To The Brink And Back

When an actor is working truthfully, they don’t ‘play’ emotions. You don’t begin a scene by thinking to yourself, “here is where I get really pissed off”, or “here is where I cry”. Rather, you discover what your character is doing. He is defending himself, or he is trying to get the other character to face the facts, or she is trying to get the other character on her side. And people use a whole arsenal of tactics to get what they want. Just think of the last interaction with your boss.

Real emotion, which can occur spontaneously within the actor during a rehearsal or performance is a byproduct of the struggle to achieve those goals. But it is elusive, and the minute you make it your goal, you’ll never find it again.

What is a special challenge with I AM MY OWN WIFE is that one character can be speaking, trying to achieve whatever his or her goal is, and an emotion may begin to manifest itself. As an actor you can’t deny it! You embrace it and continue trying to work toward your goal. You have, for an instant, become that performer who is living truthfully within imaginary circumstances.

But then, and here is where a one-person show is particularly challenging, that scene ends! And in one second, you are another person in a completely different place with a completely different goal. And so the title of the blog. To the brink—leaving one character a wreck—and back. It’s almost like you have to install a sort of air brake that can be applied very quickly. It’s tricky.

How far can you allow an emotion to take you knowing (somewhere in the recesses of your brain) that in a moment you must wipe the slate clean. Good fun. And the best thing is, I get paid for doing this.

Fire and Brimstone!

This showed up as a comment to one of my posts. I thought it deserved front page attention.

"You'll get the full force of Christ, don't think you won't. He was sheer weakness and humiliation when he was killed on the Cross, but oh, he's alive now--in the mighty power of God! We weren't much to look at, either, when we were humiliated among you, but when we deal with you this next time, we'll be alive in Christ, strengthened by God. Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don't drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups."

I happen to be reading Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion" these days. I wonder if the folks who took an interest in my little blog wouldn't like a copy?

Two bits and a shave

I was getting my haircut yesterday by a local barber in Harrisburg, a very nice guy (and cheap too, $12), and we were exchanging the usual banter. He discovered I was an actor and a served up this gem, “How did your parents handle it?” Okay, I know I look a few years younger than my age, but here I am, a guy in his mid forties, trying to think back to the days when any of that even mattered. For the record, my parents had a brief adjustment period (previously, I had intended to be a doctor) and then settled into unadulterated support. The only persistent question my father has raised is why the hell can’t a theatre make a profit. Aside from Broadway and Off Broadway this is true, and I have no idea why and I have no desire to discover the underlying economic dynamics. A little more off the top, please.

Touring

My wife is two days away from hitting the road. Ah, the road. Touring was once upon a time the primary venue for an actor. Companies would travel from city to city, sometimes bringing several shows with them. I have seen an authentic sign that was once commonly hung on the outside of Inns, “NO THEATRICALS ALLOWED.” Such was the esteem in which the community of actors and stagehands were held.

My wife’s tour is being produced by Theatreworks, a company that brings musicals and dramas to young people across America. It is a noble endeavor and they do it quite well and efficiently and compensate their actors reasonably. They operate under a union contract and so deserve much more respect than their non-union competition which takes advantage of the willingness of young inexperienced want-to-be actors to work long hours for little. But I digress.

My wife’s tour reminds me of the few tour experiences I have had. The first being very similar to her Theatreworks experience. The Paper Bag Players is an outfit that I became associated with a few months after moving to NYC. I was with them for a few years and we did similar regional tours. But then, through happenstance and association, I was bumped to first class, and boy, what a difference.



Here we are, in Boston at the Shubert Theatre, just before Thanksgiving, 1986. I’m in the bottom left corner. I was a child. “I’M NOT RAPPAPORT”, written by Herb Gardner, directed by Dan Sullivan, starring Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little. Seven actors, five understudies, five crew and stage management. Thirteen cities in eight and a half months. Our shortest stay was one week, our longest, five. We flew everywhere and the set, lights, costumes and luggage were trucked. It was sweet. I learned to scuba dive in Florida, played tennis with Judd in Kansas City, Dallas and beyond, played squash with Richmond Hoxie, who remains one of my dearest friends, and generally had a good ole’ time. The road can be fun, but now that I’m a few years older, home sounds pretty good too.

Revisiting Charlotte

Many people have inquired as to how it feels to go back into rehearsals for I AM MY OWN WIFE. So, I have two choices. I can fulfill the request, thereby burnishing my blogger cred, or I can take a baseball bat to my laptop.

The first time around seemed like a monumental task, especially for someone who was also doing his first solo show. “How do you remember all those lines?”, the question of the layman, has some resonance here. The memorization for me took about two and a half months, a couple of pages a day at best. I’m a relatively slow study but the up side is that once they are in, they remain with just a modicum of maintenance. There is that unique feeling doing a one person show that once you enter the stage and open your mouth, you will be speaking for the next fifty minutes with no way out. And then there’s Act Two!

My director for the first go around was Bruce Levitt who I have worked with several times before (and will do again for his production of GOOD at Cornell University). He was a dream director for this project. We both felt that the team who wrote directed and acted this puppy for Broadway had to have some sense of what works and what doesn’t, so we adhered to the spirit, tone and physical shape of what they had achieved. Bruce was patient and supportive as I floundered through the process of putting the lines in my head and the characters in my body. And, as always, he was organized and diligent about bringing the rest of the production (costumes, set, lights, sound) to fruition. His insights were invaluable and his instincts fall in line with my own much more often that not.

The second time around I am bringing to the table a lot of decisions and habits from the first time. My director,Don Alsedek is like that soft-spoken uncle who never seems to be ruffled by anything and gives you a sense of support without actually ever saying anything. His sensibilities as a director have been slightly different and certain changes have been made. In general Don is sensitive to the extremely intimate space that is the Open Stage. Seating wise it is not any smaller than Riversides facility but it wraps around two sides of the playing space and the audience is right on top of the performer. The acoustics are “crazy alive” (a technical term) and a whisper will carry far enough for everyone to hear. So that, coupled with a taste for action based, realistic work has caused him to soften the overtly theatrical aspects of what I had been doing with “Wife” and indeed what I remember Jefferson to have done.

Contrary to popular belief, I can be a good little soldier of an actor if I sense that I am not being led down some blind alley only to be abandoned there to rot. I have embraced this softening of the slickness of the piece. We are trying to ‘slide’ in and out of characters rather than ‘snap’. We are eliminating some of the repetition of the iconic ‘poses’ or ‘gestures’ so that we let them establish the character but then relax them into variety. Some characters have been lost altogether because they are not delineated in the text as separate. He is also paring down movement for movements sake. In the Broadway production one of the theatrically splashy components was how the actor moved from place to place on the simple set and how the lights seemed to follow him seamlessly. Because of the smaller space and about 300 less lighting instruments this is not a realistic goal. So I stay in the same place more often than not. Don was also concerned about who was telling the story, which, if you know the piece, is not clear cut. Is the play Doug’s story—Yes, I think so. However, when Charlotte is telling a story from her past are the characters she conjures during the story telling completely separate from her or are they filtered through her? See what I mean?

I miss some things that have been changed. I’m not sure if that’s because you tend to miss what you are used to. I enjoy some of the specificity that has been found by re-examining the actions (motivations) of each and every character (took the first week).

During my graduate days I was lucky enough to have worked with a few really fantastic directors who demonstrated to me that the form something takes doesn't change your job. That the actors task is to accept the outward structure (sometimes) imposed, and to breathe an emotional life into it. Extreme examples would be Robert Wilson casting you and giving you a monologue about throwing your newborn into a trash bin, delivered while walking extremely slowly from up stage right to down stage left as if trying to pass a sobriety test. Or executing the first entrance as Uncle Vanya by leaping into an EZ-Boy and staying there for nearly the entire first act. (the Vanya bit I did)

I am happily engaged in the process of trying to fill a slightly different form with as much truth as I am capable of. I have had the privilege of working with a few extremely good actors who seem to be able to deliver a performance that approaches the 90% truthful, 10% bullshit mark. I strive for that.

How American Are You?

Allow me to put my tool belt down.

Tadashi Suzuki was sitting at the head of the gathering. This was in the summer of 1991 when I was in Toga Japan, studying with a group of international students at his invitation. We were assembled in one of the facilities that his acting company used in which to train. During the nearly two-hour question and answer period much was covered. This comment was one of several that have remained with me since. Suzuki was asked if he felt that there was a difference between Japanese and American performers. He had been working for a long time with both and so had some grounds from which to base his reply. But as you will note, his reply goes well beyond acting and the theatrical world. “Yes” he said, “I have noticed a difference”. “Americans are brave experimentators. They do many things. Their vision is wide and they are bold and try this and that. But they often stay on the surface”. “The Japanese are timid when it comes to experimenting and do not range widely, but once settled, they have the capacity to go very deep”.

I have auditioned twice now for productions of I AM MY OWN WIFE since first performing it at the Riverside Theatre. Both times I was asked why I would want to do it a second time. Well apart from the fact that it’s work and a paycheck, which of course would be a true but bluntly uninteresting answer, I tried to articulate something about re-examining…continuing to refine blah blah blah. Inside however I was thinking how American they were and how Japanese I wanted to be.

My wife and I were handed two tickets outside the Lincoln Center complex to see the second installment of COAST OF UTOPIA by Tom Stoppard which has been getting rave reviews by Ben Brantly of the NY Times. Our benefactor is a wildly wealthy American who, born with a silver spoon stuck somewhere, has had the luxury of living a life of higher learning and artistic consumption. Don’t get me wrong, he is in no way under achieving. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre, classical music, literature and fine art, as well a speaking several languages fluently, including Russian. He has the energy of ten, and buys season subscriptions to dozens of arts organizations around New York, knowing that he will be unable to attend them all. He then befriends aspiring artists through various contacts and hands out his unused tickets as an encouragement to that community which enriches his life through the performing arts.

When he gave us our first row seats he said that he hoped we would enjoy it. I sensed something behind the sentiment and asked him if he had seen the first installment. He smiled and said that he had but then quickly added, “I’m sorry, but I have been in Moscow the past half year teaching and have gone to the theatre there as often as I can. It’s very hard for me to adjust back to American actors.” In Russia they often rehearse for up to a year (in America, four weeks). In Russia they bring back the same repertoire over and over again. In Russia an actor could spend a lifetime in the theatre and return to any given role hundreds of times.

In Russia or in Japan or Germany or France or Scandinavia or many other places, I would not be asked such a silly question as I was asked twice at an American audition. But I’m an American actor. Do I have the capacity to be otherwise?

Ought Seven

We here in our Haven on Haven have begun what is sure to be a year chock full of activity. The renovations have been put on the back burner for the month of January. They will be moved to a slow simmer in February and turned back to full in March.



What is left:

Building the wall unit in the living room that will house the “entertainment center” and books, the radiator and a window seat; building a unit in the little hallway just outside the bedroom and bathroom that will have a base that houses fourteen drawers and an upper part consisting of three cabinets, the center one with a glass door; laying the cork flooring in the kitchen; completing the wine cork backsplashes; tiling behind the stove to the ceiling and the backsplash around the sink; installing the hood above the stove and the dishwasher; spackling, caulking, priming and painting all the built-ins, trim, baseboards and crown moldings; wall papering the tiny hallway; painting the walls of the living room, entry hall and kitchen; sanding, staining and finishing the oak floor.

So, a few odds and ends.

In the mean time I am in rehearsals for I AM MY OWN WIFE. The wife that I have when I’m not my own is beginning rehearsals in two days for her tour. We are looking at extended periods of time apart for almost the entire year if things happen the way we expect. More details will be forthcoming, as they are made apparent to us. Suffice it to say that ought seven will be scattered. Somewhere in our wake we will leave a beautiful home which we hope to spend at least a little time in.

And The Stockings Were Hung (in the hallway) With Care.

This is Manhattan!! Who the hell has a chimney?!
Some Christmas memories from the year of the gut (renovation, I mean).

Our Tree.



My stocking stuffed by Santa. ( I don’t know about your santa but mine looks really good in red)




Leigh’s stocking stuffed by Santa. (Scrawled on the wall by this careless santa, “too small” and “see below”).



Our Christmas stuff is packed away in boxes and so we made do. Somewhere in the box is the stocking in which I was carried home from the hospital. You see, I was due on Christmas day and had several people convinced that I represented the second coming, but alas, I came too soon. OK, let’s stop right there. Anyone who’s mind wandered to the gutter needs to find a new blog. Anyway, I was given the stocking as a keepsake and it makes an appearance annually. Truth be told, it’s holding up slightly better than I. But let’s be fair, I get used daily.


Occasionally people will ask me, “How can you live in New York City?” Some days I am hard pressed to answer. But some days it’s just this easy. Look what’s in my back yard.



Taken on our Christmas Eve stroll, 2006.