Becoming Caliban

The Last Performance

2005-03-20T22:28:00.000-05:00

And now our charms are all o'erthrown. The costumes have been put in a pile to be washed, the props have been stowed away, the set still stands because a local school wanted to use it to stage a pageant (which made strike nice and quick for us). It was fun to watch the kids get emotional just before the curtain call -- I could feel sagely and old, thinking, "Ahhhh, yes, I remember those days, when the end of one show seemed like the end of a world." But it was the end of a world, and one I liked being in.

The final performance was pretty good, though I think Friday and Saturday nights were the best, with Friday feeling the most energetic and precise. Afternoon performances are strange things, and when they're the final performance, they lack, for me, the feeling of finality that comes with an evening performance, something that caps off a day. I liked ending this show this way, however, simply because it did lack that sense of an end. It felt like fading off into the sunset rather than raging against the dying of the light. A slow fade rather than a smash cut.

And I got paid, which was nice. It seems that, with grants, advertising sales, and ticket sales, the company probably broke even on this show. That doesn't leave anything for the summer show (I assume), but there are a few months now to raise the funds. Ahhh, the joys of nonprofit theatre!

One of the things that makes working with this company so much fun is that it's entirely free of big egos. Everybody seems to be there to have fun, and in four years of working with this group, I've never seen a lot of the temper tantrums and pettiness and thoughtless cruelty that I've encountered with nearly every other theatre group I've worked with. Theatre people tend to be a little strange, a little off-kilter -- emotional, moody, insecure, grandiose, etc. It goes with the territory, and the territory is mighty contoured. I vividly remember what one of my writing teachers at NYU said, warning all of us aspiring playwrights against taking ourselves too seriously: "Look, actors and directors are all screwed up and neurotic, but playwrights are worse. We take things from our imaginations and put them on paper, but then we give those pieces of paper to other people and have them act them out in front of audiences! This isn't neurotic -- it's insane!"

I haven't written a play in at least a year. I think it's time...

Enough of this rambling. I'll post some final thoughts later in the week. Some people may be sending me photos, too, so I'll post them if I get them. For now, rest.

Performances 3, 4, & 5

2005-03-19T22:09:00.000-05:00

Friday ended up being a phenomenal day -- the energy waned some in the morning, since the audience was small and we were all a bit tired, but by Friday night the show had found its pacing and everything seemed to connect. The audience Friday night was magnificent and truly appreciative. The concentration and imagination that propelled us through the first three shows by Friday night had blossomed into something closer to living than performing.

I learned Friday afternoon that I had been rejected from Brown University's grad school, which was not a surprise, but was, nonetheless, a disappointment, and it affected me more deeply than it really should have (I knew the odds), so by the time I got to the theatre I was fully ready to shed the dull and tired suit of my self and wear Caliban for a while, because as servile and mercurial and vindictive as he is, I find him really quite endearing -- he is at his core innocent in a way that I almost envy (and yes I know much of this comes from the colonialist impulses of Elizabethan/Jacobean England, but when wearing the character and being propelled by the words, I don't think about any of that. That's the sort of thing a director has to think of. For me, it's just about existing within the moments laid out by the script and by the rehearsal process.)

Today I found myself out of sorts. I suddenly had an entire morning and afternoon free. There were plenty of errands I needed to do, and did, but I was unorganized and moody. Then when I got to the theatre and sat down in the dressing room and began putting gel in my hair and make-up on my face, I was comfortable and at peace again. Strange. The woman playing Alonso said she felt the same way, that she'd gone grocery shopping and done a bunch of things that needed to be done, but had felt anxious and muddle-headed until she got to the theatre. Ending tomorrow will be sad, I'm sure -- I'll be thrilled to get my life back, to begin to read through the pile of books I have waiting for me, to perhaps clean the dreadfully cluttered apartment, to figure out how I'm teaching what I'm teaching in the spring term. But I have become so attached to this character that I will be sad to let him go, to no longer get to play in his world twice or once a day.

Tonight's performance wasn't bad, but didn't feel as energized as last night's. This is entirely subjective, of course; audience members seemed quite taken with the whole thing, and an actor's perception of how a show felt is narrow. I've added something every night, just to keep myself amused, and tonight I borrowed some make-up and colored my hands green, which the director suggested before the show, because he said when I rise up out of the pit hands-first, my hands are much too white and clean. I agreed and did something about it. Apparently I also danced somewhat differently than usual at the end of II.ii -- he came back at intermission and was amused, suggesting I'd become a sort of hip-hop Caliban.

There was a cast party tonight, but I was feeling antisocial and skipped it. Some friends invited me out for drinks, and I avoided that as well. I feel too naked after a show to do any social activities, which are a different kind of performance, and with this show in particular I find that the only thing I really want to do is get in my car and ease out of the role during the 45-minute-drive home. I probably seemed rude and unappreciative, but so it goes. I wonder if I acted more frequently, and not just once a year or so, if I'd find it easier to go from the world of the stage to the world of the world, but for as long as I've done this -- about 20 years now, actually -- I've never much liked parties or group things after a show, while most of the actors I know seem to be exactly the opposite -- they love the social stage as much as the theatre stage, and their performances go on and on late into the night and early morning. Me, I just want to go home and watch a movie.

Last night's movie was Stage Beauty, which is full of Shakespeare, and which I very much enjoyed for the first two-thirds and hated hated hated for the last third, when all of the complexities and ambiguities of the story's explorations of gender and identity are slaughtered in favor of a Hollywood ending. Billy Crudup's performance, though, is breathtaking. (I'll probably end up writing more about this over at The Mumpsimus, because the reasons I hated the ending are more complex than I just said.) Tonight's film is one I've been looking forward to for well over a year now: Hayao Miyazaki's >Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind -- I adore Miyazaki's films, and a former student of mine, who is Japanese, told me many times that this is one of the best. It only recently came out on DVD in the U.S., and I bought a copy today as a consolation to myself for not getting in to Brown.

And so it goes. One more performance. I both look forward to it and dread it because it is the last.

Opening Day and Night

2005-03-17T22:57:00.000-05:00

The first performance, at ten o'clock this morning, seemed marvelous. Lots of energy, but also a lot of precision, which is something we'd often lacked in rehearsal. The pacing felt just right, at least for the scenes I observed or was in. There was a real joy in performing this morning, the joy of doing something marvelously challenging, of pulling it off, of capturing an audience's attention and imagination, of feeling the language push you forward, of giving yourself over to the circumstances of each scene and discovering new possibilities within each moment.

I came home, took a shower to get the quarter-bottle of gel out of my hair and all the eyeliner and eyeshadow off my face, and then fell asleep in a 2-hour nap. I woke shortly before my mother arrived to come drive up to the theatre with me.

The second performance felt a bit more sluggish, probably because we were all a bit tired, but nonetheless seemed to go well. One of the younger kids, who hasn't done many shows before, went up on his lines in one scene, slapped himself on the head, and said, "Oh. Uh. Um. This island's like ... well, I don't remember what this island's like." He felt horrible about breaking character, but it was actually kind of cute and funny.

The audiences reactions were quite positive, but most of the audience members knew or were related to people in the show. My mother's usually a reliable critic, though, and her only major complaint was that my face wasn't dirty enough. She liked the physicality of Caliban -- half the time I feel like I'm in a modern dance -- and said she wished more actors had a stronger sense of their physical presence, which was an interesting comment. It's something that can get lost in a lot of American training; I know of plenty of acting teachers who think that everything must be internal, and so the concept of, for instance, starting with physicality and bringing a character forth from that is anathema to them. (In some ways, this is the stereotypical difference between American acting training and British. It's stereotypical because most programs and teachers fall somewhere in the middle, and anybody whose done much actual acting [as opposed to teaching] is likely to say, "If it works for you, do it," which should really be the only major rule.) Because I find the constant psychologizing of plays by traditional method actors to be both boring and annoying, I tend to like approaches that use more than just internal motivation, which may be why I enjoy finding interesting physical approaches to roles. Caliban, of course, particularly lends himself to such an approach.

Two more performances tomorrow. Then Saturday I can sleep in.......

The Last Rehearsal

2005-03-16T23:07:00.000-05:00

A great last rehearsal is a sign of a great show; a terrible last rehearsal is the sign of a great show.

I think our rehearsal fell somewhere in the middle.

But actually, I think we've got a good show here, and there were a enough big flubs that I'm pretty confident tomorrow will go well. Today was fun, and it felt like everyone was getting a good handle on their roles. Now I'm tired and have to get up early tomorrow so that I can be at least half-awake by the time I get to Tamworth.

Beware the Ides of March

2005-03-16T08:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the Ides of March, but, despite its legacy since Caesar's assassination, it was not a particularly bad day. In fact, it was one of the better rehearsals we've had.

A frequent actor and occasional director with Advice to the Players, John, came with his wife (who directed Comedy of Errors, which I was in a couple of summers ago) and their infant son to observe the rehearsal and do some work with small groups. (Both he and Dawn, his wife -- yes, they're John and Dawn -- have worked with Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts, one of the better regional Shakespeare groups). Stephano, Trinculo, and I got a lot of time with them, which was wonderful, because they're both very energetic and supportive, and their comments were exactly the sort of specific, incisive directing that we've missed in the whirlwind/triage process that the short rehearsal period has forced us in to. Yes, rehearsals can be fun.

We spent about twenty minutes trying some new sight gags for II.ii, the spot where Trinculo hides from Stephano under my cloak with me. Previously, it had been blocked with us in an X formation, with me lying diagonally across the centerstage ramp and Trinculo lying diagonally on top of me. John restaged it with me lying with my head downstage on the ramp and Trinculo lying with her head upstage, so that now our heads are between each other's legs. Though it's physically much more difficult this way, it's also vastly funnier. We then worked on the timing of Stephano's interactions with both of us, and the scene became vastly more specific and interesting, I think. What a joy it was to really work on a moment and not just rush through it and say, "Okay, well, that'll do"!

We managed to do a run-through of the entire show, and it went fairly well, though lines continued to be a problem for everyone. (Inevitable, given the process, but unfortunate.) My costume works well -- striped brown pants that look like silk pajama pants, a brown turtleneck with a rustic wool shirt over it, and a small fishing net draped over it all. The net got caught in a lot of things, including my feet, but I was able to work with it, and it's probably a problem easily solved with a few safety pins.

And later today we'll have the last rehearsal. Tomorrow morning we open.

'Tis a Custom with Him i' the Afternoon to Sleep

2005-03-14T21:27:00.000-05:00

I hadn't been at a rehearsal for two days -- as I drove home after Friday's rehearsal, a lot of snow began to fall, and it didn't stop falling until Sunday morning. I took one look outside my window Saturday morning, saw that the plows hadn't been on the road in a while, and that the snow was still falling like flour from the sky, and I called the producer and said, "I'm not going to risk driving up to Tamworth today." So I didn't.

I did spend some time polishing lines, though. Friday we had stumbled through the first four acts, and some parts went pretty well -- II.ii seemed to amuse the audience quite a bit -- but I felt like I was stretching for too many of the lines and spending far too much time during monologues thinking, "What's next what's next what's next" rather than letting myself go with the actions and ideas.

Sunday was a day off and I spent some time shovelling, some time reading, some time doing anything other than thinking about plays or Shakespeare or acting or lines.

And then there was today. Two days off takes it toll, no matter how prepared you are. I thought I was in great shape, but discovered soon that every line I thought I knew did not think it knew me, while lines I'd always messed up suddenly came easily. This is not a good state to be in three days from opening. I.ii was slow, but bearable, and I thought I got through the "This island's mine by Sycorax..." bit without completely embarrassing myself, though I haven't yet figured out how to make the transition from the first line of that monologue ("I must eat my dinner") to the next. If I have to, I'll just play it that Caliban's compulsive, but that seems like a cop-out.

Then came II.ii. The scene that has always been our best. Today it took forever. Entire civilizations rose and fell during the time we slogged through that scene. Most of it was my fault -- I transposed a couple of lines, completely throwing the other actors off, so that we finally got to one point and had no idea where we were or what was supposed to happen next. "Let's stop and go back," the director said, much to our relief, although, of course, it was a dilemma, because if we went back then we'd have to actually do it right before we could truly move on. My mind filled with images of doing the same two pages over and over and over again like a scratched record of life. I had even somehow managed to forget a line I've never forgotten before -- there's a moment where I'm supposed to be crouching between Stephano and Trinculo while they talk about the bottle of wine, and finally I reach for it, miss, plummet between them, and look up to say, "Hast thou not dropped from heaven?" It's one of those simple little lines inextricably tied to an action that it's impossible to forget. I forgot it.

The rest of the rehearsal proceeded like that. I began to feel that my delivery was monotone, that I said everything in exactly the same way, that the tone was always the same. Blah blah blah with an occasional BLAH. Ending with an ugh.

The "Be not afeard" speech went quite well, however. The musicians and I have really begun to play off of each other, and I think that's going to be a good moment. It's a particularly nice one for me, because I get to feel like a sort of conductor, and I've always wondered how intoxicating the sense of power a conductor has is -- standing up there, and entire orchestra at your command, the sounds seeming to follow your fingertips...

Before the show a reporter came to do a photo shoot, and I threw on some pieces of clothing I found and did my best to look menacing for a photo. I'll be curious to see it. Theatre photos tend to be deeply unsatisfying; too wooden, too fake. The theatre is a fundamentally fake art form, but one that, with its appeal to all the senses, overcomes its fakeness. Reduced to a single sense -- sight -- in a photograph, the artificiality triumphs over all. (Speaking of photos, my mother let me borrow her digital camera. I loathe taking pictures of anything or anyone, though, and haven't yet had the courage to take it out and take any pictures. Maybe tomorrow, when we're all in costume.)

I have most of my costume now. It's very brown.

We finished the run-through (with lights for the first time, though not most costumes) and then did notes. We all had the obvious and painful note to pick up pacing, cues, and lines. I had a note to find some variety of tones. It was one of those things you hate to hear because you know it's true and had hoped hoped hoped nobody noticed. I've been telling myself to find tonal variety through the whole rehearsal process, and haven't found it except for the "Be not afeard..." speech. Just have to keep looking and hope by opening night (well, morning) that it's there.

After the rehearsal, I said to Caroline, "Have you ever considered doing maybe three-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal instead of two-and-a-half?"

"Yes," she said.

"And?"

"It would bankrupt us." Indeed. I haven't been paid yet because Actors' Equity, the union, of which our director and three actors are members, demanded a lot more money than Caroline had planned on, so all of the grant money has been used to pay the union actors and the union, and the rest of us have to wait until there are some ticket sales. I try not to think about it, because I'm not doing this for the money, but I couldn't afford to be driving this much and putting this much time into it all without it. I hate even having to think about it. So I won't.

Two more rehearsals.

Music on the drive up: various Bob Dylan, some Natalie Merchant. On the drive home, listened to NPR.

I'll Be Wise Hereafter

2005-03-10T23:18:00.000-05:00

The Saga of Learning the Lines is slowly coming to an end, and the words are beginning to stick in my skull after hours of practice. I'm not sure why it was so hard this time; maybe I'm just getting old. Most likely that I've just been trying to think of too many things at once and haven't been able to focus on the play to the exclusion of everything else I need to get done.

In any case, yesterday we worked IV, V, and I.ii. Acts IV and V went relatively smoothly, and I even got through V without a script (this isn't a huge accomplishment, it being my smallest scene). I.ii we hadn't done in a while, and it felt clunky (though I was also off book for it -- IV was the only thing I needed a script for). The problem is that the scene doesn't become particularly dramatic until Caliban enters, and that's about 300 lines into the scene. Everything before that is exposition of some sort, with Prospero pontificating a tremendous amount. Yes, the play is about telling stories, and how stories are told, etc. etc., all of which makes for fascinating reading, but when it comes to giving the play life on the stage, the best thing I can think to do with everything before Caliban's entrance is get through it as fast as possible.

(An aside: I hate the character of Prospero. Clearly, I must be missing something. Why did Gielgud love the role so much? Some lovely poetry, yes, but what an insufferable character! Or perhaps it's just that Caliban is affecting my vision of it...)

None of my scenes had been scheduled to be rehearsed today, but we all asked if there would be time to do I.ii again, and so we found time in the schedule, and today spent half an hour or so on it, reblocking some spots and generally polishing it. More and more musicians are being added in the pit, which makes my entrance a bit difficult, as I rise first with one hand on the edge of the pit and then another, then peek over. Now I'm doing it with musicians directly in front of me. With luck, it won't look too awkward to the audience. I then climb up the ladder, which felt, for one reason or another, particularly good today -- I think I've done it enough that the ladder doesn't seem tremendously foreign anymore. This may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but any little thing like that that indicates I'm feeling my way into the physicality of Caliban makes me happy.

It got a bit more awkward-feeling with the "This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother..." speech, because I'm supposed to range from one part of the stage to the rest while all the time keeping some distance from Prospero. This is kind of like trying to drive to Manhattan from Boston without going through Hartford. Possible, certainly, but not particularly easy. I also get to climb up some little steps that are primarily used by Ariel; never having been on them before, today I nearly plunged flat onto my face.

The voice is developing differently than I had expected; far less of the ultra-Americanized accent now. I still like the idea, but I haven't been able to feel my way through the idea, and so it hasn't been consistent, and I'll probably just end up going with the style of speaking that the words seem to impel me toward. I like it best when the tone and pitch seem to come from the rhythm of the written words, anyway, so I'm not unhappy with this. (A couple days ago when I was trying to learn some lines, I practiced them in Brooklynese. Too bad it would be really distracting in the show, because I kind of liked the effect!)

Tomorrow is our first full run-through. Completely off book.

A week from today is our first (and second) performance. A week from right now, I will have completed two performances. Huh.

Music on the way to rehearsal today: A Radiohead mix. On the way back: lines.

Learning Me Your Language

2005-03-07T22:49:00.000-05:00

Today I spent some time in the morning trying to learn lines, then did what learning lines always tempts me to do: procrastinate by pretending to do something related to learning lines. So I decided I would create a CD of my lines that I could listen to in the car. This meant I needed, of course, to get something other than the demo version of an old edition of the Audio X Mac software, since the demo only lets you record for half a minute. So I downloaded the new edition demo to test if it would work, and it did, so then I went through the process of paying $19.95 for it (justified by the fact that I used the demo quite a bit, even with the limitation on length, and so now that there's no limitation on length I'll probably use the software even more) -- notice that none of this actually involves learning lines.

In fact, by the time it was all done, I only had time to record one scene before I needed to leave for rehearsal. I wasn't about to waste a CD on one scene, so I abandoned the project for later, not having learned many lines at all. But now at least I can record them.

At rehearsal, somebody asked the director when we should be off book, and he said Wednesday would be good. I nodded. Wednesday would be good.

First we went through II.ii and III.ii, then did all of acts III and IV. Things are getting smoother. It will be wonderful once we don't have scripts in our hands (I keep reminding myself). The fun today was doing some work with the musicians. We came up with a plan for how to approach the "Be not afeard..." speech -- sounds growing and growing, then stopping after "when I waked" so I can say "I cried to dream again" in silence. The director loved it when he heard it, and I thought it was a vast improvement over what I'd done before.

I had less success doing my song at the end of II.ii, because the musicians and I kept trying various rhythms, but never tried the same rhythm at the same time. Rhythm is something that has always challenged me, and is one of those things that, like brussel sprouts, I try to avoid. I have no idea what we'll come up with that will work, but it's probably best for the musicians, who are talented and flexible and not rhythmically challenged, to try to follow me, because I know that once the performances begin my brain will panic and I'll just come up with whatever rhythm happens to occur to me.

Music on the way up and back: Bob Dylan Live 1975, a very Calibanesque album, and one of my all-time favorites (I'm one of the three people alive who never heard the Rolling Thunder Revue material on bootlegs, so this album was a revelation to me).

I Know How to Curse

2005-03-04T19:09:00.000-05:00

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.)

Third Rehearsal

2005-03-02T22:10:00.000-05:00

It's been a long day. I started the morning with a study session for some students at breakfast, then administered a three-hour final exam, then went to rehearsal, then came home and wrote another exam that I'll be giving tomorrow, this one for my Advanced Placement class and modelled on the format of the actual AP test, so it has 35 multiple choice questions (the AP has more, but I got tired) and three essays about everything from Beowulf and King Lear to Samuel Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino. My brain hurts.

But anyway. Caliban. Right. We did the ending of the play, which we hadn't done before, then returned to II.ii and III.ii to adjust the blocking and show Trinculo what we'd done yesterday.

I arrived a bit early, having forgotten that it doesn't take as long to get to Tamworth when the roads are clear. The director was working on building some set pieces, and we chatted a bit. He asked one of those questions to which I never feel like I can answer adequately: "So what's your conception of the character?" To answer truthfully, I would have said, "I dunno, I just try stuff and see what feels right and hope it works." Instead I talked a bit about trying to figure out for myself why Caliban was so torn between a desire to be subservient and a desire to be free, and I said I thought he represented a kind of half-civilized being, a creature that could move between pure nature and the world of Prospero. I think this at least convinced the director that I was thinking and not just reciting lines, though I'm not sure if I convinced myself.

II.ii and III.ii are coming along well, and we're at the point already where we just need to get the lines down and get the books out of our hands. That won't be happening before the weekend for me. I found myself thinking a lot about vocal tone and patterning, because I could feel myself falling back on old tricks. This always happens early in rehearsals, because we can only build from what we know, and it's not a bad thing as long as the actor is aware of it and fights against it when possible. A two-and-a-half week rehearsal period inevitably causes some falling back on habit, but there can be more subtlety than a lot of people would expect possible. I actually tried to play against the poetry today, to push my speeches as close to regular talk as I could get them. I've also been forcing myself into a more Americanized accent than I typically have, one with sharper A's than are part of my own accent, because I want Caliban to be a contrast to Miranda, who's played by a young British woman (whose own name is Miranda -- she was in As You Like It with me a few years ago, and I kept wondering if she'd get cast in the role with her name on it, because she's just right for it, and not merely because of her name). I don't want to make the contrast huge and comical by doing something like a southern accent, but I think being more clearly American than I normally am (for instance, I normally say "aunt" as written, not as a homonym for the insect) will be enough.

I also began to get a feel for the physicality. I expect it will grow and continue, but for the moment I hover a lot between all-fours and standing up. It probably looks pretty ape-like. I'm also trying to be as flexible and relaxed as possible, which emphasizes the animalism of the character. I had one moment where I was resting against a platform and thought, "Oh yes, this is Caliban." Now I just need to find that feeling for every moment.

For the moments when Stefano feeds me liquor, I'm often underneath the bottle, and so I thought of how my cat likes to drink from a running faucet. It's all in the tongue.

After III.ii, Caroline told me it was looking great and the chemistry between me, Stefano, and Trinculo is already marvelous. "I was born to be subhuman," I said. She laughed and said John, who has done many of the Advice to the Players shows in the past and directed Much Ado this past summer, thought the casting of me in the role was perfect. It's nice to know that when people are trying to cast tragicomic, bitter, vengeful savages, they think immediately of me...

Today's music was Radiohead (the live album) on the drive up, and a mix of various stuff on the way back. One song was by Tom Waits, and sounded like something Caliban might sing, so now I've got to figure out how Tom Waits would approach the song in II.ii (I think that's the scene -- too tired to look it up).

Second Rehearsal

2005-03-01T19:42:00.000-05:00

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.

First Rehearsal

2005-02-28T20:49:00.000-05:00

And so it begins. Today I rushed through teaching my last class, jumped in the car, and drove 45 minutes from New Hampton to the Barnstormers Theatre.

Inside, I found a variety of actors and technicians standing around chatting on the beginnings of the set. I had never been on the stage at the Barnstormers before, having only been to the theatre a couple of times in my life. It's a cozy old theatre, the home to one of the oldest summerstock companies in the country, and a wide variety of companies and acts perform there during the year. (Less so right now, it seems, as the theatre is currently searching for an artistic director.)

I was surprised to see how many high school students were in the play -- I've done shows with Advice to the Players at an outdoor theatre in summers before, but never their winter show, and one of the goals of the winter productions (and a cause for them to get quite a bit of grant money) is to have high schoolers and community members working beside professionals. Thus, Ariel is played by a young woman from town, someone I've actually seen perform before, and who is remarkably talented and focused. (I was kind of hoping Ariel would be male, because he is in the script and yet, despite knowing this, I always think of him as female. Doing a production with a male Ariel, I thought, would solve this misperception for me. I'm just going to have to give up now.) Prospero is played by a woman as well, which ought to make the relationship between Prospero and Ariel interesting to watch textually.

While the producer (the woman playing Prospero, and one of my favorite people in the New Hampshire theatre world, Caroline Nesbitt) and then the director laid out various rules, regulations, and schedules, I took a copy of the script with cut lines in it and collated it with my own script, since the cuts hadn't been sent to me. The cuts were made with the knowledge that a few of our performances will be matinees for local schools, and so some of the more tangential and figurative language has been chopped out. (Very few of Caliban's lines got cut, and nothing I miss.)

Before I started performing in Shakespeare plays with any frequency (if once or twice a year can be said to be frequent), I hated even the idea of cutting the lines. Tamper with the words of The Bard?! What heresy! Any close reading of the plays shows that every line -- every word -- is necessary!

A production must, however, take into account its means and ends. The Shakespeare plays that I have acted in have all benefitted from judicious, and sometimes merciless, cutting. The theatre is at its best when it's a joyfully pragmatic endeavor, one where directors and actors and designers and technicians all recognize they are creating not some Platonic ideal of a play, but specific versions that are given life in actual places and actual times. Some productions could be performed in any place at any time, the actors and stage and audiences all interchangeable with other actors and stages and audiences, but the best theatre can only be performed in one place with one group of people for a certain type of audience. We know who most of our audience will be -- people from central and northern New Hampshire, most of whom are only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare's work, if at all. If we do our job right, we're going to give our audiences a play that excites, amuses, and moves them here and now, not in England in a theatre without a roof or electricity in the early seventeenth century.

After getting organized and dealing with details, then doing a short physical and vocal warm-up, the director began the rehearsal. He had decided to jump right in without a read-through, and this is a decision I tend to support, particularly with Shakespeare when people who are not experienced with early modern English are among the actors. Simply reading through an entire Shakespeare play can be arduous in such circumstances. Even with modern plays (for instance, Beckett's Endgame, which I directed a few years ago), I will sometimes move right into work without a read-through. It's remarkable how fresh and surprising the text can be when everybody starts out on their feet.

Though we aren't necessarily going to be rehearsing the play in order, we began with the first scene, which is fairly large, as it involves most of the main characters plus some sailors and spirits. The storm was choreographed with large strips of thin white fabric to be carried over the audience's heads by the spirits. Timing this with the lines and various necessary movements took about an hour, during which time I tried to memorize a few lines, since I'm not quite sure when I'll have time to do so much before the performance. (I always feel this way. I always find time. I always hate it. It's the worst part of acting -- memorizing lines. The only technique that really works for me is the most arduous: memorizing one clause, then moving on to the next clause, then going back to make sure I have the first and doing the two together, then continuing to add, always going back to reinforce what was learned earlier. Once I think I've got the lines down, I go back with an index card and read through the script, stopping after every cue line to make sure I know the cues, then trying my own lines and checking them against the script. Inevitably, once I get on stage, I forget half of what I learned, but the prompting of the stage manager helps solidify them, and once I've got the lines connected to my sense of the stage as a physical object, then the magic begins and I stop worrying about lines altogether, because I can trust that I have them. Sometimes I get surprised or muddled and go up on a line, but by that point, I know the character and situations well enough to be able to get through it. Improvising iambic pentameter can be an interesting challenge when an entire audience is watching...)

After watching the rehearsal for a bit, I began to worry. I could see that the director's style was very different from my preferred one. This isn't necessarily a problem -- I've worked with many directors who direct in ways I never would, and the friction of trying to fit myself into their process produces interesting results more often than not. In fact, the best play I've ever acted in, a college production of Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick (I was the title character), I nearly quit half-way through because I didn't feel like the director and I were communicating about anything. The play had the worst dress rehearsal I've ever been part of -- we seriously considered cancelling it. And then opening night it all came together. I can't speak for why it worked for everybody else, but I know for me, my goal became to prove the director wrong, since I didn't think he thought my performance was very good. (We won a bunch of awards and had audiences lining up for tickets an hour before the play every night after the opening, so something must have worked.)

Anyway, the problem I saw for myself with The Tempest was different. Our director has planned out all of the blocking (movements) beforehand, and so most of what he spent the rehearsal doing was telling people where to move on most of their lines. Frankly, I hate this. It makes me surly and anxious and annoyed. I like to use rehearsals to play around, to try out everything I can think of and see how it works, to get things wrong more often than right. When I direct, I seldom even write in a script until it comes time to set light and sound cues, and I hardly ever write down blocking. If a movement is so important that I need to command it, I figure I will have communicated well enough with an actor that the movement will seem self-evident, and therefore they will never forget it, and I will never have to write it down. (Yes, this is an ideal. But it works more often than not.)

I finished directing a production of The Glass Menagerie a few weeks ago, and mostly only told the actors where to enter and exit, since we needed to know for the lighting. The majority of the other lighting cues came from the actors' movements, and those weren't set in stone. It means both the actors and technicians need to understand the rhythms and cause/effect stucture of the play, which can sometimes be difficult, but once they get it the results can be phenomenal.

So here I am, having directed a show this way myself for about six weeks, and now I have to adjust to being an actor for a director who gives very specific blocking. I can intellectualize why this is important -- we've only got two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsals, after all -- but as we got closer and closer to my entrance in I.ii, I got more and more anxious.

When I entered though and tried out some movements, played a bit with the voice, and tried to get a sense of my relationship with the other actors, it worked out okay. I only got a few specific directions (and promises of, "Well, we'll choreograph that later..."), and I agreed with them all. Afterward, the director said, "Would you mind being on all fours more? Prospero's the one who taught him to walk upright. I think he might only do that when forced." I said I'd be happy to try -- it sounded like a fun challenge. And that was it -- no time for more. Tomorrow, we'll be doing most of the Stephano/Trinculo/Caliban scenes.

The costume designer, who seems like a very nice woman, asked me sheepishly if I would mind if my costume showed a bit of skin. I almost said, thinking again of Jeffrey, "I once was in a play that opened with me in bed with six guys, and I spent a lot of time wearing nothing but boxer shorts. I don't think showing a bit of skin will kill me." (The glare might blind people in the front row, though.) Instead, I just said I didn't think it would be a problem.

Meanwhile, driving home I heard on the radio that a winter storm warning is in effect, and we're to expect somewhere between a foot and two feet of snow between 8pm tonight and 8pm tomorrow. Fun. Luckily, rehearsal isn't until 3.30pm (most of the roads should have been cleared by then), and my car is an all-wheel-drive Subaru.

I thought I'd also chronicle a bit of the music I have listened to on the drive, since I often use it as preparation. Driving up, I listened to Radu Lupu playing Brahms, a CD that was a Christmas present and has quickly become a favorite, particularly the Rhapsody in G Minor (Alex Ross has written glowingly about this album and Lupu's playing). On the way home, I considered listening to Bob Dylan's Royal Albert Hall concert, which has been playing in my car for a day or two (after I got fed up with Tori Amos's latest album), but decided on NHPR, a good choice, it turned out, because Bradley Dean, a Thoreau scholar, was on "The Front Porch" program, and I adore just about anything having to do with Thoreau.

Well, it's almost nine o'clock now. No snow yet...

At the Globe

2005-02-27T16:52:00.000-05:00

This will give us a sort of baseline: A photo of me in London in March of 2003 at the reconstructed Globe Theatre.

I don't usually like photographs of myself, but I can live with this one, because I like the composition. The photo is by Carey Royce, who was then living in London, and remains the most phenomenal tour guide and companion I know.

Invocation and Instructions to the Audience

2005-02-27T16:36:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning this new blog at the suggestion of Jeff Ford, who's really curious about my experience playing Caliban in an upcoming production of The Tempest. I'm curious, too. This will give me a place to chronicle the day-to-day joys and frustrations of rehearsal and performance, as well as a place to store ideas and thoughts coming out of the experience, and perhaps even some photographs (if anybody will let me borrow their camera).

I'm very much hoping this doesn't just become horribly narcissistic. Since I'm making it all public, I'm hoping that it will be perhaps helpful and at least interesting to someone other than me. We'll see.