From the Actor's Perspective: Connecting Theatre History, Theory, and Rehearsal

"Circles, souls, melons, masks… these are but a few of the ideas and images that have been thrown around in the intense and incredible rehearsal process that is our “soon-to-be titled” production. It has been a phenomenal experience so far and what’s even more incredible, are the connections we discover between our work inside AND outside the theatre. As artist-scholars, we constantly connect what we learn in our academic classes during the day to our production rehearsals at night, and for me, some of my biggest connections are with my theatre history/theory classes.

WARNING! - What you are about to read are not final decisions made by the ensemble and production team for our production. The following are ideas that have been brought up in rehearsal and my own observations based from those ideas.

As rehearsals progress, our ensemble is incorporating hundreds of years’ worth of theatre, from the stage adopting a diagonal version of polyscenic juxtaposition that was used in Medieval Theatre, a physical division of Heaven, Earth and Hell similar to Elizabethan Theatre, concepts from multiple kinds of religious rituals, etc., but what strikes me is our progression towards the creation of a “unified” play. Not only unified in a sense that all of our work is coming together, but that it is beginning to fall into the criteria of Greek philosopher Aristotle’s concept of the unities, from his work The Poetics. For Aristotle, to be unified the action of a play must 1) be set in one place, 2) last no more than one day, and 3) must be within one plot. Having developed an environment for our stage, we have created one setting where our characters’ actions take place, which consists of many sections for different groups of characters. We have been discussing using a circular form for the structure of the play; the play ends where it began, possibly showing a “day in the life” of these characters. Finally, as we rehearse we discover how each character is connected in some way to each other and to the greater being that is the production (reminds me of the show LOST), which can lead to one plot within the circular form. As artist-scholars, this is but one of the many connections my ensemble members and I make every rehearsal, and it goes to show that no matter how much the creative process progresses, bits and pieces will always remain from the Souls of Theatre Past…"

-Matthew Dranzik ’13
Ensemble Member