The many faces of Lorelei • 10.03.08
I met my new Lori -one of my two leads - for the first time at dress rehearsal. In an ideal world obviously this wouldn’t have been the case but schedules and timing conspired against us.
As I mentioned previously Natalya and I’d worked on Getting Sam before, with her as Melly and me directing. However, the lead then was an actress called Jacqueline Rose.
l-r: Jacqueline Rose, Elizabeth Alice Murray
Jackie did a fantastic job in the role, but when I started thinking about shooting the play as a short (as it was originally written) back in July I felt we needed someone older. Jackie is in her early twenties, Melly in her early thirties and more reassured, worldly – something easier to carry off on stage but not so much in film.
That’s when Natalya introduced me to Elizabeth Alice Murray, a talented writer/director as well as an actress. We met in a little café off Union Square in August and talked for an hour. She read for the part and I cast her on the spot.
However, the combination of our three busy diaries (summer holidays, other shoots/work, traveling) meant the shoot was pushed, and soon Natalya and I were already starting work on Show Two for Me & Them.
Originally I’d written a piece called Darwin, Adam and Eve for Show Two, in which four NYC friends meet for dinner and discuss the disparities between their families’ traditional hopes for them and their actual lives, but when the writers met for script workshop we all agreed it was too long a piece for the collective. We discussed how I might split it into two pieces instead but I wanted to save it and spin it into something more complex rather than simplify. Rather than rush out a new piece for the sake of it, I suggested we use Getting Sam and Natalya agreed.
We went back to Elizabeth but she’d just won a webisode competition for her awesome series Café Conversations so was hard at work moving forward with that. Step up, Amy Gironda, an actress Natalya had met in a recent class, and we had our new Lorelei.
With previous creative work I have either cast friends or gone through extensive casting sessions but Me & Them engenders a faster, hit-the-ground-running approach than more intricate film projects. Also, I trust Natalya’s judgment so went with her casting blindly. As such, I was on tender-hooks when it was time to see what the two of them –Amy/Lori & Natalya/Melly - had done with the piece and I was thrilled.
Though sick, at dress rehearsal Amy was a consummate professional and jumped into the role with full energy. Seconds after dozing in a chair with flu she was battling Natalya in a dazzling array of verbosity. I loved what they had done with the piece, which was infuse it with vigor by understanding that for the friendship to be believable and for the beats to fall in the right place, the dialogue needs to be extremely fast: the characters need to almost talk over each other, and use the words as ammunition.
An added bonus was that Amy physically looks very similar to Natalya – I’d always imagined Lori with longer hair, being the shyer of the friends – it tends to give people something to hide behind – but this mirror image presented to the group was a pleasant visual surprise and actually made sense given the script. Natalya’s first comment on reading Getting Sam had been that she felt the two characters were the two opposites sides of me – and here they were, battling it out.
As I smiled I remembered the term “happy mistake” my fine art professor repeated to us again and again in college – that often it’s the unintentional marks on a page that lead you to a new, advanced place.
Given the chaos and speed of the event overall and Amy’s sickness I left notes for our next rehearsal – we have one scheduled between dress and performance. Initially I’d been worried that this was not enough and too late in the day, but now I saw that it was only minor tweaks that were needed: Amy to temper Lori with more vulnerability at certain points, a few pacing variations in speed and volume and a few physical interaction notes, that’s all. I’m excited to work with them again.
