BWW Exclusive Blog: CLYBOURNE PARK Behind the Scenes: Day Two (Part 2)

BroadwayWorld.com welcomes Clybourne Park to the Broadway neighborhood by offering readers an exclusive behind-the-scenes peek as the play gets ready for performances. Through this unprecedented access to the fascinating creative process of technical rehearsals, students from Fordham University will keep BroadwayWorld.com readers in the loop through daily updates and photography. Log on to follow along as this Pulitzer Prize-winning play moves into its new Broadway home and literally gets built from the ground up.

In the afternoon session the students observed the actors performing through most of Act 1 (no costumes, just spacing). Then in the evening session, they picked up where they left off and finished Act 1. Then the crew practiced the scene shift again and they started Act 2, which they got through a good chunk of. Tomorrow afternoon they're starting at the Top of Act 1 in costume and will work through the show again.

Most theater artists would agree that tech rehearsals can be incredibly boring. They are repetitive and slow and tedious. You might go over a single moment once, or twice, or five times, or two hundred times. That one moment, which may have seemed interesting and thought-provoking at first, quickly becomes torturously mind-numbing. These tech rehearsals are where the work of designers, stage managers, actors, directors, and all manner of theater artists involved in a production comes together to create the play that audience members will experience just a few days later.

But, as is pointed out to the four of us Fordham theatre students who have been invited to Clybourne Park's first tech rehearsal, these rehearsals can also be filled with moments of magic. Sometimes the moment doesn't happen until the two-hundredth run of a scene. Sometimes it happens during the first on-stage run of a full act, or during a cue-to-cue when the lighting designer writes a clever light change. The point is that no one really knows when that magic will happen - part of the magic is the surprise of it, when for a second the entire team experiences a feeling that the audience will experience when they see the show.

The team of Clybourne Park only have four days of tech rehearsals before a dress rehearsal on Saturday. The day starts off "slowly," which means that everyone is quickly making last-minute changes and fixing anything out of place before they begin what seems to be a spacing rehearsal. Since I am a lighting designer, my eye is drawn to Allen Lee Hughes standing on stage and motioning for an electrician in the balcony to adjust the focus of a light. Three others sit at the two lighting tables, talking to each other quietly via headsets, making notes, watching the multiple computer monitors and programming lighting cues. At another table next to them, the stage manager has set up three production books. The stage is still being tweaked with technically and props are being set. Huge black boxes are lined up along the back wall of the house. I and my classmates seem to be the only people in the entire space who are simply observing.

Finally, everyone begins to get into places and prepare for the actors to start running through the play. We sit and watch. The play begins. Pam MacKinnon, the director, walks slowly around the front rows of the orchestra as the actors recite their lines with the kind of understanding that only comes from repeating them again and again over the course of two productions. Occasionally an actor pauses to ask a question or is stopped by MacKinnon. Prop placement, blocking, and entrance timing are all discussed. Even with the stop-and-go action, the actors onstage are compelling. I find myself forgetting to intensely study how the designers are working as I had planned. In this rehearsal, no element of the process is uninteresting.

A few more of my classmates come in to replace me during the day's first 10-minute break. As I leave, a load of something is delivered via the house left entrance. The lighting team is still talking over headset and adjusting the look on stage. Electricians and carpenters scoot past me through the aisles. I have no doubt that when I come in to see their progress on Thursday afternoon, I will not be disappointed.

By Megan Lang, Fordham University Class of 2013, pursuing a B.A. in Theatre with a concentration in Design and Production (Lighting Design).