A photo from the production of The Rehearsal in New York, N.Y., on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020. Photo: David M. Russell\/HBO \u00a92020 HBO. All Rights Reserved<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAnd The Rehearsal<\/em> is even more compelling, as it makes a similar move but with regard to life itself. Nathan offers to help people rehearse for important events in their lives (or at least I presume this will continue to be the premise as we move forward from Episode 1), recreating the scenario in all of its detail, hiring actors to play the people who will be involved, and playing out every permutation of how things might go that they can conceive of as a possibility.<\/p>\nOn top of this, he\u2019s rehearsing events for himself, such that in S1E1 the narrative loops in on itself at multiple points. Nathan is helping Kor, but then we cut to Fake Kor—the actor Nathan has hired to play Kor—and indeed at the climax of the episode this appears to lead Nathan to decide to forego making his own confession to the real Kor.<\/p>\n
All indications are that Kor and Tricia are real people, by the way. The credits for \u201cOrange Juice, No Pulp\u201d list the names of the actors playing the fake versions of each but nothing about the real ones. If there is something to puncture the conceit that the events of S1E1 are \u201creal\u201d I\u2019m not aware of it as of yet.<\/p>\n
Of course, in many ways the events aren\u2019t real, insofar as Nathan makes a full-scale replica of the Alligator Lounge, down to the balloon in the corner. He tricks the trivia host into giving him the questions for the trivia night Kor will use as the scene to confess to Tricia, and hilariously implants the answers to the questions into Kor\u2019s brain by hiring actors to play people on the street they encounter while walking together, who find ways to sneak in lines about who invented gunpowder and what the tallest building in the world is.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all delightfully absurd, and while Nathan\u2019s argument to himself that it would be wrong to not do all of this is ridiculous, his appeal to the idea of controlling for all of the variables is right in line with the very idea of the rehearsal in the first place.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an appealing idea! Who hasn\u2019t lamented how they failed to say the right thing or foresee how someone would react to what they said? We might even mentally rehearse important conversations on the horizon. I know I do, or used to until I realized things never went the way I\u2019d imagined them in my head, or any of the ways I\u2019d imagined. Instead, overthinking things beforehand tends to keep me from being able to go with the flow of how the conversation actually unfolds. In short, I’ve tended to find it makes things worse.<\/p>\n
But taking this all to the extreme that Nathan does in The Rehearsal<\/em> seems to work.<\/p>\nS1E1 is cut through with tension, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, wondering how it would ultimately go when Kor told Tricia that he didn\u2019t really have a Master\u2019s degree. He was worried about how she would react, and I was worried with him. And then I was worried that he might get too nervous and not go through with it.<\/p>\n
The stakes here were small, but I was more enrapt by this tension than I can recall being by any fictional drama I have watched in a long time. And then, of course, it seems like it was no big deal to Tricia. Is this because the rehearsal was so effective, or would it have gone this way regardless?<\/p>\n