Student Blog: Understudying in a New Work

This semester I have the pleasure of being an understudy in the world premiere of Ida Esmaeli’s play called Girlhood. Girlhood was the winner of the 2024 Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival and in part with winning the festival, it means that my school, the Dobbins Conservatory, then fully produces the play as a part of our spring season. It is such a cool thing that my school does and that I get to be a part of. Since we open in less than a month, I wanted to share a bit about my experience so far in Girlhood.

For context, Girlhood follows the story of 7 girls as they prepare for their coming of age debutante ball. Throughout the show, the girls face many issues and personal struggles of adolescence over the course of a year until the big night arises, but with that tensions rise as well and more chaos ensues. I am understudying the role of Katie, who is the fearless, academic, leader, student council president and captain of the varsity soccer team bound for Harvard. She isn’t afraid to speak her mind and isn’t afraid to keep her sister Maddie in check either. It has been so much fun getting to know Katie and getting to understand her more and more as she changes with the new versions of the script.

When it comes to the rehearsal process, this so far has been a pretty relaxed and great one. Our first rehearsal began as a table read for our wonderful playwright, Ida, so she could hear it outloud and get our understanding of the play. From there she made rewrites and changes some bits and bobs. There was a week of rehearsal where we got new scenes every day I believe. It is very fast paced, but I like it a lot. Our director as well has been so nice and has given us time to read through the new scenes/parts and get to explore them so that has been a great process as well. After the table read, we started with tablework, which is where we talk about the play and what it means to us and for our characters. We then did a deeper dive of our characters and who they are and what makes them tick. From there, we moved onto running through the sections of the play on our feet and exploring the scenes and such. Our wonderful amazing director, Roxanne Wellington, also has been super inclusive of the understudies and has also given us a voice to talk about the play as well. During tablework, she would also ask all the understudies questions and I’ve felt very much included this whole process and I am very grateful for that.

After exploration, it was time to start blocking! We then have been blocking and then cleaning bits and bobs of the show for about a week now, and we start full runs later this week. While Roxanne has been going over blocking and such with the cast, she has graciously let us step out of the rehearsal room and run lines with each other which has been really interesting and a lot of fun. We’ve also gotten opportunities to run certain scenes in the space which has been so so helpful to get to walk through the blocking and the lines.  I love getting to see different people’s takes on these characters since they are brand new and we have nothing to base it off of, we get to help make these characters who they are so it is so cool to hear different people's voices and takes on them. That is one reason I love new work so much is I love getting to help create something from scratch and be there right at the beginning of it and grow with it. It has been really great getting to watch the play change and see how it develops and evolves. I’m excited to see where else this play goes and to get to be a part of it.

We have an understudy run of the show next week which I am definitely nervous for, but overall very excited for the chance to run the show with the understudy cast. They have been so great to work with and get to know. The atmosphere in rehearsals has been really positive and uplifting. We often do little check-ins at the beginning of rehearsals to see where everyone is at and to get us focused, and I love getting the chance to hear from everyone and get to know everyone better. I am overly grateful for this process and I’m eager to see what else is in store.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, now forever and always, I love new work. I love being a part of new work and I love supporting new work. For more information on Girlhood which runs at the Dobbins Conservatory February 27th-March 2nd, click the link here. Also, for more information about the Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, click here.

As always, go do great things.