End of Week 1

Hello all!

Well golly, I've already been here a week! Here's a little recap of my past week...

SUNDAY:
Got up, spent the majority of my day settling in- unpacking, moving furniture, amassing household essentials from the landlady, Norma, who is very friendly and accommodating. As funky as my apartment is, it does get GREAT light in the morning and the evening, and being as I won't really spend all that much time during the day, that suits me just fine. I borrowed the bike of my boss, Jen, and pedaled out to check out Barkerville, which was under a great deal of snow. That night, we had a "meet & greet" of all the actors, or "interpreters," as they call us, and crashed early.

MONDAY:
Biked in to Barkerville, and dove into the first day of rehearsal- great bunch of folks- Lynette, who grew up in Wells/Barkerville and is playing Bella Irving, a local hurdy-gurdy dancer turned washerwoman; Jacqueline, from Alberta, who is playing Madame Bendixon, a French woman who fled from a life in the French underworld to the Wilderness of BC, where she opened up a number of saloons; and Todd, who is playing Mr. Church, the local handiman. The town is well taken care of and well managed, and other people working in town are glad to see us rehearsing, which is always nice. Basically, 4 of us lead scheduled tours twice a day. The tour, in addition to being chock full of history, is a pretty entertaining one. I play Dr. Hugh Watt, who is the town physician, and is a major blowhard and the closest thing there is to a "villain" in the town. He's loud, obnoxious, against Women's rights, and just an overall annoyance to the other characters. Needless to say, it's going to be great fun. We got through all of the tour blocking, and planned to start working through the rest of our scenes and daily finales later on in the week.


TUESDAY:
More rehearsals, fine tuning and tweaking, but mostly just running the thing, as it's about 35 pages of text split amongst four of us, with alternating roles and different combinations of lines to keep the tour moving in a cohesive and understandable way!

WEDNESDAY:
We meet in the morning, and are told that we are going to start doing the tour on Monday- a week ahead of schedule! See, the park is already open, and there's only one of us, Todd (who's worked out here for a few years), that is really able to lead tours. As this puts a huge work load on Todd, it's decided to focus all of our energies on getting the tour up and running. We spend the day diving into character, which is great fun. I bellow and huff and puff and stomp around (for those of you who have seen Golden State, imagine Cubby as a Victorian doctor and not gay) and have great time doing so... We get through the tour twice, the second time I do basically off book- woo hoo! We also meet with Heather (the costumer) to try on our semi-finished costumes- I have a dapper maroon & gold-checked vest and brown coat- very swanky! The bigger news of the day is also that one of the male actors who hadn't arrived yet had to back out, so the hunt is on for a replacement!

THURSDAY:
Jacqueline and I start the day with a trip to the Barkerville archives, where we get to look over letters, newspaper articles, and other materials on the people we're playing- pretty wild! It turns out that Dr. Watt was even more of a jerk than I'd thought, which is just fine by me- it basically gives me just that much more license to bellow and insult people. After that, it's more and more of the same- just drilling the lines and sequences into our heads. We're beginning to really play with stuff- lots of ad-libbing, covering for each other, and just running with it. The Pub in Wells opens for the first time tonight, so a lot of folks get pretty drunk. I have some great talks with Matthew, our director, and Tim Sutherland, who plays one of the Judges at the courthouse and will perform his 1,000th speech as the judge this summer (for those of you who follow the puppet scene, he's also the director of OLD TROUT's "Famous Puppet Death Scenes"). After a Gunslinger and a Mark Dawson (a famous local non-alcoholic drink), I hit the hay after a phone call with someone I may have in mind as a replacement actor, and my daily phone date with Kate (who doesn't get up here until June 20!).

FRIDAY:
Since we've got a pretty good handle on the tour, we change gears and start working on one of the scenes, which we sort of play at random during the day... We also work one of our "Finales" which are the shows that we do at the end of the day. We also get a chance to see one of the town shows, which is a discourse on the British Columbia Gold Rush- very funny and informative (and performed by Mark Dawson, Dell'Arte alum!) We're all a bit wiped out from a full week of rehearsal, so we end about half an hour early. I come home to an apartment with high speed internet- yee haw! I spend most of the night setting up an internet phone line, the blog, and just cruising around online. I also start sealing the deal for the replacement actor- who shall remain nameless for the time being- give my brother Jordan a birthday call (he's 26!), hang out with my bosses, Jen & Faith, and the director.

SATURDAY:
A day off! I hitch a ride into the nearest big town (Quesnel, pop. 25,000) with Stewart, who runs the Chinatown tour in Barkerville, and Matthew. It's pretty amazing just how remote we are here in Wells- Quesnel is an hour away through mountains, forests, and along lakes and rivers. Once in town, we have some lunch (a delicious buffalo burger for me) and do some grocery shopping. So far, there's been very little culture shock for me- all of the packaging is in English and French, they've got $1 and $2 coins (loonies and toonies, respectively), I was served gravy with my French Fries, and they really do say "aboot," but otherwise, I could be just about anywhere in the states! Tonight I head to the Wells curling rink (oh yes, there is a curling rink in town) for a local woman's birthday party... Tomorrow is our last day before we do it for real- Yowza!

That's it for now, more to come!
Tyler