If you've ever been friends with a theatre student, you know there are three words that are likely to come from this student's mouth after you've extended an invitation to them. Those three dreaded words? "I can't. I have rehearsal." My friends hate those words. Unfortunately for them, they've been hearing a lot more of them lately. Last week my latest show started rehearsals, and life has been crazy ever since.

This semester I'm assistant stage managing the IC theatre department's last mainstage show of the semester, Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice. The show, which is directed by Wendy Dann, an Ithaca College alum and professor, is off to a great start in rehearsals.

The first week of rehearsals is one of my favorite parts of doing theatre. At the first rehearsal we got to hear the actors read the play for the first time. This is always a fabulous experience; it is so much fun to hear the words on the page come to life. I'd read Eurydice a couple of times by the time first rehearsal came around and while I loved it when reading it on my own, I was delighted to find that the play is much funnier and more touching when read aloud by its cast.

Our cast, 10 actors from the IC theatre department, consistently impressed me over the course of the next week of rehearsals. The first couple days were devoted to table work, a process in which the actors and director literally sit down at tables and work through the play, scene by scene (You'd never guess by the name, right?). The purpose of table work is to give the actors a starting point for character work and line readings before they get up on their feet and start blocking the action of the play. Wendy Dann and our lovely actors did exactly that for the first couple of days of rehearsal, and as I said before, I was impressed. I've never worked with Wendy or any of our cast members before, and I was delighted to find that they all came into the process with a great deal of enthusiasm, professionalism, and work ethic. You'd think I'd expect that from members of the IC theatre department by now.

Anyway, when table work was over the actors got on their feet and Wendy started blocking the show. For us stage-managers, that meant that we had to tape-out the groundplan onto the floor of the rehearsal studio. (In non-theatre lingo, that means that we had to use tape to put down the outline of the set (in this case a curvaceous boardwalk) onto the floor so that the actors would know where to enter/exit and where to walk, etc.) Taping out is always an interesting process, as it involves plotting out a number of points on the ground plan of the set, and then transferring those points from the ground plan to the rehearsal space. It's like a really big game of connect-the-dots, actually, except Stage Management has to find the dots themselves. In the end, though, we had the set taped out on the floor, and we started the blocking process.

We've only had a few blocking rehearsals so far, but we've already come a long way. Blocking is interesting because it's not just about where the director wants an actor to move and what they want the actor to do when they get there. There's a certain element of that, of course, but what I find absorbing is the process of working through the motivation behind that movement. People in real life don't tend to walk across a room without a reason, and good blocking reflects that idea. I'm not doing the process real justice here, but suffice to say its interesting stuff.

So a Eurydice progress report for week one would go something like this: My cast rocks, my director is super fascinating to work with, and my stage management team is efficient as can be, and entertaining, to boot. So far, so good.

I'll be back soon with an update. Up next this week is Act (or in this case "movement") Two! Three characters named Big Stone, Little Stone, and Loud Stone are about to enter the blocking process. I can't wait to find out what's going to surprise me next!