Rehearsal Playground
Week Twenty Four: Three Sisters / 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 + June’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. It all begins with Three Sisters.
Your Weekly Character Challenge
This week’s challenge … The Heart Map.
Choose your character.
Read the play. (Member Bonus - Class Archives: EA First Rehearsal/Report)
For each sentence of your Three Sisters text, say it aloud in your own words.
Speak your soul’s truth. Allow messy, unapologetic sound to pour out of you.
Once a sentence feels free and true - write it down.
Move onto the next sentence, repeating the process until you’ve done this work for all your text in Act One.
Next, add to your Heart Map by speaking the unspoken thoughts that cause your first sentence. Add them to the start of your map.
Finally, speak the connective thoughts between each and every written sentence. Include the thoughts you hear inside of yourself while others have dialogue. Or in group silence. Add them all to your map.
Your Heart Map is complete when you’ve written down the full, free-flowing truth of both the spoken and unspoken in Act One.
Now tear it up. Delete it. Throw it away.
We want to be careful not to prioritize this text. To treat it as “right” or “better”…
We do this work to discover something in our hearts. If we were to hold onto it or be careful with how we shape it … the work then moves into our intellect to judge, doubt, compare.
Let’s treat this as an exercise. A muscle-builder. A speed-bump groover.
Once you’ve torn up your first map … do it all again for Act Two.
And then again for Act Three. And once more for Act Four.
Each thrown away after completed.
Four maps total.
The Characters
Natasha - Act III
We must come to an agreement, Olga. Your place is the school, mine—the home. You devote yourself to teaching, I, to the household. And if I talk about servants, then I do know what I am talking about; I do know what I am talking about … And tomorrow there’s to be no more of that old thief, that old hag …
Stamping.
That witch! And don’t you dare annoy me! Don’t you dare!
Stopping short.
Really, if you don’t move downstairs, we shall always be quarrelling. This is awful ...
Anfisa - Act IV
Well, little girl, here I am, still alive! Still alive! In the high school, together with little Olga, in her official apartments … so the Lord has appointed for my old age. Sinful woman that I am, I’ve never lived like that in my life before. … A large flat, government property, and I’ve a whole room and bed to myself. All government property. I wake up at nights and, oh God, and Holy Mother, there isn’t a happier person than I! …
Play Along With Your Own Summer Character …
Read Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
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.
June’s Mainstage Project
Performance Possibility: The Character
This month we’re bringing to life your unique, one-of-a-kind character in our world of Oz.
First, start with a favorite fictional childhood character.
Next, harmonize your character by combining it with a real-life, historical figure that feels like a “soul twin.”
Give us a taste of your unique character concoction using Creative Communication:
a specific piece of music
a specific image
a specific object
a specific piece of poetic text.
Let’s culminate this month’s mainstage project with one “Spoon River-esque” page of text where your character speaks from their soul - saying the most true, most important, most personal words they want the world to hear.
Share your page of text - using your character’s name as the title.
Cinema Elysium Presents … The Saturday Matinee
Friend Like Me
Alladin (1992)
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.
