Thankfully, parking downtown was much easier on Sunday night, and I found a spot right around the corner from the theater with no trouble at all. I was nervous and excited again, just as I had been the week before for auditions, so I made myself sit in the car for a moment. A few deep breaths had me more or less back to normal, and I was ready to face the theater.

The read-through was being held in the upstairs classroom where we had finished the auditions, so I was in no danger of getting off to an embarrassing start by getting lost inside the theater. I was only the third or fourth person to arrive, and except for the director I didn’t recognize any of the others. He recognized me right away and swiftly killed my rather irrational fears that his phone call had been a mistake.

"Liz, hi! Glad you could make it."

I smiled back, took the script he handed me, and found an empty chair. As I was taking off my coat I noticed that the table next to the door was covered with stacks of xeroxed handouts. Since I was still too wound up to sit still, I walked over to take a look at them. Arcadia and Chaos. Notes on Byron Contexts in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Arcadia and Physics. A Glossary of Definitions, Terms, Names, Contexts, and Allusions in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The Picturesque and the Sublime in Arcadia.

My first reaction was, "This is the first play I’ve been in where we had homework at the first rehearsal!"

I spent a moment reading the article on physics, since it was a subject that had always interested me. The next one I picked up was a plot summary – and it said a lot about the complexity of the play that the summary was five pages long! Before I had time to read anything else, however, the other actors had arrived and we were ready to begin.

Again, there was no one in the cast whom I really knew, but as we went around the room and introduced ourselves, there were a few whom I recognized from the audition. The fellow with whom I had read the scene between Bernard and Hannah had been cast as Mr. Chater, and the character of Richard Noakes would be played by one of the men who had auditioned for Septimus. The younger blonde girl whose performance I had enjoyed had been given the part of Thomasina.

There were a few characters missing, but the director explained their absence. "Ann Saville is busy at the bookstore tonight – she will be playing Lady Croom. And our Chloe is out of town – Bethany Cline."

Bethany Cline? Good grief – she must have auditioned after all! Wait until I tell Evie!

David went on to explain that tonight was just a read-through for us to get a feel for the way the play was put together. And if we wanted more information about the topics covered in the play, we were welcome to take copies of the handouts on the back table. Blocking would start on Monday with the 19th Century characters, and the 20th Century characters would start on Tuesday. He hoped to have a more detailed rehearsal schedule for us by Wednesday. There were no questions after this, so we all opened our scripts to the first scene and began.

THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace, my lady, is the act of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.

THOMASINA: Is that all?

SEPTIMUS: No. A shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison, well hugged, an embrace of grouse…

Hearing the play read aloud was an entirely different experience than reading it to myself, and the lines I had thought were funny became even funnier. Some of the actions and concepts were still rather confusing, but I knew I would be reading the play many more times before we were done, so I would understand them eventually.

*****

Since the characters from the two different centuries never interact, the rehearsals were split into 19th Century nights and 20th Century nights. This meant that the director and the stage manager were always at the theater, but the actors could count on at least one or two nights off a week – more, if their roles were small. Since Hannah appeared in every 20th Century scene, I had to be at nearly every 20th Century rehearsal.

Splitting the rehearsals also meant that the actors in the two different centuries didn’t get to know each other very well, so for several weeks all I could rely on was the first impression I had received at the read-through rehearsal. Thomasina, it turned out, was the director’s daughter – a fact I would have found mightily suspicious were she not so obviously talented. Her name was Gabriele, and she was 17 years old and in her junior year of high school. Septimus was Tim Mace, a drama teacher at a different high school. He was also positively dripping with talent, and possessed a lovely rich, ringing actor’s voice that probably served him well in Shakespearean plays. Jellaby was played by John Cowan, a retired attorney who had the perfect upright bearing and sanctimonious vocal delivery to be the butler of a grand estate. Gary Brown played Ezra Chater – a distinguished-looking gentleman with graying hair who happened to be the only other engineer in the show. The part of Captain Brice went to Rick Brown, a local attorney, whose full beard would lend him the necessary authority to be playing a captain in His Majesty’s Navy. Ann Saville had the perfect attitude for being Lady Croom, having played Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell not long before – she was also the only member of the cast with an authentic British accent. The landscape architect who wreaks such havoc on the Croom estate, Sidley Park, was played with great humor and comedic timing by Greg Morris.

The 20th Century actors, of course, I would get to know better. My main counterpart, Bernard Nightingale, was played by Gene Lafitte, another lawyer – he had an unmistakable physical and theatrical presence, and I quickly learned how much of a challenge it was just to keep up with him on stage. The Coverly descendants Chloe, Valentine, and Gus were played by Bethany Cline, Greg Garner, and Ansel Payne. Bethany was just as blonde and just as talented as I had been warned. She managed some marvelous acting even with the smaller role and watching the little mannerisms and reactions that she gave Chloe were an excellent learning experience for me. Greg (whom I privately titled Greg-Val, to distinguish him from Greg-Noakes) gave Valentine an amusing bewilderment, as if he always had something more important, most likely Val’s mathematical theories, to be thinking about. Ansel was another high school junior, making his first appearance with the Stage Company; his role was unusual since he played Gus in the 20th Century scenes and Thomasina’s brother Augustus in the final 19th Century scene. The role was also difficult because Gus never spoke, and Ansel had to develop a character through action alone.

Altogether it was a superb group of actors, talented and professional. I could easily see that I would have fun and learn a great deal while I was working with them.

*****

"Blocking" is the process of determining the mechanics of the play: from basics such as determining where the actors will stand as they say each line. Or when and how they will move around the stage, to details such as how the actors deliver each line, noting emotion, pitch, or the pace of dialogue. Much of the blocking is given as the playwright’s stage directions in the script, but the fine points are up to the director. For Arcadia, the blocking is somewhat simplified because there is very little set: three doors for entrances and exits at left, right, and center, and a long table with several chairs.

Once I had refreshed my memory regarding which way was stage left and which way was stage right, I had very little trouble with the blocking. The chair on the far right end of the table I soon dubbed "my" chair, since I spent so much time sitting in it. (It turned out to be Septimus’s chair in the 19th Century scenes, which led to some interesting parallels between the characters.) We would not get the "real" set until a week or two before we opened, so for the moment we had only a folding table and chairs and no actual doors.

I find that blocking helps me a great deal with memorizing my lines, since I often associate certain phrases with where I am moving on the stage. Alternatively, the blocking notes I wrote in my script also allowed me to memorize my movements while I was learning lines.

The blocking seemed slightly lopsided, with most of the action occurring around the right end of or behind the table. However, David seemed satisfied with this, so perhaps I only formed the impression because I spent so much time at the right end of the table. I was also surprised to find how quickly I came to regard the table as a safe margin between me and the audience; the first few times that I had to go around the front of the table or even up to the edge of the stage, I felt terribly exposed. However, I became more comfortable with the forward movements as rehearsals went on.

*****

One method to add a little extra amusement to rehearsals is to develop a crush on one of your male co-stars. Well, it doesn’t always happen. I have known theater friends who managed to get through a show without any serious flirting, but it was usually only because they were already in a relationship with someone – but most likely with another actor who was rehearsing a different show at the same time. (Bethany fit that description this time – her boyfriend had been cast in Ten Little Indians, which overlapped both Arcadia’s rehearsal schedule and its performance dates.) I have even managed to completely avoid the crush syndrome myself, but that was when my leading man happened to be two inches shorter than I was – and I’m not tall! I was also twelve years old at the time.

However, recognizing that a crush will probably occur at some point, it is wise to consider which of your fellow actors is good crush material. Looks, intelligence, age relative to your own, the number of scenes you have together – all of these are important factors to evaluate.

In this play, however, there was not a single man in the cast with crush potential. Rick and Gary were definitely too old, even if they hadn’t been married already. Ansel was a sweetheart but unfortunately much too young. Tim was nice enough, about the right age, and had a marvelous sense of humor – but as Septimus I would almost never see him until the play opened. I got along well with Greg-Val, which was good considering the friendly relationship our characters had, but his hobbies of motorcycling, smoking cigars, and bungee jumping didn’t appeal to me. I considered Greg-Noakes for a while, since he was somewhat attractive, but he was dropped from the running when I found that he already had four daughters. That left Gene, who was OK in the looks department, but he was much too tall, too old (40-ish), and something of a chain smoker.

Oh, well. Maybe one of them had some 30-ish single friends…

*****

Compared to other shows I've been in, the rehearsal schedule for Arcadia was actually pretty easy – even allowing for the fact that I had to be at nearly all of the 20th Century rehearsals. The rehearsal period was shorter, for one thing. Since this was a play, not a musical, there was no need to spend two extra weeks learning song-and-dance numbers with a music director. The only choreography required was at the very end, when Hannah and Gus and Septimus and Thomasina waltz in the final scene.

David was very professional about sticking to the schedule: rehearsals always started on time, and they rarely ran late. I'd find myself on the way home at 9:00 PM or maybe 9:30 PM, which felt really odd – shouldn't I still be at the theater for another hour or so? (When I was in Hello, Dolly! a few years ago, it was a miracle if I was ever home before 11:00 PM.)

I was still plenty tired after two or two and a half hours of rehearsing, though – especially in the scenes where it was just me and one or two other characters. The concentration required to stay in character, remember lines, and follow the blocking can be exhausting.

The final half-hour or so of every rehearsal, right up to opening night, was for notes. The actors would gather down in the first few rows of the theater, and David would sit up on the edge of the stage and go through the list of comments he had made while watching that night's rehearsal. Most of my notes had to do with improving my vocal projection, which was always a problem for me but was more so here since we would not have body microphones for the performances.

As the nights went by and the notes sessions continued, I became ever more impressed with David as a director. His comments were always constructive and positive, his patience seemed endless, and for scenes that had problems he always had some new idea to try until the problem was resolved. He was always asking us questions about our characters, trying to help us discover why they said a certain line, or different ways to say it that might fit their personalities better.

The vocabulary of the play proved to be an interesting challenge. Although I know quite a few esoteric words, I found myself reaching for a dictionary more than once as I was reading the script. For example, I learned that a theodolite is a kind of surveyor’s instrument, and that a ha-ha is a landscaping feature like a dry moat that was used to keep livestock from straying too close to a house.

My familiarity with English English (as opposed to American English) also proved to be useful, since I was able to translate terms like trainers (sneakers), spot on (correct), and tight (drunk) for the other actors. David had us exchange a few of the more glaringly British terms with their American counterparts, since he wanted to be sure the audience understood what was going on.

Deciding the correct British pronunciation for several words also became an issue. Thomasina spent the entire play calling Lady Croom "MAma," instead of "maMA," which I thought would be more appropriate. "BerNARD" abruptly became "BERNard" about three weeks into the rehearsal period, causing no end of confusion, especially when Gene occasionally forgot how to pronounce his own name. Most surprisingly, we were told to say "DERbyshire" instead of "DARbyshire," on the advice of Ann, our resident Brit. (So much for all those times hearing it said the other way in the P&P miniseries…)

The play is so packed with technical detail that my engineering background also proved useful. While reading the script, I would occasionally come across a reference that seemed familiar, but I just couldn't figure out where Stoppard had gotten it – and then I wasn't satisfied until I had looked up the reference somewhere.

For instance, Valentine has the following line in Scene 7: "There was someone, forget his name, 1820s, who pointed out that from Newton's Laws you could predict everything to come – I mean, you'd need a computer as big as the universe, but the formula would exist." It drove me nuts that I couldn't remember who the person was! Eventually I found it and felt much better: it was Henri Laplace. (The irony, which would probably be lost on the audience, is that Thomasina comes up with the same theory back in Scene 1 – which takes place in 1812. She was such a genius that she beat Laplace to the theory!)

Once my "research" was complete, I could explain the technical terms to my fellow actors. I was able to clarify a few things about heat engines, entropy, thermal efficiency, fractals, and chaos theory for them – and discovered that there were some areas in that last field I couldn't remember, so I promptly started rereading James Gleick's fabulous book about chaos. (Gene was amused to catch me reading it between scenes at one rehearsal - I'm not sure if he was impressed or if he just thought I was being an intellectual snob.)

*****

Rehearsals got a lot more interesting after all of us had read through the play five or six times and had started memorizing lines. Before that point, we were all too busy staring at our scripts and paying attention to David to be really completely conscious of what the other actors were doing. But finally, when you have begun to know your lines and you can look away from the script occasionally, you can start interacting with the other characters.

For instance, in Scene 2, instead of me and Gene reading lines at each other, it became Hannah and Bernard having an intense literary debate about the decline of the Romantic era! Suddenly the scene had a lot more energy and became a lot more fun.

Rereading the play so often also revealed more twists in the plot, as I had expected it would. For example, in the scene where Chloe says her genius brother is in love with Hannah, I had assumed she meant Valentine – after all, he’s the one who jokingly calls Hannah his fiancée. But it’s not Valentine, it’s Gus! That gave a whole new level to my interaction with Ansel on stage. There was also some very funny imagery about the tortoise and the hare that Stoppard throws in, particularly when he’s comparing Bernard and Hannah. The most startling realization was that Thomasina dies almost immediately after the final scene – it’s not shown on stage, but it’s one of the things Hannah discovers in her research about Sidley Park. If little details like these took me multiple readings to recognize, how on earth was the typical audience member going to pick them up after seeing the play only once?

*****

No rehearsal period runs perfectly. There will always be at least one rehearsal where the actors’ concentration level is not where it should be. Lines are missed, blocking is forgotten, and everyone becomes generally annoyed with themselves.

There was one Sunday night rehearsal that began less than auspiciously – the control board for the stage lights was out for repairs, so we had to rehearse in the dark, and we could barely see to read our scripts. The stage was also cluttered with the set of another show that was in the middle of its performance run, and it was distracting not to have the big table around which most of Arcadia’s action occurs. On top of that, I was fighting a sore throat and doing my valiant best not to get sick.

But I wasn’t certain that the rehearsal would be a mess until we started the scene and I confidently and assuredly walked onstage – a line and a half before I was supposed to appear. I promptly turned around, apologized for my mistake, growled to myself, stalked offstage again, and did it right the next time.

However, I wasn’t the only one dropping lines and missing my blocking – Gene and Greg were having a tough night as well. Bethany was the one who had it easy in this scene, since all of her lines were delivered from the same place: while she was sitting in the chair at the far left end of the table. (Or the far left chair, in this case, since we didn’t have the table.) Thankfully David was very patient with us and let us work through our mistakes.

That night was also the first night that I started to get nervous about how many lines I still had to memorize. Part of it was just frustration at having missed so many lines at rehearsal, especially when I thought I knew them, but the rest was the realization of just how much of the 20th Century scenes revolved around Hannah and Bernard. Gene and I had spoken briefly about getting together to work on lines, even if it was just for half an hour or so before rehearsal started, but so far we hadn’t done it yet. I hoped we would do it soon!

*****

It hardly needs to be mentioned that being sick during rehearsals is one of the more miserable experiences an actor can go through. You hate to miss any rehearsals, so you drag yourself to the theater, no matter how awful you feel. Once you’re there, you worry about passing whatever bug you’ve got to the other actors, and your concentration is shot because you’re woozy from whatever medication you took in an effort to feel well enough to rehearse.

Still, you manage to console yourself: at least you’re sick now, and not on opening night!

From past experience, I knew I was guaranteed to get sick at least once during the rehearsal period. The extra stress affects my immune system, and I’m suddenly around all sorts of other people carrying all sorts of other germs. I did my best to delay the inevitable: scarfing large amounts of echinacea, drinking lots of orange juice, and so on. However, from the rehearsal that David walked in and proclaimed that he was sick and felt like he’d been hit by a bus, I knew it was only a matter of time.

Sure enough, a few days later my nose started getting stuffy and my throat got scratchy. At least this time I could still talk – usually when I get sick, whatever it is settles in my throat, causing me to totally lose my voice for a few days. I made up a big batch of the ginger-lemon tea that my voice teacher always recommends, and prayed it would pass quickly.

It ended up not being too bad. There were one or two rehearsals where I could barely croak through my lines and then went home to bed as soon as David let us go, and that was it. I was just glad to get it over with, hoping that my immune system could cope with the rapidly increasing levels of stress and hell week and opening night approached.

*****

I was very excited on the night when we had our first complete run-through – or "muddle-through," as David deprecatingly referred to it. Not only would we finally get an idea of the continuity of the play, but this was also the first time we were able to see what the 19th Century cast was doing with their scenes, and (obviously) the first time that they were able to watch us. I found myself surprisingly nervous at the idea of having an audience, even if it was only the other half of the cast.

The rehearsal went pretty well, even allowing for the awkwardness created by the absence of several actors who were unable to attend. David simply read their parts from his position in the front row of the theater, and we on stage continued as if they were present, directing our lines to the air in the general location where the actor would have been standing.

It must have been longer than I thought since we had rehearsed Scene 2, the first scene between Hannah and Bernard, since I found in places that I suddenly couldn’t remember the blocking and had to refer to the notes in my script. Thankfully it seemed that Gene was having the same problem – he forgot to move at one point, and by the end of the scene we were having our conversation from entirely opposite positions than those to which we were accustomed. It was an odd feeling, but very good practice. If anyone misses their blocking during a performance, you have to continue the scene as if nothing is wrong.

At the end of the rehearsal, David told us that he was fairly pleased with how it had gone. He warned us that he wanted to us to rely less our scripts this week (in preparation for next week’s "off-book" deadline) so we could focus on directing our performances more towards the audience.

For about a week I was feeling stalled and frustrated about my acting, but then suddenly – revelation! David made one simple suggestion about how I could change my character’s personality, and all at once I was finding new energy levels and really enjoying Hannah.

I had been following David’s initial instructions about Hannah, making her just as intelligent as Bernard but not quite as capable of lightning-quick thinking on her feet. That made the delivery of my lines a bit slower, and it seemed that Hannah always had to wonder for a moment before giving Bernard a good comeback.

The change came after our first full run-through. David approached me at the next rehearsal and said he thought Hannah was becoming too cerebral, thinking too much before she spoke. So he wanted to see how she’d be if she engaged in faster repartee with Bernard, if she could make her responses sharper and be more of an equal opponent for him. So we started Scene 2, and I gave it a shot. David had to coach me on a few lines to get the faster pace and the attitude he wanted, but after a little while I got the hang of it.

And I loved it! I hadn’t really been excited about Hannah before, and I had been very worried that I wasn’t connected enough to my character for my acting to be convincing, but the change was perfect! With some more work, I could see that the arguments with Bernard would be absolutely electric, the antagonism with Chloe would be snidely funny, and the contrast of Hannah’s friendly relationship with Valentine and Gus would be even more meaningful.

I was excited about the play again, and not a moment too soon!

*****

In addition to lines, there was one important moment in Scene 5 that I really needed to rehearse: the slap. Bernard says something to Hannah, which she interprets as offensive, so she slaps him. I had never slapped anyone onstage before, so I was a little nervous. As for slapping offstage, it hadn’t been necessary since my ex walked out on me, so I was somewhat out of practice.

As it happened, the dreaded slap created an excruciatingly mortifying but extremely funny moment at one rehearsal. We had been miming it up until then, but the critical moment came when Gene stopped after the cue line and asked David, "So when is she going to start hitting me?"

To get an idea of what’s coming, you need a better description of Gene. He is at least a foot taller than I am and at least 60 or 70 pounds heavier, so he’s a pretty substantial guy. He had also told me that he didn’t want to do a stage slap, because he thought they looked too fake. A stage slap is when one person pretends to slap another, while the other person (or someone backstage) makes the sound effect by clapping his hands together at the correct moment. The two actors have to be arranged on stage so that the audience can’t tell there was no contact between them. The problem was that Gene is so much taller than me that there would be no way for the audience not to see that I didn’t really hit him.

Anyway, I was a little surprised that Gene was willing to be actually slapped for six performances and over a month of rehearsals, so I asked him many times, "Are you sure you really want me to hit you?" And every time I’d ask the question, he’d say yes, I could hit him – apparently he didn’t think that a woman a foot shorter and 60 pounds lighter than he could do much damage.

So, when he asked when I was going to start hitting him, I shrugged and said I’d start right then if he wanted me to. We backed up a few lines, started again, and when we got to the appropriate point, I reached up and slapped him…

Gene was still in shock a few moments later, after backing up a few steps and shaking his head to clear the stars that were suddenly dancing in his vision. His first words were, "Right! There’s no way I’m going to do that for six performances!"

I couldn’t keep myself from laughing, but I felt absolutely awful! I hadn’t meant to really hurt him! I had hardly put any of my weight behind my swing, after all, and from my side it felt like I had barely touched him. (I don’t know my own strength, apparently.) I apologized profusely, and after Gene had collected himself again (and stopped seeing double), we went on and finished the scene. Then Gene promptly took off in search of some cold water to nurse his bruised jaw and his wounded dignity.

On one hand, I felt terrible and hoped he would forgive me – but on the other hand, I thought it served him right for dismissing me as harmless. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one laughing – for the rest of the evening Greg-Val and Ansel were making jokes about, "Don’t make Hannah mad – she’ll deck you!" or "Hannah Jarvis: Byron scholar, karate master."

Needless to say, the slap still needed more work. I hoped we could find a way to make the slap sound good without my knocking Gene senseless every night.

*****

The next important point in the schedule was our first full run-through without scripts. The rehearsal went pretty smoothly, though, since we all had our lines mostly memorized. Frankly, it was a relief to finally be able to move around the stage without a script weighing down one of my hands – suddenly my gestures became a lot more natural, and I no longer had to worry about dropping the pencil that I kept with me for taking notes.

The stage manager stationed herself in the first row of the audience with a script in her lap. Anyone who got stuck would call out, "Line?" and she would read the line they were supposed to be saying. No one had to be prompted more than once or twice, and David was pretty pleased that we were doing so well and staying so close to the timing of his original rehearsal schedule. There were two and a half weeks left before opening night, which gave us plenty of time to perfect our memorization.

*****

We didn’t get to rehearse with the actual set of the show until about a week and a half before opening night – but it was just in time, since most of the cast was thoroughly tired of the folding chairs and eager to see how the set would affect the performance. We had begun to add a few props – mostly books that the characters used, all of which stayed on the table for the whole show – but having real doors to enter and exit from would be a relief.

My first impression on seeing the set was that it was huge – and I found out later that it was the largest set ever installed in that theater. In the script, the set is described as a room on the garden front of an English country house, and this fit the description perfectly. Filling the entire proscenium was an 18-foot-high wall full of a double tier of large multi-paned windows. The two at the bottom in the center were rigged to be French doors, and there were two additional doors: one each on the far right and left sides. Between the windows, the wall was painted a funky turquoise-green color that changed hues beautifully depending on what color stage lights it was lit by. (There were white lights, of course, but red and blue gels had been installed on others.)

The wall was only about halfway up the stage from the audience, leaving plenty of room behind it for interesting shadows to be cast on the scrim that had been hung on the back wall of the theater. (This also meant that we would not be able to sneak across backstage that way, since anyone going behind the windows would be instantly visible to the audience.) The table proved to have massive legs and to be even a few feet longer than we thought it would be, giving plenty of room for five actors to be seated at it during the final scene.

More props were always appearing, and we were often amazed at what the prop crew managed to collect or build. In addition to the ever-increasing number of books, we soon had Septimus’s tortoise and his rabbit pistols (and also a fake dead rabbit), Thomasina’s lesson books, Noakes’s rolls of architectural plans and sketches of the Sidley Park gardens, Lady Croom’s pot of dwarf dahlias, Bernard’s briefcase (which was full of other pens, journals, and lecture notes), Chloe’s tea tray, Valentine’s laptop computer, Gus’s hamper of 19th Century costumes, and even a standing kaleidoscope which masqueraded as Hannah’s theodolite. (Almost all of this and more ends up on the table and stays there, which is why the table had to be so large!)

*****

As we reached the final week of the rehearsal period, there were nights when everyone was stressed and tired. My biggest source of stress came from being so busy at work (not to mention a threatened strike by the operators), but I managed to leave most of it behind when I entered the theater. In fact, it got to the point that all I wanted to do was survive my day at the plant so I could get to rehearsal and have fun!

Everyone had everything just about memorized by now, with only the occasional wrong word or the right words in slightly the wrong order. David was very particular about getting the lines exactly right, since Stoppard was very precise with his language – we couldn’t afford to be messy, or the audience would lose the meaning of what was happening on stage.

Greg-Val seemed to be having the toughest time, since even a week before opening night he was still stumbling over his lines. After several nights of just watching him stumble, David – who must have been even more stressed than the cast – lost patience and started shouting out Val’s lines from his place in the audience. David had never had cause to raise his voice before, so this unsettled all of us. Greg kept his cool, though: he got through the scene and arranged for the stage manager to run through his lines with him before the next rehearsal.

We had a couple of days off after this, and David told us all to rest up: only four more rehearsals left!

"Hell week" is the colorful but extremely appropriate nickname for the last few days of rehearsals before opening night. Since the play was scheduled to open on a Thursday, instead of the usual Friday, our hell week was shorter than normal, giving us less time to cram in all the finishing details.

On the Sunday night before opening, we could only have a quick run-through rehearsal at the student theater on the State College campus, since our performance space was booked that night. (The interloper was a one-man show of works by e.e. cummings, which I would actually have liked to see.) It was an odd rehearsal: everyone was zipping through their lines as quickly as they could, not bothering at all with characterization, hardly paying attention to anyone else on stage, and only skimming over the blocking. Ann and Rick tossed in a few random Cockney accents to liven things up a bit (somehow I don’t think "ducky" was an endearment much used by the landed gentry of 19th Century England), and John got some laughs by delivering his lines in an utter monotone. ("Are you dead, Jellaby?" was Tim’s amused reaction.

*****

On Monday night before opening, we had our most important rehearsal of the week: the technical rehearsal, which is done for the benefit of the lighting and sound crews, not for the actors. The actors’ job is to walk through their lines until they come to a point which is an important lighting or sound cue, and then wait patiently (preferably without moving) while the technical crew works. Then the scene continues until the next cue, when the action is stopped again. All of the stage lights must be checked to ensure that they are pointing to the proper areas of the stage at the proper time, or else the action will be lost in shadows, creating a huge distraction for the audience. Any sound effects must be timed correctly, or they might cover up dialogue between the actors – or worse, there might be silence when there was supposed to be sound.

The tech rehearsal ended up being an informal dress rehearsal for us, since a photographer came that night to take photos for the newspaper stories and to post in the lobby of the theater. I was in two shots: one of Hannah in her chair at the table, diligently pursuing her research, and one of Hannah listening to Bernard’s high-flown theories about Lord Byron. Other photos included Bernard practicing his Byron lecture, Chloe giving Valentine her opinion of Isaac Newton and determinism, Septimus and Thomasina waltzing, and Captain Brice and Lady Croom discussing the changes to the garden.

The rented costumes arrived that night, so I was finally able to see what my 19th Century dress was going to look like. (In the final scene the 20th Century characters end up in 19th Century costumes, supposedly because of a dress-up garden party that is being held at the house. The costume changes add a little more confusion when the 19th and 29th Century characters are on stage at the same time.) The color was slightly bland – a pale yellow that would have been quite nice if it hadn’t leaned so much toward beige – but the style wasn’t too bad. Thankfully a zipper was the only thing required to fasten the dress, and it had no elaborate sashes or bows (just a mutant bunch of fake purple flowers on the bodice), so accomplishing my 30-second costume change in the increasingly crowded space at stage left might actually be possible. There was a slightly squashed straw bonnet to accompany the dress, which looked so ridiculous when I tried it on (Gabriele said it looked like I was wearing a birthday cake on my head) that I hoped David wouldn’t make me wear it. However, there was also a lace shawl that made the outfit look very elegant.

The 19th Century men looked quite dashing in their breeches and tailcoats, and they spent an amusing amount of time deciding how to tie the bits of fabric that passed for cravats. (Only Tim had trouble with his, so Septimus went through the play with his tie in a 20th Century knot – not that noticeable from the audience, at least.) Ansel and Greg-Noakes ended up with some interesting stockings (bright purple and bright green, respectively), and for the final scene Tim had to trade coats with Rick, since the rental place had somehow managed to send identical costumes for Septimus and Augustus.

Bethany also had a rented dress for the final scene, but Ann and Gabriele’s dresses had been made for them by the costume crew. They looked quite nice, and the costume mistress confessed she had watched Sense and Sensibility five times while she was getting ideas for their design. My favorite was the dress that Gabriele wore in the final scene of the play, when Thomasina is an all-grown-up young lady of "sixteen years and eleven months, and three weeks." The material had a lovely golden shimmer to it, which really shone under the stage lights.

I was becoming a little frustrated with myself because at each of the last few performances I had missed or mangled at least one line – never the same one twice, but I wanted to have a clean rehearsal before opening night. That way I thought I was less likely to forget something if I got nervous in front of the audience. At least in the scenes with Gene I knew I wouldn’t have to worry too much – even if I did mess up. He was an experienced enough actor to be able to cover up my mistake or ad lib something that would prompt me towards what I was supposed to have said. But it would still be better not to have to rely on the others for my lines, and so I promised myself that my next few lunch breaks would be spent reviewing lines.

*****

Tuesday night’s rehearsal included all costume changes, but we were not required to put on stage makeup yet. The rehearsal got off to a slow start because David used the first half-hour or so for a final review of all the lighting and sound cues with the technical crew. However, it was our first taste of what the show would feel like for the actors, since we were no longer allowed to sit in the audience when we were not onstage. Being banished to backstage is not normally much of a problem, but there wasn’t much of a backstage in this theater. The dressing rooms under the stage were tiny, with no monitors to allow the actors to hear what was going on up above; and the huge amount of space behind the set didn’t do us any good because of the danger of being seen through the windows. The sight lines had been clearly taped off by the tech crew, and these tapes marked the limit of the areas where we could wander.

The fast costume change into my 19th Century dress for the end of the final scene turned out to be easier than expected. I had no problem with changing my clothes in front of the six other people who were crowded into that side of the stage, since I usually lose my sense of modesty when I’m in a show. Besides, it meant that there were plenty of people who could zip up the dress while I put on my shoes. The dress was a little big, but it was nothing that a few strategically placed safety pins wouldn’t fix. The hem was a bit long, but I would be wearing heels, and after all I only had the dress on for about five minutes. My only worry was the plunging neckline, which was extremely plunging because the dress had been designed for someone taller than myself. A consultation with the costume mistress would definitely be required.

Going to the downstairs dressing rooms to change between scenes also gave me my first real glimpse of another interesting facet of the theater. First of all, it was an old theater, decorated in the audience area with scrolling plasterwork, lots of gilding, and a gorgeous painted ceiling. Downstairs, however, had its own kind of decoration: for years it had been the custom for everyone who performed there to sign the walls. Every flat surface was covered, in every dressing room and both bathrooms: the walls, the ceiling, exposed piping, electrical junction boxes, and even the treads of the spiral stairs leading up to the wings of the stage. Most of the graffiti was from other community theater productions. In some cases, actors who returned for more than one show would sign in the same place, making a list of play titles under their signature – one guy who had claimed the corner over the makeup mirror in the women's dressing room had fourteen plays listed!

The theater had also been used as the venue for the radio show "Mountain Stage" for quite a while, so a large percentage of the names on the walls came from folk music performers from around the world who had appeared on the show. I found signatures for the Tannahill Weavers, the Battlefield Band, Lucinda Williams, and Mary Chapin Carpenter; and you could still see the squares in the drywall where some enterprising soul with an exacto knife had cut out and carried off the signatures for (I'm told) R.E.M. and Joan Baez.

On Tuesday I also did a little bit of creative writing. Two of my props were supposed to be letters containing information that was important to Hannah and Bernard’s research – one written by Lady Croom, and one from a visitor to Sidley Park. I had not found anything I liked to use as a stand-in for these letters, and I was tired of staring at random blank sheets of paper at the appropriate points in the play. The second letter was especially worrisome, since David also wasn’t satisfied with the props I had found. So, being inspired by something I remembered from Emma Thompson’s diary of the making of Sense and Sensibility, I found an easy way to solve the problem: I wrote the letters myself, using information from the script and the presumed style of the authors.

Lady Croom’s letter was the easiest, being short and in a style that Lady Catherine de Bourgh would probably have approved. The only important things to mention were the date (1810) and Mrs. Chater’s Christian name. Mentioning Count Zelinsky, who is mentioned later in the play as Lady Croom’s latest paramour, I just threw in for fun.

The second letter was more difficult, especially since it was supposed to be correspondence from Thomas Love Peacock to William Makepeace Thackeray. Its main subject was the hermit whom Hannah was researching, and several lengthy quotes from the letter were given in the script (shown in boldface type). The trouble was figuring out what happened between the quotes.

During the final dress rehearsal, I was amused to see several people standing over the prop table, actually reading my little compositions. Perhaps it was a pretentious exercise on my part, but I had fun doing it, and better still I finally had props that I was comfortable with.

*****

The local newspapers are very supportive of the various community theater groups in the area, and getting publicity is never difficult. In addition to the ads that the Main Stage Company had bought to promote the show, the Daily Mail, which had sent the photographer on Monday night, published the following article in its Wednesday paper:

Is this one better than Shakespeare?
April 15, 1999
By Todd C. Frankel
Daily Mail staff

First off, know that Tom Stoppard is likely smarter than most of us. The playwright behind the Main Stage Company's newest production, Arcadia, can toss out literary allusions and mathematics theorem with ease, but without being arcane.

And he makes plentiful demonstration of this skill in Arcadia, using the writings of Shakespeare and Lord Byron followed by Fermat's Last Theorem and Chaos Theory to tell a complex story twisting back and forth from the 19th century to present time.

But the trick, his trick, is he can make you laugh while he does it.

And Stoppard's star has never burned quite as brightly – a it of good timing and "dumb luck" for the Main Stage Company, says the play's director, David Wohl.

While the smart set has known of Stoppard for 30 years (ever since his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was picked up by the prestigious National Theatre Company in Britain), he only recently burst into the American mainstream with an Oscar win last month for his screenplay of Shakespeare in Love.

Wohl insists Arcadia is Stoppard's best work. Wohl describes the play as a mix between the writings of Oscar Wilde (Irish author of The Picture of Dorian Gray) and Stephen Hawking (wheelchair-bound philosopher and author of A Brief History of Time).

There will be six showings of Arcadia, all at 8 p.m. today, Friday and Saturday and April 22-24 at the Capitol Center Theatre, 123 Summers St. Call 343-5272 for tickets or reservations.

Arcadia tells two intertwining stories connected by their setting on an elegant English estate. The play opens with Thomasina Coverly, a 13-year-old prodigy (played by Gabriele Wohl, the 17-year-old daughter of the director) receiving a lesson from her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Tim Mace). They are discussing the meaning of carnal embrace, which proves to be a significant topic. But Septimus tries to divert her attention with a discussion of Fermat's Last Theorem.

The play moves on to follow two modern-day scholars studying the actions of the Coverly clan, trying to decipher their goings-on.

"The play explores how we interpret facts, create stories and how we're often wrong," Wohl says.

This production uses the largest set ever installed inside the theater, an 18-foot-high interior of an estate mansion. The set was originally used in a November production of this play by the Appalachian State University (N.C.), which collaborated with the Main Stage Company in this project.

Another sign of both the play's and Stoppard's intelligence is the extensive use of the British accent. Everything sounds smarter with the clipped British accent.

Of the 12 actors in the play, only one truly speaks the Queen's English: Ann Saville, who plays Lady Croom. The rest of the volunteer cast had to acquire their intelligent sound by practicing with dialect tapes.

The paragraph about the British accents made me cringe – another reminder that I’m living on the fringes of civilization. Stoppard didn’t write the play with British accents in order make it seem "smarter," but because he’s a naturalized citizen of Britain! And we weren’t using the accents to sound more "intelligent" either, but because the play takes place in England! Sheesh. Other than that, I thought it was a pretty good article.

*****

There is a vague theater superstition that the success of the final dress rehearsal is inversely proportional to the success of opening night. In other words, if you have a horrendous final dress, and if all the actors, the director, and the tech crew feel like pulling their hair out, then opening night is bound to go smoothly. However, our final dress went pretty well – hopefully that didn’t mean that opening night would be a disaster! I felt pretty confident, especially since my theater nerves hadn’t gone into full panic mode yet. I had even managed to fix my dress: safety pins in the back and some lace trim tacked around the neckline had rendered it quite wearable. (I still wasn’t crazy about the color, but the style had definite possibilities.)

The final business of the rehearsal was arranging the curtain call, which is always the last detail of a show. They are generally pretty similar: the least important characters come out first, take a bow, then step aside to clear the stage for the next most important characters. I knew that I would have one of the later bows, since Hannah was one of the larger roles in the play. So I watched as Jellaby, Brice, Chater, and Noakes took a bow, and then Lady Croom, Valentine, Gus, and Chloe. But then David said the next bow would be Septimus and Thomasina, which meant…

Bernard and Hannah would share the final bow! Here was a first in my theater career – never had I been in the final group, since all of my previous roles had been smaller. And even here, I expected that Septimus and Thomasina would take the final bow! The idea still hadn’t quite sunk in as Gene and I walked out to take our individual bows, following which we joined hands with the rest of the cast and took a company bow. When that was done, we filed off stage, went down into the audience seats for some final notes from David, and that was it.

No more rehearsal. No more practicing. Tomorrow would be the real thing – showtime!

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