More from The F Word

Hello, guest blogger Lisa Hill-Corley here. I'm Voluptuous. Well.....the character anyway, for Melissa Blackall's play The F Word. I was involved with the show at The Kennedy Center's Page to Stage Festival and I've loved watching all of the changes, from whole scenes gone to speeches being reassigned to two words chopped off of a line right in the middle of rehearsal. The version of the script we performed at Page to Stage was much more abstract, with the characters ("bodies") representing types as the play commented on the bizarre relationship our society has with body image.

This time Lean, Voluptuous, Toothpick, Blimp, Belly, Stout, and Huge are individuals. They are still described as "bodies" in the script, but I'm not sure if that label is accurate now. I think people who saw the earlier version and come on Saturday will see a real arc for each character, and how they cope (or don't cope) in particular. So to me, it's less about the topic of fat and body image itself and more about how these seven people deal with it. I guess that's ultimately what it has to be, it's always a little dangerous to start with a "concept" rather than a story about well-defined characters and plus, it seemed to me that the two casts and audiences responded the most to those personal moments and were more confused by the sort of grand abstract things. But I hope it doesn't lose all of the abstractness (is that a word?), because that's what made the earlier version of script felt so universal. I think I would be a little sad if I went to see the full production and it was about this pudgy guy Bill and his slightly plump wife Linda and their too skinny daughter Tara, etc....rather than body types standing in for all of us.

We're getting very spoiled having the playwright right there to ask about what things mean. However, there are some things I actually don't want to know because I'd rather just make a decision and see if something I said or did ends up in the next version. Really, how cool is that?  At any rate, the experience will make me much more understanding when my next show has that inevitable moment where we'll have to go from being in the main character's living room to Disney World with only one line of text for a massive costume change for both leads, and we're all at the production meeting going, "Seriously? What the hell?"

As for Saturday, half the time I forget it's a reading we've been rehearsing for because Patrick Torres has had us moving around in scenes and letting us really play with moments. I think people are going to forget we have scripts in our hands during some of those group scenes we've fleshed out. I like those parts the best; it's just too much of a physical, lively play to sit there and just read. We don't even start by filing in and sitting down behind our little music stands, but in a big pile on the floor. It's a very lovely pile though, you'll see. Saturday will be lots of fun; we'll have the energy of a performance. And any mistakes? Well...they'll just be "new discoveries we made in the text Melissa!" Yeah....that's it...

And don't call me Sweetie. (You'll understand what that means if you see the staged reading on Saturday at noon at the H Street Playhouse).

In the photo above, we see the pile of bodies that Lisa describes in her posting.  And the woman at the bottom of the image is Lisa as Voluptuous. (photo by Melissa Blackall)