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.