Free Fall - Notes from Angie

Our first Angels blog post this season shared a bit from Angie about why NC Stage chose to produce the play in the first place. Today, the first night of our public performances (and Pay-What-You-Can Night), we have another snippet from Angie -- this time about how this amazingly talented ensemble has really come together in this project to put forth some stunning work. We had a smaller audience for our dress rehearsal last night, and our set designer, James Johnson, took some pictures. Keep your eyes peeled and you'll be seeing them in the very near future. For now, feast your eyes on the words of Angie Flynn-McIver, the director of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches.

Free Fall

"When I start thinking about a play I’m directing, I begin with the cast. That may seem obvious.  For me, though, choosing the people I’ll be working with for upwards of thirty hours a week, spending days and nights, many meals, the requisite company-wide cold, the change of season…the decisions are crucial and can’t be fixed once we move forward. So I agonize and labor over casting, dragging it out for weeks.

 

And then it’s done. And we’re in rehearsal. And all the auditions and moving around of headshots and list-making start to pay off.  At the time of this writing, we are a little more than a week from our first performance. Rehearsals are going well, and we moved onto the set last weekend. But this play is huge, and even though we’ve had an extra week of rehearsal, I feel like I could use another week, or two; I’m afraid I’ll miss something. But aaahhh! The actors! They are smart, and they understand their craft.  I can throw myself off the trapeze, calling, “Heeeeey!  We have to fix this blocking but I’m out of ideas!” and one actor or another, or all eight of them, will swing by and grab me by the wrists, keeping us all aloft, or we all fall into the net and laugh and pick ourselves up again and tackle the dilemma of the moment together. 

 

Theatre is a collaborative art. We are all in this thing together.  The cast of Angels in America is a great example of this, in part because the cast is a mix of actors I’ve worked with before and some new faces. I love the rapport I have with an actor like Willie Repoley (playing Prior) because he and I have worked together half a dozen times—we know each other’s shorthand and trust each other implicitly. It’s also great to get to work with people I haven’t directed before, like Dusty McKeelan (playing Louis) because the newness keeps me on my game and pushes me to be better. The chemistry of the cast provides its own momentum, in many ways, and informs the process as well as the production."