05.18.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:01 am by Administrator
Fourteen days and seven run-throughs (if we’re lucky) before BARNABY RUDGE, PART TWO hits the mighty Herbst Theatre stage; back in the Golden Age of WSU Theatre, it was the home of countless OPSs, Mark Olsen “studio shows”, the ACTF Kennedy Center winner LOOK BACK IN ANGER, etc. I generally prefer the black-box theatre and Directing Lab shows to the Festival fare. The emphasis isn’t on expensive bells-and-whistles, or about keeping our subscribers placidly content… One can do plays and musicals actually being performed in current professional Theatre, with sexual situations, strong language, controversial topics, TEETH instead of pablum… (Maybe we’ll do THE BOOK OF MORMAN in the Herbst?) Thank the Powers-That-Be (our wise Chair) for the occasional RENT and AUGUST:OSAGE COUNTY on the main stage. But the upstairs theatre mainly must maintain sold seats with titles like THE MIRACLE WORKER, PICNIC, ANYTHING GOES, FORTY-SECOND STREET, AS YOU LIKE IT… Not my type of Theatre, though fine as training experiences for our students. (So long as they also do what’s current on regional theatre, off-Broadway, and Broadway stages — in classes, if not in front of our sheltered subscription base.)
So where do I get off, as an educator, doing my own “vanity project” — a knock-off of NICHOLAS NICKLEBY? First of all, Dickens is a “classic” author, taught in schools; he’s perhaps sentimental (i.e. you care about his characters), but he’s also a keen observer of human motivation and behavior. The scenes from his novels are primo acting material, with subtle sub-text beneath the artfully crafted text itself. For young or experienced actors, this is rich artistic broth, to be heated, savored, and served. Diracting RUDGE, I’ve had some of my best one-on-one character meetings with students, which are also one-on-one professional advising sessions: telling them that stage actors are character actors, not to be confused with personality, uncrafted “be-ers” — those film and t.v. types who cannot be hired by regional theatres because they perversely believe that they must be themselves above all, “honest’ above all, “authentic” above all… In short, everything but what the story demands: a character, different from them, in different circumstances, fighting for things they personally have very little experience with… Imagination, technique, and a keen passion for general humanity, not just their puny little selves, are demanded.
Had a good night tonight, with a quiet, focused, fun group of actors; solving problems, finding motivations and tactics and obstacles. Not just clever ways of staging or monotonous, organic ways of “being.” These young artists give me hope for Theatre not dying, not being second-fiddle to Film and Television and look-at-me navel-contemplation. …Hope for people who might play Hamlet, Lear, Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Rudge, Miggs the maid, Sarah in TIME STANDS STILL…. Craftsmen who will work in Theatre for a lifetime, with pleasure if not for plentiful profit, instead of a few seasons on a cruise-line or as chorus members in summer theatre musical comedy, or spear-carriers in Shakespeare…
Why be satisfied with the mundane, when the magical awaits with more effort, patience, commitment, striving?…
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05.09.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:20 am by Administrator
Have been in rehearsals for BARNABY RUDGE, PART TWO at Wright State for two-and-one-half weeks; our first act is blocked and am nine scenes into blocking the second. Wonderful cast and understudies, terrific stage management staff (of two), already have the majority of the props and furniture thanks to our terrific Props Master. And the script, adapted by yours truly, has been scoured and scraped during our first week of sitting at the table and reading, questioning, cutting, and dialecting. (Hey, I verbalized a noun, Ma!) It’s now a mere 54 pages long; still provides a juicy, literate, character-rich, action-packed two-and-a-half hours worth of Dickens. And we’re still clipping the unnecessaries here and there, as we go.
I do adore being in a rehearsal room with excited, imaginative, committed young actors. Try to be transparent and humble about my directing abilities, begging their patience and understanding; especially when there are more than five people on stage and I have to place bodies so the story is being clearly told AND so the actors don’t feel totally like flesh-puppets, doing insanely artificial things, merely because the power-mad dictator orders them to do so… But, hell, I’m often worse than my worst directors — and hiding behind my cute “Diractor” title ain’t enough, sometimes. I get lost, tired, sloppy, inarticulate, discouraged — which is why I never like to work more than three hours per night. (And why I like to make sure there’s coffee for all. Cannot understand how a Professional Training Program would fail to provide the most basic, necessary, professional courtesy delivered by practically every theatre for which I’ve ever worked: COFFEE!!!)
But BARNABY TWO has a lot of challenges: mob scenes (and I have a total of fifteen actors), quick shifts of locale, combat sequences, multiple-casting and quick changes, the afore-mentioned dialects, etc., etc. I completed the rough staging (I call it “sketching”) of the last mob scene tonight and feel so very relieved. My company will improve it all, once we begin work-throughs, with more questions, specific answers, exploration, attempts to do it “Right” by finding out how to do it wrong… Directors who change too much too often too whimsically drive actors nuts; and don’t work at any theatres more than once or twice. Directors who don’t allow actors to make big, glorious, bold mistakes — and then steer them back to The Story, rather than Their Story — are directors who should be kept in academia. But in classrooms (not in theatres) where they can do less harm.
This is what Michael Haney’s taught me, in our back-to-back productions at the Cincinnati Playhouse and Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati — A CHRISTMAS CAROL, SPEAKING IN TONGUES, and TIME STANDS STILL: the director doesn’t have to know everything, doesn’t have to be The Authority. But s/he must gain the company’s trust, keep it, let them fly through her/his support and guidance, and — ultimately — get out of the way.
I’m trying to follow Dickens and my actors, after pushing them where the adapter thought we were all headed… But the wondrous part is following the story where it wants to go, telling even the person who arranged the words on the paper that he was wrong.
More to come; but those are my thoughts after two-and-a-half weeks…
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04.04.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:47 pm by Administrator
In 1985, I was playing Richmond and Murderer 1 in a miserably flawed RICHARD III at the Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee. Nothing can devour the spirit of a professional actor more than being in a bad show — it’s worse than holding down the necessary day-job of filing or washing dishes. —— Worse because I was doing what I’d been trained to do at Wright State, what I’d been doing professionally for about three years, and it was Shakespeare on top of all that — but it was very, very bad indeed.
A fellow actor suggested that I go to a local library and watch the videotapes of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, “for theatrical therapy.” Having always been an avid Dickens reader, I knew little about the RSC’s eight-hour stage adaptation of the novel. But I needed a great deal of consolation and inspiration, so I went. I watched. And watched. And watched. Perhaps my memory is incorrect (as usual), but I could swear that I eagerly, amazedly viewed all eight hours, on four successive videotapes, in that small library cubicle in one sitting.
It fed my soul. It was one long ride through the wonders of Charles Dickens, his humor and humanity, the fabulous characters which he offered that large company of virtuoso actors, and every twist and turn of the journey had me laughing, crying, thinking. Under the earphones and inches from the small videoplayer’s screen. I remembered why I’d first started acting in the fifth grade, why I’d gone to college to study it, why my young wife and I were scrabbling and scraping to live the hard life of a theatrical couple. NICKLEBY, even on film (what must it have been like to actually have been in the London or Broadway theatres to experience it!), was a validation of the attempt to act, to tell stories to other humans in a darkened room, to transform into another being while searching your own heart and mind.
I finally own a copy of the DVDs, watch them at least once a year, and have been joyously performing in A CHRISTMAS CAROL for a total of nineteen years of my life, in Dayton or Cincinnati or Milwaukee. It is the magic combination of Dickens and theatre that we’ve attempted to offer in this new BARNABY RUDGE — and that we’ve been happily playing with for the past months. Great characters, from the pen of great writers, teach actors great lessons: in comedy, tragedy, the godly details of daily life in our eras and earlier ones… And now we offer our story-telling abilities to you, as a bit of theatrical consolation and inspiration for the evening. We share more common traits, thoughts, feelings than the current polarized politics of the country would suggest. Dickens’ spirit is doubtlessly weeping, considering, and chuckling about it all someplace…
We dedicate the productions of BARNABY RUDGE, PART ONE and next spring’s PART TWO to Brian McKnight, for all of the inspiration, love, artistry, and humanity he’s given to so many, on stage and in the classroom and throughout the poetry of his days.
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03.11.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:34 pm by Administrator
During the run of A CHRISTMAS CAROL at the Cincinnati Playhouse, I was approached by Michael Haney about auditioning for the upcoming Playhouse production of Andrew Bovell’s SPEAKING IN TONGUES. The rehearsals would commence hot on the heels of CAROL’s closing, when I thought I’d have a month or so off to work on my BARNABY RUDGE, PART TWO script. But the play, the director, the rest of the cast, and the salary made it impossible to turn down (I’d been offered a concert version of THE KING AND I in the same time slot, for virtually no money and little interest on my part). So I’m happy that I passed the audition, was cast as John, Pete, and Neil in TONGUES, and thus got to work with Michael Haney, Amy Warner, R. Ward Duffy, Henny Russell, Jenifer Morrow, etc., etc., etc.
TONGUES is an intensely challenging script, for actors and audiences, which defies easy categorization. It’s about marital infidelity, trust and betrayal in relationships, the power of stories to change lives, bonds between strangers, lost shoes, salsa dancing, etc. The play’s been a hit in its native Australia, but seems little known in the U.S. of A. (I had never heard of it). A movie re-working, written by Bovell as well, called LANTANA — with Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey — was made in 2001. But the play version involves actors playing multiple roles, simultaneous scenes on the same stage — with synchronized lines being said in both scenes… It has moments of comedy, moments of wonder, moments of suspense. The audience is forced to stay awake, aware, active, and to piece disparate fragments of plot together. I must admit that I was pulled into the form and substance of SPEAKING IN TONGUES almost as soon as I started reading it; it seemed like some enigmatic, purposefully provoking independent film. It showed, it told, but you weren’t sure what was going on, who these people were, why you were so intrigued by their quirky interactions…
Unfortunately, I learned once again that I’m best when entering rehearsals with my lines fully memorized; especially for intricate puzzles like TONGUES. A pleasure of professional Theatre is being cast and contracted months before that first readthrough, so you have a craftsman’s time to absorb the words, mull them, move them over your articulators (yes, including that speaking tongue), to think and feel them at work on you. Then and only then are you ready to make them work on others. But I require more time, now that I’m fifty-five and flippy, than I did in the past; TONGUES gave me less. It popped up, as ‘t’were. Ultimately, I was/am grateful. On my feet, trying to put the script down and offer up the right words at the right time, I was more than a leetle frustrated. Henny Russell, who seems to learn lines by merely pausing to inhale them, was undoubtedly rightfully frustrated with me. Thankfully, Amy and Ward were having a bit of trouble, too; but not as much as Cromer the Stoner. (Nurses at my future rest home will identify me as Demon Ted, named after mother’s final mental state. But mine may come sooner, the result of having too many of others’ words in Mind.)
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01.06.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:35 am by Administrator
Tis far, far better to act without a day job to add stress, dissipate focus, and increase the chance of illness. My sabbatical (oops, sorry, we don’t use that word anymore — it’s a Professional Development Leave) certainly improved my Scrooging this December. I was hale and hearty and happy, only gave what I considered to be two bad shows in all thirty-nine of this year’s performances. (Interestingly enough, they came at the beginning of new weeks, after I’d spent a day-off at home in Yellow Springs. Not due to any bad family vibes, I assure; maybe I enjoyed my time with my beloved four too much.)
Scrooge taught me many lessons, once again. How to not squeeze my air so much and so often, tightening my chest and throat and adding unnecessary strain to my breath and voice. Michael Haney, our ever-brilliant director, found more moments when I could be softer, quieter, more poignant rather than piercing or playing hard for laughs. I am a self-confessed laugh whore, ready to debauch myself all-too-often for a rousing guffaw from the audience. But this year I learned that some moments in the script just aren’t that funny; so I was trying to make them more human, more revealing instead. Or to relatively throw them away.
How often have I told my students to pick their high points, to not give everything all the time, to trust Michael Shurtleff’s concepts of Mystery and Ambiguity: not all character secrets have to be shouted from the rooftops. Some moments can be fascinatingly open for interpretation.
I had one moment in rehearsal when my eyes were streaming tears over Tiny Tim’s death. I guess the lack of contact lenses and Mom’s death in September allowed for more flow than usual. Of course, it never happened again in performances but I didn’t need it to do so. This year’s Scrooge was more of a matter of conservation and selection than just a pushed deluge of whatever was at hand.
I will have to revise this blogging, as it’s as nebulous as a bad acting teacher’s feedback. But I wanted to get back into the habit of splashing thoughts on my computer, as I’ve been busily spraying them on the pages of my log. Not having a PC at my Cincy Playhouse actor apartment has its good and bad points.
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11.01.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:23 pm by Administrator
Found myself in the Theatre section of a Barnes and Noble bookstore this afternoon. Very small section, dwarfed by the Juvenile Romances and the Christian Fiction. (The latter two were in separate parts of the store, understand; don’t want to have you think there were bodice rippers involving vampires and a teenaged Jesus or something.) And I found myself getting rather angry about the acting books I was leafing through.
Look, here’s what I’ve done, for over thirty years, as a professional stage actor. I know it can be different from what is done in some theatres by some actors, but this is what I do to not only keep the present job, but to gain good enough reviews and a reputation in order to get the next offer…
I do not just “Be”, whatever the hell that truly means. I’m a boring little git, in real life. I mumble, I plod, I exhibit little intelligence or grace, and I’m just a 54-year-old American actor who lives in Ohio. So I’ve been trained and employed to read a script, analyze it, memorize my lines, and do what the character would do. What the character is scripted to do, and say. And to do it through my own chosen, director-approved, appropriate actions: call them Tactics or Tools or whatever, they are literally how the actor/character moves, speaks, and thinks to get what s/he wants. Reacting to how the other actor/characters are doing things to get their often-opposing wants.
Luckily stage characters aren’t written for one particular movie star; they’ve been played over and over by all sort of different, trained interpreters. Fed with different stagings by different directors. And I always have to speak in different wordings, if not different dialects, if not different voices, when I play characters on stage. I have to move differently. I have to think and feel differently. And all stage characters are character-roles. They ain’t me!!!
Yes, you use the appropriate bits of yourself (thinking, feeling, speech, and movement) that mesh with moments of the character’s doing, their act-ing. For three to four weeks, up to eight hours per day, you rehearse possibilities and then your choices, so they hopefully seem more natural, more instinctive to you. So the audience is pulled into the necessary, artistic (selected and crafted) illusion that it’s all happening for the first time. And a part of you, inside the “machine” of the character, is pulled into the make-believe, also.
But you never go insane, or psychotic; you cannot truly believe that you’re somebody else and just “Be.” Bollocks!!!! That’s not what you’re paid for, unless you’re some sort of star and you’re going to malign the script and demean the character so it’s just you. A boring little git of a you — which is whom you trained and now earn money in order to escape from… And whom the audience does not want to see!!! They want a truthful story, in stage work, not a star.
Expend your heart trying to achieve fame and fortune on Broadway or in Hollywood, if that’s what you desire; but be trained to do things, appropriate to the wide spectrum of dramatic literature and history and human psychology, if you want to “just” be a working stage actor.
Hmmm, maybe I should write one of those unread books in the Barnes and Noble shelf for Theatre folk… That’d make my fame and fortune, wouldn’t it? I’d be the table-talk of every American dinner table, huh?
(How can anyone be arrogant in an art-form that the vast majority of Americans never see, don’t know, and couldn’t possibly care less about?)
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10.31.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:40 pm by Administrator
Listened to the WDPR broadcast of my ROMEO AND JULIET work with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. Despite much praise afterwards, verbally and via e-mail from respected audience members, and the standing ovations — I couldn’t stand to hear the recorded performance. The DPO was exquisite, it goes without saying: passion and precision in every note. So I know it affected the audience as it affected me; your image-ination is pulled into the combination of what you see and hear, absorbed into your suggestive human nature — and POOF! something can seem better than it was…
But, having listened through the broadcast on Saturday morning and taped it, I simply cannot bear to hear it all again. This has happened to me in the past, seeing myself on a videotape of what I thought was an excellent show, which got positive or glowing responses from the patrons — and then being disappointed by my work. But I’ve obviously allowed myself to forget one of my maxims in my Acting Professionally class: “Don’t believe your own P.R. (Public Relations)!!!” I sincerely expected to be blown away by the artistry, the brilliance, the interpretative nuances of my Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, etc. Instead, I’m aghast, embarrassed, and quite properly humbled by the awfulness of it all.
Yes, the actor tells himself, in his own defense, I was on a microphone that boomed out an echoing version of my voice, in order that it could be heard over the orchestra. Yes, I was told by the sound engineer to not trust the mike and allow myself to get too quiet, a mistake I’d made in our first rehearsal in the Mead Hall. And, yes, I’ve heard the recording of the first version, two years ago, over and over; I initially didn’t like parts of it as well, but it is overall a far more believable, detailed, moving bit of acting than this current taping could ever be… I’m over-acting, too loud, too slow in some sections, too fast and monotoned in others. Luckily, perhaps, I can’t see how my physicalizations affected the show; I certainly hear the mike’s thumping and shuffling as I moved here to be Romeo, there to be Juliet, etc. But did the action suit the word, or hopefully improve the speaking of those words?
So, to depart from the specific instance of artistic disappointment and, I could define it, failure, let me muse about what one does in response. I’ve had admitted failures in my acting over the decades, god and the audiences know; it’s just that I haven’t allowed myself to be this hurt by the experience in a long time.
Eventually, of course, you just move on. I don’t want to say that you forget it; I think it’s a poor actor who forgets their mistakes, instead of learning from them. And you have to remember history to learn from it. Come to think of it, forgotten history isn’t History, is it? It’s just stuff that happened that nobody knows about, because nobody cared to write it down or even acknowledge it at the time — or they chose to bury it, as if it never occurred. Or rewrite it, revise it, as if it occurred a different way.
But actors should remember when they suck, and not generalize the excreable quality of a moment or two into “It all blew chunks, the whole thing!!!” No, eventually I will listen with a bit of horrified patience to the tape again, and find the good moments and note why they were good — and define why the so-so bits were mediocre — and learn what not to do again by identifying what makes the lousey parts technically so bad.
I so hope that directors, who have the wisdom to see their productions again, towards the end of the run, can thus identify the Bad Bits. ‘Cause not even critical and popular successes are perfect, to the creators. The defects should be humbly noted and learned from, as well as the good stuff acknowledged. But only the monomaniacs (like George W.) refuse to admit wrong-doing.
I can tell you (and I’m mainly telling myself in these blogs, I know), that I was mainly bad, in that recording; I will try to do better, given the chance. And, since I intend to keep acting (because it would be impossible for me to stop and it’s the only thing that makes me a legitimate acting teacher), I will have the chance.
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on. (But keep the dust in a jar — or in a journal, for future reference.)
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10.24.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:00 pm by Administrator
Drove to see our middle son, Toby, on Friday. A two-hour plus journey in my Saturn (named Prospero — there are reasons) and in my thoughts. Listened to a Nick Hornby novel on CDs, but mainly listened to my brain-droppings. So truly blessed to be able to hop in a car and visit my college boys. Never had the time before, but my sabbatical allows it now. Have the chance to compare their education and educational environments with where I went and teach (Wright State — where it often seems I’ve always lived, a la Shirley Jackson’s castle). Toby’s housing has already been the subject of a blogging, so I needn’t blundgeon that topic again. But I often wonder about why he chose to attend such a large university, where anonymity is virtually assured. And, since Elliot and Charlie chose to spend their student debt upon a small, residential, liberal arts college, I was thinking why Toby felt he had to swim in a more specific, non-cross-disciplinary branch of academia.
He’s still searching for his passion, I think. For the equivalent of what Acting was to his parents. Something, some Way that pulls him from day to day, affects his income, his reading, clothing, politics, religion and/or spiritual leanings… That makes him endure the necessary compromises, digressions, contrary-companions, etc., that Life throws at him. Is such a bliss more obtainable, more obvious or more elusive in a large school? Where one lives in dark, nicotine-aromaed, chaotic hovels, and attends parties celebrating excess, and has a new professor for every course?
I was one of two acting majors in my class. Started with more, certainly, and I well remember about a dozen. But the others slipped into other majors and pursuits. So I was a big fish in the smallest of ponds. So unlike what the current Wright State acting or musical theatre majors experience. But perfect for my needs, though I never planned to attend that program — or the many changes of curriculum and faculty which occurred during my student years. My blessed (and often depressed) BFA experience was a sterling example of luck, circumstance, and my daily choices. Might have been possible in a small place like Kenyon, but never in a massive academic factory like Ohio University.
Elliot, our youngest, will do very well at the smaller school. He’s gregarious and makes friends easily; has already taken the stage there and proven that he continues to enjoy his acting and the society it provides. He has a firmer, more magnetic pull towards his bliss, his passions, his purpose (?) than his older brother, perhaps. So a more contained, and yet less-specialized course of study seems appropriate.
But it makes me wonder, during long solitary drives, to provision and enjoy my English major, whether Toby has found his Path yet. Or has “merely” made his first steps on a dusty side-trail. Hard to see the ones you love so very much wander off, even when you know they have to search and that you strayed constantly yourself — from and towards your Self.
I can only make my journeys to catch up with him, now and then. And try to let him know there’s always a path to the Old Place. The Old Folks. The ones who are still watching and listening for his steps.
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10.12.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:57 pm by Administrator
Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we were all Druids, everyone on the planet, united in one religion, all painting ourselves blue at the same time, agreeing on when we shall hug the trees and erect the monoliths and bay at the slivered moon? And we, of course, would have have to be sure the blue was exactly the same color, and painted over exactly the same parts of everyone’s bodies, no naughty bits omitted unless everyone’s were. And we’d have to face the slivered moon from the same angle, bay the same sounds, simultaneously, never deviating from a detail regarding our deity worship…
Facist, fanatical, fundamentalist horrors, yes?!!! Thank godS for the differences of the religions, the beliefs, the faiths, the believers, yes?!!! Why should I, as a non-organized, devout believer in my own, idiosyncratic, humanist view of a Higher Force (and I don’t mean I follow the Jedi Way) — why should I have people appearing on my doorstep, or shouting on my campus, or preaching on my media about the Ultimate Truth of Their One and Only Religion? Do they have the right to verbally persecute my beliefs because they believe their beliefs are the Only Ones to Be Believable?
Hey, fellow humans (which takes in considerably more people than just fellow Americans — if we are fellows, anymore)… Plurality, differences, many views exist in this world. Look how many varieties of insects or bottle-caps there are… Why do we want to slam one with another?
But here I will get off my High Horse to safely climb onto a Smaller, Less Significant Pony. Yes, I’m all for celebrating the diversity of Religions and Politics, instead of this incessant attacking and self-righteous proclaiming. But let me focus on a facet of my worldly experience that truly drives me nuts, just because it isn’t as important as The Big Social Items — yet fanatics abound even in nutshells: Theatrical Taste.
I attend a play or musical and I don’t like it. Others do. Fine. End of story, yes? Especially in an academic setting, when faculty and students and audiences are naturally free to voice their opinions, to maintain their personal integrity and beliefs. In something as relatively insignificant (and unknown to the majority of the population) as Theatre, who cares about differing perspectives? I’ve done many shows in which I didn’t really care for the script, but I liked the director, the cast, certain moments, etc. It’s very hard to find any play or musical, especially when you’re paid to perform them, in which there isn’t at least a moment or two which pleases you. In either content or form, in either the text or the way it’s per-formed.
As a practitioner, I pride myself on being able to articulate what I like or dislike about productions. Especially ones which I direct or in which I nightly act. The beliefs become more cogent as time passes and if I write them down, certainly. But I can walk out of a show, on stage or off, and rattle off some structural or thematic positives or negatives, easily enough. I’ve been doing this since junior high, after all. But I’ll have friends in the same show, or in the same audience as myself, and we will disagree. This used to drive me a little nuts, but I’ve never cared for pointless arguments (they seriously give me headaches), and now I’m only truly bugged by the persistent preachers who will not shut up. They are the Jehovah’s Witnesses of Artistic Taste, ready to cram their own perspectives down your screaming throat, regardless of your reactions.
Unless you Circle The Wagons. Join the group. Protect the Us and Condemn the Them. Because, as one of the most disastrous and powerful leaders of civilization all-too-recently spewed, “You’re either for us, or against us.” (Bush the Barbarian, but he talks to The God, so he knows who’s Us and who’s Them.)
Liberal theatre folk will jump on such intolerance if it occurs in religion, politics, sexuality, censorship — but then they’ll say (or heavily infer) that you’re not being a team player if you don’t root for the team. “Yes, it’s a hideous production of a slight and stupid piece, it’s certainly how I wouldn’t direct it, but we must Circle The Wagons, give it a standing ovation, pretend that we like it.” And thus serve as sterling examples to our students and audiences, who we’d like to believe like everything that we do. “…Either fer us, or agin us…”
Such conflicts may be inevitable, so long as humanity tries to do “The Right Thing” instead of “A Right Thing, for This Moment, In Context, for the people concerned.” But surely the ongoing, ever-flowing, unstoppable stream of differences points out the idiocy of insignificant theatre workers (especially theatre leaders) saying, “You must believe or act as if you believe this, for the good of the organization.” What is a theatre group but folks dedicated to telling different stories to different audiences, night after night? Staying open-minded to the moment?
So please, have the courtesy to respect my views. Don’t ask me to like something that I don’t. Don’t try to convert me. I promise to speak my beliefs and respect your right to have and speak your own. Co-Existence Can (and Does!) Exist.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 12:31 am by Administrator
Our story continues…
Had my first of two rehearsals (and that’s all I git) on the Schuster stage tonight, with Neal and the Dayton Philharmonic. I am 54 years old, been acting professionally since I was 21, and I’m supremely confident (perhaps e’en arrogant) in my ability to comprehend, speak, feel, and mean Shakespeare. But I was soooo nervous just an hour or two before I hopped in the car to drive to Dayton. Got there early, of course, so I could walk around, shake my hands and arms (my students and cast-mates see me do this constantly, like I’ve got ants running from my shoulders to my fingertips and I’m trying to shake-shake-sh-sh-shake the little critters off). Walking in the aisles of the theatre while the orchestra was rehearsing other pieces for the concert; mumbling to myself, doing my tongue-twisters and articulator warm-ups. Trying to calm myself to do my work.
For god’s sake, it was just a rehearsal, my first time to go through the blocking (my own devising) on the stage, have a microphone to play with, have my stool (my only prop) and lights and — oh, yeah, the music and Neal — all of it there for the first time. C’mon, Cromer, give yourself a learning curve, breathe and play…
And I did. Got most of it right, in fact. But “went up” at one point, had missed my cue, looked up to see Neal doing his own version of the shaking-arms thing — but his version involved a repetitious finger-waggle in my direction. Well, he could wiggle until the Rapture came and took all those angelic musicians away BUT Mr. I-Have-No-Frigging-Clue Cromer wouldn’t have been able to speak. The words had gone.
And I didn’t spontaneously combust and get dragged into the seventh ring of hell; Neal and the celloists didn’t disembowel me, call me a fraud, and revoke my acting privileges. I stated the blatantly obvious (“I’ve gone up on my lines, I don’t know where I am…”), they simply kept playing, Neal gave me the next word and POOF! All was well in Rehearsal Land.
And I was having a great time before the goof, riding that wave of verse and symphonic splendor — and I had a great time after it, finishing the last scene. Oh, to quote my new-found Buddha, Buck Brannaman (the horseman), sometimes the horse is just a projection of you, your bad habits, your attitudes… Well, an actor can think and feel himself into a bad performance — or open himself up, know he knows what he knows, and just enjoy the ride. Stop with the bloody spurs and just gallop.
First time I’ve ever used a horse metaphor. Feels good to try something coltish and unbroken.
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10.07.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:16 pm by Administrator
About two years ago, Neal Gittelman, maestro of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, talked to me about acting a bit with the DPO. The idea was to sort of orally-interp. some ROMEO AND JULIET scenes, with Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet music sandwiched between or laid beneath the Shakespeare. For a youth concert, with bussed-in school kids. Sounded great to me, I actually like ROMEO AND JULIET (though have never seen a stage production that worked, because the chemistry — or age or good looks — is never right between the leads).
(I will confess, since I don’t think I ever have before in these bloggings, and since no-one ever reads them, anyway, that I HHHHHAAAATTTTEEEE the following Shakespearean so-called romantic comedies: TWELFTH NIGHT, AS YOU LIKE IT, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, and LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST. Never want to see another production of any of them again. Or ANYTHING GOES, LADY BE GOOD, THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, FORTY-SECOND STREET… Basically any tap-centered so-called-musical-comedy. I know comedy, at least the type at which I laugh — and dese ain’t dem.)
I thought I’d just be behind a podium, with a script and a pitcher of water, glass, that sort of thing. Dressed all in black. Orchestra behind me. Cued to read, nice microphone, all easy and a bit informal, maybe even slightly “hip”… But it somehow evolved into me moving, acting out scenes, script in hand, yes, but not really needed except as a security blanket. I’d done Lemony Snicket’s THE COMPOSER IS DEAD twice before with the DPO, a reading (or was it memorized, I don’t remember now) of the Queen Mab speech from R&J, and, of course, the Human Race co-production of Tom Stoppard’s EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR. So I was used to acting with the orchestra. But not acting the parts of Romeo, Juliet, Lady Capulet, the Nurse, Friar Laurence, Mercutio, Tybalt, Benvolio, and the Prince/Chorus. Sometimes with three characters on stage at the same time!
But Neal had seen me do I AM MY OWN WIFE (a one-man, many character show at the Human Race) and thought it was possible, I guess. So I acted the bits in the youth concert; over-acted in parts, at least in the recorded rehearsal which I’ve heard. But, I immodestly admit, I thought I had done some of the stuff quite well, with verbal relish and a good interplay with the music. I kept the staging as simple as possible, with the inevitable now-I-face-right-now-I-face-left cliches here and there… It seemed to go well with the kids.
Then Neal inquired about expanding the script a bit, adding more music, making it appropriate for some evening, adult concerts. Well, with thoughts of famous Brit actors doing such concert readings, of Shakespeare or poetry or the Bible, etc., I did the smallest of gulps and said, “Yes!” I could do that, add the post-sex-wedding-night-parting scene (“It was the lark… No, sweet butt, it was the nightingale…” etc.), and the Queen Mab speech. Watch for more cues, that curious point and look Maestro Gittelman throws me, amid all the complicated conducting he’s doing with all those musicians, all those instruments, all those precise artists who know what the hell they’re doing when… Sure, I could do that. Hell, I had six months to prepare, at least.
So I take the recording of our prior version, with a script, and a copy of the complete play to New Jersey with me; to study and memorize and improve during my TIMON OF ATHENS and Apemantus days with the Shakespeare Theatre in Madison. And I do review my lines, amid my avid reading and journaling and TIMON rehearsals and performances. But I don’t write the necessary new narrations, the segues, the connectors — because I think even my old ones sound so sophomoric, next to William’s words. “Now the masked Romeo spots Juliet across the dance-floor — and will eventually slip beside her, to take her by the hand…” Gack!
I come back to Ohiya, begin rehearsals for MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Keep thinking that I must work on the ROMEO AND JULIET staging and write those damn narratives; c’mon, Bruce, we’re talking about maybe three short paragraphs, maybe four. And the blocking for the scenes has to be simple. But my mother dies, in her sleep, at the nursing home where she’s lived for roughly a year…
And my world shifts. Changes. Gains a new perspective. Loses a lot of old ones… MAN FOR ALL SEASONS has speeches which I must say about Death and mortality and convictions. But my Mom has died and it’s just a play. ROMEO AND JULIET is just a concert. Make-believe. Important, but not as important as they used to be.
The funeral, the burial, the family problems… I’m really glad to have SEASONS performances as a distraction. But R&J is really a back-burner issue. And the weeks pass. Nothing written, nothing staged, meeting with Neal regarding the new version looming… I drive back and forth to Cincinnati, speak my R&J lines aloud, get them fairly cold, start learning the old narrations as well. I am to be totally off-book this time, no script, just my little pea-brain on that large Schuster stage with what, 80 musicians? And all those audience members and the Maestro staring at me. (Well, Neal is too busy and too centered to stare. He’s a combination of a Buddha and Bernstein. A calm genius.)
TO BE CONTINUED
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09.20.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:15 pm by Administrator
Drove to visit Toby in his new college housing yesterday, a relatively-inexpensive-yet-comparatively-overpriced dump of a slum-lord’s dream. Dark, musty, filled with discarded furniture and junk from prior tenants, truly just the type of place where a loving dad wants his son to live for nine months of his higher education. Thank heavens I came bearing gifts, a care package of goodies from his mom and me — and then we went out for a grocery-shopping spree and a nice meal. Otherwise, the guilt would’ve suffocated me on the long drive home; I’d've been found, blue-in-the-face, slumped over the wheel, and wrapped around the The Bad-Dad Designated Deserved-Death Tree.
I know that I lived in a dark, dingy, depressing little crap-hole apartment in Fairborn, during my fifth year of BFA studies. It was all I could afford — and my parents, understandably enough, rarely visited. Came furnished with distorted, barely-functional furniture and a little kitchenette, stains everywhere on the floor and walls. But it was mine own, and I got a few young lady friends to visit (one of whom I eventually wedded). So I guess one can’t judge a domicile by its exterior or interior… Nope, screw that, one can and should judge domiciles by such criteria; the judgement will doubtlessly be accurate, just, and appropriate. So I lived in a dump and now Toby’s residing in a dump, too.
Well, at least he’s in college. Though most of his neighbors, crammed into their equally claustrophobic rat-farms, are also O.U. students — some of the nearby residents are just the type of people who always reside in such earthly rings-of-hell. They have sixty-three cats meowing and be-crapping their tiny, curtain-shut spaces — and an antique au-to-mo-bile rusting in the tall grass of their driveway. And they dint never need no book-larning tuh git tuh their lahf uv luxyooree!!! Hail no!
Where’s the skid-marks and ditch leading to that Bad Dad Tree?….
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09.15.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:49 pm by Administrator
While in my senior year of Westerville High School, I began keeping a diary; like so many things I eventually have become obsessed with or dedicated to, it didn’t seem appropriate for a young mucho-macho guy to be doing at the time. Girls kept diaries, began every entry with, “Dear Diary” and such. Narcissistically detailed their latest pimples or Jimmy’s kisses or how the kitty is just being so naughty… But what did a guy write about?
But Dad kept a log, in his miniscule but elegant handwriting, which I’d occasionally peruse. And he would sometimes be quite mundane, recording the weather or meals and such, but often I thought he was quite profound, insightful, AWARE!!! When he often seemed so distant around the house, it seemed that he could open up and ponder “aloud” in his scribblings.
Then I got into college and Bob Britton took over the Professional Actor Training Program (hell, he invented it!) at Wright State — and required us to keep acting logs. Which he, at first, read and graded! (What an audacious snoop, now that I think of it…) Eventually it was totally up to us to keep at it, but I found that I couldn’t really stop. I have over twenty of variously sized, covered, and lined or blank journals now — all but one bound, the exception being a small, college notebook. And I feel a nagging, vacant pull when I go too many days without jotting down some events and reactions, though I have gone months sometimes in silence. I consider those days, especially with my steadily worsening memory, lost; as ephemerally disintegrated as the performances I’ve delivered. Dissolved into Time with few traces lingering. Wisps of my Life dissipating like the smoke of snuffed candles.
I read Charlton Heston’s diaries when I was in college; still have that volume in my library, in fact. Nothing earth-shaking or even that literary about them, but they were the daily deeds and deliberations of a major film star. They made the untouchable world of such people more real, more comprehensible, more human. All was not golden in the land of fame and fortune. Artistry still struggled to survive, as well as family relations and personal integrity. (Funny, but I am so diametrically opposed to Mr. Heston’s NRA Republican Conservatism and yet found it so easy to connect to him as a human being in his diaries…)
Autobiographies by actors are a passion of mine, also, which began with David Nivens’ witty and well-written BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES and THE MOON’S A BALLOON. I always spend far too much money on books by or about the lives of actors or comedians. They make me both humble and ecstatic to be a stage-walker, to know that everyone has had hard times, that all is cyclical (karmically and in terms of the ups and downs of every life). They make me detest self-proclaimed “experts” and “authorities” with even more gusto, because the truly wise seems to know that they’re fools.
Currently reading Michael Palin’s diaries, as I’m cultivating a daily journal habit myself for my sabbatical. Like his filmed journeys to the far corners of our Earth, I’m mesmerized by the glimpses into his thoughts, feelings, observations, personal and professional life. He’s a man I wish I could know, whom I like and admire, both through his work and now through his present-tense, concise but vivid summaries of his days.
Perhaps that’s the essential need for keeping and reading accounts of lives, in a detailed, daily manner… You find a kinship in souls, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, sexuality, politics; true, I rarely read the diaries of people I’d hate. (Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld — sorry, not interested — unless they recanted their stupidities and sins…) But I often discover my own frailties and self-disappointments at work in those who often become my heroes. Just because they have the guts to try to tell the truth to the one person who’d really know what’s b.s. and what’s not. Themselves.
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09.07.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:25 pm by Administrator
I sometimes wonder what kind of man I’d be if I hadn’t had Ruth Amanda Warner Distelhorst Cromer for my mother… If I — and my four brothers — hadn’t had her gentle, generous, kind, patient, loving example to offset my dad’s more brusque, harsh, intimidating, distant method of parenting.
I know I wouldn’t have been able to offer my wife Carol any type of love that listens and attempts to understand and to compromise. I wouldn’t have been equipped to enjoy the time I had with my three boys as they grew. (Mom always said the time would never be long enough and, like so many other things, she knew what she was talking about.) I wouldn’t have grown to be someone who hugs readily and often and rather indiscriminately; I began my college theatre days hating hugs, thinking they were so phoney and actor-y and invasive. But now the Mom part of me hugs my brothers, my sons, my wife, my cast-mates, my students, dogs, cats, telephone poles. (Mom gave great hugs.)
Without Mom, I might still have been an actor, because Dad made me love words and comedy and big ideas, but without Mom’s goodness, her sensitivity to the plight of others, I’d never have been able to play so many of the roles that I’ve been blessed with. Mom was walking compassion. She never saw anyone in pain, I think, with whom she didn’t empathize — often when the men in her household would be shaking their heads over her unnecessary vulnerability. Mom has made me, on stage and off, and hopefully in my classrooms, see the value of caring for another human being. Trying not to judge, to be superior, or to be intolerant, but walking in their shoes — recognizing we are all human. Aside from trivial matters of race, religion, sexuality, politics, where you leave your dirty laundry, we are all human. And potentially very good, decent, luminous.
Mom has somehow entered my emotional system, I believe, and made it possible for me to cry at the smallest suggestion of tragedy. On the day after Dan and Connie had called to tell me that Mom had died, I was once again rehearsing the part of Thomas More in MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, my next play in Cincinnati. Work was a welcome distraction, I thought, from grief; but More’s final speech, before his execution, says:
“Have patience, daughter, and trouble not thyself. Death comes to us all, even at our birth. Even at our birth Death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day of the next he will draw nigh. It is the Law of Nature and the Will of God.”
So I’m on stage, surrounded by my great group of cast-mates, who know about Mom’s passing. And I’m kneeling by More’s chopping block (he’s beheaded for his religious beliefs), speaking the speech, and get to “It is the Law of Nature…” And I’m hit by the reality of Mom’s death, the law of nature robbing me of this woman who made me the best husband, father, teacher, actor, and man I can hope to be — and I can’t speak. And the silence goes on, with this breathless sob freezing the thirty or so people in the theatre for maybe a minute — but a loooonnnngggg minute. And then I go on, voice level, focus regained, onto the next part of the scene, no problem.
Because Mom also taught me that you get hurt or feel the hurt of others, and you feel it fully, and then you go on. Knowing that some hurts never go away and that others will come in their place. But you must feel fully or you are not human, not truly a caring soul, and not what Ruth Amanda epitomized. So I thank her, I will miss her hopefully every day of my life, and I consider myself blessed to have been one of her boys.
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08.31.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:31 pm by Administrator
Okay, I have about fifteen minutes before I trudge to the theatre for our first preview, so I will at least begin to answer your questions. First, thank you for your compliments and for thinking that I might have something worthwhile to write to you about life as an actor… I will say that I’ve never regretted choosing to spend so many decades in and around Theatre, but I fully sympathize with your situation; my son Charlie is experiencing the same doubts, empty pockets, and less-than-desirable roles and less-than-desirable pay for the roles he gets.
When I graduated from Wright State, I was lucky enough to be chosen as an apprentice for the summer with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival — which was then (in the late seventies and early eighties) a summer-only rotating repertory company; in Anniston, Alabama, of all places — not what one would consider the intellectual or cultural heart of America. But Martin Platt had built an impressive group of actors and designers, financial patrons and loyal audiences. Families would get a motel room in Anniston, or park their RVs in the theatre parking lot, so they could see all four mainstage shows over the course of a weekend. They could even see a more modern piece in the smaller theatre.
For a young actor, with classical aspirations, it was a godsend. In my first season, I was a soldier in MACBETH (and assistant to the fight choreographer), a soldier and Jacques de Boys in AS YOU LIKE IT (and assistant to the fight choreographer), and was then hired to play Sebastian in the fall tour of TWELFTH NIGHT (for which I did the fight choreography). I saw and heard experienced, classical actors night after night for the first time — and I was on stage with them!!! All of the academic bullshit taught at Wright State by non-actors got blown away and I was really getting the Good Stuff: practical, immediate, repeatable, reliable, CRAFT!!!
For seven seasons (’79 through ’85) I returned to ASF, which was my artistic home for three months out of the year. It kept me grounded and sane, gave me a sense of identity — no matter what survival jobs I had to take elsewhere, I knew I was an actor. Martin Platt was very loyal to his company members and gave many of us “youngsters” a steady growth in size of roles, contact with visiting directors (like Ed Stern), and salaries. Eventually, it seemed that I had achieved my dream position when the ASF opened in Montgomery, on a nine-month contract, and where I had promises of leading roles, title of Fight Choreographer (I never used the term “Fight Director”), my own armory space, and my name on the dressing room door.
I taught Stage Combat in the MFA program in that first year in Montgomery, as I had in Anniston, but I never wanted to be a teacher, except as something to occasionally be an offshoot of my acting career. I certainly never desired to teach at a college. Quite the opposite. Academia is filled with non-actors teaching actors, non-directors directing actors, people who don’t have the chops to do it professionally, so THEY TEACH?!!! What is wrong with this picture?!!!!
So why have I taught at WSU since 1987? Because I got married and had sons. Actors don’t make enough to support families, not the vast majority, not on acting alone, and I wanted/needed a steady relationship and children. Carol and I met in college, married when we worked together at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and spent our non-ASF months looking for a viable “market”. We moved to Seattle, moved to NYC, then moved to Montgomery for the opening of the new 22 million-dollar ASF complex. But Carol wasn’t hired as an actress in the company, though a lesser-talented, former Wright State classmate of ours — married to the Business Manager — was!!! Since we still didn’t have any kids, we decided it was time to end our Alabama days. We moved to L.A. after that first season.
(The whole company atmosphere had gotten petty and mean — victim of the “Edifice Complex”; it was beautiful to do summer rotating rep. of the classics, with a group of friendly, quirky colleagues getting together for three months and for relatively slim salaries, but the new Theatre seemed to spawn greed, jealousy, and competition. I was happy to leave, and to put my marriage as a higher priority than my career.)
Carol was pregnant with our first son, Charlie, as we struggled in L.A. I got a night-job on a Glendale newspaper (setting copy for ads, as I remember), did some bad Equity Waiver Shakespeare (very disheartening, with a dogmatic director who was also playing Shylock — badly), and we became parents. My dad was diagnosed with cancer (back in Ohio), Wright State fortuitiously offered me a teaching job, and so we returned. Had another son, spent two years living in Beavercreek (ugh!), then left WSU and teaching to return to acting in Seattle. Briefly, the boys were diagnosed with an expensive medical condition, the bills were too much, Wright State fortuitously offered me another position, and so we returned yet again to Ohio academia.
I only go on so long about my non-teaching days because I think the common thread you need to contemplate is A Need of Family. If you can be ambitious to the point of putting career above your parents or girlfriends or wives or children, you’ll probably do better as an actor than I. But maybe not. For myself, I couldn’t survive the insecurities and rejections of Theatre if I didn’t have Carol (and now my sons) to ground me, to make me whole. One way or the other, you can never be sure where your life will take you, but you have to “stick to your guns”, and know what makes you happy.
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08.30.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:38 pm by Administrator
Have been in rehearsal for A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company for over two weeks now. Had our first rehearsal off-book today and I survived it, though our Assistant Stage Manager Ellen seemingly delights to give me thick sheathes of line notes. They do those rectangular slips of paper, one per muffed line, called line, forgotten line, etc. Very discouraging, but an actor needs to face the reality of not saying the words correctly — and patiently work to the perfection of saying all the playwrights phrases, as penned; not the way you want to say them or misremember them. Like notes from the director, a professional actor should take the aid (and it is offered aid) and say, “Thank you!”
I’ve been struggling to just get the “rough draft” of memorization in my skull, so I could feel some sense of ownership of the part. Now I can calm down a bit and do more of the detail work. I like to come into a show off-book, but just couldn’t do it on this one. Too many lines and I was too distracted with my Apemantus work in New Jersey and then getting my sons off to college. (Still working on helping Toby return to O.U.; he can’t find a cheap, clean, close-to-campus place to live. This makes it very difficult for an actor/father to not prefer to be a father/actor. And put the repetition of the More words off ’til the proverbial Later.
Not enough is said of memorizing in acting classes. It seems like a simple enough task, but not when you get a mammoth role and have to gradually, pain-stakingly, stoically say them ALOUD over and over and over. Noting what in the preceding line motivates you to say yours, putting a little slash-mark there, at least mentally. (In my acting classes, they have to do it literally. Most of the beat changes are in The Other’s lines, not your own.) I’m older and the memory is a bit tired of stuffing things in it, so I have to start ahead of rehearsals or I’d never accomplish the ingestion. Especially if it’s a dialect role, like More, when you must repeat the words ALOUD (does no good to just think them!!!) and also get the vowel substitutions and splashed ‘t’s, etc. into your muscle memory, into your articulators so fully that you don’t have to consciously think about it. Until I own the words, I can’t act the role.
Never understood academic directors who forbid their casts to memorize ahead of time. Or teachers who pile on lengthy scenes without enough time for the student actors to properly learn their lines. Let the teachers try it, see how they do. But the Golden Rule is so often ignored by acting teachers or academic directors — or professional directors who don’t work more than once at any theatre…
When I got home from Cincy this evening, I went for a two-mile jog, speaking my lines ALOUD as I ran; great for a distraction from complaining muscles and lungs and a perfect way to kinesthetically slip those syllables into mouth-muscle-memory. And don’t worry about memorizing line readings (that’s another dickhead complaint by academics); Thomas More never runs while speaking on-stage. The speeches always sound very different. Duh!!!
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08.12.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:34 pm by Administrator
Reading Michael Palin’s diaries, the second volume, for writing and Life inspiration. The Pythoners’ absurdity, their delightful cut-to-the-chase satire of society, their what-the-hell!!! and what-the-hell? outlook is soooo healthy. My intelligence doesn’t match any of theirs, but I feel my heart slow a bit when I read their words or see their sensible nonsense. For one who’s been so anxious for the past weeks, fretting about my sons’ college costs, wondering what-the-hell???!!!!… “Can’t afford this. Break their hearts, but… Better to face it… How could I have been so selfish, to be an actor and to then have children?… I CANNOT PROVIDE!!!… They are smart, sensitive, decent people and yet I can’t give them an education. How will they learn to question authority, until they have the knowledge to intelligently question everything?”
My leave from academia already has me reading more, writing more, running more, and — yes — questioning more. Never one to believe the tone and body language of Experts and Authorities and Know-It-Alls (George Bush is a prime example, but merely the stupid form of an arrogant professor), I’m developing some type of Thomas-More-ish compulsion to write against the sinful self-righteous. Those who talk, but don’t walk the walk.
Yes, I am guilty, I confess. (This is why I hated Bush, he’d never admit his horrific mistakes, his devastation of thousands of lives and now our economy.) I talk, sometimes, in too definite a manner. I become frightened or too sure of my opinions and “facts” — but I try to do something, to live my daily life true to my mouth, to perform my art as I profess it. I fail, often, yes; but the successes and the on-going effort make me endure.
Just watched THE BLACK SWAN with Carol the other night. You can take the Artistic Perfection thang too far, at the expense of too many, definitely. And I’m not sure what humanity will have gained by that one moment of “ultimate” artistry. But the film’s dire warning was well-taken by Fretful Me: have a Life and your Art, not one or the other. Balance your beliefs with questions. Check to see if your parents were nuts, maybe you came by your instability honestly.
Oh, and own your shit!!! Take responsibility for what you do and think; change it, if you don’t like it. Be wary when you like it too much and others are left bloodied by your unquestioning pursuit of The Way — it might just be Your Way, or better still, merely your way today.
I want my beloved sons to stay humble, open, happy in asking rather than hideous in Knowing.
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08.02.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:08 pm by Administrator
Back home from my TIMON OF ATHENS adventures in New Jersey. Trying to find the finances to get Toby and Elliot in college for the fall, but — like Timon — we’re over-extended. It’s a day-by-day matter of trying to find out the ACTUAL cost of Kenyon and Ohio University, our ACTUAL income, and reconcile all that with our ACTUAL credit debt… Nice to have days free from the Make-Believe Land of acting and teaching acting, so that I can actually pay some attention to actual reality for a bit.
I’m continuing to journal daily, as I started in Madison, NJ. Trying to gain discipline as a writer, in order to pen something creative and fictional during my sabbatical. Often it seems it’s merely a matter of spilling the words on the page, knowing it has to be revised — but not as I write. Editing in the moment kills the moment. It’s like trying to perform in rehearsals, instead of rehearsing. Trying this, trying that, working through the possibilities. Yes, dammit, you have to make choices as an artist, it ain’t just wiping your instinctual ass randomly on a canvas (as some bogus acting teachers would have you believe). But first you play, then you shape, and then you publish (to mix artistic metaphors).
At any rate, my journals are just for me, not for the general public. They’re a way of trying to be truthful and not censored. Of ranting and raving at times, knowing that just because it’s written one day, that doesn’t mean it’s transitory and won’t be a true feeling or thought the next twenty-four hours.
Reading Charles Dickens and John Irving and gaining inspiration to really do it this time… Unlike this blog, which falls way behind in my priorities, and is more edited that my journal or attempted creative scribbling, I need to sit repeatedly before empty pages and fill them.
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07.01.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:00 pm by Administrator
I find myself in Madison, New Jersey, transported in rehearsals to the world of TIMON OF ATHENS. This is my twenty-first Shakespearean title, added to the many repetitions of MACBETHs, DREAMs, ROMEO AND JULIETs, HAMLETs, etc. It also signals the commencement of my second (and perhaps final) Professional Development Leave from Wright State University. I have a year to recharge my teaching batteries, renew my knowledge of acting (especially the artistic/technical and business sides of a working stage actor’s life). Essential for anyone presuming to train professional actors in a conservatory-approach curriculum like the WSU Professional Actor Training Program.
An added thrill of the current job, playing Apemantus in alumnus Brian Crowe’s production, is being surrounded by my past Shakespeare students. Which include Mr. Crowe, Jasmine Batchelor, Greg Mallios — and I had the pleasure of watching the resonant, articulate, funny Brian Cade playing Demetrius in an outdoor DREAM last night: all here at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. And none of the productions involving First Folio fanaticism or flavor-of-the-month, Professor-Harold-Hill acting dogma… Just daily work, eight hours of it, by people who do it professionally, not academically.
I have emerged from the depths of professorial pontification into fresh, clear, sweet air.
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03.22.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:19 am by Administrator
(Bruce’s remarks, excerpted here, were first presented at the Playhouse’s Annual Meeting this past June, 2010.)
First of all, I’m quite serious when I apologize before speaking publicly without the aid of a playwright or author’s words. I’m one of those shy actors, who played in the back yard by himself as a kid, a superhero battling devious bad guys, providing all of my own soundtracks and sound-effects. I was nerdy in junior high, but an English teacher somehow coaxed me into auditioning for a school play, The House at Pooh Corner. Yes, the Pooh as in the bear. So A. A. Milne provided my first public speeches, which I delivered in shorts and fake freckles. I was Christopher Robin.
So, to o’erleap Time, this shy kid grew up, studied acting in college and has been fortunate enough to become and remain a professional stage actor for the past 30 years or so. I do pretend to be a full Professor, of Acting and Movement, at Wright State University, during my days. But I am, first and foremost – and it’s the only reason I can strive to teach acting to young hopefuls – an actor. I get the same thrill playing Lear and Hamlet and Prior Walter in Angels in America and definitely Ebenezer Scrooge now as I did rolling in the grass and pounding imaginary villains in my back yard as a kid. Like many actors, if not all, there’s a big part of me that can’t seem to fully grow up.
When the cast of the Playhouse’s A Christmas Carol gathers in November, as it has for the past 13 years in which I’ve been blessed to be in the production, there are thus a lot of kids in the room. Some are 7 to 13 years old. They’re generally shorter and cuter than the rest of us. Some are older, but don’t appear in the show. Mr. Stern is always there, and Mr. Ward and Mr. Haney, and most of the Playhouse staff. They are kids like the rest of us, don’t let them fool you, but they don’t get to play in public, as the actors do. No, only the older folks who are cast as Fezziwig, Belle, Marley, Cratchit, Past, Present, and Future – those are the actors who still get to don costumes and makeup and learn lines and blocking, who do our very best to learn the intricate and arduous and well-intentioned direction of Mr. Haney, and who go out on the Playhouse stage during the holidays to play in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
And we do. We play. We first play in a read-through, then we play weeks of rehearsals, then run-throughs in which you’re actually expected to act while you do the blocking and dancing and singing you’ve been taught in rehearsals. We play in previews, and then in performances. We play when we’re tired, or ill, or beset by personal problems because, yes, we get paid for it, but also because, dear lord, how fun it is to play A Christmas Carol…
Charles Dickens is perhaps my favorite author, because he loved humanity so much and was so supernaturally equipped to record mankind’s eccentricities, foibles, quirks, mannerisms, genius, idiocy, horrifying evil and blinding goodness. Dickens churned out his serialized novels with a godlike capacity to weave invention with insight, to see what was occurring in his world and what might and could occur in his fiction. A Christmas Carol is perhaps his most concise, and certainly his most well-known, if not most beloved story.
To crawl into the world of Ebenezer Scrooge every night for a month, in the midst of crowds of adults and children eager to hear the tale once again, is glorious. Glorious. The family of actors gives to the audience and the family of the audience gives back to us. The exchange is laughter, love, loss, learning, and the need, the desperate need, our desperate need to change – to change the moment, change the thoughtless words, change the wrongs, the injustices, the mistakes, the miseries, to change humanity, to change ourselves.
I played Bob Cratchit to Joneal Joplin’s Scrooge for eight years and I loved it. I adored being the squirming, shivering, benevolent Bob under the steely glare and frosty speech of Jop’s Mr. Scrooge. When I would mourn the death of my beloved little child, Jop was right beside me, literally and emotionally, choking back tears.
Jop and I spent a few hours on stage, during his last week of performances, and he walked me through the role. And he told me that for him (“but you do what you feel is right for your Scrooge, always…”) that the big change, the Big Lightbulb always occurred when Tiny Tim died. Not during the next scene, at his own graveside. But when he knew he could have prevented that child’s death and hadn’t done anything, when he saw that beautiful loving family devastated – and yet enduring for one another – and realized he might have changed things. If he could change himself.
That’s the actor’s insight, coupled with Michael Haney’s constantly illuminating direction, which has given me the gift of my Scrooge. I begin the show as the most notorious boss in history, the original “Looking Out For Number One” Mr. Ice Guy, keeping my distance and counting my gains. The spirits come, the spirits go, the spirits speak, the spirits show… But when a poor man’s son dies, perhaps known and loved only by his grieving family, then the Change, the miracle, the Dickens Hope that all men seek appears. You’re always tired by the end of the show, just when Christmas morning comes and it’s time to be slap-happy, joyous, buoyant and bounding. But Scrooge always pulls you into that Change, that renewed childhood, where everything is new again, where everything is possibility, and play. Michael has said, I believe, that my Scrooge finds his Inner Child again; I think that Dickens allows us, inspires us all to do the same. Year after year after year. God bless us, everyone.
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03.15.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:38 am by Administrator
Marsha Hanna was a friend of mine for approximately twenty-four years, if I start counting from our first show together at the Human Race Theatre Company. We played mismatched lovers in THE SEAHORSE: Harry and Gert, making love, dancing, brawling, learning to trust and truly accept each other, in some little port-town bar. A video exists of the show, so Marsha and I are captured in the old Biltmore Hotel performing space, with our buddy Michael Lippert’s laugh erupting now and then from the audience. She was 35 years old back then; I was 30. She was venturing forth on the dream of a professional theatre in Dayton, while I was finishing what I thought would be a digression from my “real” acting career: I was in a temporary teaching job at Wright State University.
She would eventually grow to be perhaps my closest theatre buddy, because of the many shows we did together, because of our similar taste in scripts, because she could converse with me on matters of craft and humanity and common friends like no one else in my life. When she was diagnosed with cancer, I immediately thought of it as a death sentence. Not a believer in organized religion, certainly not a Christian, I still began including her in my nightly prayers, asking that she be returned to full health, to lead a full life doing what she loved to do. After a year of hospitals, and shows (we finished our director/actor days with THE VERTICAL HOUR in early 2010), and chats, Marsha died. It was a full year, one that put her in peril and frustration and dependency, and I think she’d had enough. Her body had had enough, at any rate.
So months have passed since her death on January 3. I spent January and February playing Butch in NEXT FALL, at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. Performing five or six times a week in a play about the abrupt death of a loved one, a son, a friend, a partner. Broke down in tears for over twenty performances, a mix of dreaded imaginations of my boys’ dying and Marsha’s memory and my real feelings of loss, forever loss, never-to-be-reclaimed loss… It seemed an appropriate way to vent my grief and put it to artistic use. And the synchronicity, the timing of the show made it all inevitable… I had to use what washed over me, practically every night, regardless of whether I felt it was proper or not.
A side of me considered that allowing my actual sadness to come on stage with me was cheap and exploitational; the winning, actor part of me thought it was a tribute to my love for my friend… I could show all of the audience members who’d lost loved ones that I understood, that it was a real and valid and human emotion, those sudden and wrenching sobs of the bereft.
I still miss my friend very, very much. I want to call her and chat again. To bum a cigarette off her and smoke it in the Human Race alley with her. So my love goes out, to where ever, to my beloved buddy — and I hope she knows she’s still treasured and remembered and I don’t want this pain to end for quite some time. Because I feel that then she’ll truly be gone from my life.
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11.12.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:21 pm by Administrator
Finished a three-week run (nay, sprint) of THE 39 STEPS at the Human Race last Sunday — and really miss doing that show with those people (crew, cast, director, audiences, etc.)… We always got standing ovations and, dammit, we deserved them! I will be unabashedly proud of that production, of our literal blood and sweat that was spilt, often enough in the case of the former and always in the matter of the latter. Richard Marlatt, Allison Moody, Jake Lockwood, Heather Jackson, Kay Carver, J.J. Tiemeyer, Nathan and Missy — we wuz a well-oiled farcing machine!!!
And, of course, as soon as it’s over, I feel old again. Achey and out of sorts, slow to get out of bed, like a fifty-three year-old. During the run of the show, I was released, open, yes, often out of breath, but also, yes, able to dash through the following lunacy, heart a-pounding and mind-at-ease. The show totally centered me for my Shakespeare, Comedy of Manners, and Acting Professionally classes… I felt I knew what the hell I was talking about.
A few days off and I’m back in Cincy, Scrooging around again. Loving the show and Dickens as I do, if I can stay healthy, I only look forward to it all.
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09.15.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:10 am by Administrator
Now teaching three classes at the university: Acting Professionally (a business class, basically, amid all the theatrical art), Comedy of Manners (Moliere through Coward), and Playing Shakespeare (with the Musical Theatre emphasis students). As I enter something like my 22nd year of college professing, I find myself thoroughly enjoying the give-and-take of ideas, interpretations, even opposing views… College, in my mind, is supposed to be about exploration more than definition. Possibilities and pursuits, rather than pronouncements and periods. (Luckily, I like, or likely love, the alliterative.) To jump into Noel Coward’s 1920s or 1930s world, then heave off to Shakespearean Ilyria or Verona the next day, with some morning hours spent considering New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles… To continue the metaphor, in the latter Acting Professionally class, we spent a few hours visiting their future apartments, furnished with the pets, Significant Others, acting awards, views, etc. gained by their first five years out of college. As a creature of my imagination and the gains that it (and The Universe or a Higher Power) has granted me, I revel in these artistic travels — all contained within our minds as we move from studio to studio in the Creative Arts Center at Wright State in Dayton (actually Fairborn) Oh-hi-ya!
It’s comforting to think that Charlie’s off in Frisco, experiencing his first In-The-Real-World-of-Theatre-and-Survival-Jobs year, even as I’m trying to help my students do the same. And to think of Toby attending his O.U. classes, hopefully finding intellectual curiosity welcomed, encouraged, applauded, nurtured; but not controlled, choked, crushed, BORED!!!
I went to lunch with an old friend from college days on Monday — and immediately felt that connection of people, now with families and wrinkles, who once played make-believe together and still have the gleeful child-Self lurking behind the eyes. Actors are different. Maybe not as different as rock stars, but different. And stage actors are different from other varieties.
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09.03.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:01 am by Administrator
Tonight’s the opening of Drew Fracher’s 60s version of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. We’ve worked diligently for four weeks, twisting lines and physicalities to fit 1968 hippydom — but an idealized, imagined Never-NeverLand version of that very bi-polar and upsetting era… My personal journey has been coming from an aged general dislike of the Shakespeare romantic comedies, with their archaic and often inexplicable “wit” — and the often disconnected chemistry of the leading lovers… Coming from this challenging prejudice against the material and the conception of me as a linguistically acrobatic Romantic Lead, and then having to patiently follow Drew’s supportive and incisive direction, and finding choices that finally seem to work. Our two preview audiences have been diverse in the Laff-O-Meter responses, but both seemed to warm to the concept and the characterizations quickly. Post-performance buzz has been charged and charmed — but audience members who linger and lavish loving praise are naturally going to be verbally positive.
I’m tired from the start of Wright State duties, too few hours of rest, bad nutrition, no jogging, and the commute for Benedicking around. But I’m the one who signed-up for the assignment, and I don’t regret this odd life of moonlighting and make-believe. But I should be journaling about the experience, ’cause I keep thinking my 53-year-old arms are going to tire of the juggling act shortly. How many years, especially with the new administrative duties at WSU, can I act and teach and be familial in sufficient and responsible doses?
Current physical complaints: irritatingly achey right knee, bruised and protesting right elbow and forearm, and myopically worsening vision. Oh, and not drinking enough water to keep the voice lubed, either…
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08.05.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:22 pm by Administrator
Taking Elliot on college visits has got the ol’ Grey Matter a’tickin’ about what my intentions are, as an acting teacher in the Professional Actor Training Program… Yes, as the name says, the program is meant to train students to be professional actors, but each of the faculty has her or his own strengths and techniques to offer.
Mine are geared towards the day-to-day process of a stage actor (not film or t.v.) performing a role with dynamics, consistency, personal revelation, clarity, and adherence to the director and playwright’s intentions. All of which could be summed up as performing a role, eight times a week, regardless of the material, “artistically.” Craft (technique and conscious choices) mixed with inspiration of the moment (responding to your cast-mates, to the audience, to what is really happening on a given night).
I teach what I do (the practiced and practical), as well as what I wish I could do (the ideal and the elusive). Stage acting is all I’m truly qualified to teach, because it’s what I do — thus I am so joyous about aiding young actors to approach a script, to discover a reliable personal process for the standard four-week rehearsal period, and then — most importantly, and all-too-seldom addressed in college acting classes — how to sustain a professional run. I fully confess not having found the way yet to simulate the 32-show (8 shows times four weeks) experience in the classroom, but I’m content to give step-by-step, reliable, compelling methods to “play” a part. Many different parts, in fact.
I am not a fan of personality-based techniques when mis-applied to the more demanding range of stage work. Romeo ain’t the same as Prince Hal, who ain’t the same as Lysander, etc. Juliet may be played by the young female ingenue in a company, but she’d also better be able to play Hermia, Ophelia, etc., with their own unique, different characteristics.
Acting must be a combination of the external and internal, the emotional and intellectual, the mechanical and the meaningful, however you want to phrase the vast array of paradoxes which accompany every stage performance. It’s different every night, but it’s similar. New every night, but with the technical prowess to make it consistently seem new — every night — to the audience, regardless of how the actors feel.
I am a product of the PATP, from the original faculty and approaches, but WSU has always offered a diverse grab-bag of ways (emphasize that plural — “wayS”!!!) to act, to think of yourself as an actor. It may not be as broad and inter-disciplinary as the smaller, more expensive liberal arts colleges, but Wright State’s PATP is an incredible four-year journey toward becoming the actor you can be, that you want to be, not just some malleable puppet fresh out of our mold. With the dedication of the student, we produce individual artists, capable of any number of characters, even in rotating repertory situations.
I’m emerging from the days spent shopping for Elliot’s “perfect” education even more proud and boastful about my training — and what I believe we’re currently offering at WSU. As we sail into the new seas of semesters and curriculum revision and replacing our beloved Mary Donahoe, I’m beginning to look forward to serving our Acting and Musical Theatre classes in the coming 2010-2011 school year. It is an awesome responsibility, but we’ve got a great history and amazing graduates.
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07.31.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:12 pm by Administrator
We’re shopping again, this time for our youngest son’s future. Where shall he go to college and what shall he study? What friends will he make in the next four years, who may very well prove to be his oldest friends and/or closest when he has reached his fifties, like us? What debt will he be saddled with, affecting all of his career and location choices after college? And how much will he be adversely affected by his mom and dad’s opinions, no matter how much we’re dedicated to him following his own bliss?
When you crawl into the car for a college visit, you’re driving into the past, present, and future of a human destiny, a life-path, a Big Choice with Many Unforeseeable Ramifications… So you try to look for the foreseeable consequences. You try to keep track of the smiles or laughs or shining eyes of your son as he hears about the campus, the classes, the traditions, the costs… And you cast your net as wide as possible for The Best Place for this fantastic boy who’s been your delight for eighteen years. But now he must move on.
No wonder I cried so often watching TOY STORY 3.
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07.21.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:09 pm by Administrator
I first read John Irving when I was in my first or second year with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, in 1979 or 1980. GARP, of course. And I felt such a strong kinship to the author, to his character, to his view(s) of the world. Marvellous, like you hear a lyric or read a poem, and you feel — less alone. You’re suddenly validated as a human being who cares about some things for which others care nothing. Your values, morals, priorities are affirmed, after years of assured isolation; I’d read Camus’ THE STRANGER while in high school (thanks to my Advanced English teacher, wish I could remember her name) and had rather identified with that cold outsider, also. Rather. The sense of looking at life, observing it, but not really taking part.
My first love (I was a senior in high school) pulled me into what I thought Life could be, of course. I thought I might have some value as an entity, as a being; I could be funny, perhaps, thought intelligent, perhaps, and could be needed, perhaps… Physically and emotionally needed.
But GARP (and now TWISTED RIVER) also spoke — screamed! — to the side of me so dreadfully dreadful of loss. Losing loved ones. Losing your identity because those you love fall out of love with you. Losing love because you find yourself becoming someone else, or being discovered as the Unworthy One after all the years you fooled some one into loving who they thought you were.
I hate being stereotypical about anything, but I am one of those actors who sought escape from his own life, his own boring Self, by pretending to be Others. See how Others lived, thought, acted. Paradoxically, I found myself with the life and identity of an actor, a good one, liked because of my delivery of others’ words, thoughts, feelings; yes, thank Goodness, often those thoughts and feelings matched my own. Then I could stand on a stage, pull an audience in, let them feel less isolated for a bit of an evening.
But oh how I truly wish that I could own the words, invent them, not merely rent the face of anOther for an evening…
That’s a long way of saying thank god, the universe, whatever for John Irving and the others who have made me feel less of an oddity. Less of an outsider. Of a stranger.
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07.18.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:10 pm by Administrator
No, no, no, NOOOO!!!!! I’ve spent the majority of my life being governed by the academic year, first as a student and now as a teacher. Before kindergarten and those few years (1981 through 1987) before I began professing — maybe ten years worth of “free”, non-school scheduled Time. We all have to work, yes, to make a living. And we have to do the things we love, perhaps as more of a sideline, to make a Life. Or perhaps the real Order of Things, at least pour moi, is Family and then Acting — and then teaching. The latter is the sideline.
Hard to tell your sons that you must do the things you love to do, you definitely must find them, follow your bliss, never deny those raisons d’etre (hey, I only had four years of French in high school, thank you, Mr. Lott) — BUT you must also feed your family, provide for them. Such realities don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and they don’t have to break your heart. Let the Passions feed the Practicals. But never, ever let the Livelihoods kill the Loves.
All of which is my mind-set in noticing that I’m maybe six weeks away from Fall Quarter, three classes, maybe thirty students or thereabouts. Those things are fine, usually great, if I’m healthy and well-fed, well-slept, simultaneously acting… But the bureaucratic paper-pushing and policy-making and people-poking (and you can’t be an administrator without poking people — and being poked in return) and the hypocrisy… Well, I guess I need to play the Objective, not the Obstacles; help people, keep them from being hurt, try to keep other people from hurting others… Speak my mind and my heart and know that others will disagree.
Sigh. Back to my novel, my sons, memorizing some lines…
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07.12.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:58 pm by Administrator
Didn’t write a single blog about my rehearsal process and now UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL has been performed. Lovely crowd in the beautiful Glen Helen building — which included so many familar villagers, friends, students, some family… And I got laughs and good moments of stillness, silence. So I hope it came across as well as it was going out on my end. I thought I was clear, very precise with the diction and the ideas. Was tremendously moved (into “real” emotion) in some parts and really found the energy needed for others. Funny, I’ve been reading a biography of Stanislavski as I’ve been working on the show and it only confirmed (in my humble opinion) that only a true, working (not retired and not amateur) actor knows what the hell acting is all about.
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06.25.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:18 am by Administrator
I’m doing a one-shot performance of Glen Berger’s UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL, a one-man-show or monologue, at the Glen Helen Building in Yellow Springs on July 9. Part of a village-wide celebration and exploration of the arts found in this little Ohio “hippy town.” Amid the pottery and paintings and dancing and music, the organizers have wisely thought to approach some theatre folk. And I was lucky enough to be able to do this, as a freebie, no admission charged, and less than one-hundred seats. Thus I trust I’m not offending the powers-that-be in my union. It’s a royalty-free gig, since we’re upholding all of the restrictions. And I get to revisit a script that speaks to me even louder than it did before, in two previous incarnations at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati and at the Dayton Theatre Guild. And the lines have returned slowly, but steadily — and I have fourteen days to go.
Picked up my battered suitcase of Lovely Evidences from the lovely Shannon Rae Lutz at the aforementioned ETC yesterday. I’d pulled her into the theatre basement prop storage early, but she was her usual generous self, diligently searching for Baedakers guides and evidence tags and fossilized turtle excrement amid the endless shelves of bric-a-brac and paraphenalia and gee-gaws. (Tremendous pleasure for a writer to spend time in a decades-grown prop basement.) So now the case rests, with it’s precious cargo, in the garage. And I need to find my Librarian’s “lecture suit” in the area Goodwill stores.
Thought I’d experiment and use the ol’ blog as my LINTEL acting journal, and spill some ideas and reflections about the way I actually do what I do… Absorb the lines, the thoughts, the feelings of a character, then get on my feet and find how he moves, and then put those choices (instinctive and conscious) on a lit stage. And see how the crowd affects it and is affected by it.
I have some colleagues at the university, on the acting faculty, who teach things I don’t. Which bespeaks the strength of the Wright State Professional Actor Training Program. We’re not a One Way school, we give our young artists the right to be artists, to find techniques which work for them instead of being made to swallow What Must Always Be Done. I believe in making choices, taking a script apart by defining beats, key words, obstacles, tactics, and, yes, objectives. But I don’t agonize over articulating objectives, goals, Ideal Futures, victories, whatever you want to call the desires of the character… It’s not The Key to acting, it’s not The Essential First Step for me. I usually find what a character’s fighting against first. By repeating the lines aloud while I memorize them, scrutinizing the sound and meaning of the words as I go. Why does the Librarian say these words at this time, why MUST he say them, what is he pushing against or with? What is in his way, the obstacle, the conflict? Because dealing with that is the way I unconciously play an objective. “That which hinders your task IS your task.” You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or an acting teacher to have to recognize a human need; you don’t even have to be able to put it in words. You just have to commit to playing it. Night after night after night. With a professional, compelling consistency. Perhaps only a standard four-week, eight-shows-per-week run can teach beginning actors the internal and external techniques needed for an actor’s job. It’s certainly not a matter of having an emotional or intellectual or physical breakthrough in one acting or speech or movement class, because an instructor has bullied you into it. That ain’t technique, that’s dependency. And it ain’t a teacher or director’s job to make you dependent.
I fully confess my dependency on playwrights. They’re my addiction, to great words, lovely crises, stirring characters… Good writers pull you in, make the choices obvious (even the complex ones), make it so easy and thrilling to be in the character’s mind/body/machine every night and go for the ride.
In LINTEL, the Librarian relates and relives his quest to find (and believe in) the man who turned-in a 113 years-overdue book. He will methodically progress through his own 24 year-old struggle to decode, detect, discover, and declaim the clues of two lives — one extraordinary and one, his own, all-too-common. Just like Bruce Cromer playing the Librarian, the little man pursues the larger soul. And finds himself, his true self, his humanity along the way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, big ideas, big abstractions, like the claptrap out of an acting prof’s maw. But I will try to detail and define the true process as I go.
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06.22.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:44 pm by Administrator
It’s lovely and wondrous and refreshing and splendid to finally be free of academia for the summer — but I miss my son Charlie so very, very much. He’s started his “post-graduate” life, has a “civilian” job and the traditionally-low-paying first theatre job (well, his first in San Francisco), and I think he’s happy and healthy. But as I slide into my forgetful, fragile, fitful fifties, I know there are other things I was supposed to teach my boys, important lessons which will carry them through the worst of times when I can no longer be there, physically, to help them. Not that I have any true wisdom for my poor trio, I’m just an actor who pretends to be a professor… But I have had a good Life, chockful of learning moments; shouldn’t I be boring them to death with those? Eliciting the pained protests of “Yeah, yeah, Dad, you told me about that already, fer chrissakes don’t you remember telling me about that five-hundred times (as if it had any relevance to anything the first four-hundred-ninety-nine blabbings which I endured)…” Isn’t it my god-given right to either write yet another unnecessary textbook about acting or at least shove the unwanted ramblings of age at my own progeny?
I will try to expend that urge and energy in my garden instead; dirt always listens to the hands that crumble it.
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05.06.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:02 am by Administrator
It is so weird for me to have my batteries seems so drained all the time. The Energizer Bunny’s been shot or something, winged by a malicious Elmer Fudd. Maybe it’s because I’m not going to rehearse someplace in Cincinnati in the evenings, with a two hour commute added to the night’s demands. Maybe my system needs that type of mental and physical activity to recharge me for the day’s classtime. (Introverts need personal time to rev up the body and soul; extroverts need social activity. I guess being in a professional rehearsal or performance, I feel more at home, more where I belong… Teaching is always more of a risky business for yours truly.)
I’m also homesick for my absent sons, worried about a beloved friend’s health, and wondering if my acting career is going to go through a dry spell after so many lush years of project-after-project. Sigh.
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04.17.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:03 pm by Administrator
Funerals are the most unsettling form of “comedies of manners” for yours truly… Some aging, religious spokesman — who never knew the deceased — speaks platitudes to a group of grieving ones (or those who were brought by the grieving), standing beside the ghastly inert shell of the departed. I should have just sat in the back, at a distance, as I planned. But a friend waved me into the middle of the seats (actually, I was on a side couch), where I had to go through the expected motions and mumblings. But I really just missed my old college buddy, who would’ve hated the gathering and the format and the pausey mis-timing of the whole production. We were on the Wright State stage several times, in FRANKENSTEIN and a commedia piece and LITTLE MARY SUNSHINE and STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and surely others I’ve forgotten. But I remember broad-smiled, twinkle-eyed, square-jawed Bill; he had a great laugh, used it often, and what a master of the pencil!!! To see him and Byron together at a party or in a dressing room, as they riffed off one another — that was how I’ll remember my friend; not by the artificial and awkward posturings of a funeral “ceremony”…
His departure age and means were shocking, but I guess a broken heart can only travel so far. Then it seeks an alternate destination.
(I want to be cremated, cheapest means possible, with friends just smiling broadly at a good memory; no need to gather and go through public motions. I value private grief far more than the shared. “These are actions that a man might play… But I have that within that passeth show… These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”)
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04.05.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:43 am by Administrator
Weekends are sent from heaven… Lovely moments of resting and reflections and recouping; now I’m looking forward to the second week of my Freshman and Senior acting classes, and the Sophomore and Senior movement classes. Playing with Wilde’s THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST with the Seniors, and I hope they will knuckle down and intelligently and effervescently tangle with one another in those incredible scenes; keeping to the high ground of wit and subtlety, instead of getting too big and too false. My first-years are being typed, as Laban energies, as Theatrical types (Ingenues, Young Leads, Characters, etc.), and putting together contrasting audition packages: they are to do what they do best, nothing outside of their age range and type… Sophomores are happily meeting the challenges and delights of improv games, and seniors are getting their Skills Proficiency Test choreography for Single Sword. All is well with the world.
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03.30.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:36 am by Administrator
Two classes today: “Comedy of Manners” with the seniors and “Auditions and Character” with the freshfolk. I threw my artistic preferences at the comedy class: I don’t like the over-the-top, judgemental, chronocentric approach to Coward, Wilde, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wycherly, Moliere, etc. American actors and directors can consciously or unconsciously employ a shallow, stereotypical, obvious, and inhuman “style” approach to such material; it seems they’re trying to “dumb it down” to make it more accessible or funny for their audiences. (“Style” is no excuse for bad acting or directing.) If I have to watch such productions, I lose interest very quickly — and really only pay attention to the actors who are more complex, more psychologically and emotionally motivated and honest. Style is something that’s invented by the directors and the actors of each production, not something inherent in a particular writer or era. We tend to judge every other time period from our own (chrono-centric) and think we’re superior; so we play a judgement rather than human beings. I think the plays are dangerous challenges to the artifice of human beings, the social masks. These playwrights sat outside the social circles they’re satirizing and threw tomatoes. Yet they did it with language as the primary tactic. These plays are not just vehicles for funny noses and poses and ways of talking; they have something timeless to offer, if they are enacted by damn good actors who can be human, individuals, and, yes, make they audience believe in the world of the production.
Of course, I must train our students to also be able to do the broader, more overtly funny type of comedy, also. I want them to be working craftsmen, not elitist academics. I’ve done the schticky productions of THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL and TARTUFFE and SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER; I’ve preferred the more serio-comic versions of THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES and THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL and THE COUNTRY WIFE… They were far more interesting to play for four-week runs, with greater critical acclaim, and they challenged, instead of coddled, the audiences.
The freshfolk will get a taste of the concepts (and practical applications) of Michael Shurtleff’s brilliant book, AUDITION. They’ll also be working on characters from plays which are stretches for them, perhaps their opposites in terms of thought, action, and emotion. So today we played my Ball Toss game, experiencing an objective (“toss the ball to a partner so they can successfully catch it”), obstacles (more than one ball being tossed in the circle, various names being shouted, fear of failure, etc.), and instinctive and more conscious tactics (hmm, maybe I should lob the ball instead of whizzing it, the way I usually would)… Laban Analysis was introduced to the group, with my first off-the-cuff attempts to classify these young strangers into energetic Types: Flicker, Dabbers, Slashers, Thrusters, Gliders, Floaters, Wringer, or Pressers. They were an attentive, pleasant bunch of faces today. I’m really interested in seeing what type of actors they are and that they can become.
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02.19.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:36 am by Administrator
It’s damn interesting to be an actor who teaches acting… I wish I had a better playwright for my life, often; my lines are usually so lame, so infantile. I do create my own movement, however (no director, donchaknow), and generally like that aspect of my off-stage work. Trouble is, now I move like a 53-year-old, I get tired like a 53-year-old, and I talk about being old like a 53-year-old. This is new for me. I’ve always prided myself on not fighting my age, but also having plenty of energy and curiosity. What would that new role be like? What’s this play that I’ve never heard of? Let’s dive into the experience and see what happens…
At the moment, I’m teaching four courses and enjoying them all, but wishing I had more time and energy for them all, too. I’m missing my nightly ventures into THE VERTICAL HOUR at the Human Race Theatre; once those lines were learned, it was such a delight to step into Welsh border country with Todd Lawson and Cathy McCafferty every night, into a philosophical discussion, into a father-son problem, into Freud and the Great Idiot Bush and the senseless Iraq war, etc., etc., etc. I am quickly tiring of low-browed entertainment, be they Shakespearean romantic comedies (which aren’t funny) or musical comedies (which aren’t really that musically interesting or comical) or dramedies like THE LION IN WINTER. Is this a sign of maturity or aging? Some projects no longer seem worth my time.
Younger folks who care about ANYTHING GOES or THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE or AS YOU LIKE IT or TWELFTH NIGHT — they should do them without me on stage or in the audience. I’d rather be at home with my family, or doing LEAR or VERTICAL HOUR… Something of substance.
I’ve done well over one-hundred professional productions now, in almost forty years of acting. I guess I have a right to slow down and be more choosey.
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08.15.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:17 am by Administrator
So, I spent my June and July (summer vacation, ha!) playing Arnolphe in Moliere’s THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES, at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Very fitting, since I’d done a few weeks of Moliere scene-work in my Comedy of Manners class this year at Wright State. STNJ used the Wilbur text, of course, with all of its spritely pentameter rhyming couplets. Director Brian Crowe took a marvellously physical approach to the enterprise, all done in lovely period costumes by Emily Pepper. At 52, I was dashing here and there, bodily, verbally, emotionally, energetically — and in damn good shape, for once; no health problems during the run, though I would get a bit faint at times during performances. Just a bit, nothing that truly worried me; reminded me that breathing is a wise choice to consciously make on stage now and then. We ran the show for three weeks, Tuesday through Sunday, with a few double-show days. Once I finally had the lines firmly lodged in my head and muscles (so your body keeps talking in those moments when your thoughts drift elsewhere), I had a good time with a great cast, brilliant director, fabulous stage manager, etc. I adore the company, the people, the audiences, the material at STNJ!!! Classical theatre is alive and well in select parts of the country!!!
Speaking of which, now onto a faux period play set in 1184 A.D.: LION IN WINTER at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. Henry II and his plotting wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their duplicitous sons, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. Unfortunately, though he had auditioned for John, my real son Charlie is doing a show at the Human Race Theatre, instead; he’ll make more money and be performing a physical comedy show in schools during the fall, so all’s for the best, I guess. Sigh.
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