I Second that Performance

There is a phenomenon among those known exclusively by thespians called "second-night slump." Opinions differ on the exact nature and causes of the "slump," but it is pretty universally acknowledged as something legitimate and worthy of consideration. In essence, it is a drop in energy between the opening and the next performance. Whatever truly causes it--a less personal audience, lower adrenaline, a sense of deja vu--it is a real thing that seems to me unavoidable. Opinions differ even more greatly as to whether the second-night slump is a good or bad thing. In most cases, I feel bad in it. Nothing will click and I'm off my game, or so it seems. Some directors (and, indeed, some actors) insist that the second night is always an all-around better performance. The actors are more relaxed, fluid, and the show loses a lot of the grating edges of first night. I was curious to know if, what with the

Fringe Festival

's bizarre schedule and our replacement actor, a second-night slump was going to occur last night. And, if so, whether it would be beneficial or detrimental.

Now I have no idea whatsoever.

That's not quite true ("...but I do lie."). The slump definitely happened, at least to me.

As Far As We Know

requires a certain intensity in performance, owing both to the subject matter and the style in which we've chosen to present it, and mine was slow to start last night. The engine, as it were, coughed a time or two before turning over. It began (it always begins with something small) with my missing the cue to begin the slower movement in the initial movement sequence. I caught the change of pace out of the corner of my eye and thought, "Oh yes. This bit."

Not a good sign.

I did pull out of my tailspin eventually, but not before the memory scene and the car scene were sacrificed on an altar to the Goddess of Preparation. It seems that it would be a good idea for me to run through the whole of my part in the play the day of a show. This is not something I need to do for a regular performance schedule, but having days between each show makes for strange rot in the brain. I could feel it in every marching entrance--the tightness, the intensity (

commitment

, as

Sara Bakker

chides me) wasn't there. I was at once more relaxed than I had been Saturday, and yet less in tune with the play. I felt good about my last scene, but that was about it.

Yet the feedback was very positive. It's always hard to say how much of the response is politeness and how much is genuine admiration immediately after a show, but even using my deepest B.S. filter it seemed those I spoke with thought I had a very good show. So I'm letting it go, to some extent. But I'll be sure to run through my show before Saturday's performance (enormously easier, given that I won't be coming from eight hours of desk work).

In other

AFAWK

news, we've had our first review. Sort of.

There's a very interesting trend in New York (and elsewhere, I suspect) in the past couple of years, and it involves an intersection between the internet and live theatre. For some time now, the only major paper left in the city reviewing theatre was

The New York Times

, and their word on one's show was pretty much the kiss of life, or death. That's still strictly true, in spite of independent papers making more of a mark in the last decade in that regard, but there's a host of tiny, new player on the critique scene: Bloggers. The majority of reviews we had for

A Lie of the Mind

were from 'blogs, and 'blogs dedicated to theatre reviews at that. In some cases this is a very, very bad thing (see

4/11/07

; though not from a 'blog per se, illustrative of the potential problems of the exposure of unedited work), but in most cases the articles are surprisingly well-thought-out and composed, as evidenced by Tonya Plank's

response

to our little show.

I love this aspect of the internet as it is now. It's a bit like the wild west, a violent infant as prone to critical error as it is to tremendous success, a mixed metaphor (if you will) that nevertheless satisfies, because all have access to it. This I do verily dig. Someday in the future I imagine the 'bloggers will hit a collective slump in excitement and ingenuity, but for now it's still opening night, and the joint is jumping.

Gull(ability)

I became very interested in philosophy in my early twenties. It was around a time when I was just figuring out most of my priorities in my work and life in general, and it helped that I (a Unitarian Universalist) was freshly in love with a girl who had some very strong, specific ideas about life, the universe and everything. One wishes to rise to such specificity, after all. So I began reaching out--in the inimitable U.U. fashion--for any and everything around me related to philosophy. I rapidly began leaning eastward, based on a completely non-substance-abused altered state I found myself in one day. Here's a short list of some of the books I explored as a part of this process:

  • The Case for Christ
  • A Grief Observed
  • The Celestine Prophecy
  • Hero with A Thousand Faces
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • Way of the Peaceful Warrior
  • The Tao of Pooh
  • Tao Te Ching
  • The Analects
  • The Art of War
  • Chuang Tzu
  • Siddhartha
  • The Prophet

I came to find a lot of personal truth in Taoism, such as I understood it, and incorporated it into my core philosophy of Unitarian Universalism. (Let's not get into religion here; pretend we're at the Thanksgiving dinner table.) One's spiritual and philosophical journey continues, etc., etc. Being a U.U., I find people with answers a little silly. People with answers often find this frustrating. I suppose this is part of the motivation behind all these books written about the way we should all be living. Sure, there's a selfless hero's quest to such a contribution to the history of literature; every self-help author has had some profound sip from the fountain of Truth and returns to his or her humble hometown to share the wealth, like a mama bird, regurgitating into her young, blind ones' beaks. But let's face it, too: No matter how ecumenical one is, writing a treatise on what one believes is at least a little about saying, "I know something you don't."

Written apparently in a similar spirit is the famed book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach. I'll admit two things: I haven't read the book, and I can't get a terribly clear picture of the author's intention in writing it. It seems, however, to have been embraced by anarchic Christianity as a really good metaphor for how a life should be lived, and by all accounts (no: still haven't read it) there are some good reasons for this identification.

Last night I attended Kinesis Dance Project's presentation of Gull(ability), a work-in-progress sort of thing in its first stages. The dance featured Friend Patrick and Friend Melissa (who is also Kinesis' founder/choreographer/artistic director) along with three other dancers, and was squoze (is SO a word) into the Manhattan Theatre Source stage, which itself was further reduced in spacial capacity by a proscenium demi-arch, presumably built for this weekend's premier there. True to my college habits, I read up on the various notes and critiques of Jonathan Livingston Seagull prior to attending, in order to better appreciate whatever parallels Friend Melissa might draw. This was probably a dumb idea on my part.

I forgot two things. Firstly, Melissa tends to treat her inspiration for shows as just that, making her product unlimited by any artificial allegiance to identifiable details from the source. There were people emulating seagulls, and there was the dissatisfaction in an individual for the given circumstances of her life, but from there it took off into explorations and free-verse in the form of dance. And therein is my second neglected fact: It is a dance. I forgot that my best mental state for watching dance is one of extreme receptivity--a relaxed mind taking in waves, rather than an analytical one struggling to make sense of it all. That difference of mental state makes all the difference between an evening of sublimity or one of frustration. I found the sublimity, but wasted a lot of time sputtering about in the detritus of logic and analysis.

And so maybe too there was a third neglection (is SO a word) (the three thing just never gets old for me, do it?). The Taoists are big on being receptive. It's sort of their whole thing, really (see 7/16/07 for a brief reference to my take on this), and part of the appeal of the philosophy for yours truly is the way in which it reminds me how valid and valuable that approach can be, in any experience. I neglect my self-learned lessons sometimes, to my and my friends' and coworkers' disadvantage.

Gull(ability) doesn't seem to be interested in telling a story per se; at this stage, it is much more an alternately humorous and existential expose into the neuroses of four seagulls, and the aspirations to nonconformity of one. This does not sound entertaining, I confess, but in the hands (and feet [and legs]) of Melissa Riker and her crew of uninhibited dancers it achieves out-loud laughter. They do not seek to impersonate seagulls, or even to embody them (a term I hate seeing the generic use of in artistic circles). Rather they interpret seagulls in movement and shape into human forms, each one a little characteristic of the individual dancer, which is nice, seeing as how that's most likely a distinction animals make amongst members of their own species. A particularly memorable sequence involved a series of tableau in which the dances all came together to form the shape of a single seagull from different perspectives, weight-sharing and flat-out climbing atop one another to create wings. The entire performance was infused with this sort of child-like joy, which we can safely state is a trademark of Melissa's choreography to date.

In contrast to that joy, Gull(ability) also contained some movement that began humorously, but through repetition became almost disheartening. The dancers would haul their left legs up and down, or perform a brief, formal series of pelvic twitches with glassy stares, and hysterical laughter was elicited repeatedly by the latter. As the piece went on, however, it became clear these twitches were unthinking, unfeeling impulses--compulsive--and something about them seemed empty and sad. This, interspersed as it was with "solos" in which each gull came on stage with a bundle of seemingly precious items and made a nest out of them somewhere on stage or in the audience, suggested to me only after the performance the hollowness of the pursuit of a material life.

Then again, maybe it was just a comment on conservationism?

In terms of what I'd like to see this piece progress with (and Melissa asked for feedback, so stop judging me to be judgmental), of course I'd hate to see any of Melissa's patented sense of humor leave, and the sound design by Benjamin Oyzon was beautifully layered. I would like to see a more succinct narrative of our seagulls' personal quirks. Or perhaps an expanded view of who they are, as seagulls (a sentence I never would have guessed I'd one day write). I felt it needed to go one way or the other, or else let their nesting build toward something, otherwise it becomes (at least in form) too predictable to me. But this is an actor talking. I'm always trying to make it about story.

When very often, it's better just to not act, and let the moment be what it wants to be.

Knock-Knock

My favorite joke to tell is a knock-knock joke. So, pretty much automatically, you know that it's inane and probably not reliably funny. So why should it be my favorite?

Last night I had my first New York rehearsal for

As Far As We Know

since returning from our New Hampshire (NOT Vermont) week-long workshop. It was just my person, Kelly's and Laurie's all in a

tiny rehearsal studio

working through the two scenes in the play (for the moment) that are simply Nicole and Jake, sister and brother. They are memory scenes for Nic, with elements of hallucination or nightmare, and one of them we've been doing in one form or another almost the entire time we've had a playwright on board. It is affectionately referred to as "1-2-3 In a Car."

For a while there--in particular over the last workshop period--it was entitled simply "1-2-3." That's because it was restructured and taken out from inside the car to being set partially underneath it, as Jake works on the vehicle. Yesterday, minutes before rehearsal, I printed a revised script that had been emailed to us, one and all, to discover that the scene had been largely restored to its former state.

"Damn," thought I.

It's incredibly awkward, you see, performing pantomimed driving. There's a reason mimes don't speak. That reason being, all mimes have their vocal cords personally removed by Marcel Marceau.

No seriously though, pantomime takes enormous concentration (I sometimes wonder if mimes haven't indeed had their sweat glands removed) and I think it's an especially talented person who can convincingly drive an imaginary car whilst truthfully playing a scene. Hence: "Damn," thought I. And the first part of rehearsal was just as I might have expected with a scene so well-worn, with a layer of additional pretense applied: Halting and stilted, with a dusty sensation in my throat. "Damn," thought I, "will the hoped-for acting rehearsals all be as dry for me?"

And then, remarkably, we all started working together as actors and a director. I had somehow forgotten how good it felt. Sure, we did some revision of the script along the way (prerogative of the UnCommon Cause) but it was more internal, within the scene and without too much time spent (re)hashing out the play as a whole. In sum, we found the emotional truth of a scene that has existed for almost two years, and did so within the confines of a tiny room and a fairly standard rehearsal process. I was so uplifted by the experience that when I left rehearsal at 10:00, I felt as though I was leaving a performance, full of juice to run another four hours or so (and I did stay up past my bedtime reading old drafts of a werewolf story I may never finish).

In his

Being An Actor

, Simon Callow asserts that the most comparable experience a non-actor has to performing is the act of telling a joke. In a joke, so the theory goes, all the considerations of structure, performance and communication are present, in a very concentrated form. Personally, I dread telling jokes, especially to people who don't know me very well. It seems to me the expectation is just too much, that I'll never encapsulate my experience of hearing the joke sufficiently to make it worth people's time. Occasionally I'm wrong about this outcome, but for the most part it's another one of those skills most people assume actors (especially comic actors) naturally possess, right up there with impersonations and dance, and that I am sadly lacking.

So. My favorite joke to tell?

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
A mime.
A mime who?
. . .

Never mind that I find reversal of expectation, silence and surreality (is SO a word) incredibly funny; this joke leaves off all that junk I feel horribly self-conscious about and, usually, somewhat disappointed by. No applause, no critiques, no climax or denouement. In fact, no feedback of any kind, as I've robbed the listener of even the moment

before

the promised catharsis. I love the rehearsal. I love the problem-solving and private victories. To hell with the punchline, I usually say.

Yet I'm excited, this time, to put all our work on T

he Torture Project

/

As Far As We Know

up in front of you all.

New Hampshire Log: Day Six—All Good Things



Just to mention: all the photography from my New Hampshire section compliments of Jen Schriever. She's got a great eye, no? ("Yeah; some people think she has two." <--thy movie quote)


Everyone seems hungry to have more time to work on their acting. It’s an interesting aspect of this way of working that the actors have to rather prioritize in order to find enough time to create a sufficiently well-rehearsed performance. I’m not sure it’s entirely unhelpful. Having to fight for what you want—as most actors will agree—makes for good energy. It’s good to be a little hungry. Then again, some creation isn’t possible without a relaxed, un-self-conscious environment. For my part, I hope our New York rehearsals prioritize scene work a bit more. In the meantime, I’ll grab every moment I can with my scene partners to clock in rehearsal together.


Our last day here in New Hampshire began, for me, with a trip to Hanover with Mike The Great to pick up some breakfast at the Dirt Cowboy, some toiletries and office supplies from CVS and some Joe (in box form, an impromptu tradition this week) from Dunkin’ Donuts. On our way, we were practically silent, but the coffee revived us considerably. This is good, because it turned out to be a sweltering day, and every move a little more of an effort. We began rehearsal with where we left off, a little after the (former) act break. There isn’t much for me to do, as Jake’s further disappearance from the environment of the story is crucial. People are forgetting him, and so I only show up in one “charivari” and one of his sister’s memories/hallucinations.


It may be very funny for people who’ve heard me talking about this show for years now (indeed, some of them having had to accept it as a reason I couldn’t work for or with them) to see it and see so little of me…live, anyway. Maybe they’ll think all that time was spent photographing me, somehow. At any rate, my heart and soul is in this show, for better or worse. It’s, oddly enough, like a hypothetical story of my sister. The relationship between Jake and his twin sister in our story is crucial, and very much informed from my end by how I feel about my sister, Virginia. It’s an incomparable relationship, and it’s a great experience to get to demonstrate some of it on stage.


There is, built into the corner of a rafter of our rehearsal barn, a nest of baby swallows. We’ve charted their progress through the week, and it’s rather remarkable how quickly they develop. When we arrived this morning, one was lying dead on the floor, having fallen from the nest. I scooped it into a cup and laid it to rest in some of the shrubbery off the beaten path. Then, later in the day, one more dropped out directly in front of Joe Varca as he exited a scene. It died shortly thereafter. It’s a curious reminder of the facts of life in the midst of our story of an unimaginable circumstance.


By the end of our rehearsal period for the day, we had worked through our new script once. We spent another half an hour cleaning the barn and prepping it for an audience that night. The “stage” was set in a ¾ round, with four entrances but—owing to our lack of actual wings or backstage space—no areas to cross over from one side to the other without traversing the stage area. We have some uncertainties about our set-up at the Fringe (every show gets no more than 15 minutes set-up time for each performance, and the prior show will alternate, so we’ll never know exactly what we’re facing when we get in to begin) but this is the closest we could imagine until we get into the actual space. The guano was vacuumed up, and a variety of bizarre seating laid out in the form of beds, car seats and lawn chairs. Then it was a two-hour break for dinner.


It’s hard to say how the showing went. The barn somehow held onto the day’s humidity, despite our best efforts to air it out, and we were all anxious about what we had to show and what kind of response we could expect, not to mention our wondering exactly what we would each forget to do. You see, it wasn’t a question of if: We had revised so much so many times, and run some bits only once that day, so I think it’s safe to say each and every of us was prepared to bite it at least once. At the same time, we were so excited to have something cohesive to show at last (and excited to see the damn thing for ourselves) that we couldn’t care too much what went wrong this run.


So how about our show? Well, it has more of the catharsis I craved on last writing, but it’s owing in large part to a device that concludes the show, and I would prefer that it hinged on scene work. As you might imagine, the bulk of the show is difficult to judge without some time to pull together the acting, but I’m pleased with the momentum it seems to be beginning to acquire with the overlap of scenes and the emphasis on the military’s role in the story. Some of the staging is entirely too symmetrical for my tastes (I prefer asymmetry in general—creates more tension) but that’s already being broken up a bit, and may continue to as we progress. Overall, I feel good about what we’re headed to present, and look forward to seeing it blossom further.

It’s raining now as we drive our way back to Manhattan, and my mind drifts out over the landscape, floated on scraps of New Hampshire memories. (Hey, by the way: Joe Varca’s a freaking punk. I’m so glad I don’t look like him anymore.) I’m watching a movie tonight, just to take my mind off Art for a little while, and ease my heart away from lakeside sunsets.