fourth rehearsal: Bobo and Brian

50 days until we open *The Zoo Story* at Empyrean: the luxury of a leisurely rehearsal period. We marked the beats, then devised physical gestures for each and ran the scripts as best we could, sort of improvising as we went. Nothing new for many actors, I know -- just breaking down the script, getting on our feet, and making motivations in each subsection foremost by associating gestures with the emotions in each chunk. When Jerry (the angry man) is pumping Peter (the bourgeois conformist) for information, basically interrogating him, Brian came up with the idea of literally spinning me, twirling me about as if I were his plaything. Another sequence had us basically fencing: He'd poke at me with my fingers while I tried to fend him off with open palms, like a trainer in boxing who takes punches in those big catcher's mitts they wear. Nothing radically new, but a lot of fun and a great way to internalize the shifting emotions within a script.