Frickin A! Gotta watch these early morning posts. I was only writing for 30 minutes, and when I went to publish, Blogger had kicked me out to the sign in screen and I lost the friggin post, again! F#@%. I don’t know why that happens in the early morning, it’s not a problem during "normal hours."
Anyhow -- Take two, written in Wordperfect and then pasted into Blogger:
I think there’s gonna be a lot of these early morning insomnia posts in the future. I’m freaking out (just a little) because my massage business isn’t picking up as quickly as I imagined it would–But I’ve always had an active imagination. *sigh* But I’ve only been in business two weeks, and I’ve gotten 4 new clients. Actually, 6 if you count the two upcoming appointments I have for the third week. I guess that’s not too shabby in the overall scope of things.
I’ve also been thinking about my character Suzanne and the rehearsal process in general. As I stated in my last post, I’ve realized that I haven’t jumped into my character the way the other actors have: For example, there’s one scene where Suzanne turns around and sees the ghost. I’ve been attempting to play that honestly, where I turn around and become speechless at the sight, very quietly. Then on Thursday night when the other Suzanne was there shadowing me, she was playing the fear way up, gasping, breathing loudly, moaning with fear, that sort of thing. Putting a lot more into it than I had been.
And Stan the director has given me a few specific character notes: Suzanne follows Judy around like a puppy dog. She’s not really as smart as she thinks she is. She’s very giggly. But until this weekend, I really didn’t know how to connect to them or play them.
My dad was listening to Lake Wobegone with Garrison Keiller on the radio on Saturday. In one skit there were two teenage girls, dying to audition for Mr. World (who they had mistaken Keiller for.) The characters were portrayed as totally over-eager, over-excited puppy-dogs the way they spoke, and I realized I could use a similar portrayal for Suzanne. It suddenly occurred to me that I’ve been attempting to play Suzanne too honestly and earnestly for the farce style of the play. The characters are meant to be simple and silly.
I felt at first that my loss of understanding at how to create Suzanne until now was because I was never taught how to make character choices in my recent classes; my teacher simply told me how to play the character, not the reasoning behind those choices. But that’s not necessarily true. It may just be that I haven’t learned how to use that particular set of acting tools yet, for farce, because I’ve done well in the past understanding how to create more honest characters, I believe.
The same thing happened in my acting class a few semesters ago: My scene partner and I were doing The DMV Tyrant by Christopher Durang, I was the DMV Lady. The teacher told us it needed to be in a characture-ish Saturday Night Live style. But neither of us were quite sure what to do with the scene or how to make scene work well until my partner’s friend came to watch us rehearse. He’d worked on the scene in one of his classes previously, and gave us some tips, and then my partner and I realized, "Oh, that’s what we can do with this." and ran with it from there.
I’m still learning farce comedy’s tool set, even though I know I’m good at comedy. I’ve always gotten great feedback on the comedic scenes I’ve worked over the years, both in laughter and in comments.
So I’m looking forward to tonight’s rehearsal so I can try out the new stuff I’ve discovered from Stan’s direction, from the other Suzanne, and from that radio skit.
And I’ve also realized that there are actually two weeks of rehearsals still between now and Oct. 7th, not just one. YEE-HAW!
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