Listening: The Joy of Doing Something Definite.

Ah, it was great to be out in the glittering city on a mild winter night.

I went to see Walter's one-act, Well-Laid Desert, part of Riant Theatre's 10th annual Strawberry One-Act Festival tonight, a very well-received one-act where the characters discover that truth is the antidote to the panic and fear that threatens to tear apart their lives and friendships -- a surprisingly sensitive play by a guy who's also a very talented actor. It's great that through his theatrical experience he's been able to absorb enough of the "form" that he can now start to write. Playwrighting is the heart of it all as far as I'm concerned -- I've no idea how playwrights work, but that is the other side of all of this, a fascinating, beautiful, process

And, as always, I was fascinated by watching the actors work -- I find this almost always surprisingly informative and instructive.

Some observations:

One actor in the one of the plays was quite good along the dimension of believability: moment-by-moment, he was simply believable. One thing that really seemed to be driving this was how well he listened and reacted to the other characters without trying to do anything more than that, really. Layered on top of that, of course, was a simplicity about what he wanted -- in each scene, he was clear about what he wanted. Finally, there was also a "Craft" or "Theatricality" about his work, i.e., he seemed to know how to use the space, seemed aware of the "technical" demands of his performance. Hard to put a finger on this, but I think this definitely comes with experience, gaining a sense of the theatrical up there, a sense of what works for the audience (or for the camera in film).

Only about 10% of the time could I sense him decoupling from the scene, I think, in order to "act" a pre-conceived idea of either what he wanted to happen or what he thought should happen. It's fascinating to watch this when it happens. I don't quite know the cause and effect: we suddenly stop reacting to what's going around us and then feel pressure to "act" what "should" be happening, or we just can't let go of the desire to make something happen at some point, and as a consequence, decouple from what's going around around us. I think both are true: deciding to direct oneself in the middle of a performance or panicking because (for whatever reason) we decouple from the moment -- and the panic is the worse. So like the characters in Well-Laid Desert, I guess the thing to do is just NOT let yourself give into the panic, i.e., take a moment or two to reconnect with what's going at that moment: pay attention to something -- anything -- that's going on in the scene, and then you find your way back.

This was also a dynamic I saw between two other actors who started a scene quite far apart. They seemed to be "acting" more than, or at the expense of, "reacting" to each other. You can just sense when people, in life/on stage, are not listening. However, when he got up and sat down next to her, it got much more interesting to watch, I think, because they started to listen and react more.

Fascinating.