Hi all! My name is Josh Altman and I’m the assistant director for the world premiere of Do The Hustle by Brett Neveu, directed by William Brown. I am so excited to return to Writers’ Theatre where I assistant directed last season’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Every morning I drive up to Glencoe and join the team at Glencoe Union Church for rehearsals. We’re two weeks in and so far it’s an exciting and challenging process.
Working on a new play always involves an extra level of thrill. It’s never been done before! There was a workshop last season to give Brett, the playwright, and everyone else a chance to hear the work out loud, but this will be the very first time the whole thing comes together with acting and design. We’ve got one more week in the rehearsal room before we move over to Tudor Court to put it all together with tech.
Rehearsals have all been going really well. Each day feels like a long, tough day of work with exciting and fruitful results. The play is “up on its feet,” which means that the physical life of the play has been sketched in, and we’re finding out who these characters are and how they interact with one another. Do The Hustle tells the story of Eddie and Sam Sisson (played by Francis Guinan and Patrick Andrews, respectively–who last appeared together in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of American Buffalo last year), a father-and-son grifter team and the cons they pull on one important day. Karen Janes Woditsch and Joe Minoso play a myriad of other characters who Eddie and Sam run into throughout the course of the day.
Each rehearsal, we concentrate on finding what the characters are battling for, making them active fighters in each scene. We run small chunks of the scene and Bill hops up from the table and joins the actors on stage to discuss what just happened and how to build upon it. He lovingly reminds everyone that they are “very good in their parts” (one of his signature phrases) and jumps into a discussion of the kernel of the scene, or the conflict. Brett listens attentively, making edits to the script as he hears it out loud. And with new ideas and new language, the actors try it again.
We had a run-through on Sunday for our designers to see what it’s looking like so far, and it was one of our first opportunities to put the whole thing together, to learn “how the block stack up” and see what the play feels like as a whole. Bill has often said that, for this play, Brett is the “playwright of the inarticulate.” Like most of us, these characters struggle to find their words, to make clear their feelings and intentions to other characters. This is certainly a unique and intriguing aspect of this production, and something we’ll be working on right up until opening.
Check back in next week for further updates on our progress. And remember performances begin January 25th!
Josh
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