My Life in the Theater (Part V)

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

- probably not Leonardo da Vinci

George Bernard Shaw
born July 26, 1856
(112 years before me, to the day)

A theatrical production has a strict time limit. From the beginning, you know when it will end; there are set performance dates, so when you are cast as an actor, when you have been assigned a role, you have a set period of time in which to prepare.

David Mamet says you don’t need to prepare anything, just read the words on the page, in the right order, all the rest is self-aggrandizement. In this, as in so many other things, Mamet is just wrong. Silly and wrong. It is true, the audience can’t see your backstory, will never know or even care how many books you read – in a very, very short time – to learn about the time period, the setting, the particular brand of tea your character might drink.

But as a twenty year-old in 1989, playing a twenty(ish) year-old in 1904, there are things that are seen and heard by the audience that are very important. After all, this isn’t a movie. The set helps, the costumes help, but the performer is the primary focus and it is the details, the immersion into character that either transports the audience or it doesn’t.

True, there are actors who are so compelling in and of themselves that they do not need to do any kind of deep research. The rest of us try harder.

My third year at school was the most challenging, and revelatory. I won’t get into the details, but following a near nervous breakdown in the fall, I was (for the first time) reborn with a renewed sense of purpose, and expanded my major from acting to a general theater degree. It was as the man said, “Look to your left, look to your right, only one of you will complete a degree in acting.” I was not the one.

Winter 1989, I had no acting practicum. I had not been cast in either mainstage show, I had no lab work, I focused on my studies, worked to control my diet, grew my hair, tried to be what today they call mindful.

That spring, however, I had three shows to split my focus; a role on the main stage, I had written a one-act for the playwrights’ festival, and I was assigned a role in a lab production of George Bernard Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband.

Third year undergrads were paired with graduate level directors to create an evening of one-acts. It was a class, so rehearsals were during the day. Our director was, or he seemed to me at the time, a rather intense man, charming in his way, and we spent weeks on the text with him. Weeks.

We were a three-person cast, I was He, the ingénue. It was the only time I have ever played a fresh-faced young man. She was my then ex-girlfriend Jules, and Her Husband was played by my best friend, Rich. The four of us sat in chairs around a small, square table on the stage of the Little Theatre, like we were about to play Bridge, only we had scripts instead of cards, and George, our director, led us through the piece, word by word.

We would read a word, or a short phrase, and we would stop and he would talk, and ask us questions, while throughout he would handroll a cigarette. This was part of the process. Every mechanical part of rolling a cigarette would take a significant amount of time, each rehearsal. I don’t mean to say he moved in slow motion, just that, as one of us read a phrase, he would get out his papers, and stop and we would talk, his hand holding the envelope of papers, for however long the discussion lasted, maybe five minutes, before moving on, now the envelope was gone, but the paper was between his fingers, and so on, forty-five minutes into rehearsal there might be tobacco resting in the the fold of the paper, I would be fixated on one strand of tobacco leaf hanging from the edge as he held it there, as we discussed the text, it may finally be a complete cigarette after an hour or so. It was a mystery to me and we never commented on it.

I imagine this ritual prevented him from smoking throughout the rehearsal, in this way he limited himself to one. But I found it fascinating. Time expanded as we ruminated upon the manners of the very early 20th century, for a piece for which every word is carefully chosen.

As a writer, I do appreciate that one thing above all other considerations, is that actors say the words, all the words, and in the order that they are set down upon the page. But you will never have so much time to read, understand, consider, and digest them, as you will at school.

I know this is not entirely the case, there are those theaters that make it a practice to spend months on a production. But they are the exception. A LORT production will have a very short turnaround, where are actors are often expected to arrive on day one with lines memorized, because of the cost. Time is, as they say, money.

"The Ocean Breathes Salty" at the 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival

Hatchet Cove, Friendship, ME

The Ocean Breathes Salty was originally a writing exercise for a class, but I was happy enough with the result to submit that for my entry into the 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival.

I was unable to attend the first read-through on Wednesday, and so attended the second rehearsal on Thursday. The company inquired about backstory. I asked if they had any ideas about that themselves and they, the four-person cast, director and stage manager, said they had plenty, ideas that had come up the night before in my absence.

This was fine with me, more than fine. Any “backstory” I was to provide at that moment would have been stuff I was making up off the top of my head. I asked them to tell me what they had thought of, and objected to little, if anything. They had read the script, and were inspired by what was there to create more or less psychologically correct histories.

In his book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, playwright David Mamet opines that “backstory” is pointless bullshit, that there are only words on a page. Play the words and the play either works or it doesn’t, bringing your own ideas to the work is irrelevant. That is one very simple way to look at it.

Human beings think backward and forward in time and space, and just as the words I say (or write) are informed in the moment by what have experienced and what I expect, so, too, an actor wants to know what they have experienced and what they expect in order to speak a line or perform an act. It is, as they say, in our nature.

And this is a ten-minute play. How to interpret a line, any line, requires a little imagination. You could just speak the words on the page but it might not be very interesting. Like, you know, any of Mamet’s recent work.

The original title of this short play was brief and alliterative, but I didn’t feel it captured the “gothic romance” which I believe best describes the story. For this first production, I changed it to the title of a song by Modest Mouse, the lyrics of which are a direct address to one beloved who has died.

It wasn’t even a song I had been familiar with, I just Googled songs about death, and this one resonated with me, the mood and also the title, as this play takes place in a town on the coast of Maine. It's a bit of a mystery (as which of my plays are not) or as I have called it, a gothic romance. Director Kelsey Jones promises to make it weird, and I am here for it.

The 2022 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival will be produced at convergence-continuum, February 10 - 19, 2022.

Process XXXIX

Lindsay Buckingham

An Effective Play, by August Strindberg c. 1900

Translation by Evert Sprinchorn

An effective play should contain or make use of:

• Hints and intimation.
• A secret made known to the audience either at the beginning or toward the end. If the spectator, but not the actors, knows the secret, the spectator enjoys their game of blindman's buff. If the spectator is not in on the secret, his curiosity is aroused and his attention held.
• An outburst of emotion, rage, indignation
• A reversal, well-prepared
• A discovery
• A punishment (nemesis), a humiliation
• A careful resolution, either with or without a reconciliation
• A quiproquo (ed.: “misunderstanding”)
• A parallelism
• A reversal (revirement), an upset, a well-prepared surprise.

I have been enjoying the assigned essays of Strindberg, in the same way that I enjoyed David Mamet’s book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. Each writes with the unapologetically bellicose certainty of a white, cishet man, but in this case each is expressing their abusively confident assertions in the service of the performing arts, which is kind of adorable.

Strindberg provides this brief list of items necessary to make an effective play, and while that’s just like his opinion, man, I find them to be instructive in retrospect rather than construction.

To wit; I am writing a play for class. I am daunted by whether or not it is any good, but fortunately that is not really the goal. The goal is completion, someone else can work about whether or not it is any good. But it should be well-constructed, and while I am putting all the pieces-parts together, I can check this list to see how well I am doing.

• Are there hints and intimation? All over the place.
• Is there a secret? Yes, a big secret.
• An outburst? No, not yet. That is a necessary ingredient to this particular play.
• A reversal? Also important, I will work on that.
• A discovery? Yes! A punishment? Unfortunately, yes!
• A humiliation? Not enough to my satisfaction, but we’re getting there.
• A careful resolution? There had better be.
• A misunderstanding? Totally.
• A parallelism? I think so?
• A reversal, an upset, a really big surprise? Yes, that comes with the careful resolution.

It's a mystery.

Henry VIII: Pageantry

I love to sing-a.

And the moon-a and the June-a and the Spring-a

I love to sing-a.

This afternoon I had a conversation with a reporter for the Sun News about the production. And I found the play is not difficult to talk about, it's actually pretty straightforward. You just have to make sure the subject stays on what the play is, and not so much about what it isn't.

When I first agreed to the production, I assumed there would be "pageantry" though I could not imagine what shape that might take. The more we commit to the contemporary look and feel of the production, the more any kind of classical pageantry, with formal dancing and choral odes would seem awkward. If we cannot find a modern way of presenting any aspect of the production, it just won't fit.

And so the party is an office party, crashed by the King and a few of "his guys" dressed not as masquers, but in a disguise which is at once contemporary and a little obnoxious, in the effort to bring life to the party.

Think Prince Harry coming to a costume party dressed as a Nazi, or Ted Danson in blackface. I mean ... we aren't doing that. Only something kind of like that.

Later, during the midst of divorce proceedings, the Queens requests a song to cheer her mood. This would be an odd request for someone to make at the office, but one of her people makes it work. And others join in. It's like that scene in Magnolia. Only different.

Yesterday we worked the song, just me, four actors and Rachel, the stage manager, talking through, singing through, and working through the song, with lyrics and without, stopping and going as necessary. Great progress had been made by the end of two hours, and we will revisit the piece on Tuesday.

The wife has forbidden me from ever again using the term "sausage fest".

Laura, our Katharine, recently joined the company in rehearsal. For two weeks we have been working non-Katharine scenes, establishing mood and attitude. Moving into the scenes with Katharine, it was stunning to me how different her character is from the rest. More conciliatory, open to compromise, calling things as they are, devoid of ulterior motive. Neither scheming nor clueless.

Two weeks in a hall of boys gave me insight as to why dudes like to direct Mamet. I am not saying I would, Mamet is a myopic bucket of shit. But I understand how one could.