Live from the week 2 pickup rehearsal PLUS! We've got Twitter now!

First things first: We've got a Twitter account now, so if you'd like to get a special message from midway through the show (or any other time when you least expect it), just become one of our first followers and we'll tweet you right.

Now, then, bearing in mind John's apology for not including more Woyzeck images in his ever-more-ravishing slideshow, here's a shot (taken about two minutes ago) of the soldier and his captain from a perspective absolutely no one can see during the play proper:



I think it's safe to say that we all feel like the first week of the show was about a month ago, so it's nice to be reuniting for our weekly pickup rehearsal just to make sure we're all remembering who does what and what happens when. On the other hand, it's oddly regressive to be back in an empty room again, sans audience. If you haven't seen the show yet--or even if you've only seen half of it--we looking forward to seeing you in the next 2 weeks!

Hey! You got chocolate on my peanut butter!

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.

Man vs machine, again

Driving home from last night's rehearsal, I was listening to a podcast collage of various talks by Krishnamurti, a writer I've heard both revered and reviled over the years, although I really know very little about his teachings. I was only half paying attention when this fragment, out of context, jumped out at me, triggering a number of only loosely connected responses:

We are so conditioned, so programmed, like computers, that we cannot learn something new. The computer can, but we can't. You see, the tragedy is that the machine that we have created, the computer, can learn much faster, infinitely more than [we] can, than the brain can. And the brain which has invented that ... ultra-intelligent machine ... hae slowed down, because we have [become conformists].

My first fleeting thought was, ugh, I still suck at learning lines. It's the bane of my existence! (Turns out at least three people have dreamed recently that I fucked up the show by forgetting my opening and closing speeches--the 4 paragraphs which constitute 98% of my scripted contribution to the show.) Then I recalled Sarah's blogpost about her first experience rehearsing with robots, who never "forget" what they are supposed to say or do; on the down side, they tend to shut down rather than make the most of a situation (like, say, creating new lines until they can find their way back to familiar turf and/or the next cue for somebody else). Is it even accurate to refer to robots or game characters as "actors"?

I also thought about the way that, for all of us in one way or another, WoyUbu is either a big or small step outside our personal comfort zones into "something new." It's easier for me as a performer to slip into the skin of a character if I can think and speak spontaneously as him or her than if I have a set of lines to memorize (which is the major reason my solo performances and Cabaret roles have been mostly improv for the last couple of decades, with a few exceptions now and then to keep me on my toes).

Somewhere in there I also made a connection between Krishnamurti's comments on the possibilities and limits of humankind and Buchner's, as expressed most directly through my character in the show. ("You are created of dust, sand, and shit. Why must you try to be more than dust, sand, and shit?!" The unspoken answer: Because the compulsion to transcend our humble origins is precisely what allows us to transcend them--what separates us from both monkeys and computer-driven robots.)

And while this has little to do with his actual point, the Krishnamurti quote also makes me think about how I've always heard it's harder to master a new language after you reach a certain age--an age I have clearly reached, although I really do want to learn one for the first time since high school. I also wonder if it's too late to get my brain to handle the large chunks of dialogue I could in the past (at one point in my mid 30s I somehow managed to memorize a trilogy of my own monologues--a whopping 4 1/2 hours of material!--and now I keep fumbling over 4 paragraphs). Clearly the brain is a muscle that requires and responds well to exercise, or else actors far older than me would be out of work.

If I were a computer, you could feed page after page of text into me and I would recite it exactly the same way, night after night. Only where's the fun--the challenge to conformity--in that?

Pre-history

Since we've been using this blog to provide a play-by-play account of the creation of the show, I thought it might be interesting to provide some of the backstory, as best I can remember it. (Apologies in advance if I've jumbled up some of the details--if you know the real story, by all means post it in the comments below.)

About 2 1/2 years ago, Josephine, Dave, and Sarah approached me about the possibility of collaborating with the Dream Cab on a project. They knew some of our work, and we knew some of theirs, and several of us Cabbers got together at UB for a demonstration of the possibilities of VR by Dave, Josephine, and Stuart. (The main thing that struck me that night was not the possibilities in the creation of virtual worlds, but the weird interplay of levels when someone walks in front of a projector or something else jars the viewer out of the illusion and back into, ahem, "reality.")

Sometime around this point, Sarah proposed two plays we might want to consider working with in one way or another. So the rest of us went home with scripts of Jarry's Ubu Roi and Bruchner's Woyzeck. The original idea was to pick one, given how different they are in terms of history and tone, but we ended up discovering all sorts of points of contact between them and decided to create a mash-up of the two, much like smartass DJs have been doing for the last 10 years or so. One crucial commonality was the fact that neither play exists in a definitive version, inviting all manner of rearrangement. Early on, we toyed with all kinds of approaches, the most radical of which would have involved cutting up the scripts and pulling fragments out of a hat, or improvising scenes as they appeared on a Wheel of Fortune-style spinner. Another early idea was to have the Ubu cast appear only on film, or have the Ubu-ites be performing a carnival watched by Woyzeck and his wife. One thing we decided quite soon was that Ubu was practically written for the Dream Cab, and that "real" actors should handle Woyzeck.

A year or more went by, during which both collaborating groups went on with other projects of their own, and two "teams" formed to adapt the plays. (Sarah and Josephine worked on Woyzeck, and Holly on Ubu with feedback from Brian.) When we regrouped, we did several table reads of the two separate pieces, weaving them together in a fairly instinctual way. (This photo is from a bit later in the process, but you get the idea. Add in some more comfy furniture, lots of junk food, a few cats--one violently insane--and you're there.)



As I recall, our first stab at the mash-up was not too far from what we've still got now--I remember how amazed we all were at how easily certain pivotal events in the two works lined up. We moved one entire character and two minor walk-ons from Woyzeck to Ubu, but the rest stayed largely the same. Somewhere in here IPS did a staged reading with actors (none of whom are in the current production) and some VR elements (ditto, I think) during last summer's Infringement Festival.



Once we had the two scripts compressed into one, we brainstormed ways to stage Ubu: the premise became starting off with live actors and then moving deeper and deeper into various media--a TV sitcom, Eyewitness News, a slasher film, a PowerPoint presentation, and so on--until there was no human presence onstage by the end. Logistics have led us to fudge that a bit, but it's still more or less the basic concept.

For a very long time, the show was purely hypothetical, until some very generous funding allowed the IPS folks to rent a rehearsal/performance space on Main Street near Lafayette, at which point things started rolling pretty fast. Our core group of six or seven expanded to incorporate computer science folks, robot designers, and, eventually, actors. Before we knew it, we had performance dates, and discussion-based meetings gradually evolved into rehearsals.

And now, somehow, opening night is a mere eight days away. So, back to real-time updates.