Playing ‘House’ (and ‘Garden’)

You can imagine what a lark it must be for the audience, this whole paired-comedies-performed-simultaneously-in-adjacent-theatres thing, watching actors dash off stage in one play, then dash on in another; recognizing plot complications from that play as they spill over into this one; seeing the stakes for some of the characters not just doubled but squared; piecing together the full story of what happens to all these people from the separate stories.

But what about the artists? Because they truly are putting on two plays at once, that’s twice the lines to learn, twice the cues to remember, twice the props to keep track of. It’s double the rehearsal time, not to mention double the energy to sustain. It’s not just finding the right rhythm for a show but matching rhythms between two shows, coordinating the timing so their respective curtains fall at precisely the same moment. You’d think it would be double the headaches, double the flop sweat.

You’d think.

But according to Don Toner, who’s currently producing Alan Ayckbourn’s twin comedies House and Garden side by side in his Austin Playhouse theatres and who directed the House half, “I have never had more fun working on a production. It’s been nothing but a glorious ride from start to finish.”

If that’s not what you expected, well, it’s not what he expected, either. Truth to tell, the veteran artistic director hadn’t expected to stage the plays at all. Since British playwright Alan Ayckbourn penned House and Garden in 1999, theatre artists on both sides of the Atlantic have been tantalized by the challenge of producing the two comedies, which are set on the same day in the house and garden of an English country estate and written to be performed by one cast at the same time in adjacent theatres. Don Toner wasn’t one of them, though, despite the fact that he presides over one of the few theatres in Austin to have stages side by side.

It wasn’t the formidable challenges of mounting the double bill that Toner wasn’t wild about, it was the author. He had been turned off of Ayckbourn’s work by a production of the author’s Way Upstream at the Alley Theatre in 1982. Toner might never have considered producing any of Ayckbourn’s almost six dozen plays – more dramas than Neil Simon and Bill Shakespeare combined, the director jokes – but when surveys of the Austin Playhouse audience indicated that Ayckbourn was a writer they were interested in, Toner thought he ought to give the plays a look. At the suggestion of costume designer Buffy Manners, he read House and Garden and, to his surprise, loved them. “The stuff in both these plays is brilliant,” Toner says. “Forgetting what he had to do mechanically to make it all mesh, the characters, the way they’re drawn, the relationships, the history – it’s just layer upon layer upon layer.” That sold him. “Fine, we’ll give you Ayckbourn,” Toner says, puckishly. “But we’ll give you two Ayckbourns.”

Toner did consider directing both shows himself – “for a very brief period of time,” he notes – but time and economics persuaded him that ultimately it would be impractical. Guiding two shows to opening by himself would necessitate six weeks of rehearsals, and with a cast of 14 and union salaries to pay, that was too long. With another director on board, the two shows could be rehearsed the same way they would be performed, simultaneously, over the standard three-week period. Toner admits to some initial misgivings about splitting the directorial duties, given that two people would be steering the creation of the same characters. “I’ve worked with these actors, some of them, for 18 years,” he says. “My worry going in was that I would start hearing, ‘Don, that’s a good idea, but when we were over in Garden …,’ and I’d get something conflicting.”

Fortunately, Toner was able to turn to a collaborator with whom he had a relationship of long standing, both inside and outside the theatre. Lara Toner has appeared in numerous productions at Austin Playhouse, and before that with the State Theater Company and its predecessor, Live Oak Theatre, and in each of those venues has worked closely with Don Toner on artistic and administrative matters. Just last summer she directed a revival of Ellsworth Schave’s A Texas Romance on the Austin Playhouse second stage. Yes, she happens to be Don Toner’s daughter, but more to the point for him, she’s a creative partner that he could trust on this singular project.

“It wasn’t necessary to formulate a new way of working,” says Toner père. “We’d been doing this for years. Play selection. Casting – Lara would come and watch and give me notes on my productions. We communicate very well. We’re on the same wavelength. I’ve seldom had anyone as smart as Lara to help me with sorting out for myself what I thought the work ought to be and how it ought to go. So it’s just a continuation of what we’ve been doing for a number of years now. It seemed a very natural thing for us to do.”

Even more natural when it turned out that of the two scripts she liked Garden better, and he liked House. So the two Toners took their respective favorites and waded into Ayckbourn’s domestic double play.

To get a feel for the cross-play quality of the production, the two held the first read-through with chairs for one play on one side of the stage and chairs for the other on the opposite. When actors were called upon to move from the house or the garden or vice versa, they walked from one group to the other. As rehearsals progressed, the casts separated into their respective spaces but continued to move back and forth between the stages depending on what was being rehearsed. As Don Toner explains it, “Actors would come to the theatre, and they’d all go to work. They’d either go to work on this stage and move to that stage or that stage and move to this stage. Every now and then, I would say (to stage manager Barry Miller), ‘Barry, could you go see if you can borrow so-and-so so we can do this scene?’ This is a different experience, sharing actors with another production. Not that we don’t do that in Austin all the time – ‘Can I leave by nine? I have another rehearsal.’ – but generally, we were able to schedule rehearsals so that everybody got there and was busy most of the evening.”

As for his concerns about the actors getting mixed signals from dueling directors: Didn’t happen. “Not once,” says Don. “The actors would just build on whatever I gave them and whatever Lara gave them. They put it all together very easily. No complaints. I can’t remember anybody saying, ‘I’m getting one signal from Don and something else from Lara, and I’m confused.’ I thought our acting company was up to it, and that was an understatement.”

The company did separate the openings of the two shows by a week, just to give themselves more time to sort out technical issues. “Opening weekend of House was tech for Garden,” says Lara. “The actors had already been in run-throughs of Garden, so we had kind of a head start in that. You have to be in run-throughs at the same time as far as seeing how things are timing out and all of that.”

Timing was more than essential, it was critical. Both plays don’t just run loosely alongside one another, they must keep pace, so characters can literally exit a scene in one play and enter the other play without a dropped beat. And they are intended to end at exactly the same moment. That’s tricky, especially since Garden seems to the production team to be a less fully developed script, with activities such as a fancy dress contest for small children intended to pad the script out a bit and buy the Garden company time in the running of the show. With the limitations of the Austin Playhouse second stage, some of those bits were cut, and it showed when the shows started running side by side. “The first run-through we did, Garden was a full 20 minutes shorter than House,” Lara Toner recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know what y’all are doing over there.'” Which prompts her father’s deadpan reply, “Apparently, people were acting.” Beat. “We stopped that right away.”

In the week or so before opening, the two productions were able to get more in sync, timewise, but they still had to compensate for Garden‘s shortcomings, so to speak. So Don, who gives a curtain speech for each of the shows, starts with House, then gives the speech for Garden, which allows the play to start a minute or so later.

But unlike with most shows, the House and Garden company isn’t able to coast on the rhythm of the show they worked out prior to opening. As Lara Toner puts it, “One of the more interesting things I’ve found backstage is that usually you get a show up and running, and you’re able to sort of relax into the rhythm of it. There’s just no relaxing into the rhythm of this show. I’ve never been so aware as a performer or director of how long scenes are, of where we are in scenes. We’ll check in on House, and say ‘We need to stretch a little in Garden,’ and that word gets passed around, and (the actors) stretch a little in Garden.”

“Or pick it up,” says Don, which provokes a round of laughter. More seriously (but not much), he adds, “The stage managers are constantly checking in with each other about how many pages they have left.” And that provokes a round of praise for Barry Miller, who has stage managed many an Austin Playhouse production and is characterized by Don Toner as “unflappable.”

Much of what Miller and the actors have to adjust for every evening is the character of the audiences, which is different at every performance and sometimes wildly different between the two shows on the same night. Case in point: A Saturday night performance in which the Garden audience was clearly enjoying itself, but the crowd next door was having a riotous time. An actor could wink and bring the House house down. And every big laugh drew out the running time for House a few seconds, time that its companion production wasn’t losing. At one point, the Toners estimate, a three- to four-minute gap in timing had grown between the two shows, and as Don Toner notes, Garden can’t hold for House‘s laughs. So, Lara remembers, actress Babs George “went on in this little scene (in House), and she drove it so much, I think she took two minutes out. And didn’t lose any laughs. And everybody else (in the cast) picked up the pace. It was beautiful to listen to backstage.”

As it turned out, both shows hit the finish line at the same time, just as they’re supposed to. But, curiously enough, it’s what happens after that moment that has proven the biggest challenge for the two directors. “The most difficult thing about this whole production, bar none, was the curtain call,” says Lara. “We had more conversations about the curtain call and how that was going to work (than anything else), and for a little while I just about threw up my hands.”

“In the back of the script, they suggest the way they’ve done it in other productions is just split the cast: half take a call in one theatre, half in the other,” says Don. “But we’ve got it now so that Garden comes down 30 seconds to a minute before House, so you have time for a good curtain call, then everybody’s off and in line for the next curtain call. And we have the people who are first in line for the House curtain call leave the stage first and the others follow.” The director figures there’s a chance that some night that final bow won’t time out quite as planned, but he has some perspective about it. “If we can keep it all together ’til the curtain call and it falls apart, we’ll be fine. We can live with that.”

This article appears in February 3 • 2006.