Deconstructing Hitchcock for the Stage

I recently had the pleasure to sit in on a rehearsal for an upcoming performance piece that integrates, dissects and deconstructs many of the topics we have been discussing in 150 and 160. The director Reid Farrington, who has a residency at 3-Legged Dog Productions downtown on Greenwich Street, wanted to adapt the legendary Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Rope” for the stage.

Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant movie about two friends who murder out of curiosity was shot in what seemed like an endless shot with no cutaways. Hitchcock achieved this effect by filming 10 reels of 10-minute shots that carried the continuity of the action. By splicing these ten reels together, the film appears to be one eighty-minute shot of one apartment in real time.
Quoting James Stewart, one of the lead actors in the 1948 flick, Farrington insists that the integral team for this film was the technician crew, who rehearsed the shots for weeks before the actors were even brought on. To relay their process, four actors play the crew (including a Hitchcock whose blocking affords him to walk into that famous silhouette). The crew runs, trips, gallops and bumbles through the set of backdrops, movable screens and flats while certain clips of the original movie are projected on said set pieces. At times, the “crew” marks through the movie actors’ gestures. At others, screens step in to replace their positioning. The performer’s antics and characters, still in the rehearsal process, are reminiscent of a three stooges routine, as they run into one another and trip. Their lazzi bring to light the hard work and hilarity that happened behind the scene to make “Rope” work on film.

But to achieve the projections, Farrington went through a process he calls “reverse rotoscoping.” Rotoscoping is a technique used to create believable animations by tracing over, frame by frame the subjects of live action film, and translating it into a drawn form. To isolate the actors and shatter the film onto different projections, Farrington took the reels from “Rope,” which he obtained from Warner Brothers, and traced over the actors in order to manipulate their placement for projections. Using programs like After Effects and Photoshop, he is able to essentially three-dimensionalize the film for the stage. Farrington was able to obtain the ground plan from the movie, to lay out his stage. With these processes as a basis, the actorsare free to reincarnate the film technicians’ rehearsal process of setting down the actors and props marks, in a fun and intriguing way.

The piece is only three weeks into the rehearsal process, and only four reels of ten were presented, but Farrington’s project certainly promises to be an media and theatre integrated spectacle to behold. It will preview with six performance in the UNDER THE RADAR series through The Public Theater before opening at PS122 in April.