Blocking a Stuffed Animal and Paedon's (prop) understudy

Hello! 

Here’s an update on The Play With The Stuffed Animal In It! It was the first week of in person rehearsals this past week! I felt like we accomplished a lot more in the time we spent rehearsing this week than we did at all last week. 

Monday night began on the Withycombe Main Stage where we will be filming the project; so we were able to immediately work in the space which I was extremely grateful for. We mainly blocked for this rehearsal and discussed some of the technical aspects to the show that needed to be considered or the actors wanted to know more about. I noticed that in the first probably ten or so minutes, I kept wanting to start and stop my actors to get nit picky about certain aspects of the scene when this was clearly not the time for that. I think I start to overwhelm them; if not them, I know I was catching myself getting there and so I quickly stopped myself from doing that and kept with the big picture for the evening. 

The second rehearsal we had this week we were lucky enough to have the Lab Theatre as our rehearsal space for. The size of the Lab is similar enough to our taped-out set for filming that I felt confidence in rehearsing there for good reference. The actors both contributed to different ideas that helped in solving some obstacles we have faced through the production process. The main one has been that the two entrances the set will have won’t be able to magically disappear as the doors do in the train station that Rue gets trapped in with Paedon. Shocking, I know, but still a little disappointing that we can’t use ~actual~ magic. However, we promptly came up with solutions to those being that the hallway/doors led to things like the bathroom or a storage/security/electrical closet. Our magical door will be just off camera but if possible, I would love to get the visual that I had of the characters banging on said door or the place of said door somehow. That is a different obstacle for a different day. 

For the rehearsals, I brought in a substitute for Paedon’s actual bear until the costume designer, Libby, is done with creating his look and bringing him to life. However, in doing this, I brought the only stuffed animal I still have, a stuffed Dumbo that I got a few years prior when I went to Disneyland for the first time. Now, I think Dumbo is cute as a bee or even more but in the context of the rehearsals and being a visual representation of Paedon, I think everyone in our rehearsal can say that they were absolutely terrified. It didn’t help that Kane sat behind AB and I, while he voiced for Paedon in the rehearsals. I've included photos below for reference.

Thank you for reading!

                            Hannah

The red tape is the outline of our set with
"Paedon" sitting front and center 

Paedon's temporary understudy, *still voiced by Kane Sweeney