Proposal for the director’s notebook

My play for my director’s notebook is Caucasian Chalk Circle. It is a Brecht play and I love Brecht style. CA has finished this production last fall, but I am not satisfied with that production after I learned more about Brecht and his style. In this project, I don’t have the limitation that a high school theatre has so I can achieve my “epic theatre”. I will mostly follow Brecht style when doing this project. 

Before I start to working on everything, I will read my Caucasian Chalk Circle again and read another biography of Brecht during the summer, so I will know more about Brecht and his idea of “epic” theatre and more about his techniques. After that, I plan to watch 2 or 3 production of Caucasian Chalk Circle and one of them will be Brecht’s production. I believe during the summer and next semester I will have new chances to know more about theatre techniques, and I will mostly use technologies to show how is an “epic’ theatre looks like. 

From technical aspects, I have several ideas of my tech choices already. My story will occur on a huge proscenium stage, probably like 35 yards in width and 30 yards in height. My performers for the prologue will all wear military uniforms with many Soviet Union symbols on it. The prologue will be realistic and natural, and everything after that will be exaggerated or act in another way because that was the “story” I want people be critical at. As the singer starts the scene one, he will walk into back stage and appears standing high again on some height at the top of the stage, and he will stay there for the whole play as the narrator. During the time period of the singer walking up, everyone will participate the story will be constructing the stage for the story themselves—this arrangement is close to Brecht’s “make performers prepare props on stage”. Also, the orchestra will not be sitting somewhere between the down stage and the audience. The orchestra members will be on the stage at the prologue, sitting with others as the “workers of the collective farm.” And then, when people are setting up the stage pieces, they will move their instruments from back stage to sides of the stage and they will perform on two sides of the stage (I don’t know if that works acoustically and that’s one reason why I need a huge stage). Based on the conditions above, my materials for stage pieces should be maneuverable. So I will do a research on the story after I watch the 2 or 3 production to see what stage pieces I need to have, then I can have an idea of what kind of material I need and what to buy. Despite of all above, I will design several points in the story that actors will do really bad suddenly but they will recover soon, as a reminder to the audience that everything happening is a story inside another story.

The themes in my production will be mostly negative themes. For examples: the betrayal of the fat prince, the indifference of Grusha’s sister in law, the greed of Ironshirts, the poverty of the people in mountain, the hopelessness of the war brought to people... etc. As a Brecht fan, I will focus on negative social issues, and audience will feel little warm themes in my play. To compensate, I may need to do several comedy moment inside the story.