Today’s Date: July 5

Show Title: Troilus and Cressida

Director: Mili Konceliik

Assistant Directors: Marielle Buxbaum and Austen Bell

Stage Manager: Amy Hartt

Dramaturg: A H. Poma

What we did

I know we’re not supposed to talk about fight club, but it is apart of my job to talk about stuff, thus I must talk about fight club. We began rehearsal, as we always do, with a thrilling game of Eastenders. After that Jake Raiter, our fight choreographer, was in the space to teach us how to fall safely and some other stage combat basics. Once we all felt safe about how stage combat works, we moved onto actually choreographing the many, many fights in the show. While that was happening, Austen and I were outside with the other cast members doing some specific text work to find what our subtext is, and how we show that to the audience. Then, we ended with a modified edition of Eastenders to come back together fully.

Quick and Quotable

• From the Play

Y’all get a break from Shakespeare today, we were less text focused, so there was no outstanding line.

• From the Director
  • “There’s gonna be a lot of mouth noise made with this.” – Mili
• From the Fight Choreographer
  • “Butts are made to be bounced on” – Jake

• From the Cast
  • “Yellow card!” – Everett, breaking up Hector and Ajax fighting
  • “Achilles, shouldn’t you be laying down doing nothing?” – Everett

Production Insights 

Today we saw the cast bring their intense passion about the story into the fights. The intensity of our characters were matched and surpassed by all of our actors, specifically our small yet mightily large Ajax, Zoe. Most of my work today was with specific speeches to help actors get out of their shell a little, and they certainly did. So many choices are being made and we are all learning from our mistakes.