Theatre Geek

I live in a little bedroom community outside of my hometown of Austin TX... Austin is home to the SXSW Music Festival, and the SXSW Film Festival. It is also home to The Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Each year, we also do FronteraFest, -- five weeks of off the wall, new, and just plain weird fringe theatre. Austin also participates yearly in an experimental "free night of theatre" -- along with three other cities in the nation. This is cool too.

I heard some time ago that statistically, Austin boasts more theatres per capita than New York, but I don't know if that's true. I am a theatre geek in a theatre town, that is overshadowed by being the "Live Music Capitol of The World."

It's not a problem to live in a music city, though. Theatre flourishes as well. This season, there are no less than 106 productions to choose from if you wish to attend a play in the 2005-2006 season. And the even greater news is, the average age of the theatre patron in Austin is around 30... so given that kind of patronage, much of the work is fresh and up to the minute.

On the outskirts of town, we've got another 10-12 theatres as well. In January I will direct a production for one of them. I 'm looking forward to blogging away about the aspects of directing. In the meantime, I await with bated breath the arrival of our scripts, so that I might pre-block in my usual fashion. Many might debate the pre-blocking process as too controlling -- but frankly, it helps me to feel safer and more in charge during the rehearsal process, and I change quite a lot of it once I have a cast anyway.

Who among us really prefers a director who doesn't provide blocking, assistance with character development, and a safe demeanor in which the creative process can unfold while committing to directing the production toward a cohesive interpretation? Isn't the alternative chaos?

Pre-blocking, I find, supports the production by providing effective relationships among the characters and attractive "pictures." This could be my enthusiasm for photography kicking in. Composition counts!

I see a lot of theatre -- really, really, good theatre, and not enough of it is supported by good blocking or effective staging -- which is disappointing.

For this production, I have eight weeks of rehearsal and I'm accustomed to four to six. Should I scrap the safety of pre-blocking? NO -- but I'm tempted.

Stay tuned.