I’m in the middle of directing Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire at WCT right now, and I’ve made a decision that might sound counter-intuitive: we’re actually cutting back on some of the rehearsal time we were given.

It’s not because we’re behind because we certainly are not.  I cut it back because with a play like this, more is not always better.

When you’re working on a show that lives in grief, there’s a temptation to keep going back to the “big” scenes. The breakdown. The explosion. The raw confession. You want to get them right. You want to honour them. You want to make sure they hit exactly where you aim them.

But one of the things I’ve learned as both an actor and a director is that if you rehearse those moments over and over and over, you don’t deepen them. You flatten them.

Anyone who has experienced real grief first-hand (and we all have) knows that it isn’t something you can click like a light switch. It doesn’t behave on cue. As a director, if I try to perfect it in rehearsal, what we eventually end up with isn’t truth — it’s more like choreography. It becomes something the actor performs instead of something that happens because of the circumstances.

That is a difference that audiences can feel instantly.  They can easily tell when something is inauthentic.  And that can really destroy the vibe of a show like this.

The other big thing I am always acutely aware of is that there’s a mental health reality here that I take seriously. When you ask actors to repeatedly access trauma-adjacent emotional states, you are asking them to spend something real. Even if it’s fictional circumstances, the nervous system doesn’t entirely know that. If we keep pushing for tears in rehearsal, we’re essentially asking them to burn emotional fuel unnecessarily.

That’s not good directing.  It’s more like forced extraction and it works in the opposite way that you want it to.  To be sure that we are maintaining the balance, we purposely take lots of time between scene work to laugh and do bits and nurture the inside jokes that inevitably surround every play you do.  Our rehearsals are FAR from depressing .  We know that to do this incredible play justice we have to let the whole thing breathe in everything – not just the sorrow.

Actors need to trust that they’re not being used for their nervous systems. They need to know that their well-being matters more than any dramatic payoff. When that trust is there, they go deeper — not because they’re pushed, but because they feel safe.

So instead, we focus on the bones. We rehearse the blocking, the pacing and the listening. We focus on the objectives. We get very clear about what each character wants and what’s in the way of that, and by doing so we build the structure strong enough to hold the weight of the emotion.

If you squeeze every drop of emotion out in rehearsal, there’s nothing left to surprise the actors — or the audience. I would much rather open a show with moments that still feel slightly unpredictable than perfectly polished but emotionally pre-drained.

So that’s part of why I’m trimming rehearsal hours. At a certain point, more repetition doesn’t make it better. It just makes it familiar. And in theatre, familiarity is the enemy of authenticity.

Ironically – like most things in life –  the less we chase the tears, the more likely they are to show up.

So in this room, we’re not milking those heavy moments. It’s more like we’re fiercely protecting them. We’re building the craft around them and letting the emotion be the byproduct, not the assignment.

If we rehearse grief into the ground, we are going to rob it of its humanity.  So we’re being disciplined and careful. We’re stopping before the well runs dry — so that when the audience sits down, the heart of this play still has something left to give.

Rabbit Hole is playing at Whitby Courthouse Theatre between April 9^th and 25^th.  Do not miss it.  Tickets below.

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