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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. Let’s begin with Three Sisters.
Your Weekly Character Challenge
This week’s challenge … The Elysium Etudes.
Choose your character.
Read the play. (Member Bonus - Class Archives: EA First Rehearsal/Report)
Begin your character exploration by living-through each of The Elysium Etudes:
The Characters
Masha - Act III
I want to make a confession, dear sisters. My soul is in pain. I will confess to you, and never again to anybody … I’ll tell you this minute. It’s my secret but you must know everything … I can’t be silent. … I love, I love … I love that man. … You saw him only just now. … Why don’t I say it … in one word. I love Vershinin.
Andrei - Act IV
Oh, what has become of my past and where is it? I used to be young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to me full of hope. Why do we, almost before we have begun to live, become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy. … This town has already been in existence for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom is in any way different from the others. There has never been, now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar, an artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse envy or a passionate desire to be imitated. They only eat, drink, sleep, and then they die … more people are born and also eat, drink, sleep, and so as not to go silly from boredom, they try to make life many-sided with their beastly backbiting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and they become just as pitiful corpses and just as much like one another as their fathers and mothers. …
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
Pure Imagination
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
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.