Midnight at Red Tape

At 10:45 last night my stage manager Cynthia and I finally found the right place for the table in our set after three days of adjustments. This has involved a lot of sitting and hmming, switching places and hmming some more. Right now the space is represented by a series of multi-colored taped lines Cynthia has carefully measured against the set designer’s drawings and some artfully placed folding chairs. I’m not going to give away the genius of Bill Anderson’s set design, but MOUSE IN A JAR takes place in a basement and Red Tape’s space is anything but a basement. This is all to say that despite what is currently a cavernous space we’ve zeroed in on our dank cramped playing area and specifically where that table lives in it.

It’s amazing what a couple of feet let alone inches can do to open up a space and create the right dynamic. It’s also amazing what this play continues to do to me as we dig into each scene and try to lay the physical groundwork of who moves where and why. I come in to rehearsal with a sense of the skeletal movement of the piece, aware that as the actors give my direction a shot we may discover that another set of moves feels better, or that the moment plays better a couple of feet or even inches in a different direction.

When a beat in the scene lands we can all feel it resonating, almost buzzing in the air. It’s a giddy energizing feeling, and after three hours of hard work last night we finished with one of those moments.

Which is why Cynthia and I had plenty of energy to move the table around the space for 1/2 an hour after the actors had gone, and why at 11:00 I started walking through the blocking I anticipate for our Sunday rehearsal with Ma and HIM ( a man the size of fear with no face).  As I was walking and talking about how we will try to execute his almost catastrophic entrances and exits, I realized I was going to cry a little. One of the things that has drawn me to this play is my overwhelming visceral reaction to the images Martyna has so artfully woven through the text. HIM is one of the scariest things I’ve imagined since I was a child terrified to leave my bed in the middle of the night.

I was showing Cynthia some of the movement I want to try with our actor Don, and as I was talking through it using Cynthia as a stand in for Ma we both got chills, and agreed the combination of a man with no face, and the pooling darkness in the Red Tape space was a little too much for the end of a long day.

To try and capture a little of Martyna’s extremely effective aesthetic I’ve uploaded some images she put together for me back in March when we first started thinking about how the show should look. I shared these images with our production team and they’ve used some of it as a jumping off point for our design that certainly gives me the chills.

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