From Julieanne Pogue

BOSTON MARRIAGE:

December 18, Tuesday, first blocking rehearsal. The set was revealed to be in transition and unmarked on the floor, so we poor wee things are trying to remember which chair is which set piece. I keep forgetting to angle myself, since there are not chairs around the perimeter. But this is mere mechanical minutiae. The real challenge is to attune to Jack’s directing style, which is very much Actor-Turned-Director, meaning he will show rather than describe. I feel myself caught between doing what he does and inflecting as he inflects and moving more organically and intuitively.

What is most interesting is that when I do that, he is happier with the result, but it takes a while to get there. I’m calling this the Tactile Phase of the acquaintance process. We probe each other like a surgeon looking for a lump. Who are you? What do you want from me? What are you thinking? Where are you going? AHAH!

Gina is wandering about in the same hinterland. But Laura, bless her little witch heart, is full-on engaged. And flitting about as though Sure of Her Way. I’m going to burn her at the stake. I would, if I weren’t so charmed by her enthusiasm and her comic timing…even now…even now.

December 19, Wednesday:

This was a very different rehearsal than yesterday. Gina is feeling chipper, and her responses, particularly non-verbal ones, are spot-on. This is the Gina of “The Underpants” and the one I really wanted to do this show with! I like that she is so different from me, and that her face is so expressive. When our scripts are out of our hands, this will fly!

I’m having difficulty catching the ups and downs of Anna’s rages. Jack calls these the music of the piece, an orchestral ode to her self-involvement, and when these passages begin, build, and end at just the right moment, invariably the laugh is there.

There are many incidences of volte-face in very few pages, so we will have to be on our toes and in agreement about the lengths of pauses, etc. And I’m surprised to see that all of us have read different meanings into lines. Part of the work is to agree upon these meanings…and we’re not there yet. I wish we’d had a bit more table work, just to iron out the details, because they do affect the mood, the movement, the sense of the thing.

I’m much more a stickler on the EXACT meaning than anyone else. And I find myself chafing about until we have satisfactorily settled the matter. That said, once we DO decide, we seem able to quickly adjust to new information.

We have yet to be measured for our costumes, and I am attempting to lose a little weight that inactivity, illness, a broken toe, vacation, new medication, and stress have deposited on my prim little butt. I don’t see Anna as luscious and zaftig. There is a bit of the burned away in her body and face, I think. She is more likely of the two, I think, to lose weight when she is miserable, and to make her body accept her demands. I cannot see Anna heaving herself over the floor and wallowing like a beached whale on her fainting couch. I see her DRIFTING or STALKING from place to place, alternately languid and frazzled with the electricity of stress and rage.

One thing is sure: She is going to be, I think, my favorite role of all my work. Even more than Eleanor in “Lion in Winter” she is a woman who lives DESPERATELY by her wits. She has no dominions to defend her back and nothing to call her own save her mind.

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