I saw a new show last Friday night and while I laughed a lot at the comedy, there was also a great speech in it about how theatre is the most Buddhist of arts because it is incredibly repetitive and yet transitory. The play was a modern interpretation of a The Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Moliere -- which, in turn, was influenced by the structure and mechanics of Commedia dell'Arte. All of which to say is that even though this was a brand new play, the deep structure of this play was very, very old. Which, of course, all work is, really:

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl. (Alternate unhappy ending: They both die.)

"You shouldn't mess around with these unknown things!"
"I'm driven to know these things! ... Oh woe and horror I definitely should NOT have tried to learn these unknown things!"

And so on, and so on...

But the great thing about theatre -- and rehearsal -- is that we always make these stories new, so each time we see them they seem fresh and vibrant. It's where the magic is. But finding that magic takes a lot of work; lots of exercises, experiments and energy.

We all have a few tricks to get inside a play and make it new again. Or rehearsal exercises to find the energy and personalize each scene. This can be as simple as trying to find all the dirty jokes in a scene -- whether they're there or not -- for a character who's particularly debauched, to sense memory exercises -- or one particular favorite of mine, staging a scene silently.

In one acting class an actress and I rehearsed a scene from Les Liaisons Dangerouses without any of the dialogue, stripping it down to bare motivations and actions. It was absolutely absorbing to me to try and communicate with the Marquise without words, but the real shocker happened after the scene was over. The class was entirely silent, near tears. The Marquise's actions towards me when I wasn't looking were entirely different than how she interacted when I was engaging her. The duplicitousness was shocking and moving. We were able to take that energy, and those actions, and couple them with the words to take the scene to an even greater height.

But that's me! What exercises do you like to explore a scene or a play and make it your own? To present it with fresh eyes? Let me know!

(P.S., for those of you interested, the new play this past weekend was the world premier of The Bourgie Willie B. by S.J. Hodges, produced by Asylum Theatre.)