Returning to the Blogosphere

To quote Simon and Garfunkel, hello blogger my old friend,  I've come to talk with you again. Because actually this past year or so, I've been writing quite a bit, at the suggestion of my friend and acting teacher Michael Toomey. We met last summer (or maybe it was the spring? Let's say late spring or early summer) to work on some Shakespeare, at the time I had this idea (well I still have the idea it's just kind of dormant) to develop a piece exploring Hamlet through the lens of stand up comedy. I pitched this to Michael, and he basically said "Mike, why do you need to adapt Shakespeare's texts, can't you just write it yourself?"

And I haven't, at least not yet, but since that conversation I've been writing a lot more, mostly personal pieces not for public consumption exploring and understanding my own thoughts, but also some new poems... also not for public consumption, but maybe I'll put one up here sometime. Side note, did anyone reading this know me in high school when I published a body of poetry over live journal, most of which was awful? Good times but not really I was miserable in high school.

Anyway, I was reminded this thing I wrote in a few years existed, this blog, because the person I've been dating AKA my girlfriend has been reading Three Sisters for work, and earlier today we were talking about it and my experience playing Tuzenbach way back in 2013 for The Footlight Club and I remembered I wrote all these blog posts about the experience and I was like "holy shit, look at that, well this is interesting in a way I didn't think it would be at the time."

Because how could 23 year old Mike know in 2013 that 28 year old Mike would be interested in what he thought about Three Sisters? It's been so many years since I thought deeply about that play, I've done so, so much since then, including several break ups and relationships, starting a new life in a new city, finding my footing as a stand up comedian, a composer, and a writer, all this shit has happened and I feel so distant from that version of myself. But there he is, in those blog posts.

And here I am now, in this blog post, which maybe I'll look back on when I'm 33 and think "that's what I was thinking as a 28 year old?" Who knows.

I was really tickled by one of the lines in those Three Sisters blogs about how I didn't know if anyone would read it or find it useful or interesting besides my Mom (hi again Mom) because I do now, and hopefully my girlfriend does. And actually, not to toot my own horn but no actually I am giving myself a compliment, I had some pretty interesting insights into the arc of that character that I'd completely forgotten about, comparing him to Goethe's Young Werther and how he and Solyony are these mirror images of each other.

I wrote at the time that fundamentally they saw themselves as the heroes of there own stories, both romantic in nature, Solyony's vision of his story was epic and heroic whereas Tuzenbach's turns out to be a tragedy in nature, whether he means it to or not. That really resonates with me today. I think it's for us to relate to the world as the heroes of our own story, because we learn to relate to the world through stories in the form of films and television and I wonder if Chekhov or Shakespeare's audience was doing the same thing. Did they watch Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet or The Three Sisters and imagine themselves as being analogous to those characters? David Wong writes at Cracked.com about how this kind of thinking creates a lot of dissatisfaction and misogyny, especially in men, who see stories about heroes accomplishing heroic things and being rewarded with beautiful women reduced to objects. Part of me thinks this is a fairly modern idea, and by modern I mean relating to the 18th century and romanticism, but then again story telling as a way of shaping how we see ourselves as a culture, a society and a people is a tradition as old as the spoken word, so who knows.

This relates to a lot of think pieces, you know the trendy ones about how millennial are garbage people who think there special because of course they are for being themselves? Which is something I'm guilty of, except wait I'm actually super talented, laugh out loud! Explicit arrogance! What is the tone of this piece supposed to be? Am I being satirical, self deprecating, or serious? Sorry I got caught in my head.

But I think that idea is in Three Sisters, Vershinin talks about it when he says that the sisters will pave a way for a new and better society. That these are characters are special and there lives are worthwhile, and Chekhov rather than giving us a straight forward dramatic story, shows the rhythms of people's lives on stage and how they give such great importance to everything they do, when in the end there just people and when the play is over, nothing is really different.

Having written this blog post, nothing is really different. I'm still not very good at ending my writing. But there is a document of me and my thoughts in this moment for you to read, and for me to read in the unknowable future, I'm curious to see what my thoughts are then.

Au Revoir Tuzenbach

And with this past weekend's performances, I close the door on my time on stage as Tuzenbach, one of the great roles period and particularly for actor's of my type. Where the jocks get to play Biff Loman, the geeks play Tuzenbach. Not that I seriously view the great roles of theater through a lens of base a archetypes, but it's kinda true. I am kind of a geek, and Tuzenbach is one of the roles in the western dramatic canon that I'm ideally suited for and indeed one of the most beautiful. And I say goodbye to the role with no real regrets. I do wish we'd had a longer run than four performances, but such is the way of community theater and especially a play like Three Sisters, a three hour long turn of the century semi-melodrama (which is to say a play on the melodrama but that's another dramaturgical Chekovian can of worms, yes I know $5 words $10 meanings). I don't think I really nailed down the role to the fullness of my capability until the second weekend... but when I nailed it down, I nailed that sucker down. The most fun and the most challenging part of the role is definitely the big dramatic death scene, where Tuzenbach comes face to face with his great existential quandary, Irina's inability to love him and subsequently his inability so save her/bring her meaning/find happiness with her. The fact of the scene being he's loved her to bits the entire play, and throughout as he's watched her suffering and remorse escalate fantasized about taking her away to some mystical shangri-la of work and eternal happiness... but in the end he can't give that to her, and she can't give him what he needs which is her true affection, so he fights a duel and dies.

During the process, my friend and cast mate Ron referenced a conversation he had with a Russian coworker who said that for the Russians, (this is my summary/interpretation) Chekhov is sort of like dramatic comedia de'll arte, and for a Russian audience characters like the drunken doctor or the nobody who thinks he is or could have been an intellectual savior of Russia (ex; Konstantin, Vanya, Andrei, etc) are recognizable archetypes. I think in the case of Tuzenbach, he's a reflection of a popular literary idea that I've blogged about it, that of the romantic/intellectual hero-poet, the classic example being Werther and that's why he's German because it's an idea of Germanic origin, etc I've talked about this. I've further though that Solyony, Tuzenbach's counterpart in the army and his rival for Irina's affection who goes on to kill him, is sort of like his Russian doppleganger. In Solyony's case, he's decidedly anti intellectual and violent, perhaps even a sociopath and identifies himself with the Russian author Lermontov who wrote novels about romantic heroes sleeping with lots of women and fighting duels (credit to Scott, who played him, for that background). So in that sense, they kind of mirror one another, two sides of the same coin which explains why Tuzenbach is so inexplicably drawn to him and why Solyony constantly torments him except when their alone, when they get along pretty well, blah blah contents of the play.

Anyway, this is a long build up to how it is that Tuzenbach embodies some of Solyony's madness at the end of the play, leading him to (in our version, anyway) lash out at Irina before going off to die in a duel in a final act of desperation, and as a way out of a life that he simply can't continue living while maintaining his romantic hero factor (because one of the ways romantic heroes die is in duels).

One of the things the director and I struggled with in our collaborations was this whole where Tuzenbach goes off about trees and shit, and their permanence against our mortality and it's like what? You're about to go off and die and this is what you give the love of your life before you do? Initially, we tried it where this passage is a moment of introspection for Tuzenbach where he collects himself after going off on her, and I think that's part of it. But after reblocking it where Irina was available during this speech for Tuzenbach to connect with her and during the second to last performance where I was the mostly deeply connected I would be to my scene partner and the given circumstances... I felt like I figured it out. It's his way of forgiving her, and his plea for forgiveness for what he's about to do, that in the end the trees are the way they are and will continue to be so and that we don't control the way we feel or how the universe affects us. It's not her fault that she couldn't love him, and it's not his that he has to do what he's about to do, and then even when he's gone some part of him will continue in the world and in her and it's also tied it into (I think) romantic ideas and values about the natural world and our connection to it as human beings. And that's what he's leaving her with before he dies. And in the second to last performance, I really felt like I did that, and that's the moment I blogged about where I saw a real tear go down her face and I thought to my self "yes, this acting" and I found the full truth of the moment, of two lovers saying goodbye for the last time.

If I have those moments, I tend I find to have them once per production (in the case of the two productions where I've had them, small sample size). My scene partner and I found it in the second or third to last performance of Swimming in the Shallows. I think I blogged about this at the time, but it was a particularly unresponsive audience in that tiny theater so when I came to my big romantic scene with The Shark, instead of playing to them for laughs like I usually might I just focused on The Shark and tuned them out completely, and felt the romance and chemistry of those moments, and then in the moment of our big dramatic kiss it felt... real in a way that it hadn't prior. And didn't in the remaining performances. The same being true of Three Sisters, not that Saturday's show was worse than Friday's just different. And that's the lesson I'm still learning as a stage actor, even when you find what is in a way the perfection of a moment like that, it is the perfection of that moment and every subsequent moment is inherently different, ya dig? So it's a fools errand to try to replicate that perfection, because it's impossible, you have to find the truth of THIS moment and you have to refind it every time you go on stage. And that's the truth and the challenge and the beauty of acting on stage, you have to try every time and you get to try again.

My hope is that I'll get to try again someday with Tuzenbach, but if I don't, then this was a production I can be satisfied with and moving forward harbor no regrets, because I lived a dream role and embodied it to the fullness of my ability at that time and made it something beautiful. The end.

Goodbye Three Sisters, no not goodbye but farewell for we shall not meet again. Or if we do, who will we be then? (Quote from the play, sort of). Someone else entirely, and the moments will be all the same... but different in every way.

Careful what you wish for

Would you believe it's taxing to play the arc of bipolar romanticist who goes off the deep end and is willingly and intentionally killed in a duel? Because it is, I've now realized, having performed the first of scant four performances as Tuzenbach (my dream role! and now I've remembered why) in Three Sisters. In response to your question, "how did it go?" it went extremely well. We had a healthy audience of I believe 66, which now that I think about it is probably the biggest house I've performed to since... I mean, it must have been Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Footlight Club the last time, which is ironic. And here I am, as the producer pointed from that prior production pointed out, saying things! And they seemed to follow along, and laughed at the funny parts, which are surprisingly frequent considering it's Chekov who is supposed to be all down and dour but in reality is pretty hysterical.

My mother came to see it, and although her review is of course quite biased, if I were to select a tagline from it she called it "a transcendent production" or something to that effect. And I agree it's very good. Everybody on that stage really acts their asses off, and it's such a pleasure getting to watch them doing so.

And for my own part, really going for it tonight, I felt it in a way I hadn't previously. I think of my teacher Scott Zigler, who asked me in the culmination of my studies with him after I had just done a scene where my scene partner put me in an incredibly uncomfortable position he asked "and how did that make you feel?" Not in any kind of wonky psychoanalytical way, just what was that experience like? And it was very difficult. It was uncomfortable. And it worked because the character was uncomfortable, and I was in an indirect way experiencing what the character was experiencing.

Which brings me back to Tuzenbach, who experiences the culmination of years of dreaming and fantasy... he gets to marry his beloved Irina, and to go off and be good workers and pursue happiness. Except she doesn't and can't find it within herself to love him. And because of that, more than the realization of his dream becoming meaningless, he's driven insane. And so he provokes the duel with Solyony and so dies. At least that's my take on it.

And it's especially taxing because I've known people who've felt that way, some of whom are no longer with us. Not that I draw on those experiences to create the role, but I can't help thinking of them. And that brings me back to that acting class, where Scott said "acting isn't always fun, sometimes it's stressful and if you want to do it professionally you have to be committed to do doing the work well, even when it crosses that threshold" or something to that effect. And that's true. And I felt that tonight. And I'm very proud of my work on this production. I can now say I've had the opportunity to play one of my dream roles. The next one probably being Konstantin in the Seagull... who boy does that guy go through some shit. And there is no question, he deliberately goes off and kills himself. OK I take it back, Trofimov in the Cherry Orchard would be good too, I'll take that instead. And even if none of those other dream roles ever come to fruition, I'll be able to say I had Tuzenbach and that is something to be proud of.

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.

Another Epiphany!

Increasingly I suspect that these blog posts about Three Sisters and my character work on Tuzenbach are only interesting to me... but who knows! Maybe not! Someone must read them, even if it's just my Mom. (hi Mom!)

Well, anyway tonight was our first Three Sisters rehearsal in like two weeks. I can't think of the last time I had that much of a gap between rehearsals of a play, unless it was like a read through. In the meantime, I've been off in the land of improv and auditions and seeing shows and stuff, you know? In fact, in the time since we last rehearsed, I rehearsed and shot a presentation of another show, joined the cast of another, had three auditions, and went to four theatrical performances.

So tonight, I was dropped back into the world of Chekhov and those three crazy sisters, amIright? I'm still figuring out how aware Tuzenbach is of how creepy his obsession with Irina is because it's pretty... yeah, I want to say delusional. We talked in rehearsal in the contrast between Tuzenbach and Solyony, both of whom are in love with Irina. In his mind, Solyony has cast himself as the romantic lead in his own story and he lashes out at people who don't share or contradict that viewpoint, whereas Tuzenbach on an almost metaphysical level (since Chekhov has written him this way) has been unwittingly cast as the TRAGIC lead in a romantic love story, one seemingly modeled on... wait for it, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Oh, wait wait wait! That's why he's German... he's an echo of Goethe's Werther! Arguably the original and quintessential tragic romantic hero, whom when he is unable to possess the affections of his beloved, kills himself. Just like Tuzenbach. Sad, I know.

I think the literary universe of Chekhov is very interesting. The plays are full of these allusions. I think my case for Tuzenbach as Werther is supported by Chebyutkin who references a group of intellectuals discussing him. Likewise, Ron (aka Vershinin aka Astrov) and I were discussing in Uncle Vanya Telegin's line "A plot worthy of Tolstoy" and it's ability to always get a laugh. Then in the Seagull there's this whole thing of Konstantin being compared to Hamlet, etc. Clearly the guy was very well read, as were the characters in his plays. Tuzenbach's counterpart Solyony is always comparing himself to Lermontov, who Scott (who's playing Solyony) told me wrote this one sort of adventure novel about this guy who fights duels and sleeps around, which is essentially what Lermontov was doing at the time and Solyony wishes he were doing.

Well, I could keep going, but I won't. In other news, the next few days will be busy. Tomorrow night I have a call back for Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead at Apollinaire, Tuesday is the first rehearsal for that show I joined up with, then my acting class with Carolyn Pickman then my first jam session with some musicians I found online. Then for the rest of the week... who even knows! I'll try and blog about it after it happens.

Small Epiphanies

Reading my Mamet Three Sisters on my apartment buildings lovely, shady patio, I put something together. As you might have read previously, I've been trying to put the play into my own perspective as an actor and someone who's just really into Chekhov. So for example, I've been trying to answer the question of Tuzenbach's germanicness (his name in the play is understood to be uber german) from both the perspective of an actor, and a wannabe dramaturg. One theory I'd been toying with dramaturgically, maybe Chekhov is intentionally creating an echo to Karl Marx through Tuzenbach's proto socialist diatribes and his german last name. I brought this up in rehearsal, and my director admitted she hadn't thought of it that way, and over the course of the conversation I ultimately dismissed it for myself. Then I was looking at the text, and Tuzenbach's line where he says that although he has a German last name, and his optimism could be ascribed as a German trait, his father was Russian Orthodox and not fluent and German and Tuzenbach was the same way. Then I thought, "oh yeah cause duh, he's descended from the Russian nobility, and as was the case with Tsar Nicholas II, his family married into the German royal line" because that's what they did back then in the European aristocracy. So that answers half of that question! I've now moved on to Tuzenbach's relationship to his Germanicness, and in particular that theme of optimism in his character and how it relates to the play's philosophical ideas. The other night at rehearsal, we looked at a moment where Vershinin, who provides a counter point to Tuzenbach's ideas and character, expresses his belief that over time the sister's influence will be felt and their enlightened presence and way of life will reverberate across future generations, until it is the dominant way of thought and life becomes beautiful. In the process, he kind of one up's Tuzenbach who tries to frame a rejoinder and doesn't really succeed. In the next act, Tuzenbach's philosophy has turned cynicism and we pondered the question, could this be because of Vershinin's influence causing him to attempt a new point of view to regain his status as resident philosopher? Maybe, but now I think it's just life wearing him down. Over the play he continues to realize that life isn't as sunny as he believes it to be in Act 1 as he says to Irina as he confesses his love to her. I wonder if part of his philosphizing, or as Solyony calls it his sophistry, is partly an attempt to woo her with his ideas. He persists in this throughout the play, pursuing her and a life which is more meaningful then his meandering life as an officer in the Russian army. In the fourth act, he's close to realizing it, Irina has finally agreed to marry him, having few other viable options and they are about to go off together to live a romantic life working. But in the end, he realizes she doesn't love him and never will, and instead chooses to go off and die rather then let his optimism wither way. Or has it already left him, now that he's realized his dreams will never truly come true, and death is a better option?

Did I mention how heavy duty this play is? It's pretty serious stuff. But it's really funny too! I mean, that's what I've always loved about Chekhov, how there is so much humor ingrained in his sometimes sad or downright tragic situations and that is especially true in David Mamet's adaptation.

And now I'm off to do Swimming in the Shallows, it's warm and spring like outside, and to echo Tuzenbach's earlier sentiments, life is good.

Being in two pla(y)ces at once

It was strange returning to Swimming in the Shallows for tonight's performance after spending Monday and Wednesday and part of the time in between digging into the dense existential tangle that is Chekov's Three Sisters. It's like, I'm getting on Chekov's wave length, thinking like his characters think, plotting a mental flow chart of all the levels of philosophical discourse coursing underneath the hood of this mammoth text... then I get off the train and WHOOP I'm in Adam Bock land! Concise! Funny! Gay! What where am I? Oh yeah, this thing I'd been rehearsing for a month before this and started running in front of all these audiences.

It's weird working so intensely on something, thinking about it almost non stop, then it's on to the next thing and that starts taking up all this mental real estate since you know, most of the work on that other thing is done, but not really because you still have to perform it!

So anyway, tonight's show was pretty good. I couldn't help feeling like it wasn't my strongest, but I found my footing and by the end of the night I'd even discovered some new things.

And Three Sisters? Holy shit what a can of worms that play is going to be. There is so much going on in that text... I don't even know where to begin. But it is going to be a fantastic time. I was talking to my Swimming in the Shallows director, and he said "it really is a dream role" and I was like "yeah it is". And yeah, it is. I'm kind of apprehensive about reentering the community theatre world, for various reasons. But it really is such a dream to be playing this role. There is so much to chew on in this part, and in this play. My next blogging project hopefully will be trying to break it all down...

That's all I have to say at the moment, here's to the endeavor!