Rehearsal Playground
Week Twenty Three: 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 Movement Piece.
Choose your character.
Read the play. (Member Bonus - Class Archives: EA First Rehearsal/Report)
Continue your character exploration by crafting a Movement Piece for the start of each of Chekhov’s four acts. Each piece should poetically express the effect life has had on your character up until that point in time:
Act One - express your character’s life prior to the start of our story.
Act Two - express your character’s most important internal changes between Act One and Act Two.
Act Three - express your character’s unseen personal life between Act Two and Act Three.
Act Four - express the hidden fears and desires of your character at any moment in time between Act Three and Act Four.
Here’s our Act One Movement Piece from Uncle Vanya (ECT, 2018):
The Characters
Irina - Act III
Oh, I am unhappy … I can’t work, I shan’t work. Enough, enough! I used to be a telegraphist, now I work at the town council offices, and I have nothing but hate and contempt for all they give me to do … I am already twenty-three, I have already been at work for a long while, and my brain has dried up, and I’ve grown thinner, plainer, older, and there is no relief of any sort, and time goes and it seems all the while as if I am going away from the real, the beautiful life, farther and farther away, down some precipice. I’m in despair and I can’t understand how it is that I am still alive, that I haven’t killed myself ...
Tuzenbach - Act IV
It is curious how silly trivial little things, sometimes for no apparent reason, become significant. At first you laugh at these things, you think they are of no importance, you go on and you feel that you haven’t got the strength to stop yourself. Oh don’t let’s talk about it! I am happy. It is as if for the first time in my life I see these firs, maples, beeches, and they all look at me inquisitively and wait. What beautiful trees and how beautiful, when one comes to think of it, life must be near them!
A shout in the distance.
It’s time I went. … There’s a tree which has dried up but it still sways in the breeze with the others. And so it seems to me that if I die, I shall still take part in life in one way or another. Goodbye, dear …
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
It’s The Hard Knock Life
Annie (1982)
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.
