Time Management

Is anything more exciting then the whoosh of preparation as you rehearse a play? Every day is something new, a new discovery, a new challenge. You get to watch the piece develop  from moment to moment, knowing that time is ticking down before you have to make the next step. For me, right now in working on Swimming in the Shallows that big step is getting off book. At times, this feels like kind of a bear. Nick, my character, is in a lot of the play. And this is very exciting, because I get to create and experience a very full journey across multiple scenes and relationships and I get to be on stage a lot. This both pleasing to my ego as a performer but also to my desire to develop artistically. The best way to do that is to be on stage. What you do with that time on stage will determine your development. For instance, I've played a bunch of smaller roles in things, as well as roles which have been quite substantial. Both kinds of parts have made lasting impacts on how I think about my art. As the old saying goes, "there are no small parts only small actors", and that's generally true. Sometimes I forget that. And also, well, no there is such a thing as a small part. A spear carrier is a small part. Sorry. Unless I'm getting something else out of it, which granted in the past I've usually done, I'd rather not play any more spear carriers. I guess I should specify, I'm done playing spear carriers in community theatre productions.

But that's a whole other tangent. Nick is not a small part by any means. It's kind of ironic that when I think back on my track record of let's just say parts with substantial amounts of stage time and text vs parts with less of those things, I kind of feel like my batting average is better on the "smaller" parts. Or it might be that when it comes to my history with "larger" parts, I'm just more self critical. One part in particular that I felt like I could have done more with was Solomon in Speech and Debate, which I performed a couple of summers ago when I was still doing Harvard theatre. Thinking back on it, this was the only "large" part that I performed while I was doing Harvard theatre, most of my other roles were of the more "ensemble" variety which was fine and I thought I did some very good work in performing them. Solomon though, I feel like I could have done more with. I guess I've been thinking about the part in particular because it's the one other time that I've played a homosexual, other than now, with Nick.

I don't mean to get hung on these characters' sexuality. In Practical Aesthetics, one of the principals taught is to focus more on the similarities you share with the character your portraying while acknowledging the differences, where the temptation is often to do it the other way round. It was kind of a defining characteristic for Solomon, because he was 15 or 16 years old, closeted, and with a very tortured past, including a trip to "gay reform camp" and an ambiguous-in-the-text relationship with an older teacher. So yeah, a lot of internal conflict. Lots and lots of internal conflict and contradictions, all the kind of stuff that makes a role juicy for an actor. I thought I was in good shape with the role for the first few weeks, and then I got strep throat. This made rehearsing very difficult, because if I used my voice at full vocal energy, and a lot of the energy I draw for my performance is from my voice I find, then I would exhaust myself and my throat would feel like sand paper the next day. This was made worse that I was incorrectly prescribed penicillin which I have a resistance to after getting strep like ten times in my life, as opposed to immoxicllin which would have done the trick. So I spent a substantial chunk of the rehearsal process sick, and unable to perform at full tilt, and it seriously leeched the verve out of performance and I really struggled to get it back.

Looking back on the role, I think there was a lot I could have done with that internal conflict, and more that I could have explored more deeply. Then ago, it was college theatre and the nice thing about college theatre is that it doesn't really matter.

Swimming in the Shallows is more important, because now I'm a professional actor out in the world, and as I establish myself I have to constantly be putting my best stuff out there. And isn't that an exciting challenge! I found last night's rehearsal particularly invigorating, because it was the first time now that the whole show is blocked out that we were able to go back and really do work for detail and nuance, giving shape and making discoveries. All the stuff I love about acting and especially stage acting. Onwards to the next great discovery.