Rehearsal Playground
Week Twenty Six: 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 Last Day.
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 an imaginative memory tour of the last day of your character’s life. Allow yourself to move through three major moments as they felt on that very last day.
Your work is complete when you’ve experienced each of the three moments through the eyes, ears, heart, soul of your character and translate your discoveries into Creative Communication, capturing:
the first major moment using only Haiku poetry.
the second major moment using only classical music.
the third major moment using only a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
The Characters
Anya - Act I
We went to Paris; it's cold there and snowing. I talk French perfectly horribly. My mother lives on the fifth floor. I go to her, and find her there with various Frenchmen, women, an old abbé with a book, and everything in tobacco smoke and with no comfort at all. I suddenly became very sorry for mother--so sorry that I took her head in my arms and hugged her and wouldn't let her go. Then mother started hugging me and crying. . . .
She's already sold her villa near Mentone; she's nothing left, nothing. And I haven't a copeck left either; we only just managed to get here. And mother won't understand! We had dinner at a station; she asked for all the expensive things, and tipped the waiters one rouble each. And Charlotta too. Yasha wants his share too-- it's too bad. Mother's got a footman now, Yasha; we've brought him here.
Lubov - Act II
Oh, my sins. . . . I've always scattered money about without holding myself in, like a madwoman, and I married a man who made nothing but debts. My husband died of champagne--he drank terribly--and to my misfortune, I fell in love with another man and went off with him, and just at that time--it was my first punishment, a blow that hit me right on the head--here, in the river . . . my boy was drowned, and I went away, quite away, never to return, never to see this river again. . . I shut my eyes and ran without thinking, but he ran after me . . . without pity, without respect. I bought a villa near Mentone because he fell ill there, and for three years I knew no rest either by day or night; the sick man wore me out, and my soul dried up. And last year, when they had sold the villa to pay my debts, I went away to Paris, and there he robbed me of all I had and threw me over and went off with another woman. I tried to poison myself. . . . It was so silly, so shameful. . . . And suddenly I longed to be back in Russia, my own land, with my little girl. . . .
[Wipes her tears]
Lord, Lord be merciful to me, forgive me my sins! Punish me no more!
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
Follow The Yellow Brick Road
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
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.
