image by w.johnson
“Always be comic in tragedy I say. Find the comedy in tragedy and there you shall find the truth.” – The Man Who Was Thursday
It’s been a good stretch since I’ve worked on a comedy. There have been comic elements in my projects of late, but in The Man Who Was Thursday, I have a chance to jump inside a real farce. The comedy in this play is so multi-faceted: from witty banter to sight gags, to a nigh-impossible chase, the jokes and reveals and reversals are a lot of fun to play with. But it’s very different from staging drama.
When you’ve been away from pure comedy for a while, I think it’s easy to forget the kind of precision, the specificity, the meticulous ways you need to craft each moment in order for jokes to land, for the words to hit, the elbows to just past noses instead of into them. Luckily, my casting streak is holding and I have managed to assemble a team of 10 very funny men who are doing a great deal of the funny heavy lifting.
It’s interesting to me that while working on a show like Six Years or Touch it was an important and very conscious goal to keep a positive, light-as-possible-given-the-circumstances environment in the rehearsal room. I think there’s an assumption that working on comedy will be easy, fun, simpler somehow. But it’s true what they say in the movies – comedy’s tough. It requires a specific kind of focus, and different kind of ensemble, a totally different sort of trust – as does working with an ensemble of only fellas.
We’ve been finding our footing and refining our focus together for the past couple weeks – and crafting a language together that I’m eager to watch evolve – and become even more hilarious.
