I began by reading the script, then breaking down each of the scenes. I noted every aspect that stood out to me: poignant lines from the scenes, stage directions, images I visualized, aesthetics I was reminded of, and types of performances I wanted to explore. I prepped these notes for my first meeting with Neha, where we talked about our desires and dreams for the show. We also talked constraints and feasibility, working within a two week time span. Our meeting was constructive, discussing the type of story we wanted to tell and what questions we wanted to ask. We landed upon the question: How do we showcase a descent into madness? From there, we created a rough draft of a structure from cuts of the script to start exploring. 

At the end of the meeting, Neha gave me homework to do before we met again the following week. Neha is fantastic at assigning homework to actors, and unlike reluctant school kids, I say that as the highest compliment. She is a great listener, taking in what you need as an actor and giving you a task to draw out the missing information. Throughout this two week process, I felt Neha was attuned to what I needed, what I brought to the space, and what I was interested in exploring. 

The pre-rehearsal homework Neha assigned aimed at aiding my understanding of all the character’s intentions and thoughts throughout the play. This was, of course, when I was still ambitiously planning to portray multiple characters in this solo work.

My Pre-Rehearsal Homework: 

• Read the script and highlight Katurian’s lines that represent him as a storyteller, as a character (morals), speak on the situation 

  • Reality vs story, we’re playing with his thoughts 

• Do a deep dive on Katurian’s character what are his wants 

• For all characters, find:

  • What do I say about myself

  • What do others say about me

  • Observe how your wants change

• Put the stories in order, think about why he wrote them, what do they mean to him

We got off to a slow start with physical, in-person rehearsals, due to scheduling issues and illness. Our first meeting was on October 9th, and required us to scale back the structure of the show due to time constraints. We decided to explore the singular main character of the piece, Katurian. We adjusted our previous question to better reflect the new structure and goals: How do we show the effects of isolation on Katurian’s mind? 

Rehearsals 1 & 2

Our rehearsals together were brief but beneficial and enlightening. Since it was my first dip into exploring Katurian, Neha began with a Hot Seat exercise. This exercise has the actor seated in a chair, being interrogated for 25 minutes straight about anything and everything the interrogator - in this case Neha - can think of. We returned to this exercise several times to find further gaps in our knowledge of our characters. There was another exercise, the 24-hour exercise, that was initially done on the first day, then reused repeatedly because the character discoveries were so rewarding in every scenario we developed. The 24-hour exercise requires going through a 24 hour day as your character - but not in real time. While the actor walks through their day in the space, the director or facilitator calls out times. These times are not equally distributed, but explored until the actor feels comfortable with the range of possibilities the time could encompass. The actor might spend two minutes at 10:00am but only 30 seconds at 10:30am. This exercise helped me every time, it immersed me into the character and gave the experiences a lived-in feel. We used it in the first rehearsal to explore Katurian’s average day, and we used it in later rehearsals when I was trying to delve deeper into his physicality and get a better grasp on his reaction to being stuck in a cell alone for days. In the first use of it, we had many realizations about Katurian, including his heavy smoking habits, what time of the day he writes, what his job is like, etc. These discoveries, conceptually, were not new to me as an actor, but the method of discovery was. Usually, I am answering these questions at a desk, deep in text work. Using the 24-hour exercise, I allowed my body to make decisions my head probably would not have. 

I worked outside of rehearsals to pull images from stories we adapted for our script, build my visualizations of how Michal - Katurian’s brother - is reacting to the story, and memorization of the script.

Some Notes/Questions from Rehearsal - October 12th:

• Working on structure 

  • Telling the Pillowman story 

  • Working with shadow puppets and puppeting with the body 

• Section 2a: Vulnerability and fear in the confessionals 

  • Always having a gun in your face 

  • If I say the wrong thing, they’ll pull the trigger- how do you carefully measure your words 

• Etude building the world of the memory 

  • Exploring the space as if it’s the memory 

    • When did he start writing? What were his first stories like?

• Telling the story during a fit of insomnia 

• Section 3

  • Explaining it to Michal, the Pillowman’s job 

  • Creating the Pillowman sitting under the weeping willow 

  • Physically exploring the stories while Neha reads them 

  • Play with the idea of telling a goodnight story to him, how does the pillow become the pillow boy or get incorporated into different parts of the story 

• Telling the story by the bedside (TRYING TO FIX MY LAST REGRET OF KILLING MICHAL AND NOT BELIEVING IN HIS HUMANITY- setting the story straight before I die) 

  • Giving him the happy ending he didn't get 

HW: Find four corners of the space to recreate four core memories from Katurian’s life that happened before the start of the play and shaped who he is (what makes this character who they are), 5th memory end up back in the present 

• 1st memory: night of his 7th birthday 

• 2nd memory: writing his first story 

• 3rd memory: killing his parents 

• 4th: walking Michal to school 

• 5th: getting arrested 

• Come up with Katurian’s river map 

• Write down any discoveries you have from the memories and any gestures and physicality that come out of it 

Choose three memories to do three journal entries from Katurian’s perspective  

For these two rehearsals I was completely alone, working in my apartment to build my version of Katurian. I began with a 15-30 minute warm-up, every rehearsal, to be physically present and awake to play around with character discovery. After this, I dove into the character homework Neha assigned, which included a four corners exercise and creating a river map. The river map was helpful, allowing me to track Katurian’s life up until that point. The four corners exercise was new to me. The goal of the exercise is to fully embody and recreate four different, non-script memories your character has from various times in their life, in the four corners of the rehearsal space. You let your mind imagine being in totally different spaces, times, and scenarios while exploring these memories. Ideally, this is done in the space you will be performing in, to endow the performance space with the memories. I was in my bedroom, which was small and dark, but served well for completing the exercise. I crafted five memories, all of which were important in helping shape Katurian’s inner world. They explored how he deals with being scared, how he killed his parents, and what the experience was like for him. How did he feel afterwards? As an actor, I could use these memories when making in-the-moment choices when I was living through Katurian in the space. I began building a malleable structure for the piece and how I thought Katurian might behave while entertaining himself in isolation. 

Taking extensive notes on my thoughts in rehearsals throughout this project helped me to craft a better understanding of my own practice and process as an artist. At the end of a week, or every few rehearsals, I would reread the notes. These rereads allowed me to work through my thoughts on the piece, my perspective on the character’s thoughts and how they exist within the story. With Neha unable to be present at these five rehearsals, it was important to be explicit in my notes. What was I thinking, feeling, questioning, discovering. What I wanted to explore moving forward, etc. The first two rehearsals by myself helped establish a rehearsal framework and sharpened my ability to track my thoughts on a piece through written notes. 

Some Notes/Questions from Rehearsal - October 14th & 15th: 

• Four Corners Exercise

  • 1st memory: night of his 7th birthday 

  • 2nd memory: writing his first story 

  • 3rd memory: killing his parents 

  • 4th: walking Michal to school 

  • 5th: getting arrested

• Creating Katurian’s river map 

• Writing down discoveries/gestures that came out of the 4 corner exercises 

• 1a: Thinking about how to show his emotion to no one- who does he think he’s talking to/what is his environment? 

  • What is his body language? Starting in the chair, does he ever get brave enough to stand? What about when his brother is involved? Caged animal vibes 

  • Finding the crescendo in his behavior 

• 2: Playing with the shadow idea- playing with the projector and creating shadow characters

  • How can I use just my arms to create the aura of these characters 

HW: Journal entries from Katurian's perspective, work on memorization

• Tomorrow go over 3 & 3a

• Try to completely stumble through the first section (1 & 1a) off book to see what happens 

• play with shadows and puppeting on section 2 

• Need to look at 2a and go into Katurian’s head during his confession

• Katurian’s journal entries

• Make the Pillowman fun for yourself 

• Put initial blocking thoughts into a pdf of the script 

• Work on sections 2a, 3, 3a 

  • Want to work on transition from 3-3a and how do I bring the energy back up to end it after I just put Michal to sleep? 

  • Would I take off the hood at the end? “And I was” 

In these rehearsals I was in an actual rehearsal room, which was great. In addition, I recruited a few people from my cohort as outside observers, to alleviate my struggles with continuing character exploration on my own without an in-the-moment sounding board. In my solo work, I would often complete a character exploration and immediately felt like I had closed all other doors, even if the original exploration was not satisfactory. I wanted someone to tell me what worked and what did not, to have an opinion other than my own, and one that was not putting pressure on the performance. Neha had watched my videos, sent me notes and things to work on, which I was able to incorporate into rehearsals with my outside eyes. 

Some of Neha’s notes to work on October 16:

• Physicality of Katurian is developing well

• Layer in the situation more, use the character work in the different sections

• Try using a more bleak tone on the stories, looking for the dread 

  • Maybe the story shifts in and out of reality 

• Do the 24 hour exercise with atmosphere - what would you do if you were locked in confinement, what positions would you be in, what would you do to bide your time in character? Would he write? How would he sit? When does he sleep? Is he counting the cracks in the walls? 

• Interrogation section- more calm to begin with, ramp up not such a steep crescendo - seemed out of character being frantic, fear slipping out slowly, tension of saying the wrong thing, more of a suspicious calm defensive 

• Let the character work feed into your physicality 

  • Write down all the facts you know when you’re in the jail cell, what are the sensory aspects? 

On October 16th, I worked the 24 hour exercise for 32 minutes, uncovering many things about Katurian in the jail cell. I found Katurian was restless in the dark, looking for ways out without getting caught. He hardly slept, he never ate. Always hearing things and grasping at remembered stories, attempting to conjure Michal in his mind, writing even when he did not have paper. I wrote down my observations on all the different sensory elements that I experienced during the 24-hour exercise in Katurian’s cell, and then my outside eyes gave me feedback on what they observed. This was helpful because they noticed things that had not stood out to me, but did to them, and pointed out how an audience member might read into Katurian’s actions. We spent time putting the story sections up on their feet and exploring how they fit within the piece. It was important for me to understand all the ways Katurian told these stories, and all the ways he could tell these stories. We played with many different versions of storytelling, and explored how the perspective of the story teller, the voice through which the story was told, affected what the audience experienced. Through the multiple stories, myself and my outside eyes curated a large list of questions to play with in future rehearsals. 

Some Notes/Questions from Rehearsal - October 16 

• What is your intention with the key trigger words? Am I trying to scare Michal? 

  • Am I trying to mitigate his fear? 

  • Am I freaked out by his responses?

• How do the character’s voices change when they’re older and about to kill themselves? 

  • Is there an opportunity to sing or hum? 

• What happens if everything slows down?

• Sensory explorations within the 24 hour exercise 

  • I felt, I saw, I heard, I tasted, I smelled

• Am I reliving this to Michal? 

  • Do I know he’s there? 

  • Am I pretending for myself? 

  • What does it cost to speak these stories out loud? 

From Neha:

• Don’t get stuck in the blocking - locked into one choice

• Authentic and organic, how can we tell the story authentically

• Don’t lose the core of what you’re doing 

• Focus on honing in on what you want in every section- revisit your intentions as Katurian, especially in the interrogation section 

  •  No point in doing something to the audience unless you want something from them 

  • Don’t shy away from it, fully commit to them being in the space 

• What does the paranoia of surveillance do to you? 

• For the sake of character study not production value 

• Homework: 

• Warm up with a long hot seat 

• Play with the whole first section on the floor

  • The original context of the Pillowman story is that Katurian is thinking about ways of escaping while telling the story.

• For section 2 try a version where you are thinking of your brother’s abuse while you tell the story.

• What happens if you try the third section with the context that you know you have to kill your brother? 

• Important to try the Pillowman story out in its original context with the original intentions. I think this could play into paranoia and the cameras.

The next two days I dove into extensive character explorations to find out what I still did not know about Katurian. We did a ton of memorization and line exercises to track Katurian’s thoughts in real time as we moved through the structure. I was able to identify when his thoughts switched; from caring about his brother, to caring about how his stories are perceived, to caring about saving them. I walked through the sections reflecting on Katurian’s investigations and the corresponding rapid decline in his mental facilities. In order to find that within myself, I worked the interrogations over and over, answering in new ways, feeling out the tempo of his descent into complete madness before his inevitable death. I worked on identifying each scene as its own Laban effort, curious about how that lives in my body regardless of the blocking. What was my internal vs external state of tension? How did I articulate that? 

Some Notes/Questions from Rehearsal - October 17 & 18th:

• Hot seat exercises 

  • New, personal rapid fire questions 

  • What don’t you know about Katurian? 

• Interrogation scenes- memorize your wants 

• Memorizing with line exercises

  • Walking on an imaginary grid and changing direction with each change of thought 

  • Starting from random points in the script 

• Work on embracing the situation 

• Find the opposition between the storytelling and the moments of interrogation 

  • Specify the differences in the two journeys 

• How little can you give away and still tell the story? 

  • Doing less with your body = doing more with the lines 

• Exploring extreme stillness and eye movement and how that affects the energy of delivery

Synthesizing a primary finding from this piece was difficult. I felt, despite the compressed timeline of this project, it was one of the most fruitful. It facilitated a great deal of beneficial explorations and rewarding discoveries in how to grow a character and maintain a sustainable process under unusual conditions. 

The prevailing theme for this case study is RIGOUR in reflective practice and documentation. This project required reflection and articulation of sensations I had not explored within any prior project. It is unlikely I will always need such extensive articulation in the future, but having all this invisible work and clear journaling of my thoughts throughout the process is extremely valuable to me when I look back at what worked best at how I build my characters. This rigour in my reflective practice and documentation of a project is something I want to bring with me to other processes.

At the same time, the rigour demanded by the entire project being compressed into such a short time frame allowed me to place myself in a pressure-cooker, one which squeezed a version of Katurian out that would not have been there without the pressure and rigour. Of course, having more time would have been great, but it was exciting and I felt ambitious, knowing I only had seven rehearsals to crack open Katurian’s mind, following his journey into madness. 

I set out with this piece to explore and observe how learning a one-woman show, while exploring multiple characters, would change my process. Reality required me to narrow my focus to a singular character, which produced valuable shifts in my practice and process. The most applicable in this performance, and one I want to continue to use in future pieces, was the 24 hour exercise. In my pre-rehearsal practices, this exercise helped me establish a firmer grasp on the crux of the characters I portrayed. I found those exercises to be immensely helpful for me in building a character’s journey, through embodiment and connection to the work itself, and the character’s place within. I want to continue to actively reflect within processes, articulating the feelings and journeys my characters experience. This project emphasized the importance of regimen, follow-through, and accountability within an actor’s process. I am adding this tool to my actor’s toolbox, using it alongside others to continue honing my reflective practice as an artist.