The Guardian: First Read Through

After weeks of talking, auditions, and figuring out schedules, Nate and I finally had our first read through of The Guardian with our cast. Beyond a small mishap of a couple of the actors having an earlier version of the script, the meeting went very well. It was cool to see them finally all reading together, and it will be an interesting day to look back on once this whole process is over.

I'm happy with the way the ending is now within the script, and I can't imagine any major changes will occur within the script over the coming weeks. We talked to the actors after the read through that we will be able to make tweaks and small rewrites to portions that feel weird to perform, so I'm hoping they will take that to heart and feel comfortable communicating with us in the future about things. This is a strange and upsetting narrative, and it's important to me that the actors feel comfortable while working on it. Overall, everyone seems excited to be working on this play, so I have a lot of hope that the coming weeks will be awesome.

I'm really excited to see the ideas Nate has come up with. We discussed today an idea he had about the set slowly coming in closer to the fire pit prop throughout the play's run. That was an idea I'd never thought about during my writing but felt it really well captured the "trapped" theme I had in mind. He's gotten a great handle of my thoughts behind the story and has been bringing it to life fantastically this term.

We're going to be having our first rehearsal Monday afternoon, and I'm very pumped to see what all the actors have thought about in regards to their characters and how they work with the script. We left off our read through today asking them to dive into the characters and ask us questions about them when the need arose. I have a lot of lore in my head regarding to most of the cast, but I really want to see what the actors think of things and how they interpret them. I think this cast is going to help put on a deeply unnerving and cool show.