep a notebook of ‘Things I have learned’ after every show.   Notes from the early pages include such commandments as ‘Keep stage business simple!’ and “Never assume that actors can work out their own blocking!”  Nowadays, I’m happy to say, they have become slightly more sophisticated, if occasionally somewhat cryptic. “Don’t play a later scene in an earlier one” reads one;  “Don’t allow too much behaviour”, and “All dialogue is about interruption.”  The trouble is, I don’t always remember all of my self-scribed pearls of wisdom when it comes to the crunch.

Fortunately, I also have tucked away in my briefcase a little gem of a book called Notes on Directing by Frank Hauser, which Dame Judi Dench fiercely asserts on the cover is “Compulsory reading for every aspiring director”.  I must say, it’s certainly very useful.  It tells me to “Please, PLEASE be decisive”, and “Identify the story’s compelling question”, and (my particular favourite) “Don’t expect to have all the answers”.  Also, it goes to some considerable lengths to describe “The What Game”, which it freely admits that actors detest but is apparently necessary, particularly if they are guilty of mumbling.  I’m paraphrasing here, but to give you an idea, the game goes something like this:

Actor: Clare had a bad cold

Director: Who has a bad cold?

Actor: CLARE had a bad cold

Director: Does she still have it?

Actor: No. No, I don’t think so.

Director: I see.  So she had one?

Actor: Yes. She HAD a bad cold.

Director:  Wait, who had a what?

Actor: CLARE HAD a bad COLD!!

Director: And it was what kind of cold, again?

Actor: I said, CLARE HAD a BAD COLD, YOU DEAF OR SUMMAT?!!

Director: You’re fired.

(Roughly speaking.)

Anyway, my key lesson this time was the value and importance of physical spacing.  We rehearsed in the theatre, but on a platform constructed for the last show, which wasn’t removed until the start of our tech week.  The actual stage was significantly bigger than the platform, and I should have been quicker than I was to encourage people to spread out and use the space.  And I might have been if only I had had the foresight to read Frank Hauser’s note on the subject first:  “Space between characters creates tension as well as greater possibilities for physical and psychological manoeuvring. When blocking, imagine an elastic band connects the characters.  When they come together, the tension is gone, the chase is over.”

Isn’t that great?  Now if only I can commit that to memory next time, as well as remembering to be decisive, interrupt a great deal, banish mumbling, avoid any behaviour and make absolutely sure never to have all the answers, I think I’ll have cracked it.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m in the middle of rehearsing another play which is, as I freely admitted, rather deflecting my attention from Betrayal.  It opens this week, so after that I should be back on track.

Still, a theatrical process is a theatrical process, whichever play it concerns, and that’s primarily what this blog is about.  So I’m going to ask for your indulgence this week, and write about the current play instead.  It’s called The Captive Flowers, and it’s a new work about the imagined last few days of Vincent Van Gogh.

In fact, the play is not new to me;  I directed it as a staged reading at the same theatre last Spring.  For those who may not know, staged readings are usually performed after only a couple of rehearsals by actors who sometimes sit primly on a row of chairs with scripts in their hands and sometimes move about in a rather unfocused way, occasionally clutching the odd prop or sporting an item of costume.  The purpose of a staged reading for a new play is to allow the playwright to get a sense of its overall shape, as well as gaining feedback from the audience and those involved in its performance.  It’s like a rough charcoal sketch of what the show could look like.

This time, though, I’m directing the ‘workshop’ version, which allows for the next phase of script development.  Directing a workshop is a first for me, and to be perfectly honest, initially I had no idea what it meant, and I’m not convinced anyone else was very sure either.

Well, it’s turned out to be the equivalent of a low-budget, full production.

True, we’ve been working on the set used for the previous production, the furniture is not 19th century, and the costumes are – suggestive of the period, to say the least.    The initially short rehearsal period has been rather frantically extended whenever enough people have been available to meet, and I have had to rely on my fortunately very experienced cast to figure out more of their character development alone than a good director might have wished.

But last night,  for the first time, we were ready to add in the vivid projections of Van Gogh’s paintings, the sad strains of a Schumann song cycle and the wonderful waltzes of Johann Strauss, the subtle lighting and ambient sounds of a starry night and a wheatfield at dawn.  And guess what?

Suddenly we were experiencing the full Van Gogh canvas, in all its textured, colorful glory.

I love it when that happens.

PS Click here to see what I wrote about the play on the theatre’s website

I’ve cast the play now.  To backtrack in time a little, the idea of putting on this production came out of several conversations.  One was with my financial knight-in-shining-armour.  Another was with the artistic director of the theatre company with which I am associated, a fine actor in his own right who once played the title part in my adapted 1930s radio version of Hamlet.   I already knew that he had a yearning to flex his acting muscles in a Pinter production.  He also turned out to have a good friend from his Yale School of Drama days, living abroad but at that time briefly visiting California, with a passion for Pinter to match mine.  We met, the friend mentioned his plans to return to the Bay Area this summer, one thing led to another, and both men were cast.

A few weeks later, I attended a dress rehearsal of August: Osage County in San Jose.  I went to see it for several reasons unconnected with this story, but as soon as it began I recognized one of the actresses as my ‘Gertrude’ from the same Hamlet.  I was so impressed by her performance both back then and in Osage, that I asked her the next day if she would like to tackle Pinter for me.

Right away, I had my three main protagonists.

For the first time ever, though, I have cast protagonists without ever having seen them all together in the same room.  This is not a course of action I would normally recommend, since I can’t be sure of that elusive ‘chemistry’ between two actors that is so hard to define but so instantly recognizable.  I do believe, however, that a good production is ultimately dependent on the quality of the actors.  I know that these three people will bring a great deal of ability, experience, commitment and intelligence into the room.

Still, it’s going to be, at the very least, a different kind of beginning.  But I am comforted to think that the excellent production of Betrayal I saw in London last summer starring Kristen Scott Thomas must have been cast in the same way.  Surely Ms. Scott Thomas was not obliged to knock hopefully on the casting room door with her head shot and resume, and put through her paces.  I guess that’s how it is with the stars.

Incidentally, last week, I went to see Pinter’s The Caretaker.  It was a London production starring Jonathan Pryce, and it had all the hallmarks that I associate with the playwright: terse lines, exact timing, menacing undercurrents, comic moments and plenty of meaningful pauses.   It wasn’t a perfect production by any means, but it helped me to focus and shape my aspirations for Betrayal.  It’s good to know that I have a cast who shares them.

I haven’t done it yet.  I haven’t written the marketing ‘story’.  I know, I know, but what’s a blog for if it’s not also a confessional?

It’s not that I haven’t made an attempt.  Two things have hampered me.

One, I’m rehearsing a different play at the moment.  A very different play,  It’s a fictional piece about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh and his imagined interaction with a nearby family of sisters, and it’s both challenging and absorbing.  It opens in San Jose on April 19, and between now and then it’s likely to take up most of my theatrical bandwidth.  It’s surprisingly hard, I’m finding, to think about two plays at once.

Two, in order to stimulate my thoughts, I’ve been looking up theatrical press releases for Betrayal on the internet, and I’ve discovered somewhat to my surprise that almost none of them hit the mark. So many of them publicize it as ‘a tale of marital infidelity’, as if the story begins and ends there.   But although that’s true, the play is not just about a classic love triangle.

There are so many betrayals in everybody’s life: between spouses, between lovers, between friends; by what is said, by what is not said; by what is intended and what is unintended; by language itself, and our lack of mastery over it; by the abyss that sometimes yawns between what we mean and what we are understood to mean; by our ability to deceive ourselves.  In Pinter’s deft hands, all of these shades of betrayal are woven into the play.  It’s much, much more than a simple morality tale.

The play is a meditation on betrayal in all its large and petty forms, and that’s  the story I want to tell.

Last week I met up with a friend who said, “So how’s the play coming along?”  Before I could answer, she added, “I read your blog, but I still don’t know how far you’ve got.”

Hmm. Clearly it’s time for an update, so here’s the skinny (where does that expression come from?) on my production.  It’s definitely happening.  I have a cast and crew (of whom, more anon).  I’ve booked a theatre, given my right arm in lieu of money to afford the performing rights, purchased scripts because the original is not available on line, and any minute now I’m going to sum up enough courage to take another look at the budget.  For those who are interested in the marketing, the first four standard lines on the press release look like this:

WHO: Only Connect Theatre

WHAT:  BETRAYAL by Harold Pinter

WHEN: July 13-28; 8pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 2pm Sundays.

WHERE: The Dragon Theatre, 535 Alma St, Palo Alto.

But that really is the skinniest of skinny, since I haven’t yet formulated the ‘sales pitch’.  When I do, I’ll put another page on this blog with the full details of the missing section,  WHY.  And in fact, for once I’m going to keep this blog post skinny too and get started on just that.

Although, I will add that apparently the ‘skinny’ is a military expression, dating back to World War two when orders in the Marine Corps were copied on paper so translucent that it resembled the skin of an onion.  So now you know.  Never say you don’t learn anything from my blog 

This morning, my computer keeps losing its internet connection. Techno-dinosaur that I am, I am at its mercy.  I keep pressing ‘connect’ and it keeps telling me that it’s trying, but nothing happens. Or it connects momentarily, but by the time I’ve turned to my email program, the connection is already lost.

In order for my production of Betrayal to break even, I have to sell 400 tickets.  So lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of modern theatre marketing.

In these economically recessive times, theatres of all sizes and reputations are struggling to fill seats.  I once wrote a guest blog post in which I argued passionately for the value of the collective experience over solitary activities.  Whether you’re watching a live performance or cheering at a sports match, I believe that a communal event can be uniquely uplifting. But the everyday truth for many people is that money is tight, days are long and stressful, and most of us want to come home at the end of them, pull up the proverbial drawbridge and put our feet up. To fight against this kind of habitual inertia, there has to be a compelling reason to see a show.

Theatres are also having to rapidly adapt to a new era of marketing to get their messages across.  Seven years ago, when I worked as an assistant producer at an established San Jose theatre company, we had a number of tried-and-tested marketing steps. We sent press releases to our carefully maintained list of newspaper, magazine and radio station contacts, timing each one to hit individual deadlines. We mailed glossy season brochures to our subscribers.   We produced and distributed posters and postcards in local theatres and coffee shops.

Since then, thanks to tightening budgets and the rise of the internet, theatre marketing has become much more diffuse.  Web-marketing is cheaper, for a start, and it’s definitely more hip.  In fact, if you want to attract the younger audiences, it’s the only way to get their attention.  You need to create a webpage for your show, and a dedicated group for it on FaceBook and MySpace and, I daresay, any number of other social media sites I haven’t heard of yet.  You need to blog about it and tweet about it and link your blog to other people’s blogs, and, if only out of courtesy, tweet about those too.  You need to go online and find local “What’s On” entertainment sites (of which there are an increasing number), and make sure you are listed.  Most of all, you need to create ‘buzz’, which is a hard thing to define. And alongside all of this, unless your show is targeted specifically to the under-25s, there is still a need for press releases and posters, too.

Betrayal’s target audience is people like me, who skirmish daily with the internet, but still read the morning paper with their coffee.  In the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting together my marketing campaign.  And my biggest fear is that I’ll keep pressing ‘connect’ – Betrayal!  Come and see it! – but nothing will happen. Or I’ll connect momentarily – Betrayal? Yes!  I’d love to come – but by the time I’ve tried to pin someone down to a ticket, the connection will already be lost.

Epilogue: This morning, I called my husband to solve the internet problem.  I may be at the mercy of my own computing limitations, but he isn’t.  I won’t have all the answers for marketing Betrayal, either, but I do have a circle of friends to call on who almost certainly will.  Perhaps I can make this an uplifting collective experience!  Speaking of which, if any of my readers have thoughts, experiences or tips on marketing to share, I’d love to hear them.

During last week’s directing class (did I mention I was taking a directing class?  O, you remember, when I got too excited to speak for a minute there), we engaged in a short exercise.

Wait.  Let me back up a bit and give you a quick update on the class.  It’s being run by an experienced director with passion and enthusiasm and occasional glimpses of brilliance, in the most chaotic and impulsive way imaginable.  This means that I sit there, pencil poised, waiting for the pearls to fall, all the while wishing that what takes three hours could be condensed into fifteen minutes, because, believe me, it could be.

Grumbling aside, last week we engaged in a short but illuminating exercise.  Our previous week’s homework was to study a brief section from Endgame by Samuel Beckett.  In class, we split into groups of 3 to discuss the ways in which, as directors, we would approach the scene. I thought of it as being set within the confines of a room that bore a strong resemblance to Noah’s Ark (one of the characters is called Hamm; I think my connection was rather obvious).  But my friend within the group saw it quite differently: he wanted to set it within the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic office, with Dilbert-like grey cubicles and jagged piles of broken office equipment. A single computer screen would still be functioning, showing a never-ending silent reel of TV commercials for the kind of vapid products once guaranteed to improve our lot in life.

In fact, I’ve found the range of ideas and differences of opinions in the class hugely stimulating.  People with backgrounds in dance and film and mime and puppetry and simple story-telling have approached exercises in ways that would never have occurred to me.  It has been one of the most exciting aspects of the course, even if it serves mainly to confirm my personal preference for realistic drama.

In this case, though, it would have been difficult to put into practice almost any of the ideas put forward.  Beckett’s plays are jealously guarded by his estate; anyone performing them is not allowed to change so much as a comma of either the text or the stage directions without express permission.

The same is true of Pinter.  I might consider staging Betrayal during the Jazz Age in New York, if I felt that this would lend some extra weight to the text.  I might want to add in some dance forms, or imbue it with a Latin American flavour, or change one of the male characters to a female, just to see how that affected the tensions of a scene – but perhaps fortunately, I would soon be disabused of these notions.  This week I paid the rather alarming sum of $750 in royalties to the Dramatists Play Service in New York ($75 per performance).  With the gracious permission to perform it came a reminder that I may not alter “the time, locales or settings of the play in any way. The genders of the characters shall also not be changed”.

Unlike Beckett, though, whose directions are so sparse that the barren landscapes in which his characters exist could really be in any space or time at all, the opening scene of Betrayal is set firmly in a London pub in 1977. This kind of restriction, which some of my wonderfully imaginative classmates might find chafing, suits me.  I don’t want to approach it with sleights of hand, I don’t want to turn it upsidedown, My aim is not to deafen or blind or baffle or tease or distract.  I don’t even want to try to make it bigger or better or brighter than, in my opinion, it already is.

Pinter can rest easy, at least with me.  Because all I want to do, all I am longing to do, is get to the heart of the play and find the things that I think really matter.