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