Last weekend was the closing of She Kills Monsters, and the end of a months long artistic journey going back to our initial read through way back in February until mid May, now that all the monsters are dead and Tilly's bedroom has been packed up for good, once and for all.
And so I say goodbye to Chuck Biggs aka DM Biggs because he's big where it counts... one of the most outsized but fully realized parts I've yet brought to the stage, and I'd like to think perhaps the best work of my acting career and certainly the highest profile, which is very satisfying professionally and personally. Likewise I say goodbye to the story of Agnes the Average, the girl who never left home and the experience of coming together with my first cast mates now friends every night to bring this story to a new group of strangers.
You know, the thing that happens when you put up and close a show. Very possibly you're a theatre person, so you know what I'm talking about. I'm still sort of bathing in the after glow of that experience, going through the world having people tell me how much they loved She Kills Monsters. I can still remember all the lines, all the moments. I don't have to think back very hard to conjure them. If I had to go back and do the show again tonight, I probably could.
But that won't be true for much longer, because life goes on. And for me, I really haven't had time to be depressed about this one ending (although often as not I'm not one for sentimentality with these sorts of things) because I've already started work on my next show.
Last summer I blogged a lot about putting Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead/Han Muerto, Tom Stoppard's classic in both English and Spanish, and this year I'm rejoining several of my cast mates from last year and a whole bunch of new folks in bringing another modern classic to Mary O'Malley Park in Chelsea, Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. I'm playing the part of Yussup, a young man who dodges the draft by playing sick for a year until he's married on his "death bed" to the play's heroine, a young peasant girl who's adopted the abandoned child of a displaced upper class family. I'm also playing a horseman, a peasant, a soldier, a drummer and at some point the guitar. Oh and probably a bridge, or a door, and who knows what else.
The read through was this past Sunday, and last night was our first rehearsal. We spent most of the time going through cuts and then because a lot of English speakers are tackling sometimes substantial roles in Spanish (myself included I've got some pretty big chunks to untangle) much of the time was spent addressing that issue.
And then at the end of the night, we sort of stumbled through Act 1, and I thought to myself "whoa this play is crazy! And awesome! And oh man this is going to be amazing in the park" and then I thought "oh shit and we've got to figure it out in two languages simultaneously".
If you do the math on what that entails, it's a lot of work, which I realized last summer. Initially, there were certain productions of an Equity nature happening various places I was hopeful I'd be cast in, because that's really the next big goal post for me as a performer, to get on to Boston's equity stages and start getting those EMC points. But it became clear at a certain point that wasn't going to happen, and I was debating whether to do a show, in particular something like Caucasian Chalk Circle where I figured there would be room for me in the ensemble and I would know various people involved and the environment we were staging it in and also from all of that prior knowledge the time commitment involved.
I was on the fence, on the one hand I could take it easy this summer, work my summer jobs making money, do music, work on my podcast, maybe pursue stand up again. But once we were in the run of She Kills Monsters and I had that feeling of being in a room of collaborators with a room of strangers on the other side of the dressing room, the sense of connection to each other and anticipation for what we had to do, I realized "nope I've just gotta keep doing shows, this is where I'm happiest, this is where I belong" and that's what I'm doing.
To quote the cliche line, Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Look forward to more blog posts on this exciting process. Knowing Apollinaire's work, trust me you're going to want to take the trek over the bridge (it's not as far as you think, seriously it's just a ten or twenty minute bus ride from Haymarket) to check this one out.
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