Theater news

Oh, boy, I haven't blogged in a while and now that I've started I can't seem to stop. Lots of pent-up blogging demand in me, I guess!

[Warning: loooonnggggg post]

I'm happy to report that my theater life has been busy. I just can't seem to get enough, at least not so far, although I'm beginning to be able to imagine that a time could come when I won't feel such a driving desire to keep doing show after show. Anyhoo, a while ago I mentioned that I had gotten a part in a show with a local director whose work I admired. It went live in November for three weeks, and overall the experience was a good one, albeit a bit stressful for a variety of reasons. I learned a lot about how to act in a farce:

1. Don't try to get a laugh. These people are deadly serious about their lives. Let the material get the laugh for you.
2. Talk faster than you normally would, especially if you're playing an intense person or it's a tense situation.
3. Keep the pace up. With very few exceptions, the dialogue has to be rapid-fire. If there's dead air, the humor will be lost. Serious plays have quiet spots. Farces have lots of noise and action.

My part was a relatively small one, and she was not a pleasant person. Some adjectives you might use would be "cold, bitchy, demanding, self-absorbed, vain." It was definitely casting me against type since up till now people have wanted to use me for the pleasant girlfriend/wife parts. So I very much appreciated the opportunity as a somewhat green actress, although it did contribute to the stress because I'd yet to discover whether I was up to it or not! I think I carried it off OK, although I wasn't sure at first. When you have a small part, people don't necessarily direct a lot of compliments your way because naturally they're focused on how well the leads did. It wasn't until the last weekend that someone I knew took me aside and more or less raved about how I'd done. That was a huge relief to me. The last thing you want to do is be an dead weight in a good production, and until she'd done that, I couldn't be sure I wasn't. Of course the Huz told me I was good, but he would, wouldn't he? :o) And others had made some general comments about "You guys were wonderful!," which frankly means nothing to an actor.

So, if you ever have a friend in theater and go to see their show, if you really think they did well, say something specific so they know you're not just blowing sunshine at them, OK? We really don't know if we're doing well. We rely on you to help us know. If all we get is general comments, we're liable to conclude that we're not doing all that well. Of course, if you think they stink, just try to slink out the back door without saying anything so you don't have to compromise your ethics!

The director took some black & white still pictures & promised to share them with us. If he does I'll try to post some later.

So, what's coming up next? Next week I start rehearsals for another murder mystery weekend, or what the Huz calls "a life-sized game of Clue", to be produced the weekend of February 29. Our cast of 13 (ooo! unlucky! for the murdered one(s), that is, heh, heh) will be in character all weekend long, as murder(s) occur(s) and the guests at the resort attempt to discover who dunnit. You may recall I did one of these last year.

Here's the blurb from the resort's website

---

Join Hector MacLean and his wife Gillian (that's me!), along with a clan of MacKenzies who have come to the resort for a family reunion. Little do they know that the Cameron family has the same idea. These two families have a long history of feuding. It's a situation ripe for murder. It falls to Detective-Sergeant Malcolm Hardasche of the Vermont State Police to unravel the tangled tartan of grudge, deceit, betrayal and Scottish passion that play out like an unmentionable drama in "MacDeath."

	2-Night Package
Main House	$206
Terrace Wing / Suite	$249
Avery Suite	$407

2-Night Minimum Stay required. Package includes 2 dinners, 2 breakfasts, 2 nights lodging and amenities.

---

Isn't that amazingly inexpensive? This is a pretty nice resort. $206 per person includes all meals except one lunch, Friday dinner through Sunday breakfast. And this is no diner food, folks. The food is excellent.

Anyway ... this time I believe the director wants to do more improvisation and fewer scripted scenes, which is making me a little nervous! When you do improv, you're basically writing the scenes as you go along. It's not that you just show up the day of the show and spontaneously pull something together. It's that you rehearse and rehearse, try this, try that, and when you finally get it the way everyone thinks works well, then you have to keep trying to reproduce that or something close to it at subsequent rehearsals and on the day of the show. I'm much more comfortable with scripts!

And with a full-immersion show like this, you have to also get your back story figured out, because you never know what the guests are going to ask you, and if they ask you a question and you give one answer, and then they ask someone else the same question and get another, they might think that's a clue and not just that you've bungled the answer, and that's not fair to them. So we have to be fairly thorough about inventing our back story, too. Add to that the need to learn to speak with a Scottish accent, and that I'll be a character very different from myself (this one stern, dismissive, bossy ... OK, OK, I have a hint of bossiness in me :o) .. it's going to be a challenge. But that's why they call it acting! And one definite blessing is that I don't have to weep my way through the entire weekend this time. That got to be a bit of a downer last year!

(I also have to learn a Scottish accent for this MMW. The last 3 shows I've done have required foreign accents --Russian, British, and now Scottish. I have vowed that the next thing I do is going to be plain old American.)

Sunday I'm planning to audition for a 10-minute play festival, with another new director/producer in town who's done work in Hollywood and New York, and is sure to be a mover & shaker in the theater world hereabouts. He grew up in the area, graduated high school here, and then went on to be a professional. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing maybe he's moved back here to raise his family in a healthier environment.

Anyway, he recently produced & starred in a wonderful production of a little-known Arthur Miller play, "A View From The Bridge", and now he's producing these 10-minute plays, each of which has a different director. The festival is happening for two weekends in February, so if I'm offered a role I'll have to consider carefully whether I can do both this and the MMW. If I weren't working, too, I'm sure I could handle both, but I am, so we'll see. Wish me luck! Better to be offered a part and turn it down than to not be offered anything at all!

My sis says to me when she hears all this, "You're so funny." "Funny, or crazy?" I IM back. "Whichever suits you." she says. Yep. Whichever suits me.

P.S. Any new passions in your life?

clouds on vacation

The Cloudy Monday feature has been on vacation for a while, as I spend days, nights and weekends dog-paddling madly to keep my head above water with work. I'm OK, in this case no news is good news! In fact, I was able to break away with a girlfriend, her daughter, and her friend's daughter to spend a week at their time share in Grand Cayman, where this lovely picture of clouds etc was captured from our balcony. We got to do lots of scuba diving and spent evenings in a devoted madcap effort to watch every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A good time was had by all. And then, of course, I returned to the work scene behinder than ever.

On a theater note, the murder mystery weekend was a success in nearly every way but headcount. That Saturday was a major snowstorm and lots of our participants stayed home. But it was actually kind of fun to have a smaller crowd, as we got to know each of the participants and were able to keep tabs on how well they were figuring out the murderers. (We had a "plant" in the participants who wasn't detected, so he was able to clue us in on who was catching on and what we might want to do to throw them off.) By the end of the weekend, we all kind of hated to say goodbye to each other ... although I have to admit, 48 hours in character is a stretch for me!

Well, the good news is that it was so well received that a local theater group agreed to have us give several performances of the murder mystery, condensed to a single night! So the first two weekends in June we'll be performing Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons, and hoping like mad the folks who see it early don't tell the later audiences whodunnit. This will be a very different experience for us as actors from the previous one, which included lots of improvisation and ad libbing. This will be scripted like a play, but all the same actors are returning, with the possible exception of one substitution for a small part, so it's really going to be fun.

And we're hearing rumors there may be another murder mystery weekend next year ... :o)

so i'm a drama queen ... whatsamatta widdat?

[warning: long post!]

Back at the end of January, I said with regret that I was going to have to take a hiatus from the kind of blogging that takes time ... you know, the writing kind. I wasn't sure how long I'd have to lay off. Work was causing a perfect storm: two existing projects with approaching deadlines plus a big new project that required huge amounts of startup effort. And the utter foolishness of taking on a part in a play knowing full well that I might end up in a loony bin from trying to do it all. But now here we are, three weeks later, and things have settled down a bit. Whew! And I'm excited to share with you about my new theatrical venture!

I was under the mistaken impression that community theater dies down in the winter around here. Right about the time I got really, really busy with the perfect storm... and I don't mean "so busy I can't do personal emails from 8 to 5" but more like "so busy I can't have a life days, nights or weekends," a friend alerted me to these three different productions that were being auditioned.

The first was an all-female version of Twelfth Night, being staged by a well-respected local director/actor whose first love is Shakespeare. It would be a privilege to work with him, but I knew that it would take way too much time for rehearsals --- with Shakespeare, you really can't improvise the lines, they have to be letter perfect! --- so I went with my friend to the audition out of curiosity. And I'm glad I did, because she got a nice meaty part (Uncle Toby) and I can say I knew her when!

The second was very interesting, a series of 8 ten-minute plays on love, being staged the weekend before Valentine's Day. Teensy little plays like that presumably can be done with far less rehearsal time than a full-length play, assuming you were cast in only one, and I was seriously considered auditioning .. but, again, I was leary of taking anything else on, so I passed on that one, too.

And then came the third one that just did me in. A local writer/director/actor was producing an audience-participation murder mystery. A weekend-long murder mystery. The blurb on it said, "Join Paddy O'Toole, his estranged brother, Mike, his wife Bubbles, and personal secretary Siobhan Smith for a weekend of murder and mayhem. Can you assist Detective Sergeant Manning and Trooper Becca Willing in solving the crimes? Two-night package includes 2 dinners, 2 breakfasts, 2 nights lodging and amenities."

Those of you who haven't read about my very first theatrical experience last spring, a murder mystery dinner benefitting a friend's non-profit organization, might like to read about it here. If you don't want to spend all THAT much time hearing about my introduction to acting, suffice it to say I was bitten by the bug, big time. I surprised myself by really enjoying the part where the scripted portion of the murder mystery was paused while the audience hunted for clues and interviewed us characters. I loved speaking my haughty British accent and displaying a posh superior attitude. I loved misleading them about the true murderer ... me! And most of all I loved hamming it up during the scripted scenes. It was all a huge blast, albeit a lot of work.

Since then, I've been in the chorus in a musical, Singin in the Rain, and I've had a moderately-sized role in a Neil Simon play, Come Blow Your Horn. That wrapped up in September, and I've done nothing since, assuming I would have to wait for warmer weather for the theatrical season to heat back up again. But when this murder mystery weekend (fondly monikered MMW) audition came up, I just couldn't resist.

I have to admit that I absolutely love auditioning. I've never had a bad experience. People have been uniformly gracious and encouraging at each one of the auditions I've done. Sometimes you audition more or less solo; other times it's in a group, but in any case it's always been a lot of fun. In fact, I have to be really careful what I audition for, because even if I have decided beforehand that I'm just auditioning for the experience and don't intend to take a part if offered, I have such a blast auditioning that I can't resist the part when it's offered! That's how I ended up in the Neil Simon play. So now I've learned not to audition unless I think I would take a part --- which is not to imply that I regretted taking that part then because it was an amazingly interesting experience. Check the links in the sidebar if you want to see why.

So, back to the MMW. The audition was really just a read-through, all of us sitting around in a circle reading lines. The writer/director, Dean, has a pleasant, mild personality, very easy to audition for. What made it especially fun for me was that the other plays had already been cast with a dozen women for 12th night and some number of women for the ten-minute plays. That meant that at our audition there were tons of guys and only a couple of women. So I got to read the lines for each of the women's parts a few times in support of all the guys auditioning. For a ham like me, that's irresistible!

One of the roles is for a French woman, so I got to try out my very bad French accent. Even bad, though, it was a laugh a minute. There was one line where the guy asks Helene if she is passionate, and she says, "I am French!" which now that I read it in black in white I see it doesn't sound like such a funny line, but the way it came out was both funny and sexy at the same time. You had to be there.

But the most fun was Bubbles. Husband Paddy is killed early in the weekend, so she goes through a wide range of emotions, including tears and indignation and even humor. She's not dumb, but she's a bit shallow, and a terrible flirt, so she's just a gas to play. Picture Marilyn Monroe at her most innocent and sweet. And she's a BEEEG role, too! So at the end of the evening, when Dean asked us all which part(s) we would be interested in, I said I really liked Bubbles, but I would do Helene too.

The very next day I got an email saying he had someone with a really good French accent for Helene, and would I like to be Bubbles? YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

So since then, we've been rehearsing and working on our improvs. You see, this play takes place at a nearby inn over an entire weekend. If it were all scripted, the script would be the size of an encyclopedia and nobody would be able to learn all their lines. So there are about 6 scripted scenes, where the actors are on microphones. And there are about a dozen "improvised" scenes, not on mikes, where we manage to get out more information that either provides clues or misleads the onlookers. And the rest of the time we mingle, in character!

For every character in every show, you need to have some notion of who your character is, what her background is, why she would react the way she does. There's lots of thinking that goes on to flesh out the character in your own mind, even though none of the details you're adding to your mental picture of her will be made explicit on stage. But when you do a weekend of mingling with your audience, you have to know everything there is to know about the characters so you can respond immediately and naturally to any question or comment! Did Bubbles grow up with a religion? (yes, Methodist) Does she practice now? (no) Was her high school big or small? (medium, 400 kids in her graduating class, she graduated in the top 20%, which might surprise you until you learn that her parents were very strict so she had no social life to speak of.) Did she go to college? (yes, Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.) Do she and Paddy live near Paddy's office? (yes, just a few blocks away.) And so on and so on. To help me start to think about Bubbles' life, I've begun a blog for her. Check it out at the O'Toole Tattler.

The people who have paid to attend the weekend can be relatively certain they will hear all the scripted lines. They have to be on their toes to hear all the improvised lines. In fact, it's possible there will be significant information going out at different places at the same time, so often participants will split up, with one person in the party assigned to follow one group of actors while another person follows the others; then they come back together to compare notes. Did I mention that their goal is to figure out the murderer(s)? On Sunday morning just before the final act, the participants submit their guesses as to who is the murderer and their motive. If they're correct, they win a weekend at the Inn.

Well, it's getting late so I need to sign off for now. Check back from time to time, I'll try to post updates as things get interesting!