Filed by Bil at 11:21 pm under Shameless Plugs, The Arts

We had the most amazing “Orestes” rehearsal today. There was some time spent in fight choreography and practice, wherein Theresa Neef, Anna Weiler, and Alicia Reese flip back and forth between slow-motion and real-time –- sort of like “The Matrix,” but minus the whoa.

This was followed by the most intense (and longest) fragments exercise I’ve ever been involved in. Two people cried. TWO. Hot, human tears. For real.

For those that don’t know Dream Theatre’s style, the fragments exercise is a rehearsal tool where the cast sits and stares at each other by candle light, then slowly starts to speak lines from the show at each other and really feel things out. It’s not as hippies-in-the-woods as it sounds when I say it like that, though, it’s actually really cool.

To clarify — this is not for therapy, this is for art. We sit and make eye contact and don’t break it until both parties are ready. This is a pretty common acting exercise, but in this setting, with candles and music, it rises to a level of trusting the other set of eyes until it occurs to you that maybe you shouldn’t be trusting them.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Bil, that sounds like boring actor process jargon to me.

No, no, it’s totally cool, I promise.

So we’re sitting in the darkness with just a little candle light and some eerie music, staring at each other and blurting each other’s lines, and then slowly, we stand up and start to move about the stage. We don’t say the lines in order, and we don’t limit ourselves to only our own lines — in the fragments exercise, we’re free to wander where we like and speak whatever line feels appropriate, regardless of which character says that line in the script. And as the music evolves from one song to the next, we all change with it. It’s quite an interesting experience, and the effect that it has is like taking a painting on a stone, shattering it, and creating a mosaic — it looks different, but uses all the same colors, so it’s kind of the same, and gives us a very useful sense of how the show feels.

Tonight’s fragments exercise lasted longer than any other fragments I’ve ever done, and like I mentioned before, two of our cast broke down by the end of it. We consider this a success.

Part of the success, no doubt, comes from the fact that “Orestes” is the third play in this trilogy, and the entire cast of “Orestes” was also in “Electra,” the previous show, and so we were actually able to pull lines from that show, too. Additionally, many of this cast were involved in “Agamemnon,” the first play in the trilogy, as well as “Ismene” and “Medea,” where much of the mythology bleeds over, so we had five plays’ worth of lines for our fragments. It was like taking five stone paintings, smashing them all into tiny bits, and then mashing the up together to make one big mosaic painting that conveyed all the stories as one. We were able to create an abstract sense not just of the world of “Orestes,” but in fact the entire history.

It was pretty sweet.

You know what else is pretty sweet? Swordfighting. This play might be more than you can handle. I hope that’s a good thing.