Friday, November 6

VOICE
We spent class doing a full warm-up, complete with like a week's worth of tremoring. Hoo, boy.


MOVEMENT
Today, we got to revisit Contact Improv (in preparation for our open class, also called a "showing", at the end of the month). And it was AWESOME.

My first pairing was with Killer. Movement Professor wanted us to work together because we both have a good sense of humor in contact improv. At one point, something happened with my body in a flip-over-turn-around sort of way that my classmates have been referring to as "when Angela turned her body inside-out". It was fun, but I have no idea what happened, and certainly wouldn't attempt to replicate it.

My second was with D-Train. It started off kind of slow, but by the end it was really goofy, and as some of our classmates mentioned, "all about butts" (which I didn't notice while in it, but that's what they perceived from the outside).

The final one I did was a trio (my first ever!) with Two-Shots-Up and All-The-Way. It felt like we were the Graces, or muses or something. Very Botticelli, and surprisingly more sensual than the pairings I had with guys earlier in the class.

Trios in general were neat to watch. D-Train, Iceman, and Thrill had a particularly acrobatic and athletic one. Wifey, Killer, and O.D. did something that Movement Professor compared to demons at the gates of Hell. Cool stuff.


ACTING
Wifey started us out with a "Great Actor Series" presentation on Charlotte Cushman, who was probably the first American-born female stage star. Her mantra seemed to be "Devotion and Work", which I thought was lovely. Ms. Cushman played a lot of male roles in theatre, including Romeo and Hamlet. And she was a lesbian who traveled with her partners in tow, which our class thought was really interesting, as you don't often hear about lesbians who were (at least somewhat) out of the closet in the 1800s.

We read chapter 10 of Playing Shakespeare in preparation for class, and then watched the corresponding DVD segment, which I think of as "The Battle of the Shylocks" (I think it's actually called "Exploring a Character" or something like that). David Suchet and Patrick Stewart had both played Shylock under the direction of John Barton in different productions. And although they agreed on several things (that Merchant of Venice has anti-semitic characters but is not an anti-semitic play; that Shylock should not be played as a sympathetic character or a hero; that Shylock is an outsider; that Shylock is a bad Jew, whom other Jews would not have approved of), their interpretations were wildly different.

D-Train explained the differences between Shylocks in a way that I found to be true, and related it back to Artistic Director's theory on "needs". He said that Stewart's Shylock was fighting for Self-Respect (status and what others thought of him) and Suchet's Shylock was fighting for Self-Worth (identity and integrity).

And a great piece of advice from John Barton:
"Look for ambiguities, and play them."

We finished talking about my sonnet, which is #115.

Sonnet 115
Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer:
Yet then my judgment knew no reason why
My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer.
But reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents
Creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents,
Divert strong minds to the course of altering things;
Alas! why, fearing of Time's tyranny,
Might I not then say, 'Now I love you best,'
When I was certain o'er incertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest?
Love is a babe, then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow.

We were trying to come up with a scenario, and inciting incident, and a need for me to work with when playing it. We went through a lot of possibilities (including trying to convince my lover that I should have an abortion, or that he needed to grow up, or that I wanted to have a baby...), and I felt most secure with a suggestion that Newbie made.

So. I'm speaking to my fiancé. It's the morning of our wedding, and he has cold feet. He tells me he thinks that all the poems I wrote him before mean nothing and he thinks we're going to fall out of love with each other. I speak the sonnet to try to convince him to go through with the wedding because, while the future is uncertain, I believe that our love is going to grow.

It's not a 100% perfect fit, obviously, but it was definitely the most active, positive, and playable thing that we came up with. I think it's going to work well for the assignment. As D-Train said (paraphrasing one of his lines as Orestes from The Greeks), "It made all things clear, and plain, and simple." And I think that's exactly the goal with Shakespeare.


Acting Professoressa asked us to nail down some of the benefits of working on sonnets this way. Some of our ideas:
- defining the specificity of the situation. (because it things aren't specific for the actor, they won't be clear to an audience)
- keeping the stakes high
- learning not to work against the text
- make the language your own
- start with a 'need'


THE MYSTERY PLAYS
The show has been going well. I'm still learning things about my characters, which is fun. And the unexpected happens, as it always does in live theatre. Like the night when my bluetooth phone flew off my ear while I was playing Amanda-The-Agent. I rolled to it in my office chair, grabbed it off the floor, "checked" to see if it was still working, put it back on, and finished the scene. Good times.

I can't believe that we only have another week of it. It's going to be weird not to have this show any more. I really love it.