Coronado rehearsals - Week 1

Coronado

For those of you who don’t know, I’m playing the part of Will in Dennis Lehane’s (Mystic River) Coronado at SF Playhouse.  Our West Coast Premiere goes up March 22nd, and I can’t wait.  The Playhouse is at Sutter and Powell in downtown San Francisco, and we are two floors up from where I did my very first professional show, Starship Shakespeare.  “Oh that this too solid dough would melt, thaw and defrost so I could chew, or that the almighty had not turned his canon against chowder”

It’s been a little more than a week, and we are fully into the swing of things, having blocked Act 1 and a bit of Act 2.  There’s a great deal of action that happens with other characters onstage, and so you find yourself making a conscience effort not to pay attention to what they are doing.  This is difficult, because we don’t rehearse together, and these are an engaging group of actors and a really good play.  So you want to watch.

It’s very funny, the six other cast members all know each other, and Phil and I are the only folks who are brand new.  So it becomes a constant observation game, watching who does what to whom, and who is the top dog and all that.  Kind of like watching a status game in an acting class.  Currently I have not entered into the status game, because the role that I’m playing is particularly challenging from the stand point of never releasing.  Normally during rehearsal I get to play around and socialize, and so far I have been scurrying back to my journal to write down what just happened.  New and different for me.

Stay tuned for more updates....