This afternoon actors and designers congregated for the third day workshopping Michael Perlman’s At The Table.

Today we started by working through new pages generated from last week’s rehearsal. We’re now beginning to get a clear sense of who these characters are and what they might want from each other. Much like our process with From White Plains, the task now is to generate a multitude of character/story trajectories and determine which tells the clearest and most truthful story. This stage is perhaps the most exciting to me; the play begins to take nearly infinite different forms. The characters are presented with infinite paths and it is our job to sift through the possible options to distill the story to its essence. With such a large cast, however, we’re finding the difficulty is in making sure all the characters have specific and necessary relationships to each other. Nothing should be extraneous.

That’s all for February rehearsals. We next gather on this coming Tuesday, which somehow is already in March!