Commedia dell'Arte

Mid way through our second ten out of twelve. The company is in good spirits. The zany energy of the play has infected us all, and even the ridiculous six-second costume changes don't get us down. John and I frequently come off stage and look at Jess and Angela in a panic, having no idea who we're supposed to be changing into. The girls tend to steer us into our next costumes and position us for our entrances. John is finding some comic gold, especially with two of his drag performances: Charlene and Vera. I struck my own gold as R.R. yesterday, when I chased a "U.F.O" lighting effect around the stage like a deranged house cat. Leonard Childers is so fat I resemble a Macy's Day parade blimp, and Bertha's buns are padded right down the backs of my thighs. I display said buns prominently at my first Bertha entrance. For the first time today, I got through the Rev. Spike's eulogy without calling for a line. I'm not saying I got 'em all right, I just didn't ask for 'em.

Greater Tuna is the kind of play looked down on by the theateratti. It is low-brow comedy in the best American tradition: populist, self-effacing, uncomplicated in its message. There is barely a plot - it's really a series of comic sketches loosely strung together through the conceit of a day at the local radio station. Its value lies in the performance of it, and so it claims its place as pure comic theatre along the lines of commedia dell'Arte, successful only if a talented enough company can bring it to life, meeting the transformational challenges it presents with brio. I hope we are up to it. I sense we are, but we will learn a lot as we add audiences in previews next week.

The Walnut Street theatre, which is producing this production, is Philadelphia's great populist theatre. Long sneered at by our local theateratti, it has never-the-less maintained the most robust subscription base of any local theatre. It thrives by knowing who its audience is, giving them what they want and doing it well - at least well enough that the theatre remains fiscally sound. I sneered at the theatre myself when I arrived I arrived in town some thirteen years ago. I raised my nose at its consistent menu of American musicals and "old chestnuts". But as I have matured, my nose has lowered and my perspective has shifted. I now admire this theatre for being what it is unapologetically, and am grateful for the work I have been offered here (three shows in four years). Interestingly, Greater Tuna is a collaboration between one of Philly's most outrageous theatre artists (Madi diStefano, our director) and its most conservative theatres, in terms of play selection. Madi is founder of Brat Productions and well-know for both her direction of gritty, site-specific Conor McPherson plays in local bars, as well as her theatrical performances in her own plays, Popsicle's Departure and Sweetie Pie. But she has made a useful alliance with Walnut Street, having appeared in at least one of Neil Simon's Broadway Bound plays here. Bernard Havard, the artistic director here, has taken a shine to her, and I remember being in auditions watching the two them - Bernard in tweedy British jacket-and-tie style and Madi in post-punk black leather and bleached white hair - and laughing inwardly at the pair they make.

Tonight, peering out from backstage during a break, I took in Madi and our designers sitting in the dark house, their faces lit by the pale ambient light of computer screens and small note-taking lights. Each is doing what they love, I thought, and isn't that a measure of success? I am particularly fond of Elisa's costumes (all 20 of them) and Christopher Coluccci's sound design. He's picked some great southern rock for accompanying music, and given us a variety of goofy sound effects to use as Thurston and Arles in the radio station. Turning my head, I saw Jess and Angela scurrying around and getting the next change set up, and John dressed half in Petey and half in Arles. I felt proud to count myself one of them: an artist at work, hell-bent on making people I don't know laugh as much as possible.

I long for an end to the snooty judgments. But as I have written here before, I fear our academic institutions are too deeply invested in passing judgments, and they pass on that tendency to the students they instruct. And so we get a division along an ancient fault-line: on one side the academic intellectual aesthetes, on the other the populist, pragmatic workers. For years I have been trying to live on both sides of that line simultaneously, and the result has been a certain amount of stress and academic professional disappointment. It's as if I am being led again and again away from colleges and universities, led backstage and into costumes and out in front of audiences. But I am stubborn and head-strong. I refuse to leave my students. I refuse to believe I can't have it both ways. There must be a way to lift up Greater Tuna next to Antigone and say "both/and" rather than "either/or".

Making people laugh is serious business. Indeed, in this wounded war-torn world, one might argue it is more urgent than the business of making people cry. So just watch it if you lift your nose at me about Greater Tuna. I just might poke it.

So there's been a phrase jumping around in my head since working on LEAP which I feel like writing. But I can't be sure if it's authentic or if it's just hyperbole to get a rise out of readers. The phrase is:

I have seen the future of theatre, and it is long-form improvisation.

After wrestling with this for a bit, I have refined it:

I have seen the future of my theatre, and it is long-form improvisation.

Over the last several years I have been exploring actor-generated theatre in a variety of guises. I have been creating it, studying it, performing it: meetings for theatre, commedia dell'Arte, long-form. A great deal of my professional life has been spent teaching actors to make artistically empowering choices. A great deal of the artistic friction in my life has come from my exploration of the actor/director relationship and my resistance to hierarchical power structures. All of this is rooted in family-of-origin issues which have made me who I am. My creativity as an actor has been an ongoing journey of self-actualization through the guise of theatre. I am most delighted and provoked when a role reveals something about my self to me. Sometimes this revelation is painful and sometimes joyful. Recently, it has dawned on me that the more solipsistic the journey is the more damaging to me. So in order for the journey to bring me to well-being the discoveries must be shared, must serve a purpose greater than my own betterment, and that purpose is service to my community.

This journey finds its apotheosis in long-form improv. Absent the dictates of the conventional theatre script and the conventional theatre director, the actor is left to find his way through an outrageous and spontaneous balancing act: on one side his own creative impulses and visions; on the other his complete willingness to follow someone else's creative impulse. In this - the central creative dynamic in long-form improv - the paradox of actor creativity is brought to life on stage. It's all about me and it's all about you, and we don't cancel each other out.

But what narcissistic crap it would be if it was all just a means to perform our own therapy. And so we must be conjoined with the audience, and it is their secrets and unspoken desires which form the foundation of what we make. The initial union is not between actors, but between actor and audience. This union binds the experience in a way that makes it uniquely personal for audience and actor alike. In doing so, long-form capitalizes on the essential feature which makes theatre distinct from film and TV: we are all in the same room together. What is made and witnessed over the course of a performance will never be made or witnessed again. Long-form takes this essential aspect of theatre and puts it in bold face with a line underneath it.

Don't get me wrong: there is something indisputably theraputic about long-form, especially for the performers. But I have always maintained that creativity in any form is theraputic, in that it focuses life-energy outward and assists the person in feeling useful. Long-form just brings the stuff to the fore: you know, all your stuff, your fears, issues, desires and wishes. And when all your stuff is heard and affirmed by a warm and supportive company of fellow artists, as mine was, you almost don't need to perform at all to be a little healed. But then, when you perform, and you sense your stuff being shook out and flapped around the stage in different ways by you and others, it stops having such a hold on you.

And don't get me wrong here either: we had a director. She gave us notes, provoked us forward, reigned us in, adjusted our impuses (or tried to), negotiated situations - in short, she functioned in all the ways a conventional director functions, except one. She had very little to do with the stories we told on stage, or the choices we made while telling them. Whereas a conventional director assumes a kind of ultimate responsibility for the thing presented, our director had almost no responsibility for the thing presented. She had responsibilty for the form it took and our training in that form. But on the night itself, we were on our own.

What do we crave in theatre? Well, the answer to that question will be different for each of us. Certainly, for those who crave the elegantly crafted two-hour story, the beautifully choreographed ensemble, the knock-out show tune or the gorgeous marriage of poetry and idea, long-form will come up short. And yet, I have seen and participated in moments in long-form in which each of these virtues was evident (well, maybe not the knock-out show tune). And the fact that everyone in the room knows it is being made right in front of them makes its genesis electrifying. But underneath the variety of theatre we crave, I think we each crave the same thing: the communal experience. It is simply this experience which has kept the theatre alive, I'm convinced: warm bodies together in the same big room, elbow to elbow, witnessing other warm bodies doing something fabulous. The same air being passed around. The same laughter being shared. The same Spirit being worshipped.

In this modern era we live in, in which we are in continual danger of being permanently attached to our digital devices, in which we spend more and more hours each day stimulating ourselves and our children with electronic media, in which we the time spent amongst each other shrinks each year until, sadly, we will only see people outside our tight little circle in emergencies. Even universities - once the the place where we met the rest of the world - are being offered now through computers, and some parents, convinced their children will be taught heresy in actual schools, or worse, gunned down by some cyber-depressed adolescent, keep their children at home and school them there. This is the age of isolation. No wonder so many young people are depressed. No wonder so many of us are on Prozac.

Communion is the antidote. Communion is the solution. Somehow, joy is created when we are together, even when the thing we see is sad. We are reassured that the world is safe, that others have feelings like ours, that we needn't be ashamed of who we are, or who you are. In the immediacy of of the theatrical experience, our isolation is melted and we soothe each other. This is why, after seeing LEAP, my friend Chris told me he felt like he been to church. It wasn't because he was made aware that he was seeing and hearing something holy being delivered to him by holy people. It was because he felt joined to the common everyone in the room with him, and the feeling of being joined reminded him of God. I say, it was God doing the joining. But that's just me.

Long form improv shines a light on one of my challenges: the need to have a plan, to create a "script", to join events together into some holistic pattern that has meaning for me. When we do an extended form together, I am constantly trying to create links between scenes, by performing corollary scenes to ones we have seen before, or perform "subsequent" scenes. I even tried playing someone else's character to create such a link before Bobbi told me that was no-no. She is much more interested in having us create a "collage" of scenes with no direct linkages, until the end of our aimed-for hour of improv. Given what is happening in my life both personally and professionally, it is no surprise that I am drawn towards having a plan, and fearful of ambiguity and uncertainty. I also recognize the seeking of patterns as a quintessential Quaker trait. It's aspect of my faith, which calls me to take responsibility for sensing the Divine patterns.

I was also struck yesterday by the connection between this form and commedia. In both forms, the story being told is subservient to the relationships between the actors/characters doing the telling. Both forms rely on an intense kind of focus from the actor, who needs to focus both in the shared work between herself and her partner and also on the shape of the whole thing the ensemble is creating together. Commedia is a much more structured and formalized form, with its stock characters and well-known plots. Long form is more mysterious, and in some ways more immediate. It's hard work - there is absolutely no tuning out allowed. Even when off stage I am nearly on stage, so complete is the listening and watching required to prep for an edit or a snog.

I hit a bump yesterday around the idea of "tone" - specifically comic tone. We did a sequence of exercises meant to buff our comic skills and sensibilities. What ended up happening is that some of us - like me - created over the top characters, and others simply continued with creating scenes as we had before, which weren't especially funny. The things is, we have each created funny scenes, but they are funny almost by accident, and when we draw our attention to "comedy", it seemed to send us off into some other territory. Bobbi and I had an interesting discussion about the word "realism" too. I tend to regard any kind of character transformation as unrealistic, though it can be quite truthful. Bobbi uses the term more to identify an aspect of believability.

Anyhow - onwards.

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.