Hour Fourteen: The Word Made Flesh

By 8am, each director is paired with one of his or her three top-ranked scripts. The directors gather up their casts and fan out into different corners of the Inge Theater, where they promptly launch into preliminary read-throughs. Above, even as Inge Center staff scramble to assign rehearsal rooms, members of two newly assembled casts begin scoping out the prop table and costume rack, jockeying for the right to choose their pieces first.


Each cast is allotted one hour of time rehearsing on the stage where they will be performing tonight. Inevitably, one cast has to draw the short straw, and mere minutes after they receive their scripts, the cast of "Spite Brought Us Together," by Danielle Roberts, begin to map out their blocking. Above, the cast of "What Is Imagination?" try to unravel the interplay of "real" and "pretend" worlds within their script. Without playwright Crystal Moon on hand to tease out some of the intricacies of the script, director Lea Shepard has to make a series of educated guesses based on her own knowledge and experience in the theater.


The cast of "Rainbows Don't Just Symbolize God's Covenant With Noah" runs lines in anticipation of their 11am stage call. During the writing of "Rainbows," playwright Aubrey Near tried out a number of different endings for the play, and the one that appears in the final version of the script just does not seem to be clicking with the show's cast. Director Kelly Webber ponders whether there might be a way to tweak the ending for tonight's performance, while staying true to Near's original intentions for the piece. It's a difficult balance to strike, and a valuable reminder of the fact that a play in print and a play as performed by living, breathing actors are two very different things.