The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Hello,
I will be directing a production of Curious Incident in Seotember. A sticking point I have come up on is not the dead dog, surprisingly, but the live dog that Ed gives Christopher at the end.
I have never worked with animals onstage before. We have a potential dog, but he is a dachshund mix and cannot be lifted out of the box like the stage directions state. I imagine those directions minimized the amount of training/risk that the dog posed in the original productions. The dog's owner would be sitting backstage with him for the whole show, and he seemed amiable to someone else leading him around on a leash.
Any advice for those of you who work with animals? The dog would be onstage for a minute maximum, and then would come out for curtain call and the cast meet and greet outside afterwards if the owner was alright with it.