Shakina Nayfack is a Musical Directing fellow through The Drama League’s Directors Project. He is assisting on Mormons, Mothers and Monsters and The Game.
From Shakina:
We are finishing up the second week of rehearsals on Mormons, Mothers and Monsters, and this week has been all about Tracking. In the development of a new show the director works with the writer(s) and the cast to make sure the full story and each character within it all have uniquely defined journeys. This is done by following multiple arcs through the world of the play, a process known as tracking, whereby clues and trails given throughout the text are pieced together in order to assess the integrity and thematics of a story. You can track one character to chart how they grow and change, or you can track a concept to see how the different characters help to define it relationally. In the case of Mormons, Mothers and Monsters, we’ve been doing both.
The process begins by asking what the show is about. Is it about making decisions? Then we need to track every decision made through the course of the play to see how their consequences add up. Is it about anger? Then we need to track the anger as it accumulates, transfers, and explodes. Is it about forgiveness, then we need to track how and when opportunities for reconciliation emerge, and whether or not they are accepted. We’ve tracked all these and more…
As Sam and Will work with Adrienne and the actors to define the characters, we’ve also had to track their individual paths. An issue that’s come up repeatedly in the rehearsal room this week is the question of when things should be played in a heightened, stylized fashion, and when events should unfold with more realism. This can’t be solved arbitrarily, but must be assessed on a case by case (or better, scene by scene) basis, tracking both the needs of the story and its tellers in order to find the mode of presentation that is most truthful to the world we are creating. For example, Jill Abramovitz, who plays the role of Mother, moves between campy mania, heartfelt tenderness, broken desperation, and ballistic violence. In order for these dramatic shifts to make sense for her as an actor and for the audience, we have to track her progress through the events that both inform and shatter her sense of self and motherhood, which are largely intertwined. Once we understand the motivations that underscore her actions, each one of her scenes begins to take on its own shape.
This process has not been easy on the writers. With this intimate, inquisitive, and immensely talented cast repeatedly speaking up for the needs of their characters, Sam has come in daily (and in some cases, twice or three times daily) with page replacements, constantly revising and re-envisioning the book. Scenes are staged, then taken apart and re-staged, lines are memorized then cut from the show, then brought back in a different moment, or given to another character. It’s a very dynamic process that has everyone racing to keep up.
In terms of my work, I’ve had the delightful task of, you guessed it, tracking all the changes. In a master spreadsheet I record every word that’s struck or added in. So far we’re at 219 changes, and that doesn’t include the new script–full of rewrites–that we all received yesterday.
It has been exciting to sit in on the script conversations with Adrienne, Will, Sam, and Bill Finn. Every day there are new ideas as to how we might bring more clarity to this stylized retelling of Sam’s young life. With so much of her directorial attention turned to the completion of the text (we only have four more days until tech!), Adrienne has invited me to create choreography for some of the more defined musical moments. I take everything that I hear from the artistic team in and after rehearsal, and bring it to the room early in the morning to generate material. It’s been a blast putting together dances to Will’s fun and complex music, and everyone has responded well to my choreographic suggestions. I certainly didn’t expect to be this hands-on in the process, and it’s really a privilege to be working so closely with Adrienne, the writers, and the cast.
In other news, today I taught my Butoh for Broadway master class to the Musical Theatre Apprentices. It was a two hour workshop in the gymnasium of the school where we’ve been rehearsing, with expansive acoustics and tons of space. I’m certain none of these young performers had experienced anything like it before. I had them dragging each other across the floor while singing, dancing with the image of giving up their voice, and exposing their most intimate connections to the music that lives in their bodies. We were only able to scratch the surface of what Butoh is and how it can serve the process of a musical theatre performer, but for me there were many exciting discoveries that I hope to explore further in future workshops. These are the same four actors I will be directing in a one act at the end of the summer, so who knows, there may be time for us to go deeper and build a physical vocabulary together.
For now, I’ll be turning my full attention to Mormons, Mothers and Monsters as we gear up for tech and previews. This time next week we will have our first audience, and we’ve still got two numbers to stage and who knows how many changes to track!
Read earlier Blog entries about Mormons, Mothers and Monsters by clicking below: