DAY 1

In February, I auditioned for South Coast Repertory's Professional Acting Intensive and, a week later, I got a letter in the mail saying that I was accepted. I promptly freaked out.

So I am very excited to be spending the next two months at the theatre every day, and because I convinced USD to give me some units for this endeavor, I will be blogging every day as my journal to later go back and write a massive paper about the experience. But, in the mean time, I will be sharing my daily experiences and my favorite tips and tidbits from the fabulous instructors that I am learning from every day.

My first morning, I was incredibly nervous, which is not a feeling I experience often, but the potential for my career after doing this program (hire me SCR! give me my Equity card!) is really intimidating. There are about 26 other actors this summer, with varying degrees of experience, training, and age. We took a tour of the theatre (I get a key!) and it's like starting school all over again: The building is a huge labyrinth of staircases, classrooms, offices, and of course the main stages, and I have no idea where any of my classrooms are. At one point I stepped away from the group to go to the bathroom in between classes and got thoroughly lost.

Our first class, with program director Karen Hensel, was a blast. We all came to class prepared with a monologue, and she put us on stage in pairs, gave us some given circumstances ("You're picking up a girl at a bar", "You're at your uncle's funeral"), and instructed us to do the scene using the text from our monologue. The result was sometimes hilarious and sometimes worked out weirdly well. Her entire point was that as an actor, "You control the words. The words do not control you." You need to be able to change the delivery of the words to fit what you're trying to communicate, because, especially in an audition situation, you need to be able to change at the drop of a hat if the casting people have something else in mind. She also made us solemnly swear to never leave an audition without asking the casting director: "Would you like to see it another way? Is there something you'd like to see that I didn't give you?"

Our next class of the day was with Hal Landon (he plays Scrooge every year in a Christmas Carol) and is called "Advanced Techniques." It is essentially a Michael Chekhov class, which is great because I recently took a class with Liz Shipman at USD that is very similar, so I've already gotten over the awkwardness of "move like you're surrounded by clay" or "radiate light toward this wall." (What?) This type of work was really strange for me before I took Liz's class, so I'm glad I'm a little bit more prepared for this one.

I left exhausted and excited for the next day. More to come!

Crimes of the Heart

Lenny is not having a good birthday. Not that anyone remembers that she is turning 30, but her beloved horse was just struck down by lightening, her grandfather is getting worse in the hospital, and she can't contact her much prettier sister to tell her that the youngest sister is in jail for shooting her own damn husband because she "didn't like his looks."

This immediate series of unfortunate events at South Coast Repertory's Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley is quite a bit to handle in the first ten minutes of a play, but the humorous absurdity of it all (horse struck by lightening? Really?) is quickly counterbalanced by the deep dysfunction and tragedy of a family legacy in the deep South. The three unfortunate sisters discovered the body of their suicidal mother at a young age; the national attention they received from a mother who hanged herself (oh, and hanged their cat) in the basement still haunting them in adulthood.

Lenny, played with an awkward humor by Blair Sams, is tied to the family home, taking care of the ailing Granddaddy that raised them after their mother's death and not taking time to find love for herself. Meg, played with a self-aware sexuality by Jennifer Lyon, has a completely failed singing career in California, has had "too many men" and her own recent nervous breakdown. And, as the catalyst for their reunion, Babe (Kate Rylie) has just shot her abusive husband in the stomach after he came home unexpectedly, catching her spending time with the fifteen-year-old black boy she has been having an illicit affair with (at a time in the South when such affair could easily leave such a boy murdered). Together they face Babe's upcoming trial against her politician husband as their resentments, secrets, and memories slowly make themselves apparent.

Henley has a great knack for finding humor in the darkest of situations, and the cast at SCR did a fantastic job at pulling out even more laughs. The characters were really and truly dysfunctional, their selfish decisions ruining the lives of others or themselves, but, as with more recent family portraits such as August: Osage County, I never felt an uplifting break in the cycle of suicidal despair and mistreatment by men. The message of the play seemed to be that its not up to women to break the cycle (except for Lenny, who finally connects with a man who loves her), but rather to be there to support each other through it.

I certainly left wishing I had a sister, and grateful for the girlfriends in my life that substitute.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

I was lucky enough to see the world premier of Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Kirk Douglas Theatre last year, and I was so excited when the Mark Taper announced that they would be remounting it this season. I mean, when a show contains dialogue like, "I'm sorry I'm bothering you, but you're the only person who can hear me besides the Tiger, and the Tiger just keeps bugging me about epistemology and original sin, which is as annoying as fuck," you know you're intrigued. Did I mention this is a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer?

Directed by Moisés Kaufman (The Laramie Project), this show examines the war in Iraq with razor blade humor and heart-wrenching honesty. Having seen it last year, I had somewhat prepared myself for the blood and loss, but the intimate space of the Taper brings the hopeless feeling of Baghdad right into the pit of your stomach. The acting in this show is absolutely flawless, bringing the story in and out of time and reality, seamlessly traveling from before and during the American occupation. Joseph's triumph in this piece is that he blames no one power for the suffering: The Americans are (literally) chasing after golden toilet seats, and the Hussein family rapes, murders, and tortures their own people. The only downfall in the piece is that it offers no sense of hope, ever. The ghost of the Tiger from the blown-up Baghdad zoo (an atheist in life, apparently) discovers in death that his soul must be lingering on earth because of God, but God never shows himself to reveal why he is prolonging the endless suffering.

This is a beautiful show and I think it will serve history with a vivid image of how this war is being perceived seven years into it: If possible, how do the good people living in a crumbling city stay good? And if neither of the powers that fought over it were looking out for the best interests of those good people, then what now?

The Language Archive

South Coast Repertory has snagged the world premier of Julia Cho's The Language Archive, and I believe this play is quickly going to be produced everywhere (the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has already slated it in its 2011 season), and rightfully so.

The story follows George (played by Leo Marks), a brilliant linguist who desperately fights against time to archive dying languages, who can speak a multitude of languages but who cannot manage to communicate to his wife, Mary (Betsy Brandt). As much as he loves her, he cannot say what she needs to hear, and her constant weeping and mysterious notes leave him completely bewildered. She announces she is leaving him, and he is devastated. And as much as he did not see it coming, he also didn't see that his quirky assistant Emma (a charming Laura Heisler) has fallen desperately in love with him.

As his personal life unravels, George and Emma are working on recording Alta and Resten, the last two speakers of Ellowan, a vaguely Eastern European-ish sounding language. Unfortunately the elderly couple, played with comic brilliance by Linda Gehringer and Tony Amendola, got in a huge fight on the plane ride over from their village and refuse to speak Ellowan until it is resolved. Apparently, English is a language for fighting because everyone knows you can always take it back if it's said in English, but Ellowan is a language reserved for love. As they fight with each other and counsel George in his obvious heartbreak, they create a touching picture of two people in the most real kind of love: A lifetime of two people who bicker and feud but ultimately want nothing more than to spend their entire lives loving and being loved by that one other person.

Gerhinger and Amendola also play a variety of smaller characters, each contributing a small revelation about relationships and our constant struggle to communicate and be understood by the person we love most. After such a smart first act, the second seemed to have a few too many of the usual convenient plot conventions (letters falling from the sky, encounters on a train, characters giving their own epilogues), but those seemed to stand by the wayside of the larger meaning of the play. Communicating what we want and need from love and from each other is its own language, and no matter how proficient we may be in all other linguistic aspects, without that communication, we never fully understand each other.

A View From The Bridge

Whenever anyone mentions Liev Schreiber, my absolute favorite story to tell is one of a beloved professor: Apparently, he threw a chair at her head when they were both at the Yale School of Drama (my apologies to those who have had to listen to that story six and seven times). But now, whenever he makes his way into a conversation or film, I will have a new little fact to share: He was absolutely amazing in A View From the Bridge on Broadway in 2010.

Arthur Miller's story of a longshoreman who falls tragically in his own undoing creates the character of Eddie Carbone, a role that Schreiber was born to play. His wife Beatrice, played with a perfect nervousness by Jessica Hecht, is concerned that Eddie may be a little too emotionally involved with her niece Catherine, played by Scarlett Johansson, marking her Broadway debut. Everything is under control until Beatrice's cousins, illegal Italian immigrants, come to stay with them secretly in order to find work and send money back to their starving families in Italy. When Eddie senses that Catherine may be seriously falling in love with one of them, he begins a campaign to smear his reputation, and when that doesn't work, he sets in motion a string of events at first tragic, and ultimately fatal, to himself and the Italian-American community. Schreiber's portrayal of a desperate obsession and individual moments of destructive decision making absolutely break your heart.

Now, in writing this little blog, it occurred to me: How are we, the audience, not bothered or at least a little perplexed by the fact that we root for Catherine and Rodolpho to get married when they are actually cousins? We are repulsed by Eddie's attraction to Catherine because he is her guardian and married to Beatrice, but, technically speaking, his attraction is adulterous but not incestuous as he is only related to Catherine by marriage. Is there some line in the text that implies that "cousin" is really Miller's term for distant, distant relatives? I've seen and discussed this play a few times over the last few years and this quandary has never occurred to me until just now. Miller scholars: Thoughts? Am I missing something? Or is this cousin-marriage just not that big of a deal?

Next to Normal

Next to Normal is the kind of musical not meant for the faint of heart. The rock musical deals with Diana, wife and mother struggling with depression, schizophrenia, and suicidal tendencies, played by Alice Ripley, who won the Tony Award for best actress for this dark role. Her husband, played touchingly by J. Robert Spencer, is doing his best to keep her safe and happy while juggling with his work and duties as father of the house. Their sixteen-year-old daughter, played by Jennifer Damiano, is a cynical stress case attempting to earn the attention of her mother, whose sole focus is on her older brother, played by Kyle Dean Massey.

Except that the older brother died as a baby, and the figure we see on stage is entirely in Diana's imagination, leaving her completely unable to move past her loss. What ensues is a great debate about the uses of anti-depressants, shock therapy, marriage, parenthood, and the general field of psychology. The play raises troubling questions without really answering them, and although it does end with a sense of hope, the heartache still remains.

The voices in this six-person show are, without a doubt and without exception, some of the best that I have ever heard. On the night that I saw this show in the Booth Theatre, Alice Ripley was clearly sick and having a difficult time achieving her normal sound, but the desperate hoarseness of her voice worked for the character. The set was harsh and beautiful, also consistent with the themes of the play. If you have strong feelings about medication, one way or the other, this show may bring up some volatile feelings, but I would still recommend it for the amazing voices to anyone in New York.

As You Like It

When I saw a poster on the New York subway for The Bridge Project, I was filled with memories of London and my two favorite productions of the summer: The Bridge Project's The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale and wished I had the disposable income to fly back and see the second season. When I looked closer and realized that they were still in New York, I was ecstatic.

So off on a train to Brooklyn we went, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre, a beautifully dilapidated theatre built in 1914 that was renovated in the seventies only enough to become a functioning theatre once more, but still clearly a haunting shadow of its former heyday. The second season, consisting off As You Like It and The Tempest (the latter not opening until March), did not have the headlining names of the first season (Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Hall) but was still a beautiful ensemble with great performances.

Once again Sam Mendes has created a beautiful world with music and light. One of Shakespeare's fluffier comedies, As You Like It lacks the tragic punches of last year's plays, but Mendes chose to balance the fun and joy with darker moments, including a waterboarding interrogation scene. But where joy is concerned, the play beautifully presents love and relationship and happiness in a world that seems to glow from the inside out. Said glow radiates out of heroine Rosalind, played by the effervescent Juliet Rylance, with an ease and wit that makes her instantly lovable.

The triple wedding scene at the end can quickly become cliche, but in this production, it felt more like a very pleasant dream. I would have loved to see what parallels Mendes will draw between this and The Tempest, and would highly recommend anyone on the East Coast or with plans to be in London this summer to see them together.