theaterboy®

The reviews are in

In addition to Kathleen Akerley's assessment, over here among the comments, Tboy's Hamlet and Prospero have now been reviewed by Lucky Spinster over on her blog. 

He thanks both ladies for their very thoughtful takes on his performances, and suggests that they are both perhaps too kind, as neither mentioned that he stumbled a bit in both scenes.  This, as you will surely have guessed if you know Tboy at all, infuriated him beyond all reason, as he'd never tripped over either line before and can be something of a perfectionist.  Damn opening-night nerves.

Must find a job.

If only because I just spent half an hour scanning posts to try to figure out who this is.  Fun reading, but 2 a.m. is way too late to be piecing clues together, especially when you have Prospero's lines to internalize.

Sigh.  Yes, I'm back to Acting Shakespeare again. Ran through my Tempest bit with my scene partner today in class for the first time in a while, and it became clear that I haven't quite got it down yet.

Frustrated -- lost lines that I thought I had down.  And let me tell you, if I thought I let my body get in the way of being Hamlet, I had no idea: You try being a 37-year-old critic with letting-your-guard-down issues playing a scene with a 21-year-old university student, and realizing that at some point you're going to have to touch the young woman in question.  First time we set about trying to work out blocking, I was so self-conscious I could barely speak.

It's coming along much more nicely now, though, I think.  Director/professor told me today that he could see the arc pretty clearly, could point to the places where the relationship changes as Prospero opens up to Miranda and tells her about their history.  And he had nice things to say about the physicality I'm working on, the sense of this guy's power in the body, what it means to be, y'know, get interrupted by an overwrought teen when you're trying to control a small hurricane.

And this evening, in a clean-up rehearsal, Miranda and I actually found a beat that seemed to call for an embrace -- and in the middle of it I actually took a big deep breath, looked up at the sky, and almost lost it.

Must stop this acting thing. It's way too scary.

Oh, fine, a new topic.

"Can we start another topic?" SGS wrote.

Sure, like I don't have enough to do, what with school and my brother's wedding and two damn French absurdist plays to see in one weekend and an editor (love yooooou) who seems to want a review of them within, like, a day. And the TKitty, who insists on being fed twice a day and has recently taken to shouldering her way onto my desk, which has far too many papers on it to make such shouldering a simple task.  I tell ya, she's almost as high-maintenance as Dr. H, who actually expressed reluctance to deliver my coffee to me in the bed this morning.

Let's see, what news do I have?  Well, there was my performance of the Hamlet monologue this week. (Sorry, Spinster, I forgot to alert you guys. As if.)  I was actually reasonably proud of myself. Managed not to wander.  Remembered all my lines and didn't bump into the furniture. And the feedback was good.

Although: It occurred to me on the way home that one of the young women in the class had done this to me.

Now, I think she and her classmates are too green to be as bitter and hateful and devious as all of you guys -- I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course -- so I'm sure she meant something positive when she told me that my reading of the "What a piece of work" line was "Just ... I don't know ... Amazing!"  Or words to that effect.

Now we're on to scenes.  And -- are you ready for this? -- my scene partner wants to to I.ii from The Tempest.  And yes, she's playing Miranda--which means I'm playing all the exposition.  Sigh...

Yo, Henley -- you oughta have some ideas about how to cut this one. Send me some notes, will you?

Tboy knew this was going to be hard...

But really, he had no idea it would be so mortifying.

Acting Shakespeare, week 5.  Off book (basically) with the Hamlet monologue, but as an actor I'm what a critic would call painfully self-conscious.  Lotsa fuss with hands. Paralytically aware of the body. (If that seems self-contradictory, well...)

Can't seem to let the voice go, let it do the work of the speech; this may have something to do with how anger and sarcasm, in Tboy's world, get expressed in a flat, cool voice.  "Size," in the vocal sense, is turning out to be something of a problem.

Short lab session this morning with just me and the professor; he had me walk around the room in circles, delivering the speech to a red plastic chair standing in for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Seemed to free things up a lot -- the emotion, startlingly enough, started to gather in a big knot in my chest, rather than between the temples, and at "this goodly frame, the earth," the momentum of the circling just built naturally into a big gesture that didn't seem nearly as awkward as even a half-hearted reach did when I was merely standing.  Interesting.

Can't keep walking in circles in performance, though, of course. The trick, apparently, is to use this to get the speech in the body, to find its energy, and then figure out when it's OK to move and when it's OK to be still.

This is much harder than I remember from junior high.

<grin>

Hamlet

Sucks.  Tboy can read through this speech interestingly (he thinks), but ask him to stand up and say it in front of a room full of undergraduate theater majors, and he chokes.

Honestly, I'm not this self-conscious in a gay bar. And I'm pretty self-conscious in a gay bar.

Stop fussing; keep still. Let the voice do the work, at least for the next few passes, then maybe add back some movement.

Don't be afraid of the mood swings. "I have of late" should maybe be only a little performative; I've been making it harshly sarcastic at the outset. Let it be honest.

Find bitterness -- rue? -- in the geophysical stuff. And some real horror, maybe, in "What a piece of work..."

Sonnets, again...

So, now that I'm getting back into the class groove, I wanted to pick up on a comments thread from our early days at Band Camp:

still alert wrote:

Which one of us has not suffered through the hell of the Turning Sonnets Into Drama assignment? Am I in the minority to believe that it is NOT an effective introduction to the Playing of Shakespeare?

And Stefan chimed in:

I agree that Sonnets are not the best way to teach an actor how to interpret the Bard's texts, but they are a fast and easy way to introduce Shakespeare spoken out loud to novice actors who are scared to death of him.

There was more, but that was the basic frame.  And you're both right:  John Barton, the RSC veteran whose text we're using in the class, has this to say:

Why, you may ask, are we going to work on nondramatic bits of text when our theme is acting in Shakespeare's plays? Well, sonnets can be excellent exercise pieces .... Most of the textual and verbal points that come up in working on the plays appear in the sonnets in concentrated form.
We've often found that it's better to use them when we have a session on Shakespeare's text than to take a speech or speeches from a particular play. Speeches are often too long to work on in detail, and they always trigger questions about the speaker's character and the rest of the play ... This may be a distraction from coming to terms with purely textual challenges. Sonnets can help to take the pressure off.

That makes a certain sense to Tboy -- whose second task, now, is to get inside Hamlet's head for 'What a piece of work...“

Oy...

Tboy back...

... from points East.  Sorry you guys didn't get more hellos from there, but hotspots were random and often expensive, so...

Meanwhile I'm a little slammed catching up with schoolwork -- three plays to read this morning before a quiz -- and I was at Gtown last night until 10:30, in a workshop with a very funny guy from LAMDA.  He said “fart.”  Repeatedly.

We worked, believe it or not, on the opening scene from Lear, and perhaps because aside from the professors Tboy is the oldest, erm, fart in the room, he got to read Gloucester.

So: What have I missed?

“Don't underplay the pivots”

Or words to that effect. That was the first note given to Tboy since, oh, 1984 or so.

You'll recall that Tboy, having extended a blue-enameled toe (really--haven't you noticed?) toward the perilous waters of Acting Shakespeare, has been instructed to choose a sonnet (Tboy picked No. 23) to get cozy with, internalize, and otherwise perform.

(And no, luckyspinster, opening night will not be a public occasion. Alack.)

On the first read-through at band camp a coupla days ago, Tboy hurried through his sonnet, and didn't let it breathe nearly enough after line 8. The first words of line 9 are where the speaker turns, stops beating his breast, and reaches out, making a plea to the beloved for a kind of understanding that takes the speaker's nature into account. There's another one, just before the last two lines. Thus “Don't underplay the pivots,” which Tboy is now trying mightily to remember.

Because now we're trying to get off book.  Oy.

Also, in the afternoon lab that meets in, oh, 15 minutes from now (Lackaday!) we're thinking about stakes and intentions and questions like “Why these words?”  ... “Why speak ? -- Why now?”  Also: “Who is the beloved?”  Again I say, Oy.

But here goes:

I the speaker speak, and speak now, because I live a life dominated by my uncertainty about my own gifts, my ability (or lack of it) to communicate, to connect, even (self-lacerating bastard that I am) to love another properly.  “Unperfect” and “fear” and “dumb” and “weaken” because words like these are the words that inform every choice I make -- or don't make, out of a paralyzing anxiety of making the wrong choice.

And because I (the speaker) have suddenly become conscious that my fear may just cost me the one thing that now and again helps me to transcend it -- my beloved, who's begun to suspect that my silence speaks of disinterest, of taking-for-granted, of selfishness in me and staleness between us.  I'm always a little afraid to speak, but right now I'm more afraid not to.

As far as who the beloved is, Tboy's still working on that.  For now, the beloved is everything the speaker has ever wanted and never asked for, every goal never moved toward.  That'll need a little sharpening up. It'll need a face.

Now Tboy's off to see if there's a shrink loitering about at Student Health.  He picked this sonnet for the “unperfect actor” joke, or at least he thought he did.  And now he's so depressed he can't get up off the floor...

Today at band camp ...

Still not band camp, of course, but Tboy thinks it's funnier than "acting camp," at least for the moment.

Anyway: Today at band camp, we played bunny-bunny, which isn't nearly as filthy as it sounds.

I'm afraid it's an indescribable experience, though, and trust me when I say that "indescribable" isn't a word a critic  uses lightly.

No, let's try. Bunny-bunny, as some of you will surely know, is a warm-up exercise, a kind of fast-paced game of hot-potato involving whiskery gestures and bouncy motions and exclamations of "Bunny-bunny" on the part of whoever's currently "It," while those on his or her left and right chant "dunga-dunga" and walk (in place) like developmentally disabled Egyptians.  "It" then passes the bunny -- oh, this just sounds increasingly seamy -- by making the whiskery gestures at anyone else in the circle. The new "It" must immediately begin bunnying, while the two flanking him commence with the "dunga" business.

Once again Tboy recalled that perhaps there's a reason he's a critic rather than an actor. He can handle the TV-chat thing, even without notes; there's only so much of an idiot they'll let you make of yourself before they call "cut" and start the conversation over again. But this -- this is terrifying.  Talk about yer performance anxiety.

Let's just say Tboy dropped the bunny more than once. If alertness and quick reactions are the point of this exercise--you've got to watch for the bunny, catch the bunny, pick somebody to pass the bunny on to and remember to go "dunga" if the person next to you gets the bunny--then clearly Tboy has leagues to go before he's ready for improv.

After we'd recovered from the bunny-bunnying, we took a speech from The Tempest -- “Twas monstrous, monstrous...”--and broke it up into 12 pieces, each student voicing a phrase, trying to connect them in one voice. Tboy got to deliver the last line, “and with him there lie mudded,” in his best despairing basso, in unison with another guy. Everybody giggled.

Then more sonnet work. Tboy's getting behind on his reading and his character development, not least because he had to go see The Disputation last night. (And tonight's Passion Play, then a drive to New York.)

Must go study.

One time, at band camp ...

OK, not at band camp.  At acting camp.  As you may recall, Tboy has signed up for an Acting Shakespeare class as part of his ongoing effort to become a better critic, by doing the interdisciplinary scholarship he didn't get as a music major, and (thanks to Georgetown's tuition rates) by utterly bankrupting himself.

Well, Tboy hereby inaugurates a rehearsal journal -- partly because it's a course requirement, partly because he expects that making it public might turn out to be thoroughly humiliating, and that's probably a good thing for a critic.

So.

Today, at the first day of acting camp, we contemplated the sound “Oooooooo,” but only in our heads, trying to guess where it might live in our bodies.  Tboy immediately remembered why he sometimes thinks acting is just one wack this side of Scientology.

Turns out, though, that thinking about where “Ooooooo” lives and then finding out where “Oooooo” lives is interesting, if only because Tboy's body thinks “Ooooo” lives in a very different place than Tboy's brain does.  Tboy had imagined a heady, falsetto sort of sound, but (maybe because it's before noon, and Tboy hasn't sung in a while) it turns out “Oooooo” lives in the solar plexus.

So, what we learned today is that the body can teach us things. You guys know this, of course. Tboy, who likes to maintain a carefully distant sort of relationship with his body, finds it intriguing. Possibly a little humbling. But then yoga has been kinda humbling, too.

Then we read our sonnets--oh, yeah, we had to pick and prep a sonnet, which we'll be performing over the next week or two. Tboy, for obvious reasons, picked No. 23:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharg'd with burthen of mine own love's might.
O! let my looks be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

Tboy volunteered to read first.  And proceeded to hurry through it, offhanding things he might have done better to dwell on.

Tboy's put some thought into the scansion and the operative words,, but not so much the intention yet--andd we're big on intentions here at acting camp.

Still,  he's beginning to get a pretty clear picture of who the speaker is, anyway.  More on which later. We're due to go over them again on Thursday, not least in the afternoon lab section, one-on-one...