I mention two casts, and this is indeed accurate. To provide more opportunities for our students, and to showcase the talent we have in our program at USD, I cast two complete companies, which performed on alternating nights over the course of the two week run. This presented challenges and opportunities during the rehearsal process. We started the process with character development and relationship building, using Lessac Kinesensics, Bogart’s Viewpoints, and other approaches to bring each actor to a greater awareness of their own character and their place in the world of the play. We explored music together as well as in split cast modes, utilized multiple rehearsal locations, and approached staging the same way.

Throughout it all, I encouraged each actor and each cast to make their own discoveries and convictions about who their character was and what motivated them. It was quite illuminating to see the different choices each cast made, and I found it wonderfully challenging to bring these diverse choices into a staging framework that accommodated a single scenic and lighting design, yet allowed the actors a degree of freedom of movement. The end result was a production that succeeded on many levels, and was personally one of my most rewarding.