Phèdre director Carey Perloff, who in her spare time runs the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, has just posted an entry in their blog:
Phèdre in Canada—Week One
posted by Carey Perloff, A.C.T. Artistic Director
Wednesday, July 1, 2009It's Canada Day up here at the Stratford Festival, but that doesn't mean a day off from French eroticism. We're a week into rehearsals for Phèdre, heading deep into the heart of this amazing labyrinth of a play. My head is still reeling as I try to get accustomed to working at this enormous institution, which operates like its own kingdom with its own jargon and laws and sets of givens....
In order to squeeze out the hours, you almost always have to work out of order here, a pretty wild proposition with a play like Phèdre since it is structured like a series of dominoes falling: one explosion or discovery leads to the next and to the next with a kind of terrifying inexorability, so when you jump to a new scene without having staged the scene before, you have to constantly reconstruct the thread that got you there . . .
It's a thrill a minute watching our Ariadne spin this thread. Read her whole post here.
Posted by Alison Humphrey at July 2, 2009 11:24 AM