Cab by Morris Panych - drama activity

Drama activity – Cab by Morris Panych

After deciding that the drama activity needed to perform a piece in order to emphasize its role in the community and feel the breeze of a theatrical production, we finally decided to put together a piece.

None of the participant of the activity was involved in the selection of the play. It was all made by the activity leaders, and to be honest I personally didn’t appreciate the choice. Perhaps, any of us participants, especially the theatre students could have gave good suggestion and help for a better choice of the play. They chosen play is Cab by Morris Panych, a Canadian play writer who is also famous as an actor. Interesting choice was not to choose any particularly known play, but a really specific North American amateur play.

I was asked to direct the play and honestly I was really pleased. I knew I wouldn’t have completely enjoyed acting in the play, but being able to develop my theatrical skills also outside the theatre department was really nice.

• 6^th April: today we had our first rehearsal and just an overview of the situation. What emerged mostly is that:

-         I will have to work on staging with everybody.

-         I will have to meet individually with Silvia for pronunciation

-         I will have to help both Ujamaa and Farabee with line memorization

-         Me and Abhinav have to work on our roles. He should be the “tech man” although for now is more like a co-director when obviously not necessary. I do appreciate his suggestions the most of the time, but it is also true that two contradictory opinions don’t always work well together.

• 8^th of April. Ujamaa and Laura didn’t show up. It didn’t really make me happy, also because this is my free time and as I show up, as we all show up, everybody should show up. We went through the lines and made some exercises for personification, but it is really hard to work in general with people without any theatrical experience in term of method of rehearsing and concentration. I’m starting to look for costumes.
• 13^th April. Today Sylvia didn’t come, but we were still able to have a good rehearsal.
• 15^th April. Today we had our first and so desired rehearsal with Libby. I love her; she is just so good (of course). She helped us a lot giving us a lot of specific and precious notes. Of course the show is tomorrow so this is what we got. We weren’t able to rehears a lot and people didn’t always show up. So, Nuit Blanche is tomorrow and this is what we’ve got.
• 15^th April: Just a beautiful result. Beautiful because it was simply the best we could have get. Everybody took it in a really funny way and we all had a lot of fun. Our audience had fun and a good time; therefore we were able to satisfy our audience and also in somehow our selves. What also made it also really nice, unexpectedly was improvisation.

Today I realize how important it is in a show to have a production crew; fundamental. This might sound as a really banal and useless note, but I would have never thought that it is not just the actors that make the accomplishment and beauty of the production. Actors without a good director and a good production crew are nothing. And of course, this limited a lot our production. It was amateur and for the amount of people that were involved, I can definitely say that we were successful and we achieved more than we expected. I also got to do the light for half of the show, which was really nice. A pit was the non achievement of my initial concept of all dress in white except Cab in yellow, but we just end up using basically our normal costumes.

But overall, it was a really good theatrical experience and I enjoyed it, more than also having fun.