Inside A.C.T.

by Projection Designer Erik Pearson Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Signature Theatre's Production of Old Hats.  Photo by Joan Marcus I grew up in Santa Cruz and had the good fortune of seeing productions at A.C.T. as a kid. I became involved in the theater myself when I was very little and family visits to the city to see a play left a big impression on me. I live in Brooklyn now and work as a director and designer in New York and regional theaters around the country. This is my first time returning to the Bay Area for a project since moving east. Old Hats is just the sort of A.C.T. show that inspired me when I was young and I can’t imagine a more perfect project for my return. I first became involved with Old Hats a couple of years ago at Signature Theatre in New York. Bill Irwin and David Shiner had started developing ideas for a new project that would be a follow up to their wildly successful Fool Moon . There was no show yet, really—no director, no title—but they...

A Heavy Dose of Liveness An Interview with Director Tina Landau Bill Irwin (left), Tina Landau (center),  and David Shiner in rehearsal for  Signature Theatre's 2013 production of Old Hats , photo by Gregory Constanzo “The Coolest Project Ever” was the subject line of the email Tina Landau received from her agent, asking her if she would be interested in working with Bill Irwin and David Shiner on their new project at Signature Theatre. Landau, who had seen Irwin and Shiner in  Fool Moon about twenty years earlier and was a huge fan of their work, jumped at the opportunity. Although Old Hats is unlike anything Landau had ever worked on before, she was particularly well-suited to direct this physical show, as she coauthored The Viewpoints Book with Anne Bogart. Viewpoints is a method of theatrical composition that heavily focuses on physicality, movement, and gesture. “I feel very comfortable in Bill and David’s world, because I always think of my theater w...

ZHAO BUSINESS: THE ORPHAN DIARIES OF BD WONG – PART 6 ELEMENTS OF THE DRESS REHEARSAL Sab Shimono, a great role model and Asian Actor Pioneer, on deck during tech. Photo by BD WONG By the end of Tuesday afternoon we indeed got through tech-ing the entire play, but there was no surplus time to rehearse anything additionally, let alone to run Le Whole Shebang before Tuesday’s dress rehearsal. This means that Tuesday night we will be running through the entire play for the first time. An invited audience will be present, which is good for finally gauging the response, but this of course means one’s adrenaline and stress are ratcheted up considerably due not only to the “unknown factor,” but to the dramatic placement of the process’s final puzzle piece—that long-awaited entrance of the actor’s cruel dominatrix: the audience and her judgment . It, of course, matters not whether the audience is made up of paying customers or your friends and family. The anticipation of judgment pr...

ZHAO BUSINESS: THE ORPHAN DIARIES OF BD WONG PART #5 SECOND AND THIRD DAY IN THE THEATER: TECH-TEQUE Daisuke Tsuji, Brian Rivera, and Stan Egi Photo by BD WONG So we starts tech at the beginning of the play on Saturday morning and slowly work our way through  every moment—the actors’ performances, the lighting cues, sound cues, scenery shifts, and costume changes (many of the costume changes are “quick changes” as there are a lot of actors doubling roles in this company)—gently folding them all together like ingredients in the batter of a soufflé. I believe the goal is to finish the play by the end of Sunday, basically one day per act, leaving time for revisions, a margin for error, and enough time for a proper dress rehearsal before the first preview performance. That is about eight-and-a-half hours to tech each of the two (approximately) sixty-five minute acts for each day. Why does it take so long? The tech process is partly tedious because it is in a constant sta...

ZHAO BUSINESS: THE ORPHAN DIARIES OF BD WONG - PART 4 SECOND AND THIRD DAY IN THE THEATER: TECH-TEQUE BD WONG Photo by Kevin Berne Time management always baffles me. Time is so mercurial. We humans have figured out how to measure it, and we can predict somewhat how we can negotiate our way through it when faced with a time-sensitive task, but not much thought goes into how that negotiation actually happens. I suspect this is because if we do try to figure it out, our heads will explode. So, you have a finite amount of time to tech a show. Tech-ing a show means that you take the performance of the play that the actors have rehearsed in the rehearsal room, bring it into the theater, and then spend that finite amount of time prior to the final dress rehearsal adding every remaining technical element that gives the production its physical identity. Months or sometimes years before a production goes into technical rehearsals, designers are preparing their work. Director Carey...

ZHAO BUSINESS: THE ORPHAN DIARIES OF BD WONG FIRST DAY IN THE THEATER (FRIDAY, MAY 30) PART 3 A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE HOUSE L to R: BD Wong and Marie-France Arcilla Photo by Kevin Berne On Friday, the day following our run-thru in the 30 Grant rehearsal room, we spent our first thrilling day in the theater. This experience is a little like Christmas morning. You start seeing the actual costumes that you’ve watched slowly materializing at every fitting (I believe most of the cast had three interspersed appointments with the inspired costume designer Linda Cho and her immaculate crew). You walk into the theater and actually see how the set looks on the stage in all its glory, and you can compare your reaction to it to the reaction you had when the set designer proudly presented his lilliputian model at the meet-and-greet on the first day. You go into your dressing room and start organizing the supplies you brought from the drugstore and from your personal arsenal and sta...