But Soft, What Paycheck Through Yonder Window is Cut...?

My very awfully busy week last week was every bit as awfully busy as I had imagined. Rewarding, but not in the material sense, as most of the payment I'll receive for said work will take its saccharine-sweet time in getting to me. This I'm afraid is standard practice for the teaching artist (largely what I was, apart from

Romeo Montague

, last week) which is all-too ironic, teaching artists being folks that generally need the money rather immediately. I don't do what I do for money's sake --

obviously

-- but there are times when one needs it more than others, and now is such a time for this guy. As I tried to impart in one of my workshops this week: Work is not a job unless it pays, and a job is not a career unless you are working. But let's assume the institutions will not fall apart completely before I get my checks, and focus on the work. The work is what this branch of my 'blogging is about, after all.

Tuesday was

a workshop

for the Electric Theatre Company's Griffin Conservatory, one in acrobalance. However, my usual teaching partner (my Juliet Capulet) sprained her calf and got a cold in one fell swoop over the weekend, and I was stuck trying to teach partner balancing without being able to demonstrate it. This turned out all right, though, as I had only two students show up and was able to modify the class to a general "physical acting" one, with some balance and tumbling instruction. So for three hours, on the padded floor of our

R&J

set, we three cavorted and grew together a bit. It was the most remedial class I'd taught in a long while, which was actually very nice. It reminded me of how much there is to appreciate in the smallest or most intuitive of movements.

Wednesday was a two-show day, our first, and due to a faulty calendar I managed to schedule my

career workshop

at Marywood right between the two. For a while I was nervous about this, as my central theme would have to be, "Do better than I have." But I learned from the students, who requested some further coverage of acrobalance (I've teased them with it here and there over the last couple of years) and that I talk about

In Bocca al Lupo

. So I called it "Finding Balance," and tried to combine physical activity with discussions about balancing a professional life with a creative one in the theatre. In essence, I was putting this here 'blog on its feet, and I ended up feeling that it went rather well. It's still a fledgling workshop, to be sure, but with a little more organization and some more concrete material I could see myself running it other places. At any rate, the students seemed to get good information out of it, and definitely enjoyed themselves. I like combining thought and action. Feels like acting!

Thursday and Friday, Heather and I

choreographed fights

for North Pocono High's production of

A Midsummer Night's Dream

, which was in itself a kind of workshop, involving as it did students who'd never done any physical theatre at all. Marywood has an up-coming

Midsummers

coming up too, and it's awfully fun to be surrounded by these shows whilst doing

R&J

; popular opinion has it that Shakespeare created them in close conjunction with one another. For North Pocono, we spent all of Thursday teaching stage combat basics, then taught them specific choreography the next day. We had just enough time to do it all, at that, and had to rely on their note-taking and diligence hereafter for any hopes of it sticking. The four actors were wonderfully focused, though, and we would have failed had they not been. Overall, I'm very happy with the work we did. We taught them funny, story- and character-based choreography, and we did it right, without skimping on technique and safety.

Which makes it rather ironic that I got PWN3D by Paris in our fight for Saturday night's performance.

The performances went fine this week, though we had considerably smaller audiences across the board compared to our preview, pay-what-you-can nights last week. I came to feel quite a bit more at home in Romeo this week, and truly, even the quiet audiences seemed to get a lot out of the show (I usually disdain that "they were quiet, but

really attentive

" excuse for bad shows -- these I do not think were those). I had a big week for visitors; my parents came Friday night, and

Wife Megan

and

Friend Patrick

saw it both Saturday, and for Sunday's matinee. This is the first Zuppa show Patrick's been able to catch, which made it an absolute thrill for me. Sunday morning the director thought that these audience members might be part of the reason my performance was the way it was. He said it was a very good show, but that I was just

this close

to playing more for myself than for Romeo; nearly showing off, to put a finer point on it. He asked me to just be careful, and relax.

So the past couple of days have had a cherry a-top my gradually built sundae of doubt about continuing as I have with Zuppa del Giorno. No conclusions as yet, but me, I am a'thinkin' . . .

But the real news! I got punched! In the eye! Yes, in our climactic battle, I accidentally got a shiner from one Conor McGuigan; and yes, I'm sorta proud. I don't think I've ever had a black eye before and, in spite of speaking in verse at the time, this one was pretty Fight Club-y. The move was a down punch to the face, where I am kneeling and he stands over me. Among his other virtues, Conor's got bony knuckles, and at least one of them connected with my brow that night. The effect is rather like my left eyelid is stuck in a Boy George video -- lovely, deep purples, but only on the lid. A little concealer does the trick for shows, and now I get to make up stories about what a tough/hilariously clumsy guy I am.

It made for good conversation in my audition today. I hadn't planned on returning to New York these days off, but got a call V-day about auditioning for a Lexis-Nexis web spot and decided to shell out for the bus ticket again. It was quite an out-of-the-blue opportunity; I was plucked from the casting files of one

Lisa Milinazzo

, but for the life of me, I can't remember what, if any, connection we share. The bad news is that the filming dates conflict with the final shows of

R&J

, and are thereby impossible for me, but the good is that the audition went great. I seem to get these opportunities to play straight-faced businessmen that are actually funny and run with them. This was another case in which they asked me to improvise around the script and loved what I came up with. (I really, really need to parlay this type into some live show that will get me noticed by agentry.) Casting people for

The Office

, please note: I am your guy in spades. I even know Scranton! Come on!

I'm looking forward to this final week of the show being rather more relaxed. Even our two-show Thursday should seem a breeze, compared to last Wednesday. My first order of business upon returning to Scranton tomorrow will be to attend a rehearsal of Marywood's

A Midwinter Night's Dream

, which I'm very much looking forward to (their actual performances conflict with ours). Then I hope to spend my days getting resumes out for the next gig, 'blogging more, and beginning the first revision process on

Hereafter

. That's not exactly relaxed, I guess. But it sounds wonderful . . .

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.

Learning from Loki

I have finally completed, through sporadic spouts of dedication, backlogging my performances and appearances over at

Loki's Apiary

. As I look back on this not-quite-yet-a-year, I feel I can say with some certainty that this will go down in my career history as the Year of the Reading. I mean: dag. Look at all of

these

! I'm even missing one I had to back out of. Odds are that I'll participate in one or two more, before the year is out. As someone might put it:

WHAT

is the

DEAL

with the

READINGS

?

Another thing that has made a distinct impression upon me is how few actual full productions I've acted in this year. In truth, I count the number as zed. I mean, I'm currently, technically, understudying

La Vigilia

, and I did

The Women's Project

's

Corporate Carnival

in the spring, but

LV

hasn't needed me, as it turns out, and

CC

was something I entered about midway through their process, and never quite felt like a full partner in, not to mention the fact that it wasn't a play, per se. (On the bright side, I think I gave Faulkner a run for his money with ten commas in that sentence [Not really. {At all...}].) And so, I count myself as not yet having been in a full-length production in 2008. Further, I probably won't be. I mean, I don't want to be overly pessimistic -- not

overly

-- but I'm spending the next couple of months gearing up for

The Big Show

(which, sorry, doesn't count on this scoreboard). And thereafter, well, the holidays are an awful time to get a show, much less rehearse one. So . . .

That's not good! I mean, on the other hand (four fingers and a thumb):

1. It has otherwise been an awfully busy year, professionally and personally.

1. A lot of the work I have done on stage has been with and for young, promising playwrights, which is sort of the best sort of work one can invest in one's future with.

1. I have written quite a lot this year, and even completed some of it.

1. I signed to freelance with a management agency, and have gotten work through them.

1. I did collaborate to create an original show this year, and began collaboration on an all-new one.

So, really, nothing to be ashamed of in terms of this year's work. Year 2007 was all about the large projects, with Prohibitive Standards, As Far As We Knowand A Lie of the Mind, not to mention trips to both California and Italy, so it's not like my resume feels wounded. Still, it is irksome. I am irked by it. I think it's because I rather rate my worth as an actor not on what I've done, but what I'm doing. Which, you know, has a certain integrity to it, but also a certain dose of unbridled masochism. Hence my love of being completely overwhelmed by a barrage of projects at all times. It's funny (ha ha). When I attended All the Rage the other week, I ran into a friend with whom I performed in A Lie of the Mind, and we got to chatting about what we'd been up to of late. I volunteered that I really hadn't been doing much of anything, and she remarked, in sum of substance, "What? That's not true. I feel like I just got two emails in a row from you advertising performances." I realized she was right. I had been busy this summer. I forgot, because the shows were readings, benefits, short plays, etc.

Friend Patrick commented on my first entry about the new site (see 9/4/08) that perhaps making Loki the namesake of my fledgling 'blog was inviting trouble. He is, after all, most famous for spreading chaos, benevolently or no. It could lend new meaning to the term "easy come, easy go." It gave me pause. [Hold for pause...] I'm sticking with the name for now, however. Maybe it's my impatience for another full-length show, soon, but I feel that maybe a little stirring of the pot might just do me good.

A little, mind you, Loki.

Health, Wealth & Wisdom

I hab a cohd. Id iz doh fun.

I've been doing pretty well this year past in terms of general health, especially as compared to the year before. I regard my health as a pretty good gauge of my happiness. They aren't necessarily entirely correlated -- I mean, sometimes you just get sick, and others, you're simply pissy toward everyone -- but by-and-large I've found them to be pretty good indications of one another. Whether it's cause or effect in a given scenario, my physical well-being is often my first clue as to the state of my psyche. This is most likely because I am a control-freak at heart, and cling with futile, desperate hope to the idea that I can and will feel the way I want to feel, when I want to feel it. So, occasionally, my heart has to bludgeon my mind with my body, saying in a perfectly calm voice during the repeated concussions, "Why are you hitting yourself? Huh? Why do you keep hitting yourself?" My heart can be a malicious S.O.B., but I have only myself to blame.

This used to manifest itself with some regularity, right around the week I had a show opening. Shortly after I left college, shows became less regular and adult life stresses started playing through, and I got so confused I actually stayed healthy for a long while. My struggles from a little over a year ago I attribute to an over-all sort of confusion about life, the universe, everything. So, is this bout the result of some stress? And if so, is the stress creative, lifestyle or other? Am I running myself down, or stressed about not having enough to do (yes; this is possible; shut up)?

You will notice (after I point it out to you) that a new 'blog has been added to the role on this here 'blog:

Loki's Apiary

. I don't know why it never occurred to me before. I have been trying to think for some time of an easily editable online schedule for my various appearances -- performing and teaching and what you will -- that I could update myself and what could be connected to the Aviary and send updates to

my homepage

. It took subscribing to one

Mz. Eliza Skinner's 'blog

(thanks,

Cracked.com

) to make me realize the solution was very simple indeed, and directly in front of me. ("Oh. Hi. Didn't see you there." "We've been here literally the entire time you have." "I'm a little embarrassed.") This is the intention of Loki's Apiary, to log and make accessible the practical details of every little quasi-public appearance I make as an artist and/or teacher. In the interests of full disclosure, I should confess that I'm back-logging appearances in the present tense, so it appears a more wealthy (and well-thought-out) history. Also for disclosure: Loki has nothing to do with bees. (There is a woman from Norse mythology, Beyla, who might.) But Loki's cool, and reasonably well-known, and bees are associated with a multitude of busy activities. PLUS: APIARY. "I'm rhyming. It's not easy."

One of the great stresses of adult life for artist and lay-person alike is the need for fiscal clout. There's no escaping it: In this day and age, the kind of life I'd like to lead requires a certain amount of financial solvency. There is no having my cake and eating it too if I can't afford a "Rainbow" Cookie (we all know they're M&M[TM] cookies, Starbucks{c}; you're fooling only yourself) with my coffee. Nothing to date has brought this into more prominent view for me than the necessities of planning

The Big Show

. It's expensive

just to plan

a wedding, much less actually purchase anything related to it, and I've got about as much support in this as a fella' could hope for. Still and all, it forces me to recognize that really going for the future I want for myself and my family requires that I have the resources to handle any contingency, including monetary ones. That, probably as much as anything else, has held me back from marriage in the past. That sounds bit petty to me, but it's not as simple as the sentence suggests. A person rates their worth in a variety of ways, and money can be a terribly tangible, day-to-day representation of that.

I made choices in crafting the Apiary, both personal and professional. The name may work against me (it started out as "Now Showing"), but I wanted that kind of conceptual link between it and the Aviary. Plus, Loki is a hell of a clown figure, in the sense that a clown is a character of continual making and un-making of plans and schemes, and he inspires less contemplation than Odin and more daring. I wanted it to have a distinctive and dramatic look, but also to be highly readable and uncluttered, hence the black background, colorful text and simple layout (in the reverse positioning to this 'blog). Finally, I wanted it to help make me money. There are a number of ways that announcing my activities in this format may stand to accomplish that goal, all of which are pretty straight-forward. One little additional way is through hosting other advertisements, which, if you scroll

all

the way down in the Apiary, you'll see I've elected to do.

I suppose it's more symbolic than anything. It is

all

the way at the bottom (yet above my footer graphic!) and yesterday it had two ads enticing one to make big money quick (today one is for the Fringe Festival, so way-to-go AdSense!) and anyway, I'm sure I get paid a fraction of a cent per click. All the same, I avoided doing that with the Aviary, and chose to with the Apiary, specifically because I want to embrace the possibility of earning power in everything I spend my time doing. Love it or hate it, whatever I'm doing well I ought to be compensated for, which includes even activities for which I've never quite pursued that, like writing or organization. There's also something about making it about money that makes an effort more real, more consequential. You're not just giving it a shot; you're putting money on the table and getting comfortable for a play of more than a few rounds.

And who knows? Maybe I'll make more money in the process. Maybe I'll even be able to afford my own health insurance!

dell'Arte

Contrary to popular (American) opinion. the "dell'arte" in "Commedia dell'Arte" does not in fact refer to art. At least, not in the sense the word has come to be used in most of the rest of the western world. The term actually describes the professional aspect of this form. It was one of the first recorded theatrical forms to transcend from rite, ritual or plain event into commerce, into a salable product. The "dell'Arte" also makes a tie between the theatre and the community by in effect introducing a guild mentality to theatre troupes. As the efforts became more regular and more commercial, actors formed troupes--or guilds, if you will--thereby joining the ranks of other professions in 16th century Italy. This is an apt parallel to my activities this week. Under the auspices of the newly-rebranded and resident-company-enriched

Electric Theatre Company

, I'm leading, along with Friends Heather Stuart and Dave Gochfeld, an intensive workshop in commedia dell'arte for the theatre students of

Marywood University

.

We did something similar last year--and have many of the same students back--as a part of ETC's "Portal Project" in collaboration with Marywood. However, last year's workshops simply emphasized the creation of original characters and improvisations for public performance; this year we're armed with our experiences with Angelo Crotti and a big pile of reference books, and the emphasis is on providing a very pragmatic, concise overview of the commedia dell'arte as a living tradition. This week will culminate in a few public, staged yet semi-improvised, performances of a Scala scenario for the visiting public of Scranton's annual

Festa Italiana

on Sunday and Monday (an event I must sadly miss, as obligations necessitate my leaving town Friday night). So in a week, we give them all they need in terms of history and techniques, learn and rehearse a show, and open and close the whole endeavor. And if you think that's hard for us, keep in mind that for the students it's their first week back at school after the summer break.

It's been a great week. Any incipient panic of the seeming impossibility of our task has been balanced out by the excitement of learning more and more about what we're teaching as we go along, and by the students' complete and selfless dedication to the work. They really are an incredible group to be working with. We have about 25 of them, and of those, a full 21 are electing to perform in the final product. That's a lot of roles to cast in a classic commedia dell'arte scenario (only one in our book lays claim to that many specific characters), so we're looking at possibilities for incorporating porters, musicians and police into various lazzi. In fact, at this point we've got a lot to decide about setting, logistics of the space and timing in general, things that don't even have a thing to do with the work we're doing in class . . . apart from how critical they are to informing the students' expectations as performers, of course. But what's that, really, in the grand scheme?

Yesterday afternoon, while I was trying to determine the best format for a 'blog devoted to details of catching my performances and workshops (coming soon to a link list near this entry), I got a call from the talent management agency I freelance with,

Dream Weavers Management

. They wanted to know if I could make an audition at 5:20 that evening in New York. My agent on this particular possibility was talking a blue streak about details, and before I could find a breath-space within which to insert the information that I was in another state on paying work, I heard that in was for a commercial filming in Canada, and looking to pay a non-union actor $10,000. Gulp. This is small potatoes compared to the residuals an actor ought to get for years from (what I assume must have been) a nationally syndicated commercial. But let's not kid ourselves--that would be the biggest paycheck yours truly ever garnered for plying his humble craft. I was, in a sense, saved by the beep. My agent had a call come in on the other line and promised to call me back. In the pause, a handful of minutes, I quickly reviewed my options. I could conceivably make it back to New York in time for the audition. My agent called me back, and before she could get going again, I informed her I was out of state and that I was afraid I couldn't make it. She said she understood, hoped for next time, and quickly hung up to get on with calling the rest of her mid-thirties white males.

I'm a professional actor. And that was the right choice.