Type Face

I find it really fascinating when I can't seem to get into a particular character. We've become very comfortable with the notion that every actor has a "type," or at least particular strengths that lend themselves to one sort of character over another. Why shouldn't we accept this? Grouping by type is something with which we are not only very comfortable, but it's often a necessary, day-to-day survival skill. When I get bored, I sometimes seek out

commedia dell'arte types

on the street. I'm particularly fond of my ability to recognize clipboard-types

even without their clipboards

. Saturday I found myself walking along 10th Street when I caught the eye of a rather earnest looking man of about my age standing outside a building entrance. There was nothing special to provoke alarm about this encounter. There was no clipboard, no name tag, no eccentric clothing nor any thought-provoking "stress test" paraphernalia. Yet I instinctively knew I had come across a clipboard-type, and immediately engaged my evasive maneuvers. I averted eye contact before his mouth could quite open, and my pace became still more brisk, and once again I was saved by my trusty iPod (I should nickname him Tonto) from any cries of endorsement that may have been pelted at my rapidly retreating rear. Thanks, Tonto!

He could have been a Dianeticist, he could have been an Obama/McCain/Bloomberg supporter, he could have been lost, and now I feel like a total douche. What if he was lost? Oh well: Builds character. The point is, I narrowly saved myself at least a minute-and-a-half of free time, which was of course promptly consumed by my wait for the N train. When it comes to character-building, there's little better for it than absolute, unequivocal failure. Or so I've been raised to believe. This is part of why I'm such a nearly decent actor now -- repeated character failures. I seem to do just fine with romantic types; youngish believers; broad-strokes villains; anal-retentive authority figures; clumsy sorts and quiet intellectuals. These are "types" I can slip into with relative ease, and in various combinations. I'm rather fond of the anal-retentive romantic, just as an example. If you ask me, however, to do a volatile authority figure, or a homeless veteran, or a frighteningly aggressive gangster . . . I can't guarantee you what you're going to get, nor how convincing whatever you get will actually be. You may scratch your head. You may say, "Jeff, I asked for a broken-down farmer who's contemplating selling his wife to support his kids, and what you gave me seems more like

Robocop . . . on a unicorn

."

And so maybe there is something to this "type"ing. Certainly it applies to most screen work one can readily imagine. I do not begrudge the screen its intricacies. However, as a character-actor enthusiast, I can't help but feel that nothing is impossible. More to the point, I can't help but feel that anything is possible. I believe people all need pretty much the same things -- survival and joy (in that order) -- and the seemingly infinite variety of expression to be found amongst the people of the world can be emulated in great detail, by anyone interested enough to commit the time and effort. Maybe if I had more time with

A Lie of the Mind

, I could have developed a better grasp of Frankie. Maybe the praise I received for my portrayal of a gangster in

Riding a Rocket Ship Into the Sun

was merited not because I managed a unique approach to the character, but because people simply believed in me as a sadist. It's a world full of possibility! Robocops on unicorns abound, and are accepted by all!

This question of the validity of transformation, the value of a character actor in today's world, is one I have been asking myself for some time. I don't think I'll ever get a solid answer going; it's more of a meditation. Lately, my meditation has taken me into the realm of interpersonal communication. Specifically, I've been contemplating how to reprogram myself (for a play or some other socially acceptable [relatively] paradigm) to respond instinctively using someone else's emotional landscape. More specifically, to respond as such under a parameter of the feminine. More specifically still, to respond as such under a specific (told you I was being specific) female's parameter. To wit: What makes this one woman tick? Try it yourself. Imagine someone of the opposite sex whom you know and try to get inside his or her head. For the sake of anonymity and my future happiness, let's call my particular case study "Geggin." It's absurd to imagine anyone who lives in the continental U.S. having this name, and thus her identity is completely and unambiguously protected.

In approaching a character that is unlike you, it's best to lure its attention away from you with a raw steak. Toss it at least twenty feet to your left or right, then scale the . . . oh, wait. That's approaching an evil millionaire's mansion, guarded as it is by vicious Rottweilers. When approaching a

character that is unlike you

, forget the steak, and focus instead on its origins. Why? Because Freud says so. Why else? Well, because if we're all driven by the same categories of appetite, what's left to define us are our genetic modifiers and the story thus far. Take me, for example. I'm an emotionally sensitive person, in the best and worst senses. I get this from my parents, and from being raised in a house that advocated psychotherapy and its techniques, whilst simultaneously being an extremely loving and nigh gratuitously emotionally honest refuge. Plus my mom's a minister and my dad loves opera.

Of course

I listen to your problems, and respond to simple rudeness with reason-crippling rage.

In contrast, this "Geggin" grew up in a household that got through a lot by soaring on the wings of their senses of humor, said senses being made up largely of goose down and sarcasm (it's an incredibly strong-yet-lightweight adhesive, sarcasm). Thus, whereas I may respond to a particularly coarse moment of reality television with wincing, and cringing, and running into the next room to check on the aloe plant, "Geggin" can eat it up with laughter and relish and a crowing, "Oh no! Oh!" Followed, naturally, by entirely unrepentant giggles. Had we been raised in one another's environments, we might not simply switch these reactions to

Rock of Love: Charm School

, but it is a little piece of information that helps in understanding the background of a character such as "Geggin." Were I to play her in a show, I would do well to train myself to respond similarly to such nauseating moments of schadenfreude, and this along with other behavior practices might help me to eventually understand the mental and emotional connections that allow the unbridled appreciation of television that is utterly senseless time-wasting trash.

But let me not mislead you into seeing such analysis as being only of use to actors. Nay. Indeed, committing just a little time to contemplating others' motivations and personalities can be an invaluable aid in simply communicating with them at all. We are offered insight into people more often than we perhaps appreciate, busy as we are with defending our own borders. In a sense, this kind of perception of others' motivations is blocked by the idea of "types." We never know if the rigorously tattooed young man next to us on the subway isn't in fact an incredibly gentle chap, nor whether the old woman picking out an umbrella in the pharmacy isn't a dominatrix. We need to think we know, but we don't know, not until we open up to the possibility of it, of anything. There are a lot of advantages to being open in that way. We'll probably get more of what we want from people when we understand them with more specificity. Perhaps more importantly, being open like that may allow people to understand us better.

Whether we like it or not, actually -- because this understanding could extend to clipboard-types. Then again, maybe that guy held the secret to converting "Geggin"'s taste for VH1 into an enthusiasm for the oeuvre of

Tony Jaa

. Hm. I wonder if I can still catch him down on 10th . . .

North Pocono High: Day 5

It is done. Our five-day residency at

North Pocono High School

under the auspices of the

NEIU

wrapped today, and I must admit that it has been even more of a learning experience for me than I had anticipated. It's a good policy the NEIU has, of ensuring at least an initial five days' work for new rostered artists. It was coincidence that

ETC

had an association with

Geri Featherby

, and she snatched us up for these free (for the school, that is) introductory days. It may have a made things easier on us, ultimately, to be supported and endorsed by a teacher who knew so well what kind of work we had created, and what we could offer the school. I still feel that we learned an incredibly useful lesson or two about curriculum-building and teaching within a high school setting. Going in, I felt fairly prepared, backed up by years of experience teaching workshops to all manner of groups. Now I know how wrong I had been, and how much I've not only learned, but have yet to learn.

Wherever possible, we wanted to make today about pulling together the various experiences of the week into unified, practical application. The approach we took in the Shakespeare class was to put a lot of control into the students' hands. We began warming up before the period began, and spent very little time with it in the actual class period, in order to maximize class time for scene work. We divided them into their groups for their assigned scenes for

Taming of the Shrew

, then split them in two halves for Heather and I to work amongst. For approximately half an hour we moved from group to group, offering suggestions for the work they would present to their peers at the end of the period, emphasizing the lessons in specificity, improvisation and character-building that we taught throughout the week. I had three groups, and had to move rapidly between them. If it hadn't been so busy, it would have been frustrating, to have so little time. However, we saw progress, and at the end every group performed a part of a scene to good improvement. I watched and enjoyed, bitter-sweet with the desire to continue working with them, excited to think of

Zuppa del Giorno

's approaching foray into Shakespeare's world. At the end, we thanked them, and they thanked us back, all like fellow collaborators. I hope to see them again before too long.

The gym classes, of course, didn't have the same daily consistency of our other courses, so there was very little emotional context to our work for those two periods. We learned some good lessons on how to wrangle massive groups for acrobalance yesterday, and applied them to good effect. Both yesterday and today I used squat-thrusts for the initial warm-up, and noticed that these worked well if you didn't warn the students what they'd be doing. I asked them to squat, then go into a plank (or push-up position), then squat again and stand. Then I just did the same thing all together with a four count, and everyone quickly got the idea with a minimum of commentary. It helps with such exercises to be a little competitive with the teenagers. (Helps, that is, until the next morning.) Aptly enough, both classes were disrupted in one way or another. The first lost their seniors for a group picture, nearly halving our group size. Something of a relief, frankly, for at least my voice. At the end of the second class, a fire drill went off. Still, we got good training squeezed in there. Even if we didn't get to know our students much in these classes, we did become pretty friendly with the teachers, and that was very rewarding. I really feel there was a progress in which they were skeptical of us to begin with -- having very little information as to what to expect from us -- and ultimately came to be satisfied with what we had to teach and how effectively we did it. We discussed teaching techniques for such bizarre circumstances as only a P.E. class can offer, and a couple of the teachers even volunteered that they'd love to get a group to see

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

.

Exactly how to culminate our work in the acting class, our last class of the whole experience, was a subject of much discussion betwixt Heather and I. Ultimately, we agreed that it would be good to structure it as much as possible, but to hand the actual creation of a scene or scenes over to the students. We began them with another game, then worked on group counting up to 20 (in which they succeeded). Then we did some "Yes, and..." storytelling in a circle, in which each person contributes a line to a developing story. This ended up being a little superfluous to what they created, but it was our idea that they could use whatever story was told there for source material for their assignment. The assignment was to, within assigned groups ("assigned" because even by the end of the week clear divisions were visible in the class social dynamic), create a scene with a beginning, middle and end, incorporating one rhythm of three, one pratfall and specific first and last lines of spoken dialogue that would be the same for all groups. The topper was that they had only one minute to discuss this scene -- enough to sketch an outline, not enough to avoid improvisation. We did a couple of rounds of this. It was effective insofar as it got the students working together with a minimum of fuss and put an emphasis on improvisation as an acting tool. I still wanted to take them a little farther out of their safety zones, somehow, but have to concede that for many of them this is an ambitious goal for five days' work. I smiled a lot in their presentations, thinking of how much they had to offer to this work, how real they are when they are (however momentarily) focused on the problem at hand more so than their own insecurity. At the class' close, we thanked one another, and a couple of the students who had peeped maybe twice during the whole week went out of their way to say goodbye. I respect my teachers so much more today than I had before this experience.

I don't know what the future holds for the relationship between Zuppa del Giorno and the NEIU. It had been our hope that this partnership would allow us to enhance our presence in a community at large, and compensate us to a degree that made a full-time commitment to that outreach sustainable. However, the NEIU paid us for this initial contract as though Heather and I were a single artist, under the heading "Zuppa del Giorno." The pay is still decent (which just goes to show what a generous organization they are), but won't quite justify my continuous participation when weighed against the time spent away from employment in New York. So, unless we can reach a different understanding, Heather may be in large part taking over the practice of this particular branch of Zuppa del Giorno. I hope not, though. I hope not, because through this experience I can see the tremendous potential for taking our work to another environment and integrating it and ourselves. I hope not because this week has been tremendous for all involved, I believe, and I also believe it will only get better with more experiences. Most of all, it's simply wonderful to participate in discovery.

North Pocono High: Day 4

This has been an incredibly physical day for us. I'd say it stands close to our rehearsal process for

Legal Snarls

for sheer continual physical work. (Though not even close to

Silent Lives

, for which we each became demi-gods of falling down, and from great heights.) In Shakespeare we worked on character archetypes, in P.E. we moved ahead into actual acrobalance instruction, which we continued into the acting class. Most exhausting, really, was the second gym class, for which we have somewhere from sixty to seventy students, the same class we had third period Monday. I could use a good, soothing cup of tea with lemon and honey. Fortunately, my only obligation tonight is dinner with

Friend John Beck

. I'll be sore in the morning, but not for lack of rest and placid recreation.

It was a fitful night of sleep for me, I confess. We were tackling a lot of new stuff today, and I suppose I was still riding out my left-over anxiety from yesterday's interruption. Heather and I allowed ourselves a slow internal warm-up in the process of getting coffee, getting there and getting into a constructive mental space. By the time our first class started filtering in, though, we had found ourselves again, and the class went great. Our sponsor there, Geri Featherby, happened to be there to observe, and wasn't disappointed by the physical characterizations we managed to coax out of that room full of teenagers. It's a lot of fun to explain to high schoolers that, yes, it's perfectly valid to

try

different things, to add their own interpretations to an ongoing cultural conversation. As we explained to them commedia tropes like the dottoring Dottore, full of hot air, and the greedy Pantalone's money-pouch placement (directly over his codpiece), they saw how free they were to interpret a character. Eventually we had a sort of runway demonstration of their contemporary takes on the archetypes. It was very funny, very original, very gratifying.

The P. E. classes were ones we had a lot of uncertainty about. How can we teach safe acrobalance to so many? You may recall that

Friend Patrick

and I had a similar class size at the

KC/ACTF of 2007

, but that was all college-age theatre enthusiasts. Here were we dealing not only with a mixed group of high-school ages, but ones who had neither heard of our work, nor had any immediate context for what we relatively strange persons were about to subject them. In acrobalance, there are inescapable challenges regarding trust. It seemed we had unintentionally set a similar challenge for ourselves and our students simply in proposing to teach them this skill. It went . . . great. Really. It did! My voice may be a little gravelly (read: extra sexy) for a week or more, but the students were attentive and interested and -- and this is really the best part -- daring. We just taught them an angel, the most core move of the style of acrobalance I learned, but that's plenty scary enough. And everyone had a go for at least one turn of basing, flying or spotting (potentially the most important position). Some tried more than one role. We had them in groups of four, created by first having them make a pair and then match themselves to another pair, which I strongly recommend. It saved time, and got people interacting as members of a team more immediately.

As I said above, the day ended with

still more acro!

This time with our theatre kids. We taught them a thigh stand (just to mix it up a bit), and I was reminded of how effective this work can be with ensemble-building. There are all different types in this class, and I suspect all different motivations for being there. In working on thigh stand, we did it all together, one pair at a time, with everyone else spotting in a tight circle. It was a great feeling. The pair was insulated by their peers, and in this way we managed to get some people to participate who might otherwise have quickly bowed out. I would have preferred that everyone try either flying or basing (a couple opted only to spot) but we had a majority anyway, and some tried both positions. At the end, there was a very good feeling of accomplishment in the class, which is something we've been struggling for most of the week with them.

Rest. Meatloaf (the food; not the music). Tiger Balm (TM). Tomorrow we close the show.

North Pocono High: Day 3

Today was, in many ways, unexpected. We ended up teaching two-and-a-half classes today, because just as we were ready to start the second period, the school went into a lock-down. I was confused by this; I'd never heard the term before. For those of you who haven't spent a lot of time around a high school in recent history, a lock-down is a sort of policy enacted in the interests of the students' safety in a time of crisis, or investigation. On notice, everyone goes into their respective classrooms and lock the doors. Well, one of these got timed for today in such a way that we missed out on teaching second-period Phys. Ed. class. To be fair, the announcement apparently informed people that they could continue teaching (it seemed it was simply for a drug check; they brought in drug-sniffing dogs), but they don't get all the announcements in the gymnasium and so we spent over an hour sitting, silent, instead. It's a good practice, given what can happen in a school these days. I was completely unaware of it prior to today.

Before all that, though, we had a great Shakespeare class in the auditorium. Our emphasis today was on the improvisation tenet, "When in doubt, breathe out," and we worked with the students on diaphragmatic breathing, enunciation and diction, and projection. I've been using horse stance to encourage the students to have a strong base for their breath, and they kind of hate it, but in a good, collective groan kind of way. It's working; they're really learning to relax the parts of their bodies they're not using, to ground themselves and deliver powerful voice from the diaphragm. After breathing drills and vocal warm-ups, we ran them through a diction drill, using:

"To sit in solemn silence

on a dull, dark dock,

in a pestilential prison

with a life-long lock,

awaiting the sensation

of a short, sharp shock

from a cheap and chippy chopper

on a big black block."

Then we practiced as a group throwing our voices to the back corner of the auditorium and delivering dialogue with power, before taking individuals up on stage with a line from their scene work and working them through clarity and intention in delivery. Heather and I would take turns coaching the student on stage and standing at the rear of the space, checking for clarity and projection. It was continued good work from this early group. Sadly, time got away from us again and we didn't get to everyone, but we made sure the rest of the class paid attention and practiced good audience habits. Hopefully some of what we do will stick, and they'll continue a practice. Tomorrow we plan to explore the use of character archetypes in Shakespeare (which I'm very much looking forward to), and we'll be back in the auditorium Friday to pull it all together.

Our one gym class was abbreviated to just barely a half an hour, so we kept the freshmen and sophomores in their street clothes and sped them through stretching and the most basic partner balances. Everyone was fairly hyperactive after the excitement/anxiety of the lock-down, but we managed to come together by the end of the half-period, and circle push-ups are always good for a bonding experience. We've ended every class thus far with this conditioning exercise. The way it works is that you have everyone in a circle (a rather large circle in our case) and put them in the "up" position of a push-up. When you tell them they only have to do one push-up, they relax a bit. When you tell them we're doing them one-at-a-time, and everyone must stay in the "up" position until we're through, they groan, but don't quite grasp just how hard they'll be working by the end. As it progresses, the energy builds, people moan and groan, but they're enduring together, so that by the end you can give them a choice: to keep it up, or join you in a set of ten or twenty push-ups more. Maybe this seems like torture to you, Gentle Reader? I can only say that, if you're there, you feel the camaraderie afterwards.

In our last class of the day, we revisited improvisation and set some new challenges for the students. We began with more team-building games -- group counting again, and blob tag. After a quick review of the improvisation principles, we set the students to two games: What Are You Doing? and Sit, Stand, Lie. In doing these, we asked them to remember to respond with a "Yes, and" attitude, and all that good stuff. WAYD is good for getting students to react impulsively, and rely on one another for their actions, and SSL reminds the participants that they need to pay close attention to one another if they hope to build a story together. The interesting thing about game play in this context is trying to keep the emphasis more on teamwork, less on competition. The games tend to teach themselves in this regard; they work better when people are working together. However, more inexperienced improvisers need encouragement to leave their safety zones, to trust their scene partners more and more . . . and still more. It was difficult to invite this observation in such a short time, but that's just the nature of a school day. If we get one thing across in our remaining days in this class, I'd like it to be a priority for fostering trust, for creating ensemble. Tomorrow we'll tackle this by way of acrobalance work. The physical can often be a quicker teacher than the conceptual.

North Pocono High: Day 2

Remember when I posted about the infamous "sophomore slump" that inevitably occurs with a second night's performance? (See

8/15/07

.) Of course you do! Well: It's more of a guideline than a rule, actually. Today we had a great day of teaching, in our every class. It would be foolish to try and attribute the success to any one general factor. Suffice it to say that whatever else may have contributed, we knew better what we were about today, and so did the rest of the school, and that seemed to grease the wheels just enough to allow everyone to relax and enjoy more.

In Shakespeare we latched on to the improvisation tenet, "When you get stuck, do something physical." Using it as a kind of theme for the day's (read: 43 minutes') work, we warmed them up quickly, played a quick game, and then ran them through three variations on developing strong physical characterization. Typically, we spend at least three workshops of 2-3 hours each on this part, but we wanted to at least point out the tools for them to return to if they are so motivated in future work. We had them walk the room on a grid, taking away the burden of decision-making a bit, then guided them into different postures using body-center specifics, animal forms and appetites to help them discover interesting shapes, pacing and rhythm. They took to it beautifully. My only regret was that we ran right up against the bell, leaving no time to review and process in stillness. We had also hoped to review their texts with them for physical cues and clues to their characters today. We've decided to attack some vocal work (in the large auditorium) tomorrow, and then integrate both days' work into the text Thursday, instead.

Physical Education was much the same for our first period as it had been yesterday, and today was another day for taking our time to lay a groundwork of physical awareness. Neither period had the immense numbers of Monday's third-period class. In the second period, however, we had our first freshman/sophomore group. They did very well indeed. In fact, it was easier to hold their attentions, by and large. It's clear to me that when we see them again on Friday, we'll need to take it slow, make sure everyone is both supported and challenged. Tomorrow is our big challenge in P.E., however, as we'll only see those two classes the one day. With period three today, we demonstrated some of our acrobalance to give them an idea of what we were training them for. It was well-received, and I think we'll start both classes with that tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, we'll get to partner-stretching sooner so we can go farther with it and offer them some of the insight the classes who have us twice this week will receive.

Finally, the acting class. We had a much better day today. Our strategy for incorporating more game play certainly helped, but I think also the students had simply come to trust us a bit better over the twenty-four hours between. We began with a very quick warm-up, then played "Grandma's Footsteps" (otherwise known as "Red Light/Green Light"). That got them alert, and we brought them in for group counting up, wherein one person counts one number at a time, listening for their turn, trying to get up to a certain number. This was a nice way of reincorporating them as a team while maintaining a sense of play. From there we moved into some of our standard exercises for learning about rhythm, comic threes and stops, or doing one thing at a time. Still in a circle, we did spit-takes, trying to find a distinct beat in each moment (drink - process - spit) and then a rhythm as we continued around the circle. After that, we did the dollar-bill exercise, wherein the students are asked to cross the room on their way to somewhere, discover a dollar bill on the ground, and make off with it. We spent some time on this, and they accepted adjustments very well I thought, neither fighting them nor cowering from repetition. We ended working on staged trips, and trying to make them spontaneous and an event. They did very well and seemed to enjoy the technique work. Tomorrow we see about working that into the improvisation groundwork.

I'm exhausted and, frankly, expect to be every evening this week. We're having some callbacks for background players for

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

tonight from 7:00 to 10:00., for which I need to be both acute and participatory. I'ma go nap now . . .