It Is, In Fact, Electric

Doot do doot do doot do-do do do, doot do doot do doot do-do do do!

I admit that, if I weren't at work, I would now be maliciously cackling at having suggested that song unto your brain space. I contemplated referencing other songs, such as Deborah (nee Debbie) Gibson's Electric Youth, or Electricity, as rendered by Sonic Youth, in particular because I loathe Electric Boogie and wish Marcia Griffiths had been hit by a fast-moving bus before she could unleash it upon the world and inspire Ric Silver, thereby ensuring that every wedding betwixt people of a paler persuasion for the next three decades would involve an oddly awkward and unseemly ritual. It's one of the songs on my no-fly list for the wedding. Because I hate my own culture.

But I digress.

The times, they are a'changin' (now that's a good song). Most of you who read this here 'blog with any regularity whatsoever know that The Northeast Theatre (TNT) has been nothing short of my theatrical home-away-from-home for the past six years or so. I'm even on the banner page of the website, with Friend Todd. (Said website, by the way, is fascinating in its labyrinthine complexity. It's been built up over the years with no particular notion of where it might end up, and as a result has ended up with a lot of dangling pages and decentralized indexing.) Some time back, the more-constant employees of the theatre and the artistic director got to talking and realized that, when they really thought about it, their personal goals could best be realized by aiming TNT toward becoming an ensemble theatre company. Which is to say, with people who are employed 'round the year, not just on a show-by-show basis, including actors, designers, etc. "Etc." Hmmm. Anyway, invitations were extended, including to me. I declined, though tempted, as I'm not really in a place to leave New York just yet, much less settle in Pennsylvania. But I've eagerly anticipated the change, curious to see where it leads them.

The Northeast Theatre (TNT) is dead! Long live the Electric Theatre Company (ETC)!

At the time of this posting, the website is still rather underdeveloped, but a few pages are up and a simple cursory glance will illustrate how far the theatre has come in its sense of identity over the past few years. Their season is pretty kick-A., too. At present, the only part I'm scheduled to be a part of is Zuppa del Giorno's take on Romeo & Juliet, which is rather as it should be given the change and my present priorities. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit bothered by my distance from this venture. Part of the ideal behind the change was the idea that actors suffer from not having enough long-term collaboration through which to grow. I could claim to have a good deal of that by way of Zuppa's productions, but the fact is that coming together as infrequently as we do we usually spend half the time playing catch-up on our skills and the other half just trying to build the damn show. No; I'm missing out on something good out there in Scranton. But it was the right choice for me.

And I'm not getting away from working out that way, not by a long shot. Just next week I need to spend a couple of days being certified as a "resident" teaching artist, and the weekend after that I'm to be involved in TN . . . whoops. ETC's benefit, which includes the mayor of Scranton in its festivities. (I'm not sure it gets any more prestigious than that.) I'll have two responsibilities during that affair. The first is to do a little walkabout as Chico Marx, whom I played in my own inimitable way for Zuppa's second show, Legal Snarls. I'm not-so-much looking forward to that; I've had enough clowning and walkabout lately to last me for a while. The second is to perform arbitrary acrobalance moves to music with Heather. That's kind of fun, though there's a lot of bluffing involved, as Heather and I are never in the same space long enough to really work out a comfortable routine. Well, at least not without some (thousand) other things what need doing first.

Being part of a company is important. It's how great things get done. And if I'm not going out there to be a constant part of it, what will I do to bring that particular it here, to me? We'll see.

Industrious

Yesterday I went on my first job routed to me by

Dream Weavers Management

. I had some hesitation joining up with DW, due largely to my inexperience with management and agentry, but yesterday helped to strengthen my opinion of them. The people at the production studio at which I worked all had good things to say for Laura Kossoff, the president there, and I had a generally positive experience where I worked. The gig was to be part of an industrial--a sort of internal corporate commercial--for a

Canon

conference; specifically to highlight a technology for creating three-dimensional video and, I believe, modeling. The production studio was

ADM Productions

, out in Long Island (or, to some, "Long Guylind"). So at 10:30 yesterday morning, I left el day jobo and hopped on the LIRR.

The last time I did an industrial was way, way back in 1998, as a side gig while I worked my very first professional gig, at

Theatre West Virginia

. That industrial was for a railroad company,

CSX

, and was pretty loose. A group of us dressed in our jeans and hardhats and walked around the yard all day, figuring out clever poses to point up track safety. The only camera work I've been doing lately has been a part of NYU's film-school directing classes. Plus, I'm a naturally nervous character. So as I took the train, I tried to relax and be ready for whatever was to come. They had no script to send, and all I knew was that they wanted me to bring both my black suit and my brown so they could choose which looked best for their purposes. Other than what I'd be wearing, I had no idea what I'd be doing when I got there (and even what I would be wearing was a fifty-fifty [I guessed wrong on that, by the way]). Breathe, breathe.

Turns out the people at ADM are fun to work with, and very professional to boot. They fed me. They offered to iron my costume. We talked about this and that as they struggled to stay on schedule with the shoot. They didn't, of course, because they had some incredibly complex set-ups to accomplish and they seemed to care a great deal about turning out a good product. I was prepared for this, however. As one of my fellow actors there said, "We get paid to wait on this kind of job; the acting is really just a bonus." So wait we did, in the greenroom and kitchen, and I vainly tried to make interesting conversation and read or memorize line sin good balance. It's an amazingly strange phenomenon, the hurry-up-and-wait atmosphere of a job like that. You're usually hanging out with strangers for hours, ever-ready to spring into compelling action, but with nothing actually to do. I always want to practice acro' moves, but people would think I was crying for attention, and besides, one is usually worried about one's costume.

More surreal was to come, however. When I finally did get into the studio, my job was to pose as a presenter of a . . . er . . . presentation. But not just any presentation! Oh no. An

invisible

presentation. The projection contained merely the title ("Projected Growth" [kindly control your snickers {after all, I had to}]) and a red background, with the notion that the graphic would be superimposed in post-production, so that it could "pop out" in the same 3-D effect we were all being filmed in. I say "we," because I was giving my presentation to four people seated around a table. They were not actors (that I knew of), just employees of the company who looked professional enough in attire to sit there and have their backs filmed. The fun came when it was time to "act." I knew there would be no sound for this segment, yet the effect from my movement had to be that of someone presenting something. So I did, and my presentation went something like this:

“I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here. Well. As you can see from my display here, I'm talking about projected growth. Not my projected growth, but our projected growth, and by that I don't mean anything dirty. This is a workplace, after all, and we don't talk about dirty things here unless of course we're complaining about how someone else really needs to clean them up. As you can see from the display, our projected growth is very red. We have a lot of growth in the red sector. Actually, I just set this up because it's my color. Red makes me look good. In fact, Larry, I'm going to ask you to follow me around for the rest of the day just so I look good next to you. Next I have to show you all this cartoon of a dog, trying to catch a balloon. Pay particular attention to this, Emily, because there will be a quiz later. Just for you. We need to keep an eye on you, after all. As you can see, the dog just can't get that balloon. He tries and he tries...but...nope, he can't get it. Ah. I could watch this all day. I did watch it for the entire weekend, over and over again. There are no lines in this, of course, because that's a dog, and a balloon, but if there were, if there were lines I bet you I could recite them all back to you, in sequence. Actually, I hope you all carved out at least a couple of hours, because that's how long this is. It's great though. There, he almost...but no! He can't get it!”

So there I was, in my brown suit, exploring the surreality. Fortunately for me, they all thought it was funny, engendering comparisons to Stev(ph)ens Carell and Colbert. As I ranted in a professional tone, I thought,

This couldn't be more bizarre. I left my office job to travel a half-hour by train to a studio so I could change from my black suit into a brown one and pretend to be someone like one of my bosses at the office job giving an imaginary presentation with a non-existent projection which, in a matter of days, will all be projected for viewing by a huge group of office workers in suits and 3-D glasses.

We're through the looking glass here, people.

So it was pretty great, as far as I was concerned. I even got a dramatic 3-D close-up in which I extend the remote control for the slide projector at the camera. My hand will loom large in the faces of Canon execs. If that isn't motivation to quit biting my nails, I don't know what is.

Meanwhile, back in the greenroom, I had several discussions with two other actors who were there to get 3-Ded and green-screened. They were interesting. I was very frank about my lack of experience with this sort of gig, and received some very different reactions. One of them, like me, valued stage acting and though he was very experienced with commercial work had virtually no priority for it. He had even been to Italy before, so we had a lot of interesting things to discuss. The other seemed to be devoted to commercial work, and had some trouble understanding my position in the game. She felt that I could be doing print and commercial work all the time, and wondered why I wouldn't. My answer had to do with long-term prospects and needing a steadier source of income than that, which is all perfectly valid and true, and which she accepted.

However, a much more essential answer is that I just never pursued it. Sure, when I first moved to New York I mailed my crappy headshots out every week to

Backstage

notices for film and commercial auditions, and thought with each student film I worked on that it would lead to more. I never pursued the work, though. I didn't (don't) understand it the way I did stage work, and just left it be. It may be time to learn more about it, though I did convince myself a bit with explaining myself to someone else yesterday. Who needs it? Sure, I made about $200 in a day and it was novel and all, but if it comes along infrequently I can't live on it. Then again, you never know until you try. Then again, it's artificial and irritating. Then again, an office job isn't?

Well, at least in ten years I may be recognized as "that guy who pointed the remote at my brain in that thing I saw." I wonder if he still bites his nails...

Shopping Out Our Work

Yesterday I ventured out to Pennsylvania to once again teach a workshop with Friend Heather under the auspices of

Zuppa del Giorno

, our contemporary commedia dell'arte troupe. The workshop took place on

Marywood University

's campus, and was about five hours long. All of this is exceedingly normal. From our first production, Zuppa del Giorno has been teaching more and more workshops, either as educational appendages to our shows or as independent entities that spread the word of us and hopefully bring in more students, not to mention occasional income. Marywood University is gradually becoming a regular collaborator with

The Northeast Theatre

(last fall we worked with their theatre department to create

Prohibitive Standards

), and I have just about learned the routes between New York City and Scranton so well I could probably walk them if I had to (and gas prices being what they are...). This venture, however, had a distinctive element. It represented our first foray into the world of "corporate training."

Several of my friends work for companies that shop actors out into the corporate world to lead seminars in communication and team-building. Some time ago, it became apparent to we lunatics at Zuppa that this was an occupation well within our reach. We have over the past several years taught amazing things to people, I modestly confess. We usually come out of such sessions impressed with how well they went, and what everyone learned not only to do, but about themselves. That learning includes us, I'm hasty to add. Every time I try to teach new people how to execute a reasonable thigh-stand, I learn something new. Crazy? Sure. Crazy gets the job done really well in my little world.

Friend Heather

has been particularly interested in getting the Zuppa del Giorno corporate education arm out there and swinging for the fences ever since she picked up and moved to Scranton. By and large, that move has been a good one for her. She's doing more acting work than ever since, and good work at that, and she's finding for herself a particular sense of community that those of us here in New York view with a certain envious uncertainty. ("That seems so great, that kind of intimate society; yet, where would I hide?") Hell: The Northeast Theatre is even ushering in a new era by becoming more of an ensemble company, of which Heather is a member, heralded with a name change and everything. More of that ahead. In the meantime, Heather still owes to Caesar what is owed to Caesar, and her desire is to be paid in full without the addition of another mind-numbing day job. Hence her particular enthusiasm for getting "Corporate Zuppa" to hit a homer.

Now, Thursday wasn't exactly our official corporate debut. In fact, it was a sort of paid audition for the Marywood staff who handle events and marketing, to see if they'd be interested in sort of advertising such workshops as part of what they can offer to private interests. Like most universities these days, every summer Marywood hosts conferences and such to keep up the rent payments and stay active in the commercial community. Our being a part of that would certainly provide a lot of opportunities we might not otherwise have. So we had ourselves a sort of dry run for adapting our skills (audiences only like theatre troupes with skills) to the "corporate" milieu.

It was, um.... It was

okay

. I think, by the end, everyone had enjoyed themselves at least a little bit. We definitely got a lot of helpful feedback, both from the experience itself and from discussion with the dozen-or-so participants afterward. It was a bit jarring, I must admit, to discover myself teaching a class of people who were required to be there. I mean to say, although we've taught high school classes under similar circumstances, this was a rather new domain. The bosses of the two departments required their employees to attend, and not all of them were happy to be there. In fact, the anxiety was increased by their ignorance of what exactly we were going to be subjecting them to. I was surprised, about two-thirds of the way through the initial warm-up, when I tried to help someone figure out a stretch we were doing. We were stretching our hips and glutes, and she had turned her torso the wrong way from her knees. I informed her she should twist the other way and, misreading me, she prepared to unfold her legs and turn

everything

in reverse. Realizing my miscommunication, I stood up from across the circle and said, "Oh, no--" preparing to demonstrate just for her. When she saw me coming, though, she immediately went on the defensive, saying, "It's me, I get confused, no, don't touch me!" I stopped in my tracks. "It's okay. I'm not going to touch you. It's okay."

But it threw me. I'm not going to lie to you. What I should have done was take a moment to acknowledge feeling affronted, and then move on both internally and externally. I did okay. I acknowledged she was scared, saying, "It's okay, I'm not going to touch you," and backed away. What I failed to do, however, was either find an alternate way to engage her or to put the rest of the class at ease after that kind of confrontation. I was surprised, to be sure, and it would be easy to chalk up my failure to simple shock over suddenly being confronted. But it was more than that. I took it personally, somehow. I reeled back, at least internally, and Heather took over for a moment or two. It made sense that the woman would respond the way she did. How often does the average person find themselves seated in an uncomfortable, confusing position on the floor while someone standing comes at them? I understood this logically; emotionally, I was offended. I didn't feel I could help it. It's a terrible feeling, that you and your work are unwelcome, and I never get used to it, and actors confront exactly this situation on a daily basis.

As I say, the day resolved itself, and everyone got involved. There was even a sort of blossoming from that particular woman as the course moved on. She went from flicking off her boss (totally permissible given the exercise we were doing) and exclaiming her hatred of having to be there to being one of the more engaged and entertained people overall. I can't take any credit at all for that evolution, and we were assisted by the fact that these people all generally had a rapport prior to the workshop. (I quiver at the thought of working with a group of people who are strangers to one another.) The work, however, does its work, and Heather and I can at least take a little credit for creating the most nurturing environment imaginable for risk-taking (short of installing emotion-sensitive airbags throughout the room [which, frankly, would be hilarious--you could distinguish the moment anyone started to feel insecure in themselves because they'd be immediately engulfed in pillowing]).

We're finding our balance. The course is predominantly aimed at using improvisation exercises to teach communication skills, but we reference acrobalance a bit (I'd like more, but can't quite figure how to do that without excluding injured or more corpulent folks) and are trying to develop ways to communicate the unique collaborative techniques we use in creating shows together. I'd like, frankly, to shift the focus off of improvisation, because I feel it's the least unique training we have to offer and that our enthusiasm lies elsewhere. (Plus improv's got a certain stigma built-in, thanks to its widespread use in such venues and the popularity of

The Office

[US]

.) I enjoy improvisation, so maybe it's just a way of incorporating it in a new way. Several times during the teaching I thought of the tremendous success of the Jeepform game

The Upgrade

that

I played at Camp Nerdly 2

. Some of the overt game theory applied in that particular improvisation may be a good model for easing people out of their fears and trepidations. Then again, that was another case of having all willing participants.

I'm remaining positive ("yes, and..."), but in so doing avoiding a strong reaction I had to the experience. There was something in that refusal, that fear reaction from the participant, that made me feel a complex wave of negativity. Verbalized that response would, compressed within less than a second, sound something like this, "

Okay, I won't touch you! Hey, guess what? There's stuff I'd rather be doing too, but I've come here in spite of my fears and in the hopes of creating something together. I can tell that's unwelcome, and that pisses me off royal. I get enough of that in auditions. In fact, next time you want an actor to lay off, try 'thank you...'. Just like that: 'THANK you...'. Every actor will

immediately

understand that you aren't buyin' what they're sellin', and get the hell out of there just as fast as he or she can. In fact, maybe I'll do that altogether. No one wants a live experience, no one wants to connect, no one wants a leading man who can't bench press the state of North Dakota. So I'll just go, all right? Will that make your life so much

better

? Will that make it so much

easier? MY. PLEASURE.

"

I'm glad I didn't go there at the moment it happened, but I'm also glad I went there just now. I'm not looking forward to our next go at corporate training (this feeling always reminds me of my private trombone lessons in high school, which I regarded with inevitable terror), but I'm aware that it's simply a challenge to be overcome step-by-step. I do like challenges. I just don't like when people think they have something to gain by avoiding them.

Viva Italia!

Ciao, bello/a. Come stai? Buono/a. Io? Bene, bene, grazie. Ma ho stancissimo, perche sono "jetlagged." Forse. Anche forse perche molto movemente questa volta in Italia.

Believe it or not, my Italian has improved, despite the evidence to the contrary that I willfully submit above (the which is all kinds of wrong, and took me about an hour to put together). It is still woefully inadequate, though, and I'll have to do something about that in the coming months, because Zuppa del Giorno's prospects in Italy -- not to mention other work in conjunction with Italian artists -- is blossoming. We are in the springtime of our, uh . . . soup.

Sorry. Still blaming the jetlag.

Well. I really wanted to catalogue the whole trip day-by-day, as I did last June, but since I killed my laptop in the (actual) spring, and as we tend to go a bit rustic when we visit Madonna Italia, it was not to be. I could try to recreate that effect but, well, it would be pretty boring. Not because we did so little, but because we did so much of the same thing in our first week. We WORKED. As you know from my last entry, Heather and I had to throw a show together specifically for this visit and (as you know from either experience or my previous writings or both) such a process takes exactly as long as it takes. No rushing it. Which means you either give it the time, or you don't. We did, and to the greatest extent we could manage between two American cities and mired in the swamp that is jetlag.

The flight out was delayed an astonishing four hours, all told. It was just Heather and I -- David and the theatre's stage manager, Marybeth Langdon, had preceded us on the 6th. For those of you who've never flown overseas, let me tell you: There is no good time to do it. I thought we were all set, flying overnight. I would just sleep through the thing, losing hours left, right and center, and awake at about noon in sunny Italy. Instead, I slept for maybe a combined hour-and-a-half and awoke around 4:00 in a somewhat less-than-sunny Italy. In fact, it rained daily for the entire first week, and some nights we built a fire in the divinely-bequeathed fireplace our little villa provided. Altogether oddly arduous. But enough of the fluff; on to the stuff.

We've developed our own little community of artists and business folk in central Italy, and that became evident as it determined our schedule on this trip. Rehearsals for Love Is Crazy, But Good were broken up with (and, in one case, integrated into) daily meetings with various of our contacts. Normally these were meetings that coincided with meals or coffee, which is the nice thing about our particular experience of Italy. And, because the US-dollar exchange rate is horrible horrible horrible at present, this often meant inviting folks to lunch or dinner at our place out in the country. (Fortunately for us, David Zarko is a masterly amateur chef.) And that meant that Heather and I spent a lot of time on the patio, either eating or developing the act.

One of our most exciting departures from this scene was to spend time with Angelo Crotti, a new friend there whom we met through Andrea Brugnera. Angelo is an Italian actor specializing in commedia dell'arte and other forms of comic physical theatre; he's been practicing it all his life, and it shows, as he travels internationally to perform and teach. Our introduction to him was to watch him teach a class in traditional commedia dell'arte forms and lazzi to some of Andrea's students, the day after Heather and I arrived. He did some fascinating stuff, that we'll promptly steal and incorporate into our workshops. Perhaps unavoidably, we eventually got wrapped up in the action, in spite of our jet-lagged states. He showed us some incredible animal forms that demanded serious physical commitment AND conditioning, and we were generally working up quite a sweat for a while. LOVED IT. Then we made the mistake of sitting down on a break, and both Heather and I promptly engaged in a struggle against overpowering needs to sleep. That was okay, we figured, because Angelo began the next section with brief lectures on the commedia masks and their corresponding characters. As the comfortable Italian speech pranced merrily over us, he moved on to asking the students to take a mask and perform a solo bit of dialogue with the audience in it. Good, good . . . watching students . . . mustn't take their time away from them, now . . . just . . . watch . . .

Huh-uh. We sure did get called on. "No, no," I feebly protested in my pigeon Italian, "Studenti. Studenti. No occupado (was that Spanish, Jeff?) questa volta." They weren't having it and, frankly, I was a little sick of myself as I said it, too. But, damn, was I spent. It turned out the students were working with Angelo the next day as well, so there was plenty of time for everyone, and up I went to choose a mask from the edge of the beautiful Teatro Boni stage. There they all were, and I waited for one to speak to me. I'm pretty familiar with commedia masks, but have trouble distinguishing sometimes, mainly owing to a certain amount of misinformation I've processed in the years of my informal education on the subject. For example, I had learned at some time that Pantalone had a long nose, because he was "nosey" and a phallic character. Well, he often is, but it turns out that Capitano is the one more famous for having a prominent phallus on his face, and Pantalone can have a hook or squarish nose as well. So I stood there, throwing out my presumptive conclusions, and just picked a mask which appealed. It was yellow-brown-er than the rest, with no hair accents, but lots of wrinkles and a hook nose. The point of the exercise was to improvise the mask's nature based on how it looked and felt, but I felt obliged to announce I didn't know who I had gotten as I left the stage to make my entrance. Turns out I had gone right ahead and picked up Pulcinella.

Pulcinella holds a certain fascination for me, not the least of which is owing to a desire Heather and I have to someday create our own show based on the Punch & Judy puppet theatre of Victorian England ("Punch" was inspired by commedia troupes' various "Pulcinelli"). He's also a tricky one, as his overall shape seemed to evolve from a couple of different regions of Italy, and thereby his personality can be a bit more mercurial than some. Plus he rarely gets mentioned in what I've read and heard about the standard characters; he's well-known enough, but somewhat amorphous. Typically--from what I understand--he's a trickster, with a hunch back and a prominent belly. At that moment, however, I tried to wipe all that from my mind and briefly regard the mask offstage (as Friend Patrick taught me to do) for clues about who he would make me before breathing in and putting him on.

Let me just interrupt myself to say that, though it read as a certain groggy fear at the time, it was an absolute thrill to step out on a classical Italian stage and perform in mask for a couple of actors trained in commedia dell'arte.

My mask (for truly, I made no effort toward Pulcinella once I set foot on stage) worked pretty well for me, I think. Everyone performed through a sort of guided interview with Angelo, which was interesting in this case owing to his emphatic English and my god-awful Italian, but we did get along. I began as a rather obstinate fellow, with a supportive cushion of arrogance around him that held up his body in quirky ways -- a hip raised, hands bent outward from the wrists, bird-like neck, all very vain, yet through energy instead of ease. It was (I believe) as though I knew I was the greatest, yet also knew I had to convince everyone else of it as well. I thought of the Italians (to generalize grossly for a moment) and how they all seem to be great about putting what they've got out there and loving it, and so I did that as a guy who really didn't have anything to brag about, but didn't know it. Eventually Angelo quizzed him (me) on how to seduce a woman, and I claimed complete expertise, saying and demonstrating all it took was a rapidly thrust hip from me. He had me bring up a couple of students and work it on them, and I got to play with success, selling something as success, and undeniable failure which is promptly denied. It was great fun.

Angelo -- who is also simply an incredibly funny guy, with what seems like a kind word for everyone and an endless need to be active -- also helped us with our piece two days later. The beginning of that rehearsal, I can confidently say, was the lowest point of my mood and confidence in what we were planning to perform on Saturday. We demonstrated what we had first thing, and it suddenly felt woefully inadequate, trite, and a really, really bad idea altogether. It was Thursday, two days before we were set to perform in Il Teatro che Cammina, and it was grim. I was embarrassed, frankly, and frustrated with the circumstances of our constantly pulling things together at the last minute, never seeming to have the money or time to develop or explore, and all that was really a jagged veneer of emotion covering fear: maybe I'm just not cut out for this work. Ugh. So bad.

Keeping with the Tarantino/Rashomon theme here: The performances on Saturday were not an unqualified success. We had two showings of the ultimately half-hour clown show, the first at 9:00 pm, and the last at 11:00, all as a part of a festival that took over the town with predominantly physical spectacle such as dance, circus-theatre and street performance. (For once, we were probably the least physically eccentric act on the bill.) Our first show made me want to crawl under the stage and hide; David came up to us afterwards and said, "Well that wasn't that bad," thereby straining his otherwise stalwart reputation for honesty. The second show, however, hummed. It had sound failures on both ends, which should have been fatal for a predominantly choreographed show, but the audience was with us and we all had a tremendous amount of fun and at the end, I felt I had earned their kind applause.

What happened between the two shows was this: We intended to use our little break of less-than-an-hour to explore and see other shows and generally try to forget we had another to do. Instead, we were invited into a building next door by some very kind older gentlemen who had a great view of our stage from their windows. They wanted to make sure we knew we could use the bathroom there (which we needed) and while we were there I discovered that the fly on my costume had popped permanently. I tried to ask them for a paper clip or something, explaining my situation through gesture, and they set about raiding office supplies for me. One withdrew a binder clip. "I don't think that'll work." Then he pulled out a stapler, jokingly. "Ci, ci! Parfetto!" I cried, and he, hesitating somewhat, handed it to me. I promptly stapled my wool pants closed with the knowledge that within the first ten minutes of the show I'd tear them off anyway. They found that pretty amusing, and then one of them reached into a drawer and pulled out scissors, gesturing mischievously toward my crotch. Here we were, almost completely incapable of communicating with language, and the lazzi was flowing. From there they invited us all to sit with them, and Heather worked her Italian magic on them. A friend of theirs, Silvano, the oldest yet, visited, was introduced to us, then came from out of the back room with wine and water for everyone. We relaxed. We laughed. And, after all that, Silvano worked to rope audience in to our space for the second show, possibly single-handedly ensuring us that our little courtyard performance would be full for its closing.

The hours spent working with Angelo on our piece were similar to our time with the old men, and this commonality was also in the spirit Heather and I found in our second performance. Angelo took us through what we had in terms of structure, and broke it down into bits -- bits we had already, and bits we inspired him to add. Given a little time to overcome our initial shame and frustration, we found with him a familiar game of discovery, getting excited about our connections and ideas, and really building from one moment to the next. It was brilliant. It reminded me, suddenly and unexpectedly, and from the midst of a recent history of disappointing efforts on my part, of what I love about this work and what keeps me excited about it. With Angelo we returned to our sense of play, with the old men we rediscovered our love of people, of communication, and in the final shot at the show we finally figured out how to have fun with it, and with our audience. Hell: It even happened in a three, looking at it that way!

That performance wasn't the be-all-end-all by a long shot, but it was shot of life that I had certainly been looking for lately. Maybe our enthusiasm had something to do with knowing we were being relieved of a great stress after our final show, and maybe our ease with the audience had a lot to do with their greater numbers and better understanding of what to expect. Nevertheless, coincidence or hard work or that lovely synchronicity of the two, it was a beautiful thing. And it didn't take much longer for the sun to start shining in Umbria again.

God Bless the US

Last night, after a weekend's worth of rehearsals, I was involved in another staged reading of

Justin Warner

's play,

American Whupass

. (You may recall

my last encounter with this play

[and with the dude from

Clerks

]

over a year ago.) When last we left

American Whupass

, it was slotted to be performed in New Jersey in the fall of this year. Since I hadn't heard anything more about this production since, I thought to myself, "Aw. They found someone else. Aw. Poop." Exactly like that. I enjoy the play very much, and continually find new things to pursue in portraying "my" character in it, Terry Bowen, campaign-manager savant extraordinaire. To my pleasant surprise--and, I'm sure, Justin's extreme frustration--the play was dropped from production, which is why I hadn't heard hide nor hair since, until Justin emailed me asking me to audition for a new group producing a reading of it.

Theatre Resources Unlimited

is producing staged readings in the next month for a panel of producers to provide feedback, and

AW

was put up in this series last night.

The venue is an interesting one. By and large, the intention of

the reading series

is to give feedback on

producing

a given play; that is, getting it up in a venue, marketing it, etc. This means that for the first time we were performing the play without the intention of getting feedback for improving the script itself. We were hoping to present the best product possible, in order to win over producers interested in doing just that. It remains to be seen where the play will get next as a result, but Justin is a brilliant worker, and there's little doubt that he'll pursue its production to the last. Incidentally,

Friend Todd

is appearing in the third installment in this series, which is the conflict that prevents him from joining

Zuppa del Giorno

in Italy this month. Small enough, world?

I had a hell of a good time working on this play again. I always do, but this time was different in many ways. We've never had so much time to work on the play itself in prelude to performing it, and we had a very insightful and professional director in

Nancy Robillard

, who saw me personally through a lot of discoveries about my role. (To top it all off, we were rehearsing in a penthouse in Tribeca, which ain't half bad.

Bill Fairbairn

was amongst our cast, and his apartment ain't half bad, lemme tell you.)

American Whupass

is a play that deals in logical absurdities, yet it's all grounded in real-life examples and motivations. I've written about its unique quality before, so I won't go on at length, but I will take a moment to observe that it's strange that such a quality should be so unique. People love this brand of comedy, at once ridiculous, yet perfectly believable. It goes back to ancient Greece. Why should it be so rare these days?

It all went down at

The Players Theatre

, a cool space with a narrow seating area that was very evocative of a sense of depth. (Of course, no backstage space to speak of because we are, after all, talking about New York real estate.) I think the reading went well. We had some good audience reactions, and

Friend Kira

was in attendance to provide some complimentary words afterwards. It's just possible, though, that I played my role a little too close to the cuff.

Bowen is a duplicitous dude who starts out seeming very Johnny America, only to reveal more and more his win-at-any-cost perspective. I've played him variously over a span of nearly three years now (That's nearly like a quasi-successful sitcom [if said sitcom just featured the same episode with minor variations over and over again]!), and what appealed to me at first is still my favorite aspect: He believes in what he's doing, and that the results make him "the good guy." An actor can get down with that, man! It's also great to play him completely straight in the beginning, when he seems pure, with an awareness of his orchestrations behind the scenes.

However, the play has a kind of "avalanche of absurdity" effect, integrated not only into the writing but also into the dramatic action, and I think I missed the boat on riding that this time around. My affection for playing Bowen straight should have relented a bit more, and I should have let myself get a bit more wrapped up in the action. A classic example: When the daughter of the senator Bowen is trying to keep in the Senate enters the race against him, Bowen tells the senator, "You've got to stop her before it's too late, Wayne. There is no template for this. No template!" I understand this moment implicitly. It's best when "No template!" comes screeching out almost involuntarily. The man's career hangs in the balance, not to mention the public safety of hundreds of the senator's constituents. On Monday, I played the line very sincerely, but failed to allow my voice to crack, which is something that has happened in every other reading of the scene I've ever done. A small thing, to be sure. The devil is in the details.

To what do I attribute this change? I'm so glad I asked. I've been mulling it over for a little while, and have a few possible explanations. The first, and simplest, is just as I've said above: I'm enamored of playing the character straight. He functions well in this way and, oddly enough, feels more loathsome to me by the end (which I relish). The second is that I may be making this change in my performance in general these days; as I grow older, I'm looking for subtler cues and effects, ways of accomplishing the same things without as much noisy energy as I might have opted for in earlier years. This venerable-sounding choice should also be viewed in the light of fairly regular feedback I've received over the years that my choices as an actor need to be "toned down," or that I need to be "calmed down" for a straight play. In other words, the choice may not be all chosen. So we'll call that point of possible explanation "second-point-five." Third and lastly, it may just be my body feeling different. I can't deny that the sensations from my body are a huge part of my acting, and in recent years (be it a result of age or injury or what-have-you) I've needed to work more to generate that more-manic energy that drives screwball comedy.

I'd like to find a way in to that energy again for myself. Recently I've responded better to the clown work in part, I think, because it contains built-in silences and a sensitive response. Sure, it can be back-breaking and impulsive, too, but it feels essentially sensitive to me. Screwball is different, and it's something I can do very well. I don't ever want to lose that. In reading

Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of

, I gained a new perspective on how our supposed definitions of high- and low-brow culture came about. As a young nation, we screwed that up pretty good, in my opinion, and have stuck to it. Redeem screwball, friends. Go a little crazy now and then.