Week 4: Beckett Finally

Last Thursday was my last show and we got Beckett as the playwright! I was so happy. Read more about it on experimentfarm. There’s one more weekend of shows left. I won’t be there, but that’s no reason not to go.

Here’s the summaries of last week’s shows.
Thursday: Upstairs Upstairs – in the style of Samuel Beckett
Colfax (Laurie) and Mingo (Alan) wonder if anyone lives upstairs from them, while Elizabeth (Mandy) and Charles (Christian) wonder if anyone lives below them. When Mingo’s twin brother Milo (Christian) goes upstairs, he gets trapped as Elizabeth and Charles’s servant. Then the worms move in, and everything changes.

Friday: The Teacher’s Lounge – in the style of Lillian Hellman
Miss Prescott (Susan) gets hired by Dean Nickelson (Laurie) and Miss Leone (Mandy) to fill the post vacated after the suicide of Miss Annabelle Lee (Tara). When her teaching style clashes with the school’s traditions, and Miss Leone’s machinations, Miss Prescott soon worries she’s on the same path as Annabelle. Can the Dean convince her to stay, or will she jump out her own window?

Saturday: Gwen’s Men – in the style of Oscar Wilde
Gwendolyn (Mandy) would prefer to live out her days on the estate of her best friend Cecile (Tara) and her husband Edmund (Christian), but the Lord and Lady Trenton (Christian and Karen) are determined to find her a husband. Charles Maquire (Debra) would gladly oblige, but his poetry turns Gwendolyn’s stomach. Until some mistaken identity at the cross-dressers ball and a duel gone wrong cause her to change her mind.

Rehearsal #9: Run Through

Last night we introduced ourselves to a new musician: Kristen. We've never worked with her before, and she's never really done exactly the kind of improvised music we're asking her to do. She did a great job! We'll have to get used to working together, but I'm looking forward to doing a show with her.

Then, after the musical introductions, we did something we've never really done before at Un-Scripted: We ran an entire show in rehearsal. Normally the first time we do a whole show from beginning to end is preview night. This can be highly nerve wracking, going up in front of a paid audience never really having done the show before. You never know what's going to happen.

Years ago when I directed Fear, I attempted to set up rehearsals where we would run an entire show, but every time we ended up inviting an audience or selling tickets for it, making it an actual show and not a rehearsal.

I did not play. I will play on Tuesday when we run a whole show again in rehearsal. Instead I was treated to a wonderful show in the style of playwright Lorraine Hansberry filled with beautiful songs and poignant moments. Perhaps more importantly this was the first time we ever tried playing characters of other races on such a scale, but they pulled it off quite well.

The key to playing a different race is the same as the key to playing any character different from yourself: play truths not stereotypes.

Rehearsals #7 and #8: Drama is scarey

We had a pick-up rehearsal on Monday night in which we did nothing but play. No singing. No playwrights. Just lots of free form short improvised scenes. We also went over stage combat. Everyone had a good time.

Then last night we did two first halves of shows again. For both we used Arthur Miller as the suggestion. I ended up the protagonist in the fist and I definitely learned a few things about improvising drama.

Years ago I used to direct a show for Un-Scripted called Fear wherein we improvised horror. Drama is a lot like horror with two differences:

1. In drama, the protagonist isn’t in danger of having their face eaten off by blood sucking zombies, but they might be in danger of dying.
2. The “bad thing,” be it death or what have actually does happen to the main character. The buxom teen-age heroine doesn’t summon the strength and determination to kill the blood sucking zombie. In tragic drama, they get eaten.

Knowing this, I can now use techniques from Fear to help my drama, such as talking about how nothing bad could possibly happen to me, right? There’s no reason not to go down in the basement. Let’s split up. (All translated in drama speak, of course: My boss wouldn’t screw me over. You cancer will stay in remission. I can afford to buy that home because I know I’ll get that raise soon.)

Rehearsal #6: Common Language

Wednesday night at rehearsal we had David Norfleet there to play piano and did two first halves of shows complete with singing. For the first one we did Chekov and the second we did Ibsen. I was in the Chekov. Both went quite well, I thought.

We’re starting to develop a common language for discussing playwrights, which I think will be essential for this show’s success. Perhaps the most useful thing we’ve discovered is how to describe one playwright in terms of another. For instance, Chekov is Ibsen with hope. Neil Simon is the comedic Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller is the Neil Simon of tragedy. Beth Henley is Tennessee Williams only upbeat and quirky.

Here’s my analysis of Becket based on the general categories of information we hope to get from the audience:

BECKETT

Theme: Beckett explores the nature of existence by striping life down to its basic elements and expanding or contracting time, often through repetition of similar events.

General Outlook: Beckett is very fatalistic (i.e. life is a terminal condition), but his plays are definitely tragicomic. They can be very funny, but don’t generally have happy endings. In fact, they tend to end without any resolution at all.

Setting: Beckett’s settings aren’t “real” but they are constructed out of recognizable elements. The entire play is a metaphor and not rooted in any specific place or time.

Chracters/Relationships: Beckett explores status relationships. As a result you have characters of varying social status such as servants, parents, lower class, upper class. Often these status relationships are tilted by giving a high status character socially some sort of physical or mental impairment to lower their status. Conversely, the characters on the low end of the totem pole are usually the smartest. Low status characters socially are always extremely low status to the environment, but in a very stylized way.

The verbal pacing is slow. People speak in short sentences punctuated by long pauses. Phrases and exchanges are often repeated. Movements are often repeated as well.

Rehearsal #5: Mr. Angry

Last night we did two mini-long forms. I was in the first one in a group with Susan, Tara, Lauri, and Larry. We chose Wendy Wassertein as the playwright, and while I couldn’t give you a detailed account of her style, I have at least seen two of her plays.

We told a fun little story that centered mostly around Laurie’s character as the protagonist. I good time as a side character in a volatile relationship with Tara’s character, but I came away with a couple realizations.

The first being, playing opposite someone you’ve been playing with forever and know very well is like riding a favorite roller coaster. You know all the twists and turns, but they still surprise and excite you.

The second being, I have hard time playing angry onstage. I wanted to be bigger and angrier than I was, but just couldn’t go there. This was not entirely my fault. The story was obviously a comedy and intense anger might have derailed it into drama, and yet Larry managed to be quite angry in the second long form, a Neil Simon inspired comedy. I guess this is something I need to work on: Playing anger. Playing mean. Playing characters who aren’t nice.

This could be a whole new way to avoid being the protagonist I haven’t explored!

Rehearsal #4: Dirty Old Carpet

Last night at rehearsal we finally started working on singing. As with any rehearsal, we started by warming up a bit with a name fry exercise and then moved into a vocal warm-up. We concluded the vocal warm up by standing in a half circle around our musician and singing a Verse/Chorus song. One person makes up a chorus, we all repeat it, then each person takes a turn singing a verse, with all of us repeating the chorus in between each verse. We chose to sing in the style of a David Mamet play.

We then moved into doing David Mamet style scenes that contained songs. After we’d done that a bunch, we moved on to Neil Simon style scenes into songs.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

We were rehearsing in a theater that is currently housing a run of Jean Genet’s The Maids. They’ve constructed a set that supposed to look like a run down tenderloin apartment. It’s done very well, right down to the rust orange-brown carpet that obviously came out of someone’s bedroom once. The carpet has obviously been cleaned, but no amount of cleaning could remove the inherent dirty quality of the poor floor adornment.

As the rehearsal progressed I could feel my chest getting congested, my nose filling up, my head starting to drift off into the land of loopyness. Soon I realized, it must be the carpet! Maybe its former owners had a cat. Maybe it’s just dusty or moldy. Either way, I was counting down the moments until I could get the hell out of there.

That said, as I lost my grip on reality, I found improvising and improvised singing so much easier. I was incapable of thinking, so I just opened my mouth and let stuff flow out. My brain felt directly connected to my mouth in a very strange way.

Now I just need to figure out how to recapture that feeling without the aid of a dirty old carpet.

Rehearsal #1: Theatre the Musical

We had our first rehearsal last night for Theatre the Musical. The premise of the show is simple: Take a playwright and improvise a show in the style of that playwright… only as a musical. We’ll play everything straight and the comedy will come from the juxtaposition. I mean, lets face it, Ibsen or Becket as a musical is comedy enough right there, let alone the untapped melodic potential of Mamet, Wasserstein, Albee, Miller… need I go on?

Last night we started by getting to know each other a bit. We have three people in the show who’ve never been in one of our shows before, and one understudy who is completely new as well. In fact the understudy has no improv experience at all, but has opera experience. Between rehearsals, my intro class, and Christian’s Thursday night class, we hope to have her up to speed to perform in at least a couple of shows by May. Otherwise, we’ll just enjoy having her voice around.

Then we worked on various status and style matching exercises. Style matching is one of the cornerstones of Un-Scripted’s improv philosophy. If you can style match, you can play any genre, even ones you know nothing about, as long as one cast member does. You just style match the person who knows what they’re doing. This allowed us to do a Brecht long form that drew a standing ovation when only a couple cast members knew anything about Brecht.

Then we closed by working on some improvised Mamet. The newbies leapt into it pretty well, though I noticed a tendency to rush and add more information than was necessary. Christian, our fearless director, isn’t so good at improvising Mamet, largely because he’s not a big fan of the playwright in general. He did quite good though.

I have no nugget of blinding incite to give you all from this first rehearsal. As we move forward, I’m sure epiphanies will follow. In the meantime, you have 2 weeks left to see our current show: Three (also designed to be more like a modern play than a traditional improv show.)

(photo: Brecht)