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from BJ Jones, Director

Last night was the final dress rehearsal for The Lieutenant of Inishmore.   We had over 100 people in the audience -  students and board members, as well as interested friends and family filling out the seats while  photographer Michael Brosilow shot the rehearsal for production photos.

The reaction was wonderful, the play revealed itself in important ways and the audience reacted better than we imagined.  The laughs came easily, the stunned silences were gratifying and we had one of the more remarkable dress rehearsals I can remember, given all the technical challenges we are employing.   In all I am thrilled and excited to get the real audience in to see the work.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a play about the folly of resentment, mindless violence, political folly, and misguided principals.  It takes the form of a black farce, stylistically shaped to mimic an old-fashioned Western, or more recently, a Quentin Tarantino film.  Blood sprays, TVs explode, characters insult each other with blunt abandon and it is a festival of extremes and comic irony. It is wildly funny, as audiences everywhere can attest to, and as our audience has come to expect from Martin McDonagh –  it is the third of his plays I have directed here (A Skull in Connemara, The Cripple of Inishmaan).   But this play not only pushes the envelope, it shreds it.

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from Matt DeCaro, Actor

On a break today, while we were in Northlight’s lovely Green room waiting for our terrific stage manager, Rita Vreeland, to call us up to the stage, I was watching the set on the downstairs monitor. It looked great on-camera - our Irish cottage, our home.

The lens caught the circular pattern of the floor and some of the ascending seats. The image suddenly evoked an ancient Greek theatre for me and I had one of those moments of pure happiness and gratitude for being able to play a small part in such an old and valuable tradition. To think that thousands of years later we still gather in stadium seating to share a story and look at ourselves can give me a bit of goose flesh.

Every time we play scene nine I am struck by Davey’s line, “Will it never end. Will it never fecking end?” A cry from Trojan Women? It feels very Greek to me. It echoes through History. Our playwright puts it to us fresh and unvarnished, violence is everyone’s responsibility. We are all culpable.

I play the Father of a psychopath or maybe he’s a sociopath, or maybe he’s just a poor kid born into poverty and hopelessness that suffered untold abuse at the hands of an alcoholic Father who himself had been born into poverty and powerlessness and was abused at the hands of an alcoholic Father who in turn was born into poverty…….and the cycle never ends.

As scene one opens Donny and Davey, who have forged a relationship from loneliness and drink, are at each other. A kick in the ass may be as comic as vaudeville but its still a kick in the ass. As Donny plays the scene with Davey we get some idea of just how abusive he must’ve been to his own son while he was growing up. His son leaves home to become a bomber for the INLA. Patriotism or an excuse to vent the pent up rage of the disenfranchised? Does brute strength breed violence or do feelings of impotence and powerlessness breed violence?

I think at the heart of McDonagh’s scathing indictment of terrorism he’s asking us first and foremost to stop terrorizing our children. We need to break the chain.

from Meghan Beals McCarthy, Dramaturg

Today was not a good day to wear white to the theatre.

When I arrived, I was met on the loading dock by the crew standing around a pallet filled with over two hundred gallons of corn syrup; they were receiving a tutorial from special effects artist Steve Tolin on how to mix the several different viscosities of blood needed for our production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore.  I watched for some time, fascinated by the mad scientist antics as they mixed syrup, water, colorant and detergent.  The resulting color is a brilliant scarlet that is startling enough in the five-gallon paint buckets; I can only imagine how breathtaking it will look in action on stage.

This is the fifth show on which I’ve worked with BJ and I have never seen him having so much fun.  During rehearsals the past two weeks I heard things like, “I’m running out of bullets too soon,” (John Judd) and “well, the joke lands right after you’re dead,”(BJ) and “my brains will show up on the door, so that’s good,” (Andy Luther) and now it’s  all coming together.  Today is our second day of technical rehearsals and everything is proceeding apace.  All of the meticulous planning is paying off; of course, it helps that this is the seventh Inishmore production for Steve Tolin, our special effects artist.  The special effects are stunning: pyrotechnics, dead cats, corpses and lots and lots of guns.

Meanwhile, as I dash through the loading dock during a break and my hand comes away from a doorknob covered in blood, I remind myself to wear my painter’s clothes tomorrow.  Because starting tonight, the blood’s going to start flowing.

from Benno Nelson, Floor Manager

Today was the first day of proper tech rehearsals, which means including the final technical aspects of the show like lights and sound.  Our lighting and sound designers are really fantastic. Andre Pluess, the sound designer, in addition to providing a lot of great sound effects, has composed some thrilling music to be used in transitional moments from scene to scene, and Chris Binder, the lighting designer, has some truly elegant cues that help direct focus onstage.  Unlike in movies, in the theatre the audience has free reign over the stage and it is much more difficult for the director to control where the audience is looking.  Ensemble acting and smart lighting help to direct focus to the most crucial areas of the stage, and you’ll get to see these techniques to great effect in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Especially if things keep progressing as well as they’ve started.

Another feature of the audience’s freedom of focus in the theatre is the importance of “dressing” the set or filling it out with odds and ends—props that may not have any specific function in the play but help make the playing space look lived in.  For this show Todd Rosenthal (the Set Designer) and Dan Katz (the Props Master) have collaborated to fill the set with a lot of interesting trinkets so that no matter where you look there will be something worth seeing.  But with all that’s going on in this play, you may never get a chance to appreciate their hard work.

More tech work tomorrow: wish us good luck and plenty of patience.

from Benno Nelson, Floor Manager

We had a lot of fun today. We spent Earth Day inside, completely dedicated to incorporating the special effects into the climax of the play. Hilariously though, since a lot of the effects include blood, and we’re not ready to clean up that kind of mess after each try, we’ve started by just using water. It makes a blood bath seem a lot more like just a bath…but with yelling.

Days like this take a lot of patience and coordination, but are completely crucial to the success of the play. We were lucky to have both Steve Tolin, the special effects master, and Nick Sandys, the fight choreographer, at hand to give advice and monitor everyone’s progress. (Incidentally, Nick’s also an actor around town and is featured in Remy Bumppo’s production of Old Times which has its dress rehearsal later tonight. Break a leg, Nick!)

Tomorrow is our last rehearsal before the grueling Tech weekend begins, but we’re in a very good place: we’re feeling comfortable about the special effects, and we’ve been able to spend a good amount of time already in the performance space. Also, tomorrow the Fire Marshal will be coming by the Theater to make sure that all of our effects are safe for indoor use and all of our exits are clear, this should just be a routine inspection, but keep your fingers crossed!

from Benno Nelson, Floor Manager

Today in Inishmore we had our Designer Run-Through, which is the culmination of all of the staging and acting work we have been working on in rehearsals, before we start incorporating the technical aspects of the show.  The designers (costumes, set, lights, props, special effects) are all invited to watch a complete performance of the show in the rehearsal room in order to get a better idea of the show than is possible just by reading the script.

In some ways what we have now is the skeleton of the show: the acting, pacing and storytelling without which the rest of the show collapses.  The work of the next week in tech and dress rehearsals will be fleshing out the show with all of the additional technical attractions that complete the experience.  If the skeleton isn’t strong enough, no amount of technical work will keep the show interesting, but judging by today’s rehearsal, we’re in great shape to support all of the intricacies to come.

Tomorrow’s rehearsal is going to be really fun.  Today we met the special effects coordinator Steve Tolin, and he’ll start working with the cast and crew tomorrow to help realize the exciting tricks in this play like gunshots and a crane that lifts one actor off the ground by his feet (without giving too much away).  Of course, an audience member might only come see the show once, but we’ll be doing it eight times a week so it’s really important that every aspect of this demanding show is thoroughly choreographed and rehearsed so that it’s both thrilling for the audience and safe for the actors.  I can’t wait to start incorporating these effects with the solid foundation provided by our great ensemble and all of their work over the past two weeks.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

from Lynn Baber, Artistic Administrator

Yesterday, BJ called me at my desk from the rehearsal room downstairs and asked me to come down to watch the “stumble-through,”which is BJ’s way of saying a “run-through” in the very early stages. So, I was watching rehearsal, and we’re in scene 3 or 4 and he starts meowing.
I gave him a look, but he was intent on meowing, so he didn’t notice all the looks I was shooting his way as he continued meowing intermittently. It turns out that he was putting in the meows where they will be later, when the sound design is in place. If BJ is doing the meowing in rehearsals, apparently, the stage manager will know when and how to call the cues when we get to tech.

It just cracked me up. Not everyone gets to sit next to a meowing boss. It’s not a part of most people’s jobs.
It’s a bonus feature of mine.

from Cliff Chamberlain, Actor

i’ve never owned a cat.

there.
i said it.

i’ve cat-sitted,
for friends,
but that’s not the same thing, is it?

i don’t really have anything against cats,
it’s just that i grew up around dogs.
a golden retriever named dakota when i was young,
then a couple of shih tzus named shamrock and romeo.
(actually, come to think of it, romeo was pretty darn cat like.  did his own thing.)

so you can imagine the challenge of playing a character
who absolutely loves his cat
MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD.

my character’s cat, wee thomas, is his best friend.
probably his only friend.

which is fantastic,
except for the fact that are some fundamental things about being a cat owner
that i am totally oblivious to.

how do you hold a cat?
how do you pet a cat?
what is it about cats that makes people love them?

so for all you northlight cat lovers,
help an actor out!
if you’ve got some funmemorablesadcrazyendearing cat stories,
i’d love to hear them.

from BJ Jones, Director

After a wonderful week of hard work by our diligent cast, we got through the play, blocking and marking out how the physical flow of the play’s journey should go with our set as an environment. This is a fairly aggressive approach, as we attacked these tasks first, given what the play’s physical demands are. Fortunately, the cast came in to rehearsals largely off-book (lines memorized), so that we could move ahead to take on the physical demands first.

Cast at the first read-through of the play

For a few hours at the end of last week and all of Monday, we brought in Nick Sandys, our fight director, to deal with the violence of the play. Nick teaches all of our actors to execute the moves safely and with a sense of reality. We walked through the play as blocked and he added all the fight moves that are required, as well as addressing the gunplay which needs to be safe and specific. The actors were wonderful, picking up the intricacies of the moves quickly, and eager to take on the tasks.

Nick was great at sensing the comedic nature of the violence, and working with me to find the proper balance of gravity and looniness. We seem to be moving in the right direction!

This week we will plunge further into the play’s nuances and refine the scenes, and by the end of the week we will start to do some run thrus.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is just too much fun to work on, and I am lucky to have such a talented team to take on a rather daunting piece with such challenging physical demands.

from Lynn Baber, Artistic Administrator

There’s this one part of Lieutenant of Inishmore where one of the actors is hung upside down from his feet. The production team is dealing with how to make that magic happen on stage, but we wanted the actor to be able to get used to doing the scene while upside down in rehearsal. That makes sense, right? He has to act, and he’s upside down,

BJ Jones

and he has to do an entire scene. So we got this inversion table, which is actually something used by people who feel they can benefit somehow from being upside down but don’t want to or can’t do it on their own arm strength (like you would in yoga). And BJ, being a conscientious director, felt like he had to try it out first. This photo demonstrates what I saw when I walked into work on Tuesday. I love my job: sometimes you come to work and your boss is upside down and happy about it. BJ liked being upside down. Said it felt good. I will have to take his word for it, because I am NOT going to try it out.