Cullowhee and the ASC

Today’s title is brought to you by: It’s Fun to Say It. That’s the kind of dorky title one can only expect of a Shakespearean actor. We were having a conversation about which of our lines are most fun to say, and I think Evan pretty much trumped us all with “..but in gross brain little wots / What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace.” And that’s coming from someone who gets to say “No, thou proud dream / That play’st so subtly with a king’s repose” within the very same speech. That Shakespeare—holy wow, he’s good. The result of the conversation is that I’ve had the “little wots what watch” line stuck in my head like a song.

 Aaaand that’s the kind of dorky introductory paragraph one can only expect from a Shakespearean actor. Perhaps more specifically, one who calls themself a ‘Nerd’ within the title of their own blog.

Cullowhee, North Carolina, September 18:

The campus of West Carolina University was nestled in the middle of the mountains, which made for a beautiful and slightly nauseating drive, the former due to the plunging gullies spattered with light filtered through ivy-covered cathedrals of the trees, and the latter due to the hair-pin turns. The campus was also gorgeous, and I had fleeting visions of how lovely it would have been to walk to class every day against the backdrop of the mountains, until I remembered that my Role is Absurd City Girl, and all told, I’d really rather walk to class against the backdrop of A Thai Restaurant Somewhere in a Three-Mile Radius.

And as Absurd City Girl, I have to say that I found the university’s theatre almost as beautiful as the landscape. For those Boston folk who are kind enough to be reading this, the theatre reminded me a little of the Wimberley theatre in aesthetics, only about twice as big, and with better acoustics. The stage was large enough that we had three or four rows of audience members on either side, on fancy risers, and the dressing rooms were about the size of a few of our performance areas at other venues. Some very kind people also gave us technical help, which was perhaps necessary in such a state-of-the-art theatre. For it is frequently pointed out from one troupe member to another, on the occasion of someone breaking something, that THIS is why actors cannot have nice things. Or at least, we cannot.

The audience was equally large and enthusiastic, filling up all the seats on stage and the vast majority of the orchestra, which I estimate must have been at least 500-600 people. I felt a little overwhelmed by the numbers when they all immediately rose to their feet curtain call, and it hit us like a sudden and vast wave of the ocean. Our subsequent performances of Merchant have always gotten standing ovations, as well, and it doesn’t cease to amaze and delight me.  I thought the show was at least a little improved over the previous night (which wasn’t bad), with the possible exception of the heartbreakingly gorgeous “Fancy Bred” song composed by Chris Johnston, which I continue to heartbreakingly mangle to his unspoken but patient chagrin.

I had also attended the workshop that afternoon, so it was great fun to see a lot of those faces in the audience in the evening. I felt a little guilty that the same poor boy whom I had ‘rejected’ in the Actions Game portion of our workshop was also picked out by Ms. Ginna Hoben as one of the suitors (Faulconbridge, if I recall correctly), so I had to reject him twice. It was, however, a good and no doubt purposeful choice on Ginna’s part because he was wearing a bandana tied around his head, which gave me something to reference when I talk about his bonnet. Ginna is amazing for 8.7 billion different reasons, one of them being that she always seems to single out the one person in the audience with some kind of head accoutrement.

We stayed in a lovely guest house on campus; my own room was only amusing in so far as Johnston had selected it himself, and it was clearly the Pretty as a Princess Room of the house, with matching four-poster beds with rose coverlets. However, the guest house remains memorable chiefly because Evan and Ginna were given a room in which the two single beds were placed about six inches apart. I pointed out that it was like the bedroom of a mom and dad in a 1950s television show, with the upshot that the two decided to call themselves Mama Bear and Papa Bear. The most amusing part of the story, notwithstanding Ginna’s impression of herself sleeping stick-straight in fear of moving, is that Mama Bear accidentally locked Papa Bear out of the guest house whilst she was in the shower, and the rest of the Berenstein Eloquence Troupe was out on the habitual fool’s errand of trying to find somewhere that will serve both food and beverage after 11 o’clock at night.