Do you definitely want to hit her in the face?
Bam! Yeah.
Jackie, you want to come flip over this table?
Yeah!
What is happening here?
Like over the head.
Clothing grab and a one-hand choke.
Great. Acting ensues. Beautiful.
When you go on stage, we’re on stage to tell a story and the fight is every bit a
part of that.
What I want this to really be about here is acting the crap out of your, your fight scene.
It’s not yours! It is mine!
Ninety-nine point nine, if not a hundred percent of the time, it’s the climax of the show
and so it has to be moving the story forward.
Silence! Eat your food.
I will not be abused by impatience.
There’s a lot of violence in Mrs. Packard because the play takes place in this mental
institution in the 1800s.
The violence in the show is supposed to depict the violence that actually occurred in these
asylums—they were very violent places and the patients were treated very poorly.
People get slapped, people have their hair grabbed, people are dragged, people are picked
up, people are drowned or tortured with water.
I knew that I needed help with the violence—uh, first and foremost, I need someone who knew
how to choreograph something safely.
But also, to make it look good. If you don’t have a good fight choreographer, it could
look sloppy or unrealistic and in a play like this you need it to be believable.
Quiet!
When having a moment of stage combat you can have contact moves and non-contact moves.
In a non-contact slap, Flynn will take her hand, pass the target across her partner’s
face; her partner will turn her head and make the nap.
It’ll make that kind of clap sound at the same time that’s happening, so the audience
believes it’s a slap.
But if the audience is sitting fully in the round as they are in Mrs. Packard, you can’t
mask anything—if the audience were on the side ninety degrees, they would see the foot
of space. It would look ridiculous.
So in Mrs. Packard, it’s a constant challenge that we work with, and we want something to
look brutal, but we can’t hide anything from the audience.
We have to be very careful and work a lot harder to, like, do these contact moves and
make sure they’re safe, but also look realistic.
Shut-up, you.
[laughs]
That was a little off.
That was a little—it’s okay.
It’s hard to hit someone, even if you know that you’re not hurting them.
This is never going to be a big move, right, cause it’s not safe to send a ton of energy
into your partner’s face.
You’re going to kind of glance off of it. This is going to be small; it’s going to
be tight.
There you go.
The process is a lot more grueling than one would imagine when seeing the action onstage
because it’s so—so quick.
I think right now the most challenging is the dunking Mrs. Packard’s head into the
bucket of water. In that move, like, it’s supposed to look like, you know, I’m causing
all of the violence, but really Flynn is in charge of, like, when her head moves up and
down.
The trick is Mrs. Bonner puts her hand on my neck and slides it up.
I’m not actually holding onto anything, I’m just making, like, a claw hand.
I grab her hand behind my neck and control the dunking motion, but it looks like she’s
controlling it the whole time.
This is a perfect example of, like, ‘we have class and you learn how to do things,’
but then what you’re going to do in an actual show is probably not the exact thing we’ve
done in class—we didn’t cover water torture in our semester. But, what you’re doing
is you’re using all these great, um, foundational skills that you’ve learned in class to figure
out how to keep yourself safe.
I think it’s easy to say stage combat is just something that happens, but no one really
thinks about the intricacies that go into that.
When something looks very natural to the audience, there is a whole lot of artifice behind it,
which means, like, really good actors. It’s not just the choreographer who’s created
a great story—definitely part of it—but it’s the ability of the actors to, like,
commit to that technique and sell it.
Once you know you’re in complete control of something, it’s really fun.
I think we should end on that one actually, that was great! How’s your face?
It’s a little soar.
Soar a little? Yeah.