Fetching the lines! - Off book day

 Off book day was Sunday, and I was pleasantly surprised with how well the actors had their lines down!

That is always one of my fears while writing, is "am I giving enough context in each of the lines to help cue the next one effectively". The last thing I want to do is have actors trying desperately to remember their lines because I wasn't clear enough. But I think I effectively wrote the script in a way where they are able to clearly move from one beat to the next, and I think that was shown through the slop through we did. 

The first slop through we had quite a few callings of line, and quite a few notes on wording/order/skipped over lines. I had debated just generally saying to look over the wording on certain pages, but figured that it would be more helpful to actually specifically point out everything despite this taking more time and being a bit tedious. But it must've worked out quite well because the next run through they had cut the amount of times line was called by more than half, and the lines said were more true to the script.  By the third and final run through of the day, they only called line a total of 4 times I believe? And I had a quarter of the line notes from the first time. I am really proud of all our actors and for how much work they're putting into this because the show is just really starting to come together nicely. Lorna and I are laughing at each run through with every new choice that is made. I mean, it really is just phenomenal.

Having Liz come into rehearsals and give advice is very helpful too. She had mentioned the idea of kennels throughout my time writing the play, but I was NEVER able to visualize how that would work in my head (I was picturing literal cages for the actors to be in and I did not want to do that ha). But now that she has clearly helped us visualize the stage in this new way, the blocking will be so much easier and won't need as much editing to make sense. Overall, the rehearsal process has just been amazing. I can't wait to film in the coming weeks.