Working out Imaginative Muscles

How much fun am I having at rehearsals for my current holiday mini-project?

Enough so that on more than one occasion I’ve arrived to rehearsal exhausted, or in a bad mood, feeling like anything but being playful and energetic, not looking forward to all the smiling, laughing and running from floor to floor (I’ll explain) or ad-libbing with fellow actors or with the (pretending they’re there) audience members.

Yet some how I end up leaving rehearsal feeling like I’m heading home after happy hour, a little more relaxed and less stressed, even if perhaps a bit sweaty. I shouldn’t be surprised at this considering it’s written by Joseph Scrimshaw, a very funny and successful writer, performer and producer (as well as probably a few other things like animal trainer and contortionist) and I’ve been enjoying his work for years.

One of the many old, and previously used, "sets".

You see, this isn’t your ordinary show. For one thing it doesn’t take place in a theater, or even a bar or coffee shop. It takes place in an historic flour mill – an enormous, cavernous, dusty old place which has burned and exploded on more than one occasion, and which hasn’t been a mill for over 40 years. What’s more: the audience sits in an immense elevator moving from floor to floor, while the show (and most of the actors, and primarily me, playing numerous parts) travel by stairs or other elevators up and down, hoping to be ready by the time the narrator has successfully navigated the car-load of people to the next scene’s destination and the massive set of doors open like a gaping mouth to form a proscenium.

It goes something like this:

Floor 1 (character 1,) elevator to 4 (character 2,) stairs to 3 (character 2,) stairs to 2 (character 3,) elevator to 7 (character 4,) elevator to 2 (character 5,) elevator to 5 (character 5,) then a mad dash up back stairs to floor 8 (characters 2 and 5, (and which, by the way, is more than your typical three story trip) ) and finally a slow and calming elevator descent back to 1 (character 1) while chatting with the audience. 

The final step is to lead that audience out the exit with smiles and waves, and do it quickly because the next performance begins in mere minutes.

After a run through tonight I found my mind flowing and firing on all cylinders. I did this show last year, but had forgotten how much it helped me discover and exercise my imaginative muscles. And I’d forgotten how much fun it is to do.

Happy Holidays, indeed.

An Eventually Christmas: Holidays at the Mills performs December 2 – 11 at Mill City Museum in Minneapolis.

The Good and The Bad in Acting

Yesterday was my first day off from a rehearsal or performance in 16 straight days. It’s certainly not the longest stint I’ve ever done, and the recent rehearsals could have been more grueling, but last night felt like a good break. A rest I really needed. I’ve another night off before returning to the final few performances of my current show.

As I’ve written here, and talked about with people, this show didn’t have the typical rehearsal process because it was rather short for a full length play. When we opened, I was bit nervous and apprehensive about its cohesiveness, and so I described it as being put together with spit and old tape. Initially our houses were dismally small, and then one night the ultimate in audience disappointment happened – no one showed up. I’ve heard of that happening, but I had been fortunate to never be a part of it. It was an awful feeling. The fact that I was feeling exhausted in the middle of this marathon, only added to the experience and made me rather crabby.

But we persevered.

The following night we had a small crowd and after that an even larger group, which pumped the energy up in a whole new way. It felt like a real show, and we were thrilled.

What I was noticing though, throughout, was a slight inconsistency in my work. (I saw it others too, to some extent, but I’ll mind my own business and really I don’t think theirs was noticeable.) Occasionally I would discover new  thoughts and realizations (this is good) and find I would say something completely differently or say the line completely wrong (this is bad) even if with the same intention.

This past Sunday’s matinee, during the second act, was particularly bad for me. I was all over the place, using wrong words, rewriting lines and completely unable to stay focused and concentrated on the work. It was more like a rehearsal, and a bad one at that.

The more it happened……

the more I noticed it…..

so the more it happened….

the more I wondered who else noticed it….

And just like that, my mind was all over the place.

I felt awful about it. And I felt worse when I noticed during curtain call that a very good friend was in the audience – someone with whom I’ve worked a lot and have known for years and totally knows me as an actor and I’m sure…noticed. Turns out two other good friends were there too.

Why did this happen? What’s wrong with me? I was starting to really wonder if I’m losing my skills (seems rather unlikely) or have some kind of health issue I’m not aware of, or what.

I wasn’t having this problem in the show I did earlier this year (in fact quite the opposite,) nor in the other work that I’ve been rehearsing, nor in any of the other small projects I’ve worked on recently.

I could only surmise that it’s the spit and old tape.

Part of the acting process involves discovering, developing and defining the minutia of every aspect of a character and his goals and objectives. This is all done in the rehearsal process (or primarily) and it gets ingrained, and those objectives and points-of-view become inherent and embodied, and as an actor you don’t have to think about them in the same way when you get to performing.

None of this is to say that there still isn’t development and growth and learning, etc. There is. It’s just different.

I think I’ve concluded that I didn’t complete all that process and I’ve tried to make the leap to a point where I don’t have to think about those things in that way. I think we rushed it, or I did. It’s not even perhaps that we needed more time, it’s that we needed to have used…or I needed to have used the rehearsal time differently.

After that awful performance (awful is my word – my friend said he noticed there were a few moments where “something didn’t seem quite right“) …but after that show is when I realized all this. It wasn’t really a lack of knowledge of the words, or confidence, but it wasn’t ingrained. It wasn’t in my bones. I couldn’t just trust that I knew what was going on. And it makes me think that overall, not just on this one evening, my performance is probably not coming off as being of the quality to which I strive. I just may suck in this show.

At the following day’s performance I chose to work differently, with a different kind of concentration and focus, and it made a world of difference. I got through it much more effectively.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I still don’t suck.

Butts in Seats

backstage, opening night

It’s been an interesting and tough couple of weeks throwing this show together, but we’ve reached the finish line….or rather, the starting line.

Two nights ago we opened to a small, but warmly receptive, audience. The evening was replete with opening night fumbles from most of us, though nothing was likely noticed by the the audience. Not even the seemingly gaping hole filled only with the thoughts on stage of “why is no one speaking??”

And, even more, what the audience didn’t know was that when the SM got to the theater a few hours before call she discovered that all the light cues had disappeared from the board, and had to make an emergency call to the lighting designer (or his assistant) to come in and reprogram it all. Which she magically did.

I’m happy to say that last night didn’t have its often too typical second night slump, where the excitement and energy of an opening night can drop you like some crash after a sugar high. No, our Saturday night show ran pretty well, we felt. No blunders (well, okay, I had one or two funky lines and one incorrect word which could have changed things in the plot entirely, but really it all worked in the end) and things ran smoothly and on time. What’s more, I’ve come to realize that there is some fine work being done in this show. The mystery script is well written and the actors have come together to play rather well with each other. I’m really starting to enjoy this little gem, and am looking forward to its run.

What didn’t work last night, on a beautiful autumn evening, was having an audience. The group gathered in the house was smaller on this second night than on the first. Very small. This was rather disappointing. Felt a bit like a let down.

There are several problems with having a small audience, but I think that the main one is that everyone is aware of it. Everyone on stage and in the house. An audience member in this situation may not feel compelled to laugh or respond when it will easily make him or her noticed (though thankfully last night’s group did!) and that may be complicated by a feeling of being relied upon to laugh or respond. Okay…so now they aren’t relaxed and enjoying the show but are instead feeling their own pressure to perform. (Although I do think the folks last night did enjoy it…so my hypothesis may be totally off.)

Meanwhile, up on stage, actors are keenly aware of the few people (especially if they’re known to all or most of the cast) and perhaps feeling their lack of relaxation, and it all combines to give the whole thing a strange kind of air. It’s almost, but not quite, that of yet another dress rehearsal, and leaves us wondering when  the audiences arrive. This isn’t to say that the actors weren’t working as hard as they would’ve otherwise. That’s certainly not the case here. But in the end, it’s not quite the same experience as playing to fuller house made up of strangers.

What’s more, though, is that if this were a show where I was uncertain in my own work or questioned the quality of the acting, I might be less bothered by the small houses (or no reviewer to my knowledge, but that’s another story) but in this case, as I said to one my cast mates after the show, I think there’s some good work being done here and I hope people will witness it.

As for a reviewer…well, that might help put butts in seats, and that’s the only thing this production is currently lacking.

I’ll be there again today, at 4 pm, where I expect to take the experience of the last two performances and combine it with the knowledge learned from rehearsal, and hopefully forget all of it as the lights come up, and continue growing and polishing my work and my connection with my fellow actors. As I’ll do throughout the run.

If anyone cares to join me, Dial M for Murder is playing at the Gremlin Theater through November 19.