Reviewed!

We got a great review last week in the East Bay Express. Of course the show is over now, but still:

Meanwhile in San Francisco, the Un-Scripted Theater Company is improvising full-length stage musicals in the style of the non-musical playwright of your choice. The group has done fully improvised musicals before — notably The Great Puppet Musical and the holiday show Let It Snow — but this is the first go-round for Theater: The Musical. Over the month of May a rotating cast of actors has been coming up with two-act tuners in the mode of David Mamet, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. (Simon wrote Sweet Charity, but rules are made to be broken.)

The night we saw the show it happened to be an all-female cast and the playwright chosen from audience suggestions was Lillian Hellman. (No one uses her book for Candide anymore, so it's easy to pretend she never wrote musicals.) Usually five out of the pool of ten actors perform, but this time six women quickly whipped up the characters and story arc on the spot and belted out improvised lyrics to the spontaneous keyboard compositions of David Norfleet.

More melodrama than comedy, the plot that emerged was somewhat inspired by The Children's Hour in exploring fear, loathing, and sapphic suspicions at a girls' boarding school. Susan Snyder became the new teacher, Mandy Khoshnevisan the snobby establishmentarian, Karen Hirst the spiteful gossip, Tara McDonough the awkward nerd, Debra Shifrin the budding idealist, and Laurie Glapa the absent-minded dean.

Some songs were meandering, others remarkably catchy, but on the whole what emerged was often quite funny and more solidly constructed than some scripted musicals that have passed through the neighborhood. (Lestat comes to mind.) When there were long pauses, especially when things were still taking shape, the actors used the awkwardness as a character choice.

Because each performance is an entirely different show than the last, you could see three completely new musicals in the one weekend remaining, each never to be seen again. Theater: The Musical isn't just subverting musical theater by making it look easy — in a particularly immediate form, it's what live theater is all about.

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.

Tonight's your last night to se ME (and Week 3 recap)

Tonight’s your last chance to see me perform in Theater: The Musical!

I missed last Thursday’s show because I had laryngitis, but my voice had recovered enough for me to play in Saturday night’s Tennessee Williams show. We kept it lighter this time, since the audience clearly wanted it lighter. I played a character who smoked the whole time which was a good exercise in space object work, and a character who was subtly in love with Larry’s character. It worked well, considering the main storyline was about Tara being secretly in love with Laurie. (The audience wanted lesbian Williams.)

Tuesday night at rehearsal we worked a lot on absurdist playwrights (Albee, Ionesco, Beckett) and split screen scenes. Something we’d been having problems with. I’m excited to play tonight, but sad it’s my last night.

Come tonight! If you can’t, come see the show before it closes May 31.

Here’s what happened last weekend:

Thursday: Writer’s Block – in the style of Woody Allen (yes, he wrote plays)
Marsha (Mandy) has writer's block until she starts dating her accident-prone therapist, Dr. Allen Goldstein (Christian), who is even more neurotic than she is. But when her cutthroat editor Kathleen (Laurie) convinces her to put everything into her new novel, Allen starts to wonder if Marsha's been grabbing the extinguisher because his arm's on fire – or because her career is.

Friday: Shooting Richard – in the style of David Mamet
Famous actor Richard Sylvestri (Christian) wants to make art films, but his agent (Mandy) and producer (Sal) keep forcing him into mindless Hollywood schlock. When the mob calls Sal’s loan, he needs Richard dead to save his skin, but he can’t dupe the young Hollywood starlet Cassandra (Debra) into pulling the trigger. So he pulls it himself.

Saturday: The Broken Figurine – in the style of Tennessee Williams
Virginia (Laurie) is becoming a woman and Peter Calhoun (Larry) has come courting. Melinda (Tara) tries to talk her best friend Virginia out of returning his advances. He’s a mean brute of a man, but that’s not the Melinda’s only reason. Melinda doesn’t like men. She wants Virginia for herself.

Week 2: Williams, Martin, and Simon

I managed to survive performing in all three shows in the second weekend of Theater: The Musical, but I’m not sure my voice did. I got off to a rocky start when my character had to scream at Larry on Thursday and it all went down hill from there. Hopefully I can recover by Thursday.

Other than the voice damage, this weekend was a study in playing supporting (yet important) characters who didn’t need to be on stage much.

Thursday night I went out in the second scene as Larry’s character’s old father. As soon as I left the stage after that scene I knew two things: I would have to yell at Larry at some point, and my character would die. Turned out that was my only scene in the first half. I had two in the second. My character didn’t need to be in it anymore than that and I was quite content. My yelling followed by my immediate death ended the show. Very satisfying.

Friday my character wasn’t as pivotal, but I got into a great banter with Larry onstage about the fact that my character refused to read specials boards at restaurants. I could have kept that argument up for hours.

Saturday I probably should have been onstage more. I played the love interest and should have had more songs with the lead character. Even so, I did have more songs in that show than any other. Unfortunately I had a heck of a time finding my notes. Finally in the last song I managed to sound good. At least I got there.

Over all, I think we learned this weekend that we need to sing more. Not only will it deliver more of what the show is promising (being a musical and all) but it will slow us down and force us to do less. More singing = less plot.

Here are last week’s show summaries:
Thursday: Southern Gothic – in the style of Tennessee Williams
Charlotte (Tara) struggles to change her abusive husband Beauregard (Larry) on a southern plantation. When the ghost of Beauregard’s mother seeks to intervene, the whole family must confront the truth about their past.

Friday: Pirates & Producers – in the style of Steve Martin (yes he’s also a playwright)
Rachel (Mandy) tries to get her producer sister Carol (Laurie) to make her 400 page pirate romance script with little success. Then she starts dating Richard (Larry) whom she thinks owns a bowling alley, but when she discovers he too is a producer can she make the 7-10 split?

Saturday: The Wedding Plan – in the style of Neil Simon
All Sandy (Debra) and Brian (Alan) want is a simple wedding, but when Sandy’s family takes over the planning, the wedding start spinning out of control. They call off the wedding, prompting Sandy’s mother (Mandy) to dig herself a grave in the living room. What will she do when she finds out they eloped?

Week 1: We Can Do It and I Can Sing!

Theater: The Musical successfully opened last weekend. Our houses Thursday and Friday were on the lean side, but Saturday sold out, which is great for opening weekend. I came away from the weekend with two nuggets of incite.

First off, we can do this show and do it well. Thursday’s Mamet was definitely the rockiest, but it was the first night and happened to be the cast least suited to doing Mamet well. Tara excelled, but everyone else seemed a bit at sea. Even so, it was a solid show. Friday night we nailed Eugene O’Neil right down to his darkly depressing core, and Saturday night we did a highly entertaining Neil Simon. There was some room for improvement on the Simon, but I’m not sure we could do a better O’Neil. Maybe if we sung less in the first half. Either way, I’m convinced now that we can take any playwright the audience gives us and do an entertaining and satisfying show, even for playwrights we’ve never heard of (I’ve never read any O’Neil).

Secondly, I had a bit of an epiphany in regards to my singing. I’ve started listening to the music more closely, mostly as a way to not listen to the sound of my own voice. When I’m focusing on the music, I can harmonize more naturally and singing feels easier. When I’m paying too much attention to the notes I’m singing, I get too self conscious and singing gets really difficult. I’ll have to see how that works moving forward.

Here are little summaries of each of last weekend’s shows:

Thursday: Don’t Screw Up! – in the style of David Mamet
Miss P (Laurie) hires competing photographers to follow her ex-lover Laroue (Mandy), but one of them (Susan) double crosses her. The slow-witted Tina (Tara) figures it out and spells doom for Laroue’s double (Larry). In the end, Miss P discovers that Laroue was right under her nose the entire time.



Friday: The End of the Play – in the style of Eugene O’Neil
Aspiring author Tim (Alan) struggles to break free from his overbearing family. His father (Karen), an alcoholic washed up actor, uses the young Mary (Debra) to recapture some of his youth, while Tim’s younger brother Robert (Christian) resentfully fills the void left by their dead mother.


Saturday: Big Plans – in the style of Neil Simon
Christopher (Christian) has gotten into UCLA, but his mother Rachel (Tara) doesn’t want any of her children to leave their home in New York City. Meanwhile Chris’s father (Alan) is so eager for his kids to move out, he’s started turning Chris’s bedroom into a solarium, complete with fully grown corn. Will Chris and his sister Kathy (Laurie) finally have the courage to stand up to their mother?

Rehearsal #10: The Office by Beckett

We ran another entire show last night in rehearsal. This time I played instead of watching. We even had a little audience composed of the half of the cast that played last Wednesday, Shaun Landry (who was just visiting) and an extra musician. Actually we had Joshua play music for the first half of rehearsal, and new musician Kevin play for the second half.

Our playwright, suggested by Joshua, was Beckett. Fortunately I’ve just read a lot of Beckett and even recently posted my synopsis of his elements. I was all set. Susan was terrified, but she still dived in head first.

I can’t even begin to describe how much fun it was. I hope we get Beckett again on a night I’m performing so I can explore some other aspects of him. The show itself took place in an office conference room. Susan’s character was obviously lowest on the totem poll, somewhat rebellious, and had a fascination with her hand. I played Sebastian, who was onstage for the entire show! He was the next man up on the chain of command and spent most of the show deliberately moving two chairs into place in the center of the conference room. Christian played middle-management-man who did nothing but spout corporate buzz words. Laurie played the gender ambiguous boss. Debrah played a customer. We sold vacuums. The play ended when I choked Christian to death.

All that makes it sound way more normal than it actually was. Again, words fail me at Beckett’s brilliance and how much fun it was to improvise in his style. I understand why 90% of people think Beckett is rubbish, but there’s a reason he’s famous. The other 10% of us think he’s ripping brilliant (and soooo funny).

Theater: The Musical Play Schedule

This is subject to change. The dates I'm playing are highlighted in green:

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 #3: Acting Your Beats

Last night in rehearsal we talked a lot about what playwrights we might get form the audience as suggestions and worked on acting.

At Un-Scripted, we typically do a lot of work with protagonists. Most often we strive to identify a show’s protagonist in the first three scenes and then the rest of the show revolves around that person. This is especially true of the musicals we have done.

However, plays aren’t really like that. Plays often don’t have a strong central character whom every scene revolves around. Each scene, and even each beat within a scene might have its own protagonist.

First we went over some of the elements that can make a person the protagonist or allow them to deflect in on to someone else.

1. The protagonist is usually on stage. If you’re the protagonist, you should stay on stage. If you want the other person to be the protagonist, you can leave.
2. Protagonists talk about themselves, revealing their feelings to the audience. They say “me” and “I” a lot. To not be the protagonist simply say “you” a lot and talk about the other person. (WARNING: as with anything there are exceptions to all these rules, as Karen discovered last night. In a scene her character started telling another character how she was about to break down because of her crazy husband, but because she was using it as a tactic to illicit a response from the other character, not simply as a revelation, she was throwing the protagonist role on to the other character.)
3. Protagonists are the most normal and relatable person on stage. If you want to be the protagonist, be slightly more normal than the other people on stage. If you don’t want to be, be weirder.
4. Be changed. Protagonists are changed by what’s happening to them. If you’re not the protagonist, don’t be changed.
5. Protagonists respond to new information, but rarely supply it.

Then we played a game where played 3 person scenes and tried to bounce the protagonist around each character throughout the scene. We chose to do this in the style of Neil Simon for the practice. The result was scene that could have been straight out of a play and didn’t seem improvised at all.

All this made me think: I should be in a scripted play. Suddenly acting seemed so much easier. Just figure out who’s the protagonist of the beat and act in a such a way that makes them the protagonist. Since the script will have taken care of numbers 1, 2, and 5 above, simply act broader and weirder than the protagonist in those moments and don’t let your character be changed. If the protagonist is you in a beat, act more normal than everyone else and be changed. How easy is that?

Rehearsal #2: Banter

Wednesday night we worked on how to make dialogue sound less like improvised dialogue and more like written dialogue. Oddly, improv dialogue generally sounds more natural, and in order to make dialogue sound playwritten you have to make it sound unnatural. Because apparently very few playwrights actually write like people talk.

Christian and I improvised a scene about two people meeting at a bench in the park. Then we did it again with the requirement that we speak in complete sentences. Suddenly we were in Zoo Story.

Eventually we attempted to make it sound like banter. As we worked on it throughout the night we discovered the key, in many ways, is to ignore the improv tenant of “Yes And”. Your character has one thing on his mind and that’s all you talk about regardless of what the other person is saying. You still have to listen, so you know when to speak, but what you say doesn’t necessarily follow from what the other person just said. It’s a logical train of thought for you and your character, but the dialogue might sound like a non-sequitor.

This is harder than it sounds, especially after years of improv training, but works very well. I guess people are generally wrapped up in their own world most of the time and playwrights take that fact and exaggerate it for comedic effect. We don’t do it in improv because it’s so much extra work. You have to come up with your own stuff rather than building on what the other person just said.

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)

Let Theatre The Musical Snow

I attended auditions Monday night for Un-Scripted’s next show: Theatre, The Musical. Christian’s directing the show and he was having problems solidifying his concept for the show. Brainstorming with Mandy and I before the auditions started we hit upon some ways that the show can borrow from Let It Snow in terms of how suggestions are gathered.

The basic idea for the show is to get a suggestion for a playwright from the audience and then perform a musical that playwright might have written had they ever written musicals. It’s essentially a way to do a genre combo show, we’re just limiting the genre’s to Playwright, and Musical.

The problem is, how do you get a playwright? If I’m in the audience and am not familiar with the chosen playwright, will I enjoy the show? What if the performers don’t know the playwright?

Well, in Let It Snow, only one person from the audience was from the town, but the whole audience enjoyed it. The performers certain weren’t from the town either. So the answer is to ask for playwrights the audience likes and is familiar with and then interview them to find out what that playwright means to them. Then we bring their version of that playwright to life.

And it snows at the end.