Tag: directing
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Coming Soon
Coming soon: Here’s a little graphic I put together about my upcoming show. It’s a collection of comedic and dramatic sketches I’ve written over the past seven years. My good friend Doug is directing Act I while I have the helm for Act II. It’s going to be a bittersweet look back of what we…
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4 Weeks Off! Do you remember your lines?
Typically, when I’m directing a play, we will meet to do (hopefully) the whole play once a week. Then in the last month before the show, we ramp up the number of hours significantly and we’ll be ready. This time was strange. In the past four weeks, there are certain scenes we haven’t practiced at…
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Mega Season is Upon Us
Each year for my drama group the RLT Players (Road Less Traveled Players), I institute mega-practices. A mega-practice is simply an extra-long, nitty-gritty practice focused on one particular short sketch for a show. Our new show coming up in December has 10 original sketches we are working on. Therefore, we will have 10 different mega…
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Casting: The Worst Job in Theatre
I direct plays at the high school level. Why I haven’t “hired” someone to do my casting for me I’ll never know. In this type of setting, there’s nothing worse. Pitting my own regular actor against my own regular actor. When we do large second semester productions, it’s like putting family member against family member…
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Oops! My fault: A Director’s Mea Culpa
My new show opens in one week. It’s a series of 10 individual dramatic sketches. As I watched all ten performed as a whole on Monday, I realized that one of them was bad. Really bad. It’s not the script. Actually, it’s an award-winning script which will soon be performed in Sydney. No, it wasn’t…
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The Purpose of Dress Rehearsals
I’ve been directing stage plays for seven years now. I’m no professional, and I’ve learned a lot throughout the years. Dress rehearsals are the emotional peak that every director has to scale before a new show. Once it arrives and the actors poke through the clouds and stand on that emotional peak, a director’s job…
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The Key to Great Acting: Doing
When was the last time you walked into an office and saw four people standing shoulder to shoulder doing nothing in particular? As in just awkwardly standing there? In the middle of the work day? I suppose the answer to that is never. That was the certain scene I had to wrestle with today in…
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Last Night of Short & Sweet Theatre Penang
Here I am backstage with the cast of “‘No’ in Spite of Itself” written by yours truly and directed by Jackie (on my left). This awesome cast are all part of THE RLT PLAYERS who will be performing in the same venue in November. And here I am with the cast of “Noticed”…
Author Mark W Sasse 