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.