Cast practicing Christmas carols in Klingon

Tonight is our first designer run!!! It will be our first time through the whole show and despite the show having a ton of fight choreography, prosthetic foreheads restricting the use of our foreheads/eyebrows to convey expressions, having a central character be a puppet, and being in a completely different language, we’re actually in better shape for a designer run than many shows I’ve done in the past. As much as I’d like to take any amount of credit for that, I really have to acknowledge our director Catie O’Donnell Glogovsky and our stage manager Shandee Vaughan. I’m continuously inspired by their respect for the work and every person in the room, as well as their willingness to listen to ideas, concerns or questions that come up along the way. It really is a “best idea in the room” kind of work environment that encourages people to take risks and fail big if it means that we could find something awesome in the process.

Klingons invading Chicago! Breon Jackson, Dylan Jost, Kim Fukawa.

Also, it’s pretty amazing to being a cast where you legitimately want to hang out with every single person. There are people all over the age/experience/fandom spectrums and from the first rehearsal both Catie and Chris (our playwright/artistic director/fellow actor) made it very clear that this is an inclusive process, and that any putting down of other humans, ideas or fandoms would not be tolerated. When you combine that with the fierce dedication to both work and play that all of my fellow performers bring to their work, it’s a seriously awesome result.

Now that we’re stitching the scenes together first in acts and tonight in the complete play, I’ve been able to watch scenes featuring actors I hadn’t worked with yet. I wanted to write about all of these ridiculously awesome performers, but for the sake of time, I’ll just call out two.

Pretty much up until this week, I’d only really seen Timothy Sullivan’s work as a fellow blogger. Being able to see him play both ngevwI’ (Seller) and ben qeylIS qa' (Ghost of Kahless Past) has been such an absolute treat. He has this complete fearlessness in his approach to bold characters and artful integration of physical and vocal choices to bring them to life. It’s such a fun transformation to see him go from the relaxed, kind of quiet actor patiently waiting to go onstage to this cackling, crooked old man bounding across the stage.

Also, Matty Robinson plays vreD (Fred, Scrooge’s nephew) and Warrior 1 in a brief scene with me later on. From the second you meet Matty, you know exactly the kind of warm, generous and playful characters he brings to the stage. He creates the kind of characters that howl mid-line with such confidence, you assume it was written into the script. He’s always up for a quiet line-through of a scene while we’re waiting to go on and is always willing to say “Yup, I totally messed that up” when something falls apart.

When I was watching these guys perform, a quote from Steppenwolf ensemble member and Black Box Acting founder, Amy Morton kept returning to my mind. “When you’re onstage, you have license to do what everyone in the audience has wanted to do 5,000 times … You get to do it with no consequences. Do it all the way.” Both of these guys really embodied the spirit of those words and reminded me that we’re not just saying lines and going through the motions. We’re living these stories out loud for our audiences in a way they might never get to do, and the best way to fulfill that responsibility is to celebrate every second of it.