A Snapshot of the Beginning

From where I sit, behind the production staff (there they sit; Katherine and Elizabeth and Pamina), I can see the cast, crooked in a half circle, uncomfortable on the hard floor. They're not paying attention to me, but to our director, Shannon. It is 3:03 pm, Thursday, June 3, and the day is just getting started. Out of the corner of my ear, I can hear Shannon talking about... this blog, and me writing. It's oddly surreal.

From this day, the third of our rehearsal time, we have exactly three weeks. It sounds like a lot of time, and it sounds like no time at all. I'm not worried (some people are); I've had less time to put on a show (the least, five days), but we do have a deadline. The show is the Crucible, by Arthur Miller. We're twenty-five pages in (though the first eight are not actual dialogue), and we have 125 pages left, putting the total length at 150 pages, or about two and a half hours. We have a lot of work to do, but not immediately.

To start the day, as we always do, we (that is, the rest of the cast; I'm blogging) are playing an improvisational game called "Accused and Accuser." It's a variant on "Buyer and Seller," where one person attempts to sell an item to another without the buyer knowing what the item is. It looks like fun, and I think I will join them.

--Matthew Drahozal