Five Hun Dread: The Sacred & Profane

In the waning days of 2006 I started this here 'blog in the interests of exerting a bit more control over  my online presence. It probably speaks volumes to my misconceptions about the Internet that I imagined I could "control" my online presence, but at the time I had just had a website put up for me, and simply wanted to contribute to that effort in a more personal way. After a short time, I found a guiding principle for the 'blog, which I decided would be used to explore and expound upon my efforts to live what I called "The Third Life." That is, a life lived outside of conventional norms and perspectives, one that aspires to be about more than just home and work, that incorporates something else (see 12/19/06, but also, and perhaps more interestingly, 2/21/08).

In the five years since I started the Aviary, one or two things have changed. I've been involved in myriad productions of great variety, including one low-budget sci-fi film and several original collaborations, traveled to and performed in Italy four times, and performed an extended-run NYC Fringe show that I helped develop. I got to play Romeo, well past my freshness date for that particular role. I moved three times, once between Brooklyn and Queens, and I took up aerial silks. Friend Andrew and I dared to experiment with a performance collective.  I've acted, written, choreographed, directed, curated and devised. In that time I also changed day jobs and taught in various capacities, including joining a UK-based corporate training company. Most significantly, my sister moved out of the city, and I married a woman I've known and loved since I was seventeen.

For a little over a month now, my evenings and a significant part of my weekends have been devoted to rehearsals for and performances of a play called Sacred Ground. It was written by my fellow As Far As We Know collaborator, Christina Gorman, and is the first time I've worked with her since we departed that show. Sacred Ground also represents the first naturalistic drama in which I've acted in the city since Lie of the Mind - which, as some may recall, did not garner me the most magnificent of notices. Well, it's only taken me about four years to get over that, and so I've been dutifully applying my craft to a rather down-to-earth, straight-forward drama. And I've enjoyed it. And I'd say I've even done a fairly respectable job.

It was very interesting, returning to a conventional off-off-Broadway rehearsal schedule in NYC. Rehearsals went rather late, and something about that - combined with working with all-new people (other than Christina), and tackling something by which I was more than a little intimidated - came to remind me very poignantly of how I generally existed in my 20s. There was almost literally no stopping, from day job, to rehearsal, to wherever life took me next. I'm just not as resilient now, and the hours came to take their toll on me toward opening. There were dark circles under my eyes and dark thoughts crowding my spare moments. I really felt the personal sacrifices I was making to be a part of this play, and that was another difference between the 80-hour weeks of my 20s and now.

I have loved the part. My character, Father William, is one with whom I can uniquely identify. There was even a time when I contemplated going to seminary (though never have I contemplated converting to Catholicism) and his sensitivity and passionate need to help were another reminder to me of my earlier decade. I can't, of course, speak to how successful I've been overall with my portrayal of him, but he has felt to me like a good match for my particular personality and skills (in spite of the lack of opportunity for self-effacing pratfallery). The experience of the show, trials and rewards and all, has felt redemptive of a few lingering personal regrets in a lot of ways - fulfilling exactly what I wondered about its potential when I auditioned for it.

It's also got me thinking about acting in a different way. It's strange how the process tosses us around, a profanity of effort for one sacred experience. It's incredible how hard actors have to work, yet for ultimately so very little ownership of what they create. At best, actors co-own a collection of moments. For stage actors in particular, those moments are as temporal as anything in life. Theatre actors have to sweat through constant insecurity and uncertainty, stand up for their perspective and submit to others' needs in rapid turns, and the immaterial reward is to stand in front of a large group for a time and accept the possibility that they are "with" him or her in a given moment. God in heaven, why would anyone do this for less than big money, or at the very least a livable wage?

This perspective on acting has been developing with me for some time now, but my experiences on Sacred Ground have helped me put it into more cohesive language and context. In part, I can understand this view because of some of the challenges I experienced directing The Puppeteers. During that process, I continually found myself vacillating between the perspectives of a new director doing his best to make something a little daring and different, and that of myself as an actor in a Zuppa del Giorno show. It's often said that the best quality an actor can have is the ability to access a child-like self or state. I have to wonder if actors are given any choice in the matter, really. Every scrap of their work is entering an unknown world head-first. They are effectively forced to make mistake after mistake after mistake, and surrender themselves to forces they've no hope of fully comprehending.

Nearly five years on from my first post - and on this, my five-hundredth - the landscapes of many things have changed. Not the least of which is the landscape of the Internet itself. I've succumbed somewhat to the more-visual and less-verbal style of the "tumblelog" here and there, posting tiny entries that do nothing so much as capture (and attempt to render somewhat less temporal) brief moments of contemplation. I thought, however, that I'd return to a bit of my former style for this post. At least the length and varied direction is a return. My tone, however, has undeniably altered. Well, it's still pretentious and overwrought - don't get me wrong. It's also less immediately gratifying, I think, and looks a little farther into the horizon.

When I examine my life now, I've got no true regrets. That was one of my goals as a college student, about to venture into adult life and trying to make sense of what I wanted from it - to have no regrets. At the time, that meant pursuing a life as a professional actor, heedless of anything else. Now, my personal "Third Life" has more in it than that, and some potential for a greater richness of experience. It's taking a certain amount of courage to embrace that, to embrace everything I want. But I've done it before. I'll do it again.

...O Hai

Lest you imagine my absence has been a matter of rest:

ITEM!  On October 16th Wife Megan and I performed aerial silks at a Halloween-themed circus show at Streb S.L.A.M.  It was my debut on the aerial silks and - now that I think of it - my return to circus performance after an absence of some years.  More on this in its own post (promise [promise]), but suffice it to say that I survived and learned a lot in the process.  And: enjoyed it!

ITEM!  On October 17th I performed in a staged reading of Margo Hammond's The New Me, playing a private detective, which is one of my favorite things in the whole world.  (Good role to love, too, since a fella' can play that general type through many different stages of his life.)  It went well I thought, and I really enjoyed exploring the guy's subtle self-interests in the midst of performing his job.

ITEM!  On October 29th I and my better 50% traveled to Chicago.  It was my first time there since 2001 when I toured through it with the partial-German-language farce I starred in (not bragging; educational theatre).  It was a great trip that really inspired me in unexpected ways, not the least of which was attending the late show at The Second City and being reminded of the value of sketch comedy in constructing commedia dell'arte.

ITEM!  November 1st brought me to only my second participation in a meeting of The Pack.  At said meeting I had a scene from Hereafter read, and received feedback on it.  It was very interesting, and ultimately encouraging for continuing work on the script.  Seems like the answer to making it cohesive may be in streamlining the number of ideas represented in it.


ITEM!  On November 8th there was a developmental reading for a small, private audience, of James B. Nicola's Closure.  In it I read several male characters, and it tested my mastery of dialects, and found it as lacking as it always has been.  Some are naturals at accents, but I need to work at it to achieve consistency, and switching rapidly (occasionally having whole scenes with myself) between them was dizzying.  It was fun to try, though, and good to notice that as the script went along, I got better.

ITEM!  On November 13th I participated in a table reading of The Widow Ranter, adapted by Adrienne Thompson and directed by the acclaimed Karen Carpenter (no, not that one).  In it I played the boisterous, large old Colonel Ranter, eschewing type left right and center amidst a table of over a dozen actors.  Interesting to see all the energy and dynamic shifts with that many friends and strangers with a performance bent in one place.


ITEM!  For the first time with the revised cast, on November 21st The Puppeteers held a developmental meeting in Scranton.  It went well, and rapidly, and of course a great deal of time and work on my part has gone into the show's development 'blog.  It's an amazing - and very much ongoing - process, creating an original comedy from scratch.  We've had two more developmental meetings since, and begin the rehearsal process in earnest on December 27th.


ITEM!  I finally participated in NaNoWriMo!  And I failed!  Well, inasmuch as I didn't fulfill the word goal of 50,000 by deadline.  I did, however, get a great deal of writing done on an actual novel, no matter how questionable its worth.  It was very much fun and very much difficult, as my update-only post for November attests.


ITEM!  For the first time since I was 23 (by which I mean last year, amirite?) I performed in a musical on December 2nd.  Sharon Fogarty's one-act comic musical, Speaking to the Dead, had me playing a game-show host who falls for his ghost-whispering costar in many more ways than one.  Actually, initially I wasn't to sing, but at one rehearsal I gave a line a sing-songy quality and BAM: a few lines of song for yours truly.  It truly was a hoot.  And such a pleasure to finally work with Ms. Fogarty after many near-misses at Manhattan Theatre Source.


So, you know: That.  It's been a busy two months, and likely to be nothing but busy through the holidays and on into January.  The Puppeteers opens January 19th, and that weekend is the only one in which I'll be guaranteed to be in town watching it.  If you have the means and desire to make your way to wintery Scranton, I commend you and recommend it --  it's going to be A LOT of fun.


Merriest and happiest, one and all.

The Puppeteers: Simulcra & Pareidolia

As I mentioned back in September (see 9/20/10), I'm writing more and more on the development 'blog for the next Zuppa show.  If you want to follow along, feel free!  Right now the ideas are big and broad.  They will narrow from discussions of theme to tiny details of fart gags, just you wait and see.  My latest entry discusses ideas of creation and recognition.  A snippet to whet:

Many [human] instincts apply to our tendency toward seeing faces in things with whose creation we had little or nothing to do - pareidolia.  We see faces in woodgrain, water stains, toast.  You name it.  Of course we're inclined toward this for a variety of reasons, but what interests me about it are a few possibilities outside the realm of anything logical:
  • Maybe we're more inclined to pareidolia when we're lonely, or feel great need of some kind.
  • What if, instead of seeing faces because of a need, we're seeing them because we in some way recognize an object in front of us in some personal way?
  • What if pareidolia leads to a relationship, the way the supposed recognition involved in "love at first sight" can?
 Read the rest here: Simulacra & Pareidolia.

The Puppeteers; or, In Spite of It All

The development 'blog for the next Zuppa del Giorno show went live today, and here is where you can see it all go down: 

http://thepuppeteersproduction.blogspot.com/

.  Watch, enjoy, and comment as you see fit (comments

will

 be moderated, however).  I'm excited to make this show a little more "open source" to its audience and our friends who for one reason or another may not be able to make it out to Scranton in the dead of winter.

We have also finally scheduled our first official development rehearsal: October 2-3, to be held in New York City.  It was my ambition to have our first this weekend, but with actors in three (count 'em) different states of this great country of ours (well: two states and a commonwealth) it just was not mean to be.  So we'll get as good a start as we may at the beginning of October, and see where we all end up at the end of that.

I've avoided writing too much about this process in the Aviary thus far in the interests of keeping it private until we had a little more sense of direction - but just a little more.  The evolution of this show will be intricate and slow, and I'm excited by the prospects of both our invited collaborators, and anyone else who decides to poke their noses in.  As a result of my excitement, you may be seeing a bit less of me here at the Aviary, for which I do apologize.  But if you need me, you'll know where to look.