(Dress Rehearsal) Rehearsal, Closet, Summer Play Festival, 2005.07.18

Before I started tonight, I told myself: Get your mind off of how bad you think you are and get it on what you need to do

- and that's exactly what I did.

I don't know if I was any better, but I definitely felt better.

Other Solutions that helped fight my fear

• no doubts
• no negative thoughts
• no attention whatsoever to how I feel about the play or how I'm doing
• focus, Focus, FOCUS, FOCUS!

Also, one difficult part of the last scene got much easier tonight -- the director gave me a specific physical action that worked wonders. Interesting: I don't know if she could have explained to me in words what was needed, but that one physical gesture worked magic . . .

. . . which brings to mind a technique that's intuitively intrigued me: Michael Chekhov’s Psychological gesture. At some point, I want to work more with this. I think much of the problems I sometimes have with directors lies in translating what they want into something "internal," and I got a glimpse of this last fall during my first audition for film work (e.g., see Audition: Fornetti Productions, Student Film Project, Brooklyn College). In any event, I think I'm getting some insight into how I need to work/what I need to work on, and with time and experience, this should become less and less of a problem.

And finally, I think what helped last night a great deal was, as the director suggested, forgetting all the character's objectives and actions, and then . . . just reacting my way through with scenes, trusting that an internal guidance mechanism would be there for me, a mechanism forged by rehearsals where I explicitly/consciously followed specific objectives.

I'm still struggling with how best to rehearse and the relationship between rehearsal and performance, but -- I feel I'm learning and beginning to get a handle on it. This is exactly what I hoped would happen when I set out to get as much 'real world' theatrical experience as possible. I'm not sure if I would have been as challenged in a class.

(However, I am taking a class this summer that's proving helpful, but I won't get around to writing out my notes here for a while yet).