The Important Things

I learned two very important things in rehearsal today.

1.) White men can't jump, but green men can. (Hulk saving Iron Man in The Avengers)
2.) Wolverine, due to his regenerative powers, needs no restorative period after coitus.

This is what happens when you give a bunch of nerdy actors an indefinite break during rehearsal.  From Batman to the X-men, from Mass Effect to Star Wars, we covered everything and anything.  Nerds usually get animated when talking about nerdom, and actors get animated over anything anytime, anyplace, anywhere.  I'll leave it to your imaginations to picture how we raved and gesticulated.

Our director actually had to call us back to rehearsal twice before we responded, and rebuked us once for rowdiness onstage, but he wasn't annoyed.  A play is only as strong as it's cast, to play on an old phrase, and a cast cannot be strong without bonding.  And nothing bonds geeks more than arguing over canons, or commiserating about tri-colored endings.

But onto the actual meat of yesterday's and today's rehearsal.

Yesterday was a large step forward for me, because I finally started to internalize the Viola that our director envisioned, instead of the stereotypical self-righteous woman that I turn to when characterizing.  It never ceases to amaze me how difficult it is to play characters simply, freed from all the method-acting detritus that supposedly makes "real" characters.  No one comes to the theatre to see an actor feel.  That would be a boring, pointless production.  Not only would the play be tedious and overwrought, but the acting would be horrendous.  You can't play 'sad,' anymore than you can play 'happy' or 'angry.'  Emotions are not created in a vacuum, they are born out of relations with other people.  The best way to go about finding your character is to listen to what the other people on stage are saying.  Listen and React.  The emotions that come from your character's reaction to what the other characters are saying are going to be much more true than those coming from a complicated process of dredging up personal memories from the depths of your psyche and torturing yourself until you feeeeeeel the character.

But, let us move away from my soap box towards tonight's rehearsal.  We have blocked the entire play now, blocking the last act tonight.  During the final scene, we stumbled upon a passage that confused both the actors and the director.  It is the speech of Orsino's directly after he has been spurned by Olivia.  It is very exaggerated and stuffed with flowery language of how Orsino will kill that which he loves as a sacrifice to the "raven with the heart of a dove."  The actor playing Orsino delivered the speech with such vitriol that I suddenly realized he was talking about killing Cesario/Viola, since Olivia loves him/her.  I asked the director (because it isn't polite to question your fellow actors about characterization) if Orsino was indeed plotting to kill me.  Rehearsal came to a bit of a standstill as the three of us, myself, Orsino, and the director, tried to puzzle out the meaning of those lines.  We finally came to the conclusion that Orsino isn't actually trying to kill Cesario/Viola, but rather having a reaction (hey wasn't I just talking about reacting earlier?) to the spurns of Olivia in front of the court, almost as if he's having a tantrum.  Even so, the director promised that we three would get together to work on that little part of the scene.

The last thing of note that happened in tonight's rehearsal is that I was struck by how important blocking is to the effectiveness of a scene.  In the downtime when we were waiting for some late actors to arrive, (early is on time, on time is late, late means you're fired!) our director had Orsino and I run through the latter part of II,iv, where Orsino sends me to Olivia's for the third and final time.  When we had run through it a few days earlier we had both been standing close to one another and it was awkward for the both of us.  Today he started out by having us stand on separate edges of the stage, but stopped about five lines into the scene.  It was simply a bad staging:  it looked wrong; it felt wrong; it was simply wrong.  Then he had Orsino begin by sitting and motioning him to join me.  As I joined Orsino on the floor, something clicked for us and the scene took off.  The emotions and lines flowed freely and the rest of the movement was born out of those natural emotions.  It was a magical moment as, for the first time, we started to see the play truly come to life.

Well, that's it for the first week of rehearsals.  We'll be getting the cuts to the play soon.  That will be interesting....

Until next time!