Twin Buffets, One and a Half Merchants, and a Treatise on Volume in Stage Acting

New Martinsville, West Virginia, February 1-3:

Situated on the Ohio river and consequently nestled to the extreme north of West Virginia’s borders, New Martinsville lays claim to a number of titles in regards to this blog.

One of them is ‘New Martinsville: Town of the Twin Buffets,’ because the non-chain restaurants that I found were a surprisingly good Chinese buffet about two minutes from the hotel and a home-style buffet called Quinet’s, which is apparently a town tradition, and which I visited with Mssrs. Evan Hoffmann and Daniel Kennedy. Because the more that I am on tour, the more I get tired of chain restaurants, I ate myself into pain all three days of our visit. The hotel’s gym, which consisted of a treadmill that stopped working every two to three minutes (which rather made me wonder if it operated via cell phone reception), was consequently not on an inverse relationship with the area food, but I think this correlation only works for campuses.

N.B. For anyone wondering, ‘What is a life on tour really like?’ the above paragraph will probably give you a far more accurate view than anything in the rest of this post, and possibly in this entire blog.

New Martinsville’s other title is ‘Town of One and a Half Merchants’ which is probably a more distinctive title than the former. Some of you may be wondering whether this a rather bad idea for a sitcom, in which Antonio, being gay as a tangerine, adopts a scrappy little orphan boy, who may or may not be a girl in disguise. Some of you may be wondering if this is an effect of the troubled economy, in which the two Merchants you previously owned are now only worth one and a half. Some of you may be wondering when I am going to end this paragraph, because it is perfectly obvious what I mean! You win, though all two and a half of you will have to read on to get the full explanation.

We were set to perform Merchant of Venice for an area high school. We therefore woke an ungodly hour, loaded in first in rain and then down a long hallway, and started the show at around 10 AM. For those of you who may have forgotten, our staging of Merchant involves all eleven of us staying on stage during the entire show, seated on benches around the sides of the stage. So, when the principal was trying to signal to Chris Seiler to come off stage in order to talk with her during scene 2.3, Chris (as he narrates it) tried desperately to convey to her that exiting was not a possibility. But eventually he ceded, and shortly afterwards crept around to each of the benches to tell us that we would be pausing the show after this scene.

This would not have seemed quite so surreal with either of our other shows, in part because there would have been people backstage to receive the message, and in part because the fact that we never go backstage creates a spirit of continuity for the show that jars oddly at interruption. (We discovered this when, in our December performance at the Blackfriars, we had an intermission for the first time.) So, when we stopped after the scene, and everyone sat around in silence for a moment, Ginna, who was sitting next to me on the bench, leaned over and said, “Do you hear that sound? …That’s P.J. screaming.”

The principal came forward and announced that, as many of the students had predicted, they were indeed going to be going home. She announced that students would be dismissed by bus, and read off some of the bus numbers that were ready to depart. The performance would resume, and we would do as much as we could before the rest of the busses arrived.

Through all of her announcement, the sheer absurdity of our situation made me grin irrepressibly. There we all were, sitting around on stage, whilst the principal read off bus numbers so that the students could escape an impending catastrophe that I did not understand—after all, it was just raining, not snowing. I’m not sure why my natural response to this kind of adversity is profound amusement, but it has more to do with realising that worrying will get me nowhere than a lack of concern. Also, I should not, in honesty, underestimate my love of a great story, and perhaps my initial curiosity about the drama of not doing a show has brought this upon our heads.

DRAMA RUNDOWN

For those of you keeping score at home, we have logged one example of each of the following kinds of drama:
- The drama of thinking we might not do a show, but in the end performing as planned;
- The drama of doing a different show than the one we were planning to do;
- The drama of not doing a show;
- The drama of doing one-half of a show.

WEST VIRGINIA HIGH SCHOOL SHOW COMPLETION RUNDOWN

And for those of you keeping tabs on this particular sport, the score is as follows:
- SHOWS COMPLETED: 3
- SHOWS NOT COMPLETED: 2
This means that we are only 3 for 5 with West Virginia High Schools, or perhaps that they are 3 for 5 with us. This is not a shameful score for other sports, but in the theatre, one rather expects to make it to the curtain call. This is not a good track record, West Virginia!

And now, back to the show—in more ways than one. We resumed the performance after the interruption, and made it through another four or five scenes, until the principal somehow communicated to Chris that we needed to stop. (In my mind, because she was always behind me, I see her making signs like a baseball coach, or perhaps communicating via semaphore.) Paul was eternally devastated by the fact that we were cut off right before the Arragon scene, after he had so painstakingly made the costume change, thus prompting him to suggest the following day that we do the Arragon scene first before running through the rest of the show.

We discovered that school had been cancelled due to flooding on many of the area roads, which were becoming increasingly dangerous as more rain fell. But before many of the kids were actually sent home, they were given lunch, and we were also invited to help ourselves to some of the cafeteria food. The kids all gave us rock star treatment as we squeezed into chairs at various tables with the students; I think 90% of the autographs I have signed in my life have been at high schools, where students often mistake us for people who are actually important. These kids were particularly fervent in their adoration, almost as if Shakespeare had played hard-to-get, and was thus more desirable.

One of the finest moments of the day, which was, let’s face it, already pretty distinctive, was when the principal stood in the middle of the dining hall and bellowed something to the effect of “We have guests here with us and you all are acting like a bunch of heathens!” (“You all are acting like a bunch of heathens” is definitely a direct quote.) I found it amusing chiefly because I thought they were actually quite well behaved, for high school students. Dan and I did our part to quietly confound authority during this announcement by poking each other like two children in the back seat of a car. I am not sure if the students with whom we were sitting were more amused or surprised.

The following day, we held a community workshop about Merchant of Venice, which was memorable chiefly because, when we asked for an audience response to part of a scene with Shylock, one of the gentlemen in attendance said that Shylock “was, as we say around here, fixin’ for a five-knuckle introduction.” Most of us agreed that this was the best assessment we had yet heard.

That evening, we performed Merchant at the old Lincoln theatre (est. 1920, yet another thing that happened in the decade in which I was born) in downtown New Martinsville, which was, by report, an old opera house, but reminded me in construction far more of a movie theatre. The reasons for this comparison are as follows: the house had a long shoebox shape, deeply overhung by the balcony; the stage was small, but very high in relation to the house; there was very little space directly backstage, though there were capacious dressing rooms underneath the stage, obviously also est. 1920; and, last, but not least, the acoustics were terrible.

Aaron wisely had us all do a sound-check beforehand, wherein I learned that I needed to feel as though I was screaming at the top of my lungs in order to be heard. I know this is a weakness of mine, stemming from my primary obsession/need for honesty within myself on stage, and my consequent desire to be able to just talk to the people on stage with me. Naturally, this does not mean that I don’t try as hard as I possibly can to be perfectly audible to the person in the last row, but I only hope that I can be honest and be audible to that last person, too. Many actors have articulated this as the challenge of being understood with equal honesty and clarity by the person in the last row and the person in the front row, but I think it goes further than that: one must have equal honesty for the last row and for one’s self. I think this is one of the greatest technical and emotional challenges in stage acting, precisely because it requires a blend of all of one’s technical and emotional skill. For example, I fell in love with Jennifer Garner as Roxane in Cyrano, which I saw from, literally, the second to last row of the top balcony, but my friend who was in the show said (with all due respect) that other friends of his who saw the show from the front rows felt that they could ‘see’ her acting. And God knows, I am a far lesser actress, and I have not yet figured it out.

I think one of the greatest challenges of touring is adapting to different spaces; spatially, I find this a delightful opportunity to be a Theatre Ninja, but vocally, the kind of challenge that takes up space in my brain where I’d rather be thinking only about the scene and what I need from others. For the first few scenes of this performance of Merchant, I felt as if I were speaking unnaturally loudly directly into people’s faces, and this unnaturalness subsequently seemed, from the inside, to infuse everything I did. But after a couple of scenes, the volume became natural, and, furthermore, the acting style fitting to that volume became natural, and I was able to delve deeper into the emotions in the words. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with “You see me Lord Bassanio where I stand;” I felt my body burning throughout the entire speech, which is one way I know I am connected to the deep current of the text. So, if we were performing in that space every evening, I would be used to the kind of honesty necessary in that space, and it would consequently feel natural from the start.

Because the deeper breaths and the increased resonance essentially give emotion fewer places to hide, more things are dredged up: it feels to me like the deep-sea trawling of acting. This fits into a certain style of acting, one that is no less honest, but which is, for lack of a better term, more ‘classical,’ or more ‘Shakespearean.’ I think it has a place in any Shakespeare performance, and if I attend a show, and in an entire performance an actor never goes down to the bottom of their body and pulls their heart out of their throat, when they have been given such poetry with which to do it, I feel a little cheated. But an entire performance of it is exhausting to watch, and then I’m always itching for them to just TALK to each other, for the love of heaven.

For example, the Edward II that many of us in the troupe saw at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. was mostly a whole lot of screaming (except for the man who played Mortimer, who talked occasionally in the second act). They were all very talented actors, but many of their performances verged on using, to my ear, the dread ‘Shakespeare Voice’ (odd especially for Marlowe), and I got the sense from most of the actors that they had been directed to project louder and louder for the new space, past a place that was honest for them. Though I abhor the Voice-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, a deep emotional resonance is a beautiful thing to hear, to see, and to experience, because it shows us something greater; but it is best when used to shape the journey by pointing out the largest emotional moments in the play, or at least, in a scene. An entire play of it is mush.

Throughout my personal journey in Shakespeare performance, which, while modest, actually comprises over one-half of my life, I have always oscillated between a desire for allowing the text to carry out the deepest emotional resonances in the body, and a desire for the text to be as plain, as simple, and as colloquial as possible. Within a year, or within a day, I will head one direction or the next; but in the end, I think the only answer can be that both are necessary, and only by the inclusion of both can the beauties and the virtues of both be seen to best advantage. The reason I, in honesty, dislike spaces in which I always need to use my top volume, is because variation is harder to achieve, not because I cannot be loud and honest, both. Variety is the spice of acting.

And now that my Treatise on Volume in Stage Acting has concluded, I can bring my verbosity round to other subjects, such as our actual performance of Merchant of Venice. Some of the fantastic kids from the previous day’s aborted show came to the evening’s performance, which was lovely. One posted a comment on my About Me page expressing his distress at not being able to see the rest of the show, and someone (probably one of our Merchandise/Development folks) reported that he was in attendance. This renewed my faith in both high school students, and the possibility of people actually coming to see your show when they say they will. (One reality of life, as an actor, is that many more people say they will come see your show than actually do.)

Two things remain distinctive about this performance for me. The first was that Dan, the Emperor of Comedy, was unprecedentedly hysterical as Launcelot Gobbo. His speech just gets better each time, though it was in his later scene with Jessica and Lorenzo in which he makes jokes about preparing to go in to dinner, that I was floored with laughter. After each of his jokes, he tucked his head down and made a funny little grin to himself, and it definitely belongs on the list of Top 25 Funniest Things I Have Ever Seen On Stage, if not in the Top 10. Like everything else on these lists, it does not communicate well. Sometimes I wonder if the things I find funniest are funniest because they are unique, and truly had to be experienced at that time. I always find myself trying to explain the genius (previously discussed on this blog) of Michael Aronov leaping across half of the stage in Mauritius, and the story is always about as funny as this sentence. Part of the beauty of Dan’s grin was that I was about two feet from him, and probably had the best view of anyone in the house, assuredly much better than the people way in the back of the telescope of a theatre space. But suffice it to say, I haemorrhaged laughter at Dan’s Gobbo antics, and had to think about something really depressing, like ‘President Huckabee,’ in order to stop.

The other memorable thing about this performance was that the audience, though I am sure they are all lovely people, laughed at every single one of Gratiano’s racist jabs in the courtroom scene, and then actually laughed when he ripped off Shylock’s yarmulke and spit on it. People always laugh at the first few digs, because it breaks the tension of the scene, but never, to my memory, have people laughed at him spitting on the yarmulke. I thought I was going to lose it.

Of course, I had already been pushed to my extreme, with the volume pulling up emotion, and furthermore, watching Chris/Shylock respond to the laughter that had greeted all of Gratiano’s previous anti-Semitic attacks. Chris, as Shylock, has this beautiful and absolutely heartbreaking way of taking in the laughter, as if it were, indeed, a courtroom of hundreds of people set against him. It always moves me, but the larger the laughter, the more terrified Shylock appears, and the greater my pity for him becomes. During this performance, when I have to stop him with “Tarry Jew, / The law hath yet another hold on you,” I am not proud to say that a tear had slipped from my eye; it was awkward because, of course, I had nowhere to hide, and knew that Shylock would see it, but I thought it better not to wipe it away, making it obvious to the entire courtroom and the audience.

So, when they laughed at Gratiano spitting on the yarmulke, it took everything I had not to start crying. It’s hard to watch actors delving into a cruelty dictated by the text, and it’s painful to get caught up in the emotion of the courtroom and deliver the heartless justice that was requested, because they are reminders of the places in all human beings where compassion disappears—but it is a sharper reminder when a whole roomful of people, under no compulsion from a playwright or a storyline, laugh at such misfortunes. But I did not weep, and, oddly enough, I felt that the rest of the scene, in which I try to get Bassanio’s ring, was the best it’s ever been—as if I had to make it extra light just in order to pull myself out of my horror and assume the role of Learned Doctor. I think this is a discovery that might help me with some of the changes I’m trying my best to implement.

West Virginia constituted a tough couple of weeks for me, and for many of us, and for a number of reasons that had nothing to do with our hosts and the kind reception we invariably receive. We were all excited to be heading into Florida’s warmer weather, and, God willing, cell phone reception!