Tag Archives: Josephine Austin

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #14 Getting to Opening Night…

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#14.  Getting to Opening Night or overcoming obstacles so you can have one

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

Getting a play ready for an audience can be exciting, hard work, torturous, expensive and maybe even fun. But I don’t think it’s the producers who experience much of that last one. Understanding ticketing (the subject of the previous post) and all its 21st century permutations will likely be the least of your concerns. Filling seats may be critical to your show’s financial viability. But being ready for that audience trumps all in terms of the show’s critical success and your play’s future viability. If it’s not you might find yourself returning money when you delay opening or close early because you never should have opened.

Villa Thrilla needed more time to be ready for an audience but we forged ahead anyway, despite encountering more than our share of obstacles. We had 5 ½ weeks for rehearsal, which should have been enough, but one week in we lost a key actor in our 10-character show and it took another 10 days to find a replacement. Several actors were sick, or otherwise didn’t make it to rehearsal a lot. They had auditions, sick parents and/or needed to leave the state to attend religious holidays, which had somehow appeared on the calendar after they turned in their conflict sheets. Grrr…

It was a brand new play that could have benefited from workshopping, a luxury we didn’t have. Rewrites were needed for any number of reasons—bits didn’t work, actors had trouble with lines, our set would not accommodate the actions I’d written or—here’s a good reason to rewrite—I found ways to say things more concisely. All these rewrites meant new pages daily until Gary (our director) said “Stop!” I didn’t want to kill multiple trees in this process so I’d bring in new pages to insert into existing scripts. Well, this was a failure with most actors having the “old page 6–A-2” or whatever it was. This reached a devastating conclusion at what must have been among the worst designer stumble-throughs in the history of theatre. It brought new meaning to the phrase “not on the same page.” Our well-mannered lighting designer wore an expression of embarrassed dread. I was feeling both too.

Then there were the stage and set preparations that went awry. The scrim was measured wrong or so said the construction crew. Or was it that the construction crew cut the scrim wrong, thereby screwing up the designer’s measurements? We had to buy more expensive scrim. Critical personnel were rarely there at the same time so communication broke down. We had plenty of time to build the set before opening (though it was an elaborate one) but we had delay after delay with causation and responsibility difficult to ascertain. Promises made, broken, remade and broken again. And if you’ve been reading these posts, you might remember the “couch” issue, where I drove all over LA wasting gas and checking out couches that would meet the expectations of the set designer, Gary and my wallet. I painted the floor myself, because it had to be done on a certain day and there was no one else to do it. And there were lots of other challenges with getting the set ready in time, though once it was up and functioning we were all very happy and it received its own share of good reviews.

Failure is not an option as one is negotiating all the obstacles one is faced with in getting a show up. It’s just a question of how you will compromise on your vision with the materials you have to work with, keeping in mind that vanishing time horizon as opening night draws near.

Then you get to tech week, which can be so torturous Anne Washburn wrote a play about it called 10 of 12, which just had a run at Soho Rep. Our first day of tech represented the first time all the actors were present for rehearsal since the first read-through, so for me it was less torturous than most other rehearsals. During tech, actors run through the bits of the show when light and sound cues occur. All that gets put into a computer for the Stage Manager. Fortunately for Villa Thrilla, we had an incredible stage manager in Josephine Austin. Throughout the entire process and despite all the turbulence, Josie remained unflappable and held us all together. Now, with tech over, Josie took control and we were ready for our two previews. No obstacles to overcome appeared on either night. Costumes, the set, make up, the board—everything worked. People came to watch and both previews went well. We made a tweak or two to sound/light cues but nothing major. There were also still quite a few bungled or forgotten lines but with ten actors onstage, someone usually knew where they were and could get the play back on track. All of us felt pretty good about the show we’d made and were looking forward to opening.

Finally, the Saturday morning of opening night dawned. Everything was ready to go. Our associate producer, Jerusha Aimee Liu had arrangements for the after party in hand. Wine, beer and concessions to sell at intermission had been purchased. A few critics would be in attendance though none from the top newspapers or blogs, despite our publicist’s best efforts. I knew what I was going to wear and there was nothing more to be done. So I rose early and went on a hike. About halfway in, my brother called throwing down the last obstacle I would need to surmount. His call was to tell me our father had died. Though it wasn’t a big surprise it was still devastating. Not only because I loved my father, but I had planned to see him two days later as soon as the show opened. I sat down on a rock and cried, questioning the timing of it all. I might have spent several hours on that rock but I had to get on with it. As things went, opening night went by in a blur. I was too blue to be worried about the show and being at the theatre kept me from wallowing in grief. I didn’t watch the show that night but from the audience response, I knew it went well. We’d gotten over that last hurdle.

Next up: Reviews and Keeping it Going

The Self Production Series with Anna Nicholas: #12 Rehearsal…

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#12. Rehearsals – Or… Making it to Opening Night

by Guest Blogger Anna Nicholas

In the theater, things don’t always happen in a nice, sequential and unstressful order. And in Equity-waiver theatre—read low-budget—things not going as planned is the order of the day. Meaning a playwright doesn’t often have the luxury of a wonderful theatre to work in, fabulous designers to bring her vision to life, a positive casting period during which actors ideal for the roles you’ve written show up to audition and a smooth but exciting rehearsal period where each rehearsal builds upon the last; until finally your show peaks on opening night in front of an appreciative audience with top critics in attendance loving your play. Oh, would that it were so easy! In fact, getting a play up is more a case of overcoming obstacles—whether those obstacles be physical or mental. And with Villa Thrilla, we had our share of both.

Once we had our cast—a challenge in itself—rehearsal began with just four weeks until opening night. (For more on the challenges of casting, see this post in the series: https://lafpi.com/2015/03/the-self-production-series-with-anna-nicholas-9-finding-your-actors/) Four weeks is not much time when you’re mounting a new play with a cast of ten; particularly when it seemed impossible to get all the actors to the same rehearsals, even though the play required that their characters be on stage at the same time.

You do your best to get peoples’ schedules ahead of time in order to plan rehearsals but a few people in our cast apparently hadn’t heard about looking at a calendar to verify their availability before committing to doing a play. Did they not know about Yom Kippur or their Mother’s birthday when they signed on? Add losing a cast member one week into rehearsals, losing another cast member for 10 days when a parent became sick out of town and a third cast member who was so difficult to work with we wanted to lose him but replacing him would have meant losing another cast member we liked and there just wasn’t time to get new people up to speed.

The only advantage I can see to 99-seat theatre going away—and I truly hope it does not—is an advantage only to Producers. I guess they should get something for having to pay actors more. The advantage I see is that actors will need to make a greater commitment to the play they have agreed to do, adhering to rehearsal schedules for the privilege of earning minimum wage. Currently actors can pretty much not show up if they feel a little sick, have an audition the next day or realize there were important events they forgot—including their dog’s graduation from obedience school.

The fact that we didn’t have all the actors to rehearse when we needed them made a lot more work for Gary Lee Reed (Director), Josephine Austin (Stage Manager) and me. At the time, if felt as if it took years off our lives. Gary couldn’t tell what he was looking at with the stage missing up to 5 people at any given rehearsal, which resulted in having to block scenes multiple times; Josie was constantly changing blocking in her master script and having to phone errant actors who were late or hadn’t shown up; And I was not able to watch and rewrite during rehearsals, something I’d been counting on, because I had to stand-in for missing cast members—often two or three of them in the same scene. I was dashing around the stage speaking with multiple dialects and vocal timbres providing a real person for the actors who had actually shown up to rehearse. Some nights, we wanted to strangle someone—usually someone who was missing—and yet, we had to try to remain upbeat for the actors who bothered to come to rehearsal. What would be gained by screaming? I don’t know; we didn’t try it. But I doubt it would have improved the rehearsal experience, which I’d hoped would be a gloriously fruitful period when my play would change and grow in leaps and bounds. But alas, I didn’t get to have that on this one.

Being an AEA actor as well as a playwright, I like to think I understand actors but when I put my producer hat on for Villa Thrilla, I was shocked by the behavior of some of my fellow thespians. Emergencies are one thing but it would never occur to me to commit to doing a show, commence rehearsals and then spring a few “unavailable” dates on the producers.

In retrospect, I would have helped myself by choosing a play with a smaller cast but I’ve already explained why I chose this play in the post on Selecting the Work: https://lafpi.com/2014/12/the-self-production-series-with-anna-nicholas-3-selecting-the-work/

Shockingly, we did not have our entire cast onstage at the same time until 5 days before opening. And the only thing I can say by way of comfort if you’re considering producing your play, is that once we got to tech, the actors were mostly great. They showed up for the remainder of rehearsals, then performances and, for the most part, knew their lines. So you may get a few more gray hairs, but if you hire professionals, they will be there.

Next up: Ticketing, pre-sales and making some money back