As a theater student at Swarthmore, I have gone to lot of long rehearsals. Two hours, three hours, five hours – stretching even to six. Theater can eat up a lot of your time. Long rehearsals can be fun, but they’re often grueling, exhausting work. Different directors have different strategies for keeping the cast’s energy up for the whole rehearsal. Some directors only use certain actors at a time, working through certain scenes while letting other actors rest. Some theater classes I’ve been in stretch right over dinner time, with the professor building in time for a cast dinner. Some of my favorite theater memories at Swat have been from those cast dinners in the middle of intense rehearsals, when we got the chance to go decompress over burgers or pasta at the dining hall.
Last spring I was in a production of Angels in America: Part 1, Millenium Approaches, directed by one of my best friends. Angels in America is widely considered one of the greatest American plays of all time, but it is a grueling experience to work on. It deals with the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the early 1980s, following characters with and without AIDS as they grapple with the epidemic’s impact on their lives and relationships. There’s also an angel that comes in and out. A three hour play with only eight actors, the cast grew into an incredibly tight-knit group, especially once we started full cast rehearsals in the Frear Theater. The Frear is the black box theater in the Lang Performing Arts Center where most Theater Department shows take place. A small, intimate, theatrical setting, the black box serves as a versatile and well-equipped space for musicals, plays, and showings of pieces that are still in progress. But the much more important thing about the Frear is that it is only a few minutes from the Science Center (“Sci”) Cafe in the science building. After a few hours of running scenes, the director would call a “Sci Run,” during which anyone who wanted a snack (usually the entire cast and creative team) would walk over to the Science Center. We would discuss rehearsal, laugh about mistakes, and take stock of who had the most Dining Dollars left to pay for snacks. Once at Sci, we would run into people we knew, talk about classes, eat, and relax. And we would walk back to the Frear Theater refreshed, laughing in the light of the setting sun through the trees.
Breaks during rehearsals are usually a set amount of time – that’s why the “thank you 10!” has become such an iconic line in the theater community. It acknowledges the need to be ready to rehearse again in exactly 10 minutes, respecting the time of both cast and crew. But the magic of the Sci Run in my theater experience is that it was the activity that was centered, not the time it took. I loved those snack trips that allowed the cast to grow closer and the rehearsal process to stay fresh.
