The next phase

Hard for me to sit and write.  I’ll leave in a few minutes for the theatre, where we’ll run the play for the last time without an audience.  We’ll take a break for dinner, and when we return the theatre will be buzzing with people.  It’s a preview, only a preview.  This is what we say in the dressing room.  And to some extent the sentiment is true.  We have nine of them before we open.  Once we open there will be no more changes.  The show will evolve and deepen, sure, but there will be no more cuts, no dramatic changes.  A preview is essentially a (very) public rehearsal.  There should be no technical issues, or trouble with lines, but if there are we get to shrug, saying, “it’s a preview.”  During these nine we will continue to look for possible cuts, a change in blocking here or there.  All of this will help to keep us loose, and I can call it a preview all I want, but that won’t change the fact that there will be people in the seats.  Our nerves play funny tricks on us.  Put a human being on stage under bright lights with ten or a hundred people watching, and the mind wants the body  to behave differently.  It our training, our technique, that keeps us alive and real on stage.

The most beautiful marquee in town

Present.  I’ll never forget a teacher’s comment after an acting exercise in college.  I had spent much of the exercise, or scene, drinking from a cup.  She pointed out after the scene something I had missed the whole time: my first finger had been draped over the rim of the glass, not quite touching the liquid, but still inside of the cup.  A completely unnatural way of drinking.  I had never done this before in my life.  But here I was, in front of my classmates, and my nerves had confused me.  I’d been drinking out of glasses for 15 years, but suddenly I had forgotten how.

sure it's empty now, but my fans know where to find me

So tonight I will work to stay present with those around me on stage.  I will work to be, as acting teachers will say, private in public.

Our technique will buoy us, but we still must be present and available to those on stage with us.  Dennis recently said something worth never forgetting: “in all art forms, technique is only there to reveal the soul.  Don’t get caught illustrating your technique.”

See you at the show,

A

Wait, people are gonna see this thing?

I was informed yesterday that our show will indeed be open to the public and that in fact, tickets have already been sold.    This of course comes as a great shock.  Tucked safely away in our sunlit rehearsal room, it’s easy to forget that some day (very) soon our stage manager will call, “thirty minutes to places,” and then shortly after that we will hear the inevitable: “places everybody, places.”  We will stand in the wings obediently, listening to the murmur, nay roar, of the crowd.  The lights will begin to dim, and with them the conversations in the house.  We will walk out onto the stage and hope when we open our mouths words that we have rehearsed will come out.  However, as Dennis has said, “sometimes the mind makes dates that the body can’t keep.”

Here I’ll pause for a moment to take a gulp of water, or scotch, and wipe the sweat from my palms.

Victory Gardens Biograph Theater - quiet and still

The real source of my new anxiety came on Thursday when we moved from the rehearsal room to the stage where we’ll be performing.  The beautiful Biograph Theatre.  I love to look out into an empty house, those plush red seats.  The imagination flows wild and anything seems possible.  There’s a reason those seats were purchased though, and suddenly I’m reminded that soon they will be full.  Taking an actor out of the rehearsal room and putting them on a stage is like taking a fish, one with tiny feet and a slight ability to breathe, out of water.  Suddenly we trip over furniture, stumble over lines we’ve known for weeks.  The voice I hear leaving my head doesn’t sound like my own.  Suddenly nothing is right.  My accent is off the mark, my wig is wearing me, I can’t remember lines and no one can find their script.  Maybe worst, I’m now performing.  No one is in the seats but Dennis, but I can feel myself start to act, and my partner is looking at me wondering where I’ve gone, though I’m standing right in front of him.

First day on the set

I take a breath, and try to get my bearings.

Today (Saturday) will be our third day on the stage and I hope to come back to earth.  Our first preview is Friday, which may not seem like a lot of time, but in theatre, a magical amount of work can happen in a few short days.  I’m almost entirely off book (which is to say I’ve memorized the script).  My energy now will go towards crystalizing for myself the environment I am in in each scene, and deepening my understanding of the various relationships.

Thursday night about a hundred people attended our open rehearsal, and we were all pleased to discover how often the audience laughed.  An audience teaches an ensemble a lot, and we are taking what we learned from how they watched the show, and the comments they made after, into consideration as we move into our final week before previews begin.

Happy rehearsing,

A

Wehrkin’ hawd, and it’s hawdly wehrkin’.

Accent or not, after rehearsals I'm handed line notes. Columns on the right offer myriad possibilities of how I might have messed up.

I’ve stahted now to wehrk hawd on the accent.  Whetheh I’ve been successful is anotheh matteh.  I don’t have an aptitude for lehrning accents, and so I’m fohrced to dissect most every wehrd in the script.  If you haven’t figured from the words you just read, my character is from Boston, so I’m working on my Boston accent.  Pahk the cah in Havehd Yahd and all that.  Right now I might be accurate about a third of the time, if I’m lucky.  We had a dialect coach come watch the first act on Saturday, and she talked us through a few basic staples of the accent.  I begin by going through the script and crossing out all the r’s that I’ll lose in words like, well, words.  At the same time, I look for vowels that might change.  If I find one, I cross it out, and above it write the sound I need using the International Phonetic Alphabet, similar to the pronunciation guides you find in a dictionary.  Accents can open a can of worms, or as Dennis says, “a barrel of snakes.”  Done poorly, the audience is jarred from the world we’ve created.  The last thing we want is talk of our accents dominating the conversations at intermission.  And even if they’re done well, how much of an accent is appropriate for this particular story?  Which of us should be doing accents?  Will the audience understand that a character isn’t doing one because he’s not from Boston, or will the discrepancy just be confusing?  This script, in its way, breaks many rules that theatre generally follows, so we must create our own rules in order to tell a clear story.  Potentially problematic, accents also offer wonderful opportunities.  A character who has worked hard to bury an accent might let it slip when they’re tired, or a character who generally speaks with one might find it’s suddenly much more pronounced when they’re angry.  These are technical bits that might make the character’s life much more full.  You hope the audience will take the journey with you, but there is always the risk that where you set out to be deliberate, the audience will see a mistake.  If I choose to play a heated scene with a stronger accent, I can just imagine the headlines in the Trib the next day: New Sweet Play Is Just Short of Brilliant, Spoiled Only By Weiner’s Inconsistent Accent.  There is some conversation in the rehearsal room about whether or not accents are even necessary in a play like this, where we’re creating the world in front of the audience’s eyes.  I am willing to justify it away, happy to even, but my character is said to be from Boston, which makes me feel obligated to attempt the accent, as I would if it were set in Georgia.  So for now the accent stays, and I’ll continue to cross out the r’s in my script.  When you see the show, who knows if the accents will have stuck.  Either way, make sure you find me after, shake my hand, and whether you mean it or not, say, “hey Weineh, good wehrk.”

Happy rehehrsin’,

A

“If you cut it, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” -DZ

It’s not a new idea, the metaphor that paints the beginning of the rehearsal process as a block of wood, waiting to be sculpted into something recognizable as a show.  With a new script, it’s almost the opposite.  We have this canvas but it is not bare.  It’s as thick and messy as any Pollock.  It’s the job of everyone in the room to act as archaeologist, peeling away layers to find the essence of the show.  Some might have a hard time imagining actors asking to have their lines cut, and struggle more to imagine a playwright giving up lines he/she has slaved over, but it’s utterly necessary.  As Tim Grimm said today in rehearsal, “rarely do people walk out of a show saying, ‘I just wish it had been longer.”  We are here to serve the play, and one way to do that is to make sure the story is told in the most effective, economical way.  We are lucky to have a playwright in the room who is open to changes, and actors who are happy to lose lines in the name of telling a clear story. 

On the first day of rehearsal, Dennis promised that we would “explore till we get to that which we really need.”  This is true about the script, but it’s also true about the acting.  I’m throwing colors at the scenes now.  And what feels necessary will stay (maybe), but the extraneous will fall away.  Today in rehearsal, we’re running a scene that splits and suddenly a second scene is created simultaneously.  The second scene, played downstage, needs to pull focus, and three of us guys are left upstage, silent.  I start to walk off-stage to retrieve a few cans of prop cokes.  On my way off, I make eye contact with my scene partner, and shake my wrist near my mouth as if to say, “coke?”  After the scene, Dennis essentially says, “We explore till we get to that which we really need.  So Aaron, that thing with the coke, the wrist shake, yeah we don’t need it.”  The wrist shake goes.  A loss to every audience member that will see this show.

We ran act one with minimal interruptions today.  The show is blocked, but we continue to tweak. We spend most of the time on our feet, but occasionally we sit around Dennis to do a “radio play” version of a scene or two.  This puts the focus back on the words, and allows us to explore it more deeply.  Blocking can help enforce patterns, and this helps break that.  It’s way to early for us, (I suppose I should only speak for myself here. Nahhh) to get stuck in a holding pattern.  We’re still learning how to fly.  

I’m focussing on my physicality, looking for the limberness of youth and the opportunity to take up space, which is a silent way of displaying confidence which might derive from my family’s dough.  This also gives me room to grow, or shrink, as I age in the show and my character is a little less tie-dye, and a little more suit.  I need to focus more on relationships.  Easy to lose track of is the environment.  Our stage is almost bare, leaving it up to us to create the sense of atmosphere.  How do I behave indoors versus out?  In a bar versus a car?  Looks like I just figured out what I’ll be working on tomorrow.

Happy rehearsing, 

A

Running to new ideas

A productive day in rehearsal today (Tuesday: the start of week two).  An even more productive night on the treadmill, where I do some of my best work (or thinking anyway.)  I felt lost at times in rehearsal this afternoon, floating around, smiling, chatting between takes, eating girl scout cookies, and giving amateurish, vague readings.  There were little victories: the costumer and I decided on the appropriate look for my wig.  So victory maybe, not victories.  But still, we’re getting somewhere.  It’s on the treadmill I begin to work.  Often in rehearsal there isn’t time to burrow deeply into something, or at least to choose which tools to burrow with.  It’s the actors job to burrow at home, so when the time comes in rehearsal to call up some memory of a past experience, you have an idea of what that experience might be.  The director doesn’t need their time wasted watching us search through our emotional closet, like a math teacher doesn’t need to watch students doing their homework.  

It’s one thing to be in a scene and to laugh at a joke told by a character because you, the actor, think it’s funny (not good).  It’s another to laugh because your character is the kind of person who would laugh at that joke (better).  It’s another thing to laugh at the joke because the character you find the smartest in the room laughed and you want to impress them (now we’re getting somewhere.)  Right now I’m laughing because I’m the kind of guy  who would, and I need to want  to impress.  And this is what I discover on the treadmill: that my character, in hopes of mixing with a certain crowd, makes decisions accordingly.  This might come up in laughing at a joke, or concocting a scheme meant to impress the others.  So I’m running, alone in a small gym, and I start saying some of my lines to the mirror.  Not because I want to watch my expression, God no, I just happen to be facing one.  I start trying them on with this new idea in mind, looking to see if there’s room to play.  I think there is, and so tomorrow I will try this new tact.  Between now and then I will think of times in my life when I have done the same thing as my character.  This way I will be more and more specific, and my behavior more honest in the scenes.  Many actors are familiar with Nina’s famous lines in The Seagull.  ”I acted without thinking or feeling… I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I couldn’t move properly, or control my voice. You can’t imagine what it’s like to know you’re acting badly!”  The way to erase this feeling, and the disconnected floating I mentioned earlier, is to be more specific.  You can’t keep me away from girl scout cookies if you try, but if I show up with more ammunition for rehearsal, maybe I’ll earn them.

Dennis said something today that I loved:  ”When you run towards something, you’re running away from something else.”  I’ll have to ask him if that applies to treadmills.    

Looking forward to getting back in the room tomorrow.  

Happy rehearsing.

-A

Beginnings Are The Hardest

Costume renderings of my character in Class Dismissed

I should say first that as with performing, I’m writing this blog in hopes of starting a dialogue with the community.  So please feel free to submit questions, which I will do my best to answer.  (Not that I don’t love to hear myself type.)

I feel overwhelmed every time I begin rehearsals for a new play.  Even before rehearsals begin, when I first am given a script, I think, “how the hell am I going to do this?”  Or, “how the hell am I going to do this well?” I feel sure that doing the play (well) will be impossible.  There is just so much to consider.  What’s my relationship like with the others on stage?  What season is it?  How old am I?  Should I have a limp?  An accent?  How will I, night after night, experience the utter jubilation and hysterical laughter the scene requires?  How can I open the doors in my heart that will expose wounds my character is surely feeling?   What shoes will I wear?

I know I am not alone in my fear.  I read an interview recently in which a famous actor I admire confessed the same anxiety.  The source of the despair is the desire to be as truthful as possible in every moment on stage.  It is this understanding and specificity that leads to honest human behavior.  Art is in the details.  My teacher Alan Langdon was never satisfied that we might know what country the scene took place in.  (Substituting geography for emotion here.)  He wanted to know what city and street and block and in which house and the room in that house and the color of the paint on the walls.  He often asked us, after we’d finished a scene, where the heat source was, and the light source.  I’ve never been in a room and not known where the light source was, but ask me during a scene, and you’ll catch me trying to make one up pretty quick.  So you can see why, after I’m handed a script, I don’t sleep quite as well.

I love to rehearse, maybe more than perform, and the first day in an empty rehearsal room (Stanislavsky called this day “an event in an artist’s life”), with the outline of the set taped on the floor, is a happy one.  Tina Jach, stage manager to the stars, has set aside a mug for each of us, as is her custom.  I find my name taped to mine.  When I see the mug I know I’m home.  The fears are still there, but the excitement now outweighs the risk.  Anything seems possible.  ”Beginnings are the hardest,” Dennis likes to say, and we plunge ourselves into the world.  We’re lucky to have the playwright in the room.  All of us united in a common goal: to serve the play.  We read it.  Cut a page.  Read it again, adding two words here, a sentence there.

The model of the set for Class Dismissed - it's so small

The process has begun.  Four days into rehearsal we’ve blocked act one.  Tomorrow we’ll begin work on act two.  Enough writing for one day.  I have to go figure out where that damn light source is.

Till next time.  Happy rehearsing,

-A