Rehearsal, Closet, Summer Play Festival, 2005.07.09

Principle Number One: Listening and Reacting.

I'm finding the play difficult. It's a comedy -- a farce -- and "M" is pretty much a blank slate character wise. In the main it's clear what he wants (e.g., reassure and seduce J, deceive L (i.e., keep L from discovering the affair), and win L back after he thinks she's discovered what he's been doing behind her back).

The Problem:

The difficulty has been that there's really no direct action on M's part to get out of his situation, i.e., he seems to have no a clear "plan" (that's subsequently thwarted by a series of mishap and obstacles that he needs to deal with) in order to get out of his situation. Really, he's doing a lot of REACTING -- about 70% of the time he's like a guy on a high wire, in the wind, not really moving forward but spending a great deal of time and energy trying not to fall.

Interesting, he actively pursues only two major goals: in the beginning, it's to get J on the couch (i.e., seduce her), and in the end, it's to win L's love and forgiveness. In the middle -- he's reacting to events. He does want to get J out of the closet, but he never actively pursues a clear course of action to do this. It's really crisis management time for M.

It's in this middle part that I've been having difficulties, and the director (who's very good with a sharp eye) says things are not clear, and she's been encouraging me to find things that M is trying to achieve, actively pursue, but I don't think he really pursues anything the way Linda is does (e.g., trying to tell M about the affair she's been been having).

What does M want? He wants to "hide" the fact of the affair; he wants to keep from being discovered. It's crisis management -- that, ideally it seems to me, is where the fun is, where M is fun to watch.

Possible Solution:

The way to play him in the middle part of the play, I think, is to react to L and external events, managing the crisis, with the goal of 1) keeping L from discovering that J is in the closet & 2) somehow getting L out of the house, or distracted long enough to get J out of the house. This middle part may be a weakness in the play, I'm not sure, but this has been the most challenging part of the play, and it's where I've been struggling the most with the director's take on the play.

So, to sum up: in the end, intuitively, instinctively, I've decided -- right or wrong, I don't know -- to drop the idea of having specific clear actions each line, each "beat" in the middle of the play as the basic acting textbooks teach. And it does seem to work much better: I just watch, listen and take in the actress playing L, and I REACT to that while still keeping in mind my two objectives above, even though I have no plan nor am I actively pursuing them. I think if I can do this, the middle section becomes more alive and takes on it's own structure, pretty much defined by what's going on between myself and the actress playing L.

Interesting. I'd like somehow, before the run ends, to tell whether or not this was the way to go. On my own, I'll just have to see/feel how it plays.

Another challenge. What to do when I'm not on the same page as the director? Ideally, you want to have as open a discussion as you can, but when I've tried to talk to the director, we just haven't been able to see eye to eye -- but maybe that's the mistake: Instead, I'm going to do in these rehearsals with I did last summer in the Adding Machine: there the director and I also had a very different take on the character, and when I tried to talk to Ron about it, he gave me some very good advice, i.e., don't tell me, he said, show me. And I did. And that's how we worked it out. Because I'm not experienced, I think my tendency is to "persuade" the director through discussion, but it's not that kind of work.