Commedia dell'Arte

More true confessions. There is such an awesome sorrow in my personal and professional life right now that I feel my darkness bleeding on my fellows in rehearsal. I am like Pig Pen, except that the cloud that follows me around is not made of dust and dirt, but of bitterness and heartbreak; anger and confusion. The particular weather systems that have given birth to this cloud will remain veiled here. I am not interested in psycho-cyber exhibitionism. This is a blog post about my work on the character called Katarina in Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew. But I cannot write honestly about this journey anymore without getting honest about the intense interplay between my life and my work.

This interplay is at the center of the actor's art. The "method-ists" would have us make a temple in which to worship it, fanning the flames with which to cook the connections between our lives and art, making our own psyches into narcissistic offerings to "emotional truth". There has been a backlash of late against psychological realism because of the excesses of some mid-twentieth century teachers. There are many expressions of this backlash: the popularity of the Lecoq school and its descendants, renewed interest in commedia dell'Arte, and a variety of po-mo academic approaches which regard any attention to the emotional lives of characters and actors as irrelevant at best and self-indulgent at worst. Some in this backlash would have us believe that the actor's personal life should be sealed off from the thing he creates, creating a false objectivism more suitable to the hierarchical needs of auteur directors. I love many aspects of this backlash (see my blog posts on the commedia workshop I took with Antonio Fava as evidence), but I am equally mindful that the actor IS the art of acting. What you see on stage - whether it be in Chekhov, Shakespeare or Goldoni - is a creature with a beating heart and a mind full of memories and dreams, a soul full of victory and despair.

The truth, of course, is as Stanislavsky has taught us: somewhere in the middle, and more one way than the other depending on the play at hand. If I know anything about acting, it's this: it resists dogma from all quarters, it is not an art of absolutes, it is eternally malleable and quintessentially personal. It cannot be spoken of meaningfully in generalities. It requires a specific focus which names and defines an event and all the players in it. Thus this blog.

I am a teacher of psychological realism, and so I have a front-row seat from which to observe all the ways my tender young charges navigate the connections they feel between the characters they are working on and the drama of their own lives. To say that an actor's own anguish or joy should not effect her work on a role is to engage in a kind of willfull blindness and aesthetic repression. It reminds me of those brutal Victorian child-rearing pamphlets in which children were beaten into a kind expressionless obedience, and their feelings were regarded as insubordinate nuisances. My work as a teacher of acting - once the class reaches an advanced stage and an atmosphere of trust is established - revolves around helping my students be sensitive to, but not overwhelmed by, the feelings their work unlocks. Sometimes my work is in pushing them towards empathy, drawing more direct lines between their experience and their character's. Sometimes it is in damping down those connections, lest the performance becomes a morass of personal release. And sometimes it is about helping a student face the fear they feel at the journey their character may take them on.

Such is the juncture I stand in with Kate. Perhaps it's not fear I feel exactly. Perhaps it is that I so identify with her raging state at the outset that I resist the transformation our production is attempting. And yet I have described rehearsal several times recently as "my refuge". I am deeply aware of using my journey in this play as an escape, a way to forget for a moment the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I am aware of channelling a feminine rage I am all too familiar with through Kate early on in the play, and of feeling grateful for the relief that channel affords me. I am aware of the way her journey into laughter changes me, lightens me, and how I suddenly find myself chatting and joking with my fellows, after having entered rehearsal in a shroud of gloom. I am aware of a deep tenderness in my kisses with Tom, and I find myself inadvertently hanging on him during breaks. I am aware of the hole he is filling temporarily. Strangely, I am aware of an equitable darkness in him, and some kind of secret sharing of off-stage misery, completely unspoken between us, fueling our connection none the less. Tom too sets himself apart in rehearsal: quiet, mysterious, melancholy.

What else can I do as an actor but bring who I am today into the concoction of influences we call rehearsal? Should I resist the catalytic response my performance has to the dark energy I bring to it? Should I cling to my personal despair and be unmoved by Kate's transformation? Or should I be grateful for the blessings of a creative life, in which the vehicle for my salvation - Katarina Minola - is simultaneously a gift I offer to my community? Is this not a variant of what Grotowski had in mind when watching Cieslak in The Constant Prince: the sacred actor offering himself as a sacrifice?

Okay, so it's a bit hubristic to make that comparison. But I remember when I first read Towards A Poor Theatre about 25 years ago, how that idea leapt out at me as true, and how I felt ashamed of my own spiritual yearning provoked by the idea of the sacred actor. I am ashamed of that yearning no longer. It's the only way this bitch of a life makes any sense to me: as a spiritual calling like the rest, requiring personal sacrifice, devotion to others and service to high ideals.

Perhaps the degree of my identification with Kate can be summed up in an exchange I had recently with a reporter from a gay weekly here in Philadelphia. He was invited by the theatre to interview several cast members for a piece he is writing on our all-male production. "How is it playing a woman?" he asked me, in the first of what I assume will be an endless iteration of that query. "I thought it was going to be a big deal, " I replied, "but it isn't. I don't actually feel like I'm playing a woman. I feel like I'm playing a person: a person in a very tough situation who is transformed by love."

May it be true for me as it is for Kate.

Okay, true confession time. I'm dieting for this play. Why? Two words: bike shorts. You know, those tight, lycra things that go from mid-thigh to waist. It's what I wear in the play, under the, well, you'll see, won't you? I wondered about my vanity today. Is it unmanly of me to worry about what my ass will look like in bike shorts? Is playing a woman making me think about my body in new and unusual ways? I actually began dieting before I learned about the bike shorts. But playing Kate was the initial motivation. I'm playing a women, I thought, I want to be smaller. Then I'll be all cut and sexy for the spring time. For the record, I've lost eight pounds. Thank you South Beach and YMCA. But would I have dieted if I had been cast as Petruchio? Grumio? Hmmm . . .

It's all women on top in our all-male production of the sexist play: director, stage manager, fight choreographer, literary manager/assistant director and managing director - all female. Maybe if we get attacked from the feminist fringe for one choice or another, we can point to the assembly of women in charge and say "It was their idea!"

I continue to ruminate over the "actor" issue. I mean the "actor" I play as part of the the company of actors who arrive to perform the play. I know we only see "him" for a minute or two - but who is he? And why isn't he me? We explored this choice recently and made some adjustments with the "I want to play Petruchio" conceit. Now, I'm just a sullen, moody actor who has to be massaged into playing Kate. Wait - maybe it is me . . .

Griffen came to rehearsal recently - another childcare snafu - but it was fun to have him. He went backstage exploring and the first thing he asked was, "How do the actors get back and forth?" He couldn't find the crossover right away and was concerned. I was so proud - my little theatre brat. I thought of my time with Fava last summer, and the continual presence of his son Farrucio. I'm glad and grateful to be raising kids in the arts, snafus and all. Later, Griff and I watched The Empire Strikes Back at home, and I thought: if Mark Hamil can act with a big puppet, then by God so can I.

Speaking of Fava, I've seen the tendency in our rehearsals I noticed in his workshop: actors getting really loud and "grabby" when confronted by comic territory they don't get yet. I mean big, noisy acting and the urge to physically touch one's scene partner. Then, the slowing, calming and specifying.

Ceal and I drop into a stripped down, super direct communication style which is both refreshing and challenging. It's challenging because we put each other on the spot so quickly and with no chit chat. Part of it is that we know each other so well and so can dispense with the pleasantries. Part of it, I'm convinced, is that we are both Quakers. Speaking simply and with integrity, you know. We were joking during a break about our mutual habit of taking off-hand intros like "What's new?" literally, and having an awkward pause as we stop and try to formulate honest responses. Part of it too is that Ceal is sick, and she has no extra energy. I'm worried about her.

Over the weekend, and into the beginning of this week, we have been confronting the end of the play and the way K and P's relationship transforms. The key is in 4.5, when K agrees it is the moon which shines so bright in the middle of the day. It was agony trying to make this something other than K caving, K submitting, K losing, K just playing along so they can get to Padua. Initially, I was drawn to the "where two raging fires meet" choice: some kind of enormous fight about the sun being called the moon resulting in a screaming crying tantrum by K, followed by tenderness from P. We worked on this approach for two grueling hours. But finally, I think we realized the danger in trying to torture the text in to something it just isn't. Now, we've arrived at something more true to the play, which has more to to with the "journey into laughter" idea and P's continuous exhortations that K "be merry". You'll just have to come see it to see how this choice turns out . . .

Ironically, the big speech of 5.2 is turning out to be not as much of a worry as 4.5. After some intense homework, I'm finding my way through it, tracing who I feel like she's speaking to, chunk to chunk. By "not as much of a worry", I mean that if, by the time we get to the big speech, we can convince the audience that K and P have a relationship they can respect, or at least be charmed and not offended by, then the big speech won't grate quite so much. It is what it is. There's nothing I can do to hide what she's saying. I'm just trying to make what she's saying make some sense given the world she's living in and the people she's surrounded by.

Tomorrow, we have our first run through. Deep breath.

Late last week, I had a child care melt down in the middle of rehearsal. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket mid-scene - it was Ella's day care. During break I listened to the message: Ella had thrown up mid morning. Susan was out of town, and I was locked in till four. During the next break, I had a comic sequence of talking to Susan on the cell phone while the artistic director was waving the office phone at me, which I picked up, only to have the cell phone go off again. Ultimately, our super-sitter was able to pick her up. It turned out she was fine.

Remember when there were no cell phones?

I have extolled the virtues of the citizen actor, but this is the challenge, isn't it? You want a life that has more than your art, sometimes that "more" intrudes.

But on to the shrew.

Walking to rehearsal recently, I thought, Kate is the older sister I always wished I'd had. We could have made each other happy and staved off the other's particular misery. And so begins the work beneath the scansion, beneath the memorization. So begins the complex work of exploring this question: who is this woman to me? And then, following that question into jungle thickets, I find other ones, like: how do I feel about "woman", about femininity, about sexism, about courtship and marriage?

I will leave you dangling now, the public aspect of the blog having a self-censuring effect. But I will tell you this: these are dark pathways for me, moody, hot and tender. The personal energies around them for me now include both ancient wounds, and fresh, stinging jibes. Kate is a wounded woman, and I have been raised by, in love with and at war with wounded women much of my life.

There is an immediate connection I have to her. We finally have a rehearsal hoop skirt for me, and I while I love exploring it, I feel ridiculous in it. So the Ben-as-Kate sensation mirrors Kate's own sensation of being held up to public ridicule early in the play, especially if the initial cage entrance holds. Fiona Shaw, in the article of interviews I keep re-reading, talks about being the only woman in the room frequently in rehearsal, and how that informed many of the choices she made as an actress. I can relate to that sensation of feeling like "the other".

Re-reading that article, I realized that one advantage I have being a man playing Kate is that I don't feel the need to "represent all women" with my choices. How could I? Nor do I feel like I have to navigate some man's thinly veiled sexism in a working relationship, something the actresses talk about having to do frequently with male co-stars or male directors. Juliet Stevenson remarks that she felt her choices sometimes over-compensated for the sexist atmosphere she sensed in the rehearsal room.

These are brilliant actresses in this article - all British. It made me think again about the difference between American and British notions of "actress" (or "actor" for that matter). Certainly there are American actresses as smart and articulate, but I don't think we cultivate those qualities. Perhaps it's a generalization, but I worry "actress" in America leads to American Idol. Compare with Fiona Shaw, who has the confidence to complain about incompetent directors "who cram the area between the text and the performance with 'interpretation' and allow it to masquerade as creativity."

Another actress, Paola Italian Last Name, used a phrase about Katherine which jumped out at me: "the journey into laughter". Yes, this is the journey I want to embark on: out of the darkness of bitterness, grief and anger and into the freedom of humor and lightness, laughter and hope. But enough with these Brits, and back to the murky question I keep dodging: who will Ben's Kate be?

Commedia side-bar: Tranio and Biondello are directly descended from 1st and 2nd zanni. Baptista is a de-fanged Pantalone. Lucentio is the heroic lover, Biancha the Enamorata. Kate? She's a kind of twisted, dark Servetta, and Petruchio a heroicized Capitano.

Finally, today, we came to The Speech. "The speech is your friend, Ben" Ceal said smiling. Still un-memorized, I read it through exploring some of Ceal's staging ideas. I wasn't actually "doing" it. I was reciting it. It's actually a beautifully written and constructed speech, as long as you don't listen to what she's saying. Later, Ceal, Tom and I sat and talked about it.

"The most important idea in it to me, " I said, "is Kate's notion that fighting is wrong, that conflict solves nothing. And it feels like it needs to be something she's saying mostly to, or for, Petruchio." We agreed to devote an hour or two just to the speech later in the week. And I panicked. Next week is the week before tech.