photo of Anne Gottlieb (Etty), Will Lyman (Spier), Katie Pearl (Director)
posted by Kirk Lynn -
Rehearsal is the process by which playwrights make themselves less and less useful to their plays.
It happens through words. The actors and directors ask questions. But more importantly, the company rehearses its understanding of the script.
We had a great full day of rehearsal yesterday. Katie Pearl led everyone through the first act, inviting the actors to experiment with the scenes. Anne Gottlieb and Will Lyman discovered some nice moments around the palm reading. Will plays Julius Spier, a Jungian Analyst and Palm-reader who becomes a teacher to Etty Hillesum. Spier helps Etty experience this radical awakening in her soul—just as World War II comes to destroy life in Amsterdam as she knows it. Because this is the early days of psychiatry, the palm-reading seems like almost a kind of marketing or packaging for these really new ideas about the psyche. And palm-reading is really sexy. Try it on someone. Give me your hand. I’m going to trace this line. This is the line of the heart. Yowza!
Anne also discovered something beautiful about Etty’s state of mind at the beginning of the play. Before Etty meets Spier, she’s desperate to find a new way to live and if she can’t she’s ready to kill herself. It’s in this state that The Wrecking Ball, played by Will McGarrahan, shows up, to offer Etty a choice. Katie, Anne and Will worked this scene over pretty hard. We tried screaming. Throwing books. Taking pills. Smoking cigarettes. (It looked like a short history of my twenties.)
We ended the night with some really tough work between Etty and her mother Riva, played by Marya Lowry. Riva came to Amsterdam because she was fleeing the pogroms in Russia. When the Germans start taking over Amsterdam, Riva has a real sense of how dangerous this all is. As a consequence, Riva is really tough on her daughter. She doesn’t think all this psychiatry and palm-reading is such a good idea. The actors and Katie had questions about the script but the progress was made through getting the scene up on its feet and wrestling with it.
I feel like I learned today that sometimes I can be most helpful as a playwright by quietly allowing a director like Katie Pearl and actors like Anne Gottlieb, Marya Lowry, Will Lyman, and Will McGarrahan to make the script their own. They did some really great work. If you ever get a chance to watch Katie or Anne or any of these actors rehearse—jump at it, it’s a useful way to study a script.
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