Exit Pursued By A Bear

So You Want to Stage Exit Pursued By A Bear

The play is one movement, roughly an hour long, about Harvey Milk. It's not easy to put on. You'll need a cast of six to eight performers who can handle simultaneous singing, spoken text, and some physical choreography. The music loops. That's the whole concept. Philip Glass wrote it so the same harmonic structure repeats underneath everything, which means you can layer voices and actions without it sounding chaotic. In practice it's harder than it looks. Exit Pursued By A Bear is published by Boosey & Hawkes. You don't need to buy the full orchestral score if your production budget is anything less than several hundred thousand dollars. There's a chamber reduction available for about forty dollars, and it includes piano, cello, and percussion. That's what I use. You also need the libretto, which comes with the rental package. Some theaters try to save money by downloading parts from illegitimate sources. It works until someone notices, and then you're dealing with licensing issues right before opening night. Don't do that. If you want to rent the orchestral version, expect to pay between two and three thousand dollars for a weekend engagement, plus shipping. The chamber score is a one-time purchase. I've been doing this long enough to know which route makes sense for university theaters versus regional companies.

What Actually Happens in the Play

Harvey Milk is shot in the San Francisco city hall basement. The entire piece takes place in that moment, stretched out through time. Glass uses a single harmonic progression that cycles over and over. The singers narrate, reflect, and argue. The bear reference comes from the moment right before the assassination when Harvey says "I was preceded by a bear" — a garbled recollection that becomes something mythic. The staging is usually minimal. A chair, maybe some chairs, sometimes a desk. The lighting does most of the work. What matters is that the performers understand they are existing inside a single moment that keeps unfolding. If they play it as a linear narrative, it falls apart. The audience needs to feel like time has stopped, not moved forward.

Director Notes That Actually Matter

Here's what nobody tells you in the program notes. The chorus of voices isn't meant to sound like a Greek chorus commenting from above. These are Harvey's internal states, other people's perspectives, fragments of history. Each voice belongs to a character. They need to be distinct. I had a soprano in Boston who kept singing everything with the same bright, heroic tone. The piece lost all its tension because nothing contrasted. We switched her to a lower register for the middle section, and suddenly the whole thing clicked into place. The dancer is the hardest role to cast. This isn't a spotlight moment. The movement is subtle — mostly small shifts in posture, turning away, the physical weight of someone holding their body while they're dying. I once worked with a choreographer who wanted big leaps and dramatic floor work. It didn't fit. The bear chase is internal, not literal. The choreography needs to be almost invisible. Keep it small. Keep it grounded.

Common Mistakes

Running too long. The piece is about sixty minutes. If you're pushing past seventy-five, you're dragging it. The repetition in Glass's score only works if it feels inevitable, not indulgent. Every repeat should reveal something slightly different. If it just sounds the same with more time passing, cut it back. Overlighting. This piece lives in shadows. City Hall basement lighting, fluorescent, or natural — whatever you choose, let it sit in the low end of the spectrum. I remember a production at a small venue where the director wanted a big white sweep when Harvey enters. It completely deflated the mood. The audience needed to feel like they were already in a basement. Ignoring the text. Some directors treat this as purely musical and let the singers drone through it. The libretto by Royce Vavrek is specific. Harvey's words matter. The historical details matter. You need to be able to trace every line back to an actual interview or document from Milk's life. If a singer asks what a line means, you should have an answer that isn't "it's poetic."

The Bear Scene Itself

There's a brief section where the narration shifts into something more dreamlike, and this is where the bear image appears. Don't put an actual bear on stage. Don't put a person in a bear costume. The audience will either laugh or stare blankly, and neither response is what you want. The bear works because it's mentioned and then dropped. It's a memory slipping through Harvey's mind. Let it land as a single image and move on. The music carries it. You don't need props. Chamber version: piano, cello, percussion (one player handles marimba, vibraphone, and auxiliary percussion). Orchestral version adds strings, woodwinds, brass, and additional percussion. You need at least one singer who can do spoken text clearly — the mezzo or baritone part has long stretches of recitative that get muddy if the voice is too legato. A good articulation warmup before shows is essential. The score has overlapping vocal entries that start and stop on different beats. This means your conductor needs to be comfortable with polyrhythms and metric modulation. Glass writes in ways that feel natural to the text, which sometimes means the beat doesn't land where you expect it. I always say the conductor should feel the pulse rather than count it exactly. This cuts rehearsal time down from about twelve hours to eight for a professional company.

Where to Rent or Buy

Boosey & Hawkes holds the rights. You contact them directly through their theatrical licensing department. They'll send you a questionaire about your production, and if it's approved, you get the materials within a few weeks. For student productions, there's sometimes a reduced rate. Worth asking. I always recommend emailing them before calling — they tend to respond faster to written inquiries. There's no official downloadable score or legal PDF floating around. Any site offering one is distributing pirated materials. I've seen this happen at smaller colleges where someone uploads a scanned score to a shared drive. It works until a performance review mentions it, or someone recognizes the watermark on the pages. Just go through the proper channel.

What I Wish I'd Known Before My First Production

The piece sounds different depending on the room. Glass writes for clarity, but in a small black box theater with concrete walls, the piano can dominate and push the voices under. I learned this the hard way during technical rehearsal at a venue in Providence. The sound engineer was fighting the mix for twenty minutes before we realized the problem was the room, not the board. We moved the piano thirty feet to the left and angled it differently, and the balance fixed itself. Don't skip sound checks in the actual space. The score's loop structure means any frequency buildup gets amplified over time. Also, the cello part is deceptively difficult. It's not just holding notes. There are long passages where the cellist needs to double-stop and shift positions quickly while maintaining the pulse. If your cellist isn't comfortable with contemporary technique, consider bringing in a consultant for the first week of rehearsals. That investment pays for itself. One more thing nobody mentions: the audience will talk during the piece. It's an hour long and some people leave early, some stay late, and a lot of them won't have heard of this before. That's fine. The piece is designed to absorb ambient sound to some degree. Don't try to enforce silence. It creates tension that has no place in a play about a man who was already being hunted.