The Beating Heart

Monday, the Theatre's day off!

Here Libby and I sit in a local treasure: The General Store in Spring Green. The place is a friend to APT, and beloved by APT employees and patrons alike. Good food, fun sundries (everything from Japanese decorative masking tape to local beer and cheese!), community news, and good coffee (so Libby tells me)--a real community joint. I love places like this.

In today's installment, I'll share a bit about a key part of the theatre-making process: shaping and protecting the story.

James is a great shepherd of story. In my own rehearsals, I call this the beating heart. Close reading, listening, and more reading, and kicking the play around with the design team and the actors will reveal the beating heart of each play. Some plays take more time and more reads to reveal the beating heart. The beating heart is the clear journey on which you want to guide the audience--making sure there are no moments wherein the audience gets lost (healthy disequilibrium is good, lost is deadly). It's been rich watching James subtly nudge the actors to heighten this moment or that so as to keep the story clear and actively and compellingly moving forward (and deeper).

For example...

A week ago, during tablework--the several days of reading and discussing each scene while seated at table (hence the term tablework)--we paid particular attention to the storyline of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. The team agreed that, after Prospero and Miranda landed on the island and found Caliban (a native misshapen creature whose dead mother was a witch and whose father may have been the devil), took him in and tried to nurture him--this is one of the places from which colonialist interpretations of this play spring. Caliban and Miranda existed happily together like brother and sister, playmates, as they grew. Miranda taught Caliban language, Caliban taught Miranda (and Prospero) about the island and all was good.

One day (and we have decided that this day was very recent--which is most dramatically interesting), Caliban "noticed" Miranda in a new way, and tried to take sexual action based on what he noticed. An unfortunate choice, indeed. Paradise lost. This is the stuff of Act One, Scene Two--when we learn of the attempted rape--which results in Caliban being removed from living with Prospero and Miranda and moved into something like a cave ("...here you sty me in this hard rock..." Caliban says). There is hurt, confusion of emotion, and broken relationship. Really hard and beautiful human story.

Fast forward to yesterday. We are staging/blocking (deciding where, when, how, why people move so as to physically tell the clearest and most interesting story) the last scenes of the play. We're near the end of Act Five, Scene One when Caliban's plot to kill Prospero has been foiled--he had enlisted the aid of his new "gods": the drunken butler Stephano and jester Trinculo. Prospero admonishes Caliban, but clearly (in our production anyway) still cares about him. He tells Caliban

"...Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions; as you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely."

In this moment, Ken (our Prospero) offered his hand, took Steve's (our Caliban's) hand, gently pulled him up, put his hand on his shoulder, and spoke to him like a father who was guiding a prodigal son back into grace. I fought back tears--and am doing so even now--as I watched the beauty of a carefully sculpted piece of Act One story come into full bloom in Act Five. The beating heart revealed. This is a play about choosing forgiveness over vengeance.

For those of you who don't know THE TEMPEST, the Prospero/Caliban story is only one thread of the forgiveness theme--I'll discuss more threads in future posts.

We are hard-wired to respond to story. In my view, the forgiveness (and the journey to it), that is brought to life in THE TEMPEST is a mature exploration of humanity tapping our divine family tree.

His heart softened, Prospero says "the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance." And he chooses forgiveness of his various enemies.

Fellow prodigals, I wish you the joy of forgiving and being forgiven. My heart beats because of it.