Most of of Rabbit takes place in a bar. And the characters are drinking.  A lot.  Shortly before we moved out of the rehearsal room and into Theater Wit, director Elly Green suggested that the actors try to run the show with real booze instead of water.  Here is what she had to say about it:

Rehearsals and drinking: do the first before the second, as a general rule.

And when it comes to ‘drunk acting’, I’m pretty hard line about it. Don’t. Just don’t.

So when the characters in the play are consuming large amounts of alcohol, how do you help to take this into account in the playing of it? I have told the cast of Rabbit several times during our rehearsal process to trust Raine’s writing. The effects of alcohol consumption are absolutely in the text, both in terms of content and tone. It’s written beautifully to capture the giddiness, belligerence and emotional instability of increasing drunkenness. And I still hold to that. So when I suggested a ‘wet run’ it was more to give them an opportunity to ‘feel’ the play out this way, than for me as a director. However, discoveries were made, and now I’m certainly a convert.

One of the actors afterwards remarked on the ‘volatility’ that actual intoxication induced, and from the outside, I was amazed at how many brave and new decisions were made, and how much freedom the actors seemed to gain. Obviously, we are not talking about a line perfect run, but the messiness and unpredictability was useful. Emboldened with a couple glasses of wine (not to mention the tequila shots) they were playing their actions and the stakes with both intensity and abandon. And the result was dynamic, immediate and often upsetting. As an audience member, I’ve rarely felt so much ‘in the room’ with the characters with the sense that ‘anything might happen’.

I also enjoy crying with laughter. It’s a cheap form of therapy. 

–Elly Green, director of Rabbit

Dennis William Grimes, who plays Richard in Rabbit, offers a perspective from inside of the “wet run”

It isn’t often that you find yourself writing about a specific rehearsal, but then again, one isn’t always trying to drink alcohol at pace with one’s character. When discussing our “wet-run” with people outside of our production I have met both curiosity and derision — couldn’t we just use our imaginations, isn’t it a little childish, dangerous even? Honestly though, I am compelled not to write about an experience of rehearsing a play while becoming inebriated, but rather about finding out what happens when things get messy and unpredictable. What happens when a group of people, who trust each other enough to try an experiment, fight through the giggles, drive through the slip ups, and find something productive in play.

It isn’t always easy to walk into a rehearsal with abandon. Habituation and safety often keep us from trying to follow an impulse or destroy what has come before, because we cling to ideas like “this isn’t right”, “what is the right thing to do?”, “I want to do what feels right for this character, moment, etc.” As people (and I make a gross sweeping generalization here) we like the feeling of safety that comes with certainty. As performing artists we are taught and witness the power of that knife’s edge of uncertainty, where expectations are set up and destroyed, leaving mystery and wonder in the wake.  How we get there while executing the same actions and path every night is a wonder in its own right.  So we throw things at the wall, play around and see what comes out on the other side.

A little before we moved out of the rehearsal hall and before we moved into tech, our director opened up to us an opportunity to drink as our characters do in the play, both as something fun to do in creating our company history, and as a way to see what things might come out of such an experiment. What came out of this experiment has still left me wondering. This was not a rehearsal where everyone was dropped in, we had plenty of times where the laughter of watching one or more of our partners lose it, ground the progress of the play to a halt, but there were powerful moments where impulses were followed and things touched more personally than they might have otherwise.

This is not advocacy for using chemicals to unlock one’s artistry, but if you can be on both sides — being in the event and attempting to see it for what it is — something telling about the messy and ugly emerges. Our cast is a group of very nice people.  We are kind and, as Elly likes to point out, happily “round the edges”, because naturally being cruel, or ugly, or downright mean, is something that we are encouraged not to do in our society and art form. This run gave us a little license to go to the sharper places, the messier places of  “I’m not going to be where you expect me to be”, and “I can’t and won’t react-the way you expect me to react,” because I am not thinking about it in those seconds beforehand. I’m making it up and mostly failing, but with smiles and laughter of all of the people around us. We became emphatic and uncaring, focused and distracted, listened with great intention and broken out of the play, but mostly lost in the fun of playing with each other. Most of what came out is unusable, but some of it was gold, that shifted our story and storytelling to a place at which it might not have arrived.

We all have the ability to play with this abandon without the booze and often do.  That night, we became adults with childlike eyes again, giving ourselves permission to always play the carefree and seek out that which is messy and unknown. Choosing to be “wet” allowed us to all fall down, fail, find the surprise, the wonder, seeing the joy and pain it could bring to us to be ugly and let it all hang out.

–Dennis William Grimes, Richard in Rabbit

The play’s director, Megan, asked me, at our first meeting, what elements would be most important to me as we prepared for the workshop. “It’s really pretty much finished,” I told her. “I anticipate rewording some things, cutting or adding a line or two, little things. But I’m happy with it. The most important thing to me will be to have actors who are extremely comfortable with the words. It’s very close to finished,” I reiterated. She let me think I was right.

My first inkling that I was wrong came over the course of our two-day audition process. Actors came in who had prepared—they knew what they were reading. As the hours passed, one scene in particular got worse and worse—not the performances, the pages. As I listened to them over and over, performed by people who had spent time trying to connect the emotional dots, it became quite clear that the connections weren’t there. I hadn’t built the road I thought I had, and it took me multiple hearings to recognize it. Returning home after auditions were over, I emailed Megan: Make no copies. Print nothing. I have to fix that scene.

Thus began the three-month process of questioning, wondering, listening, and trusting. Rehearsal revealed to me how much can be cut when one is blessed with focused, thoughtful actors and a dedicated director. Turns out you don’t need to say something twice for the audience to pick it up. You might not even need to say it once.

Megan is fiercely intelligent and very intuitive, and she has a sweet-faced way of letting you think your work is done, all the while plotting a way to get you to see that it’s not. Our working draft was 109 pages and the play now stands at 94. Here’s the thing: We added two scenes. Factoring in the roughly 6 new pages of writing, I cut 21 pages. The play is tighter, more intense and more gripping than I ever could have made it on my own. Stage Left loves writers, and they work to surround us with actors and staff who will serve the pages. I thought up a story, and I wrote it down. Megan, Katie, Laura, Ed, Lindsey, Malcolm, Howard, Kyle and I got together and made a play.

-Shayne Kennedy, author of Agreed Upon Fictions, which was part of LeapFest 9

Steven Haworth’s plays have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Oregon and New Zealand.  His play Fernando was a winner of both the 2011 Ashland New Play Festival in Ashland, OR; and the 2009 First Look Festival in Los Angeles.  He wrote [HOME] or The Quest for the Lost Tablet of Ur for Zoo District which received five LA Weekly Award, an Ovation and Garland nominations.  Haworth freely adapted Mikail Bulgakov’s Flight for the Open Fist Theatre in Los Angeles.  In New York his play Little Fishes was produced by Abingdon Theater, Dark Age (starring Richard Schiff) by Project 3 Ensemble Theatre, and The White Cave by Jesco Productions.  His plays have been developed by A.S.K. Theatreworks, Echo Theatre, Project 3, E.S.T. Los Angeles, Abingdon Theatre, Circle Rep, Circle West, ANPF, Open Fist, Soho ThinkTank, Carnegie Mellon Showcase of New Plays, and The Lark.  MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University.  He is absolutely thrilled to be working with Stage Left and many thanks to all.

Elly is a British theatre director living in Chicago. She is delighted to be working with Stage Left Theatre on Rabbit. Recent projects include The TomKat Project (Playground Theatre & Upstairs Gallery) and assistant-director on Proof (Court Theatre). Elly’s UK directing credits include: Our Country’s Good (Royal & Derngate), My Balloon Beats Your Astronaut (Tristan Bates), About Tommy (Southwark Playhouse), Copenhagen (Tabard), Skylight (Stephen Joseph Theatre), The Beach (Theatre 503) and The Zoo Story (Etcetera). She spent a year at the Royal National Theatre as a staff-director, assisting on Oedipus, Her Naked Skin and Mrs Affleck. She has directed several productions for educational institutions including: The Coast of Utopia, Pillars of the Community, Summerfolk and Three Sisters. Elly is currently a reader for Steppenwolf and was formerly a senior reader at The Royal Court Theatre, London. She trained on the MFA in Theatre Directing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

The Liar Paradox

by Kristin Idaszak

directed by Jason Fleece

Wednesday, December 19th @ 8pm

Theater Wit, 1229 W Belmont

On New Year’s Eve, a catastrophic car accident leaves Marissa’s twin sister in a coma and her best friend dead. In the wake of this personal tragedy, all three of the young women’s secrets start to come to light, calling into question their identities in a multitude of ways.