After taking a hiatus of several years from blogging, in which time I ended a five year relationship, moved to a new city, appeared in small but pivotal role in a feature film with several credible movie stars, spent a lot of time on stage making music and acting in plays, during which time I mainly focused on writing pithy or insightful Facebook status updates... I return to blogging.
What brings me back, you might ask? Insomnia. I can't sleep. So I figured, why not write? And indeed, why not write. It's occurred to me on various occasions to revisit this blogging project. What's stopping me from putting my thoughts into text and sharing it with the world?
My own selfishness! These thoughts cry out to be shared with dozens of people who already read the crap I write on Facebook and will click on a link because they are bored at work or on the subway or whatever!
Or maybe you miss me. I miss you too.
Today I am reflecting on ten years in the theater (imagine a British accent for emphasis). Ten years is an absolutely arbitrary number, but it was ten years ago or so that the idea of being a professional actor planted it self in my brain and I've been running with it ever since. I think the phrase "he wants to be an actor when he grows up" even appeared in my bio in the fall production my Sophomore year of high school, when I was sixteen. I'm now twenty six... that makes ten years, right? Then again, in that same bio I also wrote "he is a distant relative of Godzilla" and that's not something I ever bring up at parties or on first dates.
Unlike many professions, all you need to "be an actor" is a headshot and a resume. For all intents and purposes, that could be a selfie and a piece of paper stapled to the back with your name, phone number, email address and that acting class you took at your local adult education center, or that time you were in Godspell at church or your local community theater.
Do not think for a moment I am disparaging adult education or community theater. During my ten years of acting (imagine a faux British accent for emphasis) I've met lovely, insightful and gifted human beings who cut there teeth in those very places and whom I'm better for having met. Churches are OK too...
Moving on.
I was reflecting because I find myself in a new city, embarking on all kinds of new relationships within this new acting community I find myself a part of. Like, right now I'm doing a production of King John. King Who? Oh, you know, the bad guy from Robin Hood. Shakespeare wrote a play about him. It's hardly ever done, but I'm in it right now, in the ensemble. We're performing in Central Park. No, it's not "Shakespeare In The Park" like John Lithgow or whoever is doing right now, it's Shakespeare in a park, and I'm pretty excited for you to see it.
I feel very privileged to be sharing the stage with these particular people. Being a part of this cast, and the several other casts I've been a part of since moving here (including an industrial, a student film and several other Off-Off Broadway productions) you meet a really wide range of different types of folks, most of whom are here trying to be actors. Boston, where I was before, gets knocked around a lot for being sort of homogenous. Which isn't really giving it credit, Boston isn't homogenous, it's deeply segregated. I found it's art scene to be a very particular kind of animal, a mixture of Boston natives and people who went there for college and stayed. What linked everybody more than anything was the place where we were. The most compelling reason for living in a place like Boston (or Cambridge, or Somerville, or Allston or the various other communities people called home and where I performed) was the place itself, it's people and it's culture. New York is New York, and to me at least the most compelling reason to be here is because I'm an actor, this is where I have to be in order to achieve a certain level of success.
Eventually, it was then or never, and I left for New York, where I am now. It's striking to me comparing how I saw myself as a Boston actor versus how I see myself now, being a New York actor working at the level I'm currently working at. One trend I'm noticing, is amongst my collaborators will be people who have been doing for a very long time (for example, the director of the last show I was in has been doing this for forty years) and others who haven't been doing it particularly long at all, at least from my view of ten years in the theater (imagine an especially bad British accent, like if I was trying to be self defacing) and comparing how I see the work vs how I see them as seeing the work.
Existentially, it's all very sticky, because as I keep coming back to over and over again in life, I can only ever really know my own experience, everything else is just speculation. Hopefully it's based on good evidence thoughtfully collected through active listening.
But for example, the thought that spurred this blog post actually, is tonight I was sort of promoted, sort of volunteered, to be one of the percussionists for our production. This is not my first time doing percussion or making music as part of a play, and I was actually pretty excited when the opportunity came up, because I've always found it to be a different and enriching experience to be a musician in the context of a theatrical endeavor, especially at something that's not my main thing, like percussion.
And I was having the thought that, although the other people in the percussion section are definitely better and more experienced at percussion than I am, I have ten years of accumulated instinct and knowledge of being on stage to fall back on. A lot of those instincts have to do with knowing when to start and stop, how much is too much or too little, how to balance a stage picture, and also just being able to keep track of a lot of things, cues, scene changes, tracking props, etc, all of which I think will come in handy with making sure all of our percussion business will keep on track. Which isn't to say my fellow drummers (Hey Scott, hey Justin, if you're reading this) can't handle their own shit but they also have a bunch of acting to do, as do I of course but my parts pretty small, and this is one significant way I can contribute to our theatrical organism.
For my own work, this whole meditation relates back to my own inability to give myself credit. "But Mike", you might be thinking (I know who you are) "you give yourself tons of credit, all the time" and this is true. Maybe a better word is difficulty giving myself credit for what I know how to do, and what I've accomplished, because those arrogant tendencies are really just me overcompensating to be honest. I've been thinking a lot about personal quirks like that, since moving here I've met so many new people and have been figuring out how to best present myself from a place of honesty and self knowledge. And frankly, to take advantage of this fresh start.
Probably some of my new colleagues in New York are reading this! Hello friends! Welcome to my blog! If you want to read back, you can see the person I was earlier in my twenties. This is the person I am now. This is my effort to reflect, to pay tribute, and to remember.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Challenges and Rewards
This week we finished the long marathon that was teching an outdoor, site specific staging of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in two languages during two week period of rain falling at some point almost very night, necessitating additional starts and stops to a start and stopping process on a show with a huge amount of tech to begin with due to the dozens of characters (and subsequently dozens of costumes) and did I mention it was being staged environmentally? In a park? And that we have a bath tub?
It was a very, very challenging week, culminating in a small panic attack yesterday afternoon while I was at work. It was sparked by a moment of confusion over my own age, but was the result of a building sense of anxiety over "what am I doing with my life!? This is crazy!"
It may also have had to do with the fact that after having opened in one language, my native language of English I was preparing to open the show all over again in a language I don't speak and had been struggling to memorize and pronounce correctly while maintaing some veneer of acting artistry for the past two months.
My Spanish text prior to last night's opening had been rocky to say the least. By the time of our first attempted tech run in Spanish, when we got to my big scene, all of my text was on point and for the first time I was totally off book and acting the hell out of my scene. Then I went away for a day or two as we worked English and fixed the very complicated mechanics of tracking all the props, costumes and set pieces as they traveled from act to act. By the time we ran again in Spanish, I thought "my lines were good last time, I got this" but they were not as good as they thought and then when my bathtub had disappeared due to the impending rain I was frankly thrown off balance, further complicating my juggling act of speaking another language and acting at the same time and my pronunciations went to shit.
So I was self conscious going into last night's run in Spanish. Our first attempt at opening had been Wednesday, but then that was rained out, and we finally opened the show in English on Saturday with no major technical glitches but definitely a cautious energy bordering on anxiety for when something would inevitably go wrong. But it didn't, and when we got to last night's Spanish performance, to an eager and excited audience that ultimately grew to something like 30 people a fire was lit underneath us, and we took off!
The crowd began immediately reacting and laughing at the funny bits (which the English audience the previous night did substantially less of, if this was us or them I'm not sure more on that in a paragraph or two) and we fed off that vibe. By the time my big scene came, at the juncture of my big entrance I felt myself go into a kind of comedic "bullet time" you know where stuff goes really slow and crazy in the Matrix movies? I get that way when I can feel my sense of comedic timing lining up perfectly, all of my lines and gestures landing at the perfect moment for maximum comedic effect, what had been a juggling act transformed into a wonderful dance.
And THAT is what I'm doing with my life is the answer to the question that precipitated my panic attack. And in this context, I'm doing it for an audience that gets very few stories at the level of a Bertolt Brecht much less brought to their park for free and in the language they speak.
I've been meaning to write for a while about how beautiful this story is, and how I imagine it must speak to the Latin American experience of the 20th century. At it's heart, it's a story about two young people in love, one of whom has to go off to war but before he does asks the girl to marry him. She promises to wait, but in the anarchy of a coup d'eta, is left with the abandoned child of the deposed aristocracy, sure to be killed if the usurping forces were to discover it. She flees with it, and due to forces of circumstance adopts it as her own. She marries a man she doesn't love to give it shelter, and in this moment her true love returns and condemns her as the forces of the previous regime, now back in power, take her to trial for kidnapping. The village eccentric, made judge by bizarre circumstances, follows his heart to do what is right and gives her the child, her beloved forgives her, they are reunited and with the child they are able to continue with their lives and live happily ever after.
There's something incredibly beautiful about this, and to me it's a story about the redemption of the human race and western civilization. There's a very old version of this story, perhaps in the mode of Greek tragedy, where the man goes to war and leaves his beloved behind, comes home to her and discovers a child and then kills both of them, or where the Judge has an opportunity to bring justice and restore order to the land and is perhaps destroyed in the process.
But Brecht turns those expectations on their head, and his story love wins the day. I speculate on this stories resonance for Latin America, because political upheaval defined the landscape of many Latin countries during the 20th century. No doubt, numerous men went off to fight the war, leaving women behind who were left to live their lives in fear and hope of their return while suffering at the hands of cruel fate. Many of them no doubt had children whether by their choice or not, and were left with no choice but to carry on with their lives as best as they could, as did the men who returned to them.
And in this parable they are able to forgive each other, and love wins the day, and I find that very moving. And the reward we get for all the hard work we've done, is bringing that story to the world at a time when the world needs stories about love more than ever before.
It was a very, very challenging week, culminating in a small panic attack yesterday afternoon while I was at work. It was sparked by a moment of confusion over my own age, but was the result of a building sense of anxiety over "what am I doing with my life!? This is crazy!"
It may also have had to do with the fact that after having opened in one language, my native language of English I was preparing to open the show all over again in a language I don't speak and had been struggling to memorize and pronounce correctly while maintaing some veneer of acting artistry for the past two months.
My Spanish text prior to last night's opening had been rocky to say the least. By the time of our first attempted tech run in Spanish, when we got to my big scene, all of my text was on point and for the first time I was totally off book and acting the hell out of my scene. Then I went away for a day or two as we worked English and fixed the very complicated mechanics of tracking all the props, costumes and set pieces as they traveled from act to act. By the time we ran again in Spanish, I thought "my lines were good last time, I got this" but they were not as good as they thought and then when my bathtub had disappeared due to the impending rain I was frankly thrown off balance, further complicating my juggling act of speaking another language and acting at the same time and my pronunciations went to shit.
So I was self conscious going into last night's run in Spanish. Our first attempt at opening had been Wednesday, but then that was rained out, and we finally opened the show in English on Saturday with no major technical glitches but definitely a cautious energy bordering on anxiety for when something would inevitably go wrong. But it didn't, and when we got to last night's Spanish performance, to an eager and excited audience that ultimately grew to something like 30 people a fire was lit underneath us, and we took off!
The crowd began immediately reacting and laughing at the funny bits (which the English audience the previous night did substantially less of, if this was us or them I'm not sure more on that in a paragraph or two) and we fed off that vibe. By the time my big scene came, at the juncture of my big entrance I felt myself go into a kind of comedic "bullet time" you know where stuff goes really slow and crazy in the Matrix movies? I get that way when I can feel my sense of comedic timing lining up perfectly, all of my lines and gestures landing at the perfect moment for maximum comedic effect, what had been a juggling act transformed into a wonderful dance.
And THAT is what I'm doing with my life is the answer to the question that precipitated my panic attack. And in this context, I'm doing it for an audience that gets very few stories at the level of a Bertolt Brecht much less brought to their park for free and in the language they speak.
I've been meaning to write for a while about how beautiful this story is, and how I imagine it must speak to the Latin American experience of the 20th century. At it's heart, it's a story about two young people in love, one of whom has to go off to war but before he does asks the girl to marry him. She promises to wait, but in the anarchy of a coup d'eta, is left with the abandoned child of the deposed aristocracy, sure to be killed if the usurping forces were to discover it. She flees with it, and due to forces of circumstance adopts it as her own. She marries a man she doesn't love to give it shelter, and in this moment her true love returns and condemns her as the forces of the previous regime, now back in power, take her to trial for kidnapping. The village eccentric, made judge by bizarre circumstances, follows his heart to do what is right and gives her the child, her beloved forgives her, they are reunited and with the child they are able to continue with their lives and live happily ever after.
There's something incredibly beautiful about this, and to me it's a story about the redemption of the human race and western civilization. There's a very old version of this story, perhaps in the mode of Greek tragedy, where the man goes to war and leaves his beloved behind, comes home to her and discovers a child and then kills both of them, or where the Judge has an opportunity to bring justice and restore order to the land and is perhaps destroyed in the process.
But Brecht turns those expectations on their head, and his story love wins the day. I speculate on this stories resonance for Latin America, because political upheaval defined the landscape of many Latin countries during the 20th century. No doubt, numerous men went off to fight the war, leaving women behind who were left to live their lives in fear and hope of their return while suffering at the hands of cruel fate. Many of them no doubt had children whether by their choice or not, and were left with no choice but to carry on with their lives as best as they could, as did the men who returned to them.
And in this parable they are able to forgive each other, and love wins the day, and I find that very moving. And the reward we get for all the hard work we've done, is bringing that story to the world at a time when the world needs stories about love more than ever before.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Identifying Identity/Putting On My Podcast Hat
Getting back into the swing of blogging, here we go!
I think two factors have contributed to the drop off in how much I've been writing this past year, well three if you count Shakes and Co. But the first is, ironically I guess, Facebook. Someone I know posed the question over Facebook "do you consider Facebook status updates and tweets to be their own form of writing?" Which got me thinking why of course they are. Usually when I go to write a status update, which is at least once a day probably, I'm trying to think of how to phrase it in the pithiest, punchiest or most insightful way possible in as few words as it can be expressed. When I consider my own identity and the ways which I define myself, actor and musician come to mind, in that order but I've always struggled with allowing "writer" or at another time in my life "poet" into that equation. I think maybe it's because writers and poets are so frequently presented as caricatured figures, the idea of the pompous pseudo intellectual novelist or poet or whatever pops up a lot in popular culture to the extent that it's become a comedic archetype in our modern landscape of comedia dell arte types. And perhaps because of that representation I was always very hyper aware of being pompous or pretentious, and thought telling people "oh I'm a poet" or "oh I'm a writer" would somehow invoke that.
Additionally, I wonder if those same forces in culture make the act of creation in some sense problematic, I suppose combined with the proliferation of technology that made it very easy to print and share one's own work. Inevitably, this writer caricature tries to get the other characters in the world they inhabit to try and read their work and it's never any good and usually the butt of a joke.
Knowing what I do know, seeing this scene played out in film or television is pretty ironic because the people who make those things are writers themselves and no doubt would identify with that same caricature in the much the same way I am doing in this moment!
Where was I? This post was going to be about my podcast but it's become about identity. Also I feel a sense of vulnerability in telling people that I'm a creative person. This doesn't extend to my acting, which I've always felt very confident about for whatever reason or at least have learned to, but also it's much harder to "act" for someone in a coffee shop. It's much more feasible to say "I'm a writer, can I share some writing with you?" and then if they don't like it or it doesn't set them off or inspire some kind of praise in them, it feels like failing a little.
This feeds back into whatever need for approval loops I have that do whatever they do for me in making me create my art. And this all a big tangent to why I haven't been writing here so much!
Because Facebook makes for a very easy feedback and approval loop I find when it comes to creating things, specifically status updates. If I can write a really funny or affecting status update, people can "like" it or comment on it instantaneously and in the hours after I put something up I can see all the people who read it and liked it or whatever.
This requires much less effort and focus than writing a blog post and involves much more instant gratification!
Which is ironic because the other thing I've been pouring my energy into other than blogging has been my podcast, (The Mike Handelman Podcast, I keep trying to think of catchier names but then I've stuck with this one for this long) which takes hours of work or honestly however much work I feel like putting into it but if I'm motivated and able it can take hours and for all that probably the fewest people take the time to really give it a listen.
But that's assuming that the goal is page views or whatever, which it's not, it's to make things I'm proud of. At a certain point the snake starts swallowing it's own tail though, because you need to go from making things you like and would want to listen to into finding other people who like and want to listen to similar things and will do that enough that people will pay money to access those people such is the nature of entertainment and show business!
So I'm doing all this work with the mindset that someday I'll find a way or have an opportunity to bring this work to a larger audience and then on to some kind of sponsorship to at least make some pizza and beer money, which would be nice. And by continuing this work with dedication, every time I put out a new podcast, I'm making a slightly improved or more refined product.
Which has been the case! I've been at this for about a year now since my friend Jesse and I first got in a room with a microphone and we really have come a long way in our artistic partnership and in my skills as a producer and engineer, which is something to be excited about. I hope after you've finished this, maybe you'll check out the podcast. Even if it's not yet something you'd enjoy (it's hard for me to keep perspective on whether or not I even enjoy it, I listen to some so many times in editing them) someday soon it will evolve in a better version of the thing it already is, that you will want to listen to.
I think two factors have contributed to the drop off in how much I've been writing this past year, well three if you count Shakes and Co. But the first is, ironically I guess, Facebook. Someone I know posed the question over Facebook "do you consider Facebook status updates and tweets to be their own form of writing?" Which got me thinking why of course they are. Usually when I go to write a status update, which is at least once a day probably, I'm trying to think of how to phrase it in the pithiest, punchiest or most insightful way possible in as few words as it can be expressed. When I consider my own identity and the ways which I define myself, actor and musician come to mind, in that order but I've always struggled with allowing "writer" or at another time in my life "poet" into that equation. I think maybe it's because writers and poets are so frequently presented as caricatured figures, the idea of the pompous pseudo intellectual novelist or poet or whatever pops up a lot in popular culture to the extent that it's become a comedic archetype in our modern landscape of comedia dell arte types. And perhaps because of that representation I was always very hyper aware of being pompous or pretentious, and thought telling people "oh I'm a poet" or "oh I'm a writer" would somehow invoke that.
Additionally, I wonder if those same forces in culture make the act of creation in some sense problematic, I suppose combined with the proliferation of technology that made it very easy to print and share one's own work. Inevitably, this writer caricature tries to get the other characters in the world they inhabit to try and read their work and it's never any good and usually the butt of a joke.
Knowing what I do know, seeing this scene played out in film or television is pretty ironic because the people who make those things are writers themselves and no doubt would identify with that same caricature in the much the same way I am doing in this moment!
Where was I? This post was going to be about my podcast but it's become about identity. Also I feel a sense of vulnerability in telling people that I'm a creative person. This doesn't extend to my acting, which I've always felt very confident about for whatever reason or at least have learned to, but also it's much harder to "act" for someone in a coffee shop. It's much more feasible to say "I'm a writer, can I share some writing with you?" and then if they don't like it or it doesn't set them off or inspire some kind of praise in them, it feels like failing a little.
This feeds back into whatever need for approval loops I have that do whatever they do for me in making me create my art. And this all a big tangent to why I haven't been writing here so much!
Because Facebook makes for a very easy feedback and approval loop I find when it comes to creating things, specifically status updates. If I can write a really funny or affecting status update, people can "like" it or comment on it instantaneously and in the hours after I put something up I can see all the people who read it and liked it or whatever.
This requires much less effort and focus than writing a blog post and involves much more instant gratification!
Which is ironic because the other thing I've been pouring my energy into other than blogging has been my podcast, (The Mike Handelman Podcast, I keep trying to think of catchier names but then I've stuck with this one for this long) which takes hours of work or honestly however much work I feel like putting into it but if I'm motivated and able it can take hours and for all that probably the fewest people take the time to really give it a listen.
But that's assuming that the goal is page views or whatever, which it's not, it's to make things I'm proud of. At a certain point the snake starts swallowing it's own tail though, because you need to go from making things you like and would want to listen to into finding other people who like and want to listen to similar things and will do that enough that people will pay money to access those people such is the nature of entertainment and show business!
So I'm doing all this work with the mindset that someday I'll find a way or have an opportunity to bring this work to a larger audience and then on to some kind of sponsorship to at least make some pizza and beer money, which would be nice. And by continuing this work with dedication, every time I put out a new podcast, I'm making a slightly improved or more refined product.
Which has been the case! I've been at this for about a year now since my friend Jesse and I first got in a room with a microphone and we really have come a long way in our artistic partnership and in my skills as a producer and engineer, which is something to be excited about. I hope after you've finished this, maybe you'll check out the podcast. Even if it's not yet something you'd enjoy (it's hard for me to keep perspective on whether or not I even enjoy it, I listen to some so many times in editing them) someday soon it will evolve in a better version of the thing it already is, that you will want to listen to.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Hello, how have you been? Here's what I've been up to.
Hello blog. How long has it been? It feels like ages. Writing has been proving itself to be challenging! (What, writing? Challenging? Never) For a while, when I felt a surge of creative energy, I'd be putting it into my podcast. Other times, when I felt the need to write, I'd be paralyzed by the impossibility of authentically communicating everything I was experiencing, which was most definitely a by product of my Shakespeare and Company experience (which if you're thinking about doing you should still totally do, don't get me wrong).
In the months, oh wow it really has been months, since I've gotten back I've spent a lot of that time in rehearsals for She Kills Monsters, the ass kicking New England premiere of Qui Nguyen (a New York based writer and artistic director of Vampire Cowboys, a post modern theatre company based I think in Brooklyn) bad ass new play. I'm using that language to describe it because it's highly appropriate to the tone of the play. Which you'll find out if you see it when we open on April 13th!
Oh wow, a huge part of that journey has transpired, and I haven't been writing anything about it. Well let's fix that! So, in the show, I play Chuck Biggs but my homies call me DM Biggs, cause you know, I'm big where it counts (this is a quote from the show) as in my BRAIN! Not because I'm fat.
OK done quoting. A big part of the action of the show transpires in the world of a Dungeons and Dragons adventure concocted by the protagonists now deceased younger sister, which she's playing in order to better understand her now dead sibling who she never really got to know in real life. And in order to play Dungeons and Dragons, you need a dungeon master, or DM, who basically is the guy who rolls the dice for the characters and bad guys not being played by the players, and generally sets up and runs the world of the game through descriptions and charts and so on and so forth. So that's what I do! It's pretty fun. Chuck is a riff on the archetypal "nerd" we all conceive when we think of someone who'd be into that stuff, which I was as a younger person and still am in a very passing extent (I'm totally down to throw down on some board games any time anyone wants to) to the point that in our cast and crew of about fifteen I probably have the most knowledge about what it's like to actually play Dungeons and Dragons and how it works, or at least I'm most willing to talk about it and explain things. Which has been complicated somewhat, by the fact that the play wright really isn't interested in the actual mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons and more so in telling a compelling story. Which I'm totally on board with! But we've also tried to reconcile things and sometimes it's complicated.
But that's another post on the dramaturgy of the play, the sort which I've been known to write and maybe will at some point if you ask nicely. This is about my experience acting. So yeah, in case you didn't know me as a sixteen year old and chances are you didn't, I was very awkward, very intellectual, very cerebral, capable of vicious sarcasm for no good reason (some things never completely leave you), and into some pretty geeky things. I also had a pretty hard time functioning, just in general, being all of these things tended to leave me rather lonely and isolated. Oh and did I mention how insecure I was? That too.
Initially, it was tempting to bring those elements of myself into the character of Chuck. Except, Chuck isn't that kind of nerd. I think a lot of ways he's written to be almost the inverse of the nerd that many of nerdier types were, and the awesome self image of our selves we wish we could have inhabited, funny, self confident, joyous, has an easy time talking to girls (he primarily interacts with Agnes who in the world of the play and hey in real life too is an attractive twenty something) etc. He's also oddly mature for his age, at certain moments, and surprisingly self aware at others.
Arguably, he actually has his shit the most together of anyone in the play AND he gets a lot of the funniest dialogue AND he gets to wear a super cool cape. Basically, this part has been awesome to play. And it's been awesome to work with Company One, which has been one of my professional goals of late, because they do really cool stuff really consistently (and for a non union company in Boston, pay pretty well). They also bring in really cool directors, like Shira (hi Shira!) and Rob who's our fight director (hey wassup Rob) both of whom have done cool stuff other places and are bringing all kinds of awesomeness to the show, which I can't wait for you to see.
The show has been really challenging to put together, it feels like every other scene is a gigantic set piece of fighting or dancing or puppetry or some combination of those but I think the end result with lights and sound and everything else will be spectacular.
She Kills Monsters! Opens April 13th. Go here for tickets and stuff: http://www.bostontheatrescene.com/season/iShe-Kills-Monstersi/
Next time on I Think Therefore Iambic: I'll try and talk about the work I've been doing on my physical instrument since I got back from Shakespeare and Company, and maybe about my guitar playing, which I've been meaning to do as well.
In the months, oh wow it really has been months, since I've gotten back I've spent a lot of that time in rehearsals for She Kills Monsters, the ass kicking New England premiere of Qui Nguyen (a New York based writer and artistic director of Vampire Cowboys, a post modern theatre company based I think in Brooklyn) bad ass new play. I'm using that language to describe it because it's highly appropriate to the tone of the play. Which you'll find out if you see it when we open on April 13th!
Oh wow, a huge part of that journey has transpired, and I haven't been writing anything about it. Well let's fix that! So, in the show, I play Chuck Biggs but my homies call me DM Biggs, cause you know, I'm big where it counts (this is a quote from the show) as in my BRAIN! Not because I'm fat.
OK done quoting. A big part of the action of the show transpires in the world of a Dungeons and Dragons adventure concocted by the protagonists now deceased younger sister, which she's playing in order to better understand her now dead sibling who she never really got to know in real life. And in order to play Dungeons and Dragons, you need a dungeon master, or DM, who basically is the guy who rolls the dice for the characters and bad guys not being played by the players, and generally sets up and runs the world of the game through descriptions and charts and so on and so forth. So that's what I do! It's pretty fun. Chuck is a riff on the archetypal "nerd" we all conceive when we think of someone who'd be into that stuff, which I was as a younger person and still am in a very passing extent (I'm totally down to throw down on some board games any time anyone wants to) to the point that in our cast and crew of about fifteen I probably have the most knowledge about what it's like to actually play Dungeons and Dragons and how it works, or at least I'm most willing to talk about it and explain things. Which has been complicated somewhat, by the fact that the play wright really isn't interested in the actual mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons and more so in telling a compelling story. Which I'm totally on board with! But we've also tried to reconcile things and sometimes it's complicated.
But that's another post on the dramaturgy of the play, the sort which I've been known to write and maybe will at some point if you ask nicely. This is about my experience acting. So yeah, in case you didn't know me as a sixteen year old and chances are you didn't, I was very awkward, very intellectual, very cerebral, capable of vicious sarcasm for no good reason (some things never completely leave you), and into some pretty geeky things. I also had a pretty hard time functioning, just in general, being all of these things tended to leave me rather lonely and isolated. Oh and did I mention how insecure I was? That too.
Initially, it was tempting to bring those elements of myself into the character of Chuck. Except, Chuck isn't that kind of nerd. I think a lot of ways he's written to be almost the inverse of the nerd that many of nerdier types were, and the awesome self image of our selves we wish we could have inhabited, funny, self confident, joyous, has an easy time talking to girls (he primarily interacts with Agnes who in the world of the play and hey in real life too is an attractive twenty something) etc. He's also oddly mature for his age, at certain moments, and surprisingly self aware at others.
Arguably, he actually has his shit the most together of anyone in the play AND he gets a lot of the funniest dialogue AND he gets to wear a super cool cape. Basically, this part has been awesome to play. And it's been awesome to work with Company One, which has been one of my professional goals of late, because they do really cool stuff really consistently (and for a non union company in Boston, pay pretty well). They also bring in really cool directors, like Shira (hi Shira!) and Rob who's our fight director (hey wassup Rob) both of whom have done cool stuff other places and are bringing all kinds of awesomeness to the show, which I can't wait for you to see.
The show has been really challenging to put together, it feels like every other scene is a gigantic set piece of fighting or dancing or puppetry or some combination of those but I think the end result with lights and sound and everything else will be spectacular.
She Kills Monsters! Opens April 13th. Go here for tickets and stuff: http://www.bostontheatrescene.com/season/iShe-Kills-Monstersi/
Next time on I Think Therefore Iambic: I'll try and talk about the work I've been doing on my physical instrument since I got back from Shakespeare and Company, and maybe about my guitar playing, which I've been meaning to do as well.
Friday, February 1, 2013
On Having The Problem
Since coming back from Shakespeare and Company, I've been writing a lot of letters to my fellow participants. Which, actually, has been incredibly helpful! Helpful in the way that I thought blogging would be helpful, but when I go to write in this space I'm inevitably dogged by intense feelings of judgement that what I'm writing is not worthy of the public sphere, or inadequately expresses what I'm feeling in the moment or does so in a way that makes me sound arrogant or pretentious.
That's one of the problems I'm having, and you know what I'm doing with them? Having them! If you'd been in Michael Toomey's Play aka Clown class you would know what I'm talking about. Essentially, the mantra as it relates to clown work is that if something is causing an issue for your clown, allow it to be there. If a fly is buzzing in your ears, don't swat the fly, that would be solving the problem. Instead, have the problem of the fly, and comedy/humanity/the things we want to see on stage will ensue.
One problem I find myself having is wanting to acknowledge and celebrate my instrument, by which I mean my acting by which I further mean that I'm a very talented actor, without becoming hubristic or arrogant. This is something that came up for me in the intensive, that I diminish myself unnecessarily to the point that it turns back on itself and becomes it's own kind of arrogance, does that sense? I guess in that to spare the feelings of others or perhaps avoid their judgement (probably it's the judgement) I diminish my own capabilities, and in the process let myself off the hook when I do a bad job. I thought about writing a note to one of my teachers, a particular instructor who shall go unnamed but who I observed did not seem to suffer from this particular problem. Then again, what do I know, it's totally possible that he does (I don't claim to know his problems), and maybe he came to a similar epiphany that I came to in that moment. Rather than finding a solution to the issue... have the problem! If I allow myself to celebrate my instrument, by way of perhaps declaring in this space, "I am a talented fucking actor" while being aware of the issue of becoming arrogant or hubristic as long as I'm aware of it that self awareness will prevent it from spiraling out of control.
Do you see? It all comes back to self awareness. Rather than ignoring my problems, or trying unnecessarily hard to find solutions to them (there may in fact be no solution) but by being aware of them then that is the half the battle in preventing them from controlling me. And by being aware of them, I hope they'll inhabit a manageable space in my life.
Take note! The above paragraph was written in the third person, BUT NO I AM SPEAKING FROM I! And hopefully, from awareness and from my problems inhabiting a manageable space in my life, solutions to the problems to which solutions exist will present themselves. Isn't that a nice thought? Well it sounds good to me, god damn it, hopefully it helps you too.
It really is funny how much letter writing has helped in this past week. Can you believe that I had the above epiphany not even by writing a letter, but with the thought of writing a letter which by the end of the thought, I had no need to write? It's true! In a sense, each of the letters I've written have become little private blog posts, which I had the idea of making public, by which I mean my own letters, none of the private responses of anyone else, no need to worry. But I think I've done pretty good with this piece of writing, and I'll allow that to be on hold until I feel the need to put something else into the universe.
Until then!
That's one of the problems I'm having, and you know what I'm doing with them? Having them! If you'd been in Michael Toomey's Play aka Clown class you would know what I'm talking about. Essentially, the mantra as it relates to clown work is that if something is causing an issue for your clown, allow it to be there. If a fly is buzzing in your ears, don't swat the fly, that would be solving the problem. Instead, have the problem of the fly, and comedy/humanity/the things we want to see on stage will ensue.
One problem I find myself having is wanting to acknowledge and celebrate my instrument, by which I mean my acting by which I further mean that I'm a very talented actor, without becoming hubristic or arrogant. This is something that came up for me in the intensive, that I diminish myself unnecessarily to the point that it turns back on itself and becomes it's own kind of arrogance, does that sense? I guess in that to spare the feelings of others or perhaps avoid their judgement (probably it's the judgement) I diminish my own capabilities, and in the process let myself off the hook when I do a bad job. I thought about writing a note to one of my teachers, a particular instructor who shall go unnamed but who I observed did not seem to suffer from this particular problem. Then again, what do I know, it's totally possible that he does (I don't claim to know his problems), and maybe he came to a similar epiphany that I came to in that moment. Rather than finding a solution to the issue... have the problem! If I allow myself to celebrate my instrument, by way of perhaps declaring in this space, "I am a talented fucking actor" while being aware of the issue of becoming arrogant or hubristic as long as I'm aware of it that self awareness will prevent it from spiraling out of control.
Do you see? It all comes back to self awareness. Rather than ignoring my problems, or trying unnecessarily hard to find solutions to them (there may in fact be no solution) but by being aware of them then that is the half the battle in preventing them from controlling me. And by being aware of them, I hope they'll inhabit a manageable space in my life.
Take note! The above paragraph was written in the third person, BUT NO I AM SPEAKING FROM I! And hopefully, from awareness and from my problems inhabiting a manageable space in my life, solutions to the problems to which solutions exist will present themselves. Isn't that a nice thought? Well it sounds good to me, god damn it, hopefully it helps you too.
It really is funny how much letter writing has helped in this past week. Can you believe that I had the above epiphany not even by writing a letter, but with the thought of writing a letter which by the end of the thought, I had no need to write? It's true! In a sense, each of the letters I've written have become little private blog posts, which I had the idea of making public, by which I mean my own letters, none of the private responses of anyone else, no need to worry. But I think I've done pretty good with this piece of writing, and I'll allow that to be on hold until I feel the need to put something else into the universe.
Until then!
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