Suppose you’re auditioning for a play.

You choose the most dramatic monologue in your aresnal. Let’s say the character is at her father’s funeral. She never told him she loved him while he was alive. Wracked with guilt and regret, she finally lets it all out and makes peace with her father, finally telling him she loves him.

You rehearse the piece over and over. You perform the monologue at the audition. Flawlessly. Terrifically. Tears flow.

(pause)

The director asks you to perform the same monologue again, but this time act like you’re thrilled the old man croaked. He was a stingy so-and-so and now you stand to inherit his vast fortunes. You’re thrilled he’s gone. GO!

But you know this character inside-out. You practically know the rest of the play by heart. You’ve created the backstory and know the character is in fact devastated by her loss. There is no other way of looking at it.

What do you do?

Easy – without a moment’s hesitation you perform that sucker again exactly as you were asked. Take this as encouragement. The director likes you and wants to see more. You’ve now moved on to the second date.

Any combination of these three things is happening here:

1. The director has something in mind for you, but the role asks for other qualities in the performer (maybe greed? vengeance? cold-heartedness?)
2. The director is testing your range. Sure you can cry on command but can you take us on the whole journey leading to that moment?
3. This is the most important one. Can you take direction? Can you just “go with it?” Good or bad. Right or wrong.

I’ve seen people lose parts over this – I’ve seen people argue back about “my character wouldn’t do this” and other nonsense. You’re being handed an opportunity here. Don’t blow it.

Rehearsal is like that too. When the director suggests an adjustment you take that suggestion and go with it 100%. You can’t see the play. You’re in it. There are a lot of moving pieces and only the director can see the whole.

I had a “go with it” moment the other day in rehearsal. My partner and I were asked to take a scene in a different direction. It certainly wasn’t  how I saw the scene and I didn’t think the text supported what he wanted us to do. But you have to trust what you’re being given. You have to try it out

And you know what? It worked beautifully. It brought the scene to a different place and said so much more about our characters’ relationship than what we were playing previously. On further reflection I found that the text did support what we were doing.

My scene partner turned to me and said something like, “You forget sometimes how bad of an actor you are.” Both of us had the same doubts but both of us committed and were the better for it.

So the takeaway here is go for it. Take the direction and run with it. Embrace it. Make friends with it.

If it works… epic win. You’ve discovered something you didn’t know was there before.

If it doesn’t work… epic win still. You’ve discovered something that doesn’t work and can move on and try other things.

But if you don’t commit 100% you’ll epic fail. Every time.

This here is an article about how different theatres handle the “turn your damn cell phones off” announcement at the beginning of a show and if their  particular method is useful.

It must be the bain of every company’s existence. Because people still don’t turn off their phones, and worse ANSWER them in the middle of a show. Oh clueless audience person, as if that call absolutely needed to be answered, right then, right there. Oh clueless audience person, how could you be so dense as not to know – in theatre, phone off. Clueless audience person, how could you.

But I have a bigger pet peeve, in a different class of clueless audience person. ( I feel at times there are so many classes) This one makes my skin crawl, my blood boil and my head ache. It’s the Krinkly candy opener.

It’s always in the quietest scene. The one that requires rapt attention. The one that you are so intensely involved in. And then it happens. Kriiiiiiiiiiick. Slow. Dead slow. Backwards. Fast, you could handle. Fast and it would be KRINKLE, over and done. But no, it’s always, always deathly slow. Kriiiiiiiiiiick. Like they think no one can hear. Like slow equals silence. I can read their minds – “If I open this candy at the speed of something that is the opposite of fast, no one will know what I’m doing.” Nay Krinkly candy opener! Your sluggish and stagnant step by step, inch by inch, minute by minute, hour by hour, of Kriiiiiiiiiiiick is enough to send me over the edge.

I can forgive a phone. Hey, maybe every other time you go to the theatre you’re very dilligent and this one time you forgot, and you turned it off right away. Maybe you’re in a special profession where indeed you are more important than every other single person in the theatre and you need to answer your phone.

But there is no forgiveness for the Krinkly candy opener. You know who you are.

What theatre pet peeves do you have?

This month we’re looking at how to use Pinterest, the hot new online scrapbooking tool. How can Pinterest be useful as a jumping off point in production or the drama classroom?

Read the whole thing here!

In This Issue - Pinterest in the Drama Classroom

Pinter what?

Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board. As you surf the web, if you see an image, something you like, you can “pin” it to an online “board.” You can keep these “likes” organized into different categories, themes, tasks or events. You can also connect with others through your mutual interests – you can repin an image from someone else’s board to yours and vice versa. You can comment on the images. You can follow the boards of others and others can follow you. These shared elements make it more than just a place to collect links or photos. It’s visual social media. It’s the newest form of social networking.

Direction Research

One of the most important jobs of the director is to come up with a vision for their production. How will you visualize the significant themes of the play?

Here are some exercises and tips to use Pinterest as a direction tool.

Set Research

The visual experience of a play for an audience starts with the first thing they see: the set. The set invites an audience into a specific world, and encourages them to engage with that world, even before the first word of dialogue. Start your set design work with these two fundamentals: Lines/Shapes and Colour.

Costume Research

Many plays require costumes to fit a certain era. Some require costumes that are complete fantasy beyond your base knowledge. Image searches are going to help you visualize the specific costume requirements.

Classroom Use

How can I use this in the classroom?

Pinterest and image searches can be extremely useful in the classroom as exercises to fully understand a play students are currently studying

Read more about all of these topics here!

Lindsay shares her thoughts on finishing a draft and where she goes from here…

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One of the great privileges of working in the theatre is being backstage. I’ve taken friends and family backstage after shows, people who have never seen what’s behind the flats, and there’s usually a look of disillusionment in their eyes. The world that the designer has created no longer exists on the other side.

Most sets are built out of stock risers and flats – standard-sized pieces that fit together in configurations to suit the designer’s vision.

Stock pieces waiting to become the Jerome family home.

The age of the set pieces shows in the paint, the screwholes, the grafitti. I took a few photos of our backstage to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

I always wonder when I’m backstage – are there ghosts of past shows watching us? Do we owe them anything?

Not Flat D or F.

Not sure what this paint represents. A distant group of office towers?

The back wall is painted for another show. Our set hides the back wall so it never gets seen.

Various sections of painted floor. Imagine all the characters and stories that strolled these risers.

Sadly our show does not call for three cans of beer. Nor is Becky anywhere in sight.

The back side of a clapboard effect. I love the different paint colours and patterns from shows past.

Love this article over at the Guardian about the “Myth of the Suffering Artist.”  I have to say though, sometimes I get a little bummed out about the mystique of “we must suffer for our art.” Because I don’t.  Suffer, that is. And everyone once in a while I wonder if I should. Haven’t you ever wanted to wallow in a little misery? Use tough times as inspiration?  Or be scattered and have it explained away  - “Oh she’s an artist.”  That has never happened to me.

Have there been tough times? You bet. I didn’t make a living as a writer till I was 35. There were many years when the rent was paid on the first and we were not sure at all where the next month’s was coming from. But suffer? Like misery? Like shivering in rags by the grate? Like starvation and scabs? No. Not even close.

And as I sit here, I can’t say I’m really all that bummed out. Because I believe it’s a crutch to say misery= art.  It can. But the blanket statement just doesn’t apply. It’s the same coin opposite side to say that artists must be inspired to create. If that was the case the large majority of us would be waiting around for a long, long time. You don’t wait, you do. You don’t hit yourself with a hammer for misery, you write about someone who is miserable. That’s the fun part, you don’t actually have to go there. That’s why I guess it always surprises me when people ask if what I write is based on my life, or someone I know, or a true story. Like they want my sad characters to come from some place of sadness. Like it makes the play better if the playwright is a basket case.  Sorry. I make it all up.

This is my favourite part of the article:

“I meet young and new writers and find they are intent upon suffering, rather than writing. It can seem that wearing black, moping, engineering car-crash relationships and generally being someone nobody wants to sit beside on the bus could be a shortcut to writing success.”

I too meet young writers all the time, and they mostly want to know two things: how do you write, how do you get published. And my answer to the first is always the same. To be a  writer, you must write. There is no shortcut, no rule, no guideline, no easy way out. It’s the pen on the page and the fingers on the keyboard. Every day.  Sometimes it’s ugly and sometimes it’s great. And you get up the next day and you do it again. The only way to get better at something is to practice. I wish that writers saw themselves as athletes. No one denies that the athlete needs to practice and perform. You can’t have one element without the other. You can’t only do one. Both are necessary. If writers approached writing the same way,  a lot more would get done.  Can you imagine if we thought athletes had to suffer to be good at what they do? Or that they had to be miserable to succeed? Oh woe the suffering football player dressed in black and moping by the goal posts….

I’ve left my real home in Crystal Beach for a fictional one in Brighton Beach and I’ll be using this space to share some thoughts that I hope you’ll find useful.

Neil Simon is a wonderful writer. One of the best. His dialogue is so free-flowing, so easy, so natural that you really don’t need to do much to make it work. Say the words and don’t trip on the furniture. You’ll get laughs, tears, and standing ovations.

But there’s a great big bear trap awaiting anyone approaching his scripts. The plays flow so naturally that it’s easy to be lazy. It’s easy to forget that the play is about something, about people, relationships, storytelling. That we as actors, directors, designers can take this rock-solid foundation and elevate it to something even higher.

This brings us to the readthrough.

Ted Price (no relation to Lindsay) is directing the play and he’s constantly pushing us to add layers and dimensions to the characters and the storytelling.

Ted laid the groundwork for this by giving us his interpretation of the spine of the play – “To find dignity and worth in a dingy and troubled world.” This is the foundation from which we build the show, the tree trunk that holds the branches together. We are all here to support that spine.

He also emphasized that this is a play about a family of seven people. Seven people means that there are 42 different relationships in the play. We all relate to one another differently.

When I start reading a script I’m very selfish. I flip through the pages to my parts. I think it’s perfectly natural to feel like our character, no matter how small, plays an integral role in the play. The most integral role. That’s healthy. Our characters should never be unimportant, never boring, never wallpaper. But we do have to remember that they are but one part in a larger whole.

We discover the roles and interactions and other characters’ journeys throughout the rehearsal process.

But in an effort to jumpstart the relationship building, Ted took great pains to explore each character in detail. Not for the benefit of of the actors in their own roles, but to give us a foundation and understanding of everyone else’s place in the story.

For example – Eugene’s spine is To be understood and to understand. Nora’s is To stand on her own two feet. These details are mostly obvious to the actor playing the character in question, but perhaps not to the others.

I challenge all directors to do this. It was really helpful so get such a detailed big picture, to understand where everyone else is coming from, and to understand how all the moving parts work.

Aside – The photo above is of our set. Theatre North West begins rehearsals with the entire set in place. All our blocking is done on set. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller – “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend building the set before rehearsals.”