"Dial M For Murder" STARTS REHEARSAL

"Dial M For Murder"

We started rehearsal yesterday and are already moving through this very dense, very 'talky' piece quite quickly. There is a lot of information to be pieced out and many tiny details involving placement of items on stage that have to be worked, considered, re-worked and re-considered.

We started blocking the murder scene today. They say that for every minute of choreography that you see in a dance number on stage, at least one hour of staging time has gone into it. It's the same with something as complicated as staging a murder, with the added complication of making sure that the scene can be performed over and over again without actually injuring any of the actors involved.

Here's what the audience sees:

Margot crosses the stage, having been roused from bed to answer the phone. She picks up the phone, but no one is there. As she puts the receiver down, Lesgate, who has been hiding behind the curtains, sneaks up behind her and wraps a scarf around her throat. There is a brief struggle, during which Margot gets turned around to face her attacker and he lays her across the desk so that he is lying on top of her, still trying to strangle her. She feels around on the desk, finds a pair of scissors and stabs him in the back with them. He releases his grip, stands and then drops dead, tipping over a chair with him as he falls. The whole thing takes less than 60 seconds.

Seems simple enough, no?

Here is a sampling of the questions that we had to address in the preliminary creation of this 90 second moment of action:
Where does Deb's (the actress) hand need to be placed in order to protect her throat from any possible damage from the scarf?
Where does my head need to be in order to keep my nose from being bashed by her head when she jerks it back?
What steps, exactly, does it take for Margot to get laid back on the desk with her attacker on top of her?
What props might need to be removed from the desk that might still be lying there from the scene before, and who removes them, and when?
Where does the lamp need to be positioned in order for Margot to have enough room to lie across the desk?
What does she have to do in order to make sure that the phone receiver falls to the floor every time, and not on the desk, otherwise she'll be lying on it.
Does the phone cradle need to be secured to the desk to keep it from falling to the floor as well?
Where do the scissors have to be placed so that she can reach them?
How can the scissors be lightly secured to the desk to keep them from accidentally falling to the floor, but still be available for her to pick up?
After the stabbing, how can both parties quickly get up from the desk while at the same time concealing the stage magic that make is look like a man has scissors sticking out of his back?
Where, anatomically, did she stab me? Did she puncture a lung? Interfere with the spine?
How long would it take to die?
How do I pull the chair over with my body weight, night after night, without hurting myself, but still making it look like I drive the scissors deeper into my own back by rolling over on them?
And, most importantly, because Margot refers to "his staring lifeless eyes", how do I lie with my eyes open until someone covers me with a blanket in the next scene?

This list covers only the really important topics. There were a mountain of other, secondary issues that came up in the time that we spent staging this moment.