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.

Self-Aware . . . ed

Self-awareness is a fascinating aspect of the human condition. It will blow your mind to think of it for very long. I mean, dude: You're only able to think

of

it because you

possess

it. It's an almost inconceivable cycle of reciprocation, like the chicken and the egg, or

Siegfried and Roy

. An endless spiral in and down, forcing us to wonder if infinity owes more to inner space, than outer.

I swear I'm not snorting the pot.

It is fascinating to me, though. Self-awareness seems to be a uniquely human condition, though this may simply be a result of we being the only ones we understand, verbal communication-wise. I mean, maybe a dolphin (maybe even one in S&R's

Secret Garden

, which just scares the crap out of me) can conceive of thinking "I am," and is maybe even capable of expressing it, and we just can't relate. I'm inclined to think, however, that we are the only ones on this planet who can think about what (or worse: who) we are. It's also my opinion that such a gift creates as many problems as it solves.

Take, for example, suicide. Other creatures can starve themselves to death, it's true, but we seem to be the only ones who can plan our own deaths, not to mention come to perceive nonexistence as a preferable condition to life itself. This is the big (possibly biggest) down side to self-awareness--the way it can wreak havoc with a simple life of stimulus and response. The urge to examine is inherent in us as a species, and I suppose it was inevitable that such an urge would eventually come to be focused upon our selves. On about a par with self-destructive behavior as an unwelcome result of self-awareness, is bad acting.

What? Well, it's on a par for me, anyway.

There are few things quite as miserable as suffering through a performance in which the actors are self-conscious. The young, I suppose, pull it off with a certain earnest quality; but the older the actor, the less forgivable this heinous crime of art. Nothing will destroy the verity, and suck the wind out of the sails of a show faster than even a single actor who seems to be aware he or she is anything but the character he or she is playing. I'm not speaking to style, here. If your play includes the actors as characters, well, fine (see

6/29/07

for my general responses to such defiance of classical structure), but even in such cases the moment of action has to be believed in. Self-consciousness destroys that more effectively than any other distraction, and lots and lots of we actors (we thousands, we stand of others) spend lots and lots of our time working on reliably attaining a state in which we can do the deed without thinking.

Enter an Eastern perspective. This summer, my father and a fellow member of my mom's church are writing a sermon together (UU Breakdown: Most American UU churches apply to their ministers the agrarian tradition of summers off, in which time the parishioners get their chance to shine from the podium. Most parishioners, though not farmers, tend to apply this schedule to their church-going, as well.), the which is largely based on drawing connections between spiritual beliefs and quantum physics. The sermon, I believe, was inspired in large part by this:

The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

. I know nothing of physics (for that, try

Friend Chris

[he

doesn't

write for Spider-Man; the other one]), but I've read my share of more eastern thought, and find the connections very, er . . . connected. Taoism--my particular favorite--speaks of all things beginning in unity before being split into "the ten thousand things." It also incorporates a concept called

wu wei

(无为), often in the axiom:

wei wu wei

. The first means roughly "without action," the second, "action without action," which is often interpreted as "effortless action." To put it another way, the idea is that there is a way of achieving things without using a lot of effort. Now, paraphrasing philosophy is tricky enough business, but trickier still when the book you're interpreting is a combination of personal and ruling philosophies, possibly written with a particular ruler in mind.

This combination of personal bias and undefined terms makes the

Tao Te Ching

rather like any acting textbook. But I digress. At great length. Shamelessly.

It is appropriate, to me, that terms such as physics, action and philosophy should find unity in a discussion of the craft of acting. In Taoism,

wei wu wei

speaks to the idea of there being a way of all things (

tao

) that it is our tendency to interrupt or otherwise interfere with through our actions and deliberations; therefore, the best way of achieving goals is to be sure one is going with this way, or at least functioning with an awareness of it. The more one achieves this, the more his or her actions will arise from stillness. Similarly, the actor (her role named by the very stuff of her craft--action) must be an expert listener and, after long hours of exploration and decision making about her actions, live in the moment without choreography, true in the moment, one with the way. A true moment on stage must be like a force, such as that term is defined in physics--just as inevitable, just as simple.

It's a tricky business. We have to be self-aware to manipulate ourselves into belief in the first place, and then we have to abandon all self-awareness to allow that belief to breathe, if only for the span of a moment. It's a state I have thus far found comparable to states of prayer, meditation, inspiration, intoxication and what many Western religions refer to as the Holy Spirit. Even the Old Testament God

chimes in

on the subject: אהיה אשר אהיה (if, by "the subject," you mean this bizarre set of connections I've been attempting to make).

So best of luck with finding your

tao

in all things. And don't stick your head in a tiger's mouth, ever, much less make a

career

out of it.

Self-Inflicted

I have, at present, one of those marks on my body that begs to be explained as a violent wound. There is a large purple welt on the inside of my left bicep, and it could easily be believed to be the result of one or more of the following:

  • This guy grabbed me with his right hand so hard, I had to punch him in the nose to get him to let go.

Sadly, none are the case. No, my manly disfigurement arose from carrying an air conditioner home from the store. In other words, from my obstinacy. I could have taken a cab and been home in a jiffy, bruiseless, but I hate cabs and had assured myself that the air conditioner, to quote my own thoughts, "isn't that heavy and hey--useful plastic straps on the outside. I'll be fine." Of course, what probably exacerbated the hematoma (SOMEbody's suffering from SAT score envy) was the prompt application of push-ups after the air conditioner was actually installed.

I'm not trying to seem like a tough guy here. Wait. Well, actually, that's entirely the point. I am trying to seem like a tough guy. In August, unCommon Cause will at long last mount a finalized (somewhat) production of As Far As We Know as a part of the NYC Fringe Festival, and in said production I will be playing a captured soldier. The gentleman my role is based off of is a large, fit guy, and though I'm making no claims to be imitating him, one could definitely get a better impression of me as a soldier if I actually had pectoral muscles. So over the next few weeks I will be eating big breakfasts and making my arms very, very sore.

An actor's relationship to his or her body is an interesting one. We're probably second to models in our interest in keeping our physique attractive (with possibly a greater emphasis on functionality--definitely, when it comes to our voices) and are eligible for all the same benefits and foibles of behavior that can arise from that interest. There are some things that just can't be helped (apart from significant surgery), such as height, body type and facial features. The better among us learn to use such features to their advantages. Most dedicated actors, however, also feel a certain sense of responsibility (or just plain ol' fun) in modifying their appearance in ways appropriate to a given role. There are some very extreme examples of this from film (such as Christian Bale betwixtThe Machinist and Batman Begins), but it applies to the stage as well. The difference is that the stage at once hides more details (such as wrinkles) and demands more drastic effects to succeed in modifying appearance (such as Antony Sher's ordeals in transforming himself into Richard III).

(A) An (hopefully) interesting observation:

Not much has changed over the years (and years [and years]) of theatre history. Actors with a reputation for altering their appearances for roles are commonly known as "character actors," unless they've achieved celebrity status, in which case they're often known as "bold," or "crazy." (

Gary Oldman

is a fascinating hybrid in that he's internationally known, and rarely looks at all the same between roles.) Lead actors, particularly in film, actually have a vested interest in maintaining similar looks between movies. It makes them more recognizable and type-able, and very often is rooted in their best, or most attractive, look. Apart from the tastes of the general public (or rather, because of those tastes), this consideration arises out of lead roles almost invariably being involved in some romantic plot or other. Take this back to the commedia dell'arte tradition, and one finds it awfully familiar. In classic commedia dell'arte, the

innamorati

, or lovers, never wore

masks

, whereas almost all of the other characters did. The exceptions to this rule were some of the female "servant" characters, presumably because they were meant to also be seen as attractive, though perhaps in a less romantic sense.

Anyway, I'm not in terrible shape. My doctor (when I actually have the insurance to be able to afford her) tells me that I'm keeping myself in good exercise, at least internally speaking, and simply as a matter of course I tend to get in a little stretching and exercise every day. That habit suffered the most it has in years over this last winter-into-spring, what with my injury and the uncertainty surrounding it, but I now feel well-returned to the habit of regular exercise. (Of particular help in this was teaching "physical acting" to high schoolers last week.) Of course, I would be in better shape if I still had my weekly Kirkos session to look forward to, but in many ways the circus skills I've been learning the past few years are what got me in good shape to begin with, and I return to them on my own. It's just easier to push oneself when one isn't . . . er . . . just one. So: I'm a reasonably healthy thirty-year-old man with several extracurricular skills to apply to the pursuit of the desired effect.

That effect being

HUGENESS

.

It ain't gonna happen. At least not in time for this incarnation of

As Far As We Know

. It's just too basic a change to affect in such a short time and, unless the show goes far, it's not a body state I'm enthusiastic to be in. When I was a kid, I would have eaten it up. My body ideals were formed by superheroes, and in large part that means no chest can be too huge, no abdomen too rippled. Now, however, having worked on circus skills and developed a better-informed interest in things like martial arts and

le parkour

, dexterity and speed are more important to me. Perhaps, too, age is a factor. The past year has taught me a lot about what it means to age in the physical sense, and as I grow older, I want to be more agile, not necessarily stronger. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see how effectively I can emulate an all-American soldier in just a month.

I had to come to a certain peace about my body image a while ago. As a kid, I was overweight until I was about 16, whereupon I grew no taller, but over a period of about two-to-three months I lost 40 pounds. No lie. I went from weighing 160 pounds (at 5'8'', very little of it muscle) to 120 (still rather lacking in muscle), which also directly led to my getting some for the very first time ever. And by "some," I of course mean "anything, at all." That detail may seem tangential, but I'll come back to it. I never really understood why the change happened then, or so suddenly. Looking back, it's easy to file it under teenage hormones. It was hard to say at the time, though, because I had wished for it for so long, silently, and it happened so suddenly I wasn't even aware of it until people started commenting on it. Still, I hesitated to do anything with my transformation, not really getting around to it until college, when I was quite unexpectedly cast as d'Artagnon in

my school

's production of

The Three Musketeers

. I had never known what it was like to really work on something so intensely physical until I had to train for the fencing in that show, and I ended up

loving

it. I love having to sweat for my craft.

Some few years ago, I had a little sit-down with myself. "Self," said I, "Let's me and I get together on this body-image thing." It was prompted by an observation from a friend, who wondered aloud if what drove me to be so disciplined about pushing myself in exercise (said friend caught me on a good stretch) was the subconscious worry that someday I would mysteriously revert and regain that extra 40 pounds of baggage. Fear is a powerful motivator in drama, but I try to avoid it in the rest of my life . . . whenever possible. I realized that I was associating being loved, even being worthy of love, with something impermanent and mysterious to me. So I made an agreement with myself that I would try to judge my body more by what it could do than what it looked like. Friend Kate and others were pivotal in helping me come to this conclusion by introducing me to circus--something concrete I enjoyed and could aim for--and since then I have made every go of it.

Of course, one can't always avoid an exterior analysis, particularly in a profession as image-conscious as my own. The important thing for me is to keep that interior (though now, shared with all seven of my 'blog subscribers) priority, even in the face of others' stunning physiques, or casting directors who look at me like I'm a Hot Pocket that didn't get enough time in the microwave. In those instances--as when I'm working to create HUGE pectoral protrusions--I just keep thinking, "I can hold a handstand 0.7 seconds longer than I could last year, and climb things like a spider-monkey." This makes my willingness to literally cause myself pain, inside and out, in order to create some unkown version of myself a bit weaker. But it also makes my journey to whatever I'll achieve far more rewarding, and spontaneous.

Now I have to go do some push-ups. And post an ad on Craigslist to pimp myself out as an air conditioner mover.

ITALIA: June 21, 2007


Imagine, if you will, a strange land full of trickery and delight. Delight, that is, if you were reading about it or watching some fetching cartoon about it. Today we went down the rabbit hole, we went through the looking glass, people. And I’m here to tell you, messiah-like, that living it is not nearly as enjoyable as witnessing it happen to other people.

Given all the good fortune we’ve experienced in Italy thus far, it seems only apt that there’d be one day of payback, and we have only ourselves to blame. Babel-like, we set our sights too high. Looking back, we have named it il Giorno del Circolo, because we simply could not escape circles--directional, mental and traffic. The day started with trying to drive a memorized local route to Firenze. After about an hour of confusing signage and increasingly rural roads, we found ourselves on what had to have been one of the highest mountain cities in Umbria, Allarona. We stopped to take in an amazing expanse and ask for directions. Turns out we had driven a good hour around a gigantic, rural circle, to find ourselves only 20 klicks from Orvieto once again. So we returned to Orvieto (with some further difficulty, I might add) to get our bearings and decided to head out to Firenze on the autostrada (uninitiated Americani, read: “interstate”). Of course, we had planned to stop in an intermediate town for lunch, but the hour was late and after a little under an hour on the autostrada David suggested we stop at one of the pull-off stations for eats. It’s tough to get lost when you go nowhere, after all.

And boy, are the service stations off the autostrada nowhere. It was bizarrely uplifting cum depressing to see this side of Italy, or perhaps greater Europe. It told me that the pervasive (invasive) culture of convenience is not limited to America’s purple-mountained majesty. The whole establishment was hoisted above the autostrada, so you could be rocked to dreamy consumption by the coastal sounds of cars topping out at 100 mph. It was the most expensive and least satisfying meal I’ve ever had in Italy, though it still beat anything I could have gotten in such an establishment in my native land. So there’s hope yet for Italia. After this strange meal, it was back on the road.

But now for a town called Arrezzo, which none of us had been to before. We decided we were so behind, and perhaps we didn’t have the courage and stamina at that point to take on Firenze. Arrezzo is one of the towns we looked into as having theatre festivals when we were applying for grants to travel here, so it seemed logical that we might find an interesting environment there. Off we went, little aware of what we were in for.

Arrezzo is a town I think I might enjoy under other circumstances. It’s fairly small, but big enough to hold a lot of history and contemporary entertainments. It felt a bit like a university town, with some 3,000 years of history behind it. We dove in and visited the largest park and a giant cathedral, but quickly had to get back to the car as we could only pay for a couple of hours of parking at a time (circles). On our second trip we wound our way around until we finally found an exhibit of Piero della Francesca in a local museum. A famous renaissance artist, he lived in the town for some time. Oddly enough, most of his extant work is in frescoes…the which you can’t exactly export to museums. So, though it was very well done, the exhibit was something of a tease. Thereafter David suggested we find dinner in Fiesole, a neighboring town of Firenze. (I think he was generally disappointed with Arrezzo.) Feeling at least somewhat successful with having found the exhibit, we agreed, hoping it would fulfill some of our Firenze jones. The bells of the church whose lot we parked in heralded us out of town as we headed out in the car…once again.

Fiesole was quite easy to find, in spite of some anxiety owing to signage on the way. I bought a road map of all of Italy at the service station (How’s that for an investment in the future?), so we at least had some perspective on where we were headed this time. It is a town on a high hill (mountain?) to the northeast of Firenze, with a beautiful view of the city. We had a very lavish dinner—with complementary champagne, of all things—at an outdoor restaurant with a view of the city below, a place David had had dinner at ten years prior. The dinner rejuvenated us so that we felt empowered to seek out a great gelato place David remembered from the same era, in Firenze.

Mistake.

We had ourselves quite a little drive around the city, ensnared continually by traffic circles with little-to-no indication of where we wished to end up. I suppose we spent the better part of an hour trying to locate the general area we hoped to inhabit, with no success. We just couldn’t catch a break, so we eventually just tried to find the autostrada again, which led us to some very interesting parts of town. Heather: “Is she for sale?” Jeff: “I think so.” Two blocks later eliminated all doubt, as a bevy of scantily (or non) clad roadside stress-relievers dotted our periphery. In case your needs should ever lay in such a direction whilst in Florence, head to where the buses park between routes. It’s like a supermarket over there.

I took over the driving once we got going on some local roads out of town. It was nearing 1:00 AM at this point, and eventually I found the autostrada near Siena, and eventually we coursed our way into our driveway, at just about 3:00 AM. Where did we go wrong (apart from, directionally, ever which way)? That’s a tale for another time. For now, we’ll just put this day to rest.