I can't tell you what an odd feeling it is, performing in a play which is really two plays at once: two very different plays with separate casts, distinct performance styles, and wildly different tones. (All of this is by design, mind you, but theory and practice are not always the same.) It may actually be less odd for me than for my fellow cast members, since my character (who was actually lifted from one play and inserted in the other) is the only one empowered to cross over from one set to the other at will, but even in my case it feels like we Dream Cabbers are doing one show while Joe and Kate just happen to be in another one in another theater next door. Sometimes when rehearsal is over I ask them, "So how did your play go tonight?" (Granted, the feeling is heightened by the fact that some of us in the Cabaret have been collaborating for about 5 years now, while we're just meeting Kate and Joe for the first time.)
Even so, it never ceases to surprise me how smoothly--to me, at least--the two plays work together in spite of/because of their differences, to the point that I think I would feel cheated now if I saw a production of one without the other.
Early in the rehearsal process, when we Ubu-ites started getting used to playing to a camera, I grasped the irony in the situation: "our" play allegedly celebrates/bemoans anarchy and freedom, yet our actual blocking has to be meticulously worked out so it reads onscreen. "Their" play depicts a man with no freedom, yet Joe and Kate have a vastly larger playing space to work with. We measure our movements in term of inches, while they have feet or yards in which to feel ... trapped.
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