This week, brevity. My first week of enforced solitude, Elizabeth back in Pennsylvania to do a role in The Clean House with Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. So I’m here with the feral cats, a fridge full of easy-to-cook stuff, countless little tats of obligations to deal with, and a large, very empty house. But work moves forward:

• The Tempest is 4/5ths cast, and I’m very pleased thus far with the actors. Starting this week with our first pre-rehearsal meetings, which will span over the next three months, talking about character, doing some individual work on verse speaking, puppet technique, etc. Meantime, hopefully, we’ll find our fifth cohort.

• Elizabeth and I have finished our first discussion on the music & sound score. She’s carried a dense pack of sound equipment back to Bloomsburg, including her accordion, and will be working on it evenings after rehearsal. It’ll be scored much like a film, with music under probably about 3/4ths of it.

• I’m lurching my way through a series of videotapes at the Sonoma State U. library—they’re on reserve, so I can’t check’em out, have to sit there for hours at the video monitor. The series, “Speaking Shakespeare,” with director John Barton and an extraordinary cadre of actors—Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellan, Alan Howard, many others—doing workshop demonstrations, 10 hours of an extraordinary master class. Confirms a lot of my ideas about verbal style, but also pushes me toward a more broadly expressive style than is theirs, certainly with a much broader gestural palette.

• Finishing two more crucial castings: Prospero and his conspirator brother Antonio. Only three heads left: Ferdinand, Miranda, and finally Caliban the impossible.

Prospero is a special challenge in the sculpting, as he must look like me. I’m playing Prospero both as my own bare-faced, full-sized self when relating to Ariel, the Spirits and the audience, yet manipulating the puppet Prospero in front of me as he relates to all the other human characters. Sculpting is first of all a matter of learning to see, and seeing yourself with fresh eyes is a novel experience. I photographed my head from every angle, pasted them all into a Photoshop document, and propped nine images of myself up beside the clay, plus a mirror. I think I’m coming pretty close: we’ll see better when the fnal eyes, hair and color are in.

But it’s also a matter of finding the right expression, considering that he doesn’t change expression the whole length of the play. Some characters, such as Sebastian, lend themselves to a predominant emotional expression, but for Prospero, what’s necessary is that cast of face that’s on the verge of expression—the musculature that’s there immediately preceding the burst of rage, the laugh, the urgency, etc.

Antonio is perhaps a more difficult challenge. He must look like a younger brother, needs a strong resemblance, and so I sculpted him as soon as I was satisfied with Prospero. At the same time, his inner nature is very different, and he has to form a good match with his co-conspirator Sebastian—who likewise was based on a “degenerated” version of his brother Alonso, the king.

Oddly, I found the key to Antonio in a comment Elizabeth made when I was sculpting Prospero, saying that my in-process Prospero looked too much like my dad. And yes, the more recessive jawbone, slightly sharper features, a bit more of the rat—which, I’m sad to say, was one aspect of my father. And so I changed these features in Prospero but drew on them strongly for Antonio.

In sculpting, I use unpainted glass globs for eyes, just to get a sense of the desirable placement and how they affect the other features, then remove them for casting. I’m getting more skilled with papier mache and finding a great affinity with the material a Toronto puppet-builder Mathieu Rene recommended to me: coffee filters. Very absorbent, very strong, and very easy to blend smoothly. Eight layers on each head, with lots of burnishing, takes a long, long time—nearly an hour on each layer—but for the lightness and strength it’s worth it.

More inspiring prose, perhaps, next week.

Peace & joy—
Conrad