Selections from The Thing We Did Against Impossible Odds: Utilizing Ensemble Devising to Direct Peter and the Starcatcher,
Chapter 3: The Ensemble Devising Process
Chapter 3: The Ensemble Devising Process
expressive gesture
"This section of dialogue posed a bit of an issue. Without a crate large enough to fit all three actors who played the orphans (Boy, Ted, and Prentiss), the director knew that this moment would not be able to be executed literally...Eventually, the production team settled on one potential solution, but wanted to see what the ensemble of actors created. The director was very upfront about this, stating that he had an idea in mind, but was eager to see a more exciting solution, as encouraging exploration is the only way to get it out of an ensemble (John Jory, Tips for Directors). The ensemble eventually moved into an expressive gesture run of the scene. The beginning of Act 1, Scene 1 features Bill Slank shoving the three orphans into the crate. The ensemble decided to transform the inside of the ladder into the crate by making it a more solid structure by stacking the smaller crates around it. For the duration of the scene, the three actors squirmed about within the approximately eight square-feet space within the ladder, building to an explosion of the actor playing Boy bursting through between two rungs of the ladder (Figure 3.1). This discovery was met with a raucous applause and an exhale of relief from the director. This had been the exact solution that he had envisioned before the expressive gesture run had begun. While the idea had not seemed very exciting initially, there was a certain spark of excitement that came from the fact that the ensemble came to this solution on their own. While this solution did not allow for Boy to dangle upside down over Molly’s head, the ensemble accepted this as the best solution to the problem, and moved forward."
spatial relationship
"The two actors had their first expressive gesture run of the scene with everything on stage (everything listed earlier in the chapter sans the ladder) and the entire playing space at their disposal. What played out was a lavish exploration of space, more space than the actors could fathom for such an intimate scene. In the second run, the playing space was cut in half, but all of the objects were moved into the smaller space, increasing the probability of the actors needing to find some way to maneuver the obstacles. In the final expressive run, the space was once more cut in half, now one quarter of the original space. As the playing space got smaller and smaller, the two actors depended upon one another more and more to explore the cramped cabin to the best of their abilities. While the initial run had a grandiose and playful sense of the relationship Molly and Mrs. Bumbrake, as the cabin and the space between the actors got smaller, the multi-layered dynamic between these two women came to fruition: a relationship that is built on love, frustration, and codependency."
staging the unexpected
"Whilst exploring expressive gesture in Act 1, Scene 5, which features the introduction to the play’s villain, the infamous pirate Captain Black Stache, the ensemble explored ways to make the reveal as dramatic and unexpected as the man himself. Various propositions included entering from the audience, hiding behind actors, and an especially amusing suggestion that the actress descend from the overhead grid from aerial silks. However, none of these seemed quite right. The team then remembered that the stage floor featured a historically underused trap door. Regarding staging the unexpected, directors are encouraged to play against the supposed audience expectations as long as the solutions fit within the circumstances (John Jory, Tips for Directors). Playwright Rick Elice’s stage directions regarding the appearance of Black Stache are as follows: 'The PIRATES shriek and bemoan the hearing of this terrible name. And suddenly, there he stands—THE BLACK STACHE, carrying a bucket…into which he pukes and spits' (Peter and the Starcatcher, 24). The contrast of the fear of the pirates with the act of vomiting due to, assumedly, seasickness, stresses the ridiculousness of this moment. Elice also provides ensembles with the adverb “suddenly.” Sudden and ridiculous? The ensemble agreed that nothing fit the bill quite like the actress playing Black Stache exploding through a trap door at the feet of the audience."
object transformation
"The creation of Mr. Grin the crocodile was a wonderful instance of a brilliant idea of an actor in the room. During the expressive gesture experimentation of Act 2, Scene 5, an actress picked up two of the small crates as an exploration of the sound of the crocodile. Originally, the actress simply clapped the two crates together, but as she grew tired from the constant movement, she simplified the movement, opening and closing on an imaginary hinge. Like a jaw. What followed was a flurry of actors sensing the energy in the room shift to help add weight to this crate-mouthed crocodile by adding bodies following the leading actress...Elice’s stage directions simply suggest that Smee and Black Stache simply see something overhead, as Mr. Grin ingested starstuff in the previous scene and can now fly (Peter and the Starcatcher, 74). Since the audience was to be seated onstage with the actors, indicating something unseen above the stage could work with enough suspension of disbelief, however, the ensemble had provided the perfect solution to this problem. In a second pass at the scene, the director simply encouraged the actors to find ways to get the crocodile on a higher level to suggest flight and to be able to allow the crocodile to travel. The ensemble took this direction and ran with it, literally. The actress with the crates stepped onto one of the large crates, and the ensemble members shifted the other two large crates to stepping distance, and constantly rotated the crates to create an ever-shifting path across the stage for the actress to traverse."