Category: Backstage

I’m working on a scene for Michael S., who is taking a directing class at the Studio Theatre. I’m doing a 5-minute scene from Jon Klein’s Dimly Perceived Threats to the System with scene partner Amal. Klein’s play is a dark comedy that swings the Hauser family from dysfunctional reality to frightening fantasy and back again, sometimes in the course of one page of script.

In my scene, Amal’s Christine is called into the office of the school mental health counselor, Mr. Sykes. A conventional upbraiding turns ugly: an imagined Mr. Sykes contemplates electroshock and desktop lobotomy with Frankensteinian glee.

Michael’s assignment for this phase of the class is characterization, so we’ve done a fair amount of table work before putting the scene on its feet. (Or floor work, in Michael’s case: he likes to work lying on the deck.) We did an improv in which, instead of the understanding Mr. Sykes, I became a harpy of a department secretary, chewing out Christine for what she’s done (she spit on three students’ baloney sandwiches because she’s having her own food issues).

Now we’re actually working the scene, and in realistic beats Michael has me moving about, leaning on the furniture, that sort of thing. Let’s hope the scene doesn’t turn out the way the last one did. There’s no storage available, so it’s pack-your-own props: I’m schlepping an extra jacket and a Makita cordless power drill back and forth on the subway.

Since the last time I was in the conservatory space upstairs, the Studio has completed the reconfiguration of its space, and now we enter through the main lobby on 14th Street. I still feel a little like I did when I was taking a class at Woolly earlier this year, working in the classroom while the mainstage production was being rehearsed in the next room over, that is, like the Bud Light gate crasher guy surrounded by all these professionals. But this evening we worked from 6:30 to a bit before 8:00, so I was on my way out through the main lobby as the house-opening announcement for The Long Christmas Ride Home played on the PA. That was cool.

And a really big one it will have to be. Elden Street Players, a community theater located nearby in Herndon, is scrambling to purchase its performance and shop space, which its landlord has put on the market.

Michelle and I met early at the theater yesterday to run our scene a few times before class. The Woolly Mammoth classroom was in use, so we camped out in the lobby to work the section of the Gentleman Caller scene where Jim entices Laura to sit on the floor with him. The residue of a (hopefully successful) Halloween party was all over the lobby: DJ equipment, ghostie and ghoulie decorations, even a few crumbs of broken glass. The way the building is set up, the lower lobby is actually out of a lot of the traffic flow to the box office, rehearsal space, and classroom; and there are a few chairs that we could make use of.

I had taken my glasses off, so I can’t be sure, but at one point I believe that Howard Shalwitz walked through and checked out the scene, no doubt assessing the decorations that needed to be struck. But I couldn’t help thinking that what could be going through his mind was, “Why are there two people sitting on my lobby floor making heavy weather of Tennessee Williams?”

For the remainder of the month, I’m taking a short class from Mitchell Hébert through Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s education program. My scene partner Michelle and I are working on the gentleman caller scene from Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Part of the assigned prep work is journaling the process: we’re writing both about the life of these two characters, as well as what’s going on with us as we do the work—what barriers and fears are we fighting through? So most of my introspection about the class is going into the paper journal, rather than into the blogosphere. But that’s okay: the point of this journaling exercise is to get at messy stuff, stuff not for public consumption. And, considering reactions to some earlier posts of mine, it’s probably just as well that I keep most of my rehearsal hall thoughts to myself.

That said, I’m enjoying the class. With the exception of vipassana meditation, most of the techniques are familiar to me. What I’ve been missing for a while is the imposed structure of applying them to the preparation of a role.

So the show that I just finished, The Gold Lunch, is a 12-minute monologue that comes at the end of an evening of shorter and longer one-acts. For an 8:00 curtain for the first show, I come on at about 10:25, but I like to get to the theater for the first curtain. So I spend a lot of time backstage. Survival tools: a fat collection of Raymond Chandler novels, an iPod loaded with all the episodes of David Terry and Michael Kraskin’s Catalogue of Ships, my water bottle, and (once the penultimate play—a version of Chekhov’s The Brute well-played for broad laughts—starts) lots of pacing back in the construction shop.

After the opening performance to a small house on Thursday, I had my doubts about how well the show would be received. But Friday’s house was with me from the second line, and that night I had one of those rare audience rushes—just everything was clicking, and all I had to do was tell the story.

Leta and I are tweaking the short monologue The Gold Lunch that I will be doing at the one-act festival two weekends from now. Once we got past some initial flabbiness on my part (Leta would say, “You’re not connected to this. You sound like Jaclyn Smith on Charlie’s Angels.”) we found a groove for it.

What is still difficult, what we are working and reworking like a fussy passage in an oil painting, is the opening 60 seconds. I’m giving this from atop the customary 3-level podium (John B. is building it) all lit up like Oscar night. This is the piece’s expository passage, where the Medalist (as we’re calling Ron Carlson’s anonymous narrator) has to sell the audience on the idea that Eating Lunch with Your Ex-Wife is now a medal sport in the Olympics. Once he gets us through that section, he can go on (from a set dressed with a lovely tile table and chairs that we found in the theater lobby) to show how he won the gold.

But it’s that opening minute (out of maybe 13:00, tops) that is killing us. Leta has tried suggesting any number of images—Lou Gehrig’s farewell at Yankee Stadium, the kiss-and-cry area just off the ice at a figure skating competition, Sally Field’s Oscar acceptance speech, getting a mic shoved in your face by Mary Hart at the Emmys—to motivate what happens. We’ll find something that works, eventually.

I found a suitably smudgy recording of the national anthem to play for the opening music, but Leta kiboshed my recording of Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” for curtain call. We’re going to try some Blossom Dearie instead.