Watching a rehearsal

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

At the theatre's open rehearsal, a scene I had expected to admire arrived in pieces. An actor stopped to ask about a movement, a chair was shifted and the same entrance happened four times. At first I felt cheated of momentum. Then I began noticing how a pause or a different distance between two people changed what their words seemed to mean.

The unfinished work did not diminish the later performance for me. It made its apparent ease more interesting. I knew that the chair's position had been chosen, not simply found, and that a natural-looking exchange could be the result of patient experiment. I would not want every evening in the theatre interrupted by explanation. But seeing one rehearsal replaced my vague admiration for talent with attention to decisions. The final scene remained moving; it also became something people had made, with doubt and revision rather than a single mysterious gift.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Ellen, I declined the invitation to attend the rehearsal, although I am grateful to those who offered it. My preference is to meet the play when its parts have learned to work together. A scene repeatedly stopped may reveal much about the labour of acting, but it may also leave an accidental gesture in the mind where the finished one ought to arrive without competition.

This is not indifference to the performers' work. I respect the hours that disappear into an evening's apparent ease. Yet I need not observe every preparation in order to value its result. At a concert I do not require the instruments to be tuned before each passage so that I may remember the musicians' effort. Let there be opportunities for those interested in the workshop of performance; I prefer the occasion when the doors of that workshop close and the play is permitted to address us as a whole.

Refer to the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on seeing rehearsals before a finished performance and how they convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.