TIM: Two weeks? That’s enough time to put together a whole new show!
ALL: (laughter)
(Later, on the car ride home…)
TIM: I wasn’t actually joking.
ME: …yeah, I know.
It’s always a bit of a surreal leap, jumping between Fringe-level theatre and mid-level theatre.
(And,
to clarify, by Fringe-level I’m not just including shows on the Fringe
circuit, but shows produced by regular members of that community –
y’know, the countless shows produced year-round at venues like the Bryant-Lake Bowl,
or various pubs and clubs and cabarets around the Twin Cities. I’d say
if you’re dealing with things like season announcements and boards of
directors and grant applications, what you’re looking at is probably
mid-level. (There’s a handful of groups that successfully straddle both
worlds – groups like Joking Envelope and Walking Shadow and Four Humors – but I’d say that for the most part they’re pretty segregated.) High-level, we’re talking financial juggernauts like the Guthrie.
My experience is primarily with the first two – I’ve acted in both and
produced both – and since I’ll be talking about them for a bit, let’s
call them "Fringelers" and "Middlers.")For someone used to the creative chaos of pulling together a Fringeler show, there’s something that feels almost decadent about a six-week rehearsal process. I’ve acted in an hour-long show where I didn’t see a word of the script until a week before opening. I’ve done a one-man show where I wrote the final scene a few hours before opening night. I’ve done a comedy where my very first time stepping onto the stage was the performance itself. This is an environment where it’s a bit weird that I usually have a complete draft six months in advance, and that I typically have scripts under development for 2-8 years.
Thing is, I don’t think this is laziness (or not wholly laziness, anyway). I’d argue that it’s a legitimate process – the goal is not to have a neatly polished show on opening night, but to line up all the elements of the performance and turn its development into an interactive process with the audience. It’s about preserving spontaneity and wildly experimenting from evening to evening. Middlers talk about being ready for opening – Fringelers talk about having a smoothly-executed show by closing night. And this, I think, is one of the key places where the two groups stare at each other in blank incomprehension. To Middlers, the idea of changing your performance every night appears unthinkably irresponsible; to Fringelers, the idea of not making any changes after opening appears unthinkably lazy.
I
want to emphasize that I’m not suggesting that one approach is
inherently superior to another – they’re both valuable and valid –
simply trying to express the creative whiplash I get moving between the
two. The great advantage of a process like that for Steampunk Delusions
is that, by the time we opened, I had a fairly tightly choreographed
performance, beat for beat and moment for moment, that I usually don’t
achieve unless I’ve been touring a show for a few months.The flip side is that it represented the first time in a long time when I opened a show in which exactly zero percent of the performance was audience-tested, and I made most of the attendant mistakes – barreling through laughter I wasn’t expecting, pausing for laughter that never emerged. I’ve done this kind of thing enough that I’ve been able to make adjustments on the fly, but it’s the opposite of the problems I typically have (and am used to dealing with).
---
It’s
always a bit strange for me to be around more traditionally-trained
actors, who talk about things like feelings and methods in the context
of these deeply internalized processes. One of the great reasons I was
drawn to mime, in retrospect, is that it offered a tangible course of
physical mastery – as opposed to most acting training I encountered,
which seemed to revolve around what I was thinking or feeling at any
given moment.I’m embarrassed to admit that I once went through one of those obnoxious phases where I felt I had to spend the time leading up to the performance meditating myself into some state of brooding intensity. It puts me in mind of Chaplin’s assertion that the fact that an actor feels the need to be mentally operated upon in order to do his fucking job is a sign that he needs to seek a new profession.
A great revelation for me was that what was going on inside my head had very little to do with how well I was doing onstage. I could be truly emotional and truly feeling it and truly, totally cut off from my audience – likewise, my mind could be wandering and I could be doing a wholly serviceable job.
In fact, I’ve almost swung around to the opposite approach now, where I feel the need to be doing something silly before walking onstage – talking about comic books or dancing or telling dirty jokes – so that I’m not thinking too much about what I’m about to do until I’m actually doing it. To torture an analogy, when you’re playing a musical instrument, you ideally don’t want to be concentrating really hard on every individual note – sometimes, it’s better to just relax and play. (To torture the analogy further, I often have the sense that Middlers want their shows to be symphonies – Fringelers want to be jazz.)
That said, I find that my internal monologue onstage these days is almost wholly technical – “Hold for laughter, wait ‘til it starts to fade, okay, next punchline – she tried something new, respond to it – try a quizzical expression here, see if it gets a laugh, nope, try something different tomorrow night...” etc.
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All
of the above are probably reasons why I’m more comfortable identifying
myself as a performer or an entertainer, rather than an actor. I’m
competent when it comes to working crowds or individual moments onstage,
but that’s not the same skill set as being able to embody a range of
characters, which remains beyond me. The former goes a long way towards
making up for the latter, but it’s pretty rare to find someone who can
effectively do both.This was perhaps illustrated most clearly for me when I started holding open auditions for my company, and when I handed my comedy monologues over, well – when I performed them, that’s what they were; at their best, effective collections of setups and punchlines. But when actual actors read them, they could make them seem organic, with, y’know, internal character logic and stuff.
That’s the kind of thing that the Middlers excel at, and that I wish I did, too. It’s also Reason #69,105 that I wish I was still able to produce ensemble work.
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