The New Life has a menagerie of characters… one of the things decided when i realized we’d have 9 actors involved at the idea stage was not to restrict the number of characters we could have arbitrarily. (as it would happen, the number 9 has special significance for dante in the poem behind the title, so there’s a near scary confluence there.)
So in the middle phase, there were suddenly over 20 principal characters in the play. Madness! The audience would need a scorecard, tons of doubling means lots of context shifts for the actors, making the play harder to realize. not that hard is always bad. but in this case, the play is ambitious in so many ways, and with the sometimes timid response difficult scripts get from some theatres, one must do everything possible to give a play a chance to see the stage again. What to do to solve this, reduce the number of characters?
Went through the script over the past month, telescoping characters and was able to reduce the number to 18 this way. Looked for another way to make a change to clarify and simplify. And it hit me. Matt had given a note during the open rehearsal – that there was a tiny influence of the Wizard of Oz in the play. As you’ll recall, in the “set up the world” long first act before the inciting incident, the people Dorothy meets (Mrs. Gulch, Dr. MarVell, Hunk, etc.) are played by the same actors who later become the Wicked Witch of the West, the Wizard, and the Cowardly Lion. And there are links between the Kansas characters in terms of how they’re played. That was it. Though I’d have the same actor playing multiple roles, I’d link the characters they played, so that the core characterization and verbs could be highly similar. Bingo.