We are now well into rehearsals for SPRING: A Knoxville Sonata. I feel obsessed with this play—the way a director should feel. When I like a play this much, I find myself thinking through it all day, imagining details, considering passages, seeing its world.

I have worked on new plays as an actor in professional workshops, and I have directed plays where an ensemble devises the piece, but this is my first opportunity to direct a new script. It is one of the more joyous theatre processes I have experienced.

The playwright and I have known each other a while, so I know she writes from a place of poetry and compassion. The writing has the economy of poetry but the depth and detail of a novel. It’s a wild contradiction, but it works.

I have also somehow managed to assemble a really, really strong team of actors. These people are amazing. I keep thinking—when I was considering this play, I let a few colleagues read it. Almost all of them said, “I don’t really get it. It doesn’t do much for me.” But that is because they couldn’t imagine it as it would actually play in space and time. The actors in the play, fortunately, have not only brought this world to life, but are doing it in a way that is compelling, grounded, and honest. The play makes so much sense on its feet, and I love that all the actors involved happen to be capable of bringing sophisticated text to life and fully inhabiting it. 3D people in lived bodies. Love it.

We have had fun in rehearsal imagining the lives of these people, inventing details about their lives, and experimenting with gesture, connecting to the ground and earth, floor patterns, and other outside-in ways of developing character. One night we worked with an eastern (far east, not North Carolina) acting exercise where we spoke a line of text with eyes as open as possible, then again with the eyes somewhat open, and again with the eyes almost closed. The effect this had on the body, as the actor followed through with the whole-body physicality cued from changing the gaze, was remarkable. Complete transformations occurred from this minor physical change. What fun!

Here’s a photo from rehearsal. I hope to see you at a performance.

-SCC