Easy Writer

Preparing to Deface The Nation by Seth Weitberg

Hey everyone, good to be back after a few weeks of craziness to once again get cozied up in the heart of the blogosphere. "What have you been doing Seth? Why haven't you written any blogs?" I'm glad you asked brain voice. Why we've been getting a brand new show ready to roll out across the highways and byways called Deface The Nation!

Okay, rewind for a second. Let's do a little review of how this whole touring thing works so that I can explain what this new show is. When people contact the booking agency for The Second City, most of the time they want our "Best of" show, a two-act sketch review that uses some original material and some improv, but is primarily comprised of archival scenes written for the resident stages. All three companies perform different shows, have different casts, different directors, different levels of affinity for finding Chick-Fil-A on the road.

Now, at some point recently someone in the upper echelon of the building thought, "Hey, we do political satire. There's an election coming up. We should send out a show that uses our archives but that focuses solely on politics as opposed to our traditional blend of political AND social satire." And yes, our producers think in complete sentences just like that one. They also make lunch decisions with Aristotelian syllogisms – its amazing to watch.

So then a director got selected, a fellow by the name of Matt Hovde who of late has directed shows with so much buzz that they a practically dripping in honey (wait for it….) Matt and the producers put together a running order of scenes, songs and some improv and a show was born! Then our booking agency in addition to selling our "Best of" show, also started selling our political revue, "Deface The Nation". Oh, and the defacin' we do! Seriously, if you're politics, get ready to get your face de-ed.

Our company was given the charge of doing most of the Deface dates this fall, in addition to a handful of regular touring dates, so we had to go into a separate rehearsal process to mount it. The process began on a Monday morning, 9am, which is unconscionably early for most actors unless you're going to shoot something or get on an airplane. I had flown in from Switzerland the night before so my brain was all kinds of frazzled and my throat was slowly beginning the process of entombing itself in mucus.

Our expectation was that everyone would be off-book on all of the scenes (fancy actor talk for, "knowing all the lines without having to hold a script"), so we could hit the ground running as far as blocking, staging and Matt's direction. Now, you might ask again, "Seth, don't you already have a director? And isn't his name Bill? And doesn't he also play in a smoking hot soul band called JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound?" Jeese, hypothetical brain voice! Yes! For this project Bill was serving as the assistant director, and with some understudies preparing to go in and other folks from the building adding an additional observer vibe, we ended up with a pretty full room come rehearsal time.

I think even in spite of the early mornings, there was a real charge to our work. I was excited for a whole batch of new scenes, and for getting to learn how to make a whole new running order click. Typically, on any given week we might swap one or two scenes in or out of our show, but to essentially transform into an entirely new revue is extremely rare. Also, among the scenes in this show are some of my all-time favorite pieces – some that gleefully I get to perform, and others that gleefully I get to watch every night. I think everyone's enthusiasm was a prominent as the word "gleefully" used twice in one sentence.

The first morning we began just cranking through the running order, working out scenes and giving everything a first pass. I really admire Matt's style, which even in the course of a four-day rehearsal process seemed to allow the actors some time to let the material sink in. I think it put a certain amount of ease in the company to feel like the expectations were high, but that even four days was enough time that we did not have to get every detail perfectly the first time through.

On Tuesday, we dove right back and reworked stuff to get it sharp and up to speed, and then moved forward through the RO. I mentioned that we were off-book on everything, but going into Monday there were a few scenes that hadn't been cast yet, so Tuesday morning was the time to go back to them without a script and get them in working order, pitch some rewrites to lines and cement the blocking. It's really amazing to me how much you can get done when you work at something two days in a row, as opposed to two days with any break in the middle. There's something to be said for repetition within a certain window when it comes to firing new synapses together.

By Wednesday Shawn had most of the props for us to look at and try out, although this, like most Second City shows, is pretty light on them. I'm psyched because I get to wear a trench coat and a wife-beater (those things have to have more politically correct names, right?) when normally I'm pretty confined to our uniform of a black suit and white shirt. We had gone through everything more than once by the end of Wednesday with a few exceptions made for scenes we had either run previously or that were currently in our show. The group as a whole was feeling confident and excited about stuff, and moving forward to the last day we were focused on getting the show flowing like oil down a Slip-N-Slide.

Matt had choreographed a number of the transitions and was also very specific about the amount of time he wanted other ones to take. A long time ago I wrote about how our old director Pat's belief was that the thing that really made Second City stand out in the world of sketch comedy, was how efficient and clean the execution of the shows are. My friend Luke, who saw our show in Chicago recently, had that exact assessment as well. He was impressed by how each act felt like a non-stop train, where the whole stage would be transformed in a matter of seconds taking you to the next stop. It really is amazing the effect it can take on a show when you're not sensitive to those issues, and the difference between a three second black out and a five second black out – oddly enough – can in some situations be the determining factor in whether or not a scene works.

With shows Friday night in St. Charles and then the matinee on Saturday, we had a chance to get a couple reps in on a few of the more difficult pieces, so that by our preview on Monday night everyone felt confidant about the show as a whole. Our Monday call time got moved from 1pm back to 3pm, which allowed for some nice extra rest. The cold that I mentioned earlier had grown all throughout the week to the point that by Saturday morning I was having trouble standing up for longer than five minutes without feeling like I needed a nap and more drugs. The primary culprit was my throat, which I never have any problems with, and which wasn't sore, but just scratchy and covered in junk. The extra rest Monday was great as I really hadn't been able to get a significant night's sleep since returning from abroad.

In rehearsal we polished and tightened the show more, essentially focusing on running tops and bottoms and trouble spots in scenes. I was saving my voice, but a nagging cough led into a splitting headache that nagged at me for a good eight hours, and by the time the show was up, it was really the pain in my temple that was a bigger issue than the state of my vocal production. Lots of room temperature water and a good warm-up kept everything in good working order as far as my voice was concerned, and honestly once you're on stage you completely forget about the headache too. Adrenaline kicks in, you sink into a character, and then it's ten seconds after you get off stage that the searing pain needles its way back into the forefront of your consciousness.

Everything went solidly with the performance, we learned a lot about what we needed to know, and then in the set we tested out a number of blackout scenes that we were still hoping to mine from to fill a hole or two in the show. Wednesday it was back into rehearsal where we added one piece and tweaked a number of others, Saturday we're in Atlanta, Monday we have to put in some understudies, Thursday we're in Missouri while Obama delivers his acceptance in Denver, and then it's off to Lancaster, PA for the first run of the show! Stay tuned!

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posted: 08/26/2008

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