Creating a Safe Environment.

I've asked a lot from my cast over the past few days. We've had to work some pretty heavy moments and in some pretty tedious ways. We've done some alba emoting work, which is emotional recall through breathing patterns and postures rather than memory recall. I've worked through Act One at almost a literal snails pace.

Last evening, I asked my cast, especially a specific member of my cast, to trust me as we worked through two pretty potent moments in the play. It's a scene that calls for a lot of controlled chaos, one actor running all over the place with another exhibiting some intimidating exposure and the rest of the cast supporting these two characters. We walked through the scene step-by-step, moment-by-moment. I continued adding conditions such as volume and the addition and subtraction of spoken subtext. A character dresses throughout the scene and eventually that was incorporated in, creating another layer of physical action and an added element of vulnerability.

As we worked through the final moments of the scene, a character is written to basically have an anxiety attack and shut down in a flood of tears. But, as any good director knows, you can't coach emotions. All I have the power to do is  encourage the choices they make but at the end of the day, if their sad, it is only because they have chosen to fight for what they want and they aren't getting it. If they're happy, it has to be because somebody gave them what they wanted. If they're mad, somebody has to have taken something from them and they have to choose to fight to take it back. It's all their choice. I can't tell them "be sad here." (I mean, I suppose I could, but I would like to keep my position as their director...)

You know what got me through this intimidating, emotional evening? A tiny bit of advice a dear friend gave me. She said, [more or less] "You can't control what they do, just the environment in which they do it." Great advice. If I were to expand it a little more, I would probably say "The director's job is not to control the way the actor feels, but rather create an environment from them to feel, fully."

The people in 100 Saints You Should Know are fighting for some really tough things to be missing. They're fighting for love, comfort, stability, structure... Some people get what they want. Some people don't. Some people fight back. Some people are stripped of what they want and never get it back. Regardless, all these people fighting for these things is going to elicit some emotional responses. As a director, I get to take my actor's hand, say "trust me" and create a space to let them express how they're feeling in a full, rich, SAFE way.

It's an honor to be trusted by these people. But more honoring is what they are willing to share in a safe environment.