Good bye LA

Today is the end of the latest chapter of the volume of my Acting career filed under "Crooked Arrows" titled "Reshoots and ADR in LA" cross referencing another section "Acting in LA" title "The First Time". It was a good trip, and I am incredibly grateful for having had the oppurtunity. I learned alot. I felt much more comfortable acting on set. With a large crowd of extras, and also grips camera people PAs etc everywhere. Its hard to get in a zone and focus. I struggled with it a bit last summer. But I learned how to deal with it and this time was definitely easier. I did my first real voice over session, and had my first real oppurtunity to work closely with the films director, Steve Rash who is a consumate professional and a great guy. It was way different entering the character with this totally differ t context and build up. For me acting on film the adrenaline of the set up, calling action, etc becomes part of the given circumstances that drive the scenes stakes. For this character the costume made a huge difference to the role. All of which was removed leaving just the actor and the performance. Steve was tremendously helpful in putting me at ease as we worked together to find the best reading. Will I move to LA? Maybe. So far I dont mind it. I will wait and see what happens! The future, what a wonderful and terrifying prospect.

Straight Chilling

Hello loyal readers! This is Chad Bryan reporting to live from Custom hotel in Los Angeles with an inside joke you wont get until you see Crooked Arrows this April in a theatre near you. Today was pretty chill. I needed that time to refuel. Yesterday was a long day shooting. Today I just chilled at this cozy hotel. Worked out less than I should have, but worked out none the less. Just chilled. Had some beers at the hotel bar, got caught up on WTF with Marc Maron, one of my all time fav podasts. Going to bed soon. 8:30 AM pick up for a 100 AM APR (voice over) session, then a redeye home. Exciting! Blog you again East Coast style.

Back in the saddle (or something)

I tried to think of a metaphor for being back on set but couldnt come up with a good one. The one above will suffice. This is a similar situation but a new context. Or vice versa. I dont know. My first reshoots are tomorrow. Apparently the movie was screened last night and I was funny in it. Good. I have an early call tomorrow. So good night.

If I Knew Then... What I Now Know

Last night I attended the latest of Stagesource's "If I Knew Then..." series, the previous entry featuring play wrights and this one featuring actors. Since I didn't have anything to do last night, and it was right in Harvard Square at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education I thought "why the hell not" and gave Stagesource the $5 for admission.

What do I now know after having attended the event? A lot of things which I had some idea of already, but refreshed and reinforced in new ways I hadn't necessarily considered in the context of these actor's careers. One theme which actor Tim Smith repeatedly reinforced "be aggressive". For example, during the audience Q&A someone asked "who are good acting teachers" and Tim said (paraphrasing) "your fellow actors and directors who you work with whom you respect and can learn from. Most of the time, if you offer a fellow actor your money, they will help you. Ask them, be aggressive." He accompanied this with an anecdote of his younger self calling around to random agents, managers, coaches, etc and being like "hey can you help me out" and one of them said to him "ask some people you know and respect". The person was in fact, Nicholas Cage's former acting coach, so he went and did that and now he's a successful equity actor. So there you go!

On the subject of auditioning, Marianna Basham said "try and enjoy it, pick material that you really enjoy performing, not necessarily just because someone says it's right for you but because you enjoy performing it." Also on the subject, Marianna said "be a human being. Say thank you to the reader." And the group agreed "know your limits and control the things that you can control." One profound thing Will Lyman talked about sort of in that vein is instead of getting caught up in your head of what your whole performance has to be, go on stage and ask yourself "what am I doing?" If your looking for your keys, find your keys. Then what? Essentially, be in the moment. Isolate the first thing you or your character needs to do when you get on stage, and do that thing.

That last point I learned from Scott Zigler's Practical Aesthetics class and from reading David Mamet, but they are deep and essential truisms of our craft, worthy of being reminded of, over and over! Another great suggestion from Will, which I hadn't heard before, "prior to walking into an audition take a sip of water or suck on a lemon drop. Feel the water or the juice from the lemon drop going down your throat. Focus on that." Whoa, pretty Zen type shit, Will Lyman. And so true! And not something I'd heard before! But also so obvious. Just be in the moment. As Will put it at the end, "your job is not to act, it's to be." And I mean, there it is, that's the fundamental thing. But it's so difficult to do that, and cut past all our prepared, canned, smelly bullshit.

Another subject that was discussed at length was the subject of having a "survival job", basically the job you have that you can manage alongside your acting pursuits that helps you buy food and pay rent. Will Lyman highly recommends a career in voiceover, but then again he's also Will Lyman voice of Frontline and those beer commercials with "the most interesting man in the world". Consensus was that it's important to find something you enjoy and which you find worthwhile. Will talked at length about how during a period of doing what I imagine to be mediocre plays, television work, commercials, etc, Frontline gave him the feeling of working on something worthwhile which contributed to society, and sort of "fed his soul" when acting wasn't doing that.

Maybe the biggest and most universal point of the evening, find meaning in what your doing and lead a rich life, which may not come from acting alone but all the things you do, you have to be happy doing it. "You go from show to show and you build this career, and in the end, what's the point?" To be happy. So find the thing that makes you happy, and go after it. Follow your gut, "what is the thing I want to be doing?" A lesson I've heard repeated before, but an important one to be reminded of. Let's hope we all never forget it.

P.S. If anyone associated with the event finds this, realize all the quotes are paraphrased from my memory. Also, if you are associated with the event and reading this, thanks for a great and informative evening!

All Good Things

Last night was the final performance of Uncle Vanya. It's incredible how theatre continues to surprise me. On our final ride through Cambridge, I told Ann Marie Shea who was my transportation lifeline for much of the process how strange it still felt after so many shows, the sense of connecting with a group of people very deeply and spending such inordinate amounts of time together usually in the final moments leading up and then over the course of the performance of a piece. Then at the end, you never see them. Well I'm sure I will continue to see these people in different contexts, usually at theatre related things like auditions or performances and we talked a little about seeing our co-actors upcoming projects together as a group which would be fantastic. But of course the likelihood is that I won't be working with this same ensemble of characters again in the near future.

I also continue to surprised by how much I like people. You know, I guess it was really only in my time doing academic theatre in high school and college that I ever went through a process feeling disconnected from the people around me. I tend to enter a company expecting that, and of course it takes time for people to open up and a common language to develop between you and I found that in Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead, where I met a lot of people I really liked. I assumed my liking those people was an anomaly, but then I found the same thing was the case in Our Town and now in Uncle Vanya. I guess as I get older, I'm less harsh and more open. I'm not the bitter teenager I used to be, it would seem!

Anyway, all good things come to an end, and that is now a truism of the Vanya estate. Man, what a fantastic production. Probably the best thing I've done yet. Wandering the halls playing my guitar was really a joy. This is the second time I've played a musician, the first being Marat/Sade when I was in undergrad, both times it kind of happened by (happy) accident and it's fun and different exploring a theatrical performance with musical notes instead of text. In the case of Marat/Sade, I was kind of faking it off of the lead sheets to the RC Peaslee score that was included in the back of my copy of the play. It's a funny coincidence, come to think of it, how that came to be. My friend was one of the producers, but he was too lazy to do any photo copying and as an Extension student I had access to free printing at the computer lab, so I made all the scripts. My recollection was that I saw the music at the back, didn't think it was important, and didn't print it with the rest since there was a print limit and it would have been more effort on my part breaking up the job across the hundreds of pages I had to print.

I like though, when possible, working from a bound copy of a text rather then a photocopy so I had bought a copy of the play from a used book store. At a rehearsal, the director sort of tried to enthusiastically lead the cast in some of the music as he, being tone deaf, had sort of remembered it from I guess the movie version. I pointed out the music in the back of my text, and someone who played piano pecked out the melody and we figured it out that way. Later on, it came out that I played guitar and I was moved from being a member of the staff of the hospital to a guitar playing inmate in the asylum, the rest being history.

It's funny that in Uncle Vanya, myself included three of us had been in productions of Marat/Sade since it's not very commonly done for understandable reasons of it being fucking insane. But it was a new and fun experience, that also helped prepare me for Uncle Vanya. In this case, I had a much longer leash to fill space and did quite a bit of improvising as well as learning a couple of classical pieces and Russian folk song, which was fun! Hey by the way, if anybody is doing The Cherry Orchard or another Russian play and needs a guitar player, I'm your man.

Oh, and there was a question of what I'd be doing next, if anything in the immediate future. One of the auditions I blogged about did come through. I won't say which until I know for sure it's on, but I'm pretty excited to be working on it. It's a role that I think will be a great opportunity for me to learn and grow, and I'm all about that right now.

Art is Everywhere

This week I saw Red at Speakeasy and Art at New Repertory Theatre back to back. Last week I saw Superior Donuts. On my list of things to see in the near future, Green Eyes with Company One, A Number and maybe the other Caryl Churchill piece that Whistler is doing at the factory, but especially A Number since I worked on a scene from it last year in an acting class and I'm really curious to see it done, then also Imaginary Beast's Winter Panto at the BCA since I did rather enjoy Macbett although I also thought it was too long, but whatever.

I have to say, my least favorite part of seeing these plays has been sitting in the theatre with my fellow audience members. Jostling into me from their cramped seat, chattering to each other during the play sometimes fairly conspicuously, in one case snoring audibly multiple times. For gods sake, shut up and sit still, we're sitting in the second to front row, you know those people up on stage working for your entertainment and intellectual stimulation... yes, them they can hear you!!! I'm sorry your hearing is going (in the case of the group at ART today, who at least chittered during the silences on stage) and you, persons next to me at Superior Donuts gossiping during the play, drink less before coming to the theatre.

Oh well, I do enjoy experiencing art and stuff with other people and I'm especially sensitive to people's etiquette in the theater since I spend so much time in them. At the very least, I haven't seen anybody do any tweeting, blech.

In other news, this is the last weekend of Uncle Vanya, wow. What an incredible show this has been, definitely one I'll look back on a long time from now. I had resolved myself to the prospect of not immediately getting any new roles but I have some callbacks coming up which is exciting, and I've been auditioning continuously so I feel pretty good about myself. That's right! I feel good about myself! What do you have to say to that, WORLD?! Good for me? Yeah, it is good for me. Let's try to keep this going.

Guitar Post

I've been playing guitar a lot lately. It's funny how these things happen. Guitar took on a really important role in my life from when I first started, and later started taking lessons getting more serious but I started finding real success of a kind with acting it took a back seat, and that frustrated me a little, that I couldn't keep taking it to the next level in the way I knew I could if I really focused. Of course, I've never set out to be a professional musician, music has always been about catharsis for me, and it continues to serve that role. It's always come in handy in my theatrical life, like when I played arrangements of the RC Peaslee score to Marat/Sade on my guitar which elevated my role from a very minor ensemble member to something more vital and it felt fantastic to be creative on stage in that way. A similar thing has happened with Uncle Vanya, the director saw an opportunity with my guitar skills, first to have me instruct my cast mate who needed to learn to play for the show and then use my musical ability as atmosphere. So, in the course of doing that show, I've been a lot of guitar. Mainly Russian sounding classical guitar, a couple of pieces the sound designer picked out and my guitar teacher helped me arrange and some improvisation on my part. It's been a cool experience, the whole thing. I've been playing mainly acoustic guitar, but today I picked up my electric and got the microphone directed at my amp and into Garageband and just noodled out this jam without thinking too much about it (which was the point of the exercise, to capture a spontaneous moment of music). I was feeling a blues, but a happy one. So there's plenty of major pentatonics in with the minor, and some wonky, jazzy, diminished stuff. Check it out, this is where I'm at.

Waiting...

My week of Uncle Vanya performances and other auditions has come to a close, and now the hard part... waiting. I've probably talked about this before, the anxiety I feel sometimes when I don't have a project lined up that I know I'll be occupying myself with in the present or near future. I've been aware of it from the beginning, and this weekend it really dawned on me that Uncle Vanya will come to a close. And now that we're out of weekend 2 of 4, next is weekend 3 and then the final performances. Out of the course of this past batch of auditions, I've been hoping to have something lined up, and now that they are all over and with varying degrees of perceived success or failure attached to them, I just have to wait for the phone to ring or the rejection email to land in my inbox. Speaking of which, isn't that irritating when they say "we'll get back to you" or "we'll let you know either way" and of course you don't... and after a few weeks you get the message. But that's just one of the realities of the acting world, nothing to be done about it.

Anyway, let's do a run down. Monday was the Miracle Worker; perceived sense of success to failure ration, let's say 6 out of 10. I thought I did pretty well, but I have no connections to the company and I'm sure they have a sizable existing roster of actors my age and there are all kinds of factors completely out of my control mostly having to do with the "type" they want to cast in the role, etc, etc.

Friday was Crimes and Crimes, perceived ratio 3 or 4 out of 10, I went into my 10:45 AM audition slot having had no coffee (always a mistake) and was probably too big, broad and general in the audition and I got the sense that the auditor just didn't like what I was doing and dismissed me as such. As far as I'm concerned, that one is off the table.

Saturday was Hookman with Company One, and I'm going to say... 6.5 out of 10. I thought my monologue went over well, but at the same time I think I've done the same piece better in other auditions and was trying to recapture that rather then just being truthful in the moment etc. Then again, my side reading went very well, I was luckily (and maybe consciously? Who knows) partnered to read with my scene partner from when I did the scene study with Company One so we had an existing sense of comedic chemistry and were generally very comfortable reading on stage with one another and they laughed audibly multiple times during our reading. Again, I took the class with them, so hopefully they recognized me from that but again probably a lot of actors read for the one male role, so who knows.

Yesterday was Swimming in the Shallows with Salem Theater Company, and without putting a number to it, that's the one I'm most optimistic about. I auditioned for them over the summer, and they seemed to really enjoy my work, but then due to scheduling stuff with Crooked Arrows I couldn't make it to that particular call back. But this audition felt more like a call back, I had done some work on the sides ahead of time and I felt like I was really jiving with the director, who gave me several different angles of direction over the course of my working with him. It also seemed to be very thinly populated, only three people in my slot, the other two being women. But, again, there's no way of knowing. And here's to uncertainty!

One Audition Down!

Well, today was audition number one: Wheelock Family Theatre! How did it go? WHO FUCKING KNOWS! No, but seriously, pretty good I thought. Here's a play by play; the last few auditions I've gone on, I've been a few minutes late. In the past, it hasn't seemed like that big of a deal, time slots felt like they were pretty loose at the auditions I was going on locally. But at these two, and at one in particular where I got what came close to being a hard time when I was there right smack on my time slot but wanted a minute to look over a side and the producer or auditor or whoever was like "well you know your time slot is for 3:30 and I can give you a minute but you'll have less time in the room" so I was like "OK let's just do it, that's fine". For me, personally, as long as I roughly know what the play is about I don't find that having an extended period of time with a piece affects my cold reading skills since... it's a cold reading. Your basically making it up as you go along and trying to follow your instincts and a few additional moments with the words, for me anyway, doesn't have much bearing on my ability to do that. Anyway, since none of the postings or correspondence I'd gotten said any different, I kind of figured I would be reading a side for this audition, and hadn't thought about a monologue. I had skimmed the play, the parts pertaining to my potential character particularly, and sort of knew what his deal was. Did I mention the play is the Miracle Worker, and the character the older half brother of Helen? Anyway, I was determined to be early for this one, my appointment was for 4:50 and I got to the green line platform at Park St around 4, a D train came a few minutes later and I was on my way to the Longwood T stop, a few minutes from the theatre. Except then the train went out of service at Fenway, a stop away from Longwood, I consulted my Iphone and decided the quickest thing was just to walk from there since it's basically the same distance and I would avoid getting a new train and going just one stop on it. Thank god for my Iphone, by the way, because I have a terrible sense of direction. I'm pretty good at following directions, and I've used Google Maps a hundred times to find a hundred different auditions, potential apartments, restaurants, stores, etc. Taking a different T-stop, I got a little turned around in the Fends, but found my way to the theatre at about 4:35, 4:40 and was brought in early. You see, they had slotted ten minutes per person, but they wanted a monologue. I assume it was a monologue, and not two, since they had never specified when I got up on stage I heard a "whenever your ready" from the director and said "Oh? You want a monologue? OK this is from The Glass Menagerie" and launched into Tom's speech to his mother. Mind you I was completely unprepared, still a little sniffly, my throat a little parched and my hands still thawing from the cold, but I've done that piece so many times I can basically pull it out of thin air and that's what I did. I gave it a solid beat of silence at the end, then turned to the auditors who seemed to be nodding and saying "yeah, pretty good" (subtext: for someone who didn't know they would be doing a monologue) and they said their "thank you, we'll let you know either way, might be a call back later" schpeel. And that was that!

In other news, reviews have started coming in for Uncle Vanya. If you read blog posts I don't link to from Facebook, then you might have seen one I wrote about secretly wishing in the back of my ego to have a reviewer comment on the effect of my guitar playing in our show. Well, right after I wrote that, I encountered Larry Stark's review on his Boston theatre website Theatre Mirror and this is from the beginning of the review: "Take for instance Mike Handleman playing a house-servant, with no lines to speak of. He turns up in several scenes, fetching things, but mostly learning to play a guitar. But when the farm's overseer comes in, the guilty snap with which he jumps up and bows, doffing his cap, defines not only him but an entire society." Hey! A positive notice! In a review! Of a play where I had next to no lines! This is a legitimate first for me. And it made me feel pretty proud. It doesn't reference the guitar playing as doing anything in particular, but it's cool that a little moment I came up with made that kind of an impression.

Larry's review as a whole was especially glowing, and so far all the press has been positive. The Globe review did not mention me by name which is fine, and felt to me... I don't know, kind of contrarian, the reviewer took issue with the translation (which I think is pretty good) and a few performances (which I also think are good) but hey, critics are critics. So far all the shows are selling out and audiences are enjoying themselves, and that's what matters.

happy new year

Well, New Year's Eve was unspectacular, I hadn't been feeling well all day and by the time I got to the theatre to do our show, my energy was pretty low. Everybody else continues to put in damn fine work. And last night I will say I thought the pre show music worked as best as it has up to this point, in terms of my accomplishing what I wanted with the dramatic arc of the music. That was cool. It's going to be interesting keeping the music stuff fresh from night to night, I'm basically playing the same stuff from night to night and improvising little riffs during and in between pieces.

So, I guess the Boston Globe came to the show the other night, which is exciting. This is the first time a show I've been in will get a review from a major, major publication. Can I allow my ego and vanity some floor space, for a moment? I'll be honest; I'd really enjoy if the guitar playing in show made it into at least one of the reviews, of which we're going to have several I believe, in some kind of light of the effect it has on the show. It would be nice for my contribution to be recognized critically. There, I said it. It won't be the end of the world in the very possible even likely circumstance that in the however many words a critic is able to give over to discussing the merits of the production they don't mention the live guitar playing, but it would be nice.

Anyway, I have a bunch of auditions coming up for January, a total of five this coming month. Let's see, Monday is The Miracle Worker at Wheelock Family Theatre, Friday is a reading of a Strindberg play, Saturday is Hookman at Company One, Sunday is Salem Theatre Company, and the following Saturday is Fresh Ink.

In there somewhere the trailer for Crooked Arrows is coming out. I've resisted marking it on my calendar... but that's pretty exciting. It is getting real. I need to decide what I want to do. I've been leaning towards that I should just give Los Angeles a shot and see what happens, the worst possible outcome is I come back here and continue what I've been doing. Real life is scary. Here I come.