In League with Liars: Storytelling and the Actor

Photo by Andrew Lloyd-Jones.

Last Wednesday, I was a bad husband and father. Well, maybe not a bad husband and father, but an absentee one. But only for a few hours. But it was in the evening. But it was for a cultural event. But it was at a bar. With a bunch of professed liars. And it was my daughter's nine-week birthday.

I am the lowest of the low, and have done little-to-nothing to earn the understanding of my wife.

The Liar's League is a very cool organization that specializes in public readings of short fiction. Their motto: "Writers write. Actors read. Audience listens. Everyone wins." It is, in my opinion, the perfect venue for someone of my stripe - thirty-something, recent father, pragmatic (somewhat) actor who nonetheless occasionally needs to stretch his performing legs. This, too, is how I justify my flagrant negligence of wife and child. The household's psyche is better off for my occasional jaunt back to the boards. Plus: the venue is relaxed, the work of high quality, and the time commitment is very reasonable.

I was introduced to the Liars by Friend Natalia Zubko back in July, mere weeks before Daughter J. would enter the world. Natalia was prescient enough to realize the perfection of the League's match with my new time and mental-space restraints, and when we attended their Public & Private themed reading she took it upon herself to introduce me to the organizers. We enjoyed the evening, and an interesting discussion began about finding the balance - as a performer - between presentation and representation. Or: telling the story versus embodying the moments.

This is a classic conundrum for an actor, in large part because it has so much to do with that horrid convention of casting - the audition monologue. Most audition pieces list toward storytelling, having as they generally ought a beginning, middle and end. Conversely, the point of an audition piece is not actually to tell an effective story (though that can only help) but rather to demonstrate an active, intentioned character who is experiencing things in the present. It is most important that the actor know who they're supposedly talking to - their invisible scene partner - and that said actor is trying clearly and convincingly to persuade their opposite of something. The story if there is one is actually what's happening in the room, not the narration it may involve.

I've a long-held fondness for actual storytelling. That and stand-up comedy were my first real performance opportunities as a kid. Along with reveling in what John Ritter could do with a long phone cord, I spent many an early-eightes Saturday morning watching this one storytelling series on UHF channel 50 (the name of which is long-lost to the annals [ew] of my gray matter). Just a guy with that distinctly awful grooming of the time talking to some kids in a carpeted "activity room," with the occasional prop or puppet. I ate it up, and continue to admire people who are adept at unwinding a good story at cocktail parties and the like.

Fortunately for me I had good, written material on Wednesday last. Don DeLillo, by C.D. Rose, is a slightly abstracted, but generally straight-forward story of a romantic couple who may - or may not - fall apart over certain personal failings; not the least of which might be the fellow's intellectual insecurity. I love the story and the writing, and felt like I could uniquely identify with its narrator in a way that would help the performance. (One of my favorite little things about of the approach of the League is that when they emailed me to ask if I was interested, they attached the story; it should not be as rare as it is to be offered the opportunity to survey the material when someone is asking something of you as a performer.) But here I was, presented in fact with the formerly hypothetical problem I discussed so idly with Natalia months before. To embody, or not to embody?

The answer is of course: To embody. Everyone wants some in-the-moment transportation, even from a cocktail anecdote. If only it were an on/off gradation, however. The difficulty is in choosing the right timing and intensity for capturing the moment. It's a balancing act. Keep both eyes straight ahead. That way, at least if you fall you might be aware of it for a few seconds fewer than you otherwise would.

I'll save some suspense and report - and this is after a week's time, feedback and listening to my own recording on the League's podcast (possibly several times [possibly not solely for critique purposes {how's this for allaying suspense?}]) - that I believe I did OK-fine. I'd say I was in the neighborhood of 75% on-target. That's safe, I'd say. I'm saying. I said.

It's tricky. It takes precision, and it's a precision that can't even be complete after months of rehearsal, because the final information comes from the audience and how they're responding to particular moments. This can be said of acting in any live respect, but the consideration takes on such a unique dimension when it's a little more layered as it is with storytelling, involving a kind of meta-balance of story and moment. As an actor in a play, you generally have this rule to guide you: Believe in it, no matter what, and live there. As a storyteller, you're something of an actor/director, steering as much as riding, based on the charts you sketched out in your rehearsal. And you can get lost.

I got a little lost, I must admit. It was disorienting; a new medium. I never lost my place in the words, but there were certainly moments in which I thought

well I'm not sure where we are just now I think this moment needs a little examination no? no we have to keep going? all right then we're going and I guess hey when did I last inhale...?

  My tendency, and it shouldn't have surprised me (but it did), was to revert to being the actor, feeling the moment. If anything, I over-did on that side. Somewhat. My priority was to serve the writing, which kept me from going overboard outright, but my tendency was to be an actor. Interesting conflict, that.

Also interesting, coming from my experience, was just how effective it was to detach from the material at the right moments. Perhaps it was the audience, who were made up severally of writers, but there were several times when I reported something written and the words did the work better than I could have with any special interpretation. And - in spite of what Mamet may posit - this is not the general rule.

Also fun was the audience interaction. In this milieu there's a blend between what an actor does, and what a stand-up or orator can do. Even before I learned about the commedia dell'arté, I was obsessed with effective moments of breaking the fourth wall, and at one particular moment toward the beginning of my tale I got to do that with a facial expression in response to an audience member's applause. It was a moment in which none of us could be sure I was in character. My reaction was appropriate to the voice of the story, but obviously there was no

[Pause for silent response to audience.]

written there. It doesn't carry over on the recording, having been visual, and I rather savor that. A gentle nod toward the ephemeral nature of live entertainment.

I think serving the words as best one can is probably the closest thing to advice we can offer an actor stepping into the storytelling arena, at least when it comes to scripted storytelling. (Perhaps aptly enough, this is also popular advice for performing Shakespeare.) That's subjective as all get-out, but getting much more specific risks hampering the unique abilities an actor can bring to the story. I might rephrase it, though, to give it a little more impact for types such as myself:

The story is for you, but not about you, and similar to something as unique and rare as a piece in a museum the story is to be shared. You are the one who gets to share the story with the rest of the world. Be sure to be moved by it, be sure to explore it to the breadth and depth it merits. Do not drape or gild it, though. Let it speak for itself, through you.

Something like that. It really is a precious thing. Fun too! But precious. If they'll have me, I think I'll be back.

Photos & layout by Andrew Lloyd-Jones.

Guys On Film

Or rather: guy. Or rather: me. Last Sunday I attended, in a little bar in Williamsburg, the screening of

Android Insurrection

. You may recall my experience filming

Android Insurrection

a little over a year ago (see

5/11/11

). In that time the director has dropped us completed acts here and there through Vimeo, and the whole thing was off to the presses (They use presses still, right?) in the spring, but this was my first time really seeing the fruit of our labors. This was in fact my first time seeing myself die on screen.

Actors often mention in interviews that they are loathe to see their own performances. The reasoning is often offered that all we can see is the mistakes, but I think it goes a layer or two deeper than that. There's a dissonance between what we perceive of ourselves, and what is objectively observable by a camera. It's similar to the response most people have when they hear their recorded voice. The view from the inside is just too subjective to immediately match with what other people perceive.

So there was a lot of that. I did, I have to admit, come out of the screening vowing never, ever to have my mouth open in performance again unless I was speaking. There was also a more positive response, here and there. I may not have a face that sucks one in, but neither is it loathed by the camera (if only I could slice out this weird, Willsian slope to my neck/chin [my nin; my check] area) and once or twice during filming, I fancy I managed to contribute something useful to the storytelling with my eyes.

There was also the more introspective consideration, as I sipped my vodka tonics and laughed at the sheer balls-ery of some of the movie's moments. I was watching myself of a year ago run around a warehouse in new Jersey, before I acted in

Sacred Ground

, before I had been to Seattle, before I had this new job and a baby girl on the way. The idea that you can never step into the same river twice felt very real indeed during this experience, which proverb stands as a lovely contrast to such lines as, "I only care about you and me making it out of here alive. Me, because I only care about me. And you, because I'm gonna kill you once we get out."

And the movie? Well, there's one word that describes this movie, and that word is: Art. Pure art. Which would of course be two words, so you can choose either - "art," or "pure." One of them is the only one to describe

Android Insurrection

. Well, also "movie," I suppose. I mean, if you want to be technical about it, there are probably several words that can, together or of a piece, describe my cinematic debut. At some point soon, I may have a private screening for a select few adjective-makers, and leave them to label it.

The thing that's great for me about doing this movie is that it fulfilled something for me, a childhood fantasy, and it not only did so but it did so with a positivity and lightness of which I consider myself very lucky to have been a part. When the screening was over, Friends Nat and Virginia and I, and eventually Joe and Libby, enjoyed one another's company for as far as we could manage on the trips to our respective homes. It was a fitting reward for a job...well: fun.

Sadly, in spite of having acquired an American distributor,

Android Insurrection

is not yet for sale in these United States, and so I can't link to it for you. If you'd like a copy dubbed into Thai, I understand that may be possible at this time using something called an "Internet."

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.

IN A WORLD...

Found here.

I know I couldn't act my way out of an unlocked locker in junior high. I didn't know at the time - that's one of the blessed ignorances of youth that allows us to learn, I think. No, at the time, I was just excited to be there. Excited to get that outlet for all my confused emotional and physical energy, excited by all the trappings that were new to me.

Prior to junior high (and the inimitable Mr. John Newman) what I knew about performing was that my peers responded more when I made a performance more physical - especially when I inflicted some kind of damage on myself - and my teachers responded better when I recited lines clearly, from memory. What more could there be to it? It would take me many more years to learn even the most basic of acting skills and concepts, but in junior high I was suddenly and thrillingly dropped into a semi-professional environment.

We had published scripts. We spent time on dialects. We had auditions as well as performances for people other than our parents. We had a vast theatre - hell, we had TWO theatres at Lake Braddock, both the classroom proscenium (which dwarfed most off-off-Broadway spaces) and an auditorium space (co-designed by a former theatre teacher, so it was built as much for plays as for more official events)

Probably the biggest thrill of all this, though I can't explain quite why, was "tech day." Tech day was when we moved from the classroom stage to the auditorium for the first time. I don't remember if it was a formal thing every show, but it felt like it to me. It felt like getting real. We would open the doors to the curving, dark hallway that led around to the auditorium, and immediately we'd hear power tools and smell sawdust. That smell, in the cool dark, just before stepping into a vast room of seats leading down to a three-quarters-thrust stage . . . well. Memories.

I've had my last day filming on Android Insurrection out in Metuchen. In terms of a career as an actor, this work probably won't hold a lot of significance. I mean, it could be huge, just as anything might, but it's not a job I need to sing from the mountaintops about. (Getting on IMDB finally is a little mountain-toppy for me, though; perhaps I'll sing it from a monadnock.) It was more significant to me, though, than just a bit of fun. Working on this movie was a bit like revisiting that initial thrill I felt as a pre-teen, invited to walk down a dark corridor into a little living through fiction.

And now, too, there's a teaser for the movie. It expresses quite well, I think, the level of fun and excitement involved in making a genre movie of this sort. These movies, they seek to thrill and titillate us. Maybe we find them appealing because we feel a little younger watching them, a little less prepared, a little more thrilled. Our teaser starts with "In the 23rd century..." rather than with "In a world...", but danged if that isn't close enough to titillate me, just a little:

Android Insurrection Teaser from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

Row Butts

Photos by Andrew Bellware.

A couple of weekends ago was my first experience on a real film set.

Now, some will argue that what I was experiencing was not by any stretch a real film set. Craft services consisted of Chinese take-out and a stunning abundance of snack foods and sodas. We were filming in the warehouse space of a railing-design workshop (right next to the bundled set of the recent tragically short-run

Les Miserables

). And, believe it or not, I worked without a trailer. That's as may be, but it's the closest I have yet to come to a real film set, and I think all the major elements were there. For example: A crew of really smart and funny people (myself excluded, naturally) got together, played pretend, and someone recorded the whole experience.

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Mercs + android.

It's one I rather stumbled into myself. One night I went to see

Friend Nat

's one-man Lovecraft show at Manhattan Theatre Source, the which the charming

Ms. Laura Schlachtmeyer

happened to be stage managing. We sat for a bit after the show, she asked me if I was SAG, I said no-with-sad-face, she cheered me up by offering to send me a script. It looked like it wasn't going to work out schedule-wise for a while. And then it did, just like that. So I'm playing the ambitious, arrogant ex-space-mercenary Rathbone. I have two more weekends of filming after Easter weekend in which to live some of my favorite tropes.

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Said android.

The movie is probably best described in the current parlance as a mock-buster, but I don't like thinking of it that way. Sure: It is

Predator

 meets

Aliens

 (with more than a dash or two of Whedon-istic glee/feminism) and yes: we have no money. I resist the term, though, because everyone knows what they're doing, and everyone takes it just seriously enough. That is to say, we have a ball and laugh as much as possible at ourselves, but on-camera everyone's in the same high-stakes movie. If this were ever to get picked up by, let's say, Syfy (

ARE YOU LISTENING, SYFY?!

), you would turn to it in the early-morning hours and most likely think,

Huh. This looks like it would go nicely with this pint of Americone Dream I have here. I wonder if there will be much gore...

To be a bit more succinct: It's good fun, done well, and I can't complain at all about getting to play around in a genre and process that I've enjoyed since I was about eleven years old.

It's made even easier by enjoying all the folks whom I've thus far met. In no particular order, there's:

• Nat Cassidy, as a medic a bit out of his depth.
• Virginia Logan, as the hard-scrabble, near-invincible leader of the merc crew.
• Juanita Arias, as a scrappy merc.
• Sarah-Doe Osborne, as an elite prototype android.
• Tom Rowen, as a cocky, quasi-rock-a-billy merc.
• Joe Chapman, as the heavily-armed, bulldog merc - also the set designer.
• Libby Csulik, amazing do-it-all-er.
• David Ian Lee, as the maniacally handsome Colonel (David also co-wrote the first draft of the script with Mr. Cassidy).
• And Mr. Andrew Bellware, as a maniacally maniacal director who occasionally seems to be having even more fun than I am (and the aforementioned Ms. Laura Schlachtmeyer, keeping him in check).

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LENS FLARE!

In our little tale, we venture into a suddenly radio-silent robot factory to extract a special new prototype of android from what appears to be a situation wherein the artificial intelligence has taken over and slaughtered all the human faculty. I essentially play the dubious jerk of the crew - think

Predator

's Carl Weathers meets

Aliens

' Paul Reiser (by which I of course mean Weathers' muscle tone and Reiser's razor wit). It's delightful, made all the more fun by the implication of a storied past with Virginia's character and some blatant animosity with Joe's. So far I've mostly gotten to trade what are hopefully telling looks with folks, and say a few lines; but I've also been kicked over by a giant robot.

HOW FUN. IS THAT? (Answer: VERY FUN.)

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"It's quiet...TOO quiet..."

I'm back this weekend for what are likely to be much longer shoot days, and I'm very much looking forward to it. It's difficult for me to imagine enjoying the product nearly as much as the process, but it might be pretty cool to finally see some actual robots incorporated. For now I'm more than content to let the enormous gnashing things be played out in my imagination.