Tohu Bohu

I’m not sure what to write about The Pillowman. It’s a… fascinating play to read. I wish I had seen it. I actually wish I had seen both the London version and the New York version; it’s easy to imagine David Tennant and Billy Crudup playing the writer, but the lead cop was played by Jim Broadbent and Jeff Goldblum, who are more difficult for me to imagine in the same role. Also, of course, this play like others of Martin McDonagh’s, was evidently screamingly funny while it was screamingly horrific, which honestly did not come through in the playscript.

So. Mr. McDonagh is a writer who, for this work, came up with a story that is just about the most appallingly revolting thing you could imagine, and which (perhaps just by virtue of being imaginable) has elements of uncomfortable realism in it, while being disorientingly unreal. The main character is a writer who comes up with stories that are just about the most appallingly revolting things you could imagine, and which (perhaps just by virtue of being imaginable) have elements of uncomfortable realism in them, while being disorientingly unreal. Which is not to say he is writing about himself. One of the underlying jokes of the piece is that the law has come down on him because of the one story, out of hundreds he has written, that somebody somewhere was willing to publish. Mr. McDonagh by this point is a highly successful writer—but then, supposedly he wrote all of his celebrated plays in a short time long before he got anything produced.

Lately, I’m afraid, I have been reading plays and then thinking what’s the point? Not the point of reading them, but the point of, well, of writing and producing them, I suppose. What is the audience supposed to get out of it? I don’t mean, I think, whether they are supposed to learn and grow and become better people, although that may be part of it. No, I mean—well, I read Equus recently, and while there is certainly a voyeuristic thrill from watching the sheer fucked-upness of the boy, and I suppose a sense of accomplishment when we are able to trace it back to what fucked him up, I just don’t really get it as a play. I felt much the same about Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and still do, really. I didn’t feel that about Richard III, of course, which is mostly because it is Shakespeare! but also because I fully buy in to the premise that it matters who is King and how they get to be King. Well, and I admit it is because I love the character, and want to watch what happens to him, and do find watching what happens to him fulfilling because it fulfills (if you’ll allow me to claim it) the nature of Richard himself.

Anyway, I was going, in a roundabout way, to say that I don’t think what’s the point about The Pillowman. I’m not sure I know what the point is, mind you. Mr. McDonagh is having too much fun twisting the point around to ever let it, well, come to a point. I’ll note that once I understand as a reader that everything you see or hear is likely to be false, that this scene’s revelation is the subject of the next scene’s revelation that the earlier revelation wasn’t so, I can’t be properly surprised anymore, even by the bits that are surprising. But I don’t think that falseness is itself the point. I think the point is that…

Well, I don’t know. But I would say this: In Mr. McDonagh’s world, not only of this play but of the others I’ve read, and probably including the movie as well, stories are always both fundamentally false and fundamentally true; storytelling is both fundamentally evil and fundamentally necessary for survival. You can’t trust anybody who tells stories, but you certainly can’t trust anybody who claims not to tell stories, and you really really can’t trust yourself, because your own stories are the worst betrayers of all. But when you are not telling stories, then you’re really in trouble.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So. This was more than a year ago, now, that my Dear Director (the one who directed Man Who and Liaisons and Pyggie and the reading of Bound, way back when) mentioned that she was considering putting on The Dresser. It hasn’t happened—the rights are evidently not available just now—and if it had, I don’t know that I would have committed to the ridiculous travel time to do it. I might have, though.

Actually, I had never read the thing; I know it from the wonderful film. Tom Courtenay is the titular Norman; Albert Finney plays Sir (and Eileen Atkins who is probably the best film actress ever plays Madge). I haven’t seen the film in fifteen years, I would guess, but I can remember their line deliveries as clear as anything, their faces, bits of business. Ronald Harwood, who wrote the thing, did the screenplay and added a few things (and I think took a few away, but as I say, it has been fifteen years), but I would say three-quarters or more of the playscript is in the screenplay and vice versa. I don’t generally recommend things, you know, but any Gentle Reader who has any interest in the Theeyater at all should definitely watch this thing.

Being in it, though… I can’t imagine being in it. In the main roles, I mean, as I am egotistical and, tho’ I say it my self, successful enough to think that I would have a shot at the main roles, and wouldn’t be Mr. Oxenby or Mr. Thornton, and wouldn’t drive across half the state to play the small roles, I’m afraid. But reading the play and imagining doing Norman or Sir, that is very difficult indeed. Tom Courtenay in the movie is doing the role he created and played in London and New York. I can’t read any of his lines without hearing his voice, his inflections, seeing his gestures and his grimaces. Not a line. Not a pause. If I were forced to play the part, I would do a Tom Courtenay imitation, which would be sad and wrong and bad, and not worth seeing. Oh, in the event, given time and direction, one hopes to come up with something, but I have read through the play twice now, and I am baffled.

On the second time through, though, I did come up with some… well, not ideas, properly, but possibilities of ideas for Sir. Things I might want to emphasize that Albert Finney did not. Even, here and there, a line reading that isn’t an echo of Mr. Finney’s powerful voice. A possibility of delineating the sudden mood changes, or even a physical aspect to the disorientation. Something, anyway. Is it because I know that other people have played the part, and played it well? Freddie Jones was the first Sir, and Paul Rogers took the part in New York (evidently because Mr. Jones didn’t have a Green Card and didn’t want to bother with the paperwork, figuring that his success would give him plenty of opportunities at home, which it did), so there is in the back of my mind the idea that it can be done. Which is not so much true for Norman; I don’t know of any sizable revival of the play at all, and there definitely hasn’t been one in New York or London.

Which, bye-the-bye, makes Samuel French’s restriction very interesting indeed. The most likely reason for it is that somebody has put a hold on whilst putting a New York production together. But who? I mean, who for the actors, not the producers. For Sir: Frank Langella? Michael Gambon? It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Gambon would do the part here and not in London, or not in London first. Is Christopher Plummer too old? I would think so, but wouldn’t he be wonderful? What about Philip Bosco, is he still working? Simon Russell Beale? I think there’s something to be gained by having a Sir that’s not actually elderly, but is old young, as it were. And for Norman, there’s… um… Philip Seymour Hoffman, maybe? Seriously, I can’t think of anybody at all that I want to see in this part. Of course, I haven’t seen very many people. For all my interest in the theater, I have seen very few professional productions, and know the great stage actors of this era through recordings, films, television and YouTube clips. Still.

As a side note, just because I think it’s interesting, in the latest Queen’s Birthday Honours List Ronald Harwood, C.B.E., was added to the list of Knights Bachelor, and will be a Sir, now. Tom Courtenay has been a Sir for some time now, and Albert Finney has reportedly turned down a knighthood more than once. So it’s Sirs all around. Well, Freddie Jones isn’t a Sir, but Eileen Atkins is a Dame, so that’s all right. The irony—well, it isn’t actually, irony, as such—is that Sir is not a Sir himself, which we don’t find out until two-thirds of the way into the play:

HER LADYSHIP: […] And you drag everyone with you. Me. Chained. Not even by law.
SIR: Would marriage have made so much difference to you?
HER LADYSHIP: You misunderstand. Deliberately.
SIR: I should have made her divorce me.
HER LADYSHIP: You didn’t get a divorce because you wanted a knighthood.
SIR: Not true.
HER LADYSHIP: True. You know where your priorities lie. Whatever you do is to your advantage and to no one else’s. Talk about being driven. You make yourself sound like a disinterested stagehand. You do nothing without self-interest. Self. You. Alone.
SIR: Pussy, please, I’m sinking, don’t push me further into the mud—
HER LADYSHIP: Sir. Her Ladyship. Fantasies. For Gd’s sake, you’re a third-rate actor-manager on a tatty tour of the provinces, not some Colossus bestriding the narrow world. Sir. Her Ladyship. Look at me. Darning tights. Look at you. Lear’s hovel is luxury compared to this.

That moment comes as a shock to me still, even reading the play through twice in a month. I believe in Sir, still, because of course I want to believe in him, and Sir feels that pressure the way we all do up there, that we trade our love for his agreement to be what we want to love. Norman, of course, loves him even more for failing.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, and R3 has been closed for more than a month now, right? If I am going to do a post about it, I should just start typing, because otherwise it’ll all be a blur…

Things of which I am Proud of:

• doing Shakespeare at all, frankly. This is my third in twenty years; I hope I get to do more. Any of my complaining about the production or the theater group should be put into the context of how pleased I am by a community theater that does Shakespeare every couple of years.
• Chemistry with Richard. If Richard and Buckingham don’t have a kind of chemistry together, Act Three is going to really drag. I think we nailed that part of it—it’s always possible that two actors feel they are working well together and the audience doesn’t see it, of course, but you have to trust your instincts sometimes.
• My death scene. If y’all are interested, I can write it up in detail, but in general, I think I managed to be just sympathetic enough to make the scene matter, without ruining the whole thing by making Buckingham into some sort of Righteous Wronged figure. Also, my Big Idea about the scene and the part (the notebook, and destroying it at the end) seemed to work, which was nice.

Things in which I am (somewhat) Disappointed in:

• The houses, of course. We should have drawn more people. I don’t really understand that end of the business at all, but seriously: damn.
• My costume. Our costume mistress kind of pooped out on us partway through rehearsals, and we wound up on our own, for the most part. Costume is really not-my-forte (despite my own fondness for dressing up), and I feel that Buckingham’s costume just didn’t really work. The punk costumes were great (Richard’s Act One leather jacket with the boar on the back was a highlight), and my inclination to dress against the punk thing may have been an error. Ah, well.
• I,iii: the scene where Buckingham stands around for a long time in the background. It is hard on a fellow to start with a scene like that (or to only have scenes like that, which must be excruciating), but I don’t think I overcame it. Not that I think I was awful, but I don’t think I either prepared the audience for Buckingham’s important role in the middle of the play, or prepared the audience to be surprised by Buckingham’s important role in the middle of the play. Mostly, I just stood in the back and wiggled my eyebrows. Hm.
• My lines. I did a good job but not a great job. I think I only really screwed up once, when I absolutely blanked and floundered for a couple of minutes before somehow getting back on track. On the other hand, I misspoke myself slightly every night in one or another place, got a couple of words consistently wrong, and in general satisfied myself with speaking mostly Shakespeare. Not good.

Other Things:

• I met some very nice people who I enjoyed spending time with. It doesn’t look like any of them are going to wind up close friends, alas, but Facebook means never having to say goodbye.
• Within thirteen months I had been in three shows with three different theater groups. The three have each had their own problems as companies. The one that seemed to consistently sell tickets is now defunct and bankrupt, but the people in charge will open a new place soon. The one that owns a humongous house that seats two hundred and fifty is happy to sell fifty seats, and had in the past year a significant changeover of the board, with quite a bit of bad feeling, and is struggling to put on three shows a year. The one that does six shows a year plus showcases, with very few dark weekends, is organizationally a mess, priding itself on its post-hippie leftover structure that leaves nobody responsible for anything. I really really really don’t want to get involved in community theater politics, and it looks like if I want to do community theater in this neighborhood, I will have to either get involved, or keep doing one show with each company.
• I am due for a break from theater for a few months, possibly until the new year. I enjoy it, but it takes up a whole lot of evenings. And after a month, I am not missing it yet.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today’s Shakespeare News is that Roland Emmerich—yes, Roland Emmerich—is directing a movie about the man who wrote all those plays. No, not William Shakespeare. That would be too easy.

See, here’s the thing: it’s not like I care very much who wrote the plays. I tend to think it was William Shakespeare, because, you know, he said he did, and there is no evidence whatsoever that he didn’t in the contemporary record. But I don’t care very much, and if it turned out that it was someone else, well, it doesn’t change the text at all, so that’s OK. But really, the reason why I tend to think that William Shakespeare wrote the plays is because almost everybody who writes trying to persuade people that it was someone else is a dickish snob.

I don’t mean that it’s impossible to believe that W.S. was a front without being a dickish snob. It’s certainly possible. And I suppose it’s even possible to care about it enough to try to talk people out of their belief in the Stratford fellow without being a dickish snob. I haven’t seen it happen, though.

And I have to say that I don’t expect it to. Part of that is simply that I find it a bit dickish just to keep hocking about the whole thing, trying to persuade me that I am Wrong Wrong Wrong; I try to keep an open mind about things, but I do get defensive when attacked. And a lot of the writing on the topic that I have read (or skimmed, or began and given up on, more likely) seems like an attack on the deluded fools who are so simple to believe that William Shakespeare—a nothing from nowhere, practically a peasant—wrote those plays. And more than that, an attack on the poor deluded fools who believe that they enjoy the plays without grasping the True Key of Understanding. In all honesty, if it isn’t possible to enjoy them properly without knowing who wrote them, then the pseudonymity of authorship implies to me that they plays aren’t very good, and that we shouldn’t care about them at all. But of course lots of people have enjoyed the plays just fine whilst believing they were written by William Shakespeare, going back to their first productions when presumably the whole audiences were taken in (except the Queen, of course, and other select aristos).

That’s the snobbish part, of course. Not just that there’s the classic snobbery of locating all positive attributes in the hereditary aristocracy, although that is very prominent in Anti-Stratfordists. But there’s another kind of snobbishness, the inner-ring delight in having Special Knowledge, being among the elect who are In On It. They transfer that delight to an inner ring in Elizabeth’s court, duping the groundlings who didn’t get all the political undertones. That’s pretty dickish, too. I do get the inner-ring temptation, of course, and it’s a powerful one, but the right thing to do is resist it, not promote it.

Mr. Emmerich’s movie appears to be based on a recent book by Charles Beauclerk. Mr. Beauclerk is (unless there’s something that doesn’t show up in the family tree) a descendant of Edward DeVere, the current favorite in the Shakestakes; since he argues that his ancestor was not only the greatest playwright in the English language but an illegitimate son of Elizabeth I, which would make him an heir to the Tudor line, and quite possibly a Pretender to the Crown. When his father dies, of course; his father Duke of St. Albans and head of the Royal Stuart Society (which lists among its aims opposing republicanism). And, according to Wikipedia, Charles Beauclerk was banned for life from the Palace of Westminster for misbehaving in the House of Lords.

I should add—Mr. Beauclerk recently came to speak at an event held by my employer, and by all accounts didn’t, you know, do anything to get himself banned. I saw the man briefly as he walked through the library; he seemed a bit like a dickish snob, but then, so does YHB, probably. And while I am spending time mocking Mr. Beauclerk, he didn’t have anything to do with the 1998 Godzilla movie, so there’s that.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

When I was thinking about auditioning for R3, I knew I would want to read Year of the King, Antony Sher’s Diary and Sketchbook about his preparation for playing Richard III. I have read one other of his diaries, and enjoyed it tremendously. He has a nice touch with anecdotes and name-dropping; enough to give you a sense of traveling in heady circles (—then you had better crawl, hadn’t you?—said Michael Gambon) but not so much to exclude you. And he makes himself the butt of the joke, usually.

Anyway, I failed to get hold of a copy by the auditions, but eventually my ILL librarian turned it up for me. And it’s a marvelous book, really enjoyable. And it occurred to me, as I read it, that that is what I thought I wanted to be when I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be paid a salary by the Royal Shakespeare Company or some similar repertory company, get leading parts in fantastic plays and spend months working with wonderful people on all aspects of putting on a complex play. And there are, presumably, people who have lives like that, the bastards. What I failed to understand is that not only to most people who attempt to make a living acting on stage fail to do so, almost all of those people who do manage to make a living at it are going to spend most of their time either in long-running shows doing the same role eight times a week, with very little creativity involved once the show is formed, or else very quickly ginning up a role in a slapdash way. And I envy those people, too, of course, although I am unwilling to pay the cost in auditions, misery, ill-treatment, low pay and time away from my family. No, when I imagine myself as a professional actor, I imagine myself as a Star, I’m afraid, going from playing the Fool and Tartuffe to playing Richard III.

Anyway, it was startling, in a way, to recognize my youthful dreams in that book, although I had never read it. I am just, really, adjusting to the idea of myself as a community theater guy. I had adjusted to the idea of myself as not being an actor, but I hadn’t adjusted to the idea of my being an amateur actor. And a lot of the stuff he talks about? Just isn’t in the world of amateur acting.

OK, I’ll pass along one story, or at least a version of it. They had decided not only to have the coronation on-stage but to have the King and Queen stripped to the waist for it. We see them from behind, you understand. And there’s Anne, perfect and pretty and sexy. And there’s Richard’s hideous deformity.

Well, naturally if you are showing the hump onstage, out there under the lights, you can’t just use Lord Larry’s old one, you are going to need something new and designed to look realistic. And so they budget to have Christopher Tucker, the movie makeup artist (Company of Wolves, Mr. Creosote, Elephant Man, original stage Webber-Phantom), do up a fancy hump. Mr. Sher, who has a very visual imagination, wants to have the hump be in the center, a huge build-up of flesh that would remind the audience of a bull and lend emphasis to his nearly-useless little legs. The idea, aside from it just being a great visual, is that we would get a sense of tremendous upper-body strength overcompensating for lameness; Richard is simultaneously vulnerable and imposing.

Well, in they go to Mr. Tucker’s studio, where there are werewolves lying about in various stages of completion, and he immediately asks if the hump will be on the left or the right. No, the center, he is told. That’s not right, he says, humps are on one side. Well, this is true for scoliosis, but not for kyphosis, and anyway they are looking for this kind of impression, and so on and so forth.

Well, and nobody seems very happy about the discussion, but they agree to keep working, and the cast is made for Mr. Sher’s back, and so on and so forth over weeks and weeks, and meanwhile the costume people are very upset. You see, in a show like this, it’s best if you can make the lead’s costume first, so you can make sure that everybody else’s costume works with it. But they can’t make the costume, really, without the hump. So they are waiting, and doing the other costumes, and waiting, and so on, and finally, we are about a week before opening, and the final fitting happens and the hump is ready, a really disgusting lump of putty-like substance that will look absolutely hideous when he is stripped for the coronation.

And under the costume, it barely makes a ripple.

This, I think you will agree, is the kind of situation that calls for freaking out, and Mr. Sher is freaking the fuck out. Here’s this hideously expensive bit of stage magic for in between Four, one and Four, two, and it’s going to make him look like an idiot for all of Acts One, Two and Three. So the director comes around to the costume shop to look, and yes, we are all in agreement that this Will Not Do. So he takes the second version of it (if you have the money, it’s best to have two of any costume piece, just in case) and shoves it on over the top of the other one, and pulls up the back and starts shoving stuff in between, bits of fabric, some foam rubber, some batting he found lying around, and there. Now you look like Richard.

Meanwhile, with all the money from the budget going to the Hump, they wind up with a Hasting’s Head that looks like utter crap. But that’s all right. Nobody expects Hasting’s Head to look good, and honestly, when you have Brian Blessed playing Hastings, there is just no way for artifice to catch up.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and the show is over now. Twelve performances. I don’t have audience numbers, as they were not relayed to us, alas, but my impression is that we had something like four hundred people over the twelve shows, with two really decent-sized houses (for the venue) of sixty-plus, and two houses under twenty, which isn’t good for anywhere. Thinking about it, that four hundred is probably high. Ah, well. I will say that we had only one performance that I thought was below par throughout, and one or two that started slow or low-energy but picked up steam. There were two or three that stood out for me as really good all the way through, at least as far as I could tell from where I was.

For one of the shows, I posted here some of the things I was pleased about and some that I was disappointed in. I’m not really prepared to do that for R3, at least not yet. I will say that I was particularly pleased and proud that nine Gentle Readers come to the show (if I have counted correctly, and if nobody came and went without telling me); I hope you all had a good time. In fact, I just realized that I brought in a pretty good share: twelve tickets, I believe, were attributable to my having pushed the show to friends and acquaintances. With a cast of eighteen plus a crew of five or so, if we had all managed a dozen tickets we would have cleared five hundred tickets, right? That said, I am quite sulky about none of my co-workers coming to see the thing. This is the third show I have been in locally since starting work there and nobody has come. This bothers me more because the two people I work closest with are occasional theatergoers; it seems like it would be a fun night out for them, rather than a social obligation. Further, since the theater where R3 was produced has a pay-what-you-will policy that seems ideal for students, I was hoping that some of my student workers would have made their way. Not so.

Well, and that’s all right. I pushed the show on y’all, because we are part of this Tohu Bohu voluntarily and without obligation; I am circumspect and diffident pushing the shows at work. I put up a poster and make sure everyone knows about it, but I try not to mention it more than once. And while we are co-workers, we are not really social friends—we do not invite each other to dinner at our homes, or go out to clubs and bars together after hours. Still, I am sulky and petulant.

Most of that, of course, is the usual post part-um depression that kicks in when an actor realizes that doesn’t get to play dress-up any more for a while. I am also very aware that I am unlikely to get to play another Shakespeare part for quite some time—I am lucky to have been in three Shakespeare plays, more or less ten years between them. And I am, I rush to clarify, really enjoying not being in the play, having no theatrical responsibilities to add to my family ones, seeing the lovely quiet evenings stretch out before me into the summer. I would not audition for a show this month if they were doing Comedy of Errors (I like to think I am not yet too old to play Antipholus); I want some time off.

I am, in fact, simultaneously relieved and saddened. But extra emotional, either way. I blame William Shakespeare.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And we head in to our last weekend of Richard III, I feel I should write something to observe the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. And probably birth, although that anniversary is just within a day or two. And even then, the baptism was recorded as being April 26, 1564 old style, before the calendar reform in 1582 (which was not actually accepted in the UK until 1752, because you don’t want to rush into things). So although this is, by any useful reckoning, the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 1616, it is not the moment at which the earth is in the exact position relative to the sun than it was when he died. Much less when he was born.

Are you all clear on that, now? When you read your This Day In History lists and discover that it is Admiral William Penn’s Birthday, do you question what that this day in History means? The good Admiral was born on the 23rd day of April in England, but it was already May in France, or possibly Mai, and I’m afraid I have no idea what it would have been in the area that was later named after his boy Billy. When Pedro Alvares Cabal claimed it for Portugal on this day in 1500, what day was it in Brazil?

You are better off with Camryn Walling, born twenty years ago today. You may never have heard of Camryn Walling, but then he may never have heard of you. And he knows who lives in a pineapple under the sea, which is more than you can say about William Shakespeare.

Well. All right, technically, you can say that William Shakespeare knows who lives in a pineapple under the sea. Just like William Shakespeare can say that Richard III was a murderous hunchback. Doesn’t make it true.

It does make it memorable, though, which is what this calendar-based anniversary system does, too. So even if William Shakespeare was not born on April Twenty-third, and even if April Twenty-Third didn’t fall on April Twenty-Third in 1564, still, this is the day we use to commemorate. So go and commemorate it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People, it occurs to me to say, are different one to another, and that is what makes the world interesting and fun. The specific instance of this general observation that sparks its repetition is from a green room conversation about acting classes and books. I have never taken a proper acting class—I took Drama in high school for three years, I think, and I took an Intro to Theater course in college that wound up focusing on acting. But none of those were proper acting courses. And I have read a bunch of books about acting, and read in a bunch more, but I can’t say I have adopted any sort of school of either method or technique. Mostly, I make it up as I go along.

In the conversation, though, I did mention that the only book on acting I have ever really liked was A Practical Handbook for the Actor, by a bunch of people associated with David Mamet and the Atlantic Theater Company. The next day, that very book came across my desk (or rather came across the shelving area next to my desk) and so I decided to pick it up and reread it for the first time in years. And I didn’t really like it.

It turns out that the reason I really liked it was that it was incredibly snarky about Method acting. It states that most acting teachers are frauds, and that most acting classes are fraudulent, and most of the people in them are faking it and faking themselves out in an attempt to be what they think an actor should be. When I was a teenager, this was an wonderful affirmation that (a) I was completely right in my opinion of my high school drama teacher, and (2) I was so, so superior to everyone else I had been doing theater with. Reading it all again now, I am suspicious. Yes, I think my high school drama teacher was a fraud, and both mistaken and deeply confused about theater. She did, however, put on great shows. Which is a point.

More important, though, the so-called Practical Handbook presents a formula for analysing a scene that seems utterly without value. I know the book is not supposed to replace actual work with actual teachers, and it seems possible to me that the actual work with actual teachers would be valuable to me, but a third of the book or so is taken up with this formula that I cannot imagine is useful to use from the book. Not very practical or handy. I can only surmise that the book is intended to be a reminder of techniques learned and practiced in person, and that the formula is useful in that context. That isn’t how the book is presented, but I can imagine that the writers would have found it difficult to imagine how it would look to people without that practice, and thought it was useful when it wasn’t.

The other thing that I found completely lacking in the book, which I don’t remember noticing when I read it twenty-odd years ago, was any recognition of the existence of non-naturalistic acting. I don’t think it would be a problem to fit stylized acting into their Practical Aesthetics, if they wanted to, but they don’t seem to have even thought about it. It’s not going to help you, then, with a commedia production, or The National Health, or Aladdin—again, I suspect the authors and their troupe could adapt to the needs of the show, but the Handbook doesn’t give any idea of how. This is a frustration for me with a lot of the stuff I read about theater—while naturalism has thoroughly dominated the American and English theater scene for a couple of generations, it isn’t the only style in the history of the world, and it even the only style that playwrights are currently working in. It certainly isn’t the only style that audiences like. It’s a perfectly good style, don’t get me wrong—although I have begun to think that some familiarity with, some more presentational style is a very helpful tool even in the naturalistic actor’s kit.

Hmph. This has become a very negative note, and I don’t think the book deserves quite such a negative note. I would break it down like this: about one-third of the book is nasty snarking about the Actor’s Studio-derived Method, which is (imao) a well-deserved corrective; about one-third is the useless formula for scene study; and about one-third is useful observation about the theater, with which, of course, one can agree or disagree, but which are in either case useful for anyone interested in theater.

I would definitely encourage any young person who has gone through some half-assed Method training to read this book; I think it helped me, not only in my theater work but in a larger sense. I don’t find it useful anymore, myself. I wonder if the writers still find it useful. I know their school is still going, quite successfully as I understand it, but they haven’t put out a new edition of this book or a replacement in the last twenty years. Either they are happy with this one, or they have given up on the idea of it. I suspect the latter, although of course there could be a million other reasons.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know how many GRs are fans of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but I thought I would throw this one out to y’all… We have a performance of R3 on April 23, which is the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Relevant, because, you know, William Shakespeare wrote R3, as well as writing all the rest of Shakespeare’s plays (with certain possible exceptions). So we are having a little post-show shindig, with cake and champagne and the reading of some of the sonnets.

YHB has scanned the sonnets in the past, but has never made anything like a study of them. I am fond of 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment), but that one was claimed by someone faster off the mark than I am, in my ear-infected state. 130 (My Mistress’ess’s eyes are nothing like the sun) and 138 (When my love swears that she is made of truth) are also claimed, as is, I think, 27 (Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed). Does anyone have any suggestions? It’s not a Big Deal of any kind; I don’t have to participate at all, and it being more of a lark than a performance, I can just grab one and read it off the cuff, as it were. Still, I think it would be nice to work something up.

Any favorite Shakespearean sonnets, Gentle Readers? I will promise to record and post my interpretation of the one I actually perform, unless I get sicker and die before the 23rd.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Malcolm McLaren has died.

It’s hard not to feel personally bereft, at the moment, although of course I am not really basing my Buckingham on Mr. McLaren so much as on a kind of stereotype (or archetype, if you will) that Mr. McLaren himself used and subverted and ultimately fed into. I admit that I thought, briefly, that it would be great to have his curly mop of hair atop the Duke of Buckingham’s head, but (a) my hair is not curly, and (2) no, it wouldn’t be great. Still.

As it happens, I don’t really have much good to say about Mr. McLaren on the occasion of his demise. It’s an odd thing—I don’t particularly like his music, or his fashion design, or the staged outrages and Situationist stuff that he perpetrated so effectively, but I am glad that they exist. I think his attitude (Turn left, if you're supposed to turn right; go through any door that you're not supposed to as quoted in the Observer recently) is self-indulgent and self-defeating, and that it is far likelier to lead to bad art as good, and that even more the dissemination of that idea is far likelier to lead to a docile and easily-manipulated crowd than an independent and progressive one. On the other hand, I would hate to live in a world without punks. I want my daughter to grow up, as I grew up, in a world where people are trying to sell previously-ripped jeans and t-shirts. I want her to do what I did: experience the thrill and energy of contrarianism, and then find some deeper and more satisfying joy.

I want the establishment, and I am specifically referring to myself and the things I like and support, to be faced with the sort of aggressive and frankly stupid disrespect that typified the punk movement. I want taboos (and calling a shop 'SEX' and putting bondage gear in the window was very very taboo when they did it) to be smashed—I don't want to smash them myself, thank you, but I want to be making the choice to follow the traditions I value, not just following along without thinking.

I asked a few college kids today if they had heard of Malcolm McLaren; they hadn't. That's too bad. If you are eighteen or nineteen, and you think of punk as being your parent's generation, you're right—but you are also wrong. Punk is for all time, but not for everybody; punk is about looking for something to smash, and discovering, with any luck for the first time, that a lot of our assumptions and our traditions and our taboos and our social structures really are fragile. Yelling boo! at the right time, in the right voice, loud enough, really does work. And it's a great thing for people who want to take those traditions and social structures and assumptions and taboos seriously to know that, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Four down, eight to go. I suppose that’s one-third in, although it’s also two-fifths, as the remaining three weekends include the two matinees. The shows have gone well, for the most part. We were a trifle overrehearsed, I think—two nights before we opened we were ready but for lights and sound, so we kept running the show for our lights and sound people, which was correct and needed, but took a bit of the edge off our performances. This is a problem for us community theater amateurs; we tend to be either overrehearsed or underrehearsed, and we haven’t the years of experience or the technique to just do it all the same.

I was concerned about the audiences: after getting a fairly nice house of 67 for Opening Night (the place seats a hundred or so), we had only 34 on the second night. The next weekend, we had 17 on Friday, and I began to perceive a pattern. Fortunately, however, we had more than 9 in the house on Saturday, actually bumping up to 25 or so. Still quite low in absolute numbers, and in terms of the theater making any money to speak of (or at that level, keeping the losses down) it ain’t great, but not so bad as I had feared. And, in fact, the smallish audiences on the second weekend were more appreciative and noisier (in a good way) than the somewhat bigger audience on the previous Saturday.

In fact, that Saturday was the worst of our four performances so far. We did not have the nervous energy of Opening Night, and the initial quietness of the crowd fed into a fall-off in the energy level (after tech week, we were very very tired) which of course led into the audience being less entranced, and therefore giving us less, which brought us further down, and so on and so forth. In my case, I misspoke several of my lines—not forgetting the line but hearing it come out of my mouth incorrectly. That’s exhaustion.

In point of fact, just today I was wondering what was up with the odd feeling I had, strangely energetic and alert, and realized that it was just that for the first time in three weeks, I’m not tired. That was kind of scary.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the things about this last week before we open is that we are running the show from front to back, you know, in order. While it’s true that I originally read it in order, I had, over the course of the rehearsal process, lost the order of it in my head. This is very common and perfectly proper, and we properly and correctly are readjusting our heads to the show as a whole. This usually gives us new insights on character arcs and pacing, which is happening, but for YHB and the Duke of Buckingham, there was something else I hadn’t noticed.

So. The Duke first enters in I,iii with Stanley, and is immediately confronted with the factionalism in the court: The Queen says to Stanley that she doesn’t blame him for his wife being in the anti-Queen faction. The words are conciliating, but there is steel behind them; he is immediately wrong-footed at the very beginning of the scene. And I am standing right next to him.

I have been playing this by taking a half-step away from him during the Queen’s speech, without looking at him, just a tiny separation, as if to say we are here, together, but we aren’t here-together, if you know what I mean. Then I take the Queen aside to tell her privately about the King’s plan to make peace between the factions—you see, by coming in with Stanley, I may have already compromised my position as a neutral arbiter. Then, when I am speaking privately with the Queen, Richard comes in. So I have again compromised my position.

The second time I come onstage is for the grand reconciliation scene, and while it is implied that I am not in the Queen’s faction (as I am reconciling with her, and why would I need to do that if I were in her faction), at the moment that Richard comes in, I am in fact shaking hands with her brother. So the first two times that Richard sees me (on stage, of course) I am in close conversation with the Queen’s faction. And at the end of that second scene, I declare myself on Richard’s side.

The point, here, is that I think of myself (or rather, the Duke’s self) as neutral at the beginning of the play, successfully avoiding committing myself until I see that (a) Clarence is dead, and (2) Edward is dying, at which point the choice is between Richard and Young-Edward-as-a-proxy-for-the-Queen-his-mother, and I quickly make that choice, throwing the balance decisively in Richard’s favor (a show more focused on the politics could do something with the fact that Hastings is on Young Edward’s side but very much not on the Queen’s side, which leaves the young prince with two champions at odds, which is worse than having one champion and certainly worse than having two in partnership). But my studied neutrality may well be a figment of my imagination; Richard, certainly, has every reason to think of me as in the Queen’s faction. So my declaration in the second act has a different meaning, perhaps, to Richard than it does to Buckingham.

And to the audience? I wonder.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tech week is upon us, the time when everybody in the show, not just the actors and the director but the sound and lights and tech and costume and props and front-of-house and publicity people all think to themselves, wouldn’t it be nice to have a hobby that involved less work? Like building those ships inside bottles? Or maybe butter sculpture?

Call last night was for 6:30; YHB left at 11:30, and I am told that the remaining crew left around midnight. We were painting the last bits of the set, hoping it dries before 6 this evening, when we start assembling again. I am not much of a hand with a paintbrush, but I did a little bit before realizing that I really was tired enough to be problematic for the short drive home in the rain. Which, since this morning my Best Reader found the bottle of port in the fridge, seems to have been a more or less correct assessment of my mental state. Safety, as our fight choreographer says, is reallyreallyfirst.

I do feel bad that I have managed now to show up at three work calls and do almost no actual work. For those of y’all that haven’t done community theater, one of the sources of tension is that many of the actors simply never show up on a Saturday to paint or build or shift furniture. I generally am an offender in that, which I justify to myself by the importance of spending time with my children, when I can manage it. Probably the same is true of the other people in the cast; we do spend many, many hours at the theater, and volunteering to spend more is not really high on our whatsit. For myself, there is another issue, which is that I am not good at that set-building stuff, and I dislike feeling that incompetent. And, since I am incompetent, I am able to tell myself that the crew are not losing much by my absence.

In actual fact, I can wield a paintbrush without doing damage, and am perfectly good at, for instance, holding a bit of wood while somebody sinks a screw in it. Not to mention, my broom skills are actually quite tolerable, and when it comes to hauling a sack of trash to the dumpster, I admit to no better. There is always a large amount of unskilled labor involved, and if I don’t do it, somebody else will have to.

So, out of the eight or ten work calls for R3, I have made it out to three. For the first, logistics prevented me being there at the beginning, so when I arrived a couple of hours in, it was just in time to some ten minutes of sweeping up sawdust and flinging screws in the bucket, and then we broke up for the day. I joked about how brilliant my timing was, and posed with the broom. The second time, I arrived at the beginning, helped to tidy the green room, moved some bits of wood around, held a strip of wood while the set guy measured it, and then toddled off. I did not, this time, joke about getting credit for showing up without having to do any work. Last night was the third, staying around after the technical to help out with the painting, or rather “help out” with the painting, since I did a lot of very little. And then toddled off. Perhaps the other fellows made the jokes this time.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and we open in less than a week. The show keeps getting better, at the very least in the sense that it gets more smooth and professional. The scene changes are still a trifle messy and slow, and there are the moments of Where is my prop? Where’s my fucking prop!!!! but that has to happen this week if it isn’t going to happen in front of an audience. None of that is any worse than it has been in any other show, and much of it is much better.

Anyway, do y’all remember the earlier R3 Spoiler note? In my final scene, now, I’m tearing up my precious, precious notebook. I didn’t mention it before, but the notebook is an Accopress Report Cover, not a three-ring. This means that the front and back covers are easy to separate, each from the other, being held together by presumably-patented aluminum prong dealie. On the other hand, the pressboard covers do show the wear and tear. Luckily, I happen to own two nearly-identical black Accopress Report Covers (although I believe one of them is actually Wilson-Jones), so I figured that I would carry the pristine-looking one through four acts, and swap out for the increasingly war-weary one for the last scene, which, you know, makes the scene even better, showing that I have been dragged halfway across England to my doom. Great, right?

Only, of course, there are limits to the abuse a little folder like that can take, and I noticed after one of the rehearsals this week that the holes were tearing through, or actually that two of the four of them had already torn, and that the remaining two were just barely hanging on. So. What do I need? I need reinforcements! Those little circles that people used to use so that their papers wouldn’t fall out of their three-ring binders. Only, you know, I really only needed four of them. Well, call it eight—may as well protect both binders, just to be safe. And I really didn’t want to purchase a package of two hundred and fifty little ring reinforcements when I only needed ten. Not that there was a lot of money at stake—what would a package cost, a buck?—but that’s the kind of thing I hate.

So, I ask at work whether we have any, and whether it would be OK if I took a few for my own personal use. Our office manager said that she didn’t think she had seen any for years and years and years, but I was welcome to go through the supply cabinet and take any that I found. So I hunted around in there (our supply cabinet is not well-organized, nor does it usually need to be, so there was a good deal of digging through stacks of things and moving things that were on top of plain cardboard boxes and so on) and lo and behold, just as I was about to give up, I get to the bottom of a stack and there is a whole little package of paper reinforcements. Success! I show them to the office manager, who tells me that they are mine, now, and that she thinks they are probably thirty years old.

And, in fact, there is no more adhesive on them, but it isn’t that big a deal to swipe it with a glue stick before pressing it on. So that’s all right. And I carefully prepare my folder for the rehearsal on Sunday.

And then, in my frenzy of tearing, I rip the whole back cover of the binder in half.

Ah, well.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger doesn’t have any news from last night’s rehearsal. We’re getting close, now: last night we did after-the-intermission twice, tonight we’re doing before-the-intermission (twice, I hope), and after that it’s just running the play through from beginning to end, over and over, until somebody starts applauding.

It is a trifle strange for, running the second half twice like that. The second half is my quiet half: I’m in IV,ii (at the beginning, and then exiting for a page or two and then coming back on) and V,i (my death, a one-page scene) and then I’m one of the ghosts in V,ii and that’s it. So I have a lot of sitting down in the green room in between scenes of tremendous emotion and stress. It’s not actually that hard to gear up for the tremendous emotion and stress; the hard part is sitting back down quietly in the green room afterward. The first half has a lot less backstage time for me, and a lot less emotion on-stage. Build-up, don’t you know. The second half is the payoff for my character#&8212;but since it’s not a play about the Duke of Buckingham, it’s a payoff well before the play actually ends.

And, of course, running the thing twice means that the moment I am backstage, I am thinking about what went wrong in the scene, and what I need to do to get it right. If we’re just running scenes, then I don’t have that moment—I’m just up and doing it again. If we’re running the whole play, then I know I can’t do anything about the problems until tomorrow, so that’s all right. But running half the play is the maximum time for me to fret about doing it again the same night, which is what really makes the whole sitting-in-the-green-room bit so difficult.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I have decided, unless I change my mind, to go with the easiest idea for a Richard III mix: songs about kings and queens. What the heck. I have a lot of such songs, and it looks to be a good mix, so why make trouble for myself?

Here’s an initial list, with some notes and possibilities, and then I’m throwing the floor open for comments and GR help. My restrictions on this were (a) no instrumentals, (2) no jazz numbers this time, and (iii) um, I had to kinda like the stuff. I am tempted to break the no-instrumentals rule to end the Mix with Queen’s recording of “ God Save The Queen ”, but then, they are my rules and I can break them if I want to, right? Your advice is, as always, gratefully appreciated, both on more tunes to add and what to leave off (as well as what must stay).

• “I’m King”, B.B. King: I’m stuck between this slow sexy blues and “Riding With The King”, a duet with Eric Clapton.
• “The King Of Bedside Manor”, Barenaked Ladies: A fun song, with some relevance to the Boar
• “Kings Of The Highway”, Chris Isaak: a ballad, which could either provide a nice variation with a mostly uptempo mix or be a stone cold drag.
• “Rock’N’Roll is King”, Electric Light Orchestra: Rama-lama-lama-lama!
• “King Of Confidence” or “King Horse”, Elvis Costello: or, I suppose, “Brilliant Mistake”, which begins he thought he was the King of America; another ballad, though
• “The King & Queen Of America”, Eurythmics: I had forgotten this song entirely until I did a search in my library for the words, but it’s a good song.
• “Duke Of Earl”, Gene Chandler: This is the only song left on my list with duke rather than king or queen, but it does seem to belong.
• “Wanderlust King”, Gogol Bordello: Gotta have some of that gypsy shit.
• “The King Is Gone”, Heads: This is from that odd and inconsistent album that the rest of Talking Heads did without David Byrne; it’s a good song, in its way, and has a bit of that punk sound to it.
• “New Crawlin’ King Snake”, Howlin’ Wolf: This is not about a king, actually, but a king snake. Well, it isn’t actually about a king snake, either…
• “Babydoll, The Beauty Queen”, Jabbering Trout: One thing about a Mix Tape is the right combination of familiarity and novelty. I like to have a couple of obscure things like this one.
• “King of the World”, Joe Jackson: a live cover of the Steely Dan song.
• “King Of Spain”, Moxy Früvous: Gotta have this.
• “King of the Dogs”, Iggy Pop: this sounds nothing like Iggy Pop to me, but I like it
• “La Femme duDoight”, Queen Ida: The chorus goes Queen Ida/Is her name
• “King Of Comedy”, R.E.M.: Off my least favorite album, one of those grungy songs, seems to suit the mood of our show
• “King Of Bohemia”, Richard Thompson: Another somewhat obscure track, and, alas, another down-tempo one
• “King Of The Hill”, Roger McGuinn: The former Byrd, the side is pretty much indistinguishable from Tom Petty, which isn’t a bad thing
• “Sun King”, The Beatles: Hard to leave the Beatles of a list if there’s an excuse for including them
• “The Rascal King”, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones: Love, love, love this one, which is of course about Mayor Curley
• “King Dork”, The Mr. T Experience: The chance to include this track is what made up my mind about using the K&Q theme.
• “King Of The Hill”, The Nields: another obscurity, alas, but one that begins Gimme my bomb back, yeah
• “King of Pain”, the Police: this Mix? Needs Moar Eighteez.
• “King For A Day”, XTC: one of their cheerful Colin Moulding numbers

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Your Humble Blogger has ruminated in the past about adapting Leave it to Psmith for the screen, at which time it was suggested by Gentle Reader Chris Cobb that I get my grubby paws on the stage adaptation. Yes, that was more than two years ago, but I only recently got around to requesting the thing through interlibrary loan. I was disappointed in the adaptation, frankly. For reasons that are not clear to YHB, they transported the thing from Blandings to another Stately Home very similar to Blandings, replaced Lord Emsworth with another Stately Peer very similar to Clarence, and replaced Lady Constance with a character substantially inferior to Lady Constance. And Phyllis Jackson is replaced by an entirely different character named Phyllis Jackson, one not married to Mike Jackson at all but engaged to Freddie (who is not Freddie). On the other hand, Eve is pretty solidly Eve, Miss Peavey is gloriously Miss Peavey, and Psmith is Psmith, which is the best thing you could say about anyone.

As for the adaptation, Mr. Wodehouse (and probably some other uncredited writer) put Act One at the door to the Tube station just down from the Senior Conservative Club. This allows for a lot to happen quite quickly. Alas, that means we only see Psmith go into the club and come out again with Comrade Walderwick’s umbrella, but we do meet Comrade Walderwick, not once but several times, as he is one of the Berties and Algies who come to the weekend at not-Blandings.

Which brings me to my real disappointment, which is that Mr. Wodehouse writes with a very free hand to paying castmembers. There are about a million of them. Many with lines to say. I cannot imagine attempting to cast the thing at a community theater, drawing on available talent, and I cannot imagine attempting to cast the thing at a professional theater, drawing on available money. Things must have been very different in the old days. I mean, I know it was, I have read plays of the thirties before. But this was ridiculous. Utterly prohibitive. The thing would require an altogether new adaptation of the adaptation, if anyone wanted to try it.

On the plus side, the play is in a collection called Four Plays, and although I didn’t manage to read the Jeeves play before returning the thing to my ILL hero, I did reread The Play’s the Thing, which really is a wonderful play. It’s good to be reminded of that, because I do prefer the adaptation by Tom Stoppard, which is called Rough Crossing. The original is called The Play in the Castle, and it is by Ferenc Molnar, who is, of course, wonderful. The last play is also an adaptation of a Hungarian play, this one by Ladislaus Fodor, and this one is really good. I mean, snappy. And with a managable cast, too. There is a moment near the end where our Leading Man threatens to rape the Leading Lady, which might ruin the whole play, though. I mean, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t mean it, and it’s very very clear that it won’t happen, but even to be brought up in talk, well, I don’t know. Do productions of Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam these days cut out the lines about rape? I certainly would. Well, anyway, I hadn’t read Bill before, and I really enjoyed reading it, so that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No, seriously, actually, this isn’t about plot spoilers, but about production spoilers. Because it occurred to me that four Gentle Readers of this Tohu Bohu have already made plans to see the thing, and it’s possible that perhaps half-a-dozen more are contemplating it. Which y’all should be, if the logistics work out—I’m starting to get the feeling that this is going to be a good show. It’s early yet (two weeks from tonight!), but there are bits that are very good indeed. So if you can come to Greater Hartford on a weekend night in April (or late March), come. If you need details, let me know and I will email them to you.

And there are a few details of the production that will probably work better if you haven’t read too much about them beforehand. So I was going to refrain from writing about, oh, the really cool thing that we did the other night, because I don’t want to Ruin It for the folk who are coming to see.

Still, of the three dozen or so Gentle Readers, two thirds at least are simply unable to arrange a trip. Not going to happen, and I do understand. Frankly, I understand even if you could possibly make it to town and you don’t. I have missed my friends in shows this Winter just out of laziness and cheapness, and I’m OK with that in myself and others. And I believe that some of those GRs who are not coming (for whatever reason), are amongst those most interested in Shakespeare and theeyater. So. Rather than continuing to refrain, I think my plan is just to mark some of these notes as containing SPOILERS for the production.

SPOILERS

Really, not just warning you to avoid wagering on Richard in the final battle (I will give you 7-2 odds) but that as with any production, we have made some new choices and you will enjoy the show more if you don’t know what all of them are. So if you are even thinking about the possibility of coming and seeing the show, stop reading here. You can always come back in a month or two and tell me how it worked out for you.

OK?

Everybody good with this?

Ready for the production SPOILER? It’ll be a letdown now, I know, but still, it’s a bit I do like, if I say so myself.

Right, then. Act V, scene i: my death scene. We have discussed the scene before, and how it ends with my telling my executioner to covey me to the block of shame and the closing couplet. I haven’t talked about the beginning of the scene, where I list the dead:

Hastings, and Edward’s children, Rivers, Grey, Holy King Henry, and thy fair son Edward, Vaughan, and all that have miscarried By underhand corrupted foul injustice.

In the full text, Buckingham is addressing the shades of the dead, whose moody discontented souls are invited to mock him as he dies. We cut that bit of the address, as we have cut a lot of the supernatural elements of the show. So as I was preparing the scene, I was just listing them, in a sort of hysterical laughter: he knows he’s going to die, and now look at the people he has had killed for (it turns out) no benefit at all. A cosmic joke, and the panicky laughter as he faces his own addition to the list was, I must say, working for me.

And then I happened to sit in on the rehearsal for IV,i (in which Buckingham does not appear) and saw that Lady Anne responds to the summons of Lord Stanley that Come, madam, you must straight to Westminster, there to be crowned Richard’s royal queen. is stunned and panicky laughter, rising to hysteria as she contemplates the cosmic joke that her own curses redound on her head as the unhappy wife of the accursed Richard. And that was working very well, indeed, and was not only pathetic (in a good way) but a highlight on her basic instability (as opposed to the Duke of Buckingham, who is not inclined to regret and second-guessing). Only… if I respond the same way twenty minutes later, it makes me look dumb, and make the show work worse. So. Ah, well, what the hell. Back to the old proverbial, eh?

What to do, what to do. And then what comes to the rescue but my trusty notebook, and the rumination of the other day that I had a little list and could, in my own words, Cross them off, one after another. So, despite it making no real-world sense whatsoever, I determined that when I was caught and brought to execution, I would be clinging to that notebook of mine, and

[opens Notebook, glances at executioner, shows him page] Hastings [Rrrrrip!], and Edward’s children [Rrrrrip! Rrrrip!], Rivers [Rip!], Grey [Rip!], Holy King Henry[Rip!], and thy fair son Edward[Rip!], Vaughan[Rip!], and all [Rip!]that have miscarried [Rip!]By underhand [Rip!] corrupted [Rip!] foul [Rip!] injustice[Actually, by this point I have torn out the pages, torn the covers from each other and am surrounded by the fluttering shreds of my life].

A couple of things to note: first, of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that I love but don’t do well, what I have called physical inventiveness, coming up with bits of business that bring out something in the character and the text in a way that would not be present without the business. As such, I am really, really hoping it works. I have done it once, and it seems to work, but, you know, it is a bit over the top, and I can only justify it by doing it really well. A trifle daunting.

The other thing is that this business brought out Buckingham’s anger at his betrayal. Buckingham, of course, is a mix of emotions at this point (as is everyone at every point, but this is dramatically heightened, being, you know, in a play), and the text emphasizes his acknowledgement of the irony, his wittiness, as it were, over everything else. But of course he is also angry at Richard’s betrayal of him (I feel sure Buckingham never sees the raising of a rebel army as a betrayal on his part), and afraid of his immanent death and damnation. Regret? Sure. Defiance? All right. All of that. The question is which come to the front in the portrayal to make the better theater. And when, urged to by the list-shredding, I brought the anger to the front, it seemed to make the scene work better, and (I think) the play, as of all his emotions, the anger is the most Richard-directed, and the play is all about Richard.

And best of all, it brings the whole Buckingham’s-notebook thing to a satisfying conclusion. It’s a version of Tchekov’s law, right? If you show the audience a notebook in Act One, somebody has to tear it up before the final curtain.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of days ago, when my Director asked if we had any production or schedule type questions, and I asked for an off-book date. She said that we should definitely be off-book by the 26th. That is Opening Night, you see. A little joke.

My preference is to have a deadline, some date to prepare for, after which any actor clutching a script will be scorned and derided. I have been in shows where actors were simply Not Allowed to clutch a script after that date; I don’t approve of that. So, I suppose there’s some sense in being unwilling to declare a deadline you are not going to enforce. Still, there has to be a time.

Now, as for myself and the Duke of Buckingham, we both carry around a folder. And, in fact, it’s the same folder. Although, presumably, what’s in the folder is a trifle different—the Duke probably would not carry around a printout of everything he is going to say for the next two hours. He might, if he could, but most likely he does not.

So. I found myself, at that rehearsal, carrying around a prop notebook with an actual script. And although I am mostly off-book, I mean, off-book enough to be off-book, but not yet off-book enough to get all the lines exactly correct, the temptation to open it up to the correct page and take just a little peek was overwhelming. Just, you know, while somebody else is talking, open the folder and glance down at the page and back up, refreshing my memory that I address the Queen as Madam not Highness or that it is for shame if not for charity and not vice versa. And we’re not past some deadline for off-book-ness, so it’s not, you know, cheating. There’s no scorn or derision. There’s only the beginnings of the formation of a bad habit.

Therefore Your Humble Blogger, being a Good Lad, has transferred the sides to a new folder, a new blue folder, and put a bunch of random pages out of the recycle bin into the black folder I will be carrying properly. I will probably want to make up something that looks good (for mid-70s values of good) before we go up, but the key thing is to get the book out of my hands so I get used to being without it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you know what the secret is to all good theater? No, it's repetition. And timing. And repetition. But mostly timing.

YHB has an unfortunate tendency to slow pacing. Not terrible, and at least I'm aware of it, but still—I like to create a silence to speak into. A rather effective technique, if it is used very, very sparingly.

I should say that I am not generally slow to pick up cues, that's not the issue. It's that once I get into a speech of any length, I tend to find places to pause, to create emphasis with stillness, a kind of creeping Shatnerism, to be honest. As I say, I am aware of this, and I know that it can be easily overused, very very easily, and so I struggle with it.

My point is that I have a line, one line in particular in this play, that seems to me to require a pause before I speak. There's my cue line, and then I come to a decision and speak. In order for the audience to follow that I have come to a decision, and that I am coming to a decision right at that moment, there needs to be a pause.

But how long a pause?

My instincts will tell me to prolong the moment, that the tension is continuing to build. My instinct will continue to tell me that for at least, oh, three or four seconds after the last audience member has dropped off to sleep. My instinct is not to be trusted. So I will not trust my instinct. I'm not sure how I will wind up judging the pause—there's the simple method of counting two, or I could find a way to have Richard (for it is Richard, inevitably, to whom I speak) cue me on his instinct by raising an eyebrow or otherwise unobtrusively kicking me. Or something will come up—the one thing I know for sure is that whenever I do speak, it will feel to me rushed.

Which means that every night, at the end of that scene, I will leave feeling a twinge of dissatisfaction. And I will feel that twinge of dissatisfaction no matter what. If I don't feel that I rushed the line, I will feel that I dragged it out; if I nail it by any objective measure—including an audible gasp from the audience and a chorus of ooooohs—I will still feel rushed.

Ah, well. Such is life. As we hear in They Might Be Giants, everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We are slowly settling on a character for Buckingham. Not as comic as I would make it, which makes sense, as we are not doing the play as a whole as a comedy (alas). There will be some laughs, but we are going to emphasize Buckingham as a capable political player, albeit overmatched. He is the money and the repute, the public face of Richard’s faction. Do y’all remember, and I hate to bring this up, but ten years ago there was this idea that Our Previous President’s callow and stubborn inexperience would be tempered by the wisdom and statesmanship of Old Hands, of the ilk of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld? There is some sense in which our Buckingham makes our Richard more plausible, easier to support. Only, of course, Richard doesn’t have any loyalty.

Well, and one of the things that has guided YHB into a nearer orbit of this particular Buckingham has been a prop. I asked our Director, possibly at the first blocking rehearsal, if I could have a hand prop of some kind, something to hold during my first scene (which for me consists of long stretches of standing quietly at the back, watching), and she suggested a notebook or portfolio of some kind. Since I have been carrying my script with me at the blocking rehearsals since then, of course, it has been easy to incorporate that into my various bits of business. There was one moment, really, when it came together for me, as we were blocking II, ii a couple of nights ago.

So, King Edward is dead; Richard and I come to the Queen and Rivers along with Hastings and Stanley for an impromptu Privy Council meeting, to conclude that it is time for the Young Prince to be brought to London. My line is “Me seemeth good, that, with some little train, forthwith from Ludlow the young prince be fetch’d hither to London, to be crown’d our king.” At this point, I know the line well enough not to have to read it off the page; I am now carrying around my folder more as a prop than a script (particularly in these scenes where I have so few lines). On the spur of the moment, I flipped open the folder to get information: …forthwith from what the hell is the name of that place, oh, right Ludlow… and flipped it quickly closed again.

And, there, you see? So much in that half-second the notebook is open. Buckingham is the sort of fellow who keeps lists. He’s got the train schedule in there. He can’t remember the name of the Prince’s school, so he writes it down. He is persistent but not inspired. He has written down Earl. Hrfd; moveables, so he thinks he will get them. He’s a list-maker. Who needs to sign off on Richard’s investiture? Hastings, Stanley, Bishop, Mayor. Cross them off, one after another. Who has a claim to the throne? Edward, the Princes, Clarence, Richard, Buckingham, Richmond. Hm.

Of course, it doesn’t always work like that. Last night in III,vii when I dragged the Lord Mayor off (Come, citizens: ’zounds! I’ll entreat no more), I did an absolutely lovely spin. Headed for the U.L. Exit, I have the L.M. on my right arm (Come, citizens!), and then turn back to my left (’zounds!) dragging him across my body upstage and then turn to exit again (I’ll entreat no more!), dragging him downstage of me in a full circle. This also was on the spur of the moment—it came as a surprise to the Lord Mayor, who is a very funny fellow and reacted perfectly (I am guessing, because of course it is essential to the bit that I not look at him or acknowledge him at all during the spin), and to the cast and crew who erupted in screams of laughter. I love screams of laughter. Alas, when the Lord Mayor backstage said it was a terrific bit, I immediately said yeah, but I don’t think we’ll be doing it in three weeks. And in fact, at the end of the night in the Notes, our Director quite rightly said that it would have to go. Because, you know, it could be a good bit and still ruin the scene. And, as I think I said, we’re not doing it as a comedy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and I don’t know if we have at last finished blocking the whole play, but we have finished blocking the bits I am in, so that’s all right. After we did my death scene in V,i, I was released to go home, and I did, and thank goodness for that, because the roads? Not so good.

Anyway, before we did that, we did the ghost scene. Now, I don’t like the ghost scene at all. We’re doing a reasonable job of it, but frankly, I would cut the whole thing. We have already cut two-thirds of it, so it’s just a little bit more.

Now, I could imagine a terrific production of the show that emphasized all the occult and unnatural elements. Ours is not that production, but I imagine it could be terrific. It would begin, I imagine, with Richard spying his shadow on the wall, and then, when he moves to the left, the shadow moves to the right, and then perhaps morphs into a boar—or perhaps just into a bigger, more grotesque version of Richard, more deformed. Maybe… with horns? Or tusks, anyway. Still, that would set up a special-effects laden version, a dark Richard. Margaret, of course, becomes more prominent. Perhaps she is onstage more frequently than is written, observing and casting spells—if you can have her appear and disappear, perhaps overlooking the seduction of Anne, it can prepare us not only for her arrival later, but for the strange behavior of everybody else, who seem not to see her at first, and then inexplicably fail to have her arrested and confined. And then, possibly, when Queen Elizabeth asks her, in Act Four, how to curse her enemies, she could …not sure. Something, though.

And, of course, there are the dreams. Clarence’s dream, Stanley’s dream, and Richard’s dream of the ghosts—if we see the other two performed, brought to vision for the audience, then the ghosts fit in. How to do it? Puppets, I am thinking, behind a scrim. Hard to have it be appropriately spooky, but there are people who do that sort of thing very well. And then, perhaps, begin the ghost scene with puppets and have them appear to climb down and become life-sized people? Just a thought.

And in a play like that, there is the possibility of having ghosts appear throughout. Bloated and disfigured Clarence watches his nephews being sent to the Tower. Wasted and debilitated Anne watches Richard attempt to negotiate a second marriage. Rivers, Grey and Vaughn take up the empty seats at the council table to watch Hastings’ destruction. Henry VI could show up. Dead Rutland could play jacks with Dead Edward while the bodies pile up around them on Bosworth Field. The dead could outnumber the living.

But if that’s not what you are doing with the play, which we’re not, and thank goodness for that, and if furthermore you are not doing the whole text, which we’re not, and thank goodness for that, I firmly think that the ghosts should be the first things cut. Well, the second, after the scene with Clarence’s children. But early in the cutting process.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night we blocked IV,ii, which is probably known as the ‘giving vein’ scene. Immediately after the coronation, Richard suggests to Buckingham that he take care of murdering the Princes in the Tower, and Buckingham equivocates, and then asks for the Earldom he was promised. Richard dicks with him and then tells him “I am not in the giving vein today”. Buckingham sees the writing on the wall and flees the court to raise an army.

So. I found it particularly difficult to learn the lines in this scene. Not just straining to get the exact words right, as I have been having problems with in all my lines, but missing whole lines or getting them in the wrong order. That’s because through a page or two I am trying to get Richard to respond to me and he is conspicuously not responding to me but talking about something else. Our lines don’t match, deliberately. I ask about Hereford and he answers with Richmond; he asks about time and I answer about promises. We’re not listening to each other. It’s harder to find hooks to attach the lines to each other.

Mind you, it’s a terrific scene. Lots of conflict. Just hard to memorize.

Well, and last night we blocked it. I had been imagining possible blocking problems as I was preparing it, imagining possible solutions, ways to make the scene work in different ways. And I had kinda figured on one particular way as working well with what we’ve done so far, meshing with some of the earlier stage scenes and themes and working with the scene itself. And what our director did is just about the opposite of what I had been thinking. I don’t think I want to be any more specific—I am hoping that a few Gentle Readers will make their way to see the thing, and there should be some surprises for you—but I will say that never in a million million years would I have thought of blocking IV,ii like that. And it’s brilliant.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, so you know how helpful you all were with my exit line last time? Well, I have a different problem this time.

First of all, I have a great, great speech for when I’m about to die. But the last couplet, which is one of the few well-known lines I have, which is in fact one of the very few well-known lines in the whole play that is uttered by anyone other than Richard, that last couplet? Doesn’t make sense to me.

That is, I know more or less what it means. Here’s the line: Come, sir, convey me to the block of shame; Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.. I have admitted, at this point, my complicity in underhand corrupted foul injustice, and I have further admitted that foreshadowing is a legitimate literary device my own pledge had asked for and deserved nothing better than betrayal in response to my own. So what I’m saying is that I am being wronged by Richard in response to my own wrong behavior toward the Young Prince, and that insofar as I blame Richard, I needs must blame myself as well. Right?

Or, as SparkNotes and the No Fear Shakespeare site have translated it, I have done wrong, so I will suffer wrong. I have been blamed because I deserved to be. Boy, that’s terrible writing.

But the problem—my problem—is that I can’t make the words of the text mean that. If I am saying Wrong hath but [the seeds within it that grow into greater] wrong, that’s an awful lot of implication to put in between the words. If I am saying Blame [that I place on Richard is] the due of blame [that I place on myself], then not only am I jamming a lot of implication in between the words, I’m using due in a way that is difficult to understand. For me as well as the audience.

Now, I don’t mean to say that I can’t deliver the line. Frankly, if I do say it myself, I think the bit that leads up to the closing couplet is going to be terrific, and then, I straighten myself, look at Tyrell (who I think will be my executioner, although it may be Brackenbury), take a deep breath and snap Come, sir! Convey me to the block of shame! before smiling ruefully, opening my arms and saying Wrong hath but wrong, and blame… the due of blame. Or, of course, I could play it the other way: resignedly asking to be brought to the block, and then suddenly turning on my escort and snapping out that wrong hath but wrong, and so on, as a threat that he, too, will pay for his support of Richard. In some ways, when the structure of the sentences are opaque, the actor is released to use the words as floaters, independent of the surrounding sentence, and shouting out wrong! and blame! will carry (I would think) the audience to the meaning I put into them.

On the other hand, it would be nice to feel like I’m working with the text and not around it. I don’t ordinarily feel any difficulty with Shakespeare’s language, you know. Oh, I like to work against the meter, but not against the language itself. I almost never have a problem with understanding the basic meaning of the sentences, or figuring out why the various parts of the sentence are presented in the order they are. I have lots of lines that I can say a number of different ways, even within the confines the character than I am narrowing, but the different ways is because they all make sense in different ways. And, in fact, for all of Buckingham’s courtly language, with his unnecessary modifiers and intensifiers, his sentences are for the most part straightforward. Either straightforward lies, or straightforward truths. This last couplet of mine, though, is baffling me.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Your Humble Blogger has spoken before about two schools of thought about acting, and how while my sympathies are with the English, my training (such as it is) is with the Russian. Since that time, I’ve done some more shows, am on my third director since then, actually, and none of the directors has engaged in improvisation or any of that Method stuff. Which is fine with me—although I do enjoy improv generally, with the typically limited rehearsal time available to Community Theater, I’m in favor of just getting the blocking right.

And, I feel, over time I have become more and more sympathetic to the Technical style anyway. One of the ways people have described the difference is that the English style is outside-in while the Russian is inside-out. The Technical actor will begin with the externals—a hat, a limp, an accent—and fill in the character from there, whilst the Method actor will begin with the internal emotions and sensibilities—relationships, motivations, instincts—and fill out the character from there. I have always felt better when I have the externals—the hand props, the shoes, the hat. It is true that on occasion, I have had to ditch an external, when it doesn’t work with the internal, but that’s part of the process, too.

I mention it because as we have been blocking the scenes, I have been touching the other actors a lot. No, not like that. At least not yet. No, I’ve been putting my arm around them, grasping their forearms, putting a hand on a shoulder, turning them by their shoulders, and generally being the kind of guy who is always touching you. That had not been a plan of mine, and I was honestly surprised to discover it happening over and over again.

When I first come in, after my greeting, my next line is

QUEEN ELIZABETH: God grant him health! Did you confer with him?
BUCKINGHAM: Madam, we did: he desires to make atonement Betwixt the Duke of Gloucester and your brothers, And betwixt them and my lord chamberlain; And sent to warn them to his royal presence.

As the Queen’s brother is there in the room, I thought it might be nice if I took her arm and drew her aside, speaking to her as if in confidence, while Lord Rivers (her brother) conspicuously eavesdrops. The scene (I,iii) is all about the intrigue, making clear to the audience the factions, insofar as it can be made clear without having people wear different colored track suits (which has been done, you know). So, the two obvious options are to say the lines to Lord Rivers through the Queen, and to say them to the Queen around Lord Rivers. Well, and I suppose the most obvious option is to say the line broadcast, but that’s the least interesting option as well, and fails to contribute to the sense of factionalism and complottery. So I went for the most secretive one.

Then, later in that same scene, I am drawn aside for private talk myself. The Duchess of York (who has been given some of Margaret’s lines, which is very interesting and probably worth a note in itself) warns me against Richard, who is in the room at the time and wonders what’s up. We kiss hands (the Duchess and I, not Richard and I, at least not yet), and I take her glass away and hand it to Hastings as I feel she has had enough. That’s two.

In the next scene, although I am speaking to a group, I speak to each in turn, taking hands with a symbolic handshake—that’s three handshakes in the scene at least. I enter with my arm around the Young Prince’s shoulder, and then later, I draw Catesby aside and put my arm around her shoulder. In my scenes with the Lord Mayor, I steer him around the stage so that he can play his part properly. Richard puts his arm around my shoulder (his shoulders are off limits, of course), and I take Hasting’s arm to lead him to the Tower. In each of those cases, or almost all of them anyway, I was doing what the scene seemed to require without thinking of Buckingham as touching people rather a lot.

In real life, as it happens, I don’t touch people very much. I suspect it’s not uncommon for a week to go by without my touching anyone other than my Best Reader, my Perfect Non-Reader and the Youngest Member. Oh, I shake hands, now and then, but not every day. When I come in to work, for instance, I do not greet anyone by touching them, with a high five or a back slap or whatever. When I come in to rehearsal, I don’t generally speaking touch people—I don’t shrink from a proffered hug or handshake, but I don’t offer them myself. I have a few friends with whom I am physically affectionate, but not many, and not new ones. It would not have occurred to me to develop Buckingham as a character who is physically—what—not affectionate, certainly. Physically insinuating, let’s say. But once the actions are there, it makes sense for the character, too. Outside-in.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So. We had a cancelled rehearsal on Tuesday, due to the storm that wound up dumping eight inches or so of the white stuff on our roads. SNo Big Deal, since we are naming our storms these days. And can I suggest, if the Baltimore/DC area is hit with another one in the next few weeks, we call it SNo Mas!, which I think has the proper sound of defeatism and disbelief.

Anyway, we were back to rehearsal on Wednesday, and one of the other actors, sitting around, came up with a great image that I think I may make use of, which is the idea of Buckingham as the manager of the band. He’s enough older than Richard and Richmond and all of them that he doesn’t really get the punk thing, but he sees that there’s money in it, so he’s all in favor. He’s the link between the punks and the straight world, the one who gets the gigs and collects the money, and maybe hands some to the band, but not too much, because they will just piss it away. He loves everybody, because anybody could be useful, and if possible, when he screws people over, he won’t be there to watch it, he’ll be in the back room gladhanding the next contact.

And then, you know, once the band has a hit and a contract, they don’t need him any more and out he goes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The thing about putting on a Shakespeare play is that you have to set it somewhere.

So, in my positivist way, shall I do a breakdown? Yes, I shall.

Shakespeare in tights: This is in some ways the first thing that people think about, when they think about Shakespeare on stage. The cast dress in something approximating Elizabethan style, or what Shakespeare’s colleagues would have worn on stage. The setting approximates an Elizabethan theater setting, adapted to the physical layout of the theater. Drawbacks: comes with a sign marked Warning: Shakespeare is Dull. Relegates the actions to long ago, when things were different. Advantages: Audiences are expecting it, usually, and aren’t confused or distracted by it. Also, it’s what Shakespeare had in mind, so there is rarely any need to modify the text or otherwise put effort into making the setting work. Personal Taste: We hates it.

Historical Accuracy: That is, setting the production when the story itself is set, whether that is Ancient Greece or Medieval Italy or Imperial Woam or Scotland’s Dark Ages or Fairly Recent England. The idea is that the modern, clever, analytical dramaturg can bring out things in the setting that Shakespeare could not in his day, not having Wikipedia. Drawbacks: Togas. Also, Shakespeare is the total king of anachronisms, so you have to do some fancy footwork. And in the case of R3, it would be difficult for a Production Team to make it clear that this was not, in fact, Elizabethan, but a few generations earlier. Advantages: Well, it does have a sort of literal consistency. And some of the settings are pretty cool. Personal Taste: I’ve never seen it work really well. But then, I don’t particularly like Julius Caesar, which is the one that gets that treatment.

Modern Dress: Actors wearing the same clothes as the audience, pretty much. Advantages: It’s cheap and easy. And you can indicate quite subtle differences in class, regional background, ethnicity, climate, affluence, rank and occupation in ways the audience can pick up on. Disadvantages: No sensawonda. Difficult to explain references to horses, heralds and hogsheads. Throws the non-naturalism of Shakespearean language into sharp relief, as well as the archaisms. Personal Taste Fine. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages for me.

Brilliant Idea: There is a time and place (possibly imaginary) that totally works on a bunch of levels. It casts new light on the play as well as on its setting, and also on our own situation. Not only does the main setting work, but all the other places fit as well, and the class/race/wealth/culture/religious differences between the characters translate beautifully. Advantages: Wonderful, wonderful show, talked about forever. Disadvantages: Largely mythical. No, but extremely rare. The Fascist Julius Caesar, maybe the Voodoo Macbeth, the Fascist Richard III, perhaps the white box Midsummer. Alas, most ideas are not brilliant. Personal Taste: A wonderful, wonderful thing. When it happens.

Something to do: Something that looks good, at least part of the time. Coriolanus in Imperial Japan. Titus with tanks. The Comedy of Errors in Postwar Italy. Twelfth Night in the Wild West. Advantages: A couple of cool effects, some awesome costumes. Perhaps some cool music in between scenes. Doesn’t actually have to be consistent throughout the show; if you want to have the Capulets in kimonos and the Montagues in muumuus, heck, go for it.Disadvantages: Not making consistent sense. Can be distracting, when the audience is wondering why these dogfaces don’t have a radio, or why this importer doesn’t go to a different insurance house, or why that guy is wearing that thing on his head. Personal Preference: Actually, I like this sort of thing a lot. Oh, sure, I spend the intermission and half-an-hour afterward complaining about it (OK, half-an-hour a day for a week), but that’s part of the fun.

If I were to rank my preferences, I would say top would be the Brilliant Idea, of course, but second would be Something to Do, ahead of the other three. So as much as I am complaining and will complain about the whole Punk R3 business, and as much as I still don’t really get the point of it, the truth is that I’m just glad we’re doing the play, and I’m happy for the bits where the punk thing will work, and will live just fine with the bits where it won’t.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I have not yet finished my post about designs and settings for Shakespeare’s plays, and as I haven’t anything else to say at the moment, I would encourage Gentle Readers to view this publicity photograph of a Richard III performance. First of all, is it not a thing of beauty? And second, do all y’all recognize that Richard? No? Look closer.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So. A quick breakdown of the 25 scenes of the play, with particular focus on Buckingham’s through-line. OK?

Act One, scene one is The Monologue, Hastings and Clarence. The important thing here is that in the politics, the following people are mentioned along with their supposed factional differences: Clarence and Hastings, of course, the Queen, Rivers, Mrs. Shore and the King. And, I suppose, Warwick’s daughter, the Lady Anne. Nobody mentions Buckingham.

Act One, scene two is the Seduction. Nothing to do with Buckingham, at least in the short term.

Act One, scene three begins with the Queen and Rivers (and Grey, cut in our version) and continues with Buckingham coming in with Stanley. We immediately learn that Stanley’s wife is in the anti-Queen faction; Stanley manages to straddle the fence (as usual). Buckingham passes along the idea of reconciliation from the King, but is not at this point included in that. Richard comes in and starts fighting with the Queen, and then old, mad Queen Margaret comes in (although this part is given to the Duchess of York in our play). Margaret has a happy facility for getting different people to agree, that is, to agree on how much they hate her. Buckingham is finally singled out for address by this powerless outsider, but he dismisses her and is brushed aside. After the gang all go see the King, Richard includes Buckingham in his list of “simple gulls”

Act One, scene four is Clarence’s murder. The key here is that this is the first murder, possibly the first violence. This is where things begin to actually move. Buckingham is outside this and pretty clearly doesn’t know anything about it.

Act Two, scene one is Edward’s deathbed; Buckingham is there and makes it clear that foreshadowing is a legitimate literary technique. After the reconciliation, when Richard drops his bomb (the news of Clarence’s death, blamed on the Queen), Buckingham does not go with the King and the rest but waits with Richard and whoever is with him. He has the last line of the scene (“We wait upon your grace.”), which we are playing as a formal declaration of support to Richard. A private declaration, but clear.

Act Two, scene two is Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, and her orphaned grandchildren (that is, Clarence’s children), and then Queen Elizabeth and then Rivers and Dorset (still on the fence) and then Buckingham comes in with Richard and that faction (Stanley and Hastings and Ratcliff). At the tail end of the scene Buckingham is seen in active political maneuvering for the first time, but still subtly, waiting until he is alone with Richard to speak openly.

Act Two, scene three is a group of Citizens discussing the political scene. We cut this. The only thing worth mentioning is that they mention only the young Prince and his uncles (Richard and Rivers, and the Queen’s other brothers); there is no mention of Buckingham at all, nor of Hastings or Stanley or Dorset or anybody else on any side.

Act Two, scene four is Queen Elizabeth and her younger boy and her mother-in-law getting the news that Rivers and Grey and Vaughn are prisoners, sent up by “the mighty dukes Gloucester and Buckingham”. Gloucester is Richard, by the way; most of the characters are referred to variously by their first name, their title lands, their family and their rank. Buckingham is never anybody but Buckingham, which is nice. But the key thing here is that Buckingham has by this time declared himself publicly, and is known to be on Richard’s side against the Queen and her family.

Act Three, scene one is the first time we see Buckingham and Richard working together. They have come to meet the Prince of Wales and divert him to the Tower; they make a show of convincing him that it is for his own protection. Then Buckingham has a political conversation with Catesby, of all people, as if Richard hadn’t been directing Catesby from the beginning. The notable thing there is that although Buckingham and Richard are publically allied, he spends a lot of effort on pretense: they are civil to the Young Prince, although he pretty obviously sees right through that (and also sees that he has little choice), and his instructions to Catesby are clumsily subtle, if that makes sense.

Act Three, scene two begins with a lot of Hastings and Stanley business, and ends with Buckingham coming in and having a brief and somewhat odd conversation with Hastings. Buckingham reveals to the audience that Hastings is for the chop in an aside that reads like a sort of Richard-knockoff. It’s Buckingham using the Richard technique, but badly, and to no great purpose. It’s also odd that Buckingham is here by himself, one of the few places he isn’t with Richard.

Act Three, scene three is the deaths of Rivers, Grey and Vaughn, and we have cut it. It’s a shame, really, but as we are making Rivers stand in for all three of them, it would make the scene awkward. This scene, by the way, has another reference to Buckingham in his absence, in a way that clearly ties the Richard and Buckingham together.

Act Three, scene four is the strawberries scene. There’s a bit at the start where Buckingham jests about not being as close to Richard as Hastings is. That’s contradicted immediately on Richard’s entrance, when it is clear that they are buddies, and in fact leave the room to speak privately. Interestingly, when they come back in and Richard accuses Hastings, Buckingham doesn’t speak at all.

Act Three, scene five is the scene of Hasting’s Head, where Buckingham and Richard pretend to have just barely fought off a murderous attack. It’s a hilarious scene, and the two of them seem to be almost equals. They alternate advice to each other, and play to each other’s lines. Fun to do.

Act Three, scene six is the Scrivener scene, and cut. I think I want to write about this scene later, but for now, there’s nothing Buckingham in it.

Act Three, scene seven is the photo-op, where Buckingham arranges to bring the Lord Mayor to disturb Richard at prayer, and then offer him the Crown, which he reluctantly accepts. It’s a lot of fun. At the beginning of it, Buckingham talks about his appearance before the electors, and how (a) Richard has no popular support at all, and (2) he is able, with the help of a claque, to provide a facade of popular support, enough to go on with. In all of this, Richard is listening to Buckingham—in the full text (not in our version) it is clear that Richard’s earlier advice was insufficient without Buckingham having thought to pay a claque. Then Buckingham gives Richard advice on handling the photo-op, which he meekly takes. We do not, alas, get a moment between them to private enjoy the success of their plan.

Act Four, scene one is the womenfolk learning (from Stanley) that Richard is going to be King. Nobody talks about Buckingham.

Act Four, scene two is the giving vein scene, just after the coronation. It begins with Richard drawing Buckingham aside for private consultation and ends with Buckingham kicked to the curb and fleeing for his life. A great, great scene. I don’t know if it can be a surprise to the audience, which has over the last half-hour or more been seeing Buckingham not only increasingly at the center of things, but tied very strongly with Richard as a character and his success. Now, gone.

Act Four, scene three is Richard and his goons. Buckingham is mentioned, but is not considered a threat.

Act Four, scene four is the wooing of Elizabeth, a long and lovely bit in the middle of a very long and rather muddled scene with a lot of mostly unconnected bits. One of the bits is the news that Buckingham’s army is scattered. The last bit is the news that Buckingham is now a prisoner.

Act Four, scene five is a short scene between Stanley and one of Richmond’s supporters;

Act Five, scene one is Buckingham’s death scene. Or at least, his just-before-being-taken-offstage-and-killed scene, depending on how bloodthirsty the director is feeling. We haven’t blocked it yet. It’s a nice bit, short enough not to slow down the action, in which Buckingham more or less goes over the story so far.

Act Five, scene two is Richmond and his buddies.

Act Five, scene three is a long and bizarre scene, containing in it a bunch of plot stuff and fight stuff, and the Ghost Scene, where Buckingham is the last ghost, in the chiefest place, but, you know, still dead. After the ghosts is Richard’s last great monologue (very different from the earlier ones) and then the battlefield speeches and the battle begins.

Act Five, scene four is a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse. Which is pretty much the whole scene.

Act Five, scene five is Richmond killing Richard, and getting the crown from Stanley, and the end of the play, hurray.

This is all somewhat misleading, as the division into scenes is not necessarily going to be visible to the audience. But still, I think it should give an idea of what I’m talking about with my character arc, and how it helps tell the Richard story.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I’m not sure which kind of rehearsal dream is worse.

There’s the kind where you wake up absolutely convinced that you have had a brilliant idea in your sleep, and that you really should deliver the line not to the glassblower directly, but to the glassblower’s cat, which would totally bring out how bompstable the relationship between you and the glassblower really is. And then only later, when you are fully awake, does it occur to you that the glassblower doesn’t have a cat, and that you don’t have any scenes with the glassblower, and there isn’t a glassblower in the play anyway. And that bompstable is a perfectly rippin’ word but it doesn’t so much have any meaning, alas.

And there’s the kind where you wake up already unable to remember what brilliant idea had come to you in your sleep. But that one probably was brilliant, right? If only you could remember it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There are, of course, a million different ways of playing Shakespeare for an audience, and not all of them are wrong. What I’m on about at the moment is the verse.

I assume that y’all know what I mean when I talk about Shakespearean verse. Perhaps I shouldn’t. Essentially, Shakespeare wrote big chunks of his plays in a highly rhythmic style, not much like common speech. This is separate from the language—Shakespeare has a largish vocabulary containing a fair number of words that you won’t come across very often, and very very often uses words you know in ways you don’t, but I think that’s exaggerated in people’s minds. The thing about the verse is that the demands of its rhythmic structure (among other things) push the structure of Shakespeare’s sentences well out of what we expect. This is not a problem unique to Shakespeare, or unique to iambic pentameter; David Mamet, f’r’ex, and Martin McDonagh f’r’another’ex, bend grammatical syntax to their rhythmic demands. But with Shakespeare, which has a reputation for unintelligibility, it’s something that requires real and serious thought.

There are two major schools of thought: some people emphasize the verse, other people play against the verse. If you figure that Shakespeare’s intent in writing in verse in the first place should be a high priority, you focus on the beats and play them up. If you figure that the verse is a problem for audiences, you focus on the beats and break them up.

Let’s take a look, shall we, at one of Buckingham’s most famous speeches. It’s not terribly long. Seven lines. Buckingham and Richard are preparing for a photo-op with the Lord Mayor and a crowd of Citizens, during which Richard will be formally offered the Crown and will accept it.

The mayor is here at hand: intend some fear;
Be not you spoke with, but by mighty suit:
And look you get a prayer-book in your hand,
And stand betwixt two churchmen, good my lord;
For on that ground I’ll build a holy descant:
And be not easily won to our request:
Play the maid’s part, still answer nay, and take it.

First of all, it’s written here as verse. As a clue to which school I am in, here’s how I formatted it in my sides for the scene:

The mayor is here at hand. Intend some fear; be not you spoke with, but by mighty suit. And look you get a prayer-book in your hand, and stand betwixt two churchmen, good my lord, for on that ground I’ll build a holy descant. And be not easily won to our request: play the maid’s part—still answer nay, and take it.

What’s odd to me is that on the whole my instinct is for stylised acting, rather than naturalism. I don’t have a problem in theory with the idea of verse; it doesn’t bother me at all that people don’t talk like that. But when I see a passage like this one, my first idea is to see where I can break up the verse.

Perhaps some noise will help. Here is YHB reading the thing with an eye to keeping the verse. I’m trying not to exaggerate. Emphasizing verse is not just going rumpty-tumpty-tumpty-tum. More than anything, it’s finding those places where the verse is not regular. Now, having said that, R3 is very rumpty-tumpty compared with later plays, and this is a pretty rumpty-tumpty passage. All seven lines have all their feet; there are two lines that have an extra soft syllable at the end. There are a few more beats that have an extra soft syllable in them, barely. The last line is the furthest off, with no introductory soft syllable and that double off-syllable in the middle. You could think of it as two trochees at the beginning, followed by three iambs, or you could think of it as the first two iambs of five being busted. Whichever it is, it’s clearly a break, there.

OK, now here’s the other way, where I look for ways to break up the verse and emphasize the meaning rather than the rhythm. I again am trying not to exaggerate. The way I do this is to treat the speech as if Buckingham is making it up as he goes along. Say the first bit, get a reaction, decide what to say next. It’s actually perfectly plausible that Buckingham would have had the idea about the churchmen and the prayerbook while walking back from the hall, but what the hell, it’s more exciting if he comes up with it on the spur of the moment. I’m also trying to play up the connection between the two, where they are working together on this project, and Richard is for the moment at least pretending to take his cousin’s advice.

The second version is a few seconds longer. That may not seem like a lot, but with thousands of lines of verse, adding a second to each line can add up to a very long time indeed over the course of the play. On the other hand, if the only way to get through your text in a reasonable time is to gabble it at tremendous speed, perhaps you need to cut some more.

The real issue, though, is that the two instincts don’t work very well together—if Richard is emphasizing the verse, and Buckingham is breaking it up, they sound like they are in two different plays, working against each other. And I think my Richard likes him some verse. And given his lines, who could blame him?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I haven’t yet reported on our first rehearsal, which was on Thursday last. This was our first proper rehearsal, I should say; the read-through doesn’t count.

The evening began with a rehearsal with Richard alone, which is as it should be, and then I joined them all for some general discussion about the relationship between Richard and Buckingham and the way that plays out in our production. We have agreed that Buckingham is not a punk, or at least not at heart; he follows Richard out of opportunism, and indeed does not so much think of himself as following Richard as being equal partners with him, and perhaps even as Richard’s puppetmaster. But then (and I should discuss this with Maria directly) one of the funny things about Buckingham is that his high opinion of himself is very much at odds with his deserts. He genuinely believes that he played a crucial role in Richard’s ascent; it doesn’t cross his mind that nobody actually believes his play-acting. They are bullshitting him as much as he is bullshitting them; they acclaim Richard because he would have them killed if they don’t, rather than out of faith in his Buckingham-described virtues.

Which is not to say that Buckingham is not important to the politics of the play. He is. It’s the fact of Buckingham’s active support of Richard’s claim that is important, not the actions themselves. If Buckingham is making an idiot of himself in Richard’s cause, rather than protecting the Young Prince, it’s clear which side is going to win. From the Lord Mayor’s point of view, or Oxford’s or Blunt’s for that matter, Buckingham’s support for Richard makes it clear that the Prince will never reign; it is time to find somebody else. In that sense, the moment when Buckingham and Richard ally themselves in II,ii is pivotal, and neither Catesby’s bungling nor Buckingham’s clowning are enough to shift the balance in the other direction.

Well. All that’s not actually a rehearsal report, just my thinking about it, mostly since that evening. At the rehearsal itself, as I said, we talked in general terms and then blocked out III,v and III,vii. Or mostly blocked them out; we still are lacking a Lord Mayor, so things will no doubt change when we have a real actor rather than an Invisible Man and the Stage Manager’s voice.

III,v is the scene of Hasting’s Head, a tricky scene to manage, particularly in an intimate theater. We will be following the time-honored tradition of keeping the head in a sack. I remember they brought Sir Ian the head in a metal pail, but I’m pretty sure he brought it out for us all to see. But that was a proscenium, and I was in the balcony. Although I had little opera glasses, as I recall. Anyway, there will be laughs, particularly when the Lord Mayor is left holding the proverbial; the trick I think will be to keep just on the straight side of the clowning line. We are laughing at the Lord Mayor ourselves, so the audience should laugh too, but then (ideally) feel just a bit guilty about it.

III,vii is the balcony scene, which will not of course involve a balcony in any way. This is where Buckingham pretends to implore Richard to take the throne on behalf of the people, and Richard pretends to be reluctant. It’s a goofy scene, frankly; by that time we know (or ought to) that Richard isn’t going to leave anybody any choice. It doesn’t matter whether the Lord Mayor consents, because we can find another Lord Mayor. It doesn’t even matter whether the Lord Mayor believes that Richard is piously reluctant, just that he is willing to say that he believes it. Nobody will believe the Lord Mayor, but that doesn’t matter either. It’s not unlike a coronation—it’s not going to convince anybody who thinks the monarch is illegitimate, but you have to go through with it anyway.

On the other hand, it is important, I think, for the audience to see that Richard and Buckingham do work well together. They generate a sort of rhythm together, feeding each other lines and relying on each other to carry through with them. It’s not a perfect partnership—I should go into detail at some point on the minor specific instances where they cross each other—but the audience should both (a) enjoy watching them work together and (2) imagine or almost believe that there is something genuine behind it.

Of course the audience should imagine or almost believe that Richard is in love with Anne. And that Richard is on Clarence’s side. And that Richard wants to protect the Young Prince. And that Richard is determined to prove a villain only because he cannot prove a lover. The audience should keep falling into the trap of trusting Richard, even trusting him to be untrustworthy, and then realizing they’ve been played again.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gentle Readers will be asking themselves, what about the Mix? Well, some of y’all might be, anyway. Maybe. Others, particularly if you are new-ish here, may not know what I am talking about. Well, Your Humble Blogger has started a tradition, of sorts, where I make a playlist of an hours worth of music for my castmates for Opening Night. As the first rehearsal for Richard III (or Gd Save the King and His Fascist Regime) is tonight, it is not too soon for YHB to start thinking about the Mix.

But what sort of a Mix shall it be? One way is clearly to do a mix of the 70s punk sides that are the artistic overlay to the show. On the other hand, I’m guessing we will be listening to that stuff in the theater itself. If it isn’t piped in as scene-change music (and I’m thinking it will be), the director is bound to be playing it just for us to get us in the mood. So there isn’t really any necessity to do up a playlist of it. Besides, I’m afraid that the pre-1980 punk stuff isn’t really my strong suit; I’m more of a post-punk guy. Oh, I like that punk stuff all right, but I don’t think I’m going to come up with anything that would go on the mix that I’ll be introducing to anybody.

The other idea that occurred to me, naturally enough, is to do a mix of Elizabethan music, or even music from the late fifteenth century (when Richard was King and everybody was nervous). The advantage to that is that I like that music, and I probably know more about it that my castmates, just because most of them probably don’t know anything about it at all. So that’s a possibility.

Another thing that comes to mind is an hour of songs with the word king in the title. Everything from “The King Porter Stomp̶ to “King Dork”. Or add in some songs with queen and duke; that has the advantage of allowing me to call the mix Duke’s Place, because, you know, Duke of Buckingham. That would be pretty easy to do, and I would have a lot of choices, so I wouldn’t wind up throwing in lousy songs to fill an hour.

What else… songs about killing people, of course. Songs about ghosts? War songs? A whole hour’s worth of songs by people named Richard? That would be funny, actually.

Anyway, Your Humble Blogger has a little time to think about it, so now would be a perfect time for a Gentle Reader to provide inspiration. Come on now, inspire!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, and the rehearsal process has begun. Last night was the first read-through, and I’m working on my lines.

The first read-through is a strange thing. For one thing, sitting around reading a play is a strange thing in the first place, somewhere in limbo in between acting and reading. For another, we are at the very beginning of the process, in a room with strangers and near-strangers (and friends and lovers as well, depending), and as much thought as we may have put into our characters in advance, this is the first moment when our castmates hear it aloud. There’s something tentative about it, and the lack of gesture and movement makes it even more so.

And, of course, actors react to that tentativeness in different ways. I tend to go over-the-top, trying to make up for the lack of visuals and for the unfamiliarity with volume and expressiveness. Also, you know, there’s nothing like getting a laugh out of the rest of the cast. Other people go the other way, bringing the energy down, keeping their eyes on the page and concentrating on getting through it. That’s a perfectly good reaction (although, as it isn’t mine, it is a little strange, isn’t it?); any particular line reading or any idea of character arc that you have at this point is certain to be demolished over the next few weeks. So I don’t have any sense of how our Richard is going to play the thing—but then he doesn’t have any sense of how I’m going to play Buckingham. Until Thursday, when the first rehearsal is just we two. And maybe later.

Our Richard is not, as it happens, the Richard I had been willing to wager we would have. I don’t mean that I’m questioning the decision—our Richard gave a good audition, as did three or four other potential Richards, but I had pegged one fellow as Richard, and they went the other way. The casting table had seen both of them in previous shows, so it’s not surprising that they know more than I do. Anyway, I’m happy with him. Envious? Yes. But happy.

And the rest of the cast is very good, too, at least as far as I can tell. Our women are conspicuously good. Our women playing the women’s parts, I mean. The woman playing Hastings and the woman playing Catesby, as well as the very young woman playing Ratcliff, are good, but our Anne, our Elizabeth and our Duchess are all marvelous. The Duchess will be interesting, as they’ve given her some of Queen Margaret’s lines (having cut Queen Margaret altogether), which makes her much less sympathetic. She storms into the squabble scene and publicly insults and curses both her youngest son and her daughter-in-law; she appears to regret the entire war, despite being on the victorious side. As well she might, as her husband was killed in it, and she is mocked, disparaged and discarded by both political factions in the aftermath.

The great moment in the read-through, though, came late in the play courtesy of our Young Prince Edward. This punk R3 has, quite correctly, got rid of most of the kids. Clarence’s brats are gone altogether (hurrah!) and the long taunting Richard receives from the Younger Prince Wossname is gone, too, as is the Younger Prince. Edward is the only representative of that generation we see. Our Prince is a very cute kid, excited about the idea of doing a real play, and perfectly able to get his mouth around the few lines of verse he has left. I don’t know how old he is, and I’m not good with guessing those ages, but he could be twelve or thirteen, say. Something in that range. He did his bit very nicely in Three, one and was carted off to the Tower.

Later, on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard (and Richmond, in the full script, but we’ve cut that) is visited by the Ghosts of the Dead, specifically the people who Richard has had killed or killed himself. Or some of them, anyway; in the full script it’s eleven ghosts. In our version it’s not so crowded. But we still have some ghosts, at least for now, and we get to Five, three and Dead Hastings has told sleeping Richard to despair and die, and there’s a pause. A longish pause. And we’re all looking around, and there’s Young Edward, sound asleep in his chair, his head resting on his mother’s shoulder.

Cutest. Read-through. Ever.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Rereading the play with an eye to Buckingham, Your Humble Blogger noticed that the part is structured very oddly. It starts out as a small supporting part, which becomes a very big part in the middle, and then, just as the play is coming to a climax, he is cut off, and makes just a couple of small appearances in the second half.

I'm going to go through the scenes, as they are in the full (Penguin) text. First of all, there are a lot of scenes. 25 scenes in the five acts altogether, with no act having fewer than four. Some are short, and some are immense, and the whole division into scenes is a bit suspect from the start, but still: lots of scenes. And Buckingham is in eleven of those 25 scenes, a bit less than half. In the first act, I have only a few lines, and again in the last act, but I am in five of the seven scenes in act three. Well, I'm going to go through them one by one, which you knew anyway, so here we go.

I'm not in either I,i or I,ii. The first scene is the monologue and the scenes with Clarence and Hastings, which set up the politics of the factions; Buckingham isn't even mentioned. The second is the seduction of Lady Anne, which doesn't touch on Buckingham at all, so that's all right. Those scenes, by the way, total about 430 lines of verse (if you do them all, which nobody does). The third scene is all politics. It starts with the Queen's faction, and Buckingham and Stanley come in quickly. It's established that Stanley's wife is not in the Queen's faction, although it isn't clear whether Stanley himself has chosen sides, and Buckingham stands aside and is ignored. Then Richard and Hastings come in and squabble with the Queen's faction, to which Stanley and Buckingham stand apart, and then the old banished Queen comes in and everybody joins together in vilifying her. Buckingham is actually pulled aside by the old Queen to make two points: first, that Buckingham and his family were neutral in the civil war just concluded, and then that Buckingham should not trust Richard. Buckingham dismisses the idea, and is cursed for it. I enter on line 17 and exit on line 323 but have only a dozen lines of verse of my own in between. At the end of the scene Richard is left behind to arrange Clarence's murder, in a sort of after-scene; the whole scene is 356 lines. And then there's Clarence's murder itself, of course, a long, long scene of 286 lines, and Buckinham isn't in that or mentioned at all.

So. The first act is between eleven hundred and twelve hundred lines, of which Buckingham delivers twelve. He is on stage for three hundred or so, perhaps a quarter of the act, but most of that is spent in the background. And in the real business of the act for everyone other than Richard, which is finding out who is in which faction, Buckingham is oddly unidentified. There is no reason for the audience to suspect that Buckingham will be important. Certainly Rivers, Hastings and Stanley are placed more obviously in the plot. But things are about to change.

Act Two opens with what I think of as Edward's deathbed scene, although really it's just the dying King's final scene, where he demands reconciliation between the factions. Buckingham is singled out and gives a short speech in which it is revealed that foreshadowing is a legitimate literary device. 140 lines in the scene, Buckingham has a dozen of them but is singled out more than once. Still a minor character, but gaining. Then there's an inevitably cut scene with Clarence's children (I came across a great quote from Brian Blessed, in reference to cuts in this play, who claims that nobody in the history of the English Theater has ever even known that Clarence had any kids) which leads into a bit arranging for the arrival of the Young Prince. Buckingham takes the front as arranging everything. It's only 24 lines out of 154 in the whole scene, but it's a key plot mover, particularly as it's the first moment where we see a relationship between Buckingham and Richard. Buckingham refers to us two: it's not clear whether he has already started to conspire with Richard or if he is now proposing to begin, but either way, the audience is now alerted to a change.

The third scene is between three unnamed citizens, worrying about the realm in the aftermath of Edward's death; it's 48 lines that have probably never been performed, unless the leads need time to change costumes. The fourth is another short and often-cut one, 73 lines between Edward's widow, his mother and his younger son. And that's the end of Act Two, a bit over 400 lines of dialogue, of which Buckingham still has only thirty or so, but (and this is crucial) spends less time being ignored.

And now Act Three, in which Buckingham has the first line, as he greets the doomed Prince. We are now suddenly seeing a Buckingham/Richard double act, dishonesty and subtle mockery and plans within plans. That scene is 200 lines; Buckingham has more than fifty, almost the same as Richard himself. Then there's a short scene with Stanley and Hastings and a lot of politics. It's 123 lines, and Buckingham comes for the last eleven and delivers six and a half of them—when he comes in, he dominates the scene for the moment (and in the absence of Richard). The third scene is the death of the Queen's faction, 26 lines and not necessarily performed. And the fourth is the immediate power-grab, orchestrated by Buckingham and Richard together: the scene is only 107 lines (I think if it as longer) and Buckingham has only eleven, but spends a portion of the scene in private (unheard) conversation with Richard, clearly at the center of attention. The fifth scene is the scene of Hasting's Head, where Richard and Buckingham play-act that Hastings attacked them first&8212;it begins with a wonderful, wonderful exchange between them about their ability to lie and be believed. It's also short: 109 lines, but Buckingham has 39 of them, and much of the rest are addressed to him directly. It's still Richard's scene and Richard's play, mind you, but Buckingham has stepped up to a major supporting part. The Act ends (after a 14-line comic bit with a Scrivener) with another scene cooked up between the two of them, where Buckingham persuades the oh-so-reluctant Richard to accept the kingship, all put on of course for the benefit of the Lord Mayor. It's a longish scene and Buckingham spends most of it talking, 155 lines out of 247 total. And that's the end of the act: 800 or so lines, and Buckingham has 250 of them, about a third of all the lines in the Act Three. Act Four, and Richard is King, and Buckingham wants to be paid but finds his buddy is not in the giving vein. He is only in IV,ii, which is a great scene. Buckingham has 30 lines or so in that 124-line scene and then flees. The act is five scenes and something around 850 lines or so, most of which take place rather conspicuously in Buckingham's absence.

And then Buckingham is executed in V,v. It's a nice little scene, 29 lines and of course all but two of them are his. And we move on. The play is moving very quickly now toward its end; The second scene is only 24 lines long. The third is the center of things, 351 lines covering the whole night and dawn, and including the appearances of the Ghosts, including Buckingham's Ghost, who gets another bonus lines. The fourth scene is all of thirteen lines and ends in Richard's death, followed by another forty lines in the last scene of all. That's 467 lines (if I've counted right), and Buckingham or his ghost get to deliver 36 of them.

So, you see: 350 lines or so, of which 250 are in Act Three. The whole play is around 3700 lines, if I'm not confused. So Buckingham is a third of Act Three, and a thirtieth of the rest of the play. That's not so unusual—after all, Clarence dies in Act One and has very little to do for the rest of the night, and Lady Anne gets one huge and important scene at the very beginning and then kind of wanders through the play for a bit before being forgotten entirely. Richmond doesn't poke his nose onstage until the fifth act and then pretends to be a major part through the end. There a hundred million characters in the play, and only Richard is consistently important throughout. But it does lead to questions for me as an actor preparing the role: should we clue the audience somehow that Buckingham will become important later, or should he surprise the audience by coming out of nowhere (and surprise them again by disappearing as quickly as he came)? Should we play that Buckingham and Richard are old buddies who seize on the chance to work together, or are they comparative strangers who find they have like souls? Or do they have like souls—is Buckingham a dupe all along and only deceives himself into thinking he is a partner? Is he betrayed or just discarded?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and the news is very good indeed. I mean my personal news, of course, not any news of national or political import. My news is that I have been cast as the Duke of Buckingham in that punk Richard III I’ve been hocking about, and that means that for the next few months this Tohu Bohu will (if all goes well and the creek don’t rise) feature reports from rehearsals and the whole process of putting on a show. And none of the political commentary that I used to do so much of.

Which is just as well, really, because, honestly: a spending freeze? What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck sense does that make? I don’t think I could write a blog note that said anything more coherent than that, and knowing that, I wouldn’t write anything at all, and then, you know, not so much blog any more.

So here we are on this Tohu Bohu, having become a books-and-theater-and-sometimes-music blog, more than a political rhetoric blog. Except, of course, that R3 is political rhetoric, and more than that, it’s political rhetoric about political rhetoric. And so much more. I really love this play.

For those of y’all who don’t know the play at all, or who are vaguely familiar but (very reasonably) can’t tell your Buckinghams from your Ratcliffes without a scorecard), Buckingham is a very good part indeed. The show is Richard’s, of course, and far more of a star piece than many of Shakespeare’s plays. But then I assumed I wouldn’t get that part—you don’t choose that play and go into auditions without having a pretty damned good idea who your Richard is, and it wasn’t me. Because, you know, they didn’t know me. Still, there are a bunch of very good parts in support of Richard: Clarence, who has one magnificent scene and then has the rest of the night off; Hastings, who is loyal and true and utterly, utterly hosed; Richmond, who is young and hopeful; Edward, who is old and dying and then has the rest of the night off; and even Catesby and Ratcliffe and Tyrell.

But Buckingham is Richard’s main partner in crime, and the betrayal of Buckingham immediately following the coronation is a major turning point in the play, as well as being a great scene with several famous lines (Richard’s, of course, not mine). It was Ralph Richardson in the Laurence Olivier; it was Jim Broadbent in the Ian McKellen. And it’s me in this one in April. During the audition, I wrote the words I want Buckingham in my notes, and I got him.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Well, and as mentioned previously, YHB has auditioned for Richard III. I won’t know for a couple of days if I will be cast, but the audition went well, if one can speak of an audition from a process-oriented stance, independent of outcome. Of course, if I don’t get a part, the audition will have gone very poorly in retrospect, but at the moment, I would say it went well.

This was one of the auditions where we are all in the big hall and watch each other. It seems like a very community-theater way of doing things, assuming that we are not all completely eating our proverbials over the audition process and therefore able to be a big community together. I quite like it, as a way to spend an evening, actually. Which you may believe or not.

The thing about auditioning for a really great play is that a really great play is capable of a million interpretations—I should probably say that when I find a play really great, it is because it is capable of a million interpretations, each line capable of being shaded in a variety of different ways, each potentially powerful and freighted in a different way. That said, there are wrong ways to read a line, and with Shakespeare particularly, it is difficult, if you haven’t prepared the text, to get the meaning and the rhythms to work together, much less to work with the characters. Most of the people auditioning were quite good, but I heard about four people read the line in I,i

We speak no treason, man. We say the King is wise and virtuous, and his noble queen well struck in years.

and I wanted to get up and shake them and say it’s a joke! Pause after the word queen and think! And then, of course, somebody did, and I hated him for it.

But the real anecdote of the evening was that after we did our readings (mostly the Clarence scene from I,i; the Elizabeth scene in IV,iv; the Anne scene in I,ii; and the Prince Edward scene in III,i) the director asked if anybody wanted to read anything else. One young man asked if he could read the opening monologue, and the director said yes. And then, well, as one fellah said, how could any of us resist? So it was, I think, seven consecutive winters of our discontent. And it was a hoot. I mean, we were doing it seriously, we weren’t spoofing it (although I’m afraid I did do it in my Ian Dury voice), but come on—it’s just inherently funny.

Of course, my instinct is to play up the humor in the scene, anyway, as it is with all scenes. But this monologue really is funny. The whole series of comparisons between war and peace, leading up to his conclusion that… war is better! And then the outright statement of intention: I am determined to be a villain. That’s a laugh line, if I’ve ever heard one. And, of course, if it’s a laugh line at the beginning of the play, it sets us all up for real gasps when it turns out that he means it, surprising even (I think) himself with the extent of his villainy. And if you play the scene without humor, getting the audience to hate Dickon from the start, then where’s the play?

Oh, another comment from the audition, while I’m at it. None of us limped. None of us hunched over. Nobody cradled a withered hand. The director didn’t ask us to (she gave very little direction), and I suspect that we were all a bit embarrassed to pull out the crutches. And, I suppose, she feel that she has enough sense of our physical acting and our movement from the scene readings. And likely enough she is planning to downplay the whole limping business anyway, or else (she is a choreographer) she is confident in her ability to teach the physical business if she gets somebody who can do the lines. Still, a roomful of aspirant Richards, and no hunchbacks.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger will be auditioning in a week or so (if nothing prevents it) for a production of Richard III set “Set in late 1970’s London … amid the punk culture of the time.”

Now, Richard III is one of my favorites. I was lucky enough to see Sir Ian McKellen play it in 1992 or 1993 or so, his famous production having toured for about a million years at that point, and it was heartstoppingly wonderful. Magnificent. I mean, you have no idea. Well, except my Best Reader, who was there, and who in fact bought me the tickets as a gift. Did I say thank you? Thank you, Best Reader. Anyway.

My immediate reaction was that it made no sense at all to set R3 in punk London. I mean, it made no sense to me to have the main characters, who are all in the elite, royals and mandarins and whatnots, be punks. You could have the murderers mohawked and strung out, but big deal—if you are going to set the thing in the punk culture, you have to have Richard and his brothers be punks, instead of being duke’s sons, military officers and magistrates.

Having said that it makes no sense to me from a narrative standpoint, I do have to say that over the last few weeks the idea has been growing on me from an emotional standpoint. I think this is because I have been following Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, the Ian Dury biopic (starring Andy Serkis), and I’ve been thinking about that kind of twisted gleeful rage fitting young Gloucester pretty well. And, of course, I suppose one could imagine the plot being driving by Richard’s drug-fueled descent into paranoia, while simultaneously coming tantalizingly close to achieving the mainstream success and respectability that he rejected because it was out of reach. Ian Dury as Richard III.

Mind you, I still don’t think it makes any sense. And I don’t think that is exactly what they have in mind. But the idea has been rattling around in my brain for long enough, now, that I’ve decided present it to y’all for kicks and proverbials.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Richard.mp3

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger just had an odd theater experience that I thought I would share with y’all, as why not?

Gentle Readers will remember that YHB has been doing community theater over the last few years, not starting one play as soon as the other is finished (some start rehearsals for one show during performances of the last, actually, which I have never ever done) but allowing a nice rest in between. I did a show this past autumn, and one last spring, and one the summer before, and so on. Well, and I had been settling in to my time-in-between-shows, glorying in my evenings spent with Best Reader, tucking the Perfect Non-Reader and the Youngest Member in to bed, and generally not missing rehearsals, when I got a telephone call.

The director of Prisoner of Second Avenue, which was in rehearsals at the stage I was most recently allowed to tread, had come down with a bad case of lead-drop. I don’t know the details. But there he was, still eight weeks before opening, with no lead actor. So he called up two men he had seen recently, and one of them was Your Humble Blogger.

Now, I had seen the audition notice for 2nd Ave. I decided not to audition for it, because, as I say, I did not want to be in a show this winter, and I didn’t want to be in that particular show enough to overcome that. On the other hand, I was being offered a lead (or, more accurately, a 50% chance at a lead), and a lead that I think I could do well (Neil Simon should be in my wheelhouse). It would certainly be good for my future in the community to (a) be good in a lead role, and (2) help out a director in need. And, of course, it would be good to help out a director in need—it must be just utterly awful to have somebody drop out in the middle of rehearsals. So of course I said I would come in and read for him, and let him see.

The telephone call was Wednesday evening. We arranged for me to go and read on Thursday evening (latish, as my Best Reader had a thing scheduled, and I was on tucking-in-duty until she returned). That gave me all day Thursday to think about it, and since I was working in the afternoon, I could get a copy of the play and re-read it.

Digression, I suppose: I saw the thing ten years ago in London with Richard Dreyfuss in the lead, and my impression was that it was kind of a nothing part. I mean, a big part, sure, but it was just tossing out the wisecracks. It turns out, upon inspection, that Mr. Dreyfuss, the sonofabitch, is a good actor—the character is incredibly unlikable, but the audience needs to like him or the play doesn’t work at all. It is difficult to carry that off, and he did it without making me aware that he was doing it. At any rate, I was surprised, when I looked at it, how little idea I had what to do with the part if I wound up with it. Imitating my memory of Mr. Dreyfuss clearly wouldn’t work. End Digression.

So I went and read for it last night, and the director said he would get back to me today. So I went to bed thinking I might be in a show, and woke up thinking I might be in a show, a show that I had had no intention of being in until the night before.

So I was in a state of advanced ambivalence. On the one hand, I was thinking of all the reasons I wanted the director to pick the other guy. I don’t want to be in a show again so soon. The show isn’t really that great. I don’t have any idea what to do with the part. The weather is going to get ugly, and I would have to drive back late at night in January and February. It’s more work for the Best Reader. I would miss my Best Reader, and I would miss tucking the kids in, too.

And on the other hand, of course, I was thinking of all the reasons I wanted him to pick me. It’s a challenge as a part. I am building a reputation. I like being in shows. I would meet some new theater people. I am better than that other guy (whoever he is).

Well, the call came in around midday, and he picked the other guy.

Just as well, really.

Although I would have been better than him. Whoever he is.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might think, on first glance, that a Noel Coward musical based on Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, would be a good idea. Further thought, however, would probably lead to the realization that what Oscar Wilde does not need is to be a bit more Noel Coward, and vice versa. Or would lead you to invest a bunch of money into a production starring a woman with a singing voice that Mr. Coward described as sounding like someone fucking a cat.

Ah, well. I haven't heard it, but I have read After the Ball (a Concert Version), adapted, edited and rewritten by Barry Day, and frankly, unless the music is utterly utt, I don't see any reason for it at all. I mean.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the great things about working in an academic library is that when I have three auditions in a week, I can pretty much walk upstairs to the P section and grab copies of the plays. Not that our collection is all impressive compared to other such libraries (I had browsing privileges in one of the five great superlibraries for five years, so my comparisons are just a trifle unfair perhaps), but it was three-for-three for me this summer.

In fact, what I got was not just the script for The Trip to Bountiful but Horton Foote’s Three Trips to Bountiful, which included the telescript, playscript and screenplay. For those who don’t know, and why should they, the thing started as one of those plays-on-television they used to have in the fifties. It was so successful (and Lilian Gish was such a macher) that it was produced on Broadway the next year. Then it sorta kinda faded into the that-was-interesting history of American Theeyayter; Horton Foote did not become the Great American Playwright (or if he did, as some argue, he did certainly was not considered the Great American Playwright), and the play was not revived on Broadway. There were a few regional productions, and it was done in London I think, and there was an off-Broadway production, but it was not in the canon. The people who liked it, liked it a lot, but most people had never heard of it, or of Horton Foote for that matter.

Then some of those people who liked it made a movie, and that (I think) was the big move to Horton Foote becoming at least a Great American Playwright to those people who think about those things. Certainly Barbara Moore and David Yellin, who edited the Three Trips book think so. Well. Different people like different things, because people are different one to another, which is what makes life interesting and fun. And I am glad that Ms. Moore and Mr. Yellin put the book together, because knowing (a) I am just interested in adaptation, as a process and a problem, and (2) the differences between the three and the interviews and such that supplement them in the volume did provide me with some interesting and perhaps useful background when I was working on the show.

And no, I still haven’t seen the movie. And I don’t think there is any recording of the original television play.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and that’s the end of it. The last two performances drew seventyish crowds (quantity, I mean, not age) (well) who appeared to like it, although the Friday crowd laughed at everything and the Saturday crowd coughed a lot and crinkled wrappers. I don’t think I performed very well either night, but it’s hard to tell. I didn’t feel the monologue particularly deeply.

Which reminds me to mention Gerald Klickstein’s note on The Peak-Performance Myth from a few weeks back at the OUP blog. Mr. Klickstein is writing about music (and trying to sell a book; I always feel a bit whatsit linking to such a blatantly commercial blog for free, and yet they frequently do provide interesting notes as part of that whole selling-books thing, which goes to show) rather than theater, but his point is applicable. While it’s nice to maximize your chances of giving an inspired and emotionally connected performance, it is absolutely imperative to minimize your chances of giving a rotten performance. The point is to prepare yourself to be good even if you can’t quite get your mind into it.

I never did grow to like The Trip to Bountiful. Over the course of two months of presentation and performance there were aspects I grew to like and even admire, but it’s also true that there were aspects I grew to dislike more, and my fundamental lack of sympathy for the play as a whole never dissolved. That doesn’t mean I never connected with the part. I would say that of the seven performances, there were three, maybe only two in which I really felt emotional during my big scene. Where I was blinking back tears, instead of just blinking. I wasn’t able to tell whether the audience was responding differently to the different nights; the audiences were so different one to another that I couldn’t interpret their levels of silence and response during those minutes. Nor was my director the type who would rate my performance after each show, which would have been awful. The responses from random strangers in the audience were much the same, night to night, but then, they would be—no-one who thought I was stinking up the stage is going to go up to me and tell me I was lousy, and anyone who found themselves facing me in the lobby was going to say they loved my work, because that’s what you do. And the few people I know who saw the show (I didn’t pressure folk this time) and who I trust to tell me their real judgment and whose judgment I think is perceptive, well, they only saw the one show and can’t compare an on night with an off.

But I hope that the audience couldn’t tell if I was ‘faking’ it or feeling it. That’s what I was preparing for, anyway.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The second of the three simultaneous auditions was for Uncle Vanya, which I read in Carol Rocamora’s translation in Chekhov: Four Plays. I can’t really speak to how good the translation was—reading Michael Frayn’s introductions to his translations but not his translations themselves has led me to a very strange place regarding Anton Chekhov in English. Or Tchekoff. Or Tchekhov. Anyway.

I still don’t really get the play. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of stuff I get about it—Jean himself is miserable, and the way in which his misery is brought to a head is both plausible and theatrical. The various crushes, one way and another, make a good deal of sense. And the doctor, who combines a grandiose idealism with a petty thoughtlessness the way some people do in real life and many of us like to think all idealists do, is in some ways a memorable character. But mostly, these are depressing people who behave badly, and I don’t see why people keep wanting to spend time with them.

Of course, I felt that way about Seinfeld.

I do wish that I had managed to see the local production that I wasn’t cast in. Although I suppose that it’s not somehow petty on my own part to want to see what they went with, when I would otherwise not be interested in the show, or at least not interested enough to go out and see it. But that’s how it is. And anyway, I was kinda busy, what with my own rehearsals, so it didn’t happen.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The forecast for tonight in our town is for cold, cold rain. The high today is projected to be 42 degrees (Fahrenheit, in case anyone is reading this overseas and thinking forty-two degrees is beach weather) and the low tonight is right at the freezing point (so no foreign or domestic calculation of degrees is necessary). The good news is that the drizzle may actually stop around the time that darkness falls.

Why is Your Humble Blogger mentioning the weather? Because I am just trying to imagine people leaving their warm dry houses and coming to see community theater tonight. Frankly, it’s not easy. I wouldn’t be surprised to draw less than twenty.

As Samuel Goldwyn said, if people don’t want to buy tickets, you can’t stop them. But it would be nice if the weather helped.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and we’ve had two official performances, plus the Open Dress, with five more to go. They have gone mostly well, although the sound effects have been very bad indeed, coming in at the wrong places or with the wrong sounds, or not coming in at all. The sort of thing that comes off very amateurish. With lighting, a fairly good job is unnoticeable and therefore not a problem (while of course a terrific job may be noticeable and not a problem), but with sound, it is always going to be noticed. And if it’s not terrific, it’ll be terrible. Ah, well. I can’t really blame the tech guys, who don’t have money for expensive equipment, and don’t really have the knowhow to make the cheap/free stuff work like the expensive stuff.

But the sound is the only problem. Our lead (who is, after all, seventy-five years old and on-stage almost the entire time) managed to commit all the blocking and lines to memory. Well, and there have been some minor line fluffs, but nothing significant or particularly difficult to run with. I had predicted she would, of course, but I have to admit I was just a bit afraid she wouldn’t. My character does a lot of Yes, ma’aming, which makes it difficult to save my castmates if they go up. So, I bet you were going to ask me if I ever think back over the past sort of thing. But in the event, it has not been necessary.

The houses have been small, but attentive and they appear to enjoy themselves. I wish we had more people—we’ve been drawing forty in a house that seats at least two hundred—but I don’t have any idea how they could get those more people in to the seats. Or at least, I don’t have any ideas that don’t involves either the expenditure of money or lots of work that nobody is willing to do (including me). So.

I do wonder aggressively cutting ticket prices would help much. I would surely try it, if it were my decision. They are charging $18; I would cut that in half. Or do a two-for-one, anyway, which isn’t quite exactly the same thing, but is close. Or I would offer season-subscription discounts down to that amount, with individual show tickets for twelve or fourteen. It might not work at all. Let’s see: they sold eighty tickets this weekend for something less than $1400, as I am sure that there are some discounts. If they could sell another forty at the lesser price, they would make around $1000, losing $400 or so, which is a lot of money for a place like that. But they could (I’m guessing) make some of that back in donations, over a season, as getting butts in seats is a big part of the momentum for donations. And an incentive to get actors back—certainly I would, given the choice, prefer to go to a place that regularly gets a bigger house.

It’s not that it’s more difficult to play to a small crowd in a big auditorium. It is, a bit, but not that much. In a comedy, it’s harder to get audible laughter in a small crowd, which is a big deal, but in a drama it’s easy to forget how big the crowd is or isn’t. Until the end, when the applause is underwhelming from a sparse crowd. And I think to myself I worked my ass off, I want more applause than that. Well, no, I think that’s two; five to go, but if there is a big house and they liked it, I’m thinking damn, that went well! Oh, I still get the pleasure in doing my job well (or at least thinking I’m doing it well), but playing to a hundred people is just a lot more fun than playing to forty.

Ah, well. As I always say when there are lots of empty seats, at least there are still more of them than there are of us. Which has not always been the case, in my life, and I assume in most community theater folk’s.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, and tomorrow is Opening Night, but tonight is a Special Open Dress Rehearsal Senior Night Event, with Extra Upper-Case Letters, which means that we will have an audience. And my guess is that we will have as big an audience tonight as any we’ll have in the run; the Special Dress Rehearsal Reduced Prices for Elderly Folk are a big draw (as are those big initial letters, I’m sure), and I suspect for many of these theatergoers, the idea of whole houseful of alte kockers is not a bug but a feature.

I tend to joke that it’s good to have an audience for the first performance that can neither see nor hear us, just in case. This is a joke because it is false; we need to be at our peak for this performance, not only because these blind, deaf, lame and disoriented citizens are the most sharp-eyed, knowledgeable and vocal critics but because if they tell their friends to come, we will sell tickets, and if they tell their friends to stay away, we will not. No newspaper review will carry the weight of the opinions of Phyllis and her friends Phyllis and Phyllis, when it comes to Phyllis buying a ticket.

On the other hand, this show is drastically under-rehearsed. We did sound and lights all of twice, and more than one of the cues went badly awry both times. It’s not just that we have never had a perfect run-through, which rarely happens—it’s that there are certain parts of certain scenes that have never worked, and that is a problem. Still, it’ll probably be all right on the night. Which is in about two and a half hours.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, and Gentle Readers may have been figuring that if they held out during all the whining and noodling about the show, YHB would eventually come across with the Opening Night Mix. Others may have forgotten all about my tradition of giving the cast a Mix CD on Opening Night, chock full of music appropriate to the show. Or not, if I feel like that about it. The Trip to Bountiful is set in Texas in 1950; I took the Texas part more than the 1950 part, and wound up with an album of country and bluegrass tunes, mostly. This is heavily tilted to the religious music that Mother Watts would have enjoyed (she sings hymns to calm herself when she is angry or nervous), but I have thrown in some stuff relating to some other themes of the show, the collapse of small towns, the rocky marriage of Jessie Mae and Ludie, and the hopefulness of journeying.

Here's a tentative track list:

Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Doc Watson & Clarence Ashley)
Momma Cried (Alison Krauss & Union Station)
Calling My Children Home (Ralph Stanley)
Down To The River To Pray (Alison Krauss)
Cotton Eyed Joe (Bob Wills)
The Devil Made Texas (Hermes Nye)
I Saw The Light (Hank Williams)
Man Of Constant Sorrow (Bob Dylan)
Peace In The Valley (Johnny Cash)
I'm Workin' On A Road To Glory Land (Flatt & Scruggs)
Wreck On The Highway (The Louvin Brothers)
Looking t'ward Heaven (Doc Watson & Clarence Ashley)
Angel Band (Ralph Stanley)
Keys To The Kingdom (The Nields)
Laying My Burdens Down (Willie Nelson)
Travelin' Prayer (Dolly Parton)
Run Come See (The X-Seamen's Institute)
When I Grow Up (Michelle Shocked)
This My Town (Eddie From Ohio)
She's No Lady (Lyle Lovett)
I Just Don't Like This Kind Of Living (Hank Williams)
The Old Woman's Hornpipe (Baltimore Consort)

Now, Your Humble Blogger doesn't know a great deal about country music or bluegrass; I did a fair amount of research and listening, mostly to find things for the album but also to give myself mood music to play in the car whilst driving to rehearsals. So, while there's still time to fix it—what am I missing?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Perhaps it is time for an update on the play. We open a week from tonight, and at the moment it feels drastically underrehearsed. Of course, there is usually a point at which I start to panic, thinking we will never get ready in time, and why should this show be different? Actually, my feeling at the moment is not so much panic—I am sanguine that we will muddle through somehow to opening night.

I can’t tell how good it will be. That’s pretty common, too. I am distressingly bad at imagining how stuff works from the stage, or even from the audience. That is, if I am in the audience, I will sometimes find that the rest of the audience is loving a thing or not loving a thing, and I have no idea why. Or why my reaction is different. So I have no idea, really, whether audiences will love the play or be bored.

I do think that the rhythm and arc of the play is starting to come together at last. There were two major blocking changes in my scenes that have both been very positive, and have helped (I think) prepare the audience for the mother-son relationship. My only major worry is whether our lead will forget enough of her lines and blocking to create obvious moments of distracting covering, or whether she will come through once she’s in front of an audience. I suspect she will come through. I mean, it’s an immense part: she’s onstage the whole play (except two or three very short breaks, I mean, one- and two- page breaks) and she talks through much of it. Even worse, she initiates the topic of almost all her conversations, through all their meandering turns; I can’t really turn to her and say Was that a scissortail I didn’t see or I bet I remind you of someone, standing here like this or I know I was just leaving the room, but I suspect you wanted to call me back in to ask me something, didn’t you? So I have a great deal of sympathy with her plight. On the other hand, what a great part. I mean, I don’t even like the play much, but the role is terrific.

Oh, and that last line is working much better. In fact, y’all’s comments have made me rethink an earlier exhange, which goes

MOTHER WATTS: I know, Ludie. Now you’re here, wouldn’t you like to come inside, son, and look around?
LUDIE: I don’t think I’d better, Mama. I don’t see any use in it. It would just make me feel bad. I’d rather remember it like it was.
MOTHER WATTS: The old house has gotten kind of run down, hasn’t it?
LUDIE: Yes, it has.
MOTHER WATTS: I don’t think it’ll last out the next Gulf storm.
LUDIE: It doesn’t look like it would.

This is before Ludie has his big emotional breakdown, and also before he explodes in anger at his mother’s continued attempts to delay their return to Houston. He is still angry, he is still emotionally wrought up about the ordeal. But these are not pivotal lines, they are part of the buildup rather than the peak.

I had (I think quite effectively) been saying Yes, it has with a sort of contempt. Ludie’s focus at this point is in getting Mother Watts back to the car before Jessie Mae gets tired of waiting and comes out fighting (as of course does happen); he makes several attempts to get to the car before and after this. My line reading had been with the subtext that the broken-down house was not worth coming out to see, and certainly isn’t worth delaying the return home to investigate.

This is with the other undercurrent that Ludie really does not want to go back to the house, for whatever reason: he spends twenty years refusing to take his mother even to visit, and once she does force him to the doorstep, refuses to go in. I am playing it that Ludie refuses even to look at the house until the above line sequence forces him to; the audience may not pick up on any of the details, but they should become aware by this point that whatever memories Mother Watts has, Ludie’s memories of this house are not good ones.

So, considering the helpful comments in the earlier thread, I have changed my delivery of those lines. I make a bigger deal of this being the first time I have really looked at the house, and now say yes, it has in a tone of wonder and disbelief. As a response to Ludie’s transparently false claim that he’s rather remember it like it was, he is surprised to discover that it hasn’t gotten bigger, as it has in his memory, it’s gotten smaller.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don’t know how to say my exit line.

I don’t know if y’all know the play. Essentially, A Trip to Bountiful is about Clara Watts, who lives with her son and her daughter-in-law in a small one-bedroom apartment in Houston. She grew up on a farm in a North Texas town called Bountiful; after her husband died, she brought up her son at that farm, too. She hates the city, fights with her daughter-in-law, and dreams of returning to live in Bountiful. During the play, she sneaks away and takes a bus to the nearest big city, and then sweet-talks the local sheriff into driving her the rest of the way to her old house, which is now falling apart. Her son and daughter-in-law meet her there to drive her back to Houston.

She claims to have “found her strength and dignity” in Bountiful, or perhaps on the trip; she returns to Houston and her daughter-in-law meekly enough. There is some talk about everybody getting along, but the daughter-in-law is clearly not reconciled, and she herself twice ignores her daughter-in-law’s direct questions. So we’re not talking about a redemptive epiphany here, we’re talking sad, sad, stuff. If you care about the people at all, at that point, I suppose.

Anyway, I am playing the son, and I have no idea how to say my last line. It’s the end of the play, right? Jessie Mae (the daughter-in-law) has gone ahead to the car, and I fall behind to speak quietly to my mother.

LUDIE: Mama, if I get a raise, you won’t—
MOTHER WATTS: It’s all right, Ludie. I’ve had my trip. You go ahead. I’ll be right there. Look, isn’t that a scissortail?
LUDIE: I don’t know. I didn’t get to see it if it was. They fly so fast. The house used to look so big.

And I exit. And then Mother Watts says “Goodbye, Bountiful” and exits as the lights go down.

So. How do I say the line The house used to look so big? I mean, clearly, what I’m saying is that the house no longer looks big to me, either because I have grown (physically? emotionally?) or because it is so dilapidated that it appears shrunken. Or is it that the house used to loom large in my imagination, during the years that I refused to visit?

Digression: One of the things I find irritating that actors do is to come up with background details about their characters that are (a) irrelevant to the actual production, and (2) juicy beyond anything really conceivable by non-actors. I try to keep my back-story within reason. For instance, I eventually decided that Valmont was having a little E.D. problem, rather than deciding it was the early stages of syphilis… anyway, Ludie is so adamant about not remembering his childhood home, even refusing to set foot in it once he is compelled to go to the doorstep, that it’s awfully tempting to imagine some very juicy reason for his behavior. Abuse, not to put to fine a point on it. I imagine Horton Foote would be horrified to have an actor read that in to the part. And the play belongs to Mother Watts; my job is to support her, not to draw attention away from her with Acting! that will not be understood by the audience anyway. So I am repressing that thought. But still. End Digression.

The house used to look so big. What an awful thing to say. At that moment, I mean. To my mother, who has claimed to have found her strength and dignity at last in visiting it. I mean, whether you believe that claim or not, it seems so utterly heartless at that moment to say to her The house used to look so big. It’s so dismissive. And I know that Ludie is not a perceptive guy; Jessie Mae for all her bitchiness knows Mother Watts much better than I do. He never understands, for twenty years fails to understand, how much being in Bountiful would mean to his mother. And he is, I think, ashamed to have let his reluctance deny his mother that visit. Possibly ashamed of the reluctance itself. And after all that, there he is, in front of the house. Not in it, but in front of it. And it’s collapsing, the roof is probably half gone and the walls leaning and bending, and his mother is standing there convinced, convinced that just being on the land has been her salvation. And he says The house used to look so big. If his mother was listening at all, how would she take that? Or can he just assume that she isn’t listening? Or is he really so self-absorbed and oblivious that he can’t hear what that sounds like to her?

So. How do I say it? And I don’t just mean, what am I thinking when I say it, what emotions are intended to come out, that sort of thing. I mean, do I emphasize so or big? The Texas voice tends to accent the final word of sentences, but not if the speaker wants to emphasize something else. Do I say it fast or slow? Do I pause between so and big as if I am trying to think of what to say, or as if I was going to say something else and stopped, or do I run the words together as if I were trying to get the thing out and go? Do I gesture at the house? Or at the past? Or not at all? Do I say it while walking out, or say it standing still and then walk out? I’m not going to face Mother Watts (unless the director overrules me, which would be great as it would solve the dilemma), but should I face the house or the audience or the car or just away-from-her?

If you have any ideas about it, please shout ’em out. I really am stuck over this, and it seems important. I don’t know that I will actually do what you suggest, but I will probably try it, and your suggestions will very likely spark something in my brain. And yes, I will ask the director, but I’d like to try a few things first.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Your Humble Blogger should probably update y’all on the rehearsals for Bountiful. Not much to tell, though. It’s a compressed rehearsal schedule—for Valmont I had nine weeks, I think, while this is thirty-one days between first rehearsal and Opening Night.

Directors are different, one to another, you know. Our Director for this show is not one of the ones who maps out the whole show beforehand. He waves us up there to see what seems comfortable; if it looks good, we can do it that way again, and if it looks terrible, he’ll come up with something else. It has led to some moments I didn’t enjoy much, as he doesn’t have the script in front of him, and all of us have had a good deal of difficulty figuring out exactly what he means, what line he is referring to, that sort of thing. The ideas are good ones, but it takes a little while to figure out what they are. And sometimes they aren’t any good, because he has forgotten that this cross is not that other one, so we can’t eliminate it, or else we will have to reblock the whole next beat. That sort of thing.

One of the things I was very skeptical about was how early we are off-book. Well, and I suppose it isn’t all that early counting backwards from Opening, but as we live forwards, it meant that each scene had only two on-book rehearsals. One blocking rehearsal, one rehearsal holding the book and doing the blocking (and changing it of course), and then off-book. Each rehearsal involved running the scene more than once, of course, although we stopped and started a lot. And we just didn’t have all the lines. I thought the first few off-book rehearsals would be disastrous.

And, in fact, from the point of view of line-memorizations, it wasn’t good. But our Director made it clear that it was perfectly fine to call for lines—this wasn’t a test, and he knew we didn’t have it all in our heads yet, but he wanted our hands to have the props, not the books, and he wanted us to look at each other. And it worked. At least, the bits that I was in, so far. Yes, we wandered around the lines, quite a bit. My bad habit of approximating the lines is exacerbated by this sort of thing, and I may discover in the next two weeks that these early off-book rehearsals have ruined me for the actual lines. But the scenes started to have some shape and some rhythm. We went through the long first scene with only a few interruptions, and we have been through the second and third scenes multiple times, now, with prompts shouted in from the stage manager, but without stopping at all. And I’m starting to see the show.

One of the things about continuing to do theater is the discovery of new and different ways to do it right. And wrong, of course. But right is better. And I don’t know about you, but it’s always a bit humbling (in a good way) to be reminded that other people’s obviously wrong answers are often right answers, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have not been reporting my progress with A Trip to Bountiful. This is in part because I have been busy, with one thing and another, including but not limited to the preparations for the play, and so I haven’t been contributing to this Tohu Bohu at all. I know y’all have missed me. But also, frankly, because I don’t like the play and have been thinking about it as little as possible. Which is a lot, of course, but rather than snatching moments of the day to impart my insights to you, Gentle Readers, I am forcing myself to learn my lines and trying to think of other things.

Why don’t I like this show? Well, first of all, I don’t like any of the people in it. Oh, Thelma’s all right, but we aren’t on together much, and it’s more that I don’t have any objection to her than any sort of fondness or even interest. The main character, Mother Watts, is a passive-aggressive, selfish, impossible woman. Yes, she has positive elements to her character, and yes, she is put in an untenable situation through no real fault of her own, but Lord, Lord, what an awful person to spend time with. As for Jessie Mae—she has, at least, some spark of vitality, although she puts that to use in making everybody around her miserable in petty ways. Again, she’s not entirely evil, and of course her situation is as awful as everyone else’s, but she is the sort of person you avoid in life as much as you can.

And my own character? Well, he’s a despairing, broken man. He has failed at everything, probably through little fault of his own. His home life is witness to an unending cascade of petty squabbling; his work life is as junior to younger men in a tedious job without real hope of advancement. He was advancing (perhaps, it isn’t clear) before some illness forced him to spend two years in bed as an invalid. Now, starting over at forty, he’s just killing time and paying the rent.

Digression: The first version of the play was written in 1953 and is set in the present, more or less. Now, it’s a period piece. But thinking about Ludie as being 40 in 1953 (or so), and having spent two years in bed recently, I was trying to figure out what was wrong with him. It had to be something that required a long bed rest, and it had to be something from which he could recover enough to go back to work, although leaving him weak enough that six months after starting work his wife is still worried about a relapse. I am thinking heart; they did at the time put people in bed rest for heart problems (which of course was wrong, wrong, wrong), and his mother has some sort of heart problem as well. It could have been lung-related (pneumonia and complications), or a soft-tissue problem like fibromyalgia (although of course that wouldn’t have been diagnosed in 1953). I don’t think I’ll be using the information, but it makes me curious. Also, a heart problem could have kept him out of the war—they don’t mention the war at all, but there’s certainly no indication that he served, and he would have been old-but-not-too-old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He could have been exempted as sole-support, although of course lots of such people did volunteer. Again, not really useful, but once you start thinking about these people as people, certain questions come up. End Digression.

Anyway, I don’t like Ludie. I have pity for him, surely, but I don’t like him. And it’s hard for me to interpret the play as having any kind of redemption for any of them. I mean, yes, it’s the way people are—people talk about Horton Foote as rejecting the sentimental epiphanies in favor of the complexity of real life. And I see that. I understand, at least distantly, that lots of people like to recognize his characters as being like themselves and people they know; they prefer that to the outsized characters of Shakespeare or Kushner. I don’t quite get, myself, why they like that, where the pleasure comes in, but there it is: people are different one to another, and that is what makes the world interesting and fun. Presumably people are coming to this show to see a Ludie (and the rest) that are real, and I will work to provide that. But I don’t like lots of real people, and I don’t like Ludie.

And there aren’t any real people I don’t like that I will be spending much time with this Fall, I hope. But I will be spending a lot of time with Ludie, and with Jessie Mae and with Mother Watts, and although there are still lots of enjoyable things about putting on the show, the company is a distinct drawback.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First of all, The Twentieth Century is a terrific movie. It’s Howard Hawks, with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, based on a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. It’s one of those plays/movies about theater/Hollywood, and there’s a wonderful, outrageous and oversized performance by Mr. Barrymore which makes me wish I’d seen him onstage.

I had vaguely known that there was a musical, but I had never seen it, or been aware of a local production of it, or seen the cast album. Until recently, when I grabbed the CD and the book (On the Twentieth Century) from my local performing-arts library.

No, it isn’t very good. So there’s that. But the thing that really struck me was the cast—the star is John Cullum, who I know from Northern Exposure, and who I sort of know is a big deal theater guy, but it’s still odd to me to see his name above the title like that. And he’s wonderful, in the Barrymore role, although I have to say that they seem to have watered it down a little bit. He doesn’t close the iron door on people. I loved that in the movie.

The second star is Madeline Kahn, and this was a big surprise to me. I mean, of course you would choose Madeline Kahn for that sort of role. And then, thinking about it, I started to wonder why Ms. Kahn hadn’t been a big musical-theater star. I mean, she was one of the funniest comic actresses of her time, with a terrific singing voice and operatic range. She sang in comic movies, brilliantly and hilariously (particularly in Blazing Saddles, of course, but in other movies as well). Why wouldn’t people have been writing shows particularly for her, for her skills and range, showcasing her like they did Judy Holliday or Joanna Gleason or Mary Martin? Judging from the CD, and from her early departure from the show, it seems as if she just wasn’t very good at it. I don’t know why. Her songs just don’t work. Very disappointing.

And then, down in the small type, is Kevin Kline.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh, oh, oh.

Well, crap.

Do y’all remember (from way back when) that when YHB begins rehearsing a part, an early step in line-learning is to type them all in to the computer? And then I work from a printout?

Well, I typed up all my Bountiful stuff. I even printed it out as an early barely-formatted draft.

And then I evidently hit select-all and delete and then saved it and shut the computer down.

And no, it isn’t backed up anywhere. The file is on my thumb drive, and it wasn’t caught by my auto-backup software (it has barely been in my machine since) and I didn’t bother backing it up manually, and if I had, I suspect I would have backed up the empty version.

Your Humble Blogger has been cranky a lot lately, thus the lack of blogging (as why should I inflict my crankiness on Gentle Readers), and this is unlikely to lift the old mood.

On the other hand, presumably if typing the whole thing in once helps me get familiar with the lines in detail, typing the whole thing in twice should be twice as helpful.

Right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your Humble Blogger mentioned auditions for three shows: Lost in Yonkers, Uncle Vanya, and A Trip to Bountiful. Of the three plays, one is a Classic of the Modern Theater and is occasionally considered the First Modern Play by the First Modern Playwright. One is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner by one of the most prolific and successful American playwrights of the twentieth century. And the third is a much-loved but commercially disastrous adaptation of a teleplay that was later adapted into a much-loved film, all by a critically loved but popularly obscure Pulitzer winner.

I didn’t like any of the scripts. Oh-fer-three.

My favorite of the three is the one that is probably the one with the slightest reputation. Lost in Yonkers is in the Monstrous Mother sub-sub-genre, where we see the twisted adult children of a twisted woman attempt to break free in their different ways. Being a Neil Simon play, it has a happy ending: there is a confrontation, the Monstrous Mother has her power over her children diminished. The four children all grow and change and improve over the course of the play; the grandchildren are shown to be growing into adults undamaged by the family shit. Hurrah! And yet, artificial without being entertainingly or affectingly stylized.

The other two are opposites, in a way. Well, complements. They are both naturalistic character studies; they both seem to me to be lacking in incident and interest; they both use the techniques of subtext and elision; they both present problems without solutions.

Uncle Vanya is (in a sense, anyway) about how awful the country is. The characters rot in a small town. They are fundamentally cut off from the interaction and opportunity that city life might provide for them. Another character arrives from The City; this arrival drives the action (such as it is) for the characters, who show themselves having rotted past all hope. In the end, the City character leaves for City Life again unimproved by his stay on the farm; the remaining characters take up their old lives. If they are strengthened or weakened by their crisis, it isn’t evident from the script.

A Trip to Bountiful is (in a sense, anyway) about how awful the city is. The characters rot in a large city. They are fundamentally cut off from the strength and centeredness that city life might provide for them. Another character leaves for The Farm; this departure drives the action (such as it is) for the characters, who show themselves having rotted past all hope. In the end, the Farm character returns to City Life again unrejuvenated by her stay on the farm; the remaining characters take up their old lives. If any of them are strengthened or weakened by their crisis, it isn’t evident from the script.

Now, leaving aside the fact that I lean toward the City Boy type myself, my point is that I find both of those scripts depressing and debilitating. The playwrights have found situations where the characters are hemmed in, their opportunities narrowed, and their characters preventing them from seeing (or certainly taking) such chances as still remain. And they carry on. I understand that many people find that simply persisting through those circumstances is inspiring. I get that. I don’t find it fun to watch. Or at least, I don’t find it fun to watch in a naturalistic setting; I can enjoy Beckett, but that’s different.

Well, now I’m going to spend a couple of months living with A Trip to Bountiful, closely reading and attending to all the various bits of it in all the various aspects of production. I hope I will come to a greater understanding of what it is people like about the play, even if I don’t come to like it a whole lot myself. But I have to say, if I had my druthers, and I had to spend that time deep in one of the two scripts, I would rather it be Vanya, just because I think it would work out better for me later on. And if I really had my druthers, I’d do a comedy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger has talked a lot about the community theater experience. Or my community theater experience, anyway. I’ve talked about rehearsals, about learning lines, about blocking, being directed, seeing reviews. I haven’t talked about auditioning.

I don’t like auditioning. Well, and it’s more complicated than that, of course. There are parts of the audition that I really enjoy. I like cold reading—it isn’t actually cold reading, of course, and I’ll talk about that in a bit, but when we read scenes from the play, it’s a lot of fun. I don’t mind doing audition monologues, although I haven’t had to do one recently; community theaters don’t rely on those very much.

What I dislike is the bit where we all sit in a room filling out the form and playing with the pencils, reading over the sides they have provided for the not-quite-cold reading, and surreptitiously counting our fellows who are after our parts, curse them. And as I have not (yet) really got to the point of being part of the bigger community, I don’t have the enjoyable experience of running into former castmates and catching up. I have the far less enjoyable experience of sitting there eating my liver while total strangers in the room greet each other and catch up on gossip about other total strangers.

But what I really dislike is the unhappiness in those rooms. It’s the main reason I decided I wouldn’t enjoy being a professional actor—not that I could have made a living at it, anyway, but if I could have, it would have meant constantly being in those rooms with all those people who are desperate and unhappy, sweating out the chance of a part, any part. Community theater does not have that much tension in those rooms, although there is quite a bit. We all want the parts, and there aren’t enough parts for all of us, and we know it.

The good part is that Your Humble Blogger is really quite good at auditioning. This is for a bunch of reasons. First and most important, I’m a very fast reader and I have a bit of a trick memory. That means that when they hand me a scene, I can read it very quickly to get the shape of it, make some decisions about what to do with it, and then read it several more times while I’m waiting to be called in. And because of my trick memory, when I’ve read it several times, I can remember the gist of it and big chunks of the actual words, which lets me look up from the page and make eye contact with the director and (if there is one) my reading partner. Or to use the page as prompt, even, getting through big chunks of the thing with only occasional glances at the page. That seems to be impressive, and certainly it gives much more of a sense of what I can do if I get the part.

The second advantage is that I work in a library. This means that I can almost always get hold of the script before the audition, as long as it’s a fairly well-known play, which is what community theaters tend to do. And because I read quickly, it isn’t a burden to skim through the play, getting an idea of the shape of the play and the characters, and to guess which scenes are likely to be read at the audition, and then I can prepare those. These past couple of weeks I have auditioned for Lost in Yonkers, A Trip to Bountiful and Uncle Vanya. That has been interesting (I may talk about the scripts in a separate note in addition to the Book Reports I’ll have to do individually), but the key thing is that all I’ve had to do is go up to the P section and grab a copy, unlike my competition which presumably must make separate trips or shell out actual money to prepare before the audition.

The third advantage is that I’m male; community theaters tend to have more actresses than actors. Not always, of course: the Uncle Vanya session I was in had twice as many men as women, but usually it’s an advantage.

So I go into auditions with a certain confidence in my advantages. I still know I might not get a part, but frankly with all the advantages I have, my odds aren’t bad: since getting back into shows a few years ago, I have auditioned for eight plays and got only two rejections. Or, well, two plus. It’s like this.

I auditioned for Yonkers three weeks ago. I got a call-back for the next week, which was very encouraging, and then after the call-back I didn’t hear for a few days, which was not. Then another director (who was connected to the theater that did Enchanted April last Spring) called up and asked me to read for a part in Bountiful, and I figured, what the heck. And then I saw that Vanya was auditioning the night before, and figured, you know, what the heck again. Then the director of Yonkers called to say he was having trouble deciding and would have another call-back. Very confusing.

After the auditions for Vanya and Bountiful, I wasn’t sure what my preference was. I don’t particularly like any of the three plays. Of the scripts, I would put Bountiful third. On the other hand, the director of Bountiful is well-connected and so on; that would probably be the best for connections for doing other shows later. On the other other hand, Yonkers is within walking distance of our house, and although both the others are around fifteen minutes’ drive and thus not altogether unreasonable commutes, walking distance is actually a big plus. And then, Yonkers is funny, and I like to get laughs; no laughs in the others.

Vanya said they would call on Tuesday, Yonkers double-call-back was set for Wednesday, and Bountiful said they would call on Thursday. Well, Vanya did call on Tuesday with a very nice rejection, but then Bountiful also called on Tuesday with a part. And he wouldn't wait until Thursday for me to try for Yonkers again. So I took the part. I have to call Yonkers now and withdraw. Phooey. But then, cool! I have a part.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Your Humble Blogger’s Dear Director had Royal Gambit recommended to her by a knowledgeable friend, which just goes to show how little knowledgeable friends really know. Or that people are different, one from another, and that’s what makes the world interesting and fun, but also means that different people like different things.

It’s hard for me to imagine anybody liking this play, though. It was written in German by someone named Hermann Gressieker, who appears to have been successful in Germany, but not so much here. The translation is by someone with the plausible name of George White. No idea. Anyway, its original title is Heinrich der Achte und seine Frauen, and yes, the seven characters are Henry VIII of England and divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, lived. Or whatever their names were. I could barely tell them apart, even acknowledging that one was German and one was ugly, etc, etc. Ah, well. And where Henry is supposed to be one of those bravura parts, magnificently vain and cruel, nothing about it appealed to me as an actor or as an audience.

I am hoping that my Dear Director doesn’t decide to stage the thing. Although, I suppose, since I’m not going to be in whatever she does, it’s better if she does something I wouldn’t want to be in. Except that I’d rather she does something good, just with no part in it for YHB.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger read (or rather skimmed) an early Caryl Churchill radio play called Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, a radio play from 1971. And it is making me revisit the thing I wrote about a year and a half ago, that is, why there aren’t more speculative fiction plays.

I am not actually a huge fan of Caryl Churchill, for a variety of reasons, but clearly amongst the enormous output are a number of specfic plays, largely set in the near-ish future (some of them have dates that have since passed), largely without much difficulty either staging the plays or explaining the specfic elements. The idea that (as in Oxygen) the pollution is so bad people purchase oxygen in canisters, or that (as in A Number) (did you get my little pun up there? Hee Hee) powerful people will clone their offspring, these are not difficult ideas to stage, nor is it necessarily difficult to make a play that uses those ideas, except of course that it’s difficult to make a play at all.

Anyway, amongst my ideas for a play is one with the working title Station; I doubt if I’ll ever write it, so I’ll throw the thing out here for discussion. The setting is one of those small gas station and tchotchke stores on state roads a good long way from anywhere. Specifically, of course, I’m thinking of Western Connecticut, and all the places that I’ve passed again and again, but they exist in other parts of the world as well. The stage set (in my mind) is the interior of the station, with the cashier counter with computer on Stage Right, the main entrance up center with one of those auto-sliding doors, an exit to the house where the owner and his wife live, and the various displays of chazerai, anti-freeze, souvenirs and local-grown delicacies. The characters are the owner of the place, a middle-aged fellow of more than usual craziness; his wife, who is rather more sensible without (I hope) being that stereotype; the assistant (who is the main reason I can’t write the thing, as he should really be foreign-born, South Asian or Eastern European, and I can’t hear his voice at all or get him as a character, and my attempts so far have been unpleasant for me); and a variety of regular customers.

Running through the play are depictions of the ways people deal with changes in their lives, their makeshift attempts to prop up the façade of normality, and the poignancy of letting go even those things that need to be gone. So. The play opens with the assistant (let’s call him, oh, Walter) pulling the morning newspaper off the printer for one of the regular customers and reading off the headline that Peak Oil has at last occurred. The owner (Barry, I suppose, for now) scoffs at the idea that people will really change their driving habits. People don’t change like that, he insists. They like their cars, and they are going to stick to them. Like the customer who sticks to buying a printed newspaper with his coffee rather than reading it on-line like everyone else.

Over the first act, then, Barry, Walter and (hum, um, let me think for a minute) Mary (that’s very wrong, but we’ll keep going) prepare for and serve a half-dozen customers. It becomes clear that Barry has made a niche for himself providing particular services to regular customers: the printed newspaper, a thermos of soup, a particular coffee, advice on music, whatever. Barry’s customers stop here on their way to work in the city, despite there being equally convenient gas stations much cheaper, because of the personal connection and extra service, but also because it has become part of the routine. Barry entertains them and himself with running gags, goofy voices, gossip and an endless stream of preposterous ideas for money-making inventions. Walter finds the whole shtick amusing in spite of himself; he is a serious young fellow with practical dreams and a pessimistic outlook, but Barry appeals to him anyway, and Mary mothers him just the right amount, and between them they keep the place running. I suspect the first act ends with Walter going out to change the price on the big sign out in front.

The second act takes place a year later. The station is mostly the same, but a little rundown, with some empty spaces on the shelves and the posters and displays a bit faded. We see the same preparations, but some of the customers we met in Act One aren’t coming in any more. As we go through the day, Barry, Walter, Mary and the remaining customers gossip about the other customers. Some have started taking the train, some work from home, some have moved into the City. The older woman who used to buy the thermos of soup is dying, and no longer drives into the city for her weekly shopping trips. One of the fellows comes in and tells Walter that he got one of those new cars, and he won’t be needing to buy gas. It’s clear that they can’t keep the thing going much longer, and then Mary comes in with the news that their supplier has gone out of business and nobody else will take them on. The cost of delivering the gas, the dwindling supply, the lifestyle changes and the wave of bankrupt stations all wind up cutting off places like Barry’s. He refuses to fire Walter, but Walter (it turns out) has made plans and will be fine. He is insufficiently romantic to go down with that particular ship. But what about Mary?

Two things come out during the second act. First is that Barry can’t bear to leave the place, and in the stress he clings to his routine. He continues to print out the newspaper for the guy who hasn’t come in to buy it in months. He puts on his silly voices and has conversations with imaginary customers. He gossips about them. He cajoles Walter and Mary into joining him in the charade, and they each, in their way, coming to the end of it. Which is the other big question of the second act, whether Mary will stay with him in his increasingly untenable station or go somewhere else without him.

The third act starts a year after that. Barry is by himself in the station, which is back to how it looked at the beginning, fully stocked and with new-looking posters and displays, and perhaps even a new stack of motor oil cans or something. The printer is going, and Barry is making the usual preparations, talking to himself, or possibly to Mary in the back room. After a few minutes, the doors open by themselves, and Barry has a conversation with an imaginary customer, who we can hear respond although (and ideally we’re not initially sure of this) it’s Barry’s voice impersonating the customer who we saw in Act One. Their conversation is almost identical to the first act conversation; we see a series of these, with Barry providing all the services he had a couple of years ago, but all by himself and to nobody. The doors open and close, the cash register opens and closes, the coffee machine runs. At one point, the invisible customer goes into the bathroom, the door opening and closing, the sound of flushing, the door opening and closing again. Ideally the audience is not absolutely sure, at first, whether this is all in his imagination or whether (as it turns out) he has rigged the doors, speakers and all to go through the paces. Perhaps he has to go over to the computer on the cashier’s counter and hit a button, now and then. This whole bit lasts ten minutes or so; just the one actor and some tape.

At the end of it, Mary calls. Barry hits a button on the computer and her image is projected on a wall; they have a video conversation with far too much exposition: Mary has turned one of Barry’s preposterous money-making ideas into actual money. She has moved to the City, as lots of other people have, and she is supporting Barry in his delusional hobby. She tries to convince him to leave the place and join her; he is clearly tempted. He is nearly at the end of his prodigious stubbornness. His hollow world is becoming harder to sustain. He can’t quite commit to leaving, though. And Mary won’t cut off the money to force him out, and of course won’t return, as she likes her new life managing the whatever-it-is business.

After the phone call, Barry has a quiet moment looking around and tidying the place, and then goes to the computer to record more gossip for himself in the customer’s voices. The door opens again, and Walter comes looking in. It’s his first time back in a year, and he looks good, successful and healthy. It turns out that he is looking to buy a house in the area and was surprised to find the place still running. Barry has to explain that it isn’t, really. He is just keeping it going so that that whole world wouldn’t be lost. All those people, in their bedroom communities, going back and forth on those winding roads before hitting the interstate. The little rituals, the stopping places, the repeated complaints and jokes. It’s all gone, Barry tells him, and he’s like the last Aztec. Walter points out that the Aztecs were particularly horrible, and that nobody really misses them; Barry admits that the world is, maybe, better off without the Aztecs, but that somebody should miss them, just because they’re gone. Still, he admits, it’s not much use being the last one. And somebody does miss him.

Barry gets the idea to sell Walter the station; he can live in the house and keep the station part going. Walter, at first, thinks that Barry just means not knocking down the building, but Barry means going through the charade of serving the imaginary customers every day. He shows Walter the program, starts it going and goes through the thing again, showing him how it works. Walter is baffled at first, but then joins in; they agree to the deal, and the play ends with Barry leaving to join Mary in the City and Walter printing off the newspaper for the imaginary customer.

So, that’s the outline. I think it’s a terrific play, or could be if it were well-written. I’m not actually writing it, largely because (a) Walter is so far a total failure as a character, and (2) as the thing would be very expensive to stage, I wouldn’t be able to see it. And, I suppose, in the year and a half that I’ve been musing on the idea, it has already gone a bit past its sell-by date; even if were to write it instantaneously and, oh, send it into one of those competitions, and it won the competition and its prize of a full production, by the time it was produced the moment would likely have passed. The disappearance of those places and that lifestyle is still speculative fiction at this time; in another year or two it will not be an interesting speculation, one way or the other. You know?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, here’s the plot of Ira Levin’s play Veronica’s Room: it’s 1972 or so, the present day of when it was written, and a young couple has been brought into a room that has been preserved from the 1930s, the furniture draped with sheets and the clothes kept meticulously clean, etc, etc. The middle-aged couple who have brought them there say that Veronica, who used to live in that room, died of consumption, and that the young woman, Susan, looks ever so much like her. They persuade her to dress in Veronica’s clothes and pretend to be Veronica for a brief period, for moderately plausible reasons.

That’s Act One.

In Act Two, the older couple claim that the young woman is Veronica, that it is 1937 (or whatever), and accuse her of incest, murder and madness. She, of course, claims that it’s the 1970s and she is Susan, all the stuff we saw in Act One. The young man who was her date in Act One is now a doctor who confirms the older couple’s accusations, and threatens to inject her from a hypodermic. The young woman, broken, confesses to being Veronica, and confesses to all the crimes and sins they accuse her of.

Then they kill her.

Then it turns out that the middle-aged woman really is Veronica, that she is guilty of all those things, and so on and so forth; the play ends with her locked in the room alone while the young fellow goes off to rape the corpse and the older fellow, well, we don’t really care, do we?

This is a really disgusting play, and I felt throughout that it was not so much the characters abusing poor Susan but Mr. Levin forcing an actress through it. There was nothing edifying about it; the abuse served no purpose other than titillation.

And it’s very well-written. Mr. Levin builds suspense extremely well; we spend much of the first act knowing that something is going to go wrong, but not sure what. Then Act Two begins with horror and then keeps turning the screw; several times I thought that it couldn’t get any more horrible, and it did. The pacing, the characterization and some of the details of the staging (insofar as those were written into the playscript) were all working effectively toward the goal of giving me the creeps. They were creepy creeps, and I can’t see anything admirable in it, but he sure is good at the thing he’s good at.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I had mentioned One, Two, Three here before; it’s a terrific movie, and I had been wondering for years whether the play was nearly as good. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a translation. Well, after reading Farewell, My Heart, I discovered that there was a translation, but that the English version was called President. Which presumably is why I couldn’t find it. That version is included in Romantic Comedies, a 1952 collection of eight plays in English. It turns out it’s not the best play in the book.

The worst, I think, is Actor from Vienna, a one-act melodrama that fails to be witty or likeable. Another one-act, Anniversary Dinner, is igry in the extreme. Blue Danube is all right, with some very funny bits and one very funny supporting character, but it feels slow to me on the page. I liked the first act of Game of Hearts, but the second act was painful rather than funny, and the third act didn’t pay it off. The Good Fairy has a couple of great parts for a comic actor and actress, and some humor of a kind I particularly like, where characters who are restrained from talking about sex by propriety and whatnot find a way to discuss it without discussing it. The titular Good Fairy has set up an assignation, and there’s a good deal of discussion of exactly when she will lose her virtue, as it affects how other people will appropriately act regarding her. She does wind up losing her virtue, but an hour later and with another fellow entirely, which, well, you know, plot stuff.

Waxworks also has a subplot involving the exact timing of losing one’s virtue, except that the scrupulously correct woman demands that the wedding takes place first, so she doesn’t lose her virtue:

BLOCK: And so, the day the decree is granted, Mr. Thomas will take the first train, and you’ll be married the day after.

ANN: The same day.

BLOCK: The same day. But the train doesn’t arrive in Vienna until after eleven at night.

ANN: That doesn’t matter. We’ll rush right from the station to the Archbishop.

BLOCK: The Archbishop is an old man. He’ll be asleep by that time.

ANN: Wake him up.

BLOCK: That’s strictly forbidden. Wait till morning.

ANN: No. The Archbishop can’t demand that a woman should give herself to a man the night before their wedding.

KRON: But Ann! The Archbishop doesn’t demand that of you. He wouldn’t suspect that you are capable of such a thing. (to BLOCK) Just the same, you’d better wake him up.

ANN: I hope you realize that I am motivated by powerful ethical factors.

CLEMENTINE: I can’t imagine any more powerful.

That’s from an Arthur Richman text in English. If you don’t like it, stay away from Ferenc Molnar, I suppose.

But the big surprise, actually, was a play called Arthur. or at any rate the English version is called Arthur. In German it was called Jemand, closer to the original Hungarian Valaki, or Someone. The adaptation is by P.G. Wodehouse who had so successfully translated Mr. Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing; I don’t know why the thing was never produced. Neither was Mr. Wodehouse’s version of Game of Hearts. I assume that after the War, there wasn’t much interest in either Mr. Molnar or Mr. Wodehouse; it seems odd, but there it is. Ferenc Molnar seems to have dropped out of our memory altogether, actually; he was a tremendously successful and prolific playwright, with dozens of successful plays all over Europe, a ton of movie adaptations, and then, nothing. Sic transit, if you know what I mean. Arthur was produced in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy, but not in the US. Actually, it was made into a television play for “Startime” in 1960 (adapted by Gore Vidal! Starring Rex Harrison!), but somehow I doubt there’s a copy of it anywhere.

Anyway, I think Arthur is an incredibly funny play. It has a great role for a woman of, say, thirty; old enough to have been married eight years before the opening of the play. There’s another, even better role for a man of, say, fifty or so (that’s mine). The Young Man is mostly decorative, and then there are eleven other parts which I think could be played by five actors or so; the florist can also play the butler, the bishop can be the hotel manager, or the other way around. There are three sets for the three acts, and really they should be posh and elaborate, but I suspect that it could all be done pretty cheaply.

I’ve actually written to Samuel French to see if they still manage the licensing. Not that it’s likely to happen any time soon, but I want to be prepared, if it does.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve read several reviews of the current Broadway production of Exit the King that I’ve found very intriguing. I hadn’t read the play, so I picked it up. It’s… not very good.

I love Rhinocerous, as I know I’ve said here before, and I like The Chairs and some of his other plays. Exit the King has some good stuff in it, but overall it didn’t seem particularly good. For those who haven’t read it (and for some reason are still reading this note), Berengar is the King, having lived four hundred years of declining mental, medical, political and metaphysical power. Now, he is at last going to die. Dying has gone from a thing that will happen someday to a thing that will happen at the end of the play, in an hour and a half. He fights that destiny, unsuccessfully, in the company of a guard, a doctor/astrologer/executioner, a maid-of-all-work, and two queens. The rest of his subjects, the rest of his kingdom, are gone. It’s all dwindled down to this: his sceptre, his queens, his wheelchair, his pyjamas, his ermine robe, his death.

There’s a sense in which the play seems very topical: it’s America that is dying, once the powerhouse of the world, the super-powerhouse, the King, now falling under its own weight. Or: it’s civilization that is dying, modernity, the electrified and petroleated world we thought would last forever, sunk under the waves and coughing up coal dust. Or: what you will. Which is a problem, I think. There’s a bit of an excess of generality, which takes away from that topicality, because it feels like it would be equally topical anywhere and anywhen. It’s more Samuel Beckett than Eugene Ionesco, in feeling. Not that Beckettism is a Bad Thing. This play has in common with some of my favorite Beckett (and Ionesco for that matter) that it is a structure to be draped with Bits of Business. Sceptre jokes, hat moves, death. Funny stuff.

I will say this production looks like a terrific show. I wish I could go and see it, you know, without paying any money or losing any time doing anything else, or having to make any plans of any kind. Perhaps I’m dying, too, and have only four hundred years of dwindling light ahead of me. And sceptre jokes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. Your Humble Blogger has finally managed to watch the King Lear I was hocking about a couple of weeks ago. And it was… ok.

Sir Ian McKellen was very very good in places, although somewhat less impressive in others (in my arrogant opinion, of course). The rest of the cast was much less impressive. I did like Sylvester McCoy’s Fool, most of the time, although the effect of actually hanging him on-stage (as it were) is dramatically lessened by the transfer to television. Not his fault, really. Monica Dolan’s Regan did an excellent job of differentiating her character from Frances Barber’s more cookie-cutter Goneril, although the idea of playing it as Tracey Ullman-plays-Helena-Bonham-Carter-as-an-alcoholic-Sloane-Ranger was a trifle irritating. Still, I have seen enough performances where the sisters are indistinguishable from each other or from other performers in other productions; this was memorable and effective. Romola Garai’s Cordelia was luminously beautiful, really startlingly gorgeous, but (a) so what, and (2) that doesn’t really justify shoving her breasts into the camera all through I,i. Again, probably not her fault, really. I didn’t like Kent at all, I didn’t like Gloucester at the beginning, and although I liked him more once he was blinded, it wasn’t enough. I didn’t like Edgar or Edmund.

I hated the costumes. First of all, the similarity made it hard to tell one male from another; they were all black, white and grey, except King Lear at the beginning, but of course we didn’t have any trouble telling which one was King Lear. And the costumes were just bad; the worst was the Duke of Albany wearing a fucking bathrobe into combat. No, I’m serious. Lots of gold braid and medals and comfy, comfy terry cloth. And when the Fool gets stripped of his outer stuff, he seriously appears to be wearing contemporary slacks and a shirt; it was incongruous and distracting. And the sets, too, I didn’t like them, either. Again all grey and black, with nothing to really distinguish the atmosphere of the various castles. There was no way to tell at a glance that we were back in Albany, or in Gloucester, or where. Nor were they the same place, so it wasn’t some sort of thematic or metaphorical point. They were just similar, and confusing.

But I don’t really want to emphasize the things I dislike. It’s just easier to describe them and talk about them; I often will see a show I like and spend several hours talking about the aspects that failed to work. The character, Sir Ian’s Lear, is wonderful and tremendously effective. Less so on the heath (where also the sound mixing problems were particularly bad; it was difficult to make out what anybody was saying with all that rain); more so (as I expected) after the storm. His Lear was not as serene in those final scenes as some interpretations have him; he maintains a certain asperity, a certain impatience, a certain imperiousness. Do not abuse me he says to Kent, at the end, and it snapped out like, well, like a king. And I was weeping, just a trifle, at the recognition scene; I always weep at that.

The thing about Sir Ian is his incredible physical inventiveness. He delivers the verse extraordinarily well, of course, but there are others who might do it even better; nobody does the physical stuff better than him. It’s not just that he is good at the naturalistic part of physical acting, or that his body is capable of expressive gestures, not just with his face or his hands but his legs, his shoulders, his torso. It’s that he clearly is fiendishly good at coming up with bits of business, of physical acting, and then investing them with meaning and performing them with strength and care, which ultimately (for me) add up to a kind of mesmerizing reality for the character that I have never seen anyone equal. It was astonishing on-stage, of course; seeing his Richard III remains the best theatrical experience I’ve had. But in films, as well. Good ones as well as bad.

In this Lear, there’s an ongoing bit with a handkerchief that is wonderful. He seems at several points to be on the verge of a seizure; I was worried that he was going to go all the way, have a stroke on the heath in the storm, and then perform the rest of the play with the left side of his face limp and drooping. That would have been heavy-handed. What actually happened was not: his increasing stiffness, an increasingly drippy nose, and (I think) some increasingly broad gestures with his arms. “I am not ague-proof” he says, sniffling into that handkerchief, which will soon become a rather disgusting white flag. But in between, he cradles poor blind Gloucester like a baby, and then puts felt on his back hooves and steals up on his sons-in-law, stamping and rearing.

There is always a temptation for an actor to give a character some little fun physical attribute: a limp, a twitch, a habitual gesture, a stiff knee. It’s fun to put on, and it can seem so meaningful. And, you know, it can be. But what Sir Ian does (imao) goes way beyond that. I’m not altogether sure how to describe it. I can identify good physical actors, sometimes (in movies both Nicolas Case and Keanu Reeves are inventive physical actors, when they aren’t phoning it in, as is Johnny Depp, of course) but I don’t know that I could tell you what exactly makes for good physical acting.

I suppose, for me, it’s invention; it’s figuring out what to add to the words without detracting from the words. I’m not terribly good at it, myself, although I wish I were. I try to remember about it, give my character a walk, a way of standing, a way of sitting. But the thing is that I have to walk, and stand and sit (so far; I haven’t had to play a part whilst in a neck-high urn yet). I was able to talk my director for Liaisons into having Valmont and his valet cross swords during a bit of a conversation, just for a thing to do, and I think that worked. And there are sometimes little things; in April, my character trailed his fingers in a fish pond that was actually several mirrors. That’s an easy bit of visual trickery, as by folding the fingers under, it looks a bit like they are sinking under the surface, and then I pick them back up and shake them out a bit.

I try to think of things like that, but my imagination is usually limited to minor stuff, bits with my hands, a funny walk, fiddling with props. The bit where Sir Ian takes the bit of cheese from his pocket and lays it gently on the ground, and then stamps on it with his bare heel—well, that’s not even one I particularly liked, and I’m saying that I couldn’t have come up with it, or with anything like it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger has talked about learning lines for plays, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned the fine entertainment value that comes from getting the lines wrong. Well, entertaining for us in the cast. Sometimes.

We are five performances into a run of thirteen, and already there have been some doozies. Our Mrs. Graves has had the most trouble with her lines generally, but tends to get through the show, paraphrasing and muddling through just fine. However, one night… She has been demanding references before entering into this arrangement with women she doesn’t know, and ends the discussion with a magnificently magnanimous “I shall waive references”. She blanked on the key word one evening and delivered the immortal line “I shall waive, er, what were we talking about?” Since Mrs. Graves is an elderly woman, this came off as a perhaps obvious bit of character writing, rather than an actor’s nightmare. That sort of thing—blanking on a word or a line altogether—isn’t as frequent or as entertaining as when an actor says something that isn’t… quite…

Our Mr. Wilton has a line to deliver that is convoluted and bizarre, and serves to exemplify what a pompous stick he is rather than to convey information of any kind. That’s always a tougher sort to remember, but he actually hadn’t had any problem with it until… Mrs. Wilton mentions that holidays abroad (vacations, in the American terminology of course) must be nice, and he replies “I’m certain they are. Although I have heard some shocking stories to the contrary. There is an element of risk in holidays that tends to color quite nicely the sureties of home.” On one night, he said… well, I have no idea what he said, and neither does anybody else, the poor fellow who said it least of all. It was rambling, it made no sense whatsoever, didn’t match up verbs with subjects or objects, dependent clauses with independent clauses. He got off the path early on, and wound up saying something like “Well, you’d be surprised. Sometimes a holiday, can, due to its being overseas, I’ve heard, while at home, on the other hand, there really can be more certainty at home.” I’m getting it wrong, it was a good deal more nonsensical than that.

The problem, of course, is how to proceed from there. Always assuming the other actor or actors don’t just burst into laughter and collapse, they have to find a path back to the script. In this instance, it was comparatively easy: Mrs. Wilton responds to his actual line by abruptly changing the subject (“The piano needs tuning”) so that’s what she did. The actress was faced with a choice when a few lines later she was to semi-jocularly repeat a bit out of the original speech (“the sureties of home”), but she went right ahead and said it, and if the audience thought it was an odd thing to say, well, Mrs. Wilton says a lot of odd things.

In an earlier scene, she tells a joke on herself, actually, saying that her husband, Mrs. Wilton, tells her that her mind is like a hummingbird, one seldom sees it land. That’s to Mrs. Arnott, who she hustles into going to Italy with her, and when they are on the train and she has second thoughts, she turns on her traveling companion and says “You are not a hummingbird at all, Lotty Wilton. You are a hawk!” Only last night… Last night she began the line “You are not a hawk at all, Lotty Wilton.”

Now, that’s where I would have absolutely frozen. Oh, crap, I would have thought. You are not a hawk, you are a hummingbird! No, can’t say that. You are an owl! No. You are, er, you, Lotty Wilton, are a cuckoo! A finch! A gull! A stormy petrel! A cat! A wolverine! You are a bitch, Lotty Wilton, and I am going backstage to cry!

Our Mrs. Arnott, who I adore, simply said “You are not a hawk at all, Lotty Wilton. You are a hawk!”

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am inclined to think that any Gentle Reader who is interested will have already marked this on their calendars and programmed their recording devices, but just in case, let me remind you that the Ian McKellen King Lear will be on Great Performances on your local PBS station this evening. Probably. I haven’t actually checked your local PBS station, but this is the sort of thing that PBS generally co-ordinates well. PBS has promised to put the full film on-line shortly after broadcast, although in a “small-screen” version. And one hopes the video will soon be available in the US; the British version has been out for some time, but of course that won’t play properly here.

Your Humble Blogger will be recording it, because we’re doing a pick-up rehearsal tonight for Enchanted April; I plan to watch it the week after next. So please be careful with your spoilers in the comments.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Post Script: the spoiler caution is only somewhat facetious: plot details will not spoil the thing for me, but I’d prefer not to know more going into it than I already do about the staging, interpretation, supporting acting, and cutting.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sorry so quiet lately at this Tohu Bohu. Busy, busy, busy. Enchanted April opens on Thursday, for one thing, and there are all kinds of other things as well.

Here’s a quick thing to pass along from rehearsal last night: one of the two-person scenes was going slowly, and our Dear Director diagnosed the problem as the actors listening, then thinking, then speaking. That is, person A would speak (I have a thorn in my foot), and person B would listen, process the information, decide how to respond, and then speak (a thorn?), followed by person A listening to the response, considering and then speaking (yes, I did say a thorn), followed again by person B considering and responding (well, I didn’t stick it there) and so on. Although all of the considering and so on was fine acting, she said, it was slowing down the scene.

This, of course, is one of the difficult things about acting to a script; the audience wants both (a) not be carried along by the dialogue without having to wait while the actor/character thinks, not a very entertaining spectator sport, and (2) to believe, at least temporarily, that the dialogue mimics actual conversations that actual people have (assuming it’s that kind of show). Actually, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that (who guessed?), and that the audience wants to believe that the dialogue is the dialogue that they would have, if they were in those conditions, because they are really that clever and funny and impassioned and persuasive and poetic, underneath.

But anyway, what I wanted to ask y’all about was your reaction to the Director’s next statement about that pacing and acting: that would be great on film, said she, but not it doesn’t work on stage. Now, on one level, I was just impressed by this as actor-handling, as both of the actors in that scene have worked in film. Still, I was wondering if it made real sense. I mean, when I say that thinking isn’t a spectator sport, clearly lots of people like those shots in film where a person is thinking, acting with her forehead and the corners of the mouth. The reaction shot. I’m always a bit irritated with them, honestly, although I don’t mind watching Person A while Person B is speaking, or watching Person A do that forehead-and-corners-of-the-mouth thing whilst carving the roast or manipulating the cards. But I recognize it as a thing that Great Film Actors win lots of awards for doing.

On the other hand, I think (I think) that in a dialogue, the pauses for thinking in between lines would be excruciating, however foreheady the actors were. Or is that just me?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote a note the other day essentially announcing his re-entry into the blogosphere with a note On Blogging that threatened to write an incomplete and imperfectly articulated essay. He did not mention that it would be On RaceFail ’09; I think those were the good old days before I had heard of the thing, anyway. I still know almost nothing about it, and although I found his essay provocative, I am going to attempt to avoid the provocation, and instead write about…

Well, see, here’s the thing. Browsing through the whole controversy, I was struck by this thought: the SF/F community exists, and I am not in it. This may not seem like a startling conclusion to you, but it was to me. When I was a teenager, I thought of myself as a fan, possibly a trufan; I went to the local conventions, dressed in costume, and talked about books and movies and television shows with other fans. Or fen. I wound up being co-president of the specfic fan group at college, although (and this is a whole nother minefield about community) the group wasn’t particularly interested in speculative fiction. But anyway. At the time, I thought (or I think now that I thought then) that there was a sf/f community, and that I was in it.

Later, when I drifted away from attending conventions, I realized that my high school con attendance was really a group of a dozen or so teenagers, taking advantage of an excuse to go to a hotel for a weekend and generally not interacting with anything bigger than ourselves. It was a community, if you will, but not an sf/f community, just a community of a bunch of teenagers. And I became convinced that in truth, there was no sf/f community in any significant sense. Oh, there were people who went to conventions and voted for the Hugos, but not very many, and there were people who wrote and published speculative fiction, but not all that many of those, and not all that many of those were fans, really, in the sense that I understood the term. And lots of people read (or really, watched) science fiction and fantasy, and almost none of them were fans, in the sense that I understood the term. So the idea that there was a community, in any real sense involving communication and connection, bridging, common interests and goals, cooperation, any of that, well, I don’t know that I ever said ain’t no sech thing, but pretty close.

But it turns out that there reallio trulio is a sf/f community. And that I’m not it. Because one of the ways that you can tell if there’s an actual community is if Big Issues come up that people within the community talk to each other about. Did you hear about the Davidsons? is one difference between a neighborhood and a community. And clearly, people were stopping each other on the street (well, the virtual street) and asking if they had heard. And not only had I not heard about the Davidsons, I continued to have not heard Davidsons while the gossip became about what the Jim Melton said to his wife about the Davidsons, and what she said back. Not that I mean to trivialize the topic, but then you can’t really assume that the gossip about the Davidsons is trivial or shallow, either. My point when you look at the dynamic from the point of view that it is All About YHB, the overwhelming conclusion is that I don’t know the Davidsons, nor the Meltons, despite having metaphorically lived down the block from them for years.

Now, one of the things I’ve recognized about the sf/f community, even when I didn’t really believe it existed, is that it is very much concerned with issues of exclusion and inclusion. Which is why the plural of fan is fen, right? I mean, there’s a lot of secret handshake bullshit, ghu and infernokrusher and rot-13 and zines and all the inside jokes that have come and gone over the years. And no, not all of them have been purely fanstuff, but the aggregation is clearly baffling to mundanes, and while I won’t say that such is the point, really, it’s not not the point, either, from the point of view of the insider who gets to really accomplish something by getting inside. On the other hand, this is scarcely unique to the sf/f community.

OK, so I’m getting, slowly, to my point here. Because I have one. Really. I just needed to get it out of my satchel, and there was all this other stuff on top of it. But I’m nearly there, now. Promise. Anybody still here?

So. While happily ignoring everything else about this whole business, what happened to the Davidsons is that a bunch of people were told that the sf/f community is perceived by racial minorities as unwelcoming to racial minorities. That is, racist. Now, as Ben Rosenbaum was saying up there, the accusation of racism, particularly of institutional racism, of community racism, is a very tender spot for us privileged white people, and we squawked. (Of course, by saying we, I am not claiming membership in the community that I was just talking about not being a member of, I’m just saying that had I been part of the we, I would presumably have been part of the squawking white we).

So, there I was, thinking about what Ben said, and about the fact that I wasn’t part of the squawking white we or any of the we at all, and I was thinking about other communities that are similar in some sense to the sf/f community. In that they exist, I mean. One of them that came to mind immediately is Scottish Dancers; while a lot of it is just people going to their local groups and having a good time, there is a national and international community, as evidenced by the fact that when something happens to the Davidsons, people hear about it. Heck, I hear about it, sometimes, and I don’t strathspey. And you know? I suspect that there are people who feel that Scottish Dancing is not welcoming to racial minorities. And that there are people who would seriously squawk about the idea that the community is racist. I mean, seriously. Of course they would.

Of the communities that I am a part of myself, there’s… let’s see, I’m not really good at it, honestly. There’s the Jewish community, which (a) is not looking for new members, other than generationally, which, you know, is different from racism in important ways that are really difficult to explain, and (2) really does, in places, go into the neighborhoods and the churches and try to have bridges between communities, but again, it’s a lot of work, and we have day jobs, and it’s easier to remember that stuff in February than it is in September. And we have a really heavy tradition of inclusion and exclusion. Not perhaps a good comparison with other communities, but I thought I’d mention it.

What else? I work in a library, and am slowly starting to keep up with what is happening at the Davidson branch, and surely there are lots of libraries that are having issues with inclusion and exclusion. I like to think that libraries are less likely to squawk when called on the barriers to minority groups of various kinds, and more likely to put effort into building bridges. Because, you know, libraries. Still, you know it happens: there’s an accusation that a library is not welcoming to the new immigrants to the neighborhood (whether those are from overseas or from the other side of town), or just as likely the local patrons and volunteers get all whatnot, and the story gets written up in one of the library journals or sent around on a listserv, and a RaceFail would definitely be a possibility.

Stretching a point, let’s call community theater a community; I might hear about something that happened to the Connecticut Davidsons, but probably not if the Davidsons were in Ohio, but let’s stretch the point. Is community theater welcoming to racial minorities? In a pig’s eye, is it. I mean, look at it. Look at us. We may talk a good game (or we may not) about race-blind casting or whatnot, but when it comes down to it, we’re a bunch of white college-educated people who would have to work like dogs to make our group anything but a bunch of white college-educated people, and frankly, we’re working pretty hard just to put on a show in the old barn. We’re not going to go into the neighborhoods and find black or asian or latino volunteers, and we’re not going to find babysitters for those volunteers, nor give them the extra help they might need approaching the plays because they didn’t have the college theater experience the rest of us did, and we’re not going to choose plays that are going to appeal to black or asian or latino audiences because we are having enough trouble selling tickets to the shows we like and that have parts that are perfect for us. Which means that we’re going to stay a bunch of white college-educated people, who are largely comfortable with each other, and are certainly not racist. No, no. Just busy.

It seems to me that it’s really hard for people within the community to really know how that community appears to people outside the community. After all, the political Parties spend millions of dollars trying to figure out what they look like to Independents, and look what they look like. And I think—I think—that when you can assume that your community looks good to the people outside, that’s a good deal of what is meant by privilege.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So. In the book of Enchanted April, much is made of the class differences amongst the four women: Lady Caroline Bramble, of course, is a Lady; Mrs. Graves is the daughter of some sort of prominent intellectual, her husband and father were clearly both gentlemen; Mrs. Arnott is a middle-class woman whose husband has recently achieved financial success, and who could therefore move in Society, if not exactly be in it; and Mrs. Wilton is a solidly middle-class woman, whose husband is a moderately successful solicitor who circles the fringes of Society looking to pick off stragglers to fatten off. They none of them know the same people (or so they think); they are strangers to each other and to each others’ classes.

In the first scene where Mrs. Wilton and Mrs. Arnott meet Lady Caroline Bramble, they repeatedly address her as Lady Bramble. Near the end of the scene, when Mrs. Wilton assures her that they will all grow to be the closest of friends, sisters even, she has the greatest reply. “Yes. Well, let’s start then by not calling me Lady Bramble. Call me Lady Caroline.”

Of course, it’s a deliberate snub. But the snub is on two levels: in addition to saying don’t get too informal with me, she’s also snubbing them because they don’t know how to properly address a Lady. In fact, it’s clear that they have no titled friends, and are very much Not In Society. When they react, they should not only be upset by the distancing, but embarrassed by their ignorance. Not that the audience is going to pick up such shades of meaning, but they are there.

Let’s see. Her mother is Lady Bramble, so assuming that her father, the Duke of Bramble, is still alive, her mother is the only one entitled to the title of Lady Bramble; her grandmother might be the Dowager Lady Bramble, but that is different. Unless, as I understand it, her father is not the Duke of Bramble at all, but only the son of the Duke of Bramble regnant, such that his children are courtesy Lords (and Ladies). But then she would not be Lady Caroline at all, so it’s the straightforward one. And bye the bye, Lord Bramble her father must be at least an Earl, because the daughter of a Baron Bramble or Viscount Bramble doesn’t get called Lady Caroline at all (although Baron Bramble’s wife would still be Lady Bramble).

And Lady Caroline will never be Lady Bramble, either. Unless she marries her cousin, who winds up being Lord Bramble because her father has no male issue (or the brothers died in the War). No, addressing her as Lady Bramble is a terrible faux pas, and one that marks the ladies as distinctly Non-U.

Now, it turns out that Lady Caroline was secretly married, and is actually a widow. A running… not quite a joke, although it’s funny in places, but an ongoing motif of the play, let’s call it, is that everybody thinks that Mrs. Wilton and Mrs. Arnott are widows, when their husbands are alive, but everybody thinks Lady Caroline is single, when she is married and her husband is dead. There’s a rather poignant moment, actually, when Lady Caroline asks Mrs. Wilton and Mrs. Arnott if their husbands were lost in the War; she is clearly searching for what we would now call a support group, although they don’t know it and neither does the audience, yet.

Anyway, I thought that the former Lady Caroline, having married, is no longer Lady Caroline at all, as she loses the title of daughter when she takes the title of wife. It turns out (according to Wikipedia, anyway) that she does keep the title of Lady, unless she marries a Peer. If her husband is Sir Atkins or the Earl of Atkins, then she is the Dowager Lady Atkins. If her late husband was the eldest son of the Duke of Atkins, she would be Lady Adkins; if her late husband was (wait for it) a younger son of the Duke of Atkins or the Marquess of Atkins then she would be properly addressed as Lady Thomas. In all those cases, I would be correct, and she would no longer be properly addressed as Lady Caroline (although of course she would claim to be, to keep the marriage secret). If her husband was a commoner, however, as seems moderately likely given the secret marriage and the time, as well as her eventual marriage to the rich but common Antony Wilding (played by YHB), then she is Lady Caroline Atkins and then Lady Caroline Wilding, and still properly addressed as Lady Caroline.

Is that all clear now? Excellent. Now for extra credit: if her father is a Duke, Marquess or Earl, and her deceased husband was the younger son of a Duke, Marquess or Earl, and is married to a commoner, how should she be addressed? Lady Caroline or Lady Thomas?

And finally, should she, whilst married to the commoner, be ordained in the Church of England and named to be Bishop of the Diocese of Bramble, what would be the proper mode of address?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Your Humble Blogger has mentioned Alan Bennett’s marvelous line more than once in this Tohu Bohu. I don’t remember exactly where it’s from, but he makes the point that when you go around backstage after a show, whatever you say is likely to cause offence in the high-strung and excitable cast member who you want to be nice to. If you name a particular thing you liked, they will hear that it was the only thing you liked, after trying desperately to come up even with that. If you attempt to list all the things you like, they will hear your pointed silence about their favorite bit, or more likely the bit they feared was disastrously bad but hoped nobody would notice. The thing to do, Mr. Bennett said he had found, was to nod a lot and smile a lot, all with a glassy look in the eye that could be inspiration or inebriation, and simply repeat marvelous, marvelous and nothing else.

I do that. Unfortunately, I also tell people I do that, so I go backstage and give my glassy-eyed marvelous, marvelous and then people hit me.

Anyway, Matthew Barber in this adaptation of Enchanted April makes good use of the marvelous line. It first appears in I,ii when Mellersh Wilton is taking his wife Charlotte to a party with impressionist artists.

LOTTY: I never know what to say. And if, by chance, I do have something to say, it comes out wrong.
MELLERSH: If you’re asked for your opinion, you need merely say “marvelous” or something of that nature, and leave it at that. That’s all they want to hear anyhow. Try it.
LOTTY: Marvelous.
MELLERSH: You’ll be surprised how far it will get you.

I should throw in here the fact that I’m aware Mr. Bennett wasn’t on to anything particularly new, nor do I blame Mr. Barber for stealing it, if indeed he didn’t come up with it independently. But we’re moving on to my scene, I,vii, where Mr. Wilding mentions to Mrs. Wilton and Mrs. Arnott that he is a painter.

WILDING: I paint. Portraits. Classical, of course. Two eyes, one mouth, and so on. (Lotty thinks.)
LOTTY: Marvelous!

I particularly like the stage direction there, don’t you? Anyway, it’s a cheap joke but a good one, and—wait, we’re not done? No, we’re not, and this is where it gets fun: when Wilding comes back in Act Two, he sketches Mrs. Arnott, and Costanza sees it.

COSTANZA: Ah! Squisita! Bellissima!
ROSE: Is that good?
WILDING: Quite.
COSTANZA: Oh, Tonio. Meravigliosa!

Now, is Costanza, like Mrs. Wilton, saying what Mr. Wilding wants to hear? Or is Costanza’s (rustic Italian) enthusiasm a contrast to Mrs. Wilton’s (urbane English) politeness? Or shouldn’t we be able to tell? And there’s one more, this time near the very end, when Costanza and Mrs. Graves have finally taught each other a smidgen of a common tongue:

MRS. GRAVES: Oh, and both of you please be prompt for breakfa…
COSTANZA: Eh!
MRS. GRAVES: … for colazione.
COSTANZA: Marvelous!

And that’s Costanza’s exit and Mrs. Graves’ as well, two pages from the curtain.

It’s quite nice as a thread, just a little touch of writing, if you know what I mean. Unless I’ve missed any, those are the only uses of the word: other things are beautiful or lovely, or enchanted of course.

There are lots of places that I think the wordcraft of the play is weak. I have one scene where we change the subject every three lines, abruptly, and without (as far as I can determine) subtextual reason for it that the audience can pick up. The characters are all less well-rounded in the play than in the book, which would likely be true of any adaptation. But I focus on those things. It’s an unfortunate tendency, to mark in my mind all the clinkers and none of the bright spots, all of the way in which the zcript fails to be zatizfactory, and not mention to myself or to you, Gentle Reader, the things I like. Which include this little bit with the word marvelous.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger has been in three community theater productions in the last three years. I’ve been in three in the last ten years, as well, just so you get an impression. Those three were all with my Dear Director, who is dear to me, and therefore I am used to doing things her way, to the extent that I am used to doing them at all.

One aspect of my Dear Director’s way is plenty of rehearsal time; we had eight or nine weeks of rehearsal, almost all of which was on the stage and the set. Oh, there were always a few missing pieces, or a chair that stood in for the proper chair, but for the most part, we were on the set. I think I wrote about this at one point, that it was disconcerting because were on the set under the lights and totally not ready for an audience—because we weren’t going up in front of an audience for another two weeks.

Well, now I’m in somebody else’s show, and things are different. We have a seriously compressed rehearsal schedule. I have a small part and am not needed at every rehearsal, but I have been to 2 (two) rehearsals so far, and we open in twenty-four days. And I looked down at my rehearsal schedule during a break in rehearsal last night and discovered that we are off-book on Monday.

Monday! Like, less than a week from now.

I had been, you know, looking at the lines and all, but I hadn’t been seriously committing them to memory yet, because (a) it’s a small part, and (2) we had just started the rehearsal process. It retrospect, that may have been an error. Also, it’s possible that typing this is an error, when viewed as an alternative to seriously committing my lines to memory.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was looking over my notes from the staged reading of Bound. There was one place where I had made an acting note (never actually transmitted to the actor in question) that the passage was something the character had never said to anyone before. And it occurred to me that, although I didn’t think about it whilst writing the play, there was a good deal in the script having to do with Things You Say a Lot and Things You Have Never Said. That made me wonder how much that idea is threaded through literature generally, or if it’s just me.

Gentle Readers may be noting that those two categories of speech are not the only categories there are, and in fact comprise only a small amount of all the stuff people say. That’s true. But I think the stuff that falls into either of those two categories is important, and perhaps paying attention to it is one way to make some key decisions as an actor.

Look, here are some specific examples from Enchanted April. When I am closing the deal on the castle, I say that It’s a small castle, but of course it has most of the “modern improvements”, as an estate agent would say. That pretty obviously falls into the category of Things I Say a Lot. A bit later, addressing one of the women renting the place, out of the blue comes I like your face, Mrs. Arnott. Is that a Thing I Say a Lot? If it is, that’s an important thing about my character. Is it, perhaps, a Thing I Have Never Said? Again, that’s important. I suspect it should feel like one or the other, and it’ll be largely up to the director which kind of character I’ll be.

Now, I don’t think Matthew Barber (who adapted the play of Enchanted April) thought about the lines in those terms. And I certainly didn’t when I was writing Bound. But if I went through the script with a highlighter and made notes of things that fell into those categories, I suspect I would find some very interesting things. I think each of my characters has some moment in the play when they say a Thing They Have Never Said. And perhaps just as important, some other moments when they repeat Things They Say a Lot.

I should be clear—the category is not for Things You Have Never Had Occasion to Say, such as Cheese sandwiches are tasty, Mr. President or This is my first time in Seattle. It’s perhaps more accurately Things You Have Never Said Aloud. If I tell you that when I was a kid I wanted to be a doctor, and it’s a Thing I have Never Said Aloud, then it’s probably pretty important, and there’s a story behind it. If it’s a Thing I Say a Lot, then it’s probably pretty important as well, and there’s a story behind that.

Just thinking about plays, there’s a lot of stuff about those categories in Death of a Salesman, and in all of Beckett, or all of Beckett with words, anyway, and in Streetcar… I don’t think that there’s a lot of it in Shakespeare, although I could be persuaded otherwise. I’m not claiming it as the Universal Key to anything, just that it happens to be pretty important in some pretty good plays.

And in other things? In movies? In books? I don’t know. It’s obviously a dialogue-based concept, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to turn up in less dialogue-based forms. On the other hand, in addition to being part of Drama, it’s part of actual life—my life, anyway, as I certainly have a lot of Things I Say a Lot and a fair number of Things I Have Never Said Aloud, and I remember moments when I said a Thing I Had Never Said Before, and moments when I say some of the Things I Say a Lot, and some of those moments are the most vivid memories I have.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So. When I dashed off a book report about Enchanted April a month ago, I failed to mention the reason I read the thing, which is that there is a play of the same name, adapted by Matthew Barber, and I am going to be in it.

One way to draw the line between minor characters and major characters is that when you give the two-sentence description of the play, the minor characters aren’t even mentioned. The description of this play would be something like this:

In April 1923, two women flee their loveless marriages by renting a castle in Italy together with two more women they meet through newspaper advertisement. The marriages and all four women are given new life in the Italian Spring.

There you go, and you can figure out the categories from that: the two women are the leads, the two other women and the husbands are the supporting parts, and that leaves the comic servant and me, the guy who owns the castle.

Now, I do have several scenes. I have, in fact, one hundred and forty-three lines. But it is a minor part, and a minor character, and not even a comic one. I think I’ll have a lot of fun with it, though.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. It went well.

The house was around thirty, and by my reckoning, almost a third of that were not family or friends but honest ticket-buyers. Not that the family and friends didn’t buy tickets, but you know what I mean. Everybody seemed to like it. There were only three coughs, and two of those were my Best Reader, poor thing, who has a dreadful cold, so I’m not counting those. Well, and I just did count them, but I’m not counting them. There was very little program rustling, considering that the house lights were on, what with it being a church, which isn’t really set up to have the house lights down and the stage lights up. And they don’t call it a stage.

There was applause at the end, and at the end of the first half, before the intermission. And everybody came back after the intermission, except my Perfect Non-Reader, who really isn’t prepared at seven-and-a-half to sit quietly through a grown-up theatrical event. And I got a bunch of compliments from people I don’t know, who could presumably have nodded and left if they were in a bad mood from having hated the thing. What I’m saying is, it went well.

There are some problems still in the script. I have three or four different places where I describe Eliezar’s job, and each of them is four sentences or more, which is just a waste of time. There are other places to cut, most of them (I think) just individual lines or line-and-line that could be tightened up. My Personal Dramaturge came up with the turn of phrase I had been looking for to replace one of the shits, and I actually like it better, I think, than the shit phrase, so when I put the profanity back in to the play for the next draft, I’ll change it.

The big problem is III,i; it’s the first scene after the intermission, and when I wrote it, I deliberately slowed things down, to sort of start up again and begin the arc of the second half. The main thing I learned from sitting through the thing three times is that I slowed it down far too much. The scene is interminable. It’s not that it’s terribly long, just that all time comes to a halt while it’s going on, and if you listen, you can hear the audience aging. My plan is to throw the whole scene out and write a new one, and I have an idea or two for what will go into it. I will have to go back and look at what plot points I put in the scene that I will need, and then decide if I want them in the new III,i or if I want to put them somewhere else.

There were things that worked, and some that worked better than I thought they would. The way that Isaac remains in the background of the attention in the first half and then comes center, as it were, in the second half works, I think. Abraham’s long monologue worked. Eliezar’s comic character worked, and actually there were a lot more laughs than I expected throughout; I had forgotten, over the year, that the people might laugh at the jokey lines that I put in just to break up the tension. Or that people would laugh because we were breaking up the tension, which is even better. I’ll have to look at what specific bits got lines, and what’s around them, but I think the laughs and the lack of coughing between them tell me that the play works as a play.

Of course, the laughs happened because the actors sold the lines that got the laughs. The cast were really good—we had only two rehearsals, and at the first rehearsal I was pleased but still anxious about them putting it over, and at the second I was very pleased but still frustrated, and at the show itself I was pleased and pleased. The audience makes a difference, of course, but they also actually, you know, rehearsed during the rehearsals and got better, even with only two of them. Which, since as I say, they started out pretty good, means that I couldn’t be happier with the result.

When I started angling for a reading, the thing that I wanted was to hear somebody else read the characters, to know whether they existed in the lines, or just in my head. That is, whether an actor could take the script and make a good and interesting character from it, and (what I was most worried about) characters that sound different from each other. That turns out not to be a problem. True, my Eliezar played the part almost exactly as I would have done it, in terms of the line readings. But Ishmael got a wonderful interpretation, very physical and impulsive and mercurial, mixing hostility and practicality and a sort of blue-collar earthiness that I would never have even attempted, and it worked beautifully. Isaac played up the nervousness of the character by rattling through the long speeches as if he were being chased, crossing up his rhythms and seeming off-balance all the time. In the first act particularly, he had a kind of puppyish eagerness to please covering a sly intelligence; he managed to wrongfoot Ishmael while apparently placating him. And Abraham… Abraham was utterly different than I had imagined him, utterly different, and wonderful. The actor has a wonderful voice, and he was gentle and sweet, a lovable man, with the requisite steel underneath, but a persuasive man brimming with energy rather than the weary and ruthless man I wrote. And it worked. The ending, instead of an exhausted, matter-of-fact practical mask, he was a shattered, ecstatic visionary, and it worked.

I can’t remember who it was, but shortly after finishing the first draft of this play, I read some theater professional or other saying that if you want a play to be performed again and again, for decades, what you need is one great big juicy role that a successful actor in his prime will want to play. Ensemble stuff is popular, from time to time, but the people who might want to revive it are less likely to have the clout. But if you write a Hedda or a Higgins or a Hickey, there will be some actor who wants to play the part and will raise the money and push to have it happen. I thought well, crap, I’ve just written an ensemble piece, haven’t I? and decided that the next play would have a real showpiece role. But listening to Abraham last night, I thought to myself, maybe I did write a part like that, after all. Not that I think that Bound will necessarily be staged at all, much less become part of the repertory, but that it may actually be that kind of a role, a role that an older actor would want, not only to show off that he can still remember his lines, but to put his own stamp on the monologue, on the final scene, on whatever I can come up with for the new III,i.

And even if I’m wrong, it felt good to think that, for a few minutes.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Well, and today's the day. Somehow, in all the conversations about scheduling and about the whole staged reading, nobody ever brought up that it was Super Bowl Sunday. Not that it would have made a lot of difference, although I would have pushed more strongly for a three o'clock start, to make sure that people could get home for kickoff even if they live the next town over. But I think it's funny—a certain type of person, when thinking about anything scheduled for a Sunday in late January or early February, would immediately think to check whether it was Super Bowl Sunday. Not me. And not my Dear Director. Or the Rector. Or any of the fellows in the cast, or any of the other theater people that I've been trying to get to attend.

And, you know, it's not like I'm utterly cut off from the sports world. I've been reading about the Super Bowl, the unlikely story of the Arizona Cardinals, and the Boss. I somehow forgot that it was on Sunday, or that it was on this Sunday, anyway. Back of the mind thing, rather than front. Ah, well. Some people will show up, anyway, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Abraham departed with Isaac amid great weeping, while Sarah and the servants returned to the tent. He took two of his young men with him, Ishmael and Eliezer, and while they were walking in the road, the young men spoke these words to each other. Said Ishmael to Eliezer: “Now my father Abraham is going with Isaac to bring him up for a burnt offering to the Lord, and when he returneth, he will give unto me all that he possesses, to inherit after him, for I am his first-born.” Eliezer answered: “Surely, Abraham did cast thee off with thy mother, and swear that thou shouldst not inherit anything of all he possesses. And to whom will he give all that he has, all his precious things, but unto his servant, who has been faithful in his house, to me, who have served him night and day, and have done all that he desired me?” The holy spirit answered, “Neither this one nor that one will inherit Abraham.”

And while Abraham and Isaac were proceeding along the road, Satan came and appeared to Abraham in the figure of a very aged man, humble and of contrite spirit, and said to him: “Art thou silly or foolish, that thou goest to do this thing to thine only son? God gave thee a son in thy latter days, in thine old age, and wilt thou go and slaughter him, who did not commit any violence, and wilt thou cause the soul of thine only son to perish from the earth? Dost thou not know and understand that this thing cannot be from the Lord? For the Lord would not do unto man such evil, to command him, Go and slaughter thy son.” Abraham, hearing these words, knew that it was Satan, who endeavored to turn him astray from the way of the Lord, and he rebuked him that he went away. And Satan returned and came to Isaac, and he appeared unto him in the figure of a young man, comely and well-favored, saying unto him: “Dost thou not know that thy silly old father bringeth thee to the slaughter this day for naught? Now, my son, do not listen to him, for he is a silly old man, and let not thy precious soul and beautiful figure be lost from the earth.” And Isaac told these words to his father, but Abraham said to him, “Take heed of him, and do not listen to his words, for he is Satan endeavoring to lead us astray from the commands of our God.” And Abraham rebuked Satan again, and Satan went from them, and, seeing he could not prevail over them, he transformed himself into a large brook of water in the road, and when Abraham, Isaac, and the two young men reached that place, they saw a brook large and powerful as the mighty waters. And they entered the brook, trying to pass it, but the further they went, the deeper the brook, so that the water reached up to their necks, and they were all terrified on account of the water. But Abraham recognized the place, and he knew that there had been no water there before, and he said to his son: “I know this place, on which there was no brook nor water. Now, surely, it is Satan who doth all this to us, to draw us aside this day from the commands of God.” And Abraham rebuked Satan, saying unto him: “The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan. Begone from us, for we go by the command of God.” And Satan was terri fied at the voice of Abraham, and he went away from them, and the place became dry land again as it was at first. And Abraham went with Isaac toward the place that God had told him.

Satan then appeared unto Sarah in the figure of an old man, and said unto her, “Where did thine husband go?” She said, “To his work.” “And where did thy son Isaac go?” he inquired further, and she answered, “He went with his father to a place of study of the Torah.” Satan said: “O thou poor old woman, thy teeth will be set on edge on account of thy son, as thou knowest not that Abraham took his son with him on the road to sacrifice him.” In this hour Sarah’s loins trembled, and all her limbs shook. She was no more of this world. Nevertheless she aroused herself, and said, “All that God hath told Abraham, may he do it unto life and unto peace.”

Mr. Ginzburg cites texts from collections of works from the medieval period to the nineteenth century; he is gathering all the legends from various times into a single definitive narrative. I don’t have access to all the sources Mr. Ginzburg cites (the Midrash HaGadol, the Neweh Shalom, the Midrash Va-Yosha, Adolph Jellinek’s Bet ha-Midrash, the Yalkut Reubeni), or the language skills to make use of them if I did. Most important to my way of thinking about it is that some of the stories are pre-Crusades and some are post; the last bit about Sarah seems to be post-Crusades, although of course they are all claimed to be ancient as hell.

I’m also trying to track down a lovely story about Abraham bringing Isaac on the journey in a casket, so the Satan can’t throw stones at him and bruise him, thus making him imperfect and not suitable for sacrifice. The stone-throwing motif shows up in the Islamic tradition as well, although there it is Abraham throwing stones at Satan, which as I understand (poorly) forms an important part of the background of the pilgrimage traditions. I read the casket story a year ago, but I don’t remember where, and I read a reference to it recently that didn’t cite the text, curse it. Did you know that in the Talmud (Megillah 15a), Rabbi Hanina says that whoever cites his sources completely redeems the world?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hum. I suppose I should bring y’all up to date on Bound. Our story so far: I wrote the thing, convinced somebody to direct it as a staged reading in a church, and then took out all the cuss words. I think that’s as far as I got. How about the cast?

My Dear Director did the hard work of gathering the cast. Mostly, we talked it out about people we both know and had worked with before. Our Eliezar, then, is the Higgins from Pyggie, and our Satan is the Pickering. I’d seen both of them before, in different things, and she had directed both of them before, and I’m very pleased with them indeed. Our Isaac is the Freddie from Pyggie, who our Dear Director has been working with on a variety of projects since he was but a lad; I like him a lot, and I think he’ll be terrific. I expected Abraham to be the difficult one to cast, since I don’t really know a lot of older actors; we cast the fellow who was dialogue coach for Pyggie. I’ve only seen him in a farce, but she has directed him and seen him in serious things, and he does have a wonderful voice. I think he’ll be very good, but I don’t have any idea what he’ll do with the part. And for Ishmael, we cast a fellow I’ve never met, but who my Dear Director vouches for, and she has wonderful judgment, so there we are.

In order to have a sense of how long the thing is, I had to read it aloud with a stopwatch. That was a bizarre experience. I had read most of it aloud before, of course, and had ‘heard’ it all in my head as I wrote it, but that was different. And besides, it had been months and months since I read the thing through in order—I had been concentrating on individual lines and bits and scenes, and besides had largely put the thing aside since last winter.

And then it turned out to be long. I had copied a format that is supposed to be roughly a minute a page, and the script is a hundred pages, so I was thinking it was roughly an hour and a half. My Personal Dramaturge thought it was shorter, without clocking it, but based on quite a bit of script-reading experience. My Dear Director wanted to know if there would need to be an intermission, which is reasonable enough, so out with the old stopwatch and on with the vocals.

Digression: I was using an old stopwatch from my Best Reader’s father, who had been a time-study man at a factory. It’s a great stopwatch, with a big dial and a big button, and I hadn’t noticed right away that the dial was marked off in hundreds rather than sixties. That is, if at the end of the scene, the dial showed ten times around the dial, that didn’t mean ten minutes, but 1000 seconds, or sixteen minutes and forty seconds. I can imagine that being tremendously helpful to a time-study man, and I can do simple arithmetic with a calculator, but it was disconcerting to discover, when I was most of the way through, that I had no idea how long I had been going on. Silly old non-metric clocks. End Digression.

It turned out, once I had done the simple arithmetic, that the thing took me two hours to read. The first two acts together are an hour, and the third act is an hour, and that’s two hours, with an intermission halfway through. I suspect if I get to put on a whole production, with blocking and props and everything, I’ll have to cut vast chunks out of it, probably cutting at least fifteen minutes out of the third act and ten out of the first two. Well, that’s what this whole exercise is about. I’ll get to see what drags and what works. And we’ll see if it goes faster with actors. I wouldn’t say I’m notorious for slow speaking, but I’m certainly willing to take my time and create a silence to speak into. And although I was willing to skip bits of lines to approximate overlapping speech, I can’t actually overlap lines, which may make a difference, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The spark for the show came from the Midrash; here are some of the texts:

Leviticus Rabbah 26:7 …What does it say of Abraham? And Abraham rose early in the morning… and took two of his young men with him (Gen. 22,3). Who were they? Ishmael and Eliezer.

This is just mentioned, as if everybody knew it, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bombshell. When Elie Weisel (in a lecture on the Akedah I was lucky enough to attend) mentioned this midrash, I jotted down in my notes: a play? That was almost fifteen years ago, now.

Genesis Rabba LV:4 Isaac and Ishmael were engaged in a controversy: the latter argued, ‘I am more beloved than thou, because I was circumcised at the age of thirteen’; while the other retorted, ‘I am more beloved than thou, because I was circumcised at eight days.’ Said Ishmael to him: ‘I am more beloved, because I could have protested, yet did not!’ At that moment Isaac exclaimed: ‘O that Gd would appear to me and bid me cut off one of my limbs! then I would not refuse.’ Said Gd: ’Even if I bid thee sacrifice thyself, thou will not refuse.’ (Another version: Said Ishmael to him: ‘I am more beloved than thou, because I was circumcised at the age of thirteen, but thou wast circumcised as a baby and couldst not refuse.’ Isaac retorted ‘All that thou didst lend to the Holy One, blessed be he, was three drops of blood. But lo, I am now thirty-seven years old, yet if Gd desired of me that I be slaughtered, I would not refuse.’ Said the Holy One blessed be He, ‘This is the moment!’ Straightway, Gd did prove Abraham.)

I didn’t use that exchange, but I did take the scene into account as I worried at my characters of Isaac and Ishmael. Also, this is one of the points where it mentions Isaac’s age. Also, it brings a sort of narrative to this question of what Ishmael is doing on the trip. We have the adult Ishmael and Isaac, once again in conflict, sparking the entire thing. This is also from one of the angles where Isaac, not Abraham, is the hero.

Genesis Rabba LVI:2 He then said to him [Isaac]: ‘Isaac, my son, seest thou what I see?’ ‘Yes,’ he relpied. Said he to his two servants: ‘See ye what I see?’ ‘No,’ they answered. ‘Since you do not see it, Abide ye here with the ass,’ he bade them, for ye are like the ass…

I did not include this idea, or anything like it, but I did have Abraham ask who sees what. I was more interested in playing with Isaac’s inability to see clearly, both as foreshadowing (a legitimate literary technique) and as metaphor.

Genesis Rabba LVI:4 Samael went to the Patriarch Abraham and upbraided him saying: ‘What means this, old man! Hast thou lost thy wits? thou goest to slay a son granted to thee at the age of a hundred!’ ‘Even this I do,’ replied he. ‘And if He sets thee an even greater test, canst thou stand it?’ said he, as it is written, If a thing be put to thee as a trial, wilt thou be wearied (Job 4:2)? ‘Even more than this,’ he replied. ‘To-morrow He will say to thee, “Thou are a murderer, and art guilty”’ ‘Still am I content,’ he rejoined. Seeing that he could achieve nought with him, he approached Isaac and said: ‘Son of an unhappy mother! He goes to slay thee.’ ‘I accept my fate,’ he replied.

I took Satan (or Samael, or The Visitor—he isn’t named in the dialogue, and I’m not sure exactly what I want to put in the playbill) as my fifth character, because… well, because it’s always cool to write for Satan. But also because I felt the four of them needed somebody to mix things up. I decided not to have Satan speak with Abraham, but with the other three characters. One early idea had Satan speak directly to the audience, as a sort of narrator, but that didn’t work at all.

Midrash Tanchuma: He came to the place to which God had told him to go, and he bound Isaac, his son: When Abraham came to slaughter Isaac, Isaac said to him: “Father, bind my hands and legs, for the soul is impudent and when I see the knife I may be frightened and the sacrifice will be no good because my trembling will cause you to make a blemish.”

I included this bit, although in vastly different dialogue. The story is called the Binding rather than the sacrifice, because although Isaac is not actually sacrificed, he is bound. But why is he bound? Surely, if he has agreed to the sacrifice, there wouldn’t be any need for the binding? In this midrash, it is explained, and another bit of the story is filled in, making these people a little more vulnerable and human.

Which is, after all, what I’m trying to do, myself.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s the thing about Bound, which I’ve taken to describing as taking place between Genesis 22:3 and 22:4: It’s a kind of fanfic play, what we call Midrash, and I don’t know how many people really know the text that I’m using. So for my own happiness, and for the edification of Gentle Readers who give a shit, I’m going to post a series of notes consisting largely of quotes from various sources about the Akeda, together with a couple of notes about the ways that I used or didn’t use what was in them. I know very few of y’all have read the play, and I’m not trying to spoil it for the rest of you, so I may be a bit vague about the details. On the other hand, I may be a bit overspecific, and not spoil it by virtue of nobody managing to stay awake long enough to get to the spoily bits. We’ll see.

First, Gen 22:1-14, which we call the Binding or Akedah

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, [here] I [am]. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only [son] Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid [it] upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here [am] I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where [is] the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here [am] I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only [son] from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind [him] a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh: as it is said [to] this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.

This is very sparse story-telling. Not a lot of details. I began writing with the idea that I would not contradict the text at all, while of course adding lots and lots and lots of my own imagination. There are two places where I decided to break with the text. First, there is no donkey on stage. This was a technical decision on my part. I did briefly consider having two guys in a donkey suit, but upon reflection I decided that would be distracting, without adding anything other than the opportunity for a brief dance routine in between scenes. The other is in a line of dialogue: I have Abraham address the line to Eliezar alone rather than to the two (unnamed) men of the text. I’ll probably talk a bit more about that line in a later post.

Also relevant is Gen 21:9-21, the casting out of Ishmael:

And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, [even] with Isaac. And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight because of his son.

And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called. And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation, because he [is] thy seed.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave [it] unto Hagar, putting [it] on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. And she went, and sat her down over against [him] a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against [him], and lift up her voice, and wept.

And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he [is]. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will make him a great nation. And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer. And he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran: and his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt.

These events do not take place within the play, but they are important in the characters’ backgrounds, of course, and they are discussed a couple of times, from different points of view. I did not feel compelled to maintain any fidelity to the text, because of the filtering through the characters’ memories, but I did try to encompass the details in my character building. Ishmael’s character and his relationship with Abraham are of course largely formed by the expulsion, but then Abraham’s relationship with Isaac is formed in the wake of that expulsion as well.

I’ll just put one more bit in before finishing up with Genesis: Gen 15:2-4

After these things the word of the LORD came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I [am] thy shield, [and] thy exceeding great reward. And Abram said, Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house [is] this Eliezer of Damascus? And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir. And, behold, the word of the LORD [came] unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.

This is the only mention of Eliezar of Damascus by name in Genesis. Whenever Abraham deals with servants, they are mentioned in the text only as servants, or lads, or something vague like that. So we don’t really know who they are. Later, when the Rabbis start to ask who went with Abraham to visit Lot? and who was the servant who finds Rebecca for Isaac? and who were the servants who go with Abraham and Isaac to Moriah? they answer themselves that it was always Eliezar of Damascus. And why not? But that makes Eliezar of Damascus a pretty interesting guy, don’t you think?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So. Going back to The Play. My Dear Director passed the script along to her priest, who liked it enough to approve the staged reading in the church. He did ask for certain changes, though, which seem reasonable. Can you guess?

Yes, the characters in my play swear. They say fuck and shit and gd-damn. They don’t swear a lot. They aren’t inventive or startling in their profanity, but they speak modern English, and they are under tremendous strain, so they swear a bit. The rector asked for the removal only of the word that begins with an f (second letter uck), which was mostly not a big deal. There were nine instances, altogether; five of them were in Satan’s visit to Ishmael, one was in the phrase fucked up, two were fucking used as an intensifier, and one was an interjection. One of the intensifiers was actually difficult, as it was a sort of sudden outburst of intensity, such as people denote with the use of a profane intensifier, so I wound up with a sort of inarticulate groping for words rather than the blurting of profanity. I prefer the profanity, but it won’t wreck the play. None of the individual instances in Satan’s dialogue were difficult to expunge, but I was a trifle concerned about the cumulative effect. Still, it’s a church. And the rector is (for all intents and purposes) the producer. And I’ve got the file with the fucks in it, for if we ever put it on in a theater.

In fact, my Dear Director, after re-reading the thing, decided that under the circumstances, and with the audience that will come to a church to see a play based on Scripture, we risk losing them to the distraction of their own reaction to the one that starts with an s and the one that starts with a Name of the Divine. So. Out they go. This is substantially harder. I should point out that my Dear Director did not say that the (mildish) profanity was bad, or that it wouldn’t work in another situation, just that her sense of the audience is that they will find it easier to focus on the play, the characters and the situation and all, if they aren’t startled by hearing Bad Words in Church. I could argue, but (and I think I have said this here before), she has much, much, much better judgment than I do for what Works. And what Works is what will work with that specific crowd in the specific circumstances. So, out they go.

There are fourteen instances of shit, of which four refer to actual, you know, shit. Goat shit in the first instance. I could probably just globally replace shit with crap, except in the two instances of shithead, which could be… um, well, I’ll have to work on that. They are both Satan abusing Ishmael, and I will need something that ideally mixes contempt, vulgarity, and an imputation of stupidity. Read my lips? As I say, it’ll take some work. As for the gd-damns, there are only two of those, both of which were put in to replace the vehemence of uses of fuck, so I’ll have to figure something out for those, too.

Gentle Readers will understand that this business pains me. I like profanity. I am not, by blog standards, a particularly profane writer, but when I cuss, I enjoy it. I am interested, intellectually, in the whole idea of profanity and Bad Words and their uses and differences, and have written about that a few times unrelated to anything at all. When I wrote dialogue with Bad Words, those were the words I wanted. It’s not only that these characters, as I imagine them, curse, each in a different amount, and that cursing is part of their language, which after all is the only tool I have for making them. It’s also that I want the words—all the words—to have an effect on the audience, as well, and when Satan calls Ishmael a shithead or describes Abraham’s knife as a big fucker, the audience should react to that. The problem, though, is that the audience won’t necessarily react the way I want them to react, and the circumstances of the reading affect that, too. Feh.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I have not been keeping y’all up-to-date on the progress of Bound, the play I’ve written. Our Story So Far is that Your Humble Blogger wrote a play, and that there is going to be a staged reading in a church. The church is in a town where I’ve done some acting, and it’s the home church of my Dear Director, and it’s a nice space, so that’s all good. And the play has a biblical theme, which makes it fit, too.

So. Let’s start with the play itself. It was inspired (essentially) by an Elie Wiesel lecture I attended more than ten years ago. That was the first time I heard the midrash that dealt with the Akedah. In Hebrew, the events of Genesis 22 are traditionally called the Akedah, the binding, rather than the sacrifice, since Isaac isn’t actually sacrificed, but is bound to the altar. Anyway, the Rabbis ask themselves a few questions, in the way they have: who are the two servants that are unnamed in the Scripture? How old is Isaac at the time of the Binding? How early in the morning does Abraham get up? OK, not all the questions are really interesting, but some of them are. Well, and the Rabbis reason that as the event that immediately follows the Akedah is Sarah’s death, that the Akedah takes place immediately before Sarah’s death, and since we know how old Sarah is when Isaac was born, and we know how old she was when she died, we can easily discover that at the time of the Akedah, Isaac was... thirty-seven. And the two servants? Well, one of them is Eliezar of Damascus, of course, as he is generally the one identified as the unnamed servant when there is one. The other one is identified as Ishmael.

Yes, Ishmael from Genesis 16 and 21:9-21, expelled from Abraham’s house along with his mother, and exposed to a horrible death in the wilderness before the Divine reveals a well. They don’t explain what Ishmael is doing back in Abraham’s house, twenty-odd years later, but there are a handful of midrashic conversations between an adult Ishmael and an adult Isaac, so, fine. He’s back. And those four people: Abraham, Isaac (adult and unmarried), Ishmael (adult, married, disowned but returned), and Eliezar (the trusted old family servant) all go out on three-day hike that ends up on Mount Moriah with an altar and a knife.

Wow, thought I to myself, what a great idea for a play! And I started noodling out some ideas for a play, and actually wrote out half of a scene here and a few lines there. I wanted to include Sarah, but I wasn’t sure how, and I wanted to include Satan—there’s a fascinating midrash that says that not only did Sarah’s death immediately follow the Akedah, but the Akedah caused Sarah’s death, because the Adversary visited Sarah to tell her that Abraham had sacrificed Isaac, and she died of grief. Or that when Abraham returned without Isaac (in the Scripture, Abraham clearly comes down the mountain alone), Sarah died of grief. Or when Isaac returned (magically and instantaneously transported at the moment of Divine Mercy), she was so overjoyed at the piety shown by her husband and her son that her heart burst. But I liked the idea of Satan sneaking back from Moriah to tattle on the boys.

And at the time, I was focused, at least somewhat, on the idea of Male Bonding that was very big in the late 80s and early 90s. There was a lot of talk about the importance of the Dad going camping with the Son, and how this masculine activity was necessary for the Son to grow up secure in his Manliness, blah blah blah. And it was easy to see the Akedah as a comment on that, with this image of Abraham and the boys going camping and leaving Sarah behind, and then she, you know, dies. The idea of Male Bonding passed out of our national conversation somewhat, after that, and I couldn’t really figure out how to make Sarah a character, or an interesting character, which would be harder. And I couldn’t figure out what to do with the characters on the way, and so on. So for more than ten years, I thought about it as this great idea for a play, but I hadn’t written it, and I had no idea how to write it.

Then, a couple of years ago I suppose it was, I came up with The Structure. Which goes like this: there are three Acts, each with three scenes, corresponding to the three days and the three daily prayer services. Each Act has scene one in the late afternoon and scene three in the morning, bracketing scene two, which is a nighttime visit to one of the characters from Satan. Act One, scene two is Satan visiting Ishmael; Act Two, scene two is Satan visiting Eliezar; and Act Three, scene two is Satan visiting Isaac. Satan’s purpose (as it is in stories from the midrash as well as the hadith, the Islamic not-really-anything-like-an-equivalent equivalent) is to prevent Abraham from sacrificing Isaac; I love this, because of course Abraham doesn’t sacrifice Isaac, so Satan wins, right? Only sort of. Anyway, the Structure. I added a brief Act Three, scene four so that Abraham could come down from the mountain. That takes away from my elegant triples, but I think it’s necessary—although that’s one of the things I’ll be trying to figure out in the reading next month.

Anyway, after coming up with the Structure, it didn’t take very long to write the play itself. A few weeks, during which I fortunately had the opportunity to spend long chunks of time uninterrupted in front of the computer, and then some intensive work with my personal dramaturge (OK, she’s other people’s volunteer dramaturge as well, but that’s not the point) and then I held on to it for a while, until my Dear Director was finished with the play she was Dearly Directing and could read it and give me an almost-objective opinion about it. And she recognized that the next step was for me to hear other people read it, and arranged for it to happen with an audience and everything.

And I think that brings us up nearly to the present. Sometime later this week, I’ll write about the casting and other things that have come up. It’s all fascinating, I promise. Well, I promise that I’ll be fascinated.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 6:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, and it seems Your Humble Blogger has written a play.

It’s about Abraham and Isaac, which will surprise Gentle Readers not at all, I imagine. It’s called Bound, and it’s going to have a public reading on the first of February.

I’m extremely excited about this. I wrote it last year (some of you may remember my plea for assistance at the time), and having written it, came very quickly to the point where I could not improve it without hearing it. Well, that’s not strictly speaking true. I have had a handful of readers make a handful of suggestions, including one last week, that have resulted in small improvements, but I really need to hear the thing in voices that are not mine, interpreted by other people who are good at that sort of thing, to find out what the thing will sound like.

And it is finally going to happen. My Dear Director has agreed to direct the thing and recruit the necessary actors. Two of the actors have already signed on, and the rest will be approached this weekend. Copies of the script have been made and dispatched, the rehearsals are scheduled (more or less), and I am working on a poster (good Lord!). And any of y’all that will (for some inexplicable reason) be in Western Connecticut on the first day of February should come and listen.

This note is just an announcement, because I am giddy and pleased and want to tell people. I haven’t figured out how to blog this thing, as it happens. I suppose I’ll post a sort of synopsis of the play, and then I’ll describe the actors as we get them settled. I’ll be meeting with my Dear Director at the end of this month, and I’ll presumably have something to say about that. Once they rehearse, and I can listen to them, I’ll note differences between my idea of the characters and their ideas, as they read the thing. And I’ll let y’all know how it goes, in the event.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

People who are interested in the theeyater should be interested in the announcement that Sir Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart will be Didi and Gogo (in reverse order) in a tour and then in the West End.

Put this with the announcement a couple of weeks ago of the New York Production with Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane, and you’ve just got a Beckettpalooza, hunh?

Not that YHB will actually get to see either of them. But, you know, hey. They’ll exist. And I’ll get to read the reviews. And someday—I like to think that someday another will come, just as… as… as me, but with smaller feet, and they’ll make him happy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Before I shut up about Pygmalion, here are a few more things to note for posterity:

Things I am proud of

• Alfie’s accent: I got some compliments and I think it was entertaining to listen to, even if not entirely perfect. I remain a little concerned that some people had difficulty understanding me, which is a problem, but nobody actually expressed that to me, so it remains a guess. But I do think I got it mostly right, the vowels and also the rhythms and the cadences, which are more important.
• The reviews: we got five or six reviews, and they were all glowing. Only two or three of them mentioned me specifically, but nobody said anything bad about me. And the important thing is that good reviews get people to see the show, which leads me to
• The audiences: I didn’t get final numbers, but I think the smallest crowd we had was over sixty, and we were close to selling out two or three times. I think that for the nine paying houses, we sold at least six hundred tickets.
• My Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oos: I love Shaw, as y’all know, but he’s not at all interested in giving Alfie and Eliza Doolittle similar speech patterns or habits, and as a result, all the talk about how she was brought up to this and that are difficult to reconcile with the way they actually talk and act. That doesn’t matter much (this is Shaw, after all), but I had the idea to throw in a couple of unscheduled ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oos. Well, Oahohs; they weren’t as drawn out as Eliza’s. Three of them actually—when Higgins disparages my Welsh heritage and when he says that giving me money would be, morally speaking, a crime, and when Mrs. Higgins says that I can provide for Eliza with my newfound wealth. I came up with them fairly late, and I was happy with them.
• The grime on my hands. It took four dress rehearsals to get it right. My skin is so pale and pasty that the pink would shine through the ordinary makeup. I wound up using face paint cream. A layer of brown that went up to my elbows and on top of that a layer of black that focused on my fingers. The black was then wiped onto my face to complete the Poor Alfie dustman’s look.
• Twice getting a round of applause on my exit (once on my false exit, actually). I love getting a round on my exit; there’s nothing quite so triumphant. I mean, it’s only really done for supporting characters, usually comic ones, but that’s what I like to play, so there it is.

Things I am still dissatisfied about:

• Alfie’s walk. I had a perfectly good walk, a sort of scuttle, that I could do when I was coming on-stage and going off, but I never really adapted it to the middle of the scene. In particular, a lot of my crosses were two or three steps, and I didn’t scuttle them. I generally pride myself on my physical acting, but I never got the walk down properly.
• My lines. I said most of them, in more or less the right order, but I don’t think I ever got the lines word-for-word correct all the way through the show. Nothing disastrous, and I don’t think I ever got anything so backward that I screwed up my fellow actors, but I am supposed to say the words in the script, in the order they are in the script, and that didn’t happen.
• Alfie’s age. I think of Alfie as being forty or so, Eliza being seventeen. Our Eliza wasn’t playing as seventeen (not to carp on her; she wasn’t trying to), and to be honest, I never properly noticed. In fact, I am told that my Alfie came off younger than forty, younger than YHB’s true age, in fact, which make him very much too young. I never attempted to age him, either physically or vocally; I could have done something, at least, toward that.
• There were a couple of jokes that didn’t get the laughs I wanted them to, either because they weren’t actually as funny as I thought they were or because I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was. When Higgins asks Rich Alfie Have you found Eliza and he responds Have you lost her? it got a laugh. But when Higgins admits yes and Rich Alfie says You have all the luck, you have it didn’t. I love that line. I tried it fast, I tried it slow, I tried it in the middle. I tried it high-pitched, I tried it low-pitched. I tried it disbelieving, I tried it grousing, I tried it admiring. Nothing. Also, when Rich Alfie complains that I’ll have to learn to speak middle-class language from you, instead of speaking proper English, nobody laughed, but (although I think that’s funny) it didn’t bother me.
• I have to admit that I never liked Whiskers as a fawning, giggling, preening idiot. I preferred my original take on him as a blustering, boasting, contemptuous idiot. I don’t doubt that our Dear Director was right (the audiences seemed to like Whiskers the way I played him), it wasn’t satisfying. I also never really resigned myself to the fatsuit and the crazy wig and beard.
• The time I forgot to switch to my pince-nez and wore my regular glasses as Whiskers. Not that anybody in the audience knew that I was wearing the wrong specs, but that isn’t the point.
• The production blog. I started a production blog for the show, trying to get half-a-dozen people to agree to write a short note a couple of times a week, with the idea that it would keep potential audience types connected to the show. I did get several people who agreed to write notes in theory, but in the event, YHB was the only one who wrote (and cross-posted the notes to this Tohu Bohu; y’all didn’t miss anything).

I am not going through the usual down after a show is over, what we jokingly call post part-’em depression. Mostly because I am going through the angst over my middle-age, which is a different thing. But it was a good experience, and a good time, and a good show, as well. So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. This past weekend, Your Humble Blogger completed the run of Pygmalion and had a birthday. Closing night was the eve of what I’ve come to think of as my first thirty-ninth birthday. This confluence (and, um, some alcoholic intake) led me to brood over endings and passings. I’m not going to be doing another show with that gang, and I’m not going to be in my mid-thirties anymore, either.

The gang are pretty terrific. This is my third show with the same director and stage manager, and four castmates have joined me in all three of them, another one in two of the three. All good people. And the actors who I met for this show were good people, too; they were the sort of people I would want to be in three shows with. And it’s possible, if unlikely, that I will be in a show with one of them again someday, or even two. But not more than that. I am not driving sixty miles to rehearsals again; that was crazy.

Before doing those three shows, I had stopped doing theater for about ten years. I left college with the idea of becoming a professional actor; I soon discovered that I didn’t actually want to be a professional actor. I still enjoyed theater, though, and for a few years, I did shows at the community theater level. I found that level frustrating. Many people who do community theater are more interested in socializing with their friends in the group than in working on a show, which infuriated YHB, who still attempted to maintain a professional attitude (vaddevah I thought dat meant). The production values were often terrible, not only because of a shoestring budget but because nobody cared about the lights, or the sound, or the stage management. I didn’t have a whole lot of fun.

When I walked in to auditions for The Man Who Came to Dinner, I had determined that I wouldn’t make myself angry about professionalism. If I had a good time, and we put on a decent show, that would be fine. In fact, we put on a terrific show, and although the cast wasn’t in the least professional, we had a good time and worked hard. So I did another show, with most of the same people, and it was great. Since I was a lead this time, it was more work for me, but enjoyable work, and we had a terrific time and put on a good show in the end. Then I moved from Western Connecticut to Greater Hartford, and welcomed the Youngest Member, and took another couple of years off theater. And then our director told me she was doing Pygmalion, and my Best Reader said that technically, it wasn’t actually impossible. And once again, I worked hard and had a good time, and the show was good. But I also spent three hours a day in the car, and I missed dinner with my family four days a week for two months, not to mention the kids’ bedtime, and my Best Reader lost two months of work on her book because she was single-parenting while I was driving. So that won’t happen again.

I keep coming back to the definition of middle-age that I came across recently: it’s the time of life when people stop thinking about the future in terms of what they will be able to do, and start thinking about the future in terms of what they won’t be able to do. There’s youth, of course, when every year or two there’s some new thing you are admitted to: middle-school, movies on your own, driving, dating, voting, draft age, credit cards, car rental, drinking, sex, a real job, your own apartment, marriage, home ownership, promotion, parenthood. At thirty-five, you are qualified to be President of the United States, and that’s the last one until you start getting discounts. Your Humble Blogger is thirty-nine at last; there's the house, the children, a job, my Best Reader’s career. I’ve got a wonderful life; I am clam-happy. And middle-aged.

Do I want to go and visit family across the country? I can do that, thank the Divine, as long as I budget for it, and arrange it so that the Perfect Non-Reader doesn’t miss too much school. And of course I can’t just crash on somebody’s sofa anymore, because of my back (and my knee), so I need to either stay with somebody who has a guest room or take a hotel room, and there has to be enough room for the Perfect Non-Reader, and somewhere for the Youngest Member, too, and if we all share a room, nobody’s going to get much sleep, and you know? The hell with it.

That’s what I mean by middle-aged. It’s not chronological, it’s a combination of life’s circumstances and frame of mind. And I’m in it.

The important thing is to remember that I am in the middle-aged frame of mind because I've got so many wonderful things. I don’t want to be eighteen anymore, or twenty-three or even thirty. I want to have what I’ve got: a family, a home town, a settled life, immovables, habits, comforts. That’s not a bad thing.

And while the knee hurts a lot, and the back is always vulnerable, and the extra forehead limits my choice of hairstyle, the stamina is just about where it should be at this point, I’m still at the point where the physical plant problems are an inconvenience, rather than a barrier or a burden, something to keep in mind rather than something that can’t be ignored. So that’s all right, d’y’see?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We are going into our last weekend with Pygmalion. Two more performances, then I put away Alfie’s rags and riches and say goodbye.

It’s probably a good time to ask what happened to everybody after the play ended. I know Shaw wrote about it, but I think we’re entitled to our own guesses. Particularly as Shaw, presumably in the interest of the play’s timelessness, ignored the thing that was about to happen in England and Europe within a year after the play ends. It’s not entirely impossible that Freddie and Eliza would settle down with their flower shop and greengrocer’s and their classes at the LSE, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely.

So, here goes. First of all, Colonel Pickering, of course, would be recalled, despite his age, and I’m thinking he would wind up with the Rajputs, considering his skill with Hindi. Dead in Basra, then. Poor chap. Freddie, dead as well, first battle of the Marne. I’d rather think of Freddie dying early than think of Freddie limbless and shell-shocked, wouldn’t you? Clara, of course, would be a Land Girl and then an ambulance driver. I rather suspect she’d make it home in one piece, but married to a Canadian. Isn’t that what happened to ambulance drivers?

Higgins would have wound up with Intelligence, of course, working at a desk going through messages. The war would be a great inconvenience to him, but I doubt it would change him much. Mrs. Higgins would be one of those grand old ladies serving tea at some stately-home-turned-hospital, wouldn’t she? I like to think Mrs. Pearce would turn nurse as well, although likely enough once the War started, she’d follow Higgins into Intelligence and become one of those feared ladies who ran Britain for two generations, technically only secretaries, but absolutely in control of the flow of information and supplies.

Alfie? Well, let’s see. Alfie would be in his early forties, well-off and not clubbable. No service for him. Easiest to imagine him dead in a ditch within a year, but just for fun, why not imagine him surviving the war, and a widower, embracing the Army of Salvation and becoming a funder for the temperance movement? Middle class morality claims its victim.

Now, what about Eliza? With her gift for language and mimicry, would she become a spy overseas? It’s not implausible. But frankly, I don’t see it. I think her break with Higgins is enough, despite her naturally affectionate nature, to swing her into the sphere of the Suffragettes. Her experience acting as Higgins secretary, and her gift for language, and her youth as well as her strange classlessness might suit her to a job as private secretary and traveling companion to, say, Sylvia Pankhurst. Then she would follow her into the anti-war movement of the time (Freddie’s early death might have something to do with it as well) and communism. After the war, appalled by her father’s conversion, she goes to Soviet Russia for a few years, and then… what…

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday was the matinee. I hate matinees.

I should point out that I think it’s a very good idea to have matinees, and that in fact I think we should probably do more than one. There are people who (for one reason or another) can’t get to the evening shows, and part of the point of community theater is for the community. You know? And then there’s the part of the community that lives in a different state and doesn’t want to drive three hours home in the middle of the night. OK, not so much the community, but still.

The problem is that the matinee throws off our entire rhythm. First there’s the call, which is, let’s say, an hour before curtain. Curtain is usually at eight, so call is for seven, and people start arriving around six-thirty or so. It’s how we set up our day. We finish our afternoon stuff (on Friday, that’s generally our day jobs), those of us who eat before the show eat our dinners and those of us who don’t eat whatever we do to sustain ourselves, and we head for the playhouse. For the matinee, though, curtain is at two, call is for one, and we’re all messed up. There’s too much time in the morning to not do anything, but there’s not enough time to make a day of anything. We arrive at the playhouse just after noon, and wander like lost souls. There’s too much light. We can’t really believe there’s a show in the middle of the day, and can’t settle into it. We left this place only twelve or fourteen hours ago, and it looks different somehow, and worse.

We walk in out of the bright sunshine to put on our layers of woolen clothes, our hats and overcoats. In Pyggie, particularly, the opening scene is at eleven at night, in a cold rain; outside it’s eighty and sunny, and kids are throwing Frisbees. There’s an extra layer of unreality to it. We close the stage door to keep the sunshine out, and also because the matinee crowd, like the actors, have arrived early and are wandering around, their rhythm off as well.

Once the show starts, there’s an odd quality to the light, even though there logically shouldn’t be; there aren’t any windows to let in the sun. Still, we can feel it. And the audience is more restless in the middle of the day, less able to settle into their seats and be absorbed. Our rhythms up on stage are just a bit off, which sets them further off. We don’t lose our lines, but they come out a bit different, the words in a different order, the emphasis on a different word, the gesture at a different spot. Costumes, somehow, pick the matinee to open their seams or stick their zippers. Offstage, we are noisier. There’s more whispering in the wings, more chattering and cursing in the greenroom.

When the show is over (and for all my kvetching, it was a good show), we emerge into the daylight, blinking, and realize that there’s a good two hours before dinnertime, and then the evening after that. The combination of adrenaline and exhaustion that usually sustains us after a show—final curtain around ten-fifteen, washing and changing, chattering and drinking, people coming back behind and saying “Marvelous! Marvelous!” more chattering and drinking perhaps, and eating (with this group, much eating: fruit plates, veggie dip, cupcakes, brownies, doughnuts, pasta salad, cheese and crackers… someone brought an entire roasted chicken to Opening Night and we did a pretty good job of finishing it) and then off to our various homes to tumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the just for however many hours remain until morning—is now working against us as we contemplate the rest of the day.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mobile phone! Mobile phone! Mobile phone!

That is the first time that’s ever happened to me. I stopped doing theater from around 1995 to around 2005, during which time cell phones became ubiquitous. Before that, having a phone ring during the show would have been very surprising, and the actor could probably assume that the owner of the phone was a doctor, and really needed to be reachable. Or a drug dealer, and the disruption of a play was far from the worst aspect of the call, I suppose. Now, we just assume that someone idiotically forgot to put the thing on silent, curse them.

It was during Rich Alfie; I believe it started ringing during Eliza’s line that is my cue to stealthily make my way behind her and tap her on the shoulder. Eliza turns, sees Alfie in his wedding suit, and shouts awohwahwah!, Higgins repeats the cry mockingly, and then I stand staring at Eliza thinking nothing at all but Mobile phone! Mobile phone! Mobile phone!

I eventually remembered my line, but dang.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger hasn’t written here about the reviews of Pyggie, three of which have come out and been positive. I suspect we are going to get one more, possibly two, but it’s also possible that there won’t be any more. Still, three positive reviews is three positive reviews, and one is in a newspaper with a circulation of thirty thousand, and one is in a newspaper with a circulation of more than fifty thousand (wow! that surprises me), so, you know, not bad. I won’t link to them here, as that for some reason busts my pseudonymyty sense, but I suspect Gentle Readers in the area have sufficient Google Skillz to find them should they be interested.
The thing about the reviews from my point of view is that they haven’t been effusive about me personally. Two of them don’t mention me at all, in fact, and the third says I am “lively” and that I am not old enough to be Eliza’s father, and suggests that Rich Alfie should be “eliminated altogether”. The reviewer also uses the word “hilarious” to describe the part, although that seems to me aimed more at Shaw than at me, but still, the word is connected to my performance, so that’s all right.
Now, I’m in a supporting part here. There isn’t any particular reason for a reviewer to say anything about me, and given the limitations of newspapers, there is a reason to leave out anything you can. And you may think that as long as nobody says anything nasty about me, I should be happy—after all, as a supporting actor, it is my job to support the story, not to draw attention away from it. Still, I am enough of an egotist to want to see a reviewer say “A highlight of the show was…”
I oughtn’t sulk, and in fact I am not sulking as much as it sounds like I am. The important thing about reviews is not the personal affirmation, but the butts in seats. These reviews should help with butts in seats. So that’s all right.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and last night’s brush-up rehearsal went just about like brush-up rehearsals usually go. I arrive late, just in time to make my entrance as Poor Alfie. We made it through the scene without disaster, but without putting in a whole lot of effort. When I got to the point in my monologue where I skipped on Saturday, I thought to myself Oh, that’s where I skipped! Better not skip this time. Now, where am I? but made it through all right. Jenny was conserving energy and pampering what I think was a muscle pull, so she didn’t waltz during the ball, and she didn’t fully wail her aw-oh-wah-oh-aws. Steve completely corpsed at one point, I’ve no idea why. And we all got home early.

Brush-up rehearsals are an odd thing. It’s useful to have them, so we don’t go into Friday’s performance cold. Many of us (ahem) don’t run lines during the week, because we are luxuriating in not having to go to rehearsals for a few days, so it’s a good idea to have some sort of compulsory line-through. Some groups just do a line-through (that’s done with the cast just sitting around saying their lines, often at double-speed to get home faster), and some do something closer to a full dress rehearsal, and some just do a travesty, screwing around and inserting dirty jokes. I think what we did is just about right, going through it at the right speed, with the blocking, with no wigs or beards or makeup or costumes (except hats, we must have our hats) reminding ourselves of the lines and of the broad contours of the play, and getting ready to do it properly tonight.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gentle Readers will recall that YHB asked for help in mixing a CD for Opening Night presents, and just possibly have been waiting to find out the final score. Herewith the opening of the liner notes:

Notes on some recordings of popular music from the Higgins Archive

By W.G. Neppomuck

While it is well-known among scholars of historical linguistics that the Higgins Archive of recordings on wax cylinders includes many fine examples of early-twentieth-century dialects, a complete index of the Archive has only recently been completed. Even many researchers who have used the recordings by courtesy of the Royal Archive are unaware that in addition to the hundreds of recordings of London dialects and scores of recordings of dialects from elsewhere in England, Europe and Asia, there are a handful of cylinders of popular music. Whether Henry Higgins instructed the vocalists in phonetics, recorded them for study, or simply kept them for his own amusement, it is not now possible to know¹.

The purpose of this note is to sketch out the variety of styles, accents and dialects and other matters of phonological interest found in these recordings. The accompanying CD provides scholars an opportunity for close study. It is, perhaps, worth mentioning that some of the recordings lack a modern sense of cultural sensitivity. Higgins himself was, as was typical for his time, profoundly chauvinistic and insensitive²; however, the modern scholar might also keep in mind that he collected many recordings of which he did not approve. We must reserve judgement. However, for the modern listener, this author apologizes in advance for any offense, but persists in hopes that doing so will advance the cause of phonetic science.

¹ The notes kept with the cylinders are in Higgins’ own hand, and are incomplete, illegible and incoherent. Fortunately, the labels are in another hand, meticulous and feminine. The identity of this assistant is another mystery of the Higgins Archive, however, we are grateful to her for the names of the songs and of the vocalists.

² see Higgins 1908, Higgins 1909a, Higgins 1909b, Higgins and Pickering 1913, Higgins and Pickering 1914, Higgins 1915 and Higgins 1919.

The song list is below. There were some good things I had to leave off, and a few lousy things I had to leave off, and there were a few things I couldn’t track down in time. After the fact, a cast member suggested Lonnie Donegan’s My Old Man’s a Dustman, which would have been perfect and probably would have opened the CD, but I had never heard of it before, and although I’m sure I had heard of Lonnie Donegan (as he is a Big Deal influence on a bunch of musicians I like so much that I’ve bothered to read articles about them and their musical influences) I can’t say as I could have pulled his name out of my memory. With that sort of thing in mind, Gentle Reader, please chip in with other stuff that seems missing, as it may be a Learning Experience for YHB, and I can always use one of those.

“Mother’s Lament”, performed by Cream
“ I’m Henery The Eighth”, performed by Harry Champion
“ It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”, performed by Albert Farrington
“ Yes, We Have No Bananas”, performed by Billy Jones
“ I Love Louisa”, performed by Fred Astaire
“ Slow Down Krishna”, performed by The Bobs
“ In the Desert”, performed by Flanders & Swann
“ Rum And Coca Cola”, performed by Andrews Sisters
“ Me Pants Fall Down”, performed by Da Vinci’s Notebook
“ Run Joe”, performed by Louis Jordan
“ Road Man”, performed by Smash Mouth
“ Flat Foot Floogie”, performed by Mills Brothers
“ Angelina - Zooma Zooma (Medley)”, performed by Louis Prima
“ Mambo Italiano”, performed by Rosemary Clooney
“ Thou Swell”, performed by Count Basie & Joe Williams
“ Burlington Bertie”, performed by Julie Andrews
“ Bruces’ Philosophers Song”, performed by Monty Python
“ It’s You I Love”, performed by Beausoleil
“ Dos Geshrey Fun Der Vilder Katshke (The Cry Of The Wild Duck)”, performed by Klezmer Conservatory Band
“ What I Want Is A Proper Cup Of Coffee”, performed by Trout Fishing In America
“ Another Irish Drinking Song”, performed by Da Vinci’s Notebook
“ Autumn Leaves”, performed by Mel Torme

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gentle Reader Matt Hulan sent me a link to The Shakespeared Brain, an article for The Literary Review by Philip Davis, in which he describes the research he and his colleagues are doing on how the brain reacts to Shakespeare’s language. In particular, he is focused on (essentially) scanning people’s brains whilst they chew on functional shifts in words, that is, words being used as parts of speech we don’t expect. Verbing, as every stoolboy knows, weirds language, and nounification is the strangosity of languageness, but does it actually fry our brains? Mr. Davis did some experiments, bless his curly head, and found that in fact, there is something different and unusual going on in our brains when we read something that has sense but is grammatically left-field-from-coming.

This was, unsurprisingly, serendipitous. I had just been listening to Shakespeare. As I was driving back and forth to Western CT and Pyggie rehearsals, I found that the recordings of Arkangel Shakespeare were an excellent diversion, making the time fly without interfering unduly with my driving skills, never much to begin with. These are full audio productions with marvelous casts, mostly RSC folk, with unabridged text. I began with The Winter’s Tale, because it had been on my mind ever since reading The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare, and discovered that the cast was lead by the magnificent Eileen Atkins and also included Ceiran Hinds, Sinead Cusack, Alex Jennings (of whom I had not heard, but who was wonderful) and a cameo by John Gielgud. I have also listened to an only moderately good Love’s Labours Lost (despite Alex Jennings as a quite good Berowne), a very funny Comedy of Errors (with David Tennant, who some Gentle Readers may know from his Hamlet which is currently at the RSC; he is doing Berowne later this year as well) and a Henry IV, Part One with Richard Griffiths as a funny but not a revelatory Falstaff.

Now, the thing that I found myself ruminating about as I was listening was the way that Shakespeare so often uses words that have more than one meaning. I don’t just mean metaphor, the replacement of a thing with some other thing to see the replaced thing better by its displacement. Not just puns, either, although of course Shakespeare is very fond of puns. I mean wit, the saying of two things simultaneously. In H4i, f’r’ex, an exchange depicting thieves as acolytes of the moon:

Falstaff: Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.

Hal: Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the fortune of us that are the moon’s men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is, by the moon. As, for proof, now: a purse of gold most resolutely snatched on Monday night and most dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with swearing ‘Lay by’ and spent with crying ‘Bring in;’ now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladder and by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.

Here there are puns metaphors and similies and straightforward wordplay together with the double meaning I’m talking about. Hal picks up Falstaff’s use of the word govern, but of course as the heir apparent, when he talks about governing, it holds a second meaning, particularly when going on to talk of hanging. And in small talk, too: the money is dissolutely spent, but there is also the image of Falstaff, spent and sleeping (as earlier Hal describes him “sleeping on benches after noon”) and the image of the empty and slack purse reinforces the image of the hanged thief. And of course what is laid by is not what is brought in, and neither of them are boats.

It’s not that it’s a particularly wonderful passage, although of course I like it, but it’s an example of that particular style of writing that I think of as Shakespearean, far more than the verbing and nounification that Mr. Davis is scanning, and which takes a listener a certain amount of pleasurable work to unknot. And this kind of writing often requires (or at least makes use of) repetition of a word several times in different contexts, and often in different parts of speech. Government and governed, but also the sea and the moon and spent as well.

In the writing and reading of our century, when we are pressed to omit needless words and to avoid repetition, a style like Shakespeare’s may require us to use our brains in a very different way. I don’t think that Mr. Davis, who I admit knows much more about Shakespeare than I do, has hit upon the way of it. The functional shift is something that most of us only find in Shakespeare (it was a feature of the dialogue in Friends), but the double-meaning and the repetition with shifted emphasis are something that we have stamped out of our modern style, other than in puns and jokes.

Which is fine. Stylistic trends, like people, are different one to another, and that’s presumably what makes comparative literature interesting and fun. And what makes people think that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and inaccessible. It’s not the thees and thous and dosts and cansts. It’s the style. The long sentences, sure, that often pay more attention to what is important than to where a person might actually place a subject and a verb, and that are happy to repeat an idea in a different way, or in three different ways, to heap emphasis on it. We’ve been stylistically strunked out of Shakespeare.

Except that, once you get a taste for it, it’s there for you. Even whilst driving through western Connecticut.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The opening weekend went rather well. We seem to have sold a lot of tickets; I didn't get the final numbers, but the houses were reasonably full. The Opening Night audience was ready to laugh, and the Saturday audience was not, but they were paying attention. There were some moments that required quick thinking by one of us, but the thinking was done quickly, and the audience (mostly) never noticed a thing.

On Saturday, I cut about a third out of my big monologue. Steve had cut about half a line early in the scene, nothing big but just enough for me to rattle myself. When I went into my big monologue—here it is:

Dont say that, Governor. Dont look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that hes up agen middle class morality all the time. If theres anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "Youre undeserving; so you cant have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I dont need less than a deserving man: I need more. I dont eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you. I aint pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and thats the truth. Will you take advantage of a man's nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what hes brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until shes growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.

Here's what actually happened. I went along just fine until “I drink a lot more.” At that point, I turned to Higgins and said “Will you take advantage, er, of …” Oh, crap, I've skipped ahead. How can I get back to where I left off? Where did I leave off? Ah, hell with it “… er, a man's own nature…”

Nobody noticed. Well, except Mrs. Pearce.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry to have left this abandoned for so long. We’ve been a bit busy. Opening Night was last night (we had a semi-open dress rehearsal/Senior Night on Thursday, which went reasonably well, I thought), and we’ve been working very hard. So I’ve missed writing about how every time I dirty up my hands and arms for Poor Alfie, my pasty pink skin shines through, and I’ve missed writing about the strangeness of practicing the curtain calls halfway through the second act so that some folks can go home early, and I’ve missed writing about the difficulties of keeping a large cast quiet backstage. Ah, well. Too late now.

It is not, however, too late for photos! The playhouse now has a whole gallery of Pyggie Photos, and there’s a picasa page with about a million more, and lovely ones, too. Boy, this show looks good.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So. Your Humble Blogger had the opportunity to watch the musical of The Full Monty a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vaguely wanting to write a note about gay jokes. Well, about a few particular kinds of gay jokes that seem to me thematically connected. Before I begin, though, I want to be clear: I’m not making pronouncements on what is funny and what ain’t funny. I am pontificating on what I find disturbing and uncomfortable, personally. I’m curious whether Gentle Readers share my discomfort, but not as some sort of moral test, just as a shared stimulus/reaction thing.

The jokes in question are about straight men being uncomfortable with gayness. I’ll break it down into categories, because that’s my nineteenth-century-positivist way of taking the humor out of the funny:

Observed: Two straight men are interacting, and a third person observes them. The interaction is misunderstood as indicating a sexual relationship between them. Sometimes this is just misunderstood referents in conversation, but often there’s an elaborate set-up where the men are embracing or one has his pants down or some other physical embodiment. This appears to be very funny indeed; audiences howl with glee. I cringe. The humor here comes from the misunderstanding, that is, it is very important to the gag that the men not be gay. Either the men are confronted with the observer’s misapprehension (usually, I should add, positive) or we are left to imagine them appalled at being so confronted.

The joke is connected, of course, to the idea that the worst thing that a straight man could imagine is being thought to be homosexual. That’s assuming that the straight man could not imagine being homosexual, being, you know, straight. So the joke here is twofold: there’s the mistaken impression of the observer (possibly a series of misapprehensions, possibly very clever writing or slapstick to get the fellows to the point of confusion) which is a sort of Humour of Ambiguity, and there’s the idea that people think they are gay, which is a sort of Humour of Humiliation. Which, again, rests entirely on the idea that it is humiliating for people to think you are gay.

I should, however, admit that the joke is occasionally attempted when the couple being observed are a man and a woman. I have only rarely seen it done that way, and in those cases, the couple (a) appear to be engaged in completely bizarre acts of congress, such as would be humiliating to be discovered, or (2) are a potential couple, such that the point is not the humor but the romance, or (3) most amusing of all, the couple is old, and therefore it is the observer who is humiliated by the thought of older, unattractive people having sex. Despite these overlaps (and the whole thing is a variation on crosstalk), I think the joke of Straight Men Observed to be Gay is enough of a distinct category to talk about, and to view its relation to other joke categories such as…

Pretending: Two straight men jocularly pretend to be lovers, or to be attracted to each other. They amuse themselves with this banter, and therefore us. This is a surefire amusement, although not one of the Big Yuks. It must be clear, however, that this is not flirtation. The men may assume lisps, or mince, or otherwise imitate stereotypical gay men, or they may express themselves in their normal tone, but either way it cannot be humorously sustained for more than a minute or two.

I actually find this funny on occasion, if it is done well (and by well, I mean, to my taste). It is (for me) Humor of Transgression, and allows men to say and do things they wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed to. I don’t find it intrinsically funny, though. In my actual life, however, I flirt with men quite a lot, when I can, and find that amusing and entertaining. Of course, I also flirt with women and find it amusing and entertaining, when I can do so without consequence. Because I am so very straight, I flirt with straight men without consequence (at least when I am correct about their straightness). Because I am so very married, I flirt with married women without consequence (at least when I am correct about their, er, monogomosity). Connected with this proclivity of mine for my own self-amusement is my amusement at other people engaging in this sort of faux flirtation.

Unwelcome Advance: A homosexual man indicates he finds a straight man attractive, reducing the fellow to a gibbering idiot. The advance can range from an approving up-and-down to a full-bore come-on; the response can range from a quick shudder to jumping out the nearest window. This is, oddly enough, nearly identical to the Unwanted Advance joke where a sexually aggressive woman makes a pass at a straight man. I don’t find either even remotely funny.

I could imagine a version where the come-on reduces the fellow to an idiot because it is welcome, rather than unwelcome; it would be the surprise that would un-man the target, not being wrong-footed. Or, rather, it would come as a surprise to the man that the advance was welcome, as he had neither been expecting it nor wanting it, and is at one moment shocked and aroused, and of course reduced to gibbering and so misses his chance. I think I have seen this done with a woman’s advance; I am pretty sure I’ve never seen it carried off between two men.

Naked Hottie: A straight man is forced to observe a scantily-clad or entirely naked gay hunk. The humor here is that the naked hunk is entirely repulsive to the straight man. The hunk should not be engaged in any sexual act, nor should there be any question of potential sexual activity at all. The joke is that the straight fellow must see something that a gay man presumably would want to see, but his reaction (being, you know, straight) is repulsion, or nausea, or jumping out a nearby window. It must also be clear that the hunk is gay, because for reasons that passeth understanding, it is not funny for a straight man to be bothered by the sight of a naked or nearly naked straight man, in a shower, locker room or beach or (f’r’ex) coming out of a dormitory bathroom. It is also important for the humor that the naked gay man be hot, and, oddly enough, that the straight man recognize that the naked gay man is hot, although of course not responding to the hotness with anything other than revulsion.

The Full Monty musical opens with a male stripper actually stripping to a g-string; there is much hilarity in the audience, although much of the laughter is nervous. Over the course of the play, I think all the above tropes are put into play. Terrence McNally wrote the book (that is, the dialogue of the play and its scene outline); he is a gay man who often uses what seem to me to be homophobic tropes for his own purposes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. And by works, I mean… I don’t actually know what I mean by works. I suppose I mean that sometimes people in the audience are comforted in their discomfort with homosexuality, if you know what I mean, rather than discomfited. Throughout the show (which I enjoyed, by the way, very much), I was discomfited, if you will, by the audience’s lack of discomfort with their discomfort, that is, by how completely they participated in the type of gags I’m talking about.

I wasn’t comfortable with this because all of those gags depend for their humor on it being perfectly natural for straight men to be wildly uncomfortable, to the point of panic, at the thought of their sexuality coming into question. I don’t think that the joke is on the straight man (pardon the expression), with the audience feeling superior to him because he is so bigoted and closed-minded. I think the joke is ultimately on of recognition, that he reacts the way he is supposed to react, the way people should react.

I am a straight man, myself. I would describe myself as attracted to most women and to almost no men. I am not grossed out by gay men. I don’t find the idea of a gay man being attracted to me repulsive or even particularly unpleasant. As it happens, no man has ever made a pass at me, at least not that I noticed. I am reasonably capable of finding and expressing preferences among men, as for instance, finding Jude Law cuter than Matt Damon. I am not some sort of paragon of tolerance. I am just a straight guy who isn’t grossed out by gay guys. And I find straight guys who are creeped out by gay guys to be a little bit creepy and a little bit pathetic, rather than being funny.

Now, I’ve said all that in a way that makes it clear that, however I started this interminable note, I am indeed pontificating on what should be funny and what shouldn’t, what all right-thinking people should find unfunny, and how superior YHB is to the guffawing yahoos circumjacent. And yet, seriously, am I wrong?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the last week before the show, we’ve switched to just running the damned thing through. No going through a tricky scene twice, no skipping nights while they work on somebody else’s scenes, just curtain at seven-thirty and we’re done when we’re done. It’s very important to get some practice at this. The technical is technically not until tomorrow, but we’ve been doing all-but-tech for a few days, practicing set changes and some of the costume changes and other aspects of doing the show.

One of the things I find myself working on during this week is the important question of timing my journey from the green room to the wings. In the Sherman Playhouse, there are two dressing rooms (one for men, the other tidy and well-lit) and a Green Room downstairs, with a stairway up to either wing. It’s very convenient; most of my theater experience has been in places much less well-suited to doing theater. Barns, in fact, or near as dammit. Anyway, once dressed, the actor can sit in relative comfort on a moldering sofa, sipping tea and playing Scrabble or doing crosswords or otherwise quietly whiling away the minutes between exit and entrance. At the right moment, up you get, quietly up the stair, check the mirror in the wing, pick up your hand prop if you are unlucky enough to need one, and on you go.

But what is the right moment? I don’t like to be in the wings for very long. The requirement for silence is of course complete (in the Green Room whispering is customary during a performance), and Gentle Readers will know how difficult it is for me to remain silent for very long. More than that, though, the tension of being in the small dark space, silent, while keeping the energy level high is very frustrating for me. And, of course, the wings being a small space (tho’ larger than many I’ve stood in), it’s generally wise to stay out of people’s way as they make their exits and entrances or costume changes or prepare the set changes. So the idea is to stay downstairs in the Green Room as long as possible.

On the other hand, while being early to the wings is not great, being late to the wings is disastrous. Even without contemplating missing my actual entrance (and I hope the S.M. would notice my absence and send someone down to beat me before the moment), I don’t want to be flying up the stairs and running onstage without a chance to catch my breath, check the mirror, settle my hat and do the twist (don’t ask). The right moment is not the last possible moment. In fact, I am happier if I am up in the wings in time to notice that I’ve left my hat downstairs, go back down and get it, and then come back up and make my entrance without being out of breath. Not that I do leave my hat downstairs. I’m just saying if.

So this week I am trying to figure out when to climb those stairs. I’m not in the first scene at all. I will probably not even begin making up until places, when almost everyone is onstage and I can hog the lighted mirror. I certainly won’t put on the boots until we’re done with Covent Garden and into Wimpole Street. The gloves and hat and coat will be placed near me until time. I think maybe I should go up at three pages before my entrance, say just as Eliza is making her exit. Only of course I shouldn’t come upstairs just as Eliza is making her exit, because she has to come off and get totally changed (and possible made up again? I can’t tell) in the wings, without time to go downstairs to the dressing room. Hm. Practice, practice, practice.

Rich Alfie is easier. When the curtain rumbles open on the scene, I can put my hat on. I have two or three minutes yet, and it’s just slightly better if I ease upstairs after Pickering’s entrance rather than before, so I don’t need to put my hat on before the scene begins, but the curtain is my signal, and I can’t really miss that if I’m listening at all, right?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I arrived at the Sherman Playhouse last night, they set fire to my overcoat.

Well, not my overcoat. I mean, seriously, it was, like eighty-crap degrees and four hundred percent humidity. Even I wasn’t wearing an overcoat. But it’s winter in Lisson Grove, and Alfie needs an overcoat. Poor Alfie. And the selection of overcoats went from lovely to a acceptable. Acceptable is a good deal too nice for Poor Alfie. So they took an acceptable overcoat, threw it in the parking lot, trampled it, tore it, dragged it through the dirt, and (just as I was arriving) stubbed out their cigarettes on it.

Digression: Kids, don’t smoke. Disgusting habit. Hard to kick. But if you are going to take up smoking, smoke cigars, which at least are made with decent tobacco, and aren’t just the sweepings-up from the factory floor soaked in cyanide and piss. And if you are going to take up smoking, for the sake of all that’s good and holy, don’t smoke Swisher Sweets. This has been a public service announcement. End Digression.

Anyway, the overcoat seems to have made a big difference to the way Alfie looks, and the (disgusting) boots (which appear to have been actually painted with pig muck) have made a difference to the way Alfie walks. But the big difference for me to the way Alfie feels are the gloves. We have a lovely pair of old torn-up leather work gloves with the tips of the fingers cut out, and wearing those gloves changes not only the way I use my hands, but the way I feel. Er, no pun intended. I found my voice went lower in pitch. I remembered to walk with shorter steps (although that may have been the boots). I stood with my feet further apart.

And, er, I forgot a big chunk of my lines. But that won’t happen again.

It’s not that I though Poor Alfie was going badly; I didn’t. It was going pretty well. But the gloves—and the coat, and the boots, and the bandana around my neck—boost it into going very well indeed. At least from my point of view.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, I probably shouldn’t tell tales out of school, but… the conversation, you understand, started with Mrs. Pearce wondering why Higgins brought back kimonos from his trip abroad. I mean, what use did Higgins have for kimonos? I wondered if they had been gifts from some diplomat that Higgins had taught English pronunciation, but then why would you give a bachelor a kimono? Not a very diplomatic gift. It seemed likelier that the gift had been a geisha, wearing a kimono, and that Mrs. Pearce had done her in.

Also, the scores of American millionaresses? Dead.

Pickering? Once they get him to sign power of attorney over to them, he’ll be next for the chop.

We were thinking that instead of the second act being all about the tedious human relationships of person to person (and class to class) that Shaw was on about, wouldn’t a madcap thriller be more fun? Doesn’t Freddy really need an axe? We’re thinking two parts Arsenic and Old Lace, one part Sweeney Todd, two parts Little Shop of Horrors with just a dash of Deathtrap. Doesn’t that sound great?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the amusing things about this bit of the rehearsal process is that we use those bits of the costume or hand props that make us feel comfortable in the scene, and leave off the rest. So Pickering wears a lovely black jacket over a polo shirt and shorts, I put my top hat on over whatever I happen to be wearing, and Mrs. Pearce attaches her housekeys to her belt. Actually, it’s trickier for women in period plays, who usually need to change from jeans or skirts into dresses to get the movements right; guy’s clothes of the last two hundred years or so don’t necessitate changes in walk or gesture. Although I’m still needing Poor Alfie’s boots, which I think may make a difference in his walk.

While I mention it, I’m having some difficulty with Alfie’s walk. I want to make it a distinctive walk (oh, all right, a funny walk), with short steps and a rolling gait. But I keep forgetting to actually do it! I find myself crossing the stage with my usual long paces, and then stomp back. Maybe my boots will remind me. Ah, well, we’ll get there.

We have eight more rehearsals before an audience sees the thing. Eight!

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the annoying things about doing community theater, and there are lots of wonderful things, is when people who do not do theater ask how we remember all those lines. We work like hell at it, that’s how.

(The other annoying aspect to the question is that it assumes that memorizing lines is the hard part. Well, in some ways it is, but it’s like seeing a beautifully hand-carved wooden stair rail, all vines and leaves and curlicues and whatnot, and asking the carver how he manages to make it support the weight of the person coming downstairs. It takes training and hard work, and it’s important, but he was kinda hoping you would notice that bunch of grapes on the sixth newel post.)

Anyway, here’s a little moment in the line-learning process. I had been having trouble remembering Rich Alfie’s line “What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age?” I could get it more or less right, but I couldn’t make the clauses come out in order. What is there for me in my old age if I chuck it but the workhouse? What is there but the workhouse for me in my old age if I chuck it? What is there for me in my old age if I chuck it but the workhouse?

You may notice that none of the wrong sentences sound right at all. I certainly noticed, as I was saying them, and be unable to finish them or the speech. So I would stumble and stammer, and ask for the line.

Today, while running the lines, I wound up saying it a different way, and I’m hoping that it will help. I had been saying (and you’ll have to pardon the notation; I’ll try to record it for listening, but I haven’t a mic with me) something like “What is there for me, if I chuck it, but the workhouse in my old age?” Today I tried “What is there for ME, if I chuck it, but the workhouse in my old age?”

The change of inflections is sensible, I think, as it (a) leads eventually in to a consideration of what the deserving people would have if they chucked a bequest, and (2) plays in to Alfred Doolittle’s moral philosophy, which determines the ethical nature of questions by what he gets out of them. The other way, I think, conveys the, um, pathos? The emphasis on there being nothing for him, rather than on there being nothing for him, if you see. So for meaning, either could work.

But for some reason, What is there for ME… leads more naturally and rhythmically into if I chuck it and less into but the workhouse or in my old age. Is it the repeated pronoun? I know I’m saying the rhythm has something to do with it, but aren’t all three phrases two weaks a strong and a weak? No, I don’t really know why it works, but with luck, I now know my line.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, it’s like this: right at the beginning of two,three, that is, of the final scene where everybody converges on Mrs. Higgins, Pickering and Higgins go to sit down. The way it has been blocked, Pickering sits in the far chair, and Higgins and the center one. There is also a sofa that seats two; at the time of this sitting-down there are three characters on the set, but Rich Alfie is about to come on and make four.

We have changed the blocking every single time we’ve run this scene. Every time. It’s not a particularly complicated scene (although there are a fair number of entrances and exits), but we haven’t managed to get everybody in the same room for it very often, and for some reason, even when we do, something doesn’t work right.

This time, it was that move to the chairs. It was awkward. And it was awkward, no question about that. Jane solved that awkwardness by simply switching chairs. Now Higgins is in the far chair, Pickering up center. All solved. But wait…

Rich Alfie comes in, takes up the last remaining seat, on the sofa with Mrs. Higgins. Then Higgins, frustrated and impatient, gets up, and I chase him, flinging my top hat in the center chair that he vacated. Only he hasn’t vacated it. He has vacated the other chair. So I have to fling it all the way into the far chair. And then I go and sit in that chair (but not on the hat), only it’s the far chair. And then Mrs. Higgins gets up and I lead her back to the center chair, only Pickering has to get up and get out of that chair, because otherwise she’d be sitting on his lap. So. Now he’s up, and over by the sofa, so instead of pushing Higgins over on the sofa, I go and sit in the vacant chair. Now Mrs. Higgins is up, Pick and Higgins are over by the sofa, which is good, but I’m across the stage, which isn’t as good. And when she finishes and sits down, she wants to sit in the far chair, but now I’m in the far chair, so she sits in the center chair. So when I get up to go, instead of crossing from the sofa (remember the sofa?) I’m crossing from the far chair, which means I’m going all the way to center before turning around and exiting on the same side I just came from.

I have a feeling that we’ll be changing the blocking again, next time we do the scene.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first off-book rehearsal was a fiasco. Well, more of a debacle, really. It went exactly as everybody expected it to: very, very badly.

People who know their speeches cold, and were in fact running them backstage before their entrances without any errors, got into the scenes and blanked. I only asked for a line once, plus of course the time I screwed up without asking for a line. Our Pickering, bless him, came in several times with great confidence and mellifluousness with a line from later in the scene. That will throw a person off. Our Liza and our Higgins blundered through, blanking and swearing and stamping their feet. It was, in short, a disaster. Just exactly as it is supposed to be. So that’s all right, Best Beloved, d’y’see? If tonight is a disaster, too, then that will be fine. If Wednesday night is a disaster, then it will start to be a problem…

The good news (other than the disaster proceeding according to plan, which isn’t so much good news as expected news) is that we have nearly all the costume bits and hand props, and a good deal of the set dressing as well. Miraculous, actually, when you think that there are two and a half weeks left before opening. Fifteen rehearsals? Something like that. Our first Dress rehearsal is two weeks from yesterday. Except that we’re doing an early Dress for the photographer, but that doesn’t count.

Most important is that we have The Hat. Eliza’s hat, that is. Somehow, it’s not Pygmalion without Eliza’s hat. Eliza isn’t Eliza without it. And it’s such a wonderful hat, really magnificently shabby, or do I mean shabbily magnificent? Shabbily magnificent. You can see why Higgins wants to try it on, and why Mrs. Pearce won’t let him. It’s a whale of a hat. If I were worried about the off-book disaster (and in case it isn’t clear, I’m not worried in the slightest), I would be reassured by The Hat. Any show with a hat like this is bound to be good.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tonight we are off-book. We’ll see how that goes. We are easing into it with Act One tonight and Act Two tomorrow; I suspect there will be some starting and stopping. Well, a lot of starting and stopping. A tremendous amount.

Jane, our Dear Director, is very keen on running through as much as possible in order. That is sometimes an annoyance for those of us who aren’t in very many scenes, as we don’t get so many nights off. On the other hand, she’s very good about letting us go early if we aren’t needed until the end. Some directors are very big on Giving Notes: at the end of rehearsal everybody gathers and the Director goes down a whole list, something for everybody, you were a little late on your entrance, you need to pick up the pace in the early scene, can you emphasize how tired you are in that last scene, on and on. Jane doesn’t go in for that: a word in your ear in private is her way. And a very good way, too.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Your Humble Blogger, as there is no particular reason for Gentle Readers to know, is a man with a moustache.

—Darling, there’s a man at the door with a moustache.
—Tell him I’ve already got one.
Boom Boom

I started growing a moustache as soon as I could, or in truth a few months sooner. I never looked forward to shaving; I looked forward to not shaving. Sadly, the beard thing never happened. In addition to coming in patchy, a moustache suits my face, a beard does not. I did grow a goatee—an echt goatee, not one of those imperials that are called goatees these days (although as a descriptivist, I am obliged to concede that since nobody other than YHB has worn what I would call a goatee in decades, and since the word is actually used by actual English speakers to refer to any beard (with or without a moustache) that doesn’t connect to the sidewhiskers, communication requires that the things called goatees are goatees, curse them all)—where was I? Oh, yes, I grew a goatee for a few months, for comic effect, but as it neither looked particularly good nor improved my morning ablutions, I gave up and shaved it off. My beard comes in dark and impressive down my throat, which is exactly where it should not be.

But the purpose of this note is not to gripe about my facial-hair situation, except to the extent that its purpose is to gripe about my facial-hair situation, as will be seen. You see, I am a man with a moustache. I like having a moustache, I think of myself as having a moustache, and for twenty years or so, the only times I have shaved my upper lip have been for the stage. As I shaved my upper lip on Friday morning.

The first set of publicity photos are set for Wednesday, so there was a terminus for the moustache, and my experience is that it is wise to give the raw skin a few days sunlight and air before starting with the greasepaint. Well, pancake. Nobody actually uses greasepaint anymore. And spirit gum; my mad Hrungarian has whiskers, as Shaw requires. Not the fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers I think would be perfect for him, but I really don’t have time to deal with fluffy and luxurious sidewhiskers as I make the eight-minute change to Rich Alfie. Particularly as our Dear Director is trying to pick up the pace everywhere, so I may have only a seven-minute change…

It’s Whiskers that’s the problem. Alfie could have a moustache, but Whiskers must have a moustache, and therefore Alfie must not have a moustache, for the purposes of differentiating the two. And as it’s difficult for an actor with a moustache to play a character without a moustache (at least on stage), YHB must shave the lip for six weeks or so. Which is all right. Of all the inconveniences I have inflicted on myself to be in this show, the shaving ranks very low. Even counting washing out the washbasin.

However, it has been dispiriting how few people have noticed the change. My Best Reader noticed, of course, as did (eventually) a G.R. who was houseguest at the time. My Perfect Non-Reader when prodded, felt sure that I had shaved it off the previous day or even earlier. Co-workers failed to notice, or at least to comment, although many of my co-workers won’t see me until Monday. I had lengthy conversations with four of my Perfect Non-Reader’s friends’ parents, and short ones with two more, and none of them seemed to notice. Of the couple next door, the fellow gave me the business about it but his wife did not (although that doesn’t mean he noticed first). It seems in the mirror to be a radical change in appearance. If it isn’t, if it’s not something that people notice is missing, then maybe YHB is not, after all, a man with a moustache, just a man who happens to have a moustache?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Nothing new to report about the Pygmalion process today, since Friday night’s rehearsal was cancelled. Thank goodness for that! It was my Perfect Non-Reader’s birthday, and the idea of getting into the car to go rehearse after the day we had… well, it was a Good Thing that I didn’t have to.

So without any new amusing anecdotes from the rehearsal process, I’ll just ramble about the plot of the play, and the problems with it. Which aren’t actually problems, although they do look like problems from most angles.

Look: Pickering is a rich, well-connected bachelor who can wangle invitations to Society not only for himself but for a young woman he has befriended but who nobody else knows. First of all, I don’t think so. The King could get his girlfriends invited to certain kinds of events, but not into Society. But fine. Here’s this Pickering fellow, away for many years, comes back and dives back into Society. Remember: rich, well-connected bachelor. He is going to be the center of gossip. Everyone will know where he is living (with that impossible Higgins fellow!) and who he has been seen with (they were at the Shakespeare exhibition at Earls Court with a nobody of a girl, and Clara Eynsford-Hill says…). Everybody presumably knows Henry Higgins and his profession—his mother is clearly well-connected enough, and he gets an invitation in his own right to a Society gathering, despite being not quite entirely a gentleman, that is, in that he takes money for a service like a merchant or a dancing-master. Fine. I don’t quite understand how Professor Higgins got an invitation, but he did, and clearly everybody knows some American heiress or other who he schooled in received-pronunciation English. And now Pickering arrives with this girl, certainly a beautiful girl, but wouldn’t everyone just assume that she is some tart Pickering picked up in India (or Lord knows where, all those colonial places being the same, really) and Higgins has taught how to speak? Isn’t that the obvious conclusion—far more likely than that Pickering has come across some Hungarian royal by-blow?

But here’s the point: the play isn’t about whether Higgins can pass Eliza off as a duchess. That question is answered halfway through the play, is not a matter of any great suspense and is never questioned afterward. You could imagine a play where that is the main question: either the play would end with the triumph at the ball or the scenes after the ball would be driven by somebody blackmailing Eliza or some loose end of the imposture coming unraveled. This play is nothing like that. This play is about whether Eliza and Higgins can be friends (or lovers, I suppose). And they can’t.

There’s a moment in The History Boys that has become famous, when Hector has been caught fondling the testicles of his students. He tells the Headmaster, “The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.” Hector, as is unsurprising, has confused the eroticism of the body for that of the soul. But call it a romantic act, and it’s terribly accurate, or accurately terrible. The play is about that kind of romance, and its consequences. Most of the play is Eliza’s extrication from that transmission of knowledge, now that Higgins has nothing more to teach her. Now she is no longer a student, no longer a flower-seller, no longer a false princess, she has to be something else. But what?

As G.B. Shaw writes in a magnificent and lengthy essay that follows the play, despite everybody claiming she is disqualified from working in a flower shop, she in fact could do so very reasonably. If Henry Higgins had any sort of connections with retail places, he could get her a job and an apartment, and there she is. Pickering could get her a job in a bank or even in the military as a secretary, keeping the appointment book and so on—make her Vivie Warren, in fact, despite not having a proper education. Or Mrs. Pearce, bless her, could find her a position with one of the commercial establishments the house comes in contact with, or with an employment agency, where she could be a magnificent asset, impressing both the workers and the toffs. And, of course, Rich Alfie with his three thousand a year (call a pound in 1900 a hundred dollars now, for an income of $300,000) makes even that prospect unnecessary. Like her imposture, her unemployability is a red herring, or rather a platform for Shaw’s magnificent and vicious social commentary, but not a real problem for the characters.

No, the real problem is that the two have, will-they or nill-they, a relationship based on the erotically-charged transmission of knowledge, and that transmission has ended. Higgins can’t quite see it, and probably never will. Of course, he probably will never realize that he has come to the end of what he has to teach her, that he really doesn’t know anything about “Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art” that she couldn’t learn better from someone else. She does know that. And she knows that as long as she stays in that relationship she will always be smaller than he is, and will never transmit her own knowledge to someone else.

I think, and this is just me, that the scene after the ball (when Eliza’s beauty becomes murderous, perhaps the best stage direction in the history of theater) is when Eliza realizes that she has nothing more to learn from him, and that he has no intention of letting her grow. He’s incapable of conceiving of it, in fact. She can’t really imagine getting out from under his shadow. Both there and at Mrs. Higgins, she responds by cutting him down to her size, but eventually she lands on the idea of teaching, of being the bigger one in a new relationship. “You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me,” she says.

Now, Mr. Shaw, in that what-really-happened essay, makes it clear that she does not carry through on her threat to teach, but instead learns (alongside Freddie) how to operate a flower shop, and eventually makes a success at it. She remains close to Higgins, in a way (there is a wonderful and revealing bit in that sequel—wait, I’ll quote:

But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.

Or, in Alan Bennett’s more economical dialogue, the transmission of knowledge is still and always an erotic act.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The costumes are coming together. I love costumes. It’s what I like best about acting, dressing up in somebody else’s clothes. Alfie, of course, has Poor Alfie and Rich Alfie. We’re pretty much set for both, now, I believe. Poor Alfie is in trousers, a striped shirt, a leather waistcoat, and a ridiculous dustman’s hat—a brimless black bowl with a long flap behind to keep the crud out of the collar. Rich Alfie, of course, is in his wedding suit: spongebag trousers and black tails. We don’t have anything around my neck at present; we’ll either have to come up with a cravat or a necktie with a nice pin, either of which are easy enough.

The rest of the menfolk were also easy, really. There are the cockneys and the toffs, and each have a look, but really, it’s not all that different from our own kind of clothes. No tights, no breeches, no tunics. Trousers, shirts, jackets. There are cummerbunds, I suppose, which most of us have only worn at weddings, but other than that the differences are the shapes of the things.

Women have a much harder time, of course, because they are women, and women’s clothing has always given them a harder time. The stage isn’t much different from real life like that. Stage dresses are usually easier to take on and off than real dresses, as much of the hook-and-eye crap is fake and backed with Velcro. But it’s got to be the right length, and the right width, and the right color, and have appropriate shoes… audiences notice it when it’s done badly. And they like it when it’s done well.

Pickering, actually, seems to have the toughest changes. Very quick, with layers of things. Eliza, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to have that much of a problem, as she has the intermission to get into her ball gown, and then the next scene she’s still wearing it, and then she has a nice long stretch offstage while we all blather on. Pickering, though, if he’s not going to look like a total slob, has to have a new outfit in every scene (except the after-the-ball one), and he’s in practically every scene, often on at the beginning of the scene and the end. Higgins, too, I suppose, although it matters less if he looks like a slob. I wonder if the addition of the Eliza-and-Freddie bit between the after-the-ball scene at Wimpole Street and the final scene is to allow Higgins to change clothes. Although the addition of the training scene just makes a gratuitous change at the end of the first act. Ah, well.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So. As Gentle Readers will be aware, this production of Pygmalion will have the Pyggie Ball. I was originally against it. My version of the play (that is, I think, the version published before the first production (which was, if I am not mistaken, in German translation) rather than the script that was used in the first London productions) has only five scenes: Covent Garden, Wimpole Street, Mrs. Higgins’ses at-home, Wimpole Street after the ball, Mrs. Higgin’ses’sses the next morning. The version we are playing, which is based on the London playscript I believe, adds three short scenes: before the at-home there’s a short scene of Higgins training Eliza, after the after-the-ball scene there’s a short scene of Eliza and Freddie (during which Eliza does not sing “show me”), and plumb spang in the middle is the Pyggie Ball.

As I say, I was against including those scenes, but now I think that the Pyggie Ball is a Good Thing, on the whole. It’s visually attractive, you can slip in the Eynsford-Hills, which is nice, and it underlines the imbecility of the entire class thing. “Silly people don’t know their own silly business” Higgins says later, and he is utterly right. For all that they place such emphasis on the markers of class, they don’t speak properly themselves, nor do they recognize those markers correctly for themselves. They have to rely on Nepommuck—and Nepommuck is dishonest, playing the game for his own purposes, and is, besides, a fool. Insofar as the play is an attack on the class system (and it is), the Ball shows the inconsistency, incoherence and instability of that system. So that’s all right, d’y’see?

Well, and the thing about the Ball is that we waltz. Dear Jane, our director, has chosen the Liebeslieder, Strauss Op. 114, a lovely piece of music if a trifle difficult to dance to. And most of us are not dancers. Your Humble Blogger is not a dancer, although I can waltz a little, so I am well up on most of the crowd. We will have (unless there are changes…) five couples; of those ten persons, I believe three of us have waltzed on a dance floor. I count myself in that, knowing that there are some Gentle Readers who are right now snorting through their noses at the thought that what I do could properly be called waltzing, but think of this: seven of us have less experience than I have.

And our Dear Director—let me make this clear, I adore her, and yield to no-one in my adoration, but a dance teacher, she ain’t. Ah, well. It’ll all work out. In fact, I suspect it will be gorgeous. But it will take some doing.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, and the news from Thursday night’s rehearsal is that I need to rethink Rich Alfie. There are two problems—well, no, I tell a lie, there are three problems. Problem the first is that Rich Alfie is too different from Poor Alfie. The audience need to recognize Rich Alfie as just Poor Alfie in a different outfit, or a different set of circumstances. Problem the second is that I’m coming in far too hostile, which puts the audience off. The audience has to like Alfie; they like Poor Alfie, and need to like Rich Alfie just as much. Problem the third is that it has to be funnier.

The good thing about having a director that I adore (and, perhaps more to the point, trust) is that I don’t really have to worry about it. I tried one thing, it didn’t work, now I’ll try something else. It’s much better than sticking to the thing that doesn’t work until the audience comes in. If I had a director that I didn’t trust, well, I’d be sitting here today coming up with all the reasons that my original stuff was better, and sulking about having to do her stinky way that nobody was going to like. Then I would do it badly, no doubt, because I wouldn’t really believe it would work, and it wouldn’t work because I was doing it badly, and the show would suck, and everything would be lousy. This way is much better.

Why do I trust our director so much? Well, I’ve bought tickets to three or four shows that she has directed, now, and enjoyed them all. That counts for quite a lot. I’ve also been in two shows that she has directed, and several times in those shows she made decisions that I would never have made, and they worked. That counts for even more. Sometimes those decisions have been about my characters, and sometimes they have been about other people’s, and sometimes they’ve just been about the set or the sound. Heck, sometimes they’ve been about the choice of the show in the first place. The point is that she has good judgment, and knowing that makes everything easier on me.

Of course, knowing that my own judgment is not particularly good also makes it easier.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, and we’re going through the scenes we blocked last week, right? This is the second time through. I have my own blocking scrawled on my sides, but of course I don’t have anybody else’s written down. That’s their business, and Jane’s, and Laura’s.

So. I make my entrance as Rich Alfie, and I come in and look around, and I think to myself Alfie, my boy, I think, wasn’t Higgins on the other side last time? I’m all back-to-front. I am still going DL when it says DL and DR when it says DR, and it all works, but I have Higgins on one side and Mrs. Higgins on the other, and it’s the wrong side. Or is it? Am I remembering it wrong? Which one was in the sofa? Which one was in the chair? Nobody else seems to think there’s anything different.

I still, stubbornly, think that they’ve switched it. And it works this way just fine. Maybe better. I couldn’t tell, because I was so thrown by it.

This is, by the way, utterly different from the blocking being off during a performance. During a performance, I can’t let myself be thrown by a little thing like two people switching chairs. There’s too much else to be thrown by. And by that point, I hope to hell I’ll know if we’ve screwed up the blocking, and I’ll roll with it. Lord knows I’ve done it before. But at this point, when we’re still working it all out, and I’m trying to decide what lines to pitch to which people, and when to stretch and when to stamp my little feet, and I could just swear he was on my right when I came in.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We went through Poor Alfie again last night. It’s going very well, I think. The blocking is great, the interaction is coming, the rhythm is starting to happen. The only thing holding us back, now, is these damn books in our hands.

Actors, like people, are different one to another. This makes being in shows interesting and fun. And, as with people generally, frustrating and annoying.

This is an awkward part of rehearsals, in between getting the blocking and getting off-book. For anyone reading this that doesn’t know the term, off-book means doing the scenes without holding on to the playscript. There is a rehearsal designated in the schedule as off-book, and anyone who still needs to hold onto the script after that is subject to scorn and derision. Before that, though, there are two very different approaches. One school has the actor focusing intently on the script, writing down any blocking, directorial note or dialect cue in detail, giving a bit of shape to the line deliveries and only the tiniest hint of the physical business. Actors with this habit tend to develop characters and scenes slowly, but when they are at last forced off-book, they know their lines and their blocking comprehensively, and are ready to devote full attention to the scene.

The other school has its adherents nearly off-book as soon as they can possibly manage it, glancing at the script only when they go blank. These actors spend this set of rehearsals trying out line readings, trying out bits of business, playing with as much energy as they can. Actors with this habit tend to develop their characters and scenes quickly but change their minds a lot as they try out this and that. When they set down their books and play with empty hands (or their hand-props), these actors tend to wander all over the place, getting their lines and their blocking only mostly right.

Both are perfectly good, and both are roads to good performances, or even great ones. Or lousy ones, I suppose. Neither is a guarantee of success or failure, although if somebody inclined to the one suppresses that inclination, it is as likely to result in failure as any path I can think of. The problem, and it’s not so much a problem as an annoyance, comes when a scene is between two actors of different schools. Then, during this (briefish) period between blocking and off-book, the one will be trying out this and that and hollering random words all over the stage, and the other will be standing stock still in exactly the correct place reading exactly the correct words off the page. This is perfectly normal, and excruciating.

Fortunately, Higgins, Pickering and I are all of the second school. This is probably the more irritating group in a general way, but for our Poor Alfie scene together, we’re more or less evenly matched.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I had a chance to work with our dialect coach at last night’s rehearsal. Yes, we have a coach to make sure everybody’s accent comes from the right class—not the specifics within a mile or two, but in a show where everybody is talking about accents, they had better not suck. Alfie is brought up in Hounslow, in the west of London, and his mother is Welsh, and Higgins can hear all of that in the way he says Morning, Governor, I’ve come about a very serious matter. But the audience just needs to believe that he’s working class, that is accent, like his clothes and his gestures, are appropriate to one of the deserving poor.

Now, I have a good ear for accents, if I say so myself. My feeling is that the mimetic gift is something people have or don’t have. Some people have to learn the words individually, which takes a lot of work. I can usually mimic an accent without breaking it down into its constituent sounds. Which is lovely, but the problem is that it means I get very lazy. I just imitate in my head somebody, or a combination of somebodies. My Alfie is a bit of Stanley Holloway (of course), a bit of Ken Shabby, and a bit of Lauren Cooper. And a bit of making it up as I go along. Which get me most of the way there. But to get the rest of the way, there’s the dialect coach.

The little stuff (which is still very important) is just somebody to listen to each word and correct the stuff that sounds wrong. I have trouble with I ask you, which should be something like oyawskye, and with arrangement with its broad long a, and with clothes and clothing, neither of which have anything like a th (pardon me for not using the IPA; I never learned it; remember about me being very lazy?) and so on. Try, for instance, doing a cockney accent with glottal stopps instead of ts on Betty bought a bit of butter; “Bah!” she said, “This butter’s bitter! If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter.” So she bought a bit of butter, better than the bitter butter, put the butter in her batter, made the bitter batter better, better batter bitter butter, baiter, booter, oh, the hell with it.

The big thing is not the individual words, though. The big thing is the tone. The cockney tone is very nasal, much more nasal, actually, than I do it by instinct. I learned, over the years of being in shows and so on, to speak from my chest. To speak correctly, I would say. But then, so much of speaking cockney is speaking incorrectly. As our dialect coach put it, when I’m getting the words right, and even the melodies right, but the tone is wrong, I sound like an educated person putting on a cockney accent. Which isn’t quite sounding like Dick Van Dyke, but it’s not much better.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

YHB was thinking, today, about the differences between Rich Alfie and Poor Alfie. Poor Alfie comes in with the potential of causing real trouble. It’s a plot point: before we can really settle down to Eliza’s education, we have to know that the Old Life won’t be rearing it’s head. As you might expect it to, if you didn’t know the show. In fact, that would be the more usual sort of thing, with the battle between her Old Life and her New Life, reconciling the two, blah blah blah, we’ve seen that movie before. No, Shaw isn’t interested in that as a character study. He wants Eliza thrown into the new life with a clean break. Poor Alfie’s scene, where he is bought off with a five pound note, makes that clear.

Rich Alfie, on the other hand, is closer to comic relief. It’s pointed comic relief—everything Shaw does is pointed, even when it’s dull—but it isn’t necessary from the plot point of view. Oh, I suppose it clears up whether Eliza will be forced to stay with Higgins, but there are so many options available to her that I doubt any theatergoer, even if unfamiliar with the play in any of its forms, would get to Rich Alfie’s scene with any question about that.

So he serves different purposes in the two scenes. And he has also changed quite a bit. He’s had a harrowing experience, and although Shaw’s interminable who-does-what-afterwards essay indicates that he recovers from his sudden prosperity, I am not playing it that way, and I don’t think you need to. I think Alfie really is broken by middle-class morality, and he spends the rest of his years, probably not many of them, straightjacketed and morose. “Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their tip; and I’ll look on helpless, and envy them.” That’s one of the lines that’s been cut from our playing script, but that’s my image of his life after the play.

During the play, however, he’s still kicking against the pricks, which is what makes the scene funny. Or, rather, he’s caught between his rage and his helplessness, and he’s wearing respectability like a choking necktie. My favorite bits are where he tries, pathetically, to adopt the middle-class mannerisms that are now incumbent on him. I’m itching to get my hands on the hat. That’ll be the real focus. What do you do with a top hat? He won’t have worn one in his life (not whilst sober, anyway, although he may have pinched one from a pre-dawn staggering Algie or Rupert at some point), and he’ll vague know about taking it off indoors and tipping it to ladies, and all, but it’ll all be new. And besides, he’s got to keep it clean and tidy for the wedding. If I can manage it, that hat will be his cage and handcuffs and his red rubber nose, all in one.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the interesting things, to me, about the rehearsal process is how different people are, one to another. Some clown around, getting giggles from each other, and some are very serious, watching everything for fear of missing anything. Some people constantly voice suggestions, for their own part and for others as well as for props, furniture and set dressing. Some, well, don’t.

Anyway, as long-time Gentle Readers will remember, as part of my method for learning lines, I type all my scenes into the computer and print them out. It’s not a common trick; writing the lines out in longhand is an old favorite, but I converted to digital when I came back to playing parts a few years ago. As a result, at the rehearsals themselves, I’m clutching letter-sized sheets. When I played three different roles in The Man Who Came to Dinner, I printed them on different color sheets: Prof. Metz was, I believe, on green, Beverly on pink and Banjo on white. For Valmont, they were all on white. This time, I have printed both of Alfie’s scenes on blue (too dark a blue, as it turned out) and Whiskers on a lovely salmon. It makes it easier for me to grab the right scene as I’m working. I suspect I will re-print Alfie’s pages, probably with Poor Alfie on white and Rich Alfie on green, because I may have difficulty reading the blue pages, and besides, there were typos.

Normally, the rest of the cast will have playbooks, which are, oh, seven-by-five flimsy books, often staple-bound. In this show, Our Dear Director took a published copy, cut it up and pasted it up (actual cutting, actual pasting, not the digital stuff) and photocopied it for everyone, so we all have letter-sized scripts. At the read-through I saw a few three-ring binders, some binder clips, some in folders or pocket folders. I was (I noticed) the only one who was not reading along; I read my scenes, of course, and then spent the rest of the time listening and watching and making notes.

Now that we’ve started blocking, we see the difference between the three-ring binder actors, who carry the whole play with them for every scene, and the sheaf-of-sheets actors, who carry only the current scene at any moment. Our Higgins is a sheaf man; he’s using the photocopies but he stashes away the one’s he doesn’t need right away, to free himself up to gesticulate. He has lovely hands, our Higgins does. I suspect that his script will be a mangled pile before he gets off book, but then, so will mine. But I can print another copy.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

Posted by Vardibidian at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)