Free Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir by William B. Davis Page A

lines. This was pretty much the schedule in weekly rep in Britain when I began directing there a few years later.
    From Leon I learned how a director can use a half inch ground plan and a bunch of sugar cubes to plan his production. If you are going to block a play in less than five hours you had better be well prepared. Leon would initial each sugar cube to represent each character and then work through the play moving the cubes to represent the physical movement of each character, noting each movement in his script, so that he could more or less dictate the moves at the first rehearsal. It’s a useful technique, one that I adopted for several years. The director can work through many possible patterns in his study without wasting valuable rehearsal time. Of course, every once in a while, early in the blocking rehearsal, an actor might say, “Gee, I don’t think I should go to the window on that line, I think I should go to the door.” And she’ll be right. After that one has to improvise like the dickens. After directing thirty or forty productions, I found I didn’t need the detailed prep; I had a repertoire in my head and could be more elastic in rehearsal.
    An actor’s time, both in rehearsal and outside rehearsal, had to be used to maximum efficiency in weekly rep, a requirement, alas, that seems quaint in today’s theatre. Directors now are apt to spend days muddling through different blocking ideas. Amelia Hall, who was the director of Canada’s longest running weekly stock company, the Canadian Repertory Theatre, writes in her memoir, My Life Before Stratford, how important it was to schedule the actor’s rehearsal time and to keep strictly to that schedule. She was shocked once when she showed up for a rehearsal in another company at the appointed time and had to wait a whole hour! Only an hour? That would be timely in today’s theatre. Of course, actors now are so used to film when the actor’s time is the least important consideration that we have become used to waiting not just for an hour, but many hours, sometimes even days.
    Leon was a formidable note giver. He would perch on the stage, clipboard in hand, cigarette dangling from his mouth, ash everywhere, and tear off each page of delivered notes, crumpling the paper and tossing it over his shoulder. I am embarrassed to say I mimicked this technique sometime later. I guess I always tended to copy my heroes. In public school, the alpha male, Gar McGuiness, always walked with his head down. So, of course, I started to walk with my head down. If Leon threw his delivered notes over his shoulder, I guessed I should do the same.
    In those days, directors normally designed their own lighting and Leon was no exception. It was my job to execute his design on a lighting board that not only predated computers, it predated electronics. The large resistance dimmers were operated with cumbersome manual handles that could be linked together to create groupings of circuits. My long lanky limbs were often needed, legs included, to reach from one end of the board to the other. In between light cues, or sometimes at the same time, one would do sound cues, some manual and some recorded.
    I’m astonished now to watch a technical rehearsal and see how a sound cue is a computer file triggered by a flick of the finger. In 1957, playing a recorded cue was more complicated. The cue, whether music or sound, would be somewhere on a 78 rpm disc. The specific point on the record would be marked with chalk. Before the cue was to be played, the operator, me, would set the needle of the record player on the cue point. One would then hold the record still and turn on the turntable so that it revolved underneath the record without the record itself turning. At the precise moment when the cue was required the operator would release the record so that it would begin playing at correct speed and volume with no start-up sound.
    This technique failed me only once. We were doing an old