A Spork in the Road

We produced The Wisdom of Eve last week/weekend, and as usual I wore many hats: sound tech the first three nights, stand-in for one of the smaller roles on Saturday night, and combination dresser/battery replacer/sound tech on Sunday.

Saturday night I donned a blonde wig in order to play Vera Franklin. My dark eyebrows are starting to come back in enough that it looked a little odd, but not terrible. Even with my handful of lines I had a couple of costume changes, one of them onstage, so I was happy to find dresses that could all be unzipped and stepped into/out of. The Sinead O’Connor look doesn’t really work for a 1950’s period piece.

The play, which is the stage adaptation of the 1950 classic All About Eve, has some great lines and undeniably vivid characters. However, unlike the film, the stage play is very flabby on a line level. A lot of arduous explanation and recapping and fluffy dialogue that does nothing for the plot. Every night, following the script for sound cues, I itched to take a red pen to the page.

I thought of Jim Kelly’s rule that for the final draft of a piece you should cut it down by 30%. Would that playwright Mary Orr knew that principle!

You have to get your hands dirty. Yes – risk being bad, not just to free yourself, but as a way of hearing the human truth of a moment and the flesh and blood intention behind it….

I think that most actors agree that spontaneity, freshness, the illusion that everything is being said and done for the first time keeps a performance alive. This can only happen if there’s a strong alertness that, at any moment, the performance could change – something could be radically different. It doesn’t mean it will be radically different. But if I allow myself to listen, let myself (not make myself) listen, if I am alert to what is being said, how the current, the energy of a scene is going in that moment – then there will be changes of pace, inflection, vocal colour. The direction of a speech, or its quality, may alter considerably on a particular night just because a singularly acute state of awareness has allowed the speech to be discovered and spoken as if for the first time.

from Ralph Fiennes’ “Acting Shakespeare” in Arete Magazine

We went to see Legally Blonde The Musical last week at Ruth Eckerd Hall, which was Lil’s birthday present.

I admit, I was not gung ho. I loved the movie, but I thought making a musical out of it was perhaps wringing more life out of the story than was possible.

I was wrong.

Wicked it was not, but the show was hilarious, perfectly paced, and packed with light but surprisingly catchy songs. The performances were excellent, the staging clever, and of course the dogs were both Tony-worthy.

I think the best moment of the show was when the UPS guy stuck his arm out from off-stage, holding a big package (wink wink, nudge nudge), and the entire audience of pink-clad mothers and daughters went ballistic.

Greetings from the infusion room! I am sitting in my usual spot (at one end of the L-shaped room, watching the good nurses in the injection/blood work room do their thing). My laptop shares an outlet with my infusion monitor, and I’m using the wireless connection they’ve set up so we chemo patients can amuse ourselves while being pumped full of toxic chemicals. w00t!

I have been rebuked by the Wild Dancing Woman of Hoboken for being remiss in posting, so my first order of business today was to write a properly penitent post. I’m not even connected to my port yet! Read on, dear, devoted, neglected readers. Read on.

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It was a busy weekend. In addition to starring in “Italian American Reconciliation” (okay, so I had the smallest part, but I was STILL a star) for our second weekend of performances, I also auditioned for an independent film.

This was really the first time I’ve seriously auditioned for anything since “Bye Bye Birdie” in junior high. (I’ve either been precast or stepped in to replace someone in all the plays I’ve been in this past year.) My auditioning skills have not much improved in the past twenty years. I got up in front of the director and swear. To. God. My brain emptied. The sheet of dialog they handed me? The single sheet with, like, two lines for me to hit? In 12-point Courier and margins the size of Oklahoma? Yeah, I could barely read it. Totally blew my lines every single time.

I’m not sure what I said during the bit they wanted me to improv, but it could not possibly have been intelligible. I was supposed to be an angry wife yelling at her good-for-nothing husband in the morning, but I think I said something like “Banana forest? Banana forest? Emerging fossils slather up purple bubblers! How can tentacled brain wraps scare jittery keyboards?! You epicenter! You, you, you prostrate penguin muff!”

I did manage to stay between the green tape for the screen test, though.

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