Usher Redux

This is the second time I've played Roderick Usher on stage. The first time was in college. We had a studio theater program that allowed students to write, produce, and direct their own work a few times a year. A friend of mine had chosen to lump a bunch of Poe stories together under the banner of "The Masquerade", and I was given the part of Roderick Usher. The production was ambitious to a fault. We had costumes, complicated lighting, and the Red Death who spoke entirely in sound cues. It was fun to do. We had a waltz. I still have my crushed green vest.

Now it's September of 2009, and again the House of Usher is falling. It started falling, at least for myself and the rest of the Fool Collective, about six months ago. Looking at my calendar now, I can see our first rehearsal was on April 2nd. You might think this is a lot of work to do be doing for a 17-minute show, and you might be right. But it's part of the Fool Collective process to play a long game with whatever project we're tackling. For myself, and for those interested, a brief outline of said process:

• Get together a group of phyiscal performers. For Fear this was a combination of people we'd worked with before, and people we had been in workshops/classes with. We ended up with five boys and two not-boys.
• Start with meetings/chats. We met throughout April just to talk about fear, death, depression, and whatever else seemed appropriate. Much of this is archived on the show blog.
• Generate ideas via text and physical exercise. Most of our early rehearsals fell into two camps: we would be given a writing/thinking assignment and told to either blog it or bring to rehearsal, or we would be given a physical assignment to present to the group. These things influenced each other. Chairs were tossed in the air and landed on their legs. A light bulb was swung by the cord, faster and faster as a body descended into a box.
• Collect the most interesting images and swirl them around in your head until you have an order. We were helped(?) on this step by the addition of the Poe story. Originally we were just doing a show about the fear of death. Having a specific text in which to base our physical abstractions gave us a clear direction to pursue.
• Create sounds and lighting which support the images you've created. The Fool Collective likes to use practical lights, personal lights, multiple speakers systems, and atmospheric soundscapes. We try to transform a theater into a different place entirely. There are no seats in the House of Usher.
• Rehearse it over and over until each moment has a purpose, and there is an overall clarity of focus. This does not mean, necessarily, that things will be clear to the audience. You find that out during previews. Or after.

Things will change during the performance run, of course. The different audiences will cause moments to be shorter or longer, and our cycling cast of narrators will lend their varied specialties to each run. Hopefully we have made something which will at least elicit reactions from the audience. At most, it will communicate something about the cyclical nature of life and death and perhaps reveal some novel elements of The Fall of House of Usher. I'll let you know what I think after performing it upwards of sixty times.