June 26 – The end and the beginning.

So it’s over.  Last night was the final class of the Meisner progression that I have been taking for the last nine months at Freehold.  I have spent the last three years taking acting classes at Freehold Theater.  It has been a wonderful, terrifying, exciting, hard, frustrating, magical, roller-coaster of a ride.

The last class was a performance where we presented the scenes we have been working on for the past few weeks to our friends, family, and other students.  My scene partner Bill and I did a scene from The Marriage Play by Edward Albee.  We have been working hard on it, and it paid off last night.

The process wasn’t without its turmoil though.  Our last two rehearsals with our teacher, the incomparable Robin Lynn Smith, were hell.  When she starts of her notes with, “Well, the nicest thing I can say is that you don’t have any stakes,” then you know you are in trouble. She sliced and diced our performances until we were left thinking, why are we here?  What have I been doing for the past three years?  I have to say this was justified ginsu-ing.  We were lackluster, but we didn’t realize it, until we really turned up the heat.

My scene partner Bill had a hard time with his part of the scene.  He has a rather long monolog in the middle of it.  He would get contradictory notes from Robin each time we had a rehearsal.  He tried to do them all and ended up in a mush.  My problem was getting my stakes.  I had trouble connecting emotionally with the scene, because I don’t behave the way my character does, and I didn’t know how to be that way.  I got a lot of notes, that I had to go further, be bigger, be more of this, or more of that. I’m timid by nature, so this was really hard for me.

The last few days I was so desperate to break through my inhibitions I started to try self-hypnosis.  I stared at a hypnotic swirl on my computer screen and repeated phrases like, when I perform I am fearless and confidant.  When I perform my emotions flow freely.  When I perform I am relaxed and creative.  Anyway, I think it actually worked.  I was nervous, but not as much as I normally am, and I was really able to amp it up during our final performance.  I did things we hadn’t rehearsed, and I dealt spontaneously with the fact that my shoe fell apart in the middle of the scene.  I also was able to respond to Bill when he tried new things in the scene.

He too really shone in the final performance.  He managed to overcome what had been giving him so much trouble, by deciding that instead of trying to do the notes Robin gave him, he should do what worked for him.  It totally worked.  It wasn’t that he didn’t do what Robin suggested, because he did, but not all of it.  He worked out for himself what worked, and then allowed that to happen.

Before the scenes started Robin reminded us that we are here to learn how to use all the tools we have been shown, and that though this was a performance, we should approach it with astonishment as if it was happening for the first time.  I think this really helped us all.  We both tried new things in the scene. We played.  It was fun. everyone’s scenes in class were wonderful.  It was amazing to see how everyone grew, even in the last few weeks.  We all shone up there, basking in the glow of the support of our families, friends, and fellow students.  It was a wonderful experience, that filled me with hope, and a sense that I have arrived, not at the final destination, but at the top of the long hill I’ve been climbing, and now I can look back and see where I have been, while getting ready to descend into the forest, the unknown future.  Not with a sense of dread, but a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of adventure.

I’m an actor.  Now I have to act.

June 12 – Kick em when they’re down.

So we are less than two weeks away from the big final performance of our scene.  I feel as if we are doing as much work as we would for a whole play as we are doing for this ten minute scene.  We are doing a scene from Edward Albee’s The Marriage Play.  In the section we picked to do there is a knockdown fight.  My scene partner Bill and I really wanted to be able to do a good fight, since it really makes the scene, so we hired one of the teachers at our school to help us choreograph the fight, and make sure we didn’t kill each other, while trying to kill each other.

The first night we got together with the wonderful Brynna Jourden to help us, she ran us through some basic moves and concepts.  I’ve had three quarters of stage combat, but that was a year ago so I was a bit rusty, and Bill hadn’t had any experience with stage fighting.  We started warming up with trying to touch the other person’s stomach while trying to keep the other person from touching our stomach.  Our hands and forearms had to maintain some contact with each other.  It’s a fun thing to do.

Then we moved on to doing some basic unarmed combat techniques.  Mostly review for me, but new for Bill. He did really good on picking things up.  We did some slaps, some strangling, elbows to the stomach, arms twisting, groin kicking, basic falling, and rolling around on top of each other. A good start, and we didn’t get injured, so that was good, although I’m feeling a little tenderized from rolling on the hardwood floor.

We got together a few days later and then started crafting the actual choreography.  Brynna had some ideas, but took our input and modified things to our abilities as well.  At the end of our two hour session we had the basics of a good fight.  We are supposed to be exhausted at the end of this fight, our characters laying on the floor, and there won’t be any problem with playing that.  No actual acting necessary.  We were properly winded and we weren’t even going that fast yet.

I think it is a good fight, it has some slaps, some wrestling, a groin kick (scripted), some choking, rolling, hair-pulling, grasping, biting, crawling, and elbows and strangleholds.  What more could you ask for.  Now we have to work this into the part where we are doing the “acting”.  It’s almost like working on two scenes that we now have to put together.  We only have four classes left, and we are going to cram as many rehearsals in as we can.

This Sunday, we have our first full run through in front of our teacher, Robin, and this is the first time she will see the fight, and we will  see how much we can actually pull off.  It will be interesting to hear what she has to say.  I will report back with an update .

June 1 – Wrestlemania

Last night in Meisner class we got to do our physical metaphors.  What is a physical metaphor?  Well, we are supposed to take the essential conflict of our scene, and then translate that into something physical that we can do.  In our scene, from Edward Albee’s The Marriage Play, I want to keep my husband of 30 years from leaving me, and he wants to get understanding from me as to why he needs to leave.

So my challenge was to tie him up with a sheet, thereby keeping him from leaving.  His goal was to get an item (a sock) that I had hidden on my body somewhere (not on my foot that would be too obvious), and then get out of the door.  To add to the difficulty, I had to stay sitting on a mattress while doing this.

We had to do this while saying our lines.  To help us out, we each had “shadows”,  people who would feed us our lines, in little phrase bits.  We both were pretty much off book, so this was something  just to help us out, because in the struggling you can forget where you are in the text.  We also had a selection of spotters that were around us to make sure we didn’t run into poles, or furniture, or other people.

I don’t know how long it actually was, but it felt like an eternity.  Guessing on how long it was for the other people I’d say it was about 10 minutes.  Try wrestling with someone for ten minutes, it’s exhausting.  I was wearing a pair of cargo capris with lots of pockets.  I stashed the sock in the lowest pocket on my right leg, right about knee level.  I folded it flat as possible, so it wouldn’t be noticeable.

We started out energetically.  I tried slinging the shet over him and getting it wrapped around his arms.  He kept searching me.  He didn’t go for the lower pockets, tried sticking his hands in my upper pockets and back pockets.  I kept trying to wrap his arms up, or get the sheet around him, and of course do his task, he kept having to break free of my attempts.  This worked in my favor, at least for a while, because he couldn’t search while he was trying to free himself.

Eventually though, he found out where the sock was.  Then my game plan changed from trying to wrap him up, to keep him from getting the sock.  I twisted and turned so he couldn’t reach the pocket, rolling one way and another, but eventually he got it.  Then he tried to leave, so now my job became to hold on to him and not let him go.  I’m supposed to stay sitting on the mattress, but he is stronger than me, so eventually he pulled me off, but I wouldn’t let go.

He was on his butt, dragging himself across the floor, pushing with his legs.  I was holding on with a death grip to his pants (each hand located dangerously close to either side of his crotch), on my stomach, as he dragged me along with him.  I wanted to let go, and get a better grip, but I knew if I did that he would spring away, and the way I was laying I wouldn’t be able to get him fast enough before he got out the door.

So we inched along across the floor, with our entourage of shadows and spotters.  Frantically saying our lines, until finally… finally, Robin came over and told us to stop, when we were about five feet from the door.  We lay there in an exhausted heap, sweaty and out of breath.

Fun you ask?  Yes,  but it also had the desperation of the scene, especially at the end.  I couldn’t do much but hang on and hope that he wouldn’t leave.  He interestingly said, that at that point he was hoping I would do more to keep him from leaving.  Interesting when you think about it.  A husband who wants to leave, and wants his wife’s blessing as it were, but also wants her to fight to keep him more than she is.

I also got in touch with the desperation that my character has.  That was important for me, because I hadn’t been able to get in touch with that much, just on an intellectual level.  Also, interesting was that the fighting was fun.  In the play, the husband and wife snipe and verbally jab at each other.  I think this, in better times for them, is how they have fun and connect, how they challenge and stimulate each other.  That came out in the wrestling

So very productive, if exhausting.  I burned a lot of calories.  I was saying, who needs aerobics, and Tae Bo, and ab machines.  Find someone and wrestle them for ten to fifteen minutes.  You’ll get a great workout, and you might learn some interesting things about your relationship.

May 29 – There’s always tomorrow.

So here is something I’ve learned about being an actor.  It’s not good to be a procrastinator and be an actor.

Should seem obvious, but it took me a while to catch on.  First of all, I shall admit  that I am a procrastinator, and a fairly skilled one at that.  I have pretty much managed to get through my life knowing how long I could get away with postponing something. Then running around frantically doing whatever it was I had to do at the last minute, cursing myself, that if I had done this earlier I wouldn’t be all stressed out.

I think I learned this in school as a kid.  I was smart enough to figure out what I needed to do to pass a class, and that’s pretty much all I did, and generally waited until the last moment to do it.  This sort of method, while stressful, lends itself to a more academic and paper writing, test-taking environment.  Not so much the performance world.

Because let’s face it.  It’s hard to memorize a bunch of text in a short amount of time. I find for myself this is done best in short bursts over a longer period of time, rather than trying to cram everything in at once.  It doesn’t stick very well, and the brain has trouble processing it all.

Then of course, anyone who has done a play or a scene realizes that you can always use more time to work on it.  Eventually you just have to go as is, but there is a certain amount of groundwork that needs to be done, or it just comes off as crap.

So here is my problem.  I’m a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator, in fact at this moment I’m writing in my blog instead of doing my play research, and even this blog post was delayed several days, while I browsed the internet for useless widgets and weight loss miracles.  How do I get over this and start working on my acting preps that I’ve posted about before?

I have to day dream my character’s life and relationships. I have to read the play and mine it for statements about my character.  I have to analyze my scene for beats, and actions, and triggers, and blah blah blah.  Somehow I find time not to do it, and then, of course,  I stress out about not being prepared enough.  Why?

It’s that line about insanity is doing something the same way over and over again and expecting a different result.  My job is to figure out how to break this habit of procrastinating, because I want to do a good job.  There’s enough crappy acting out there, I don’t need to add to the pile.

Anyway, if anyone has suggestions, let me know.

May 20 – Light at the End of the Tunnel

So we have started on our final scenes for class.  This is it, we are nearing the end, ambling towards the stagelights at the end of the tunnel.  Twelve classes left and then we are released like baby turtles on the beach, to crawl out of our shells and see if we can make it to the ocean without becoming  dinner.

The scene I am working on with my partner is from Edward Albee’s The Marriage Play.  To sum up the story: Man suffering a mid-life crisis, after having a revelation at his desk, comes home from work in the middle of the day, and tells his wife of thirty years that he is leaving her.  Let us just  say that she doesn’t take it all that well.

Lots of verbal sparring, similar to what goes on in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but without the other couple.  There is a knock down drag out fight in the middle of our scene, which will be interesting to see how we pull that off.  I’ve had some stage combat experience, but my partner hasn’t.

Anyway we started our working reading last night.  Just running through the lines, with Robin stopping us to ask questions, about why we were doing or saying whatever we were doing or saying.  It was good.  I went early to watch some of the other people run through their scenes, which helped me feel more comfortable with the process when our time came.

There is so much to learn about a role, especially something complex like this.  Luckily Robin is there to help point things out to us.  It makes me wonder what we are going to do without here when this is all over.

May 5 – Tools of the trade

So we have attacked the text of the play we have been studying from all sorts of angles.  The way we have learned to break down text so that you as an actor have a fighting chance of pulling out a good performance is as follows:

Read the play or script, a lot.  Read through a few times just to read it, as an audience member, for enjoyment, whatever.

Then read the play and go through and pick out all the things said about your character by your character, by other characters, and by the author in the description.  Things are are stated out plainly and things that are implied.

Research things.  The author, the culture and history of the time period in which the play takes place, and in which the author lived at the time  they wrote the play.  You should also go through and find words you don’t know and learn how to pronounce them, learn what they mean.  If there are names of people in the play that are real people, find out who they are, and try and learn why they were included by the author.

Look at all the relationships in the play.  Who wants what from whom? and why?  Who are you allied with?  Who are you against?  Who has power?  Who doesn’t?  And does the power shift?

Find the main conflict of the play, and the major turning points throughout. Look for changes in the dynamics and tactics of the characters, especially your own.

Then start looking at the scenes.  What is the  conflict of the scene?  What does your character want and how do they go about getting it?  Is this scene a private scene between characters or is it “public” among the other characters?  Important to know since people behave differently in public and private.  Yes, you have to pretend that a bunch of people aren’t watching you on stage for your private moments.

Then you have to start looking at the beats.  Why am I saying this?  What am I trying to get from the other character?  How do I want them to react to what I’m saying?  Is it working?  Do I need to change tactics?  What is my stake in this situation?  What are my obstacles?  Are there secrets that I have that other’s don’t know?

What about the physicality of the scenes?  Why do you move to a certain place when you say this?  Are you close, are you far away?  Is your back turned, and how does that effect the dynamic and power plays between characters?  The director will do a lot of this in blocking, but trying it on your own in rehearsal can be very enlightening.  I found myself moving to one part of the stage, only to feel that it wasn’t right, or maybe tried sitting on a line or standing, to see if it had a different feel, a different emotional effect.

This is only some of the things to ask yourself, there are more, but these are the ones I could remember off the top of my head.  You can spend, and should spend, a lot of time with this.  If it seems overwhelming, it is.  I’m overwhelmed.  We are about to start our final scenes that we will present at the end of our nine month journey.  We are to use all the things we’ve learned to help us.  It’s a lot of stuff.  I’m not sure I realized that until now.

I guess it’s good that we have a bunch of tools to use. Nothing is more annoying than trying to build something, fix something, put some IKEA furniture together and not having the right tools.  The more tools, the more likely we will have what we need. So I will take the overwhelmed feeling I have now, and try and enjoy it.

Apr 22 – What does that mean?

We have entered the third quarter of Meisner.  This quarter is dedicated to analyzing text and than using that analysis to bring life to the characters and play.  Sounds simple enough, but it is really hard.

We’ve been given two plays to read and study.  Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, and Miss Julie by August Strindberg.  These two plays share many similarities.  The were both written about the same time, both by Scandinavian authors, both deal with the characters inability to conform to the given social structures, and both title characters kill themselves at the end of the play, finding it the only means of escape from their circumstances. A bit of a downer I say.

After reading both plays, we were assigned a character from one of the plays.  Then we had to go through the text of the play and find all the facts about our character that were said by us, by other characters, or implied indirectly by the text.  I got Hedda Gabler.

I have to say, in the first reading of the play, I didn’t like Hedda.  She was a bitch, and actually after a few readings still remains somewhat of a bitch, but now I acknowledge she might have her reasons to be.  This is not the first time where my first instinct in having to deal with a character is…this person is horrible.  Then after working with them for a while you get to understand them and like them, despite their flaws. Reminds me of some family and friends.

After this we were assigned scenes to go work on.  My scene has three people in it.  Hedda (Me), Lovborg, and Thea.  Last night in class we were to get up and do a working reading through the scene.  We set up some basic furniture and wore some basic costuming to get us in the mood.

Then we started reading the lines and trying to “play our actions” as best we good while staring at a piece of paper.  For those who may not be familiar with the acting terminology “playing an action” is basically figuring out what your character wants from another character and what your character does to get what they want.

I may want you to give me some money because I need it to escape my bad situation.   My action is that I need to get the dough, the way I do it is the tactics.  The action is drawn from the text of the play, say the mob is after me because I spilled the beans.  The words I say (along with the physical expression), and how I say them is my tactics.  I might try and seduce you, or threaten you, or plead with you, etc, etc.

It’s complicated.  We spent maybe a half hour going through the text break down each sentence, phrase, and sometimes single word, to find it’s action.  What do I mean when I say yes here?  Do I mean yes, or do I mean no, but am saying yes because that’s my tactic?  Am I saying it sweetly, mockingly, and why? What am I trying to get with this tactic?  Is it working?  How is the other person responding?  What does their response do to me? On and on and on.

We got maybe 10 lines done in a half hour of working.  With Robin, our teacher, coaching us with the above questions, and our repeated responses of, um, I don’t know.  Oh, I didn’t realize that.  Oh, I see, wow, so that’s what that means.

I think most of us who went up were pretty much ready to have a nervous breakdown.  It was a bit overwhelming to realize how much information was in the text that we had glossed over.  How are we ever going to learn how to do this?  Robin seeing us all, reminded us that’s why we are in this class, and we will get there.  I hope so.

April 13 – Mirror Mirror.

Still recapping last quarter since I was too discombobulated to write about all this stuff then.  Plus, we have only had one class this quarter and that was mostly talking about what we are going to be doing.  No action yet.

One of the big exercises we had to do last quarter was calle The Mirror.  Sounds harmless enough you say, and if by harmless you mean physically and emotionally exhausting, then you would be right.

What you do is go up in front of the class.  The rest of the class stands opposite you.  Whatever you do, they do.  whatever you say, they say.  As you might imagine, having 15 or so people watching you intently, mimicking your every move, tends to make you feel a little, um, shall we say, uncomfortable.

What you are supposed to do with this uncomfortable energy that is running through you is throw it back onto the group.  You can do this by shouting at them, or waving your arms, or grunting, stomping your feet, whatever, but it has to be at them.  Which is all well and good until they do it back to you.

Robin sits off to the side and lets this first phase go one for a while.  Then she starts to side coach you.  She’ll throw out a person or situation and you were supposed to act it out.  So for instance she would say you are a puppy, and the person would drop to the floor, wag their imaginary tail, scratch fleas, bark to try and get you to play, run away scared, and roll over.  It was all improvisation.

Common things thrown out at you were some animals, puppies, cats, chimps, wolves.  Often you would have to protect your young.  Lots of growling, swiping of claws and gnashing of teeth.

Then there were the erotic dancers, and street prostitutes in the Holland Tunnel hustling for johns, and had to fight off the young uppity ho, who thought she could take your spot.  You could go from Can Can Dancer, to boxer, to stand up comedian dealing with a heckler, to Elvis.

Often you would have to sing something.  I had to be a country-western singer performing in front of live audience at the Grand Ol Opry.  It’s amazing how when someone asks you to sing a song, all the words go right out of your head.

You would also often have to confront an imaginary person(s), who would be doing something horrible, say like torturing an animal, or about to kill a bunch of women and children.  And you would have to stop them with your words alone.  This was really hard.  My thing was I had to stop a town of religious zealots from stoning two women they thought were lesbians.  Fun.

It’s tiring. No matter what side of the mirror you are on.  You end up moving around for about 20 minutes or so.  At some point Robin lets the group drop out and then it’s just you.  She’ll make you stay still, and say some phrase over and over again, or sing some childhood song to each person who is standing in the group not moving, but watching intently.

She’s looking for our “masks” to fall away, those shields we put over us to keep from being vulnerable.  This exercise does that.  You don’t realize it while it is happening, but as a group member watching, you can see the transformation.

Most people at the end have a childlike essence.  It’s hard to describe without seeing it, but often I could see the person as the would have been when they were five, just simply standing there and being themselves, without the artifice of having to be with-it and in control.

Some people cried, some laughed, some left the planet for a bit, but all returned and came back as themselves.  Beautifully and simply themselves.

April 10 – A little imagination

Hmmm…sorry?  What was that?  Oh.  I’m sorry, I was daydreaming, and I didn’t hear a word of that.

So day dreaming, you say, Why?  Basically it’s like running.  It’s exercise, but instead of building up your body, it builds up your creative faculties.  Like any sort of exercise, unless you are magically gifted, it’s hard at first and gets easier as you go along.

We had to do some more exercises where we set up a space to be a room in our house.  We brought meaningful props in and used some Freehold furniture to make a representation of our room.  Then we again sat in there daydreaming, people watched us.

The next round we had to bring an activity and a circumstance, similar to what we had done in our repetition exercises in the previous quarter, and then we had to sit in our space and daydream.

My activity was to learn Amazing Grace on the banjo, and my circumstance was that my mom had died, and was to learn to play this for her funeral service. This is the song she wants played.

At first nothing was happening; I was too busy trying to play the song, which I didn’t know how to play. So I decided to stop and just sit there, and in that quiet spot not doing anything,  I managed to imagine what playing Amazing Grace at my mom’s funeral really meant, and I started crying.  Oh, a good amount too, more than the last time I cried.

It was interesting that I had to do nothing to get in touch with the emotions.  At other times I’ve relied on physical activity to get me into a scene.  I guess the lesson there is what you need depends on the situation.  This time it was daydreaming.

Apr 9 – Imagine that.

Boy it’s been a long time since I’ve posted.  In fact a whole quarter of Meisner went by.  So now I feel forced to sum it up, so we can move on to the third quarter, and I can start talking about that. It might take a few posts, but I’ll get there.

The focus of the second quarter of the Meisner track at Freehold is developing the “instrument.”  That’s the actor’s body and mind to put it into layman’s terms. The point (as I see it anyway) is to disassemble our cultural programming enough to act/react spontaneously to the imaginary circumstances in which we find ourselves during a play or film.

Sounds kind of high-falutin, but really it’s about teaching adults to play make believe after such frivolous time-wasting abilites were crushed out of us by the monolithic weight of our western European, Protestant, technology riddled 21st century adult responsibilities.

Things that came naturally to us as children do not come naturally as an adult.  We may be able to drive and shop online, but kids have us beat in the imagination department.

I can remember spending hours playing on the jungle gym, that was really a rocket ship, trying not to touch the hot lava playground sand.  Or running through our neighborhood playing Charlie’s Angles (the original 70’s show – I’m old), fighting over who got to play which Angel.  For the record I didn’t fight; I was always Sabrina; she was the smart one, but my friends fought like cats and dogs over who got to be Jill (Farah). The loser had to be Kelly.

So what did we do in the first part of the second quarter of Meisner?  We imagined things. We daydreamed.  Sounds easy?  It’s not.  It’s easy to daydream when you are just drifting through your day, trying to escape from your tedious job by having some fun in your head.

Maybe you are rescuing kittens from a burning building and become the town hero, or maybe it’s imagining what you are going to say to someone in some confrontational conversation you are planning having.  We slip in and out all day, but suddenly someone says, you need to imagine and you need to do it now.  Then the clamps clamp down and the gears screech to a halt.

Daydreaming is controlled by our subconscious, and because of that we don’t tend to have much control over it, which is actually what makes daydreaming useful.  Our subconscious minds, if given free reign, will take us to interesting places, that our conscious mind, so worried about trying to not make a fool out of itself, won’t. Perhaps because it is afraid, or mostly because it doesn’t even occur to it to go there in the first place.

So one of the first exercises that we did in class was to daydream.  You had to get up in front of the class, lie on one of the questionable Freehold mattresses, and daydream, while the rest of the class watched.  Yes, that’s what we did.  Imagine a room of adults sitting in rows of folding metal chairs, watching someone lying on mattress with their eyes closed daydreaming.

The funny thing was it was interesting.  In my experience, I was too aware in the beginning to really day dream, but as I laid there long enough, things started percolating.  When you’d watch other people you could see emotions flit across their faces.  That was interesting.  They probably didn’t even know it was happening, but it was happening, and it was interesting.

So the first step was taken, lying down.

Dec 12 – Say it like you mean it.

I could start of this post saying how I’m going to recommit to posting regularly again, but I think we all know how that will go.

I’ve just finished my first quarter of Meisner training at Freehold Theatre Studio Lab.  It has been a long, somewhat tiring, but mostly fun ride.

We started out with the classic Meisner repition exercise, expanding onto that to calling behavior, and then added the activities and circumstances (see previous posts for explanations of these).  The last step we added this quarter was text, specifically a short scene from a play.

We were paired up with a partner.  Robin made the decisions and I’m not quite sure what her criteria were, but everyone seemed well matched, so I can only imagine she had her reasons.  We were then given a short scene from a play.  We were told not to read the play, at least until after we were done working on it.

We did a short scene from I Never Sang For My Father.  It was a brother and sister trying to figure out what to do with their aging jerk of a dad after their mother dies.  Sis says it’s nursing home time for bad dad, and Bro’ says  I feel guilty about not loving him and and I feel like I should  take care of him even though it will ruin my chance at love and happiness.

We then worked on just reading the text mechanically.  This means reading it with no inflection of rhythm, tone, emotional content, whatever.  It sort of like reading it like a ro-bot where e-ver-y-thing is pro-nounced with the same weight and syl-la-bles are all the same.

We would sit across from each other at a table, not looking at each other in the beginning because we were to busy reading, and read our lines mechanically.  The idea being that eventually the emotional content will come out on it’s own without us forcing it.  We just read like two rock-em sock-em robots that have decided to put down the dukes and give conversation a go.

After a few days of that, we then superimposed the calling behavior onto our text, so we could say our line, or we might be inclined to say something like: you aren’t paying attention to me. Then they might repeat, I’m not paying attention to you, or they might say their next line.  Sometimes the repeating would go on for a bit.  Robin would side coach us, telling us to say our line as we would say our calling behavior.

For instance, someone telling me: you are annoying me, might make me defensive. I would answer back, I’m annoying you, and let my defensiveness shine through.  Then they might say again: you are annoying me, and then I could say my line of text again with the emotional coming through.

It’s hard to explain this process and much easier to see it happening.  It make for a very natural reading of lines, and makes it more obvious when you are “acting” the lines, faking the emotion as it were.

We learned some tricks for memorizing lines as well, such as throwing a ball back and forth with your partner while saying your lines as fast as you can, writing your lines down by hand, and writing down your lines with no punctuation, so you are not trapped into one way of thinking and saying them.

We also had different tricks during our little scene performances.  All the scenes had some element of conflict to them.  So when people were not letting the combative nature come out, or were “acting” it Robin gave them pillows to hit each other with while saying their lines.  It was amazing how real it became and how dramatically honest the lines came out.

In my scene my partner and I were told to take a twin mattress that was lying around in the studio and each hold one end, and play tug-o-war, while saying our lines.  It was amazing. It felt very freeing.  I was so involved with the physical activity and saying the lines, that they just came out however they came out, apparently much more dramatically, but also more naturally.  It just felt good and effortless, even though I was red-faced and breathing hard at the end of it.

Now I just need to figure out how to do that without a mattress.

Nov 19 – Consciously Incompetent

I was talking to one of my classmates last night.  I mentioned that I had a blog about my acting school experience, but that I hadn’t been blogging much of late.  I explained that felt like I should blog, but my brain just felt like mush when it came to trying to process the information and experiences of class.

He told me about something he had read that Spalding Gray had said or written.  I’m paraphrasing his paraphrase, but I think you will get the idea.  He said the Spalding Gray was walking through the forest on a beautiful day, and the trees and sky were so exquisite and moving that he felt he should write about it, but didn’t want to, or couldn’t, or something like that, I’m not sure now. Did I mention my brain was mushy?

It’s like it is to hard to explain what’s happening, because I’m not really sure what’s going on myself. My paltry attempts at splicing words into a narrative are likely to fall short of what’s really going on.

Last night at the end of class, Robin asked us if we had noticed anything particular about that night’s performance bits.  People responded with various things such as the activities seemed more meaningful, the background stories richer, the interactions more complex, the connection deeper, the framework of the repetition exercise was looser, and on and on.

Basically what she was trying to point out was that we are improving. That by jumping through the Meisner-shaped hoops we are becoming better at our acting just by the act of doing.  It seems Zen.  Become what you are, become what you do, a no-matter-where-you-go-there-you-are sort of thing.

Robin made us all read Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel at the beginning of the quarter.  Basically it describes the process of repeatedly trying to master something and even though you keep doing it badly, the process of doing it despite all ones errors and misdirections, will lead to improvement and eventually mastery if you stick with it long enough.

The idea is to get to the point of Unconscious Competence, the fourth stage of competency.  The four stages of competency being:

1. Unconscious Incompetency, you don’t know what you don’t know how to do.
2. Conscious Incompetency, you know what you don’t know how to do.
3. Conscious Competency, you know how to do what you do, but you have to concentrate on it.  And lastly,
4. Unconscious Competence, you don’t have to think about what you are doing.  This is the realm of mastery.

Right now I’m in the land of Conscious Incompetence.  I know that I don’t know a whole lot.

Nov 14 – Add it up.

The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, performed by the New Century Theatre Company at ACT Theatre.  Running from November 13, 2008 – December 13th 2008.

Verdict:  Go see it.  Now!

I think this is the best play I’ve seen in a while. It has a delightfully weird story, good actors, creative staging, all wrapped up into a disturbed fun house ride where you are not sure what is coming next.  Now how often can you say that, when you see a play or movie these days.

The story follows Mr. Zero, a plodding cog in the accounting department of a nameless store.  He’s been in the same job for twenty-five years, a fact that his nagging wife reminds him of continuously.  On his 25th anniversary his boss comes to tell him that he is being replaced by a new adding machine.  Let’s just say that he doesn’t take it well.  From there, the ride begins.

The play was written in 1923 at a time when the classic white American man was a mysogynistic racist, and Mr Zero is no exception.  One section of the play demonstrates the horrible racism of this time, and I’d warn audience members who might be sensitive to racial and religious epithets to be prepared for some graphic comments.

I was torn, feeling sympathetic with Mr. Zero and realizing that realizing that he’s an ass (and worse, but I don’t want to give the plot twists away).  Mr. Zero wends his way through his circumstances haphazardly.  He has moments where he dares to dream, but they don’t last, mostly his own fault.

If you liked the movie Brazil (especially the director’s cut), I think you would like this play.  It has a similar feel and look.  The set is miminal, but creates in the first half a decrepit art deco landscape. The ensemble creates a mood reminiscent of Metropolis, moving in rhythmic unison.  The music supporting the synchronization. I enjoyed the music, a mix of weird electronica, cinematic, with some singing bits now and again.  And there was dancing too. How fun is that.

What I liked about this play is that it kept me guessing.  I really didn’t know where it was going.  It wandered around seemingly randomly, not unlike what was happening to its protagonist.  I felt like I was riding on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, wondering what was going to be coming next.  A weird delight around every corner.

I should talk about the acting.  I thought everyone was really good.  The juicyness starts in the opening scene, when Amy Thone, playing Mrs. Zero begins an impressivly alternating gossiping about the neighbors and complaing about her husband in a fast and long monologue.  I personally can’t imagine having to learn all that text, let alone get it out in a coherent manner that people won’t tune out in after 40 seconds.

I don’t have the program with me to accurately recall who played who and their names, so I will just say that everyone was good.  My favorites were the guy who played Mr. Zero, Amy Thone as Mrs. Zero, and the guy who played Shrdlu (I think that’s the character name – the guy who killed his mom).  In any case, everyone seemed believable.  I almost never thought some was saying their lines just to say their lines, which I of course am paying extra attention to since I’m in acting school, and taking Meisner classes.

I’m not a theater critic by any stretch, but I can tell you that I was thoroughly impressed.  Go see this show.  I mean it.

Nov 6 – Drive on

Another review.  This time it is Becky’s New Car by Steven Dietz, making it’s world premiere at ACT Theatre in Seattle.

I have to say I liked this play. It was funny, and warm, and enjoyable. Not too deep, but not shallow either.  Having recently finished acting in The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Kaufman and Hart, I felt kinship with this play’s screwball heart.

Becky works at a car dealership processing the loans and paperwork.  She is overworked and under-appreciated.  She is steadily, if not excitedly, married to a roofer, and has the obligatory slacker psychology grad student son who likes to psycho analyze her.

One night she is working late when a very rich man, Walter, comes in looking to buy nine cars for his employees for appreciation gifts.  He claims he isn’t good at buying presents and asks her to do it for him.  Not wanting to turn down the sale of nine cars, she agrees.

In the ensuing coversation Walter, greiving for his own dead wife, mistakenly thinks Becky is a widow.  Not wanting to lose the sale, and also enjoying the obvious attention he is giving her, she doesn’t correct him, assuming that he will get his cars and be on his way, and that will be that.  What’s the harm? Oh, you know what’s coming next.

Of course he comes back later to persue her, and she is intrigued.  What follows is the classic mistaken identity/little white lie turns into writhing pit of chaos for everyone involved story.

The play had great screwball one liners.  The characters are cliches: The bored wife, the stable and intitaly clueless husband, the slacker son, the rich man who is surprised to find himself attracted to a real (read working class) woman. Still, you don’t mind because they are played well by the actors and are sympathetic.

The set was minimal, and the staging well done.  There was some audience interaction, which added to the laughs, and only at one point which I thought slowed the pace down too much, when three audience members were asked to come out on stage to help her get ready for her Cinderella ball moment.

I like to go on Pay What You Can Nights, because I’m a acting student who can’t afford the full price tickets.  When I go to the PWYC nights, I’m always expecting to see more poor college student types, but it is almost invariably the blue haired crowd that attends.  At this particular performance the average age must have been 68. I only saw one other person my age.  So when the poor ladies were called up on stage, it took them a good while to get there.  And at the end when the audience wanted to give them a standing ovation, I saw more than one person having a hard time getting out of their chairs.

But, really aside from that small snag, I thought it all worked wonderfully.

It closes this weekend (Nov 16th, 2008).  Go see it if you can.

October 31 – All for One

Review of the Three Musketeers at the Seattle Rep.

I went and saw the Three Musketeers at the Seattle Rep.  It was Pay What You Can night,and Halloween.  My Stage Combat teacher Geof Alm played D’Artagnan’s father, and Treville, and a few other people besides, which was fun to see.  I always like to see my teachers in action.

How was the play?  Well it wasn’t bad.  The thing with any story that’s been done over and over and over again, is how do you make it fresh and interesting?  They tried, but I can’t really say they suceeded.

Not that there wasn’t some effort put in. They updated some characters, giving a few women a larger role, and more importantly control over their characters. For instance they added the role of Sabine, who is apparently D’Artagnan’s sister, who disguises herself as a boy to travel with D’Artagnan to Paris.  Oh and she’s a good swordfighter too.  If there is one thing I have a soft spot for is girls dressing up as boys to go on sword fighting adventures.  And it didn’t hurt that the actress was cute.  I give the production two thumbs up for that.

Still the story is the story and you know how it goes.  There was lots of sword fighting, with at one point 10 people on stage fighting simultaneously.  There was swinging from the rafter’s on ropes.  There were guns and cannon’s exploding. There was leaping from balcony to balcony, and all the sorts of swashbuckling action that you might come to expect from Hollywood movie.  And that’s what it felt like to me., a Hollywood movie put on the stage, which I imagine is no small feat.  And like many Hollywood movies, it was pretty to look at, but not much on substance.

Still it wasn’t a bad way to spend a Halloween.  Better than hiding in the dark in our house because we didn’t buy any candy.

Oct 29 – It’s all in your mind.

So the tennis game continues.  Back and forth back and forth.  You are annoyed.  I’m annoyed.  You are boring me.  I’m boring you.  You are upset.  You are upsetting me, etc, etc, etc.  The verbalization part has remained the same, but now the framework is getting more complicated.

The repetition exercise is funneled through an increasingly complex conglomeration of imaginary machinery.  Every week new modules are strapped on affecting the output of the input.

Now we have put the exercise on its feet as it were, set it loose in an artificial environment.  First the criteria was Person A was in their room chillin’, Person B comes to the door and knocks.  Then Person A opens the door (or not if they so choose), and lets the person in and the repetition exercise begins.

Then an activity for Person A, the person in the room, was added.  Person A has to be doing some sort of task that has a cap, i.e., you will know when you are done with it.  The activity has to be done for some imaginary reason, but generally in regards to a real person.  Like I’m going to make a cake for my girlfriend because she has had a hard day work because her boss gave her a bad evaluation.  The girlfriend is real, but the bad evaluation is imaginary.

The next module was upping the importance of the activity.  It now has to be based on a life altering event of some sort, again involving a  real person, but imaginary circumstances.  You might be asking, what does that mean?  That’s what we all did.

An example that Robin gave was of previous student whose dad never thought he was manly enough, even though he was a perfectly regular guy, with a family, and a successful job.  His dad was apparently a NFL coach, so his imaginary life altering circumstance was that his dad was getting an award for his football coaching that was going to be shown on national TV.  The son would show up at the event in drag and embarrass the coach father.  The activity would be making the dress he would wear.  The emotional state generated: revenge.

This is all the background set-up for the exercise.  Then while you are sewing away on your dressing plotting your dad’s imminent humiliation, someone comes to you door and your only mode of conversation is stating either what you think their behavior is, or how their behavior is affecting you, while letting the background situation affect you however it is going to affect you.

So for this Sunday I have to come up with an activity.  I have something in mind, but I have to work out more details before the reveal.  I have to tell you this stuff is hard.  The purpose is two-fold (perhaps more-folds that i am unaware of as yet): to exercise our atrophied imaginations, and to help us experience a variety of emotional states, while hopefully managing to stay “present” with your acting partner through the repetition exercise.

If it sounds hard, and it sounds uncomfortable, it is.

Oct 9 – On and on and on.

Things are evolving.  When I last posted I was explaining the Meisner Repitition exercise to you.  The observing of your partner, the noting of a characteristic.  The saying of the characteristic over and over and over and over again, until some other characteristic or attribute pops to the forefront of consciousness, starting the cycle one again.

We started with simple statements, like “nose”, moved to “big nose”  then to complete sentences such as, “You have a big nose.”  Then we started noting emotions and the physical expression of those emotions, known as “behavior.”  This would be like “You are offended that I said you have a big nose.”  Often this would just be shortened to “You are offended,” for simplicity.  The person with the big nose would say from their point of view, “I am offended,” and this would repeat until someone noticed another behavior.  And as noted before, the person can change the statement if it is not true for them.

Now we get to also take our response to what someone has said to us, and then put the it back on them.  It’s probably just easier to give an example of what this means.

Bob: You have a big nose.
Alice: I have a big nose.
Bob: You are offended.
Alice: You offended me.
Bob: I offended you.
Alice: You offended me.
Bob: I offended you.
Alice: Your annoying me.
Bob: I’m annoying you.
Alice: You’re annoying me.
Bob: You’re boring me.
Alice: I’m boring you….

It goes on pretty much until some outside force stops it.  When we are in class, it is Robin, and when we are doing our practice outside of class it is generally when our alloted half hour is up,  when we spill our coffee haus beverage into our lap, or some other distraction breaks the flow.

You might be thinking to yourself, why are we doing this?  What is the point?  What do you learn?

These are all good questions, and when I figure it out I will let you know.

Sep 28 – You look silly.

So the third night of Meisner.  Again with the warm-ups and exercises.  This time we do an exercise which I have done before, but I always find fun.  I don’t have a good name for it, but here’s what happens.

You pair up with someone and then decide who will be the leader.  Whoever is the leader will lead the other person around the room.  The other person, the follower, will have there eyes closed, and the only thing connect the two will be the very ends of their fingertips.

So the leader guides the the follower around the room, careful not to bump them into the furniture or the object that are now being strewn about for the blind followers to interact with.  Robin runs around pulling out chairs and pillows, mops and ladders, rolls of paper and boxes.

The leaders then take their followers up to an object and place their hands on it.  The follower gets to feel whatever the object is and enjoy whatever tactile information they get.  After a bit with that object the leader takes the follower’s hands off the object and moves on to another.

Then after a while the leader no longer uses the finger tips to lead but just the voice.  You pick a word (I used biscuit) and keep saying it over and over.  The follower tunes in to the sound of the leader’s voice. Again the followers get to interact with objects.

This whole process take about five to ten minutes. And then you switch.  It is very interesting to be the follower.  First of all you have to trust your partner will not walk you into the wall.  It is also more comforting to be led by the fingertips, instead of by voice alone.  Then there is feeling the objects and figuring out what they are.  And at last, you get to open your eyes, only to find yourself in some part of the room, where you didn’t think you were.

After that Gauntlet of Repetition was set up, the chairs aligned in their rows.  We did the Basic repetition, described in the previous entry.  Then we moved on to the level known as Point of View.  In Point of View you get to say a complete sentence.  Back to Alice and Bob. Bob looks at Alice, notices an attribute and says, “You are wearing a green shirt.”

Alice says, “I am wearing a green shirt.”
Bob says, “You are wearing a green shirt.”
Alice says, “I am wearing a green shirt.”
Bob says, “You are wearing a green shirt.”
Alice says, “I am wearing a green shirt.”
Bob says, “You are wearing a green shirt.”

Now here is where it gets a little more interesting.  Let’s say Alice says to Bob,”You have brown eyes.” Now Bob, thinks his eyes are Hazel, so he would say, “I have Hazel eyes.” Then Alice would say, “You have Hazel eyes.” and the repeating would continue.

You only get to change the attribute to make it “true” for yourself.  Someone might say,”You are serious.”, because that is how they interpret your look.  Then if that person feels they are serious, they would say “I am serious”, but if they were not feeling serious, they could change it to whatever they thought they were feeling.

Alice says, “You are serious.”
Bob says, “I am sleepy.”

This repeats until Robin stops it, or until one of the actors, notices another attribute, and then says that.  Again, if the person agrees, they repeat, if not they change the phrase.

And again, we have to meet several people outside of class to practice.  Ignore the crazy people in Starbucks; they are most likely actors.

Sept 23 – Repeat After Me

So day two of Meisner class.  We started doing the basic stretchy acting warm-ups that I’ve tended to do in every acting class. We did some more acting exercises as well, the basic stuff, but nothing Meisnery yet.  Then it came.  Robin, our instructor, lined up two parallel rows of chairs facing each other, separated by about six feet.  Between them she placed two chairs facing each other about three feet apart.  From this arrangement the people in the two parallel rows, would be able to see the profiles of the people in the center, and the people in the center would be looking directly at each other.

She gets two volunteers.  The two suckers, I mean, students went up and sat in the chairs, hands in laps, trying to seem relaxed.  She explained the exercise.  It is Meisner’s famous repetition exercise.  The version we were doing was called the Basic, and as we progress more complexities will be layered on to this most basic of forms.

The Basic consists of exchanges between the two actors in the middle.  One person is chosen to start, let’s call her Alice.  The other actor we will call Bob.  Alice will close her eyes, and try and clear her mind.  Then she will look at Bob, and whatever physical attribute she first notices that pops into her head she will say.

Alice closes her eyes, and then looks up at Bob.  She notices he is wearing glasses.  She then says, “Glasses.” Bob listens then repeats “Glasses.”  It goes on like this

Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
Alice: Glasses.
Bob: Glasses.
etc, etc, etc…

After a while Robin will stop the actors, and then Bob would start by looking away, and then back at Alice, and then says the first attribute that pops in his head. For instance, “Hair”. The progression again goes on until they are stopped.  After a few rounds of this, the actors in the middle are switched out and some new ones come in.

It is a bit like watching a tennis match.  Sitting on the sidelines, I could see my fellow actors heads swiveling left, then right, as they listened to and watched, the riveting exchange.

After we all went the first time we got to do a second round, this time getting to be a little more descriptive.  People were saying things, like wire-rimmed glasses, and long brown hair, and red t-shirt. Not poetic, but functional.

We finished the second round and then were given our homework assignment.  We needed to meet at least three people between now and the next class to do this exercise with for a half an hour.

Because we are all spread out over the greater Seattle area, most of us decided to meet in mutually accessible locations, like coffee shops located between people’s homes.  So if you were in a Starbuck’s and saw two people sitting across from each other saying “Nose.” “Nose.” “Nose.” “Nose.” “Nose.” for minutes on end, most likely they were actors studying Meisner.

Or they were crazy.

Sept 21 – Meisner

So I have started the Meisner Program, or what I like to refer to as advanced acting class to my friends who don’t know who Sanford Meisner is, or the history of his style of acting training.  It probably isn’t really advanced, although you are required to have some base level of experience before you start, and are screened through an interview process to make sure that you know what you are getting into.

I actually interviewed for the program last year, but it was recommended to my by Robin Smith, the instructor, that I wait until I had more experience.  She would have let me in because I did have some experience taking Freehold classes, and had been in one Freehold play, and also that I had gotten my blackbelt in Aikido, which demonstrates a certain amount of willingness to stick with something difficult.

Still, she thought if I got more experience I would get more out of the class.  I chose to follow her advice and put it off for the next year.  I can see now that she was correct, and that what I learned in the year between, was invaluable, and I am much more ready to milk this class for all that my current level of abilities can.

So class started.  I think I entered with an advantage, because I already knew half the class.  Over the summer I did my second Freehold play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Kaufman and Hart.  All but one of the cast members from that play were in the Meisner class, in addition to two people I had taken other classes with.  Out of the 17 students, I knew 10 of them already.

The first day there was a lot of talking.  The usual, introduce yourself, what do you want to get out of this class sort of thing.  We did some basic acting type warm-ups and some basic acting exercises.  Nothing Meisner specific yet, just the sort of stuff you do in Acting 101.

One of the fun things we did, to give some variety to the say a little about yourself thing is called Video Pen Pal.  You get up in front of the class, and you get a minute and a half to present yourself as if you were being recorded on video as an advertisement for a pen pal, or dating service.  So you get up and ramble on about yourself for the set amount of time.  “I was born in California, I moved to Seattle when I was 20, I like kittens, walks on the beach, and reading mid-19th century German philosophers….”

Then someone else in class gets to do what is called Playback.  They get to go up and recreate as much as they can your portrayal of yourself, repeating what you said, as best as they can remember, and trying to reproduce your mannerisms, and convey your overall personalization.

So you get to ramble on about yourself, while everyone is watching you, and then you get to see someone else ramble on as if they were you, while everyone is watching them. Nothing there to make anyone feel uncomfortable.

Acting is so fun.