No Conceit

There really is nothing quite like performing.

This is something I had the opportunity to rediscover just last month. I’d written and directed a solo show that was slated to be performed at Theater IN ASYLUM’s The Others Project, and I was definitely excited about the piece. The form and content of the script were both new for me, and I was itching to see how the piece would translate from the page to performance. It was a solo performance – a play with a significant amount of sound design and overlapping text and voice over interacting with one another in a way that I thought could end up being quite fascinating. The rehearsal process had been a bit cramped, but still I was feeling confident.

That confidence vanished, however, on the day before the performance. That day, while I was working a day shift at my restaurant, I received some relatively heart-stopping news. I had no actor. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, my actor had unfortunately had to bow out of the performance – and now there was nobody to play the part. A solo performance without the performer can sometimes be a bit tricky.

Despite this, I was determined that the piece still be performed, and by the end of that work shift I’d decided that I would just have to act in the piece myself. I was fortunate that I’d written the play myself, as the task of memorizing a twenty minute performance the night beforehand, while still daunting, didn’t seem quite as impossible as it might have otherwise.

That evening came and went with hours that dwindled far too quickly for my liking. I’d managed to almost get a solid hold on the text, but the incorporated text and voiced over sound design were still an issue. I don’t remember how late it was that I finally slept or how early it was I woke from a fitful night of worrying. I do remember that morning recording my voice on my computer and having it sound a bit hollower than I’m accustomed to – something I attributed to a severe lack of sleep. Despite everything, though, by the time I made it to the upstairs space at New York Theatre Workshop where the piece was to be performed I felt as prepared as I could be.

That is, until I stepped in room to go on.

It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be in front of an audience. It had been more than a year and a half since I’d last performed in a show and more than that since I’d had to do any serious form of acting.

It was an intimate space to say the least. The chair from which I performed most of the piece sat mere feet away from the first row of audience members. The seats were just about all filled, and with the thrust configuration of the rows I felt surrounded on all sides.

Then the music started, and I had to perform.

Again, I’d be hard pressed to recount and one specific moment from the performance, there’s no one moment I remember in great detail beyond the one or two seconds of forgotten lines saved by a little circuitous speaking until I could make my way back to something I remembered…

The thing I do remember, though, is the feeling I got as I started speaking that only intensified as the show went forward. It was this feeling – hard to describe, but this is the best I’ve got – this feeling of such simple sympathy or empathy (that might be the word). And by that I mean I felt like I was just talking to another person. The piece already called for making direct contact with the audience, no pretending like they weren’t there, and as we went forward together, the spectators and I (both unsure sometimes about what would be coming next) I remembered what it is I love about theatre.

We talk a lot in the theatre about the closeness between audience and spectator – often in discussions about what makes theatre relevant in a world saturated by television and film. Most of the time it’s nothing more than lip service, because while yes, obviously theatre is a live event, it is much more common to see theatres and plays working in spite of this fact rather than embracing the closeness. The proscenium itself seems an effort to ignore the theatricality of theatre – we watch through a rectangle at a performance happening in essentially one dimension.

This night, though, I realized something that I feel may be essential, at least to the way I want to make theatre personally. I realized (or, as I’ve said before, perhaps simply remembered) that the closeness inherent in theatre, the liveliness – it is more than just a fact of theatre – it is THE fact of theatre. The most important thing. And this thought itself is not revolutionary by any stretch. But what it means for me, at least at this point, is something very specific.

I want to embrace theatre that never forgets that it is theatre. I want to create performances that never forget the part an audience plays in making the performance whole. That performance at The Others Project – that’s what I want. I want that closeness. It may be frightening and it may be challenging and it may be outside of just about everybody’s comfort zone, but that’s what I want. Maybe it lies in solo performances that are spoken just to an audience, maybe it comes from shows like Three Pianos (which was at New York Theatre Workshop) where there’s a show, but there’s also a blatant awareness and inclusion of the audience. The thing I’m relatively sure of is that it doesn’t involve traditional use of proscenium theatres and lighting that fully closes off the audience from the performers.


Hence the title of this post and blog: I want a theatre without conceit. 

Once again, I don’t think this is revolutionary in the theatre world. Not at all. But it is revolutionary for me. And I suppose I have my forced performing experience to thank for it.

NOTE: You may have noticed that the name of this blog has changed. This is to reflect my new purpose with the blog as well as to have a title that actually means something, as opposed to just a fancy word! Thanks for reading.

~Greg

Last Night I Couldn't Sleep

So again it's been over a month since I last posted on this blog. Quick update:

1. Had my show BROKEN premiere at the Strawberry One-Act Festival. The production went quite well, the actors involved did a great job in bringing to life the words and characters that have lived only on pages for over two years. It's an interesting show, and I'm definitely considering continuing work on the piece.



2. Have been in rehearsals for the past month for the show opening at the Emerging Artists Theatre's EATFest 2011. I have a really great cast and have been very fortunate to work with some great equity and non-equity actors on a production with a company I can really get behind - it's great to have technical support, for one thing. The show is really coming along, the script is really nice, written by Jeffrey Neuman, Assisted Living opens with a really fantastic monologue - I'm very excited for people to see this production.

This week we have three rehearsals and then Tech - which is a little daunting, but I've done this before. Just because this is in NYC shouldn't make anything different. It's about being prepared and ready for the process, and I feel that we are.

3. I don't want to say too much about this yet, but I'm working with a new group of people (including some fellow former NYTW interns) on the creation of a launch piece for a new theatre company entitled IN ASYLUM (check out www.theaterinasylum.com - right now there's not much there, but the site will be updated soon to include all sorts of information regarding this piece that will be taking place in early april). The group has produced one production already and is full of really intelligent, driven theatre artists with whom I'm thrilled to be working - it's great to start working with people your own age who share a similar passion for theatre that explores beyond the boundaries of the typical theatrical setting, which endeavors to confront and re-imagine the relationship between actor and audience and the way in which we experience art and live performance. I'll definitely be talking more about this group soon - I plan on pretty thoroughly documenting this experience here. I'm working as a Stage Manger/Assistant Director for the central piece to the even and will be directing a short piece as well. Should be really a lot of fun.


And so that's what's going on right now - also some preliminary thoughts about a possible Shakespeare production (probably Othello) outdoors in a found space - will also talk more about this if it ever seems like it will come to fruition.

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Last night I couldn't sleep. I turned off the lights and let my head rest on my pillow at around 1:45 am. Come 6:30am, with the light outside beginning to stream through my windows, I was still awake. I don't really know why, I was tired, even exhausted the whole time and yet I couldn't manage to get away from my constant awareness that I was absolutely and firmly stuck in the land of the not-sleeping.

About a million thoughts flitted through my mind over this time. One of the things that I kept thinking about was this notion of stillness - it was put in my head, humorously, by The Karate Kid (the remake) which I'd watched twice in the past 36 hours. I'd also been reading The Art of Stillness, a book about Tadashi Suzuki and his approach towards revolutionary theatre. Basically, I kept thinking about this notion of internal stillness, of internal openness and/or emptiness that allows you to let go and simply NOT think, just be. It's a central tenant of many martial arts, and it's something every artist should be striving towards as well. The ability to create within yourself a kind of open, receptive emptiness, where nothing inside is forced, where everything is calm, steady, but also active and sure. An openness to all external stimuli - to take in what is occurring without  judgment but also without letting that external world exert any sort of control over you. The actor needs to be open and empty, needs to be a reflective lens that takes in what happens around them and turns it into a calmness that attracts us - that draws us in.

And it reminds me that some of the work I did while in school, work that was very inherently physical in nature, that demanded a lot of my actors, I was doing that work in search of something similar - in search of a way to strip away all of our tricks and force what is essential and inherent in ourselves to be all that we have to rely on. Not pulling from a bag of tricks or putting something upon the characters we create, but instead allowing ourselves to be our characters naturally. Usually I used exhaustion as the method, physical exercise that truly tired us out and exhausted us. And at that point of being exhausted, having us perform, play the role - because when we are short of breath and catching up with ourselves there's no time to create, no time to put something upon ourselves, we have no choice but to be honest and true.

I'm just rambling about this and writing about this because it's been very easy for me, in New York, to turn away from the work I used to cling to - to try and be a 'professional', which for some reason seems to mean someone who doesn't experiment but instead already 'knows' how to do what they do.

And I realize, working with IN ASLYUM, one thing:

I don't know what I'm doing.

I don't 'know' how to create a piece or direct a show. Because there's no one way that will always work - there's always a new circumstance, and there should always be a new way of searching that is dependent upon the piece and the demands the text or circumstances require.

I don't know exactly what I'm doing - and that's a good thing. I should never think I know how to do this job, because once I do I stop growing and I stop learning. I don't want to stop learning.

And so the only thing to do is embrace what I don't know. And get back to the place where I'm still searching.

Catch Up (If You Can)!

So I haven't posted on this in a while, mainly because things have been busier than usual (yes, that is somehow possible). But right now I'm on my day off, which is the greatest thing ever, and I figured I'd go ahead and update this thing.

So.

To surmise what's gone on over the past month or so:

1. I finished up as an intern at NYTW - it was really a great experience, I should probably write more about the people I got to interact with, the casting sessions I was privileged to be a part of (sitting in a room with Roger Rees and Alex Timbers talking about their concept for a play and their opinions on the actors we've just seen - pretty surreal), and the workshops and readings I was lucky enough to help out on. Yes, there's office work, and yes there can be moments that are tedious, and sometimes you may or may not have once fucked up a coffee order and been yelled at by a higher up who was in a bad mood - but the good stuff, the stuff I've mentioned - that's what will stick with me when I think back upon this internship. It was a great experience, and I'm so thrilled to have had the opportunity.

2. On December 11th I had auditions for my play BROKEN which is premiering at the Strawberry One-Act Festival in February. I saw a number of really great actors, and it's quite interesting (almost intimidating, at first) to be the only one in the room, and to be the one running the show. I've done it before, sure, but always at Cornell or in Iowa City - two places I'm pretty comfortable with. Somehow doing it in NYC feels different. In the end I got a great cast, and it should be (fingers crossed) a really successful production.

3. I still work at Island Burgers and Shakes. Yum.

4. There was a massive snowstorm in NYC - you probably hear about it on the news if you don't live here.

5. Unlike in Iowa, the snow from that storm melted!

6. About a week ago we had auditions for Assisted Living, the play I'm directing at Emerging Artists Theatre, and again, it can be bizarre running the show, especially when everybody else around you, including all the actors you're seeing, are considerably older than you are. This production is an Equity Showcase, meaning I was able to see and cast equity actors in the production - a first for me. Emerging Artists (or as I'll refer to it from here on in, EAT) is seeming so far like a great company to be working with - the show opens March 8th and runs through March 20th. As a side note, it is amazing to me how many actors there are out there - there were over a hundred actor submissions for each of the three roles in the production. Crazy. The process of picking which actors you'll see from that bunch, well, it's really a crapshoot. Because resume's seem to tell you precisely zero regarding the actual ability of the actor. People with great experience show up and are really, really just... terrible - while some with very minimal experience blow your socks off. I very much understand why many casting directors keep going with people they've worked with before - they're known commodities, they're safe, and it is very difficult to know what you're going to get from someone you've never seen before.

7. So we cast Assisted Living -with some really talented people, including actors who have been in off-broadway productions. So that's exciting.

8. And yesterday I had rehearsal for the first time (technically second - the first was a readthrough) for BROKEN. It was great to be finally up and directing again - I get manic when I haven't done anything for too long (no, NYTW doesn't count as actually doing theatre. I was around it, but I myself wasn't being particularly creative for the most part). Although I'm pretty much always manic in the rehearsal room - I pace when I talk, when I stage, pretty much all the time really. It's better than sitting, much better. If you're sitting and watching you're also sitting and being disconnected. The actors are up and working, so should you be as the director. It means you might sweat with the actors, you might be working just as hard while you try to figure out what the hell you're doing next and where the actors are going to move - I work spontaneously, see, no preplanned staging here - but that's a good thing. A very good thing.

Which brings me to a question I've had to toss around for a while and now I finally have to face head on. There are certain things, as a director, that you can do with college actors that may not always fly with people who are doing this as their career. Meaning, I've always been a director who puts actors through the ringer - acting takes hard work and physical effort and total dedication. I've always started rehearsals with extensive warm-ups and have interspersed staging with exercises, planned with the unplanned. And this was appropriate - especially when the productions I was working on were ones with strenuous demands on the actors physicality in performance.

I'm not so sure that in the world I'm living in now I can pull out those exercises, run my actors until they have to stop to catch their breath - I'm not sure they'll stand for it. I still believe it to be effective and even necessary - one thing I fully believe in is that a rehearsal process is just as much for the benefit of the actor as person and as an actor going forward as it is preparation for that particular production. But I worry at times that these things can be seen as a gimmick. Grotowski, Viewpoints, Laban, Lecoq, whatever it is - all of these methods and training styles seem to most like a thing to do while still in school. I feel like most actors don't treat their art in the same way a musician or dancer understands you must. The clarinet player trains constantly, I've known musicians who practice their instrument eight hours a day - dancers are constantly in class when they're not in production - actors, however, seem mostly immune to this dedication. And some take acting classes, which are great. But part of being an actor is being taken apart - being ground down so that you can be built back up. The rehearsal process can and should aid in that.

But it is really unlikely that I'll be working like that, at least for the moment. Because I just don't feel like I can - not in this environment. It feels like one would have to found their own company - dedicated to that sort of work - for actors to even entertain the notion of participating fully. This isn't me trying to rage on all actors, hell, as an actor I'd probably have the same reaction if a young director without many qualifications starting trying to run me through the ringer. So there we are.

9. Not to end on a down note - I've also been asked to go an interview to direct a production at the Complete Theatre Company - it would happen in April, which means that if I get it I'll be directing productions in three months back to back to back. Which would be cool - and would be a pretty good start to my directing career in NYC.


That's all for now.