Sometimes a Great Notion

The reading, on stage at The Gerding Theater, went very well. I think most of us were glad to be in front of an audience, and our collective juices were flowing. Aaron wisely kept the presentation of it very informal, with the actors strolling on stage at about five minutes, getting an introduction from Chris the artistic director, then launching in to it. Incredibly, it was the first time we had read the thing (all three acts of it) from start to finish since the first day. Aaron was pleased after, and I think we all felt that we had done productive work this week supporting the creation of this new play.

I got a nice boost by being asked by the associate artistic director if I was available to audition for a show they're doing in the fall. I so wanted to say yes, but knew there was no way. Three months in Portland this fall away from my family, giving up more lucrative teaching work - impossible. Which brings up the question of being offered the chance to be in the actual production of Sometimes A Great Notion, which is in April '08. I would love to, and while it's not out of the question, it almost is. I wish it wasn't. I wish we all weren't struggling so fiercely just to get by. I wish it all paid better and was more consistent. I wish, I wish, I wish . . . .

The last night, a bunch of us went out. I don't drink, so I was ringside for the dear old tradition of the last debauch, when the cast (and sometimes crew and director, stage managers and designers) go out and get hammered after the show closes. It starts out fun, but always begins feeling sad around midnight, when it's clear we should all be going home, but we just can't let go. Even years ago, when I was drinking and getting hammered right along with 'em, I felt the sadness set in. And it made me drink more. I saw this happening Thursday night.

My unrequited wishes are connected to this sadness, because after all, what are we really clinging to and not letting go of? The beer in our hands? The next round? No, silly. We cling to each other and to the thing we made together. We cling to the feeling of working, of living in the art we have been called to. We cling all the more fiercely because we all know that it may be a while before we have this chance again, and we sense the hollow moan of lives-without-art from the weeks, or months, to come.

Thanks Portland! What a gorgeous city! Thanks to all the wonderful Citizen Actors at work there, some I met and most I didn't (Tim, our time will come!) Yes, I could live there, if wasn't already living someplace else . . .

After showing our choral invention to Aaron, he said "It's wrong in 120 ways and right in 115 ways!" And we all laughed.

One of Aaron's gifts as a director is the mood he creates in the rehearsal room. I'm not sure how he does it, but there is something both amusing and disciplined about it. We are all at ease, we joke around and laugh a lot, then get really quiet and focused responding to some small cue we get from him. He tells stories from his own life and experience a lot but it never seems self-aggrandizing. A large part of it is that he self-effacing. He's not on an ego-trip. Though he clearly has an ego, it doesn't make him nasty, it makes him sweetly vulnerable. Another paradox: he seems both vulnerable and confident at the same time. And he loves actors: he loves working with us, he loves our successes and failures and seems genuinely interested in what we create. It's this last attribute, one that I have experienced in other directors, that seems most important. And it must be noted, there are directors that don't love actors; that are, in fact, either intimidated or embarrased by us.

I'm fascinated by the way actors and directors communicate in subtle ways in rehearsal. In a new play workshop, there's a special emphasis on this kind of subtle communication. We are here not only to bring characters to life, but to be a group of dramaturgs, offering Aaron feedback on the structure of scenes, lines or situations that seem to work, or not, to us. Sometimes it's the pensive look on a face that will provoke him to ask, "Got a thought?" There's also a kind of collective thrill that occurs when a scene works well, and a kind of tuning out when something is dragging or confusing.

So much in the theatre, both scripted and unscripted, on the stage and off, rises or falls based on the glance, the furrowed brow, the mysterious smile, the distant gaze.

Aaron has been felled by what seems to be a vicious bacterial infection of some kind. He came to rehearsal looking like death warmed over then left to see a doctor, leaving us in two groups to work on our own with the Stage Manager's assistance. I feel bad for him. This is a big piece, he wrote it and I can tell he's really pissed about being so sick. The doctor did what doctors do: told him to go home and rest.

And so again, I experienced the remarkable way actors work together. I am in a kind of chorus in the play, a group of men Aaron calls "the six". We function as group narrators and each take on one or two supporting roles. It's through these six that Aaron is trying to convey the environment of the play, both natural and dynamic. So today he did something kind of remarkable for a workshop in advance of a reading. He left us to work on a page and half long choral passage in which there are no roles assigned. It looks a like a long poem on a page. We were to generate ideas for the playing of it in performance, not for the reading next Thursday.

The six of of us - all local actors except me - sat around and divided up lines based on ideas about the passage and ways to bring it to life. We worked at the table on and on our feet, undirected, for about four hours with a couple of breaks. We ended up with something broken into three sequential parts, with the lines divvied up according to six categories we had created. We added a character (Lee, who is in fact on stage but not assigned lines), gave him lines and then created simple but energetic staging around him. Finally we added the actor playing Lee and worked him into what we had created.

From an organizational dynamics point of view, what we did was dazzling. Aaron had asked me and one other actor to "co-lead" this exploration, but it quickly became a group process with me functioning something like a Quaker clerk (indeed, in the midst of it, I flashed on the way my Quaker "training" was at play in this rehearsal room). I can confidently say that all six of us shared ideas, had them tested and tried, had them edited and rejected, had them adopted and complimented, and not one nose got out of joint - not even close. in fact, the whole thing had a remarkable joyful quality to it, as challenging as it was. And this is our second day of working together. We went from nothing - words on a page - to a small but complex, six person script in hand performance in four hours.

It's experiences like that which leave me feeling convinced that our training as actors has broad application in the world we live in; convinced that there is money to be made and people and groups to be helped through passing on the ways of working we all understood and displayed today. And it certainly helped that there was familiarity around the table, that these guys all knew each other, and that I recognized that familiar vibe from a different place. I fit right in. I thought, I know what this is. This is citizen actors doing their thing.

Before rehearsal, I had a touching citizen actor discussion with Jennifer and Blake - two other actors in the cast - about raising kids and being an actor. Jen is a single a Mom with a two year old, full of ambition and doubt. Blake is an actor-Dad from LA who has written a book with interviews of working actors, which I want to find and read. He's also a member of the Red Sox Nation. I could tell Jen really wanted to talk about all this stuff: how do you get childcare that's compatible with crazy actor schedules, how do you feel good about yourself as a parent and still be an actor, where do you live, etc. But rehearsal started, and more later, I guess.

We need to have these conversations. Maybe we need to have them in a more organized way, so that we are coming together and helping each other more intentionally, in this chaotic life we lead. We need to lift each other up and say, yes, you can.

The following few posts will draw from my experience in Portland Oregon working on Aaron Posner's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel Sometimes A Great Notion. I play Evenwrite and others.

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I had the unusual experience today of being one of the out of town actors. I sat at the initial rehearsal of Aaron's adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion and watched as the local Portland actors laughed together in that familiar way I laugh with Philly actors. I listened to them chat about local shows and compliment each other about recent performances. I didn't feel left out or excluded. It only affirmed my own artistic community and the healthy state of this one. Portland is a place I could be happy in. It didn't hurt either that a young actor in the company, hearing that I was from Philly, exclaimed "I just read the coolest book about the theatre scene in Philly - The Actor's Way!" I'm buying that guy lunch.

The Gerding Theatre, Portland Center Stage's new space, is an astonishing makeover of an old armory. It's a bit like the city in microcosm: rugged red brick and stone on the outside, but tricked out to the nines inside with high fashion, eco-friendly design and state of the art everything. There's even a continually operating barista in the lobby, may the Gods be praised. The rehearsal room is on the top floor, behind a galley kitchen/lounge with trendy lunch counter and bar stools, surrounded by the admin and design offices built into the horseshoe that surround the rehearsal room. Skylights everywhere, and some office and conference rooms look out through glass over the mezzanine and lobby.

The play tries to capture the energy of the rushing river, a central image in Kesey's novel. And as we dove into it with abandon today I thought, I'd be happy if all I ever did was the first read throughs of plays. The air just crackles. With a good company of actors and an inviting director, there is a crashing together of discovery, excitement and just a bit of vanity - actors aware of being seen and heard for the first time by their play mates. Not that there's anything especially stage-worthy about it, but more and more I am becoming focused on the drama of what happens to us when we create theatrically together. The drama of making the drama, maybe.