A Little Inside

Last night was the first on-our-feet rehearsal for the debut comedy I'm performing in:

Love Me

. It's written by

Jason Grossman

, directed by

Daryl Boling

, and features two actors with whom I've worked before as well:

Laura Boling

(nee Schwenninger) and

Ridley Parson

. So in many ways, the show is a fairly epic reunion. And in others, I'm not acting with these people at all.

It's a unique role.

The play concerns itself with a struggling young actor-turned-playwright living in the city, looking for love, and the various misadventures this engenders amongst his friends and love interests. This fellow, Charlie, has an inner monologue that's realized aloud on stage. I play Charlie's inner monologue. Now, the play as it was originally written simply used a voice-over for the inner monologue (henceforth, "I.M."), but Daryl thought it would be interesting to have a physical personification, and presto: me. Jason's done some rewrites to accommodate this notion, but by-and-large we're in a process of discovery about how the concept might play out.

Last night was a very interesting, probably evenly-matched mix of exciting revelation and humbling reality check. On the one hand, this role allows for some tremendous and unconstrained acting choices; on the other, it practically demands such choices. My expressions can be delightfully hyperbolic when it works, since they're the instinctive responses of someone's private thoughts, but it's also a bit like acting in a vacuum. More than a bit. I was surprised to find, last night, just how tough that would be. We had a moment here or there at which someone would accidentally acknowledge me on stage, and it was always funny, but by the end of the evening I found myself wishing it happened more. It is tough to act alone.

It's also good practice, and particularly good practice for some of my clown training. Since much of what I.M. does is judge his analogue self, I'm also reminded of The Action Collective's recent workshop (see

4/29/10

) with

Raïna von Waldenburg

. In other words, this role is an interesting convergence of my past experiences and my current perspectives on acting. It's also an uncompromising position for one who has been avoiding the bare-faced vulnerability of clown work for some time to be in, but sometimes that's exactly the sort of situation one needs to see past something. I hope that's the case here but, either way, there's nothing to do now but commit like crazy.

Perhaps the most interesting part of it all is learning what works and what doesn't in terms of working with my alter ego, played by

Aaron Rossini

. Last night we worked on the first two scenes, and the final one, so I was introduced and had a good scene of just me and ... uh ... me, then found out how it would be to play with others in the room, then how it all wraps up. Pretty good overview for a first rehearsal. I'm positively more at ease in the scene Aaron and I share alone, at this point, and even in that there were of course spectacular failures last night. I had imagined before we started that I would mostly be playing off of what Aaron chose for the character, but quickly discovered that it was going to be more of a tennis game than that.

Generally speaking, it was working great when I was like an amplified echo of his current moment, or a representation of his creeping, intrusive self-judgment as he moved in one direction or the other. Facing him is tremendous, and we have a really nice moment over a phone on a podium that I understand and helps me contextualize what we're aiming for in the rest of our scenes together.

There is a lot that challenges, too. For example, I am assumed to have an inherent connection to myself (of course) yet when Aaron and I are looking in the same direction . . . I can't look at him for cues as to how he's feeling. Also, in addition to being a bit energetically isolated from the cast, there's a strange Icarusian (is SO a word)

polar

danger of either hyperbolically stealing the scenes, or being painfully extraneous to them. All this, and I should be funny, too.

YAY, CHALLENGES!!!1!

But seriously: Yay, challenges! These are good challenges, and I'm happy to have them, as well as the opportunity to try and be funny for strangers again. I'm working on a show that reunites me with old friends, tackles themes and conventions that are very personal to me and

on top of all that, there's the free reign to be just as physical as I please. This is a good time for that. Let's live aloud, and let out our angels and demons.

Even if just a little, inside.

Comedy in Truth

I was walking home from a dinner with Friend Alison the other night when she started recounting stories of various klutzy moments in her life. In particular, she mentioned a time that she was walking down the street and walked directly into a wall so hard and unexpectedly that she 1) fell right on her butt with 2) legs splayed and 3) skirt up over her head. I, of course, thought this was classically hilarious, and suggested we should get her a camera crew and a YouTube channel, just in case it happens again. She balked at this notion, and we moved on to stories of when we have tripped and fallen UP stairs . . . but I think I can bring her around.

Alison (and I) fall, unexpectedy and dramatically. I own a cat who humps himself to sleep at night. Wife Megan's occasional, inadvertent experiments with grammar. The Internet. These are all funny things--comedy--and all happen without any prompting or effort. In life, comedy is easy and plentiful. In acting, we can make it very difficult for ourselves.

It's a kind of magic trick, a well-executed comic bit, requiring a certain sense of dramatic flare and sleight-of-hand (or foot, or butt, etc.). Except in this trick, the performer is fooled almost as much as the audience. When I teach pratfalls, I regurgitate a good bit of advice that is so timeless, I can't begin to remember who first told me of it. The best way to execute a convincing trip, is to actually trip. You simply trail your back foot over your front heel as it's taking a step forward, so you then have to catch yourself on the other side of that step. That's not the trick, however: anybody can do that. No, the trick is in believing that there is no possible way you will trip, even as you set yourself up for it. That's what makes it spontaneous, and that's what allows everyone to believe the real payoff: your reaction to just having tripped.

Way back in the day, now (we're talking 2001, people), I played a broadly comic character in a little original production called

The Center of Gravity.

Moe Franko was the owner of a gas station, a sort of arrogantly naive fellow who was pretty crass 'cuz he just didn't learn any better. (I grew a mustache for the role; me + mustache = comedy.) At any rate, my hands-down best laugh of the show was one in which a strikingly attractive young woman visits the gas station and is introduced to my character. It's already been established that I'm freshly returned from using the facilities, and when we shake hands, she makes a face, to which I reply, "Oh don't worry, it's just water. It's not urine or anything." Their handshake disengaged, Moe turns away, and his face registers every little realization of how awful the thing he's just said is and, by extension, how awful he probably is. It got a laugh, every single time.

Which can totally and utterly ruin a joke. Anticipation is one of the worst sabotage factors of a good gag, and it applies both to the performer and the audience member. I have botched a perfectly good gag innumerable times through this very error. So why didn't it ever take down the water/urine gag? Well, I was quite young and the woman playing the interloper

was

exotically attractive, and I had a mustache (no, you don't get a photo). So that covered a lot of the sincerity bases in terms of the given circumstances -- I really did feel a little excited, and awful, and embarrassed. Perhaps more importantly, the line felt like something I might say, minus the Texan twang, of course.

I'm thinking about this because I just signed on to act in

an original comedy performing in June

. The role is probably going to require me to stretch my comic imagination, by the prospect of which I'm both excited, and slightly intimidated. It's good to remember that, ultimately, being real is what makes things really funny. I like this about comedy, that it is served best by truth and belief. Sure: It's all very rehearsed, and calculated, like any bit of good theatre. But all of that is for naught if we can't believe in it in the moment. The impact isn't what's funny; it's the way we deal with it afterward. Not the action, but the reaction, and the best reactions come from that very moment, and no other place.

The ACTion COLLECTIVE: ACT V, scene ii - Personal Character - Find Your Voice

"Everything you create comes from here."

Last night The Action Collective held our second in a series of workshops focused on character building, and our first to be led by a guest artist: Raïna von Waldenburg. Raïna is a teacher of Andrew's from NYU's experimental theatre wing, and we met with her a few weeks ago to discuss the possibility of leading a workshop with us, one based on her I Am One Who program of workshops. You can read more about her and her program on the Facebook invitation for the event, but here's a snippet of a description of the approach and goals:

"In a series of improvisations that require the actor to exist in the (power of) now, he/she will be faced with judges, habits, blocks, quirks, and latent talents that he/she has pushed aside. By literally inviting these undesirable parts of him/herself into the work, the actor suddenly has access to impulses that are alive, surprisingly truthful and emotionally resonant. The actor will learn to channel these impulses into acting that is present, open and honest, not forced, pushed or fake."

So: important and intimidating stuff. I was reminded, by her description of the technique and at times in practice, of the initial work Friends Heather, Todd and I did with Grey Valenti learning red-nose clowning. It involves that kind of sheer vulnerability and sincerity -- the very sorts of things I've been working rather hard (though somewhat subconsciously) to avoid in the past year. It also, however, has some important distinctions from that Lecoq-esque clown work, as I was to discover in the course of the evening.

An important part of the process has to do with identifying personal "judges," or voices of criticism within our own hearts and minds, and understanding them as characters. Raïna led each of us from theorizing what these individual, major judgments may be, through exploring them as people and finding a dialogue with them, right on to turning our judges into very promising characters in their own rights. She was incredibly present and listening and, though the work progressed very evenly over the course of three hours, you could tell that she was constantly responding to what was happening in the room, adapting our direction based on the "conversation" between students and teacher, or seekers and guide. Moreover, she did it all in such a way that we really had to give ourselves over to the work, because that was all we had to work with. Yet it was never strict, or forced. At least, not forced by her; there was plenty of forced work going on, whenever one of us got defensive or confused in an exercise.

A personal example: After some discussion of our personal judges, we began the exercises with practicing being open and available--present--with an audience. No need to do anything in particular, just don't retreat inward as you maintain eye contact and connection. This gradually developed in our observations and discussions into an informal rating system of 5 to 1 for how open we felt, 5 being not at all, 1 being as open as possible. One exercise along these parameters that she gave us was to start at 5 with everyone, and at some point in the course of 30 seconds flip into a 1 state. I found this really, really difficult (never really did get it) and in the course of my efforts, Raïna encouraged me to give voice to whatever impulse was preventing me from doing something so simple (my words, not hers). Eventually in the course of another 30-second attempt I twisted up my right elbow and neck in some abstract expression of frustration and sneered, "F@#$ this...." And that was good. And that was what we needed to move forward. Admitting my judgment of the exercise was how I could develop further into the work.

I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone last night learned something close to the level of a personal revelation or two (or, in my case, about a half-dozen). We were all working very hard, bravely, vulnerably and sometimes even without personal constraint. By the end, we were one-by-one improvising entire scenarios comprised of just us, and all the judges and judged that battle daily within us. Here was one of the important distinctions from the clown work that I've done, and the one that very nearly made me too defensively to effectively do the work: the naming of our judges. This requires a level of discussion and reflection that I believe actors tend to resist, because we're conditioned to -- afraid, aptly enough, of being judged as narcissistic and cerebral. And we resist it because it's frankly terrifying to acknowledge, to encourage, our judgments of ourselves. Adam Laupus made a pretty concise observation about it last night when he said that by naming one's judges, you begin to take their power back from them.

Apart from all that personal benefit, however, is a benefit of pure acting technique. This is an amazingly wonderful practice that bridges that strange divide between practices that help prepare for rehearsal and ones that are actually useful in rehearsal (for example, you would not [should not {yes; I'm judging}]) pull out the Meisner repetition exercise in the middle of rehearsing the last scene of The Glass Menagerie. This I Am One Who practice gives us a way to connect better with ourselves and our audiences, but also adds a powerful tool to the character-creation toolkit. It's genuine and impulse-based, breaks us out of habit, and it literally creates powerful characters for an actor to use. It's not often these days that I feel that sense of my perception of the acting process expanding, a feeling that I came to expect regularly in my studies at college. Last night, I felt that again, and I'm grateful to Ms. von Waldenburg for that.

In this sense, last night's event was a tremendous success for one of the goals of The Action Collective -- to provide actors with a space to do the work for which there is little time (or, in some cases, too much judgment) to accomplish in a typical rehearsal process. To enrich actors, instead of merely offering support. We may soon be making changes to the way the AC works, and what kind of work it takes on, but I'm encouraged by this latest workshop to maintain that priority. It's too important and too rare to neglect.

Gary C. Hopper

"

Acting!

"

"

Theatre

is my

life!

"

I received most of my formal acting training in the undergraduate program at

Virginia Commonwealth University

. Lots of factors contributed to my decision to attend college there. For example, I didn't make it into William & Mary; had I, I would have definitely gone, and my parents would definitely be much poorer, even to this day. When I enrolled, I wasn't even committed to being an actor -- I was just in the habit of approaching colleges

as

an actor, or theatre student, because that was the mode in which they were most likely to have already heard of me, through the conferences I attended in high school. I still had an abiding love of all things literature (except Dickens [even to this day]) and hoped to double-major.

VCU was an interesting program, one whose curriculum was in a state of near-constant flux during my four years there. Teachers and administrators came and went. In fact, the gentleman I auditioned for was no longer there by the time my first day arrived. This general situation caused me a good deal of angst during my time, fretting over the state of my and and my fellows' education. (To be fair, causing me angst in those days was not by any stretch a challenging maneuver.) Not to put too fine a point on it, I was often pretty pissed. At the most difficult times of that struggle, I think the only thing that kept me enrolled was returning to the foundation we actors received from the guy who insisted he teach each and every incoming freshman actor: Gary Hopper.

Mr. Hopper was, and delighted in embodying, an amiable terror to the freshmen. He made it clear, with a blistering smile all the while, that we were there to

work

and, furthermore, to work with enthusiasm. I can still hear his voice in my head as he jogged around the room with us in our daily warm-ups, quasi-facetiously pepping up our teenage slack-i-tude with interjections of, "

Acting!

" and "

Theatre

is my

life!

" There's a philosophy of teaching, I believe, that makes good use of the teacher as a character, as someone intriguing and idiosyncratic, who fascinates and keeps one on one's toes. This approach makes the students a little bit like gladiators, wily and ready to adapt: engaged --

if

it works on them. It certainly worked on me, but it's an approach that is full of risk and takes a lot of commitment and energy. Sort of like, you know, good acting.

Now, I don't know if Mr. Hopper intends to be as eccentric as he can be, nor whether it's to this end. My guess is he does, but I also believe most of his idiosyncrasies are ones he comes about quite honestly. He really is a man who sees the purpose in life to be inextricable from living with energy and intention. He really would like to yank the cigarette out of every smoker's mouth, then have them thank him for saving minutes of their lives. And yes, theatre is his life. In my time he directed one main-stage show per year, and often a second-stage or regional show to boot, and these were always,

always

something to experience. Every show wasn't for every audience member, but that goes with his territory. That's risk-taking, and that's art. I could tally off every show of his from the Fall of 1995 to the Spring of 1999, and would enjoy the hell out of it, but just take my word: Must Sees.

Of course, I was involved in a few of those. As a sophomore I ASM'd his

Little Shop of Horrors

, which involved various misadventures with a turntable (oh, that f&#$%ng turntable),

Intellabeams

and an honest-to-goodness motorcycle. And, as a junior, I did what I'm afraid was an astonishingly mediocre job in his adaptation of the play

Stand-Up Tragedy

, which, Gentle Reader, involved risky stunts and fights, a life-size, bleeding Christ sculpture and -- most terrifying -- me, rapping. Finally, in my senior year, I had the excellent good fortune to work with Gary on a farce:

Hotel Paradiso

. Holy crap: THAT was FUN. I'm not sure any show I'd done before has influenced my adult career so specifically and completely. I knew before

Hotel

that I had a unique (being kind here) sense of humor and an appreciation of pratfall, but it was this show that taught me how important these were to me.

In fact, I probably owe the man royalties (nothing substantial, I regret to admit). Firstly because I believe to this day -- in spite of years of experience prior to college -- that I didn't learn how to act until I studied with Gary. It can be hard, more than a decade on, to trace the sources of one's techniques back to their origins. In spite of this, I very definitely carry on in a specific G.C.H. tradition, both in my acting and in my teaching. "Actors must be athletes," is an axiom that gets included in every single commedia dell'arte or acrobalance workshop I lead, and a great many of my exercises and challenges are taken directly from the Hopper repertoire. I still score my scripts, feeling somehow delinquent if I haven't done so by opening night, and I continue to subject my poor, poor actors, when I direct, to the STOP method of line memorization.

STOP is a good way to illustrate the infuriating and exacting way Gary has of demanding not just better, but the specific best from his actors. In this exercise, everyone gathers in a tight, standing circle, and we run lines, with the stage manager (

never the director; I learned how important this is the hard way

) on book. Whenever someone misses, transposes or paraphrases a single word, the SM says, "Stop." And only: "Stop." It's then up to the actor to repeat the line and, by the timing of "stops" figure out his or her mistake, and correct it. Believe me: It is not for the weak (nor the humorless).

Of course, college is about a hell of a lot more than the classes one takes, or even the productions a theatre student may be a part of. Gary had his small, yet profound, influences on me there as well. None of it is of general interest, all of it proved very important to the person I've become. College for me was personally tumultuous, and very probably that was a result of my own doing, and growing. I suspect that is not uncommon, yet when you're in the thick of it the experience is a rather difficult one of which to take a long view. Gary's spirit, his approach to challenges and belief in rooting all that ecstatic expression in solid groundwork, provided me with an example of how to be both exuberant and responsible in life. Plus, without ever tearing me down (more than I needed it) he constantly reminded me not to take myself too seriously. To say I'm grateful to him doesn't quite cover it.

Sometimes when I'm in the midst of a warm-up on a tougher day, I'll start (quite unconsciously) whispering to myself "

Acting!

" and "

Theatre

is my

life!

" And I smile, and I can't help it. Gary's spirit is unsentimental and infectious, and it would appear I remain infected to this day. Happy birthday, Gary, and thanks for all you've done for us.

The ACTion COLLECTIVE: ACT V, scene i - Physical Character

It seems strange to write about last night's workshop; I suppose because I led it, but that doesn't actually make any sense: I write here all the time about my own work, The Action Collective is something of which I am one of two founders and last night was a great start to incorporating workshops into our regular schedule of events. It went well, the new (to us) space was perfect (replete with five-flight walk-up warm-up) and I was duly (and unsurprisingly) impressed with the work that each attendee cranked out of it. Perhaps what's tripping me up about it is that even though this was our fifth event, neither Andrew nor I actually led the previous ones. We kind of try to set up a mechanism for each evening, and we nudge it along and try to set people at ease, but in that this was our first workshop I really functioned as a leader. And I guess I feel a little odd reviewing myself at this time. I plea the fifth, regardless of whether or not it actually applies to my circumstances.

So instead, I'll bare my plans and schemes. Below is the outline I prepared for the workshop (apologies for the lack of indentation; I have wrestled with Blogger, and I have definitively lost). I wish I had some photographs or video as well, but alas, I am not a multitasker. You should take me to task, though, Dear Reader. Read it. Agree, disagree, let me know what confuses, and what you want more information about. I've led many a workshop in my time, but they're normally for amateur or inexperienced actors (occasionally, for non-actors) and the real challenge this time was to tackle similar material in a way that would be helpful and entertaining for experienced performers. I think it was helpful. I'm less assured about the entertainment value, but I was tremendously entertained by their work, so: Yay me!

Act V, scene i Lesson Plan

Premise:
There are two basic situations of physical character creation -- characters created from cues in a script or other supporting material, and those created from scratch and/or in improvisation. The key priorities these have in common are:

1. Distinguishing physical characteristics of character from physical characteristics of actor.
2. Creating physical characteristics that enhance the story.
3. Living through the characteristics, as opposed to demonstrating them.

In this workshop we will aim to learn and share methods of creating and distinguishing physical choices for a character, refining those choices to serve the larger picture, and incorporating those choices into instinctive behavior.

Outline:
I. Introduction
A. Introductions all around
B. Introduce AC, Jeff & Andrew
C. Introduce ACT V & scene i
1. Goals
2. My background
D. Introduce Megan
II. Warm-Up
A. Megan's Yoga (15 minutes)
III. Groundwork - Distinguishing the Choices
A. Review viewpoints grid
B. Teach "active neutral"
C. Request "neutralizing" techniques
IV. Scratch/Improv. Techniques
*. Request improv. techniques
A. Body centers
B. Appetites
C. Animals?
V. Script Techniques
A. Introduce Laban vocabulary
1. Body
2. Shape
3. Space
4. Effort
a. space - direct/indirect
b. weight - strong/light
c. time - sudden/sustained
d. flow - bound/free
B. Text analysis in relation to Laban
1. Adjectives about character
2. Verbs & nouns by character
3. Rhythm and pace experimentation
4. Word from a hat
C. Request script techniques
VI. Unification
A. Practice, practice, practice
B. Respect the space/mask
C. Externalize the inner-work
1. Passing impulse
2. Props
3. Passing ball
VII. Wrap-Up/Discussion