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« on: Feb 01, 2009, 11:37 pm »
IMHO (big big IMHO here) this is not a good idea for several reasons.
First of all, it is extremely difficult to see the big picture while you are also focusing on the details. While writer/director is an OK, albeit risky combination, adding SM to that soup is going to give you too many hats to wear and too many sides of the puzzle to focus on at once. What happens when your actors go off book while you're in the middle of character interpretation? What happens when you're on your feet tracing a scene and come up with nine or ten new prop needs? What happens when the lighting designer wants to add six cues in tech while you're up on stage adjusting staging to accomodate for new scenery? Best to split the jobs if possible.
Secondly, you say that for a new work you are planning on handing in a completed prompt book two years in advance. While this is admirable, I am curious as to how this feat will be accomplished without a full design team and cast already in place. In every show I've worked on, cues and quick changes and actor "bits" and frequently even script cuts were not final until bows at opening night.
Thirdly I think you are underestimating the demands and decisions required when directing a show. Actors will not just blandly take whatever blocking, line readings and motivations you give them - it's a give and take and if the acting is to feel organic (again, IMHO) they need to find their own route to making your words sound legitimate when placed in their mouths. Even if you put hundreds of stage directions into the script, the demands of the performance space or the physical abilities of the actor or the general orneriness of their personality will cause those stage directions to be ignored.
An infinite number of Hamlets will have an infinite number of run-times even though the words are always the same.
Theatre is a dynamic and collaborative art. Even one-man shows have multiple people contributing to the final product - designers bring their own ideas, production budgets alter the scale of the vision, major disasters happen that render entire scenes unusable. The beauty of the art is the end effect (also dynamic) produced by all of these minds and hands coming together to interpret the work of the playwright. If you lock everything to one person's vision what you have is a movie performed by robots. As much as the SM's love for order makes us want to lock a show as soon as we possibly can - ideally at first read through if possible - we have to accept that shows must grow and change until the very last possible minute, otherwise there is no point in doing live theatre.
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