Revisiting Friends at the Serebryakov Estate

Well, hello there blogosphere! God I hate that word. Well, hello there people who read my blog! I realize it's been a while, my posts have become much more erratic since I was writing like a man possessed this past summer... well, I'll try to be better about it. Even though I still owe a post, partially written down the pipeline, on the intensive in Lecoq technique I took two, almost three weekends ago and also my foray into modern dance at Boston Ballet with my dance teacher... after tonight's rehearsal of the revival of Uncle Vanya, I just can't help blogging about it!

This is my second time revisiting a previously mounted production with an altered cast, the previous time having been when we did The Muse for Turtle Lane's Young Actor's Winter Festival and then it was accepted into the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, and because the actor who'd played my counterpart had to work all that summer, we recast the role, with the other actor out of the cast of three remaining constant. And that was quite an interesting experience seeing how the play changed but fundamentally remained the same production.

It was also in many ways like visiting with an old friend, especially when we did it again for another festival the play was in consideration for where we quickly rehearsed and filmed it, again with another actor. Relearning the lines was like putting on a familiar suit, or I don't know something else you only wear for specific occasions, you come up with a metaphor.

In this case, I am reconnecting with old friends, specifically all the returning cast from our previous go around with this show, a few of whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the intervening time. It's also meant revisiting the music I learned to play on the guitar for the show last December, which is coming at a quite a good time for me musically actually, as in the last few months I've gotten back into guitar playing in a way I hadn't felt for sometime.

In addition of course I'm being reunited with Chekov's play... have I written enough about Chekhov in this blog? Frankly I have not! I remember being introduced to Chekhov in I guess what was basically my junior year of college, right before turning 21. In fact, it would have been right around this time that I would have been starting my Chekhov themed acting class with my teacher Scott Zigler whom I credit for first giving me many of the tools I use in my work today, much of it coming through that class.

I remember vividly how stuck I'd become in my work the previous year after working for two semesters with a very, very far out college director on productions of Suddenly, Last Summer in the autumn (which I actually thought was very good and nearly could have been disaster) and then Hamlet in the Spring (which was, in fact, a complete disaster and was the worst experience working in theatre I've ever had and if anything ever eclipses it God help me). This kid was super duper artsy and avant garde, I mean seriously, and I was 19 or 20 or whatever at the time so of course I was super into it and it came at a time when I'd been away from doing theatre for over a year, but that particular semester was when I discovered Common Casting at Harvard. Since Harvard doesn't have a proper theatre department, all of the shows on campus are completely extra curricular and run by volunteer students with support from technical and administrative staff at the American Repertory Theatre and the Office for the Fine Arts at Harvard. This applies to the casting process as well, which is completely open to anyone who wanders into the Loeb or other spaces where auditions are held and wants to sign up. After going through this process half a dozen times through my time at the Extension school, it's usually Harvard College kids who get parts. To be cast as a non Harvard College student (being part of the Extension school, I was not one of them) you needed to be very talented or very lucky or happen to audition for someone very much on the fringe of the theatre scene aka somebody craaaazy, which I later realized this director was, in a very particular way that was in part a response but stemming from the Ivy League environment and his own desire to be an artistic rebel. Ah, college! Anyway, working with this kid was an exercise in extreme stylization, which I was into at the time, and it's possible you've subsequently seen me give some pretty big performances, and that's what he was all about. The bigger, the crazier, the better. Anyway, to make a long story short, after two semesters working with this guy I'd practically forgotten how to act naturalistically. Mind you, before working with him in the first place I was still really figuring out how exactly to do that like you do when you're a teenager and I think in high school I came pretty close but who's to say?

Don't you wish sometimes you had footage of your high school plays? I'm thinking of one in particular where I was the lead, my first time doing anything dramatic. I felt at the time, even being about as self critical back then as I am now, that I did pretty well and I received some very positive feedback but oh wait Chekhov...

So anyway, working in that really crazy stylized environment I'd lost sight of what it meant to act like a human being after two semesters of doing crazy voices and crawling around on the floor. Being exposed to Chekhov at that time, who wrote for people to act like real people on stage and did so as beautifully as anyone has ever done, I think, from my limited exposure to world drama. At the time, I appreciated as an actor how wonderfully nuanced his scenes are. A case study in this was the first week of presented work, myself and two other groups presented the "seduction" scene from Uncle Vanya, featuring three very different pairs of Astrovs and Yelenas presenting three very different interpretations of the scene and final products later on. In fact, they were completely different, and maybe the juiciest thing for me about Chekhov is the sheer geometry of his writing, you can come at every line and character from so many different angles there's no one direction in the text, it's wide open to whatever you find within it. And that's what I needed to rediscover, being in a real moment and finding the things that make them real to you and to the characters and stepping away from the crutch of silly voices, like I'd been doing.

And in Vanya particularly, there are so many beautiful things to be found. Today for the first time I watched the full, new cast in action, as we rehearsed Act III, the play's climatic act with the seduction and the gun shot and it was the first time I'd seen my cast mates working largely off book and the first time I'd seen the act from start to finish, ever, come to think of it. Seeing it done, and connecting it with when I'd recently watched acts I and II I saw how our production came to be so popular, but also really came to appreciate Chekhov's skill with dramatic structure in a way that made me really want to go back and reread the major plays. Uncle Vanya in particular breathes and arcs so incredibly beautifully. Diego Arciniegas (maybe you've heard of him? He'll be playing Vanya this time) commented tonight in rehearsal the way that the lines of the play are so well distributed and it's true, it's really an ensemble piece. And that speaks to the way that each act begins with an intimate spark, with just a few characters on stage, which builds to a fire involving most of the cast and then disperses and settles again into another moment of sublime intimacy.

This Russian guy really knew what he was doing when he wrote these plays. And let me take a moment and point out the same is true for our cast and director, who are really crafting a unique and electric piece of theatre which I could not be prouder to be a part of. It's been really cool to watch, because basically the whole play had been staged ahead of time, so we've been working at a much more accelerated pace then I've become accustomed to, not that I really have all that much acting work but it's still cool to compare. Especially doing the play again with three new actors in leads, everything being in one way the same but also being so new and different, wow what an experience.

And that's why I just had to blog about it, because the experience will continue to evolve as we rapidly throttle towards opening... Yikes! October 10th! By which time I'll be 24. Did you know that? It's true. Lots of other things have been going on, I've had lots of ideas for blog posts, but lacked the focus and energy to put them down. Well, here's this one! Boom! Don't worry, I'll be back blogging at you soon.

Times Flies When You're Busy Doing Stuff

OK, time to blog! And so much so far this week worth blogging about.

For one thing, I had a callback on Monday for Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead. How'd it go? Pretty good! OK can I be honest? I feel a little weird blogging about it, because it was for Apollinaire and having worked there this past year I sort of know all those people and it feels weird blogging about our interactions because well, they might read it, right? That's the point of blogging, so people read what you write. So I do have more of a point of view then "pretty good", for example I could have prepared better. But, I was in the show, so I kind of know it. I guess I did have one epiphany worth sharing that I don't feel weird about. At the very end of the show, Rosencratz and Guildenstern realize they are going to die and they turn to the Player for answers. But, he doesn't have any for them. Guildenstern in a fit of rage, frustration and powerlessness, pulls the Player's own knife on him and threatens him with it, ultimately stabbing him (seemingly) to death. I was going over the side, trying to figure out "What does Guildenstern want and why?" and I realized it was purely vindictive, in the face of his own powerlessness he wants to feel more powerful than someone else, to take hold of some kind of control in the face of an absurd universe and the most available individual is the player. Now, maybe that's wrong, but that's what I was feeling in the audition. And I thought "man that's really heavy stuff, to be face to face with your own absurd, meaningless existence and imminent death, then to take that rage and vent into the most available human being by harming them". Now to be fair the player is kind of despicable. He prostitutes a young boy, literally. But I mean man, that's just so raw. And I don't think I was able to get that across. So probably I didn't get Guildenstern. We'll see. Whatever the case, much love to my Apollinaire peeps, I'll be back in the fall for our revival of Uncle Vanya.

Speaking of which, Uncle Vanya was nominated for three Eliot Norton awards!!! Outstanding fringe theatre production, outstanding direction in a small/fringe theatre and outstanding performance for my friend Ronald Lacey as Astrov. Man, does that feel good to say. All three feel good for different reasons. I'm super proud of and happy for Ron. I mean, he's my buddy, we were in this show together and now he's been nominated for this super prestigious award, how could I not be? And also of course the same goes for Danielle, who brought such a wonderful light touch to the material and really made the most of the space and the staging concept (and brought me in to begin with). And I feel a sense of pride in myself for being a part of it, I really feel like I'm part of our nomination for outstanding production... because hey I was part of that production! And in an integral way, obviously not more integral than anyone else, that's not what I mean. But if this had gone to a show where I was just a spear carrier, I wouldn't feel this way. I just feels great after the fact that I was included the way I was in the staging concept, with my guitar playing and then serving as the role of guide on the Serbeiakov (I totally butchered that spelling) estate. So yeah, super happy about that.

Fast forwarding to yesterday, that was quite eventful. I may not have mentioned it explicitly, but I'm not part of one of six one act plays premiering Friday, April 27th as part of Six Playwrights in Search of a Stage at Roxbury Repertory Theatre. The play I'm in is called The Apology and it's about incest! Sounds fun, right? It's actually a good challenge. On paper, it sort of looks like a Lifetime movie but reading it aloud it kind of feels like an echo of August: Osage County or something. And taking a very dramatically heightened situation like that, a son confronting his mother over the rape of his older sister by his older brother, trying to find an answer to the question "how could you let this happen?" and really grounding that, and trying to make it truthful and real... it's going to be a great acting challenge. And it's only 7 pages long, so that's a bonus. So far, the director and the actress playing my mother have been great. I'm really excited to dig into this piece.

After that was the second session of Auditioning for Film and Television with Carolyn Pickman over at CP Casting and I've already gotten my money's worth. I was looking over a side as a grocery clerk in a crime drama and I said to her "what do I do to nail this?" and she told me "look for the second choice, not the most obvious one, but the second one and do that". In this case, the most obvious choice was an "oh shit" reaction when the matriarch of a criminally connected family tries to give me a counterfeit bill. But instead, I played the first beat a little light "Oh, I'm sorry miss I can't take this" then when that doesn't work, "oh shit, what am I going to do" because the majority of auditioners are just going to be saying "oh shit" for the whole thing. If you can find that second beat though, you'll stand out. This fits with what Scott Zigler taught in Practical Aesthetics, find one tactic, then when it doesn't work, find a completely different one, and so on. So anyway, it's been great so far. I'll try to pepper in any more easily digestible nuggets as they come up.

Then after that, I played music with people for the first time in ages. Two thirty something dudes near where I live by Porter Square, and we just jammed on some blues and classic rock tunes. All Along The Watchtower, Sunny, Jammin, etc. And it was a good time. One of them plays rhythm guitar and sings, the other plays bass, so as a lead guitar kinda guy, I was a real good fit. And that felt great.

All in all, things are feeling good. Hey by the way, Crooked Arrows is being featured on Extra tomorrow, so check that out. Well, I know, it's Extra so I don't blame you if you don't. After it does, the official trailer will be released, so do check that. Until then, au revoir.