General Check-in, and Thoughts on Playwriting

Ah, tech week. I spent the night in Zoellner again last night. At least this time I managed to fall asleep on the carpeted floor of Diamond instead of the concrete floor of the studio. I don't think I've ever had the actor's nightmare at any point before a show, the one where you go on stage and forget all of your lines, or your costume completely falls apart, or some such embarrassing thing. However, last night (well, really this morning) I had a stage manager's nightmare, involving a gross amount of fuck-uppery and chaos. I wish the worst case didn't seem like a possibility, but my imagination is rather vivid.

Working with less seasoned actors for my directing scene has been an eye-opening experience. I have had to actively think about and coach things which, at this point, I myself have internalized and more or less do without thinking. I remember learning a good deal in the last couple years, while acting for various student directors, about the basics of body position, stage picture, stillness, etc., simply because those were the tools they had to play with. Hopefully, I can help some of my actors along on those fronts as well.

Thoughts on Andrea, the playwriting candidate: these thoughts will be brief-ish, because I left her session quite unimpressed. I didn't like the way she used the Tina Howe piece. Although the play itself was wonderful, the way she utilized it had this undertone of, "This is how you should do it." I know, I know, postmodernism and all, we can't create anything new, yadda yadda yadda. If playwriting was all about aping the styles of our predecessors, we'd all still be writing plays with Greek choruses. Furthermore, I wasn't really a fan of the writing exercise she had us do. I felt like the choosing of three things, which almost by nature had to be disparate, forced us into slightly to extremely absurdist writing, and I felt furthermore as if I was forcing two of the things into my scene. I had more or less found the game of the scene (to steal an improv term) in the snack food choice, but I still had to hamfistedly insert a foreign phrase and a dance step where they didn't need to be. On the plus side, the handout she gave us looks to be a useful collection of musings. All in all, I would say my least favorite of all the candidates thus far. One more to go...

Back on the subject of acting, I was Youtubing and found this clip of Sir Ian McKellen on the Late Late Show. You have to skip ahead to about 1:49 for the really fabulous part. Further proof of Sir Ian's dominance.

Oh well, break over. Back to tech...