the mise-en-scène is flexible in order to cope with absent performers.
LeCompte: There are very cued things that I start with, that with this piece, I knew may not happen. More than ever, we may have people coming and going because of the money situation. So I developed from the very beginning the idea that anyone could come and go without disturbing the piece. … ‘I have to make a mise-en-scène where anyone could fill in anytime or someone else could read the lines, and it would not disturb the heart of the piece.’
– Jeff Webster (on video), Peyton Smith and Beatrice Roth, photograph accompanied this interview by Linda Yablonsky with Elizabeth LeCompte
Or, in one scene Jonas has to be sitting in her wheelchair while Vawter delivers his lines. Having missed her cue, Jonas hurried across the stage on her toes to reach the wheelchair. Everyone burst out laughing. LeCompte used Jonas’s tiptoe cross as her entrance. LeCompte (to Jonas): ‘Now do it again recreating the same thing. Your text is that you missed your cue. … Your subtext is that you are pretending you are not acting.
…
LeCompte: If the play is boring let it be boring.
– Euridice Arratia, and quoting Elizabeth LeCompte, “Island Hopping: Rehearsing the Wooster Group’s Brace Up!” [1992], in Re:direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, ed. Rebecca Schneider & Gabrielle Cody, Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 332-346, pp. 338-341
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