or, my life in the circus
big fuckin shoutout to stanton harris nash the 3rd.
he just got cast in a leading role in the musical, madame x, in chicago.
this is so exciting i want to crap my pants.
the website is hot,
and it looks like they spent a good chucnk of money on it.
go forth and conquer, friend.
things get interesting.
the theatre we’re performing in was / is a movie theatre. in its recent renovations they put in a new screen. thousands of dollars. in the lowish double digits of them, most likely.
tonight we put a hole through it the size of a fat man’s head.
we were taking our set down and it flopped when it should have flipped. there was a cold fain fear thrilling through our veins, but the management were pretty cool about it. they kept using phrases like “accidents happen” which we all here at shakespeare on the cape hope mean “we’re insured”, and “you don’t have to pay for it” and “you haven’t ruined your relationship with this theatre”.
it serves to remind me of something my dad once wrote: by the grace of god, our attachments fail us. be attached to the immediacy of god. i guess it goes to prove the point i was trying to make earlier about the value of not valuing things. because on one level it is a totally unimportant thing. a thing. so much dust. and on the other hand it could become a very important part of our lives in the near future, and i’m not entirely prepared to tell the management of the art house that they should just be more cool about things.
reading about st francis and his Perfect Poverty, living cheap and in a five by ten foot box, thinking about my own material shadow, listening to anarchist folk-punk, and trying to come up with some kind of synthesis of concientious consumption, functional life, and pious poverty. more on that later.
This is another entry examining some of the things that classical actor training will teach you about life – things that it will teach you that aren’t true. Necessarily.
Nobility
There are a lot of stock characters in the theatre. There are a lot of stock classes and neighborhoods. Like nobility. The theatre has an idea of how a prince behaves, and it’s pretty inflexible. You stand up straight, you don’t move much, you have one of two or three dialects, depending mostly on your country of origin, you don’t use your hands much, you don’t slouch when you sit, and so on. Queens are worse. It’s a similar game when you do any kinf od ‘period’ piece. Which is like ‘regional’ theatre. ‘Period’ is anything before the advent of television, just as ‘regional’ is anywhere outside new york. “You can’t sit like that. It reads contemporary.” Or “Your speech patterns here are very contemporary.”
But here’s the thing.
Look at powerful people. Almost none of them conform to the rules. The rules of engagement as far as nobility go preclude entirely an actor creating Ted Kennedy onstage unless an author has written lots of comments such as “wow, what a fat guy.” I’ll spare you further analysis on this point, because this is a concept easy for civilians to process. It is however somewhat difficult for theatre people.
Because here’s the other thing.
Pre Freud/Stanislavski/Meyerhold/Darwin theatre is somewhat simple, by comparison, to what we jokingly refer to as contemporary theatre. That is, it deals honestly with its characters and its audience. If a person seems to be a thing, she generally is that thing. If someone is coming back to kill his mother because his mother killed his father, that’s generally the person he is. He’s not coming back because he has an oedipal complex and he wasn’t properly loved as a child.
As such the classical plays demand a certain purity of spirit. A certain poetic distilment which evidences itself in a pure, honest, uncluttered voice and body. This is what neutral mask work does – brings out the archtypical and pure. Contemporary theatre does not deal in achtypes and purity, generally speaking. It deals in the idiosyncratic and specific.
And this purity of self is powerful. It speaks to actors and audience members in a way that nothing else does. It radiates a personal power of self – which the stage translates into other types of power. Which is great if you just came to the theatre to watch Prince Hal ascend the throne. But if you’re an actor, then: then you start to believe that this personal power is nobility – that nobility is a true and real thing that can be created in the soul. That you can be pure and unfettered in your living, and that powerful people have this.
Which isn’t true. Actors have it.
