Living on the Fringe


This week is bound to be a full one. In addition to working the ol’ day job as much as possible (which ain’t a great deal, if consideration for my sanity is at all a factor) we’re essentially rehearsing and teching As Far As We Know all week…not necessarily in that order. You see, the tech schedule for Fringe, being as it is hosted by a variety of different theatres over a concentrated period, is a little catch-as-catch-can. In other words, we’ll tech the show (tomorrow [starting at 10:00 am {for only four hours}]) before we’ve really set it. It ain’t called “The Fringe” for nuthin’.

Perhaps it’s this unusual schedule that’s prompting my usage of slangy contractions.

So here’s the run-down of my schedule: Sunday we worked as a whole from 5 to 10. Today we work from 12 to 5. Tomorrow we tech at 10, have a midday break and reconvene in a rehearsal studio from 6 to 10. “Six to ten” is basically the schedule for the remainder of the weekdays, during which days I will be using the rest of the hours of said days to work the day job. And on Saturday we open at 9:00 pm.

So that’s:

Saturday, August 11 @ 9:00 pm.

Tuesday, August 14 @ 7:00 pm.

Saturday, August 18 @ 4:15 pm.

Wednesday, August 22 @ 9:15 pm.

&

Sunday, August 26 @ 12:00 noon.

Just in case you were wondering. Details here. ;)

I also blame the schedule for my use of emoticons.

So how’s it going, Jeff? Well, Curious Hypothetical, I would say we’re making good progress, and creating the previously desired emphasis on acting when and where ever we can. I don’t know if it will be enough to make it work. I can’t know, essentially, because this is so unlike any schedule I’ve ever experienced before. Unlike, but not entirely dissimilar. Our original Zuppa del Giorno shows tend to have a similar frenetic uncertainty just before they open. More, in fact, owing to certain factors that remain undecided in those shows that are actually quite concrete at this point of UnCommon Cause’s process. (Little things like character, and plot.) Still, with Zuppa there’s a fairly standard schedule for the tech week, and everything is about some kind of progression. With As Far As We Know, it feels much more zig-zaggy. So far as I’ve experienced it, that is. In other words: As far as I know.

(Does anyone else think of that quote from Fletch when they hear the title of our show [Daryl Boling, I’m looking in your direction…]? “Mr. Fletcher?” “As far as you know.”)

I do feel, in moments of decision-making, a surprisingly certain sense of impulse, which I hope is indicative of how prepared I actually am to open my performance to the public. I understand my character and his world clearly and strongly enough that, when there’s a decision to be made about a scene’s progress or expressionistic blocking, I seem to always have a firm, arguable opinion about how it should turn out. That’s a funny way by which to judge one’s readiness to perform as an actor, but perhaps in this unique “creactor” environment it’s a true judgment. We shall see.

I love it, you know. This kind of schedule, though it doesn’t afford me much time for leisurely meals or other entertainment, fulfills me in a way few other things can. It creates in me a feeling of priority, importance and service. Maybe it’s a little like the sense of duty a soldier has. Maybe it’s just the comfort of having deadlines, as in school. The best part, however, is inevitably the feeling of spending all this time on something I care about, personally.

That is a much more rare and significant feeling of frazzled exhaustion.

Knock-Knock

My favorite joke to tell is a knock-knock joke. So, pretty much automatically, you know that it's inane and probably not reliably funny. So why should it be my favorite?

Last night I had my first New York rehearsal for

As Far As We Know

since returning from our New Hampshire (NOT Vermont) week-long workshop. It was just my person, Kelly's and Laurie's all in a

tiny rehearsal studio

working through the two scenes in the play (for the moment) that are simply Nicole and Jake, sister and brother. They are memory scenes for Nic, with elements of hallucination or nightmare, and one of them we've been doing in one form or another almost the entire time we've had a playwright on board. It is affectionately referred to as "1-2-3 In a Car."

For a while there--in particular over the last workshop period--it was entitled simply "1-2-3." That's because it was restructured and taken out from inside the car to being set partially underneath it, as Jake works on the vehicle. Yesterday, minutes before rehearsal, I printed a revised script that had been emailed to us, one and all, to discover that the scene had been largely restored to its former state.

"Damn," thought I.

It's incredibly awkward, you see, performing pantomimed driving. There's a reason mimes don't speak. That reason being, all mimes have their vocal cords personally removed by Marcel Marceau.

No seriously though, pantomime takes enormous concentration (I sometimes wonder if mimes haven't indeed had their sweat glands removed) and I think it's an especially talented person who can convincingly drive an imaginary car whilst truthfully playing a scene. Hence: "Damn," thought I. And the first part of rehearsal was just as I might have expected with a scene so well-worn, with a layer of additional pretense applied: Halting and stilted, with a dusty sensation in my throat. "Damn," thought I, "will the hoped-for acting rehearsals all be as dry for me?"

And then, remarkably, we all started working together as actors and a director. I had somehow forgotten how good it felt. Sure, we did some revision of the script along the way (prerogative of the UnCommon Cause) but it was more internal, within the scene and without too much time spent (re)hashing out the play as a whole. In sum, we found the emotional truth of a scene that has existed for almost two years, and did so within the confines of a tiny room and a fairly standard rehearsal process. I was so uplifted by the experience that when I left rehearsal at 10:00, I felt as though I was leaving a performance, full of juice to run another four hours or so (and I did stay up past my bedtime reading old drafts of a werewolf story I may never finish).

In his

Being An Actor

, Simon Callow asserts that the most comparable experience a non-actor has to performing is the act of telling a joke. In a joke, so the theory goes, all the considerations of structure, performance and communication are present, in a very concentrated form. Personally, I dread telling jokes, especially to people who don't know me very well. It seems to me the expectation is just too much, that I'll never encapsulate my experience of hearing the joke sufficiently to make it worth people's time. Occasionally I'm wrong about this outcome, but for the most part it's another one of those skills most people assume actors (especially comic actors) naturally possess, right up there with impersonations and dance, and that I am sadly lacking.

So. My favorite joke to tell?

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
A mime.
A mime who?
. . .

Never mind that I find reversal of expectation, silence and surreality (is SO a word) incredibly funny; this joke leaves off all that junk I feel horribly self-conscious about and, usually, somewhat disappointed by. No applause, no critiques, no climax or denouement. In fact, no feedback of any kind, as I've robbed the listener of even the moment

before

the promised catharsis. I love the rehearsal. I love the problem-solving and private victories. To hell with the punchline, I usually say.

Yet I'm excited, this time, to put all our work on T

he Torture Project

/

As Far As We Know

up in front of you all.

New Hampshire Log: Day Six—All Good Things



Just to mention: all the photography from my New Hampshire section compliments of Jen Schriever. She's got a great eye, no? ("Yeah; some people think she has two." <--thy movie quote)


Everyone seems hungry to have more time to work on their acting. It’s an interesting aspect of this way of working that the actors have to rather prioritize in order to find enough time to create a sufficiently well-rehearsed performance. I’m not sure it’s entirely unhelpful. Having to fight for what you want—as most actors will agree—makes for good energy. It’s good to be a little hungry. Then again, some creation isn’t possible without a relaxed, un-self-conscious environment. For my part, I hope our New York rehearsals prioritize scene work a bit more. In the meantime, I’ll grab every moment I can with my scene partners to clock in rehearsal together.


Our last day here in New Hampshire began, for me, with a trip to Hanover with Mike The Great to pick up some breakfast at the Dirt Cowboy, some toiletries and office supplies from CVS and some Joe (in box form, an impromptu tradition this week) from Dunkin’ Donuts. On our way, we were practically silent, but the coffee revived us considerably. This is good, because it turned out to be a sweltering day, and every move a little more of an effort. We began rehearsal with where we left off, a little after the (former) act break. There isn’t much for me to do, as Jake’s further disappearance from the environment of the story is crucial. People are forgetting him, and so I only show up in one “charivari” and one of his sister’s memories/hallucinations.


It may be very funny for people who’ve heard me talking about this show for years now (indeed, some of them having had to accept it as a reason I couldn’t work for or with them) to see it and see so little of me…live, anyway. Maybe they’ll think all that time was spent photographing me, somehow. At any rate, my heart and soul is in this show, for better or worse. It’s, oddly enough, like a hypothetical story of my sister. The relationship between Jake and his twin sister in our story is crucial, and very much informed from my end by how I feel about my sister, Virginia. It’s an incomparable relationship, and it’s a great experience to get to demonstrate some of it on stage.


There is, built into the corner of a rafter of our rehearsal barn, a nest of baby swallows. We’ve charted their progress through the week, and it’s rather remarkable how quickly they develop. When we arrived this morning, one was lying dead on the floor, having fallen from the nest. I scooped it into a cup and laid it to rest in some of the shrubbery off the beaten path. Then, later in the day, one more dropped out directly in front of Joe Varca as he exited a scene. It died shortly thereafter. It’s a curious reminder of the facts of life in the midst of our story of an unimaginable circumstance.


By the end of our rehearsal period for the day, we had worked through our new script once. We spent another half an hour cleaning the barn and prepping it for an audience that night. The “stage” was set in a ¾ round, with four entrances but—owing to our lack of actual wings or backstage space—no areas to cross over from one side to the other without traversing the stage area. We have some uncertainties about our set-up at the Fringe (every show gets no more than 15 minutes set-up time for each performance, and the prior show will alternate, so we’ll never know exactly what we’re facing when we get in to begin) but this is the closest we could imagine until we get into the actual space. The guano was vacuumed up, and a variety of bizarre seating laid out in the form of beds, car seats and lawn chairs. Then it was a two-hour break for dinner.


It’s hard to say how the showing went. The barn somehow held onto the day’s humidity, despite our best efforts to air it out, and we were all anxious about what we had to show and what kind of response we could expect, not to mention our wondering exactly what we would each forget to do. You see, it wasn’t a question of if: We had revised so much so many times, and run some bits only once that day, so I think it’s safe to say each and every of us was prepared to bite it at least once. At the same time, we were so excited to have something cohesive to show at last (and excited to see the damn thing for ourselves) that we couldn’t care too much what went wrong this run.


So how about our show? Well, it has more of the catharsis I craved on last writing, but it’s owing in large part to a device that concludes the show, and I would prefer that it hinged on scene work. As you might imagine, the bulk of the show is difficult to judge without some time to pull together the acting, but I’m pleased with the momentum it seems to be beginning to acquire with the overlap of scenes and the emphasis on the military’s role in the story. Some of the staging is entirely too symmetrical for my tastes (I prefer asymmetry in general—creates more tension) but that’s already being broken up a bit, and may continue to as we progress. Overall, I feel good about what we’re headed to present, and look forward to seeing it blossom further.

It’s raining now as we drive our way back to Manhattan, and my mind drifts out over the landscape, floated on scraps of New Hampshire memories. (Hey, by the way: Joe Varca’s a freaking punk. I’m so glad I don’t look like him anymore.) I’m watching a movie tonight, just to take my mind off Art for a little while, and ease my heart away from lakeside sunsets.

New Hampshire Log: Days Three–Five—Where We Think We Are


Forgive the lapse. It has been three days of intensive work, with continual switches, changes, reversals—just sort of a seemingly endless exploration. My frustration with the openness of it all came to a head last night, when, after running through the second act and finding it lacking any drive or purpose, we were given an assignment to compile seven moments of the government solving a problem of media exposure throughout the play. I don’t know; maybe I was just tired after a long day, but I couldn’t pull it together to be open and fulfill the request. Fortunately my fellow actors (particularly Joe Varca) had a better attitude at that moment. It was all I could do to stay silent.

The things I kept wanting to say: It’s not about the media, it’s about the family’s descent into hopelessness; giving us another assignment doesn’t provide a solution to the structure of the story; adding bits won’t streamline the play. I got some of it said in the discussion after portraying our media moments, and Laurie has been very concerned about my reaction to the changes they’ve made to the play since last night. And, indeed, the changes they made streamlined the play into more of a story about the family. The choice to do so cut my scenes by half. I would be lying if I said that didn’t disappoint me, but when I can think about it clearly it’s a small price to pay for a more concise story, and I still count myself lucky not to have been cut from the play entirely.

Lots and lots has gone on since Day Two, but it’s hard to chart it all chronologically. You can imagine—with the gap in my writing—that we’ve been awfully busy. In some ways, it has felt like a prolonged tech day, at least in the sense that there has been a lot of time spent just being available for that unpredictable moment when one might be needed. This is in particular due to the “movement theatre” aspects of the show, which are characterized by transitions between scenes in which multiple characters enter to express some part of the situation at that point in the play. (For these moments, the director[s] have adopted a term I learned working with Cirque Boom. Charivari [shar-ee-var-ee]. In circus, it’s a term that describes the sequences typically at the beginning and end when all the acts come out at once and show a little of their stuff. The term comes from a village tradition [can’t remember where exactly, but it lives on in Creole settings] of surrounding the residence of a newly married couple to shout and bang pots and pans.) This kind of constant but uncertain availability we call “hurry up and wait.”

The pity of this is that it can feel like a waste of time, but the fact is that Laurie as creator/director, Christina as on-call playwright, Joe and Jen as all-around-technicians/designers and Kelly as actor/producer are working ‘round the clock and very, very hard. Not that the actors aren’t, but we do have periods when we can zone out for a bit (horrible practice for an actor, but sometimes it’s the only way to rest). As for me, well…. I’ve never been this muscle-bound in my life. I don’t mean that as a boast about my size; I could probably get up to 300 push-ups daily and still just give the effect of a rather slender baseball player. I mean it literally. Trying to get just moderately bigger (plus all the prolonged moments of standing at attention as we work through some sequence or other of the play) has me feeling about as flexible as a frozen flank steak.

It is having some outward effect. My fellow cast-mates are very encouraging in this; especially Kelly, bless her heart. They compliment my body with sincerity and joking cat calls. This has led to an interesting situation, in which the publicity guy we’ve hired called to complain that the pictures they had sent him for advance publicity aren’t “sexy” enough. So parts of day five were spent sweating my buzz-cut off in a separate cabin, trying to take a “sexy” photo that encapsulated the play a bit. I can’t say as I was thrilled with the results, especially toward the end of the day, when all the exhaustion of working in 90-degree weather was showing in my face. (Rather than, “Hi, you’re fascinating and I kind of want to see you naked,” my face says, “Howdy; I smell like guano and can only think about a cold beer.” I have to let it go, though. That’s just not my job, plain and simple.

The last day also started for me with filming our recreation of Matt’s capture video in Faith’s cellar. In a desert boonie cap I sat on a broken wicker chair, bare bulbs illuminating the concrete wall behind me and Alex Charington to my right, face obscured and hands grasping a reproduction M16. We tried all different versions, people kept making noise above us, and through it all I tried to maintain in my imagination the actual circumstances of Matt’s capture, and remind myself how he behaves in the actual video. It was awful and difficult. It can’t begin to compare to what he actually experienced.

It hasn’t been all tormented scenarios and constant script revision. There has been swimming at the lake, jogs through the woods and camaraderie. One of my favorite things about rehearsing here, oddly enough, is the half-court basketball set up behind the barn. I absolutely suck at b-ball, but just dribbling and shooting by myself has been a great way to loosen up on breaks (not to mention the way it keeps me away from the temptation of the group of smokers in front of the barn). Last night we even—in spite of universal exhaustion—gathered around a lakeside fire to relax and chat for a bit over s’mores and wine. This led to a mass skinny-dip in the lake, from which I abstained. Call me crazy (crazy!) but the day of rather objectifying photography took the wild hair right out of me.

Part of the cause for this celebration was that as a result of our Wednesday night crisis (and a sleepless night for the production team) we now have a play that may clock in at under 90 minutes, with what we are calling an “ending” and everything. I’m very pleased with this, of course. It means we’re better prepared to show what we have so far to the locals on Friday night. I don’t, however, particularly like the ending. I’m suspending actual judgment until I can see the whole thing together (which may not be until a week from now, once we’re rehearsing in New York), but it seems to me too technical, and lacking in the catharsis I know this story engenders in all of us. Now, one could argue that because the story itself is so unresolved, that such is how the play should responsibly end. To me, however, part of what we have to offer in creating theatre is the magic of a pure emotional release. We have all been moved to tears by this story of a missing soldier, and have to communicate that as well as the facts to our audiences.

Soon I’ll be back to subways and divorces. It will be good to reconnect with my life at home, but I always miss the sunsets and maddening, uplifting, beautiful work.