2024 - 5th Play - 10 Out of 12 by Anne Washburn
Shane Kenyon (front, right) with Eunice Woods and Kyle Gibson (left)/Photo: Charles Osgood from Theatre Wit’s production of 10 out of 12 in Chicago.
I am fascinated by MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY, but have only read it. Dying to see it! In a book that I have on my play shelf, I found that play and a couple other of Anne Washburn’s plays. I remember that Theatre Wit in Chicago did 10 OUT OF 12 a bit ago, so thought I’d read that one for my next play-a-day-in-July. Fascinating …
Summary: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to tech. Around you, a company of 14 is engaged in the very peculiar—and peculiarly impossible—task of making a new play. You’ll have a seat next to the sound designer as he mixes cues. You’ll eavesdrop on backstage gossip as it happens over headset. You’ll watch the director struggle to contain the uncontainable. Anne Washburn (Mr. Burns) took notes during her tech rehearsals over the years. 10 Out of 12 is a wry and absorbing look at how work forms us and deforms us.” from Concord Theatricals.
Laura’s thoughts in brief: Well, first let me say that I’m exceedingly happy that many companies have done away with the terrible, interminable 10 out of 12 tech rehearsals, in a bow towards humanity. Or checking a box, but whatever. As an actor they are tedious and annoying, as a director they are mind-numbing. After 4 hours I always felt like saying “Great, it’s perfect, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE.” I can only imagine how stressful they are to stage managers, lighting and sound designers, and others. Anyway … First of all, this play represents a tedious technical rehearsal brilliantly. Which is really cool and fun, until it gets, well, tedious. Which it does pretty quickly as one is reading, and from the reviews it sounds like that happened watching as well. There are some loose plot points, and one actor character who is trying to really do his work here and go deeper, which is fun. He also stops the rehearsal in its tracks to try to persuade the director to make changes to a certain scene. For those of us in the biz, we’ve all watched someone argue with the director about a new script or at least wanted to argue about one. (Actor pro-tip - I advise most actors to just be present (physically and in the moment) at long tech rehearsals - THOSE ARE NOT ABOUT THE ACTOR!) I think there’s a fun meta-theatricality in being able to observe the behind-the-scenes of a tech rehearsal to see how much work goes into things. As a theatre person, that was fascinating for a bit, until it started feeling like a real tech rehearsal and I felt flashbacks to the terrible tedium of those actual rehearsals, without even the promise of a paycheck at the end, however small. For theatre-goers, I would imagine it is charming and interesting at first to listen on headset to the random conversations and see the pieces all being assembled. For about 15 or 20 minutes. This play runs about 2 hours 20 minutes. So … I think if the play that is being rehearsed had been more interesting, possibly something could have been made of that, but the stretches of dialogue from it were even more boring than the rehearsal - maybe that was intentional? And a throughline (there are bits, but they are minimal) would help overall. If you want to see a meta-theatrical play about putting on a play, NOISES OFF does it much more entertainingly, if not as tediously truthfully. That being said, I’d definitely go see this if someone nearby did it, to see how they handled technical elements. Having to provide headsets for each audience member would likely be prohibitively expensive - I’d love to see someone do this on the cheap (yay, gritty, low-budget Chicago theatre!) and find a creative solution for allowing the audience to listen to headset conversations without having to buy/rent one for each audience member!
READ MORE! Here’s what others had to say about productions:
https://www.vulture.com/2015/06/theater-review-10-out-of-12.html
https://www.newcitystage.com/2017/03/20/behinds-the-scenes-a-review-of-10-out-of-12-at-theater-wit/