Rehearsal Playground
Rehearsal Playground
Week Twenty Five: The Cherry Orchard / Oz
Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome to EA’s Rehearsal Playground. This week we’re celebrating our Mainstage material and exploring an Anton Chekhov masterpiece.
All subscribers have a new Weekly Character Challenge + July’s Mainstage Rehearsal Project waiting below!
How It Works
Each Saturday delivers new weekly character rehearsal challenges straight to your inbox. Something dynamic, something experimental, something transformational. Something to push the boundaries of truth in character. This Summer … Anton Chekhov’s seminal works. Next up, The Cherry Orchard.
Your Weekly Character Challenge
This week’s challenge … The Memory Walk.
Choose your character.
Read the play. (Member Bonus - Class Archives: EA First Rehearsal/Report)
Find a space to work where your Imagination + Actor’s Faith can be set free and have uninterrupted freedom to explore.
Go on a an imaginative tour, physically walking through and around all the nooks and crannies of the Cherry Orchard as it looked the very first time you saw it.
Your work is complete when you’ve walked through the whole Cherry Orchard and have translated your discoveries into Creative Communication, capturing:
a surprising emotion inspired by your Memory Walk using only a specific piece of poetic text.
a surprising animal/insect discovery inspired by your Memory Walk using only a specific object.
a surprising visual of nature inspired by your Memory Walk using only a specific piece of music.
the Cherry Orchard as you knew it then using only a specific image.
The Characters
Lopakhin - Act I
I want to say something very pleasant, very delightful, to you.
Looks at his watch.
I'm going away at once, I haven't much time . . . but I'll tell you all about it in two or three words. As you already know, your cherry orchard is to be sold to pay your debts, and the sale is fixed for August 22; but you needn't be alarmed, dear madam, you may sleep in peace; there's a way out. Here's my plan. Please attend carefully! Your estate is only thirteen miles from the town, the railway runs by, and if the cherry orchard and the land by the river are broken up into building lots and are then leased off for villas you'll get at least twenty-five thousand roubles a year profit out of it.
Yasha - Act III
Lubov Andreyevna! I want to ask a favour of you, if you'll be so kind! If you go to Paris again, then please take me with you. It's absolutely impossible for me to stop here.
Looking round.
What's the good of talking about it, you see for yourself that this is an uneducated country, with an immoral population, and it's so dull. The food in the kitchen is beastly, and here's this Fiers walking about mumbling various inappropriate things. Take me with you, be so kind!
Play Along With Your Own Summer Character …
Read Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Choose your character or work with one we’ve highlighted above.
Invest in your character over the Summer with our weekly work.
Share your discoveries and challenges.
How It Works
On the first Saturday of the month, our Mainstage Rehearsal Project gets posted for subscribers to play with all month long. Each project builds out an array of rehearsal tools, applying them to work you’ll remember forever. The stuff that makes acting worth believing in.
This Summer we’re exploring the magic of Oz … creating, shaping, and living truthfully in a world of pure imagination.
July’s Mainstage Project
Performance Possibility: The Story
This month we’re finding a story worth telling for your unique character in our world of Oz.
First, start by wondering at and selecting a transformative moment in your character’s life.
Next, specify the start, end, and moment of transformation. The end arrives once the transformative moment (button-pusher) has fully succeeded in changing your character.
Then, give us a taste of this transformative character experience by storyboarding the start, end, and moment of transformation using Creative Communication.
Create different versions of your storyboard using:
only specific pieces of music.
only specific images.
only specific objects.
only specific pieces of poetic text.
We’ll culminate this month’s mainstage project with one storyboard using a mix of music, images, objects, and poetic text to give us an experiential taste of this transformative moment … this story worth telling.
Post your storyboard - using your character’s name as the title.
Cinema Elysium Presents … The Saturday Matinee
Whistle While You Work
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
ALL MONTH ON SUBSTACK
I’ll be providing feedback for paid members posted work and available as a teammate for the discoveries and challenges inspired as you explore.
