I’ve been working to distill the action of The Lesson down to its essentials. More to the point, I've been selecting brief vignettes from the text that represent the overall action. This afternoon, we began staging, or choreographing, these 15 vignettes. Some of these passages are sections of dialogue. Some of them are phrases. The point of this exercise is to completely tell the story in very clear, brief terms. The 15 vignettes chart the action from the characters’ cordial greeting in the play’s first moments to the professor’s rapid-fire arithmetic quiz to the aftermath that follows the pupil’s death. All of the vignettes are taken from passages that speak most clearly about the play’s wider political objective. This play is about oppression. More specifically, it is about widespread governmental oppression and indoctrination. These 15 episodes will provide clarity to the play.

I’ve chosen to direct the middle third of the play. However, merely taking the middle 20 minutes out of an hour long script does not allow much creativity. Instead, the middle 20 minutes of this overall event will allude to both the beginning and ending sections through these 15 vignettes. The meat of our section begins with the professor’s linguistic monologues and ends just before he grabs the pupil’s wrist, roughly pages 60 to 70 in the Ionesco anthology Four Plays. The 15 vignettes will be cut into the body of this section. We will begin our performance with vignette #6, which reads:

Professor: That’s not it. That’s not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It’s not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That’s the way life is. That’s philosophy. That’s science. That’s progress, civilization.

This is the most important passage in the text. Everything else hinges upon this excerpt, and because of this, it will appear at the beginning, middle, and end of our performance. From this vignette we skip to the middle section as defined above. The vignettes will then be added at odd intervals during the main section. They will not, however, be performed in order. For example, the aftermath vignette comes well before the characters’ cordial greeting which come before the threatening “Knife, knife” vignette. Entering from behind the audience, the maid cues each vignette transition. As she enters, she strikes a pair of claves together. The sound controls the main characters. They immediately, seamlessly, switch gears to perform the appropriate vignette. Once it is completed, the maid strikes the claves a second time before exiting. This sends the characters back into the main text where they left off.

It is vital to the rhythm and flow of the piece that the transitions into and out of each vignette are extremely precise. We are working now to choreograph each vignette. Each of the 15 episodes have to be strictly codified. Tonight, we finished vignettes 1 through 5. By the rehearsal’s end, the actors were able to move randomly between vignettes. We are by no means finished with them. Rather, we’ve now set the groundwork for what will eventually be memorized. Tomorrow, I hope to finish the preliminary choreography. In direct contrast to this strict choreography, the main chronological text will be organically blocked. The stark contrast in styles should help the transitions into and out of each vignette.

Basically, I am telling the entire story of The Lesson through essential, yet randomly placed, pieces within the context of the middle 20 minutes of the script. The chronological script provides the medium for this deconstructed approach. I can't wait to see it work.

Below, are images from the first 5 vignettes.