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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2021
Keep Tightly Closed began as an actors’ project of the Open Theatre. Three of them rehearsed it for about a month under the supervision of one of our actresses. The work stopped for the next month, because of a busy production schedule. At that point I was asked to direct the play, only two weeks and a few days before the scheduled opening, with one cast change necessary. The actors’ morale was low because of the delays, the time limitations (some of us had day-time jobs and could only rehearse at night), the problems which had not been solved. The preliminary work they had done was very useful, but necessarily limited.
I began by having the actors work on improvisations for basic character and situation. These were of an abstract nature, dealing with dependency, enclosure, and isolation, and they threw the actors off guard.
1 Transformation is the term used by Joseph Chaikin to identify an improvisational technique developed at the Open Theatre. I worked there for two years; Miss Terry is still working there. Transformation dramatizes those aspects of personality which in a naturalistic play would be implied by the sub-text. Transformations should not be thought of as dramatizations of fantasies, but as exposures of those elements of personality which lie beneath the role which a human being assumes as his identity. We are aggregates of the most dramatic contradictions, but we try to present a consistent image. We are never completely successful in maintaining this image; in Miss Terry's plays the multiple roles beneath the identifying role burst through to reveal the complexities of relationships.