Early Modern Rehearsal Structures Today

With preparations in full swing for The Taming of a Shrew, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell a bit about how Bad Quarto rehearsals fit in with a history of early modern rehearsal process. James Overton gave his enthusiastic perspective as an actor on Wednesday, and Tony wrote about the scary rehearsals a while back but just in case you missed those posts, Tony has cast this production and he is working individually with each cast member over Skype, but the whole cast will have only one rehearsal together before opening night. If you scroll through this blog you’ll see that this hasn’t been the way the process has worked for each production, but as a company, Bad Quarto has experimented with different variations on the idea of the early modern rehearsal.

So what are some of the precedents for this sort of rehearsal structure? From Henslow’s Diary and other artifacts from the time we know that a single company of actors could put on twenty different plays a month, leading to huge questions of how they could have possibly rehearsed them all. One of the companies to try out some of the hypotheses was The Queen’s Men, a well funded and heavily researched all male company performing in 2006-7 who list the steps they posit the acting companies in Shakespeare’s Day would have followed. They suggest 5-9 weeks preparation for a new play but only one day of rehearsal.

At about the same time, Tiffany Stern published her groundbreaking book Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, where she details the evidence available about rehearsal practice in Shakespeare’s day. In response to Stern’s research, the American Shakespeare Center set up the Actor’s Renaissance Season, where the first play goes up in just two days, there are no directors, do designers, and no full scripts. It’s still just one of the seasons at the ASC, but it’s one that has gained a lot of attention.  Oxford made a lovely little video about the collaboration between The ASC and Tiffany Stern’s research, which is well worth a watch.

In 1993, The New York Times picked up on the trend writing about companies performing without directors and with minimal rehearsal time, and as these practices gained notice they became more and more prevalent. Today these projects are becoming common and more and more is being learned from experiments with this sort of process. Other companies doing this sort of rehearsal process right now include:

• Original Practice Shakespeare Festival in Portland currently performs many plays with play roles in hand, without rehearsing a particular cast together.

• Back Room Shakespeare Project- this ensemble in Chicago performs Shakespeare without directors and only rehearse one time before performing in bars.

• Oxford Shakespeare Company- Performs with three days of rehearsal-- in this instance Richard III performed at Stratford on Avon.

• A Masters’ student at The Theatre School at DePaul University wrote this lovely take on “Not Rehearsing Shakespeare” and what he learned from the process.

These companies and projects all ask many questions: What was it like in Shakespeare’s day? What kind of benefits can we gain from doing a similar rehearsal process today? Are they just financial and practical--no need to deal with multiple schedules and rent a rehearsal space? Does this sort of environment capture the energy of improv theater? What can we learn about the plays themselves, and in what way were these plays written to facilitate this sort of rehearsal structure? I hope that as these experiments continue (in Taming and beyond) theater will change dramatically and for the better. It certainly seems to be making some waves already.

Shakespeare's Scary Rehearsals

I like to finish auditions for Bad Quarto shows by going over the rehearsal process a little bit, because it is very different than what most actors are used to, and right before I ask the auditioner if I've scared them off at all, I like to remind them that our approach to rehearsals is, more or less, the approach Shakespeare and his fellow players used.

And, for the record, yes, sometimes it does scare people off.

For those interested in the full story, I recommend Tiffany Stern's Making Shakespeare, and Stern and Palfrey's Shakespeare in Parts. These books present a version of rehearsals on the stages of Renaissance London that goes a little like this: the company would rehearse together once, on the day they opened a new play. They would meet at the playhouse at about dawn, and stage the play in its entirety before performing at about two o'clock that afternoon. Prior to that rehearsal, senior members of the company would meet with junior members for "individual instruction," where the leading players would essentially tell the junior players how to say their lines.

That's more or less how things work here at Bad Quarto, too. Although I don't give line readings to actors, and would never encourage another director to do so, "individual instruction" sessions via Skype are a vital part of our rehearsal process so we can explore the subtleties of language to develop character. But just as important, to my mind, is the lack of shared rehearsal time.

Knowing that we'll only rehearse the play together once forces us all to trust one another, and it forces us to make bold choices in acting and directing because we won't have the chance to polish things for weeks. This method of rehearsal helps give our actors a strong sense of their own characters while providing a performance context that forces them to actually listen to one another. Most actors, by the time a show opens, have already heard every conversation in the play they're in at least a hundred times. In a Bad Quarto show, the rawness of the experience is still fresh, and the result is that our shows capture a mastery of verse and character combined with the liveliness of improv.

It's my mind that plays on the stages of early modern London functioned similarly. Most companies rehearse more than us, and some rehearse less, but I'm of the mind that our method captures the spirit of the texts in performance in a way that only rehearsing the plays as they were intended to be rehearsed can.

I understand why that can scare some actors off, and I'll never hold it against them. And while we'll never been able to offer perfectly polished performances and pieces of stagecraft that are pinnacles of engineering, we can offer you a performance of Shakespeare's plays that brings his plays, and the plays of his contemporaries, to life in a way you have never seen before, and will help you see some of the greatest works of English literature as, quite simply, not the play you think it is.

Our upcoming production of The Taming of a Shrew will be a fine example of these principles in action, and I hope you'll be able to join us for it.