Posted By Heather Harvey '11
Today is the first day of rehearsals after our long weekend and class, so although rehearsal began at 2:30, some of the students were not able to make it to rehearsal until later. For the first part of rehearsal, the cast ran lines of different scenes repeatedly. There was not so much focus on blocking as there was on lines. All of the actors were off book, but now they had the task of being certain that they were completely word-perfect (which, largely, they were.)
After dinner, we all returned to the rehearsal space, and by this time, all of the students that were called were able to come to rehearsal. We were getting to a point where we could run from scene to scene without much interruption, so we were covering larger portions of the text today.
There was still some question as to how to treat some of the more nonlinear sections of the flashbacks. Part of the concern is the extent to which certain lines meet the truth or the extent to which certain lines actually occurred in proximity to one another. One of the issues of Willy's flashbacks is that every event and every word is questionable. There is no solid formula to determine whether something happened, if it happened, when it happened, or even if the next event happened in the same sequence as he remembered it.
We ended the night running from the beginning of Willy's act one flashback scene to the end of it, which is more so a series of flashbacks than a single flashback due to its disjointed and nonlinear nature.