Second Rehearsal
The snow arrived, but later than expected. Overnight we only got a couple inches. The morning was clear. And then, about half an hour before I had to leave for rehearsal, the sky dropped heavy, wet, slippery snow. Driving wasn't too bad until I got to within about ten miles of the theatre, and, turning left off of a main road, I discovered that the car didn't particularly want to stop, even though I'd been traveling at about half the speed limit. I barely made the turn, but did. A moment later as I inched around a corner, I rather suddenly discovered that the car had turned itself around. And was still moving. Slowly, luckily. And into a big puffy snowback rather than, say, a tree. Suddenly all-wheel-drive was actually helpful, because otherwise I probably would have been stuck in the snowbank. I continued to the theatre, missing one other turn despite having approached it in first gear, though this time I decided not to keep trying to turn and instead went up the road and turned around at a fire station.

I wasn't too late to rehearsal, and plenty of other people were later than I. The director said he'd twice ended up off the road, other people said they'd spun around or slipped or skidded or snowbanked. It's a fairly common experience around here at this time of year if you ever have to travel more than a couple miles.

The first half of the rehearsal was devoted to the various spirits and sprites, and so I spent the time wandering through the back of the theatre and the lobby, all the while reciting lines to learn them. The lobby has a display of photographs of Francis Cleveland, son of President Grover Cleveland, who was a central part of the theatre's history -- I'd looked at it all before when I'd gone to see a show at the theatre, but had forgotten about it. I tend to think of Grover Cleveland as a president in the distant, lost past, but his youngest son was alive for part of my own -- a thought that puts a lot of history into a smaller perspective than I'm used to thinking of it in.

Though the actor playing Trinculo hadn't been able to make the rehearsal, Stephano and I worked through our bits in II.ii and III.ii, mostly for the blocking. I did my best to play around with some possibilities for the character, but for the most part had to just recite the lines, as every time I really began to figure things out I got lost and had to take a moment to find my place in the script. Ugh. We're doing the same scenes tomorrow, and I don't have time to learn the lines for them between now and then, so it will continue to be awkward. Trying out the "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises..." moment was fun, though -- the sounds of the words in that passage are all the guidance an actor needs. The only thing I don't like about the passage is how short it is. The beauty, though, lies partially within the brevity.

I've been thinking quite a bit about what sort of person Caliban is. Intellectually, I can see him as various sorts of archetypes -- the archetype of a subhuman servant, a "savage"; but also a certain kind of archetype for many forms of fantasy stories, including Gollum and Igor. That recognition isn't particularly helpful for me as an actor, though, because it could lead too easily to imitation, to doing Caliban-as-Gollum or something. I don't need that. What I need is to figure out what brings him to the point where he does what he does. He's obviously torn -- partially by Prospero's enchantments, but also a bit by some attraction to Miranda, by his own nostalgia for when he was free to do whatever he wanted on the island (a golden age that probably wasn't as golden as he makes it out to be), and by what Shakespeare seems to have intended to be a subservient nature, a desire to be a slave to a good master rather than an insulting one, which is one reason why he attaches himself to Stephano.

The other reason he attaches himself to Stephano is the bottle, the endless supply of alcohol, which, once he tastes it, becomes his great desire. The liquor unleashes his most murderous instincts -- goading Stephano to kill Prospero -- as well as his most rhapsodic, as the "Be not afeard..." passage shows.

We ended rehearsal a bit early so everyone could get home, as the snow hadn't stopped falling. The drive back wasn't too bad, though. The plows had been out. On the drive up, I listened to the first disk of The Cure's Join the Dots collection, as I thought it would get me in the mood to be weird and raw and kind of punky. On the way home, I listened to Natalie Merchant's The House Carpenter's Daughter, mostly because I just love her version of the old union song "Which Side are You On", the arrangement of which is set perfectly within my vocal range, so I belted out the song a few times, and decided I'll probably use it on the days I drive to performances, since it's a good warm-up. 

¶ 7:42 PM