The Hedgehog of Horripilation

It really is in the text. Erin determined it would be a stage direction, so you won't hear it appear in a spoken line (but if you can actually identify the moment of stage direction that the Hedgehog occupies, I will personally give you a Big Prize).

The actual text reads, " Time does not like this remark. Becomes a weasel, or a vicious hedgehog, backs up, puffed up in raging horripilation."

The hedgehog moment isn't funny ... and I can and do absolutely appreciate it as a real direction, a real thought, a moment, an action from Wellman, for whom I have developed an enormous admiration. STILL: the line secrectly cracks me up. A Hedgehog of Horripilation. The words are just funny.

Under less intelligent and confident direction this play would run not just a risk but a likelihood of being intolerably pretentious. It is brilliantly composed, but complicated; the ideas and images in the text are dense. It requires a very skilled director to interpret it in such a way that it will make it alive and immediate in the experience of the audience. Erin is doing this in lots and lots of different ways, and one of the most vital of these is in being alive to the humor that is written into the play, and finding moments where we can interject humor of our own.

Of course I can't tell you about the funny bits because that would spoil them. But they're there! You won't miss them. Slapstick, even. No kidding! Antigone doesn't quite meet Buster Keaton here, but there are moments closer to this than you might think. As a professional clown, thinking about the nature of humor and how it works and doesn't work in performance is part of my job description, and it is often the case that the humor that really hits us deep is intimitely related to the things that make us most uncomfortable, the darkest parts of ourselves, individually and collectively as well. Makes all the more sense to me that Antigone SHOULD meet Buster here ... I think the content of the play is more full that way, more integrated, more real. Melusina and I both bring our clown training and skills to this work, quite directly... and besides having the freedom to do this and the enjoyment of seeing how humor actually amplifies this work - there is the huge joy of working under a director and with a cast who don't take themselves too seriously.

The Hedgehog of Humor! Hooray!

--Clotho, the one who spins

Whose Line Is It, Anyway?

Generally the process goes something like this: The first rehearsal is a sit-down read through of the script. Following this everyone learns blocking (movement) in rehearsal with scripts in hand. Then the day arrives: The first day "off-book" - that is, without scripts - that is, memorized.

WAIT! I should go back. Usually the scripts are written so that certain characters have certain lines. Right. This is what we usually understand to be "a play." We might expect actors to forget their lines, but we wouldn't generally expect actors to forget which line belongs to whom - for Stella, for example, to accidentally holler out, "STELLLLLLAAAAAAAAA!"

We wouldn't, that is, unless the cast happened to be rehearsing a Mac Wellman interpretation of "Streetcar" (there isn't one ... but wouldn't that be interesting?), in which case Stella might very well be taking that line ... or not ... or taking it WITH Stanley, Mitch, Blanche AND the upstairs neighbors ... perhaps even as the opening line of the play.

It's a Mac Wellman World - not merely a reinterpretation of Antigone but of our understanding of "traditional" dramatic form. Wellman's text identifies the characters, but gives no assignment of which lines belong to whom, or even which parts of the text are to be spoken and which are stage direction. One might be tempted to call it formless and yet it is also certainly not that: The shape and structure of the play (act division, overall arc, language and punctuation sequences) are in many ways extremely specific.

Wellman's piece, like the work of Shakespeare and Sophocles, reads as poetry. We call this "non-traditional" drama - but whose tradition do we mean? In building this piece we're incorporating music echoing very specific traditions (Gregorian chants, Western nursery rhymes), movement inspired by Japanese Butoh theater and the work of Isadora Duncan, and much of the text seems to be served well by an acting style more closely related to ancient mask traditions than to the more emotionally complex, naturalistic performance we associate with most contemporary theater. Lauri (one of our three Fates) spoke earlier of a Greek theater tradition involving an all-female cast integrating dance, music, and poetry. From this perspective, it is really more "multi-traditional" than non-traditional - which, applied to this work, could even be considered the ultimate misnomer!

As an actor, working to get off-book while also trying to learn the arc of a very non-linear (multi-linear?) story, while also trying to learn some extremely challenging physical movement sequences, while also trying to sing in three-part harmony, while also trying to play a washtub ... even NOT backwards and in high heels, it's uniquely challenging.

But even at this stage of the learning curve, I don't resent Mac Wellman. At the risk of sounding a bit of a Pollyanna I have to say I love him now even more. Working together to remember which lines come out of which mouths informs my understanding of these four characters ultimately being different facets, expressions of a single entity. I feel it more deeply in my body, I understand it more in my brain the more we do it ... and my work is not about simply my lines and my blocking and my character. It is about that, but for all of us it is about learning and becoming together the character that is and is not each of us, the character that is that The Play itself.

--Clotho, the one who spins

nothing moves antigone

Okay, it's the director here, and I shouldn't be butting in, but people have started coming to rehearsals and telling me what they see. This is an incredibly frightening and exciting moment for me in particular because so much of what I'm asking the actors to do is physicalize verbal puns, ie, create movements that represent things that, if you said them, would allow someone to hear something differently. In several cases, I wanted to keep these words as lines, but they just didn't work, rhythmically, so they became stage directions. One is: "Creon turns on Haemon. Haemon turns on Antigone," which I have directed them to perform as if read "Creon *turns* on Haemon. Haemon turns *on* Antigone. " Another is "Nothing moves us. Nothing moves Antigone" to which I have told her, "The existence of 'nothing-ness' moves you." No one will get that, right, when watching? And sometimes the whole process feels like that—we're embedding layer upon layer of references to pop culture (Tom Waits, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure...), ancient tales (Anansi, Greek legends...), children's books/games (Winnie the Pooh, itsy bitsy spider, ring-around-the-rosy...), and anagrams and on and on and on... so what will people actually take out of it? Turns out, a surprising amount. I heard from a recent college grad that she sees that the Fates aren't human and that the Shriek Operator is controlling them somehow, has some sort of authorial voice to the tale. And today I heard from someone who had seen our postcard (marketing something right is always key to happy audiences), "This Antigone looks really interesting—she looks so feral!" Since that was the one word I could come up with during that photo shoot (Hey Lauri, that's great but can you make it a little less human and a little more feral?), I'm feeling... well, useful. Also feeling lucky I have these four excellent women on stage—their translations of my instructions are sometimes even more interesting than I imagine.