Open

Tech week and opening weekend are finally past. I got home last night and promptly fell asleep for many hours. I've been sleeping poorly lately, and I think I really needed a good chunk of slumbery bliss to clear out my head.

The end result is that I woke up in a pretty good mood today. I feel like I'm actually just myself for the first time in days. All the stress and doubt, even from the things that are not show related, seems more manageable right now.

So how did it go, the opening weekend (I pretend to hear you ask)? There was some general clumsiness (physical and mental) on all our parts, a result of feeling a bit under rehearsed, but the feedback seems generally positive. I don't know if there were any reviewers in the audience for either of our performances, but if there were, it seems unlikely that we'd be taken to task for anything major. My personal feeling is that the show is somewhat disjointed, but contains some pretty nice performances by all six of us on stage.

A friend who attended last night, and who had last seen me on stage in 1990, said that he didn't feel I was acting. He sounded a little disappointed. I imagine that he thought I would be playing a 90-year-old British man in one scene, a teenager in another, and so on: that there would be costumes and makeup and some real chameleon work going on. And I can do some of that stuff, but the reality is that most acting roles require an actor to find a way to play it more or less as themselves. The casting process is usually such that they are responding to your personality as much as your monologue, and deciding based on how they perceive you as a person. That's the essence of typecasting. This is especially true with this particular director, who wants every scene to feel natural and unacted. I wish he had been at the table when my friend said that. He would have been pleased.

The trick, I told my friend later, is being yourself and believable in the scene regardless of how you are actually feeling. There is a scene in the show which ends with me more or less in tears, having kissed, fought, and courted the other actor and finally having confronted some truths inside him. Roughly two and a half minutes later, I take the stage again, in an overtly comic monologue which requires me to be genial and energetic. I have to erase the previous scene and become a completely different aspect of myself in that time period, or the monologue simply does not work. And while both characters contain more than trace elements of my actual self, the work is making both of them believable to an audience in this short span of time.

Anyway, I took my friend's remark as a compliment, however it may have been intended.

It probably helps, for feedback purposes, that I don't really know any actors in real life anymore. One of my friends seemed impressed simply by my not breaking character during the show, which is not the kind of thing another actor would think as occasion for praise. Still, his enthusiasm seemed genuine. I'm lucky to have friends who are so supportive.

The biggest thing about this show, the thing that will last after all the bad luck and problems have become amusing anecdotes, is that I've awakened some part of me that really enjoys acting. I have reminded myself that this was, for quite a while, the only thing I had ever considered doing professionally. This was the art I dropped out of college to pursue, and I think I'm still good enough at it to get some work, even though I suspect I'm no longer as good as I used to be. But that's just rustiness.

*****

Although I've missed two posts, disqualifying myself from NaBloPoMo, I still think there'll be plenty of posts coming up soon. I have some more Ask the Moon questions to answer (keep emailing those in), those pictures I took out at Rich's last weekend, and some stories to tell that now, free from the rehearsal schedule, I may actually have both the time and the inclination to get done. One of them is about the roles of acting and writing in my life, and why combining the two is sometimes difficult. I mention that one specifically so you guys can nag me if I haven't done it by the end of the week.

NaNoWrinKle and tech week doubts

So they don't have the handy-dandy status bars this year, at least not that I've seen. If you click on the link in the sidebar, though, it'll tell you that I have a paltry 1300 words completed after four days of NaNo.

Sadly, even this is an overstatement. They are once again the wrong set of words. My guess is that I'll start getting words on paper for real on probably the sixth, which is more or less when I started last year.

*****

Tech week on the show started today. For non-theatre folk, this is the week before a show opens, when you typically work the show on the actual stage and figure out the lighting and sound cues, adjust the blocking to fit the space, and begin running the entire show, in order, in the costumes or clothing you'll be wearing for the actual performances, with props in hand. These rehearsals are often long, arduous affairs, and tech week is also commonly called "hell week."

Usually, a show is already on its feet by the time this process begins. We run it again and again to iron out any last glitches or to make a choice stronger, more realized. For this show, however, there are still pieces we have to run with scripts in our hands, still blocking issues across the board. The show has been plagued with bad luck and problems from the start, but I feel a panic right now that I am not used to feeling this close to an opening.

Perhaps I will elaborate on some of the bad luck at another time.

And still, I think we can pull this off. Crushingly optimistic, perhaps, but it may also be that I have no choice but to believe that the show will open and that people will like it. No choice but to believe that we will know our lines and move when and where we are supposed to and deliver the lines with all the spontaneity, high stakes, and realism we need to carry the pieces across. And I try to remind myself that I am frequently told that I am an incredibly harsh critic when it comes to something I am involved in. Just ask anyone from my former band.

I myself am in six different short pieces. Trying to assess things objectively, I'd say three or possibly four of them are where they need to be, or are close enough that polishing over the next five nights could get them there. One of these is a monologue, and entirely on my shoulders. Two have been worked enough, and the other actor talented enough, that I think they can play correctly (in spite of how they might have played tonight). Of the ones I still feel unsure about, one is designed to be presented as a cold reading, so that's more or less ready to go, too, such as it is. Which really only leaves one gigantic question mark in the mix: the full ensemble piece which features all six actors and closes the evening.

Right now, my gut says to throw my weight, energy and time into the five that are closest to being ready. Those are all scenes which feature only one other actor each, so I can afford much less to slip up or let the other performer down. We'll be on our own up there, and whether it's the scene that involves kissing a fair maiden or the one where I nearly get into a fistfight with a man over a game we are playing, I want to make sure that I give the other actor what they need to make the scene seem true.

*****

Wow. I had no intention of writing about all of this tonight. I guess it's a difficult thing to wipe away a nine-hour rehearsal.

Still, I could have sworn I sat down to write about my lack of progress on NaNo. I'm sure I intended to try to say something positive to any of my readers and fellow NaNo-ers who are also feeling discouraged by their current word counts.

Because thirty days is really a good chunk of time. So is the twenty-five days which remain. Anything can happen. So long as we are setting aside the time and trying to push through the difficult parts, we can still find ourselves later in the month crossing the finish line, exhausted and flushed from our labors, with a tiny curl at the corners of our lips that says we have been victorious.

Advice, I suppose, I should also try to take to heart where the play is concerned. Even though the window is smaller, there is still a lot that can still happen to make this show special.

*****

Moon Topples, Advice Columnist is still waiting to help you with all the problems you might have in this world (or others*). Send your queries and quandaries using the email address in the left sidebar (rather than leaving them in the comments) and I will ponder your difficulties as if they were my own, solving them so easily that you will feel a little silly for considering it a "problem" in the first place, but not in such a way as to make you feel bad. I would never do that to you, Blogadviceseeker.

I plan to begin answering the questions I have already received later this week.

*Offer excludes Jupiter. Jupiter knows why.

Phoctober the twenty-fourth

I suppose these shots have more in common with last week's arches than anything else. They're all about texture.

The tree stands in the courtyard behind the Arts Center at my former college. I was in the area the other day, and thought I'd stop by.

Everything looked pretty much the same. I found the sameness slightly spooky. Things are supposed to change, aren't they. I drifted through the corridors of the place where I once performed in nine different shows in the span of a single year, roamed the backstage areas where the tech crew still build the sets, where the dressing rooms are.

In the courtyard, I was a part of two consecutive summers ('93 and '94) of outdoor Moliére plays, presented in a big and bawdy modern style, except with the Commedia dell'arte masks. I think I had to run around like a madman in black robes and a paper mâché mask in the summer heat both years. There may have been sweat involved. The shows were directed by the man at the helm of my current show.

Standing there, I felt a little like Billy Pilgrim, tripping through my own life at random.

The day was cloudy and prone to fits of rain. I was sleep-deprived and going with it, allowing the clouds and the weird sensation of fled youth I got walking the familiar halls to shift me into a shade of melancholy. Not a "boo-hoo" melancholy, something else. Something electric and almost good.

Our "portable" stage for the Moliére (we wanted it to look like we were a traveling troupe, and our set was an enormous wagon) was right in front of one of these extraordinary trees. There were occasions on which I had to use the tree to catch me as I leapt from the second level of the stage to get to the ground in time to pretend to be someone else in a blink of an eye.

Leaping off of things to become someone else in the blink of an eye. Anything, of course, is possible when you are 20. Lately, I find myself at a place where anything seems possible again. Perhaps my youth has not fled so far as I'd feared.

Anyway, on with the pictures...

*****

Other Phoctobering:

All Phoctober posts from this site.

Minx in Strange Town.

Absolute Vanilla finds beauty at the harbor.

Gaye gets meta.

Taffiny on wet flowers.

Meloney Lemon captures a homemade musical instrument and its creator.

Basest discovers new life while parking.

It isn't too late to join the fun. Just do a photo post, mention Phoctober, and come and tell me about it in the comments.

Phoctober the twenty-third

Play rehearsals are strange things for this actor. Too fun to be work, but sometimes too frustrating to be anything else. Rehearsals are where we begin our tentative passes at the scripts we are preparing for the world. We nourish our eventual performances in the hopes that one day the script which currently wobbles on fawn's legs will become something bigger, something greater.

We run our lines a lot, talk about the abstract concepts we hope are hidden beneath them. There is usually quite a lot of joking around, of good-natured ribbing. The energy is frenetic and strange and unlike any other thing I have yet encountered.

It can be difficult personally, as actors can sometimes be incredibly friendly during the entire run of a show and then disappear without a trace. This isn't really the character flaw I might have implied. They simply move on to the next show, which is as time-consuming and intensive as the last, and the cycle starts anew. I imagine it is much the same in any career where landing a job only means a few weeks or months before the hunt for a new gig must begin. One learns not too form too strong an attachment to most of the people one meets at a rehearsal. Except, of course, that sometimes one finds a lifelong friend from among a cast. It's a weird thing.

And sometimes, amid all of the time and the chaos and the line-running, sometimes a single line or a scene just happens and it's better than it was in your head, different from what you imagined when you first read the script. The other actor is giving you something different, and you respond to it, and all of a sudden it's right.

I've been thinking a lot about acting lately, spending a lot of time with scripts and at rehearsals. I surprised myself yesterday by saying to someone that I thought I might want to continue acting again after the curtain falls for the final time on the current show.

This show has been more chaotic than any other I have ever worked on, and still I have found some remnant of the things that I loved about this kind of work. So that is something.

Anyway, here's a shot I took at rehearsal on Sunday. Two actors discussing a scene with the director.

*****

Other Phoctobering:

All Phoctober posts from this site.

Roberta gets the Phoctober spirit.

Absolute Vanilla catches some African music.

Taffiny and sleepy bees.

Matthew on contemporary Woodstock.

Sameera retrofits some Phoctober in four installments. One. Two. Three. Four.

It isn't too late to join the fun. Just do a photo post, mention Phoctober, and come and tell me about it in the comments.

Like spider legs

Well, I have been tagged again. This time by Cailleach, for eight random facts about myself. Leaving aside the argument as to whether one can achieve anything approaching "random" for these purposes, I'll give it a shot.

1. I cannot write in cursive or lower-case letters. My cursive was impossible for even me to decipher, and I just sort of forgot how to make lower-case letters. I make non-capitalized letters in small caps. Only my signature is cursive.

2. I have never seen an ocean, or any body of water larger than Lake Michigan. This dovetails quite nicely into my irrational fear of water and the fact that I cannot swim.

3. In January of 1992, I decided to keep track of all the books I read. At the end of the month, the total was 53. I doubt I've ever duplicated that feat. I've never tracked my reading like that before or since.

4. Every place I visit, I decide I would like to live there. I nearly spent a winter in Athens, GA because I liked it during a brief stay. The only exception I can think of was Denver, CO, which is also the only place I have ever visited and then moved to. Twice.

5. I was briefly the editor of a music magazine after leaving college. My interview was held in an Arby's. Six months later, at my first professional audition in Chicago, I landed the role of the editor of a music magazine in "The Blank Page," by Adam Langer (Adam is now a bestselling author). I played the same role in the film of the same name, so I have now had more experience playing the editor of a small, indie magazine than I had being one.

6. I once quit a job because my employer wouldn't allow me to listen to music. I was shoved into a room all by myself, and wanted to listen through headphones. My boss looked like Captain Kangaroo, and didn't believe for a second that music makes me more productive. It does, and every job I've had since has confirmed that. At the time, this seemed like a trivial reason to leave employment to everyone but me.

7. Until I started blogging, I never had anything resembling a nickname my entire life. Now people call me variations of "Moon" or "Mr. Topples" even sometimes in real life. I'm still not certain I approve of this.

8. In the period after map of july's first record came out, we played some pretty diverse shows, including a bar mitzvah and the lobby of a 30-cinema theater on the day Godzilla opened. There was an enormous inflatable lizard on the roof above us.

As usual, I tag no one, but let me know if you take a stab yourself and I'll come by and check it out.

Blathering on (again)

I seem to have given some of you the impression that I have toiled and toiled, doing Daywork my whole life, and have given it up only yesterday for the life of the pen. In the interest of honesty, I feel compelled to rectify these impressions.

I have worked mostly from home for the past three years. I am sometimes lured from my domicile by a nearby company, where I once ran the department in which I now occasionally serve. I didn't work out as the manager. I fought a lot with my superiors, and when I got tired of fighting, I became lax in fulfilling my obligations.

That is all water under the bridge.

GoodThomas suggested that I point out that I have never worked. This is also not true, and he better have been kidding when he said that.

As for the writing, I made a promise to myself last July to give this a legitimate shot. I hadn't written in paragraphs much for more than a decade before that. My promise took the form of a five-year plan, in which the goal for the first year was simply to write and write and not worry about publishing or anything else.

I felt I needed at least a year to to remember how to make words rub against one another in such a way as to cause meaning to spill forth.

I'm sure when my year is up, I shall feel I could really use another year to remember these things. I'm pretty sure I'll always be working on that particular problem.

I was considered a "natural" writer when I was in school, and somewhere in there, my teachers failed to impart to me any of the discipline I am now trying to create for myself. This is not the fault of the teachers, at whom I sneered and scoffed as much as I could get away with. I hardly ever completed the assignments they set in front of me. Where the fault lies with them, it is only that they did not fail me more often. The rest is all on me. I am well aware that I robbed myself of a pretty good education.

So now I set assignments for myself. I've been at least mediocre with my follow-through. I completed a novel in November as a participant in NaNoWriMo. Before that, I had no way of knowing if I could write about something and sustain even my own interest in a single set of characters and ideas for that many pages, for that long a time. While I am not exactly enamored with the output from that exercise, I do think that I learned a lot. Not the least of which is that I can, indeed, write a novel-length piece, however turgid and excruciating.

Completing the Daywork has me thinking about all of this all over again. Now is my time to write, to put my money where my mouth is, as it were. Or my something where my something else is.

I've been trying to reawaken my more playful mind, and am giving myself a week to decompress before I start expecting any sort of real output on the novel.

But, listen: I wrote a short story today. It is bad, but it is a first draft. First drafts do not need to sparkle. I hadn't really intended to do even this much, but I'm happy I did.

In my adult life, I have been an actor, a musician, a graphic artist and many other things. I was even an accountant. I have expressed myself creativity since I can remember.

I finally stopped acting about seven years ago, because my band had become infinitely more interesting to me. I stopped being in a band because it had started to feel like Dayworking. Writing is my Last Big Dream, and the only one I have never really followed. It is also the one in which I can most easily see where I am succeeding and where I am failing. Each art I have discarded (I don't think I've really discarded any of them forever) has been in pursuit of the more challenging option at the time.

There is nothing more challenging, to my mind, than grabbing a stranger and making him or her feel things with nothing more than the alphabet. To take someone on a ride with such meager tools is an accomplishment indeed, and I salute all of the writers who have taken me on such journeys. This list will undoubtedly include some of you Blogreaders, those of you with blogs, anyway. I had thought blogs were a bit silly right up to (and a little past) the point where I started one myself as a writing exercise. Thank you for proving me wrong.

See how quickly I lose the point? I came here to tell you that I was only a Dayworker for about three months this time, and all my crowing about being unshackled and free may as well be the sound of the wind blowing. My present circumstances and freedom to write are merely the product of circumstance and luck, whose unwitting pawn I shall ever be.

Spider-Man tired of typecasting

After his success playing himself in the two recent Sam Raimi-helmed films about his life, super-hero turned actor Spider-Man is looking to branch out into dramatic roles.

He's appearing in "The Spidey Cycle," now through January 13 at the Westerton Playhouse in Los Angeles.

Spider-Man sat down with The Moon Topples at a rehearsal for the showcase, which he hopes will draw producers and casting directors to take a fresh look at the costumed hero.

MT: Great to meet you, Spidey. Big fan.

SM: Thanks, kid. (lights a cigarette)

MT: So why the shift? What's changed?

SM: Well, you know, it's great to play myself and everything, but I've been taking some workshop classes and I feel I can do so much more. Right now, they even have that kid from That 70s Show playing the "Peter Parker" character. I only get screen time when they want the character in the suit. Plus I gotta do all the stunts. They'd cost a fortune in CGI.

MT: Actually, the actor playing your alter-ego is Tobey Maguire. The guy from TV is Topher Grace. Two different, somewhat bug-eyed actors.

SM: Whatever. I don't really watch the movies, you know? They're a little too cartoony for my tastes.

MT: So what kind of films do you like?

SM: Period pieces, mostly. I like subtlety and drama.

MT: Hard to see you in one of those.

SM: You're not alone. That's why I'm doing this showcase.

MT: But you wear a costume...

SM: Yeah. And that's gotta stay, but I can revamp the costume for different time periods. I could totally do Victorian.

MT: Okay...

SM: And that kid, what'd you say? Tophey? Toffee?

MT: Tobey.

SM: Yeah. Tobey. He's in Seabiscuit or whatever. Brokeback Mountain? The point is he's getting work, people take him seriously. I've been famous for better'n 40 years, but nobody's yet taken the time to get inside this (knocks on head). I'm complicated.

MT: I watched the rehearsal. Why did you choose these pieces? A Few Good Men? Shawshank Redemption? Death of a Salesman?

SM: Well, A Few Good Men, obviously, that's my tribute to Jack. He's a good friend. I stayed with him and Angelica [Huston] a bunch in the 70s. And Shawshank Redemption is my favorite movie. I totally stay in when that's on cable. The Salesman thing was my agent's idea. He wanted something "stagey."

MT: Fair enough. So what's next for you?

SM: Well, I got another "Spider-Man" movie coming up. And after that I'm hoping to really get my career going. Maybe a nice villain part.

MT: And if people have trouble seeing past the costume?

SM: Screw 'em. I'm gonna give it a couple years, and if nothing turns up, well, I've always wanted to direct...

This guy I know

I know this guy, his name is Jeff. Or Ray, depending on who you ask. Or El-Rock, JD, Jay, Billy or any one of a number of other monikers. I have no idea why his name should be so impermanent. I think of him as Jeff.

I met Jeff at the first rehearsal for my first play out of college. It was the first time I had ever worked on an original script, my first show in Chicago. He was older than me, and working as a sub in "Tony and Tina's Wedding," which was legitimate, paying theater (if a bit on the wrong side of the tracks for a "serious" actor). So right away I envied him a little. I was the youngest member of the cast, and felt like everybody's kid brother. When a horn sounded outside as the first rehearsal was breaking up, I said "Gotta go: my mom's here."

Jeff was one of the eternally easy-going. He loved nicknames, and not just his own. He called me "Matty," "Matty P.," or "Maht News." The last was based on a typo from the original call sheet handed out at the first rehearsal. I'm assuming he didn't put an "h" into any of the others.

We lived, as it turned out, only a block from one another in the barren wastelands of Rogers Park. Since rehearsals were usually in Wicker Park, we began to carpool. We usually took his car, and I can recall watching him as we barrelled down LSD, his cigarette crunched beyond recognition between his index and middle fingers, the filters left in his ashtray crumpled and twisted from the force with which he held them.

The script was called "The Blank Page," by Adam Langer, and I think the whole cast felt pretty lucky to be a part of the production. It was a good, modern script about people working at an indie music magazine in the mid 1990s. I played the editor: a lazy, entitled suburban guy with little to no interest in the articles I had to edit.

Jeff played a bike messenger/photographer named Billy Jay, whose speeches were a beautiful combination of rapid and vapid. The show had a lot of energy from the start, but when Jeff entered everything shot up to maximum.

One night, he burst through the door and circled through the set as usual, coming to a rest by my desk and looking at me. He was supposed to have already said, while approaching: "Pictures, pictures, pictures, boss. I got pictures!" and slapped a folder down, cueing the next line. Instead he just stood there looking at me for what felt like an hour or so, but was more likely about 5 seconds. Finally I said: "Uh, what've you got for me, Bill?" and he delivered the line, and the show proceeded. He repeated that ad-lib back to me for years, dropping his voice to imitate mine.

I wasn't aware that another cast member had an artificial leg until the night I came into the space and discovered Jeff playing air guitar on it, while our friend hopped, single-legged, around the room.

When we later did the film version of the play, Jeff was the one who convinced me to do one of our scenes in Spanish without telling anyone. He had to teach me my lines in Spanish, and if I hadn't screwed them up, it's entirely possible that the final cut would have featured a scene which required subtitles.

Working on another play a few years later, Jeff was giving me a ride to the train station after a performance when a cab slammed into us, sending us skidding out of control along a wintry Wacker Drive, coming finally to a rest just a few feet from the barrier over the river. I'm pretty convinced that if Jeff hadn't burst out laughing when the cab struck us, if he had instead tensed up, we'd have gone over. I was mad at him at the time, though, as he sat there laughing in the stopped vehicle while I sat there dazed, with glass from his window in my mouth.

It was completely like Jeff that, after all the police reports had been filed, with us huddled together drenched and miserable in the back of a paddywagon against the freezing rain, he hired the same cab which had hit us to take us to our various destinations. The cabbie cursed and harrangued us endlessly as we drove, insisting that the accident was not his fault.

There's no special reason for this post. So far as I know, Jeff is fine, and doesn't read this blog. He will turn up in the next section of the map of july history, though, as he was the original drummer. Maybe that's what had me thinking of him.