Advanced Directing:
A Flea In Her Ear
During my final semester of college, I took Advanced Directing Methods with Matthew Caron. In this class, we direct three scenes and continue challenging and developing our directorial styles, play analysis, and research skills. This class also gives us the opportunity to present our scenes to classmates and the public in an educational setting on Friday afternoons. For my second scene in this class, I chose to direct a fifteen-minute scene from Georges Feydeau’s famous French farce A Flea in Her Ear, translated by David Ives. This play has a very convoluted plot full of physical and sexual humor, centered around themes of sexuality, infidelity, and mistaken identity instigated by Raymonde Chandebise suspecting her husband of having an affair because their sexual relations have decreased due to Victor’s nervousness (unbeknownst to Raymonde). Instead of talking to her husband Victor about it, she sets a trap to try to catch him in the act by anonymously inviting him to the Frisky Puss Hotel. Hijinks ensue at the hotel as the lies and miscommunications pile up, and their fear amplifies when they meet Poche, a drunk bellboy at the hotel who looks exactly like Victor Chandebise but behaves nothing like them. Poche ultimately shows up at their house looking for Chandebise, concerning everyone else, and confusing drunk Poche even more. The whole plot would be avoided if the characters could speak openly about their concerns instead of going behind each other’s backs, but it wouldn’t be nearly as funny as it is when the dramatic irony is strong.
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I chose this scene for a few reasons, all connecting back to wanting to challenge myself. For starters, farce is a very physical and stylized form of comedy, and most of my directing and acting experience as of late has been more realistic, dramatic, and naturalized. Second, it is a scene with six characters onstage at once. I usually choose scenes that only include two or three actors which can be easier to schedule rehearsals and create tension through closeness and distance. However, most plays have more than two people, so I knew I wanted to have the experience of working and creating pictures with a larger group to better prepare me for directing full productions. Third, I chose to place it in an alley configuration, with the audience on two parallel sides, instead of in proscenium. This challenged me to move around the room and become a more engaged director, and to coach my actors on how to work in a new configuration as well. Finally, I had never directed something that was written before 1980, set in another country, or translated from another language. As someone who lives in modern U.S. and speaks very casually throughout the day, attacking this text and the research required to understand the context necessary to the humor was a challenge I was eager to take on.
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Every play is a research project in and of itself. The playwright gives you the information they feel you’ll need to execute the basics of the scene and leave room for interpretation within the stage directions, set dressings, and line delivery. It is the director’s job to analyze the given circumstances of a play and fill in the holes to tell a fully fleshed and compelling story. Sometimes a production team will have a dramaturg to support them in getting clearer and specific information, but all persons in the theatre must be able to analyze the script without one as this is a luxury most can not afford. I began my research by looking at the playwright himself and the time the piece was published. When Feydeau first published this play, it was 1907, at the height of the Belle Époque era in France. From here was where nearly all my research branched,
looking into brothels in the era, fashion, politics, culture, pronunciations and translation humor, and art. I am usually of the belief that peer-reviewed scholarly articles are some of the best places to do research, but it can be hard to find specific details on the era in the time frame I had for this project. While I did look at some peer-reviewed materials, I did a lot of general Google searches, sifting through information on the era and culture and cross-referencing different web pages to get the most well-rounded picture. My goal in my research was not to know everything about the era and create a replica of it, as exact replication is not the intent of a play- if that were the case, it would be a documentary. Instead, my goal was to learn enough to guide my actors and the scene to the general mood and style of the Belle Époque. I found much inspiration in the feel of the popular salon music and impressionistic art of the time, looking at museum pages like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, YouTube clips, and lots of college and museum sites. One thing I wish I had done better during my research was keeping track of my sources as I fell enthusiastically down the rabbit hole. I didn’t always make a physical record by screenshotting, quoting, or saving the link of something that impacted me in my research, but I always felt my brain absorbing the information and getting the feel for the era and the style more.
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One particularly interesting article I found in my research on A Flea in Her Ear and the presentation of farce in theatre was a 1981 peer-reviewed article by Peter Parshall on Kinesthetic Structuring in the Johns Hopkins University Press Theatre Journal. Since I’ve not done a lot of work with farce, this article was very useful in helping me approach physical comedy and understand why it’s so important to the play. Kinesthetic sympathy is like secondhand embarrassment that an audience member can truly feel. Kinesthetic structuring is the balance of leaning into the physical comedy paired with the text to keep the audience engaged while creating an aesthetic distance of unrealistic behavior to keep the audience from becoming too uncomfortable to enjoy it. This concept was something I was familiar with before reading this article, but never had a word for. I was able to then apply the concept more directly to my scene, as well as share this information with the actors in my scene who will now be able to apply it to their future acting endeavors. One way I implemented this was by encouraging them to integrate more dance, specifically ballet-like movements into their performances and bring their breath into their shoulders to keep them more physically engaged and on an axis. Ballet was very important to the French in the Belle Époque era, and I was able to share knowledge from my previous years of ballet experience with this scene to help bring them into the elevated world of the farce.
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One thing that is unique about directing in this class compared to many larger-scale productions is that I am not only the director, but I am also the entire design team. I am in charge of the set, costumes, props, and lighting, as well as playing stage manager. This adds to the stress of being a director and the volume of research required to execute the scene, as usually, a director would have a team behind them- but not always. Luckily, these are not fully fleshed-out productions, and the level of research that I did for this project specifically is a very scaled-down version of what I would do for a full production of Flea. All the necessary components are there, from character and text analyses to beginning to dive into not only the historical context of the era but the history of the genre itself, but this is done on a much smaller scale than that which would go into a full production.
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This scene performed on March 31st, 2023 in PA113 at 4:45 pm. The audience response was very validating. There was lots of laughter, especially when the character playing Poche broke the fourth wall and took a bite out of a flower. The feedback I received from my classmates and professor was generous and helpful, though limited due to time constraints. One of my favorite pieces of feedback I got on my staging was that it reminded them of a pinball machine in how actors moved around the space. I got a few notes on actor coaching and shrillness of voice, both of which I worked on lots, but simply didn’t have time to perfect with less than 10 hours of rehearsal for a 15-minute scene. This scene had some fun challenges in actor coaching, especially regarding Lucienne’s monologue at the beginning of my scene which has lots of exposition, repetitive exclamations, and beat shifts for the character. As someone who loves teaching and leadership, coaching actors one on one are some of my favorite moments of directing, and I’m glad I got to try different approaches to this while working on Flea. Some of the things I would have liked to work on more were getting stronger reactions and engagement from my actors. Comedy, especially farce, is most successful when the actors heartily believe that their funny situation is deathly serious, especially in their reactions, and when those reactions are crisp and clean. Getting them to remain actively engaged in the scene in their breath, movement, and reactions in the style of farce without falling back into their more modern and subdued movements was difficult. This would all have been even more crisp had I had more time to work on the scene, but I am proud of the finished product we were able to put out.
In my directing experience, I’ve tried a lot of different things to find my style of directing. I’ve tried pre-blocking and naturalized blocking, physical and improvisational exercises, drama and farce, more formal and casual directing styles, as well as different stage configurations. Many of these things are dictated by the needs of the script, the setting, and the actors. The beauty is, no approach is inherently wrong and it can change from show to show, day to day, and moment to moment. In this scene, I pre-blocked a lot of it and then adjusted along the way based on the choices the actors were making, and it worked very well. In general, my directing approach is similar to my servant leadership style. I keep a very open communication policy with the team, as clear communication is key to a healthy environment that nurtures growth and vulnerability, and everything I do is to serve the script and the production. I will do whatever it takes to help the actors solve the problems the script presents, be that in motivation, spacing, tension, or reactions- physical and emotional. When blocking a scene, I like to make things relatively naturalized, giving the actors a clear world to work in, and motivating and developing the movement through the space along the way. I come in with a general idea, pre-blocking some moments, but I feel that it’s important to give actors freedom to make decisions inspired by the script within the world of their characters instead of treating them as puppets to be manipulated.
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One thing I am still working on in my directing style is not pausing the scene so often to adjust the blocking or ask questions to the actors. This is very helpful in adding details to the scene and it is a necessary evil, but there are some days I fear I do it in excess and come across as overbearing. Theatre is incredibly collaborative, and my approach as a director is always to be open to that collaboration, making decisions with the actors based on the research I’ve done. Every day I walk into a rehearsal room, I am excited to share the research I’ve found and get excited about disseminating it to the audience in an entertaining fashion. Each scene is a research project, and I love the journey of learning that each one brings me on. Theatre is a living art form, and applying research to a script to ground a production to the reality of life- even when it’s larger than life like Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear- makes it so much stronger.
This scene, as well as this class, was a fantastic exercise in the application of research to a creative activity like theatre. I became much more comfortable with my ability to analyze a text, as well as find various materials and media to support the given circumstances of the scene. While the research and analysis for the Flea In Her Ear director’s book were the most I’ve done so far, it is still only a fraction of the research, time, and dedication that a fully realized production would require. The practice I got working on this project, as well as the other scenes from this class, has made me significantly more confident in my ability to apply these skills to any future directing endeavors, and I look forward to getting to do so.