I Know How to Curse
No rehearsal for me yesterday, as I had work from 8am to 11.30pm -- two final exams to administer, various meetings, then dorm duty. The last of the exams was this morning, thankfully (finally!), and now our students go away for three weeks (and no, I don't know why we have a three-week vacation in March. Everybody says it's traditional. Less time for spring sports to have to play in the snow, I assume). I came home for a brief nap before rehearsal and ended up falling into a tremendously deep sleep and waking up ten minutes before I needed to be at the theatre. Considering that in the best weather and least traffic it's a thirty-five minute drive, this was a bit of a problem. I looked at the schedule and saw that a scene without me was set to rehearse first, so thought I was probably okay. I drove at semi-unreasonable speeds nonetheless, and arrived at the theatre only about forty minutes late.

I wasn't actually late at all, since, as I'd suspected, they started with a scene I'm not in. We soon came to the end of I.ii, though, and I got to try out some of my recently-memorized lines, because during some downtime during the last rehearsal I did manage to get most of I.ii into my head, at least provisionally. And I got to try out the ladder I climb to get out of the orchestra pit and onto the stage. The ladder's made from little planks of wood and so is not as intuitively easy to climb as, for instance, something from a hardware store. Thus, my first attempt at an entrance was something that would have been far more acceptable for one of the later drunk scenes. And I forgot all the lines. It was just going to be one of those days, I could tell.

It was, indeed. When the rehearsal process isn't as fast as ours, this kind of day generally happens during a middle week, or maybe the week before the middle week. It's the point where you know the blocking and you know what you're trying to do, but you can't really juggle both the blocking and your half-memorized lines, and so you can't quite do what you're trying to do no matter how hard you try, which only makes you frustrated, and the frustration causes anxiety, and the anxiety leads to forgetting lines you really do know and forgetting to move anywhere at all. To the untrained eye, the actor seems to be striving to impersonate an ambitious moose.

Such rehearsals continue for a few days, and are vital to the process, because the frustration causes the actor to learn the lines and think more deeply about the role. Or it causes them to quit. Or they end up like me: Telling their friends repeatedly and tiresomely that they will never set foot on a stage again, it's not worth it, it's a ridiculous activity, etc. etc. ("I have no talent, nobody appreciates me, everybody who appreciates me is an idiot, I'm an idiot, and on and on and on") while at the same time learning the lines, thinking more deeply about the role, and, finally, enjoying a rehearsal here or there. I've been doing this since I was somewhere around eight years old and have gone through a similar process for every show. And yet I've actually only regretted doing one or two plays out of a countless number I've been a part of.

I.ii ended up going pretty well by the third or fourth try, though. Then we moved to III.ii to give Prospero a break, and that, I thought, was just horrendous, and it was all my fault. I was in the sort of self-pitying mode where I knew every word out of my mouth was wrong and every move I made ridiculous, but I wanted somebody to tell me I was the greatest actor they'd ever met. Instead, we just stumbled through it, going back and forth and fixing things. Very pragmatic, as it should be.

III.ii, alas, is the scene with "Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises", the monologue everybody in the company seems to have memorized other than me, and which everyone says is the most beautiful writing in the play, their favorite, better than sex, etc. This is not helpful to me. I'm not easily intimidated, but facing an audience of people who all are waiting to enter some state of maximum Shakespearian transcendance because of the words that are supposed to come out of my mouth borders on agression-by-expectation. It reminded me of being twelve years old again and on a soccer team. I have developed some physical coordination over the years, but when I was 12 I was the definition of the awkward child. My brain would tell my legs to hit the soccer ball in a certain way, and, inevitably, I would bruise a bystander or trip over the ball. I could envision exactly where the ball needed to go and what my feet needed to do to get it there, and then once my feet took up the challenge, I ended up kicking the ball at my own team's goal. (I vividly remember dribbling the ball down the field toward our own goalie during a game, with people all around yelling, "Matt! You're going the wrong way!" And me thinking, What, you don't think I've noticed?! Who says I'm in control here?!?)

"Think about the vowels," the director says. "Elongate the vowels."

"All the vowels?" I say.

"All the vowels. Like the people in the storm at the beginning of the play."

"But I'm not in a storm."

"Right. But try it. Elongate the vowels."

And then Caroline says the ending should be heartbreaking: The clouds methought would open and show riches/ Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,/ I cried to dream again. "That's him thinking about life after Sycorax, his mother, and before Prospero," she said.

I know this. I am only temporarily impersonating an idiot. It's a phase I'm going through. Like life is a phase a person has to go through before death.

Finally, we moved on to Act IV, which we'd never done. Going through a scene for the first time is much more pleasant than doing one for the third or fourth time. It was a nice way to end the day, actually, because it was short, easy to do, and fun. Alas, this is not The Sound of Music.

No rehearsals for me this weekend, because I've got 50 exams to grade, with term grades and comments for every student due by Monday morning. On Sunday, I'm going to a poetry reading by Mark Doty. I'm going to tell him to elongate his vowels.

Music on the drive up: Redemption's Son by Joseph Arthur, an album I haven't listened to for a while but very much like, though I think it was a bad choice for before a rehearsal: too soft, not rough enough. Save for the drive home. Today's drive home: Disc Three of Join the Dots. (I was in a good mood, so naturally decided on listening to music to jump off a bridge to.) 

¶ 7:09 PM