Blog #3: Down & Up, Up & Down

Dear Readers, Edited highlights: 1) second reading disaster, nearly 2) funding approved 3) venue change 4) actors appeared 5) positive script evaluations at third reading The setting was set. Tea, bikkies, milk, sugar, apples, nuts, and scripts to chew over. Some ambience-producing music echoing around a hot empty hall. Too hot. Queensland hot. Moved outside. Waiting, waiting, waiting. No phone calls from interested prospective actors. That’s a worry. I waited outside the hall shifting locations following the shade, reading my own scripts, waiting. The phone rings. It’s the drama student. “She can’t make it” I think, rather too pessimistically. “Hello, yes sorry, which hall?” she asks. “Opposite the school” I reply with renewed hope welling up into my vioce. “OK we’ll be there in about 20 minutes”. And they were. But we could coax the BF to come in and help, so it was an awkward duet of an old guy and a young girl shifting around looking for the coolest place to read. But we read. She was enthusiastic, raw, also hopeful. We talked. The session ended after a couple of hours with a mutual declaration to meet again during the week and an offer from the young ‘thing’ to round up some actor friends for the next reading. Outcome: Positive but not perfect. The announcement that the funding had been successful and the panel were so impressed with the application that they want to see the rehearsed reading in April put a spring into the step of the project: more of a panic than a spring, really. The young thing and the old thing met. We discussed the urgency for actors to turn up and decided that if the project was to get airborne we’d have to ditch the out-of-town-readings ballast. Which we did. The result was a dozen actors of varying degrees of experience turned up for the reading. A successful session. The feedback from the evaluation forms and the discussions was very positive. And the professional director also turned up to add a bit of gravitas to proceedings. I shan’t mention that after all the organisation and running around and planning, it was slightly deflating to find that the key to the new venue door did not work and we were locked out of our costly new surroundings. What I would like to mention though is that the session was informative and useful, even if having actors of such a wide range of experience (from zip to a bit) meant that the quality of feedback and quality of reading was lacking. I would suggest that anyone planning on following a similar path for their project consider how they might secure the services of actors of some quality. Here's a few things we need to consider in the next week or so: 1. A name for our fledgling group 2. A venue for the rehearsed play reading (must be regional) 3. What scripts do we want to workshop with the professional director? 4. What form should the program for the rehearsed readings be? 5. What play or plays do we want to submit to SEQ Drama Festival? 6. What is the rehearsal period for SEQDF play/s? 7. Who are some potential actors for SEQDF plays? Where can we get these actors? 8. We need to think about a director. 9. Maybe a test performance of any play could be done in the regions Set up the Facebook page (that's definitely the young things job :) but it would be good to have a name before that. End Blog #3