Moments of Anticipation

I've realized I need to become less precious with the communications I share via this blog. Since coming back from Shakespeare and Company this February (wow hard to believe it's been that long) I've started to write a whole bunch of blog posts and then either stopped and not finished them or meant to go back to them or what have you.

Part of this I think had to do with how Shakespeare and Company dealt with the subject of communication in their training, in that they teach you to talk about things as succinctly and specifically as possible. This lead to a struggle in my writing to continue doing that, and when I've felt like I don't completely or succinctly communicate something in a first pass, I get frustrated and want to write it over until I get annoyed with writing it or move on to something else and then I have no writing to share!

That's silly. I have observed my writing process is that I'm most likely to actually get a blog post at the end of a writing session if I commit fully to writing down the thoughts I have in a given moment, ideally doing a quick pass of an edit, and then sharing it and moving on. The blessing and the curse of the internet is how easy it is to access quantity in a sense that it's removed from the expenses of physical media, so you can quickly and cheaply create things and so there are lots of things being created. Vast numbers of things, so many that it becomes counter productive at a certain point to spend too much time worrying about the quality.

But that's another blog post.

I'm pretty far into rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle, we've been getting into the really rough and difficult parts of the "birthing" as it were of this piece of art. Is that an appropriate analogy? There's a lot of collective pain and suffering as we work through the gritty details and logistics of mastering the text, smoothing over the staging, sweating out blocking and staging. For many of us in particular a big part of this has been mastering our Spanish lines, I know it has been for me! I studied Spanish a good deal in school, so I'm not coming in completely ignorant to how it works, but back then I never worked very hard at it, or was ever a preternatural talent for the language, I don't think. So that's been very challenging. But also pretty cool and kind of rewarding. I really like the Spanish text and it's fun getting to work with different sets of actors on the same scenes but in different languages. It's basically equivalent to rehearsing two shows at once. On the hand, that sucks, you're rehearsing two shows at once and it's a lot of work. But also, I'm getting to rehearse two shows at once, so I feel like I'm growing perhaps faster or at least exercising new and different muscles than I normally do as an actor and that's really rewarding.

I talked in that last process about how creating theatre feels like giving birth. Obviously, I haven't ever and will never get the chance to experience that particular component of the human experience, which is honestly something I sort of regret. If I could do it, I would do it. Is that weird and over sharey? I remember talking to my mother as a younger person about her experiences birthing myself and my two brothers. She talked about doing it naturally, and that when I was conceived the philosophy was that the feeling of giving birth can be perceived as being pain but that it's not, it's something else and if you can learn to experience it as that something else pain killers become unnecessary.

So maybe this analogy is stretching it a little bit, but what the hell. For us as artists, what other people might perceive as the tedious, frustrating or painful work of putting something together maybe what sets us apart is that we're able to see the process of birthing work as that something else, something joyful.

This is especially true in theatre, where getting to that final result is such an ecstatic experience, sharing work with an audience, sharing moments with cast members, getting to relive and redo and retry each individual moment night after night and watch it grow and change. I find myself in a series of moments of anticipation as we're on the verge of those final contractions before we can share our creation with the world. I see all the beautiful things beginning to happen, I can see all the things I've already discovered and can already imagine the moments of discovery to come. It's an amazing feeling.

Remind me to make sure I get back into the habit of blogging about it, OK? Thanks.

Closing the door on one show (all the monsters are dead), opening another (the oppressors still live): She Kills Monsters to Caucasian Chalk Circle

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.

Review! Uncle Vanya at Apollinaire Theatre through November 6th (putting on my critic's hat for once)

Well, hello! Lately I've been thinking about reviews, seeing as I just opened a show and my cast mates and I have been hoping that someone would come over the river for a second time to give our revival of Uncle Vanya a write up, and move us closer to the goal of a sold out run like last time.

So I thought to myself, "I have a blog, why don't I review the show?" Normally, I don't use this space for theatrical criticism of local work, because being a part of the local theatre community and inevitably having personal relationships to someone or something or some aspect to any given production I see, I can't hope to be critically objective. Nor do I want to be when I go to the theatre. I always go into a show, no matter what it is or who I know in it or what I know about it, really wanting to like it, right? Don't we all want to see something worthwhile? Especially when we have friends involved! Then you have even more impetus to authentically enjoy the work! Well, I'm friends with everyone in the Vanya cast and crew, and getting to watch them work night after night through rehearsals, tech and now performances with an audience and all that entails... it's simply a delight. And it deserves to be written up in review form, so that's what I'm going to do, throwing any and all pretense of critical objectivity right out the window where it belongs.

Thus far, audience reactions have been uniformly, profoundly positive, as they should be, because it's a beautiful production. Comparing the current iteration of the production to last year's, is apples and oranges. And I say that with a strong sense of objective conviction. But I can say assuredly that the performances of my compatriots from that previous version, Ron Lacey as Astrov, Ann Marie Shea as Marie, Kevin Fennessy as Telegin, Ann Carpenter as Nanny and Erin Eva Butcher as Sonya, have only grown deeper with time and continue to grow new, subtle and wonderful levels of meaning while also shifting to accomodate the new energies brought by Kate Paulsen as Yelena, Jack Schultz as the Professor and Diego Arciniegas in the title role. I've seen these performers go through the process of first rediscovering everything about the previous production while also exploring everything new brought by the additional cast. Whom for their part have enhanced the existing frame work of the production by bringing their new discoveries which then combined with the expansion of the work laid out... is simply breathtaking. I wrote previously of how conscious this time around of the play's sense of breath, and how perfectly laid out every beat of the story is. Danielle Fauteux Jacques has explicitly directed each and every beat of that story, and Chekhov's poetic contrasts and flawed characters feel as modern as the moment we are living in with her skilled and subtle hand.

This is to say nothing of the production's design, with elegantly constructed, period accurate costumes by Toni Bratton Elliott, effective sound design by Emily Ledger which takes advantage of the buildings natural acoustics... which brings us to the productions most novel and perhaps brilliant aspect which ties all of these parts together, it's site specific staging with set designs by Nathan K. Lee which make you feel the three dimensional weight of the estate around you as you travel from room to room.

Guiding you on this journey, and periodically serenading you, while making occasional appearances in the action... is Mike Handelman. Who is writing this blog post (it just got meta). It's all pretty effective, the whole effect of him playing music through the preshow, leading the audience from room to room and acting as the bridge between the audience and the world of the estate. And you know, he does an OK job at it. Alright he's pretty good. (I can't give myself too high praise, now can I?) (Oh no I accidentally gave myself most of a paragraph)

This is truly a marvelous and unique piece of the theatre the likes of which have never been seen in Boston to my knowledge. It is truly a once in a lifetime production... revived! And maybe made even better. Miss out at your own risk, last time the run sold out quickly and it's due to do so again!

PHEW that was really difficult. Just like, coming up with different adjectives for everything and stuff... that's the last time I try to write a review. But I felt it was necessary to celebrate the work being done in this production by my friends, the cast and crew, and I feel a review is a fitting extension of the experiential nature of this blogging endeavor. Wouldn't you agree?

Well that's my exercise in self promotion. Oh if you want tickets, go here: http://www.apollinairetheatre.com/productions/productions.html

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.

Blogging Along the River of Babylon (no significance just sounds cool)

Well hello readers of my blog! Why am I addressing this as an epistle? Well, why not. Did you know that before the novel entered it's modern 19th to 20th century incarnation, epistolary fiction was a very popular form? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for example. I learned in that my college expository writing class where I was supposed to have read a bunch of them but didn't really and still got like an A-.

Anyway, I feel like catching up on a few things with y'all. For instance, this is going to be the first of no doubt numerous blog posts on my second go around with Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This time as you know, I'm playing Alfred and at this rate when I inevitably do the show again because people do this play kind of a lot maybe I'll be Hamlet and the time after that, who knows! Anyway, so yeah, from my end of things we've had two rehearsals with the Tragedian ensemble mostly exploring physical character work type stuff through acting games, mimes and practicing dying different ways (as the player hammers him, his troupe of players are very into deaths) and a little bit of rough playing around sort of workshopping a few of the "play within a play" tableau type sequences. So far, so fun! As it turns out, we'll be the ensemble of tragedians for both the English and Spanish versions of the production. At the rehearsals I've been to, we didn't have the Player's Spanish speaking counterpart but that will be a serious trip figuring out how to coordinate those sequences in a language I don't particularly speak, para un pequito (which I think means except a little bit).

Last night was the first I'd been in a room with what was close to being but wasn't quite as if often the case the full cast for our read through, in English but trading off and stuff. And man, this play is dense. Our director Danielle has cut it down substantially in the hopes of making it run two hours or less and will probably cut it even more before we're through. To be honest, even having been in it, big parts of this play are still a little over my head. But then, I've never really put the full energy necessary to sitting down with the entire text, reading it through and putting all the pieces about the nature of drama and metaphysics together. Hearing it read again though, those things clicked for me in some new ways, so maybe I'll make it part of my blogging project this summer to chronicle both the bi-lingual experience and my own musings on the piece's dramaturgy.

As that is just now beginning to crawl along, Three Sisters is running to the finish line! But first we must overcome the massive hurdle... OF TECH WEEK. Tonight is supposed to be our first off book run, and I feel mostly ready. This past Sunday was our first stumble through and it definitely highlighted the problem passages for me, which isn't to say that this from a memorization stand point this translation is anything but problematic. But the character is there, the arc is there, the relationship with Irina is there and in theory this is the best and most fun part. Actually getting to do it!

As an actor getting the opportunity to act it's important to stop every once in a while and think "wow this is so great, I'm acting!" because hey, getting a shot at working your stuff in a room of people is hard to do so be grateful when it happens. In that way, acting is different than most creative pursuits. Painters, writers, musicians they can just sit and do there thing and take down their output even if it's going into a void. But acting doesn't exist in a void, inherently it requires an audience! Technology and Youtube and stuff has brought us closer to the model of a recording artist or writer, in that with the internet you can put yourself out into the world, but it's incredibly hard to create traction. Generally with theatre, some of that exists, although not always and that's one kind of experience that it's much more complicated to manufacture. So you know, I've hit on this theme before, remain grateful.

Speaking of being grateful, I had an experience to be grateful for yesterday, an audition for a part in a feature film. Specifically, The Way Way Back which was written and is being directed by the writers of The Descendants and will have Steve Carell in it. Exciting, right? I read for Charlie, an 18 year old hippy stoner dead head guy, who one of the leads a 14 year old kid has a brief interaction with at a beach party. It required me to act spaced out and do a sort of weird spacey dance and deliver a few lines. Which I did! I tried to keep it interesting and make fun dynamic choices while also bringing in the world of the party, the guy putting me on tape had me go gradually bigger and bigger with it, which I did hopefully without blowing out the frame, so to speak. And maybe I'll get a call back. More likely not because those are just the brakes. But again, I was grateful for the opportunity, and that's where you've gotta be.