Shrdlu, Rehearsal, The Adding Machine: 2004.06.23

Rehearsal @ Ron's appartment, Ocean Parkway

Rehearsal Technique: General/Specific Insights/Principles

I still don’t quite have specific objectives for Shrdlu, just rough impressions of his general ‘state.’ Until I know what he wants, moment-by-moment, it’ll be vague. But Ron’s way of working is interesting: he seems to direct with externals, e.g, 'move this way here, ‘slow down there,’ talk to Zero only when you say what you did to your mother, otherwise look out at the audience.’

Big question: does/will a specific objective-based structure come out of this way of working? It can certainly open doors to objectives, if it suddenly helps reveal why Shrdlu says what he does at any given point in time. If not, the external-based direction won’t work – it’ll just be a mechanical movement or voice adjustment.

Specifics – operational concept of the day. The more, the stronger, the clearer, the better.

For example, much of what S attends to in his monologue (to Mr. Zero) are external objects and facts, objective-invariant objects of attention, e.g., “I am the most foulest, the most sinful of murders.” I can easily imagine the most foul, the most ‘sinful’ murder, emotionally (to me) much worse than what Mr. Zero did to his boss. Once I have that ‘specific’-emotional binding, I seem to be able to use that in the pursuit of many objectives, e.g., I can scare Zero with this; I can try to make Zero see how lucky he is not to be like me. The personal ‘specifics’ I bind to Shrdlu’s specifics seem to be objective-invariant, i.e., they hold independent of any objective.

Idea: Guskin’s taking-it-off-the-page maybe most useful for generating personal specifics rather than revealing particular objectives of the character. An objective-based structure may spontaneously come out of these specifics, i.e., the specifics are not appropriate for every objective, therefore they may be putting constraints on what the character wants.