Many theatre people I know call the week before opening a show Hell Week. I don’t believe in Hell Week, unless you have fucked up OR you’ve experienced an act of the theatre gods. I’ve had shows where actors asked me, that week, when we’re going to have a crisis. We’re not. I don’t want ‘drama’ in my Drama. I don’t do crisis management. I want calm and cool as the backdrop to whatever craziness is on-stage.
There are three key elements to avoiding a week like that (or a rehearsal process like that):
1. Cast for sanity: (This is not a reference to mental illness – I have happily Directed many actors with everything from anxiety to PTSD to BPD.) Having a coup-prone cast or a disrespectful diva will destroy your soul, much less your play. Make sure your cast is ready and capable of getting off-book in two weeks, learning combat or intimacy blocking, making music rehearsals, or whatever your expectations are. Do your absolute best to assure you cast people who play well with others.
2. Make a plan: Plan every damn thing you can. Rehearsal schedules, deadlines for lines, costumes, bios, props, etc. Your copy of the Rehearsal schedule needs to include what you plan on accomplishing each week, exactly what you want to do. How much you share in advance with actors is up to you, but you need to know that Week Three is combat blocking.
3. Use every day: If you’re there, you accomplish what needs accomplishing. If you finish early, let everyone go. It’s a gift, like a snow day. If you don’t, let everyone go when you said you would. NEVER keep people more than 5 minutes over time. If you feel you need to keep them an extra two hours, call a different rehearsal – that was on you, not them, and that’s simply not respectful. It’s self-indulgent and immature.
Typically with the small community shows I do, my cue to cue (Q2Q) is the Saturday the weekend before the show opens, Sunday is a break (or one of my built-in days to fix or finish something if necessary), and then M-Th are run-throughs of the show as it should be performed, with all the sound/light/etc. cues and full costumes. Then we open on Friday.
I believe, actually, that the rehearsals that week should be (depending on the length of the show) among the shortest and easiest rehearsals – particularly for actors. The techs who have come in are working and I may be figuring out last minute stuff, but all they have to do is get ready, do the show we’ve worked so hard on until then, sit for notes. It’s settling in. Finding your back-stage culture, your timing for changes or crosses, moving from stuff tossed all over the house to what you really need and where you keep it. It’s that last transition so that by the time we open, even the first night, the audience is seeing a performance, not another rehearsal.
Each day of 5-6 weeks of rehearsal I have to keep it moving. I believe in gentle rehearsals, though I admit I am not necessarily gentle in my mind the entire time. I can be very impatient if everyone is loud around me while I’m trying to think, but I am happy to let the cast drift off on a tangent after running a scene. In fact, I think it builds common ground and unity and that is a main goal. But then you have to lead things back on course. 5 minutes here, a 15 minute break there, makes the evening feel easier. But a 40 minutes monologue by an actor about her day or the guy who leaves for 10 and takes an hour – these are not sustainable. Futzing around, taking a day off a week for everyone to get drunk together, letting an actor or two dominate the room – these are the things you cannot afford.
Instead, know what you need to accomplish in a day and do that. If you can’t, know why, know what you have to do to catch up. Call an actor an hour early the next day? Do an extra rehearsal on a Sunday afternoon? Do what you have to do so that when you hit Q2Q and TECH Week, you don’t face a host of disasters as well as tech.
But this is live theatre, done with live people, and you can’t control everything. You may have a natural disaster hit you that week: a lead is sick, the A/C in the building is out, someone stole an actor’s wardrobe, a jerk-off ate your food props. But if your show is otherwise in good shape, and you’ve done everything up to then you needed to, then you have one problem to address, not dozens. A fire to put out isn’t a crisis or a disaster and it doesn’t ruin your show. You just put it out and move on.
So make the time and effort to make plans. Schedules. Deadlines. For you and your cast/crew. Then stick to that plan while remaining flexible, because a little like war, no battle plan remains unchanged after the first shot is fired. The hardest part isn’t even the plan, really. The hardest part is sustaining interest and focus for weeks – and that’s why the occasional tangent, the short break, is absolutely necessary for everyone.
If you’re an actor or a crew member and your Director uses the term Hell Week, take heed. It may not bode well. Being “artistic” is not an excuse for incompetence or poor planning. Directing requires both practical and artistic skills and as far as I’m concerned, I have to earn the opportunity to be artsy. I have to create the environment for that with lots of hard work.
If your Director is accustomed to having a Hell Week, they have bad time management skills. Or just don’t care. They may never get around to blocking the end of the play, or panic when they remember they need in costume/on set pictures, or have forgotten to put together a playlist for intermission, or never considered costume details until right before opening, or spent all their time on one tech element and have largely ignored the cast the whole time.
They may also be of the mind that shared suffering is the best way to create cast unity. It might build it, but it’s not necessary. The simple act of showing up together every day builds unity. Repeated and consistent shared activities – like tongue twisters or games or those tangents – builds unity. The expectation that you can depend on one another when the audience is there and all you have is one another – that builds unity. You don’t need a Hell Week.
You should not have to have a Hell Week. You should have consistent, sustainable work each day of rehearsal so that by the time you hit that week, it’s plain exciting. Lights and sound and costumes. The FUN stuff! That’s what you should look for in Directors and leaders – people who hold everyone to doing their job, who do their own job, and want you to be confident and at ease by the end of that last week of rehearsal, not a survivor of Hell.
* Every example I’ve used here is real. I’ve either experienced it or I’ve heard from reliable sources. If everyone would commit to not being that actor or that director, the theatre world would be a kinder place. Just say no to Hell Week; you can have better traditions.