By keeping your sense of humor and holding fast to your sense of play, it can be done. ...or worse yet, perhaps the gym, which still smells of the agony of da feet (over-used and under-washed adolescent gym socks!). For lighting the play, there is… (drum roll) a light switch. Not even a dimmer switch! Either the lights are on or they’re off. “How can I do a play if I can’t show the passage of time?!” you scream, wondering how you’ll pull this off as a director. By keeping your sense of humor and holding fast to your sense of play, it can be done. You can add characters to the script as “time keepers” to help you. For example, your stage directions call for night. Have an actor come onstage, dressed in black, or even carrying a sign that says “night,” and have him fall down. Then he stands up and says, “Night fell.” Or have an actor come onstage with the front of his body costumed in white and the back of his body in black. He says, “Day turned to night,” then turns his back to the audience. While this won’t work if you’re doing Ibsen, you can pull it off if you’re directing a comedy, where you have the freedom to be creative and even break a few rules. See the following list for more fun ways to show the passage of time: · Have one actor dressed brightly or holding a sign that says “Day,” and then have “Night” wordlessly chase him across the stage. Reverse the action when necessary, and it’s daytime again. Action replaces words. Showing is much more fun than telling. · To show a few hours have gone by, have an actor come onstage with a large clock (don’t panic, we’re talking cardboard) and forward the clock hands to the time it’s supposed to be. · Say five days have passed between scenes. Have two actors, one the sun and one the moon, come onstage with a globe. As one goes down behind the globe, the other comes up. Or they could go up and down a stepladder, the moon rising as the sun comes up. One actor holding a sun and moon mounted on sticks could do this as well. Or an actor, let’s call him the Time Keeper, can enter between scenes and tear calendar pages. Besides indicating the passage of time, your script probably also calls for a blackout at some point. “It’s impossible,” you yell. You simply cannot get a blackout in the space you’re doing this show—even when all the lights are off, it simply looks like a pale murk. And then they take too long to “warm up” when you turn them back on. Okay, so you better not stage a murder-mystery where the crime is committed during a blackout. But again, comedies, and especially melodramas, are much more forgiving. So, a blackout is impossible UNLESS… (the tension builds) ...unless you have an actor approach the audience after the action onstage has frozen and say, “This is a blackout. Please close your eyes.” The audience will not only understand, they will laugh. And isn’t that what you want? |
