We have reached the stage in Headwaters rehearsals where the whole production gets assembled.  Until Tuesday 6/23 all rehearsals had been scene rehearsals.  On Wednesday the 24th director Jerry Stropnicky assembled the first act, following a movement rehearsal with Celeste Miller.  The next night, Thursday, we assembled the second act, with more movement rehearsal preceding the "stumble-through."  Friday, we took a whack at the whole play. We didn’t finish it – some of the more complicated scenes needed additional work – but we can see that it’s beginning to cohere as a performance.

These rehearsals are a process of creative problem-solving.  For example, adjusting to the loom that the Fate character Lacy will use: Barbara Brady briefly declared it a tool of the devil, but then Jennie Inglis, the loom’s owner, gave her a few quick pointers and it became a much better relationship between Fate and loom.  The seating platforms that SNCA was able to purchase last year with a generous contribution from the Appalachian Regional Commission are wider than the design had anticipated, eliminating an entrance at the northeast corner of the stage – necessitating adjustments in choreography and the transitions between scenes.  Jerry Stropnicky used Wednesday and Thursday’s rehearsals to give people their direction for the transitions, and stage manager Jessi Evans has made a detailed map of how the show runs, which will be posted backstage.

This is a crucial  point in the rehearsal process.  Joyous, because the whole company gets to see how the pieces come together.  Difficult, because as of now (Sunday 6/28) there are only seven rehearsals left before our first (and only) preview performance for friends and family (tickets $5 at the door) on July 8.  It feels like there’s soooo much to be done: performers learning their lines, last edits on the script to catch little discrepancies and remove redundancies, finishing the set, learning how to make the puppets come alive.  What I know from a life spent in the theater is this: it feels like it will never come together, and then it does.  Not by magic, but by hard work.

The puppets are a joy to behold.  Our scenic and puppetry designer, Lynn Jeffries has spent many days in the gym cutting out shapes and gluing them to dowels for shadow puppets, and I bet that even now she’s at her work table creating the horse puppet for Cowboy. Many people were skeptical about puppets – we’ve all seen so many bad imitations of the muppets, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any other kind of puppetry. The puppets will be one of the great surprises for audiences who come to see Headwaters: Birth, Death and Places In-Between.  Jimbo and Cowboy’s misadventures are illustrated by shadow puppets, using a screen that looks like an extension of Lacy’s loom. 

Cowboy himself is a 3D puppet, with articulated limbs and a very expressive head – a conception brought to the text by playwright Jo Carson, and made real by Lynn Jeffries.  Alainey Penn, who’s playing the voice of Cowboy, has become an adept puppeteer who’s very funny.  This is one of the delights of producing a community story performance: Alainey wasn’t real sure about this stuff last year when her stepfather Mike Fisher asked her to make Headwaters :: Stories From A Goodly Portion Of Beautiful Northeast Georgia her summer activity with the family.  This year, she’s one of the leading lights in the cast – knew her lines after the first week, and quickly grasped how to be a voice and manipulate a horse’s head simultaneously.

We continue to work on music and movement, acting and reacting, even as we add technical elements that will make the production look, frankly, sumptuous.  Tonight we have our first technical run-through, and the performers  will learn how the show feels under stage lights – another thing to get used to.  Headwaters performers are asked to learn a lot as they go, and they’re wonderfully willing.

Here’s a short excerpt from the play’s opening song, just to offer a taste of where the music and movement are going:

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