Making Masks (Superhero Edition)

Halloween happened to be closing night of my show, Hey! Mr. Spaceman!, so naturally the company had a big costume party; and when actors are involved, you know the costumes are going to be serious.

Recently I encountered a terrific bit of advice: "The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible." My costume did, in fact, come from a bit of backstage joking--the idea that my character Violet, having been zapped by Martian rays in this show, would return in the sequel with superpowers. We dubbed this character UltraViolet.

So I set about making an UltraViolet mask. I used papier-mâché, with tissue paper cut into small squares and rectangles, nothing any bigger than about 1" x 2". Tissue paper is great because it lets you create a smooth, almost slick surface, and it's relatively easy to manipulate into the sharp lines and creases you want for a 1950s-style superhero mask.


Tissue paper also leaves you with a good paintable surface, and the product is lightweight--which you want if you're going to have it on your head all night. Manipulating it is a bit like baking with phyllo: you tear it at first, and get little pulpy corners stuck to your fingers, and then you get the hang of it and you can shape it into anything.

For the paste I used the standard mix of one part flour to two parts water, with a few tablespoons of salt to prevent mold from growing on the layered paper. Chicago has been so humid lately that mold prevention was not optional. At several stages I also had to pop the mask into a 250-degree oven for a while; otherwise it took days to dry.

In the show, all the teenage characters drove cars (which Ira Amyx cleverly designed of painted, sculpted foamcore, with handles on the back so we could "drive" around the stage). Violet's Buick had a V-shaped hood ornament.


I decided to use the V as a design element of the costume--the brow of the mask and a weapon-ish detail on the wrist cuffs. The V shape would need an armature for support. I created armatures by cutting long triangles out of index cards and creasing them lengthwise. I had to hold the two halves of each V together with masking tape, but layers of papier-mâché were enough to attach the Vs to the mask and the cuffs.


The base for the wrist cuffs was a very low-tech and low-budget toilet paper tube, cut lengthwise on one side so I could just pop the cuffs on and off. I ran out of time here--the cuffs would have been stronger and stayed on better if I'd added a few more layers of papier-mâché to the tubes. Instead, they got bent pretty easily, and by the end of the night I had to use double-sided tape to attach them.


After the mask came out of its last session in the oven (incidentally, there are few things more Eleanor Rigby-esque than removing a replica of your own face from a kitchen appliance), I used an X-acto knife to smooth out the edges. Then I painted the mask with acrylics. Just as we did in the commedia mask intensive, I added some highlights and lowlights to keep the features from getting lost in a uniform sea of color.


I had planned to attach the mask with elastic, but time was running out. And I thought about the look I was going for--more or less a cross between Silver Age comics and Adam West-era Batman--and it was decidedly elastic-free. I opted just to stick the thing on with a combination of spirit gum and double-sided tape.

Of course, the way it always works when you have a good idea, all the other elements just fell into place. I borrowed a purple corset from my friend Kate. I already had dance shorts, as well as a purple maxi dress with a halter tie, which is all you need for a killer cape. I spent a whole $1.50 on purple stretch gloves at Target. I already had purple star tights and ankle boots, because...well, I don't really like to buy boring clothes.


I'd love to do this for a show. It's ridiculously fun. And can you imagine being involved with a show that needed this sort of thing?

ZOMBIES AHEAD

Dear Chicago:

Your weather in recent memory has been dismal. Your audition notices have been, almost without exception, dismayingly boring. Your administration is hopelessly corrupt. Streets & Sanitation has torn up my most convenient bike route for the second summer in a row, while leaving several other butt-jarringly cratered streets unrepaired. Unchecked giant squirrels have taken over my balcony garden, and I do not expect to see leaf one of my spinach crop.

But the construction sign greeting the eastbound traffic on Montrose this afternoon--which reads BEWARE: ZOMBIES AHEAD--makes everything okay.

Yours,
Elizabeth


Dear Person Who Made That Sign Happen:

You are my new hero.

That sign is proof that big, gloriously goofy things occasionally happen. Occasionally manage to dodge through the defenses of a system devoted to humorless order and make people laugh out loud on cloudy Sunday afternoons. It is pure clown. It is pure hope. I love it. Thank you.

Yours,
Elizabeth

R.I.P. Will Schutz

Will Schutz, a beloved fixture of Chicago's storefront theater scene, passed away on Monday. Kris Vire offers a lovely tribute in TimeOut.

This brings the tally to four very talented performers I've known who have died far before their time in the past two years. At least two of them were either uninsured or underinsured.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I don't particularly think the insurance system works. To put it bluntly (since history will not be kind to them either), in the eternal human war on suffering, most health insurance companies are profiteers.

Jesus. Moments like this make a girl need to do something. Death makes me resent every minute I spend in line, or negotiating contracts for day work, or answering calls from telemarketers. I am, at this point, massively impatient. It feels as though it's time to expect more from myself.

Thoughts on the performer as athlete

For the past month or so I've been meeting three times a week with some other clowns, developing material and characters and so forth. Like any clown process it's been sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating. I've got a new high-status clown, Paillette, and some interesting possibilities for solo and duet scenes.

Most of us have trained with 500 Clown at some point in the past, and early in the process we brought in Paul for a two-day workshop. At one point he mentioned his belief that a stage performer ought to be an athlete. I agree--and feel as though I have instinctively agreed for a while--but the discussion crystallized several ideas that I've been mulling over for a while.

First, there's just a question of physical necessity. Clown is gruelling. Most theater, if it's good, is exhausting. If you want to do it for any length of time, you have to make sure your body and voice are up to the task. (And voice, more than many people realize, is a matter of body. I remember reading an interview with one of the great Wagnerian sopranos. She mentioned that she'd just started going to a massage therapist who also treated a number of NFL players. On the first visit, the therapist said, "You know, you have back muscles like a linebacker.")

There's also a question of presence. People who are comfortable with their bodies are compelling to watch. I once saw a modern dancer, in his first speaking part, wipe the stage with a cast of more experienced actors. He was used to moving in a way they weren't, and everything that his body did was genuine and natural. That's an aspect of performance that trips up even luminaries like Gielgud (who was famously described as acting with a ribbon tied around his knees).

But beyond the argument of practicality, there's the quality that usually gets the name of "integration." It's a handy term but, I think, a fairly anemic one for one of the performer's most potent tools.

An acting teacher I had years ago used to talk about the quality of danger that a good actor brings onto the stage. It's not a question of menace but of unpredictability, of risk, of life that might burst free at any moment, passions that might turn violent. Of course those impulses exist in all of us on an emotional level; but in the physical actor, there's always a sense that the emotional impulses can immediately become action. They are no sooner felt than lived, without the intervention of conscience or intellect or social duty. Thence the danger.

We discussed this in a different guise, in the Philosophy of Performance class at the Accademia. We read "A Hunger Artist," which of course ends with the popular spectacle of the caged panther, whose appetites and actions are entirely one. We read this in the context of our discussion of Plato and the Platonic mistrust of the body (which evolved into medieval Christian mistrust of the body, which evolved into all sorts of unfortunate tendencies still with us today). Plato heartily disapproved of comedy and the physical effects of laughter, and I'm sure he would have considered clowns and physical performers as base as could be. Anyway, the point is, in a society that still doesn't quite trust the body (or treats it as something separate, an object to be altered or subjugated), the physical performer is an anomale. The difference helps create the necessary whiff of danger--a certain outsider status.

This is a lot of words for something that is easily illustrated with a few gestures. I typically avoid describing clown processes, because that puts me in too analytical a frame of mind; it's often antithetical to the actual work. But I may be at the point in my clown work where, to refine what I'm doing, I have to start describing it consciously. Well, so be it.

Orpheus

I've started rehearsing a workshop with Filament Theatre--a clown treatment of the Orpheus myth. The idea is that Orpheus and Eurydice are clowns, and every other force in their world (the snake, Hades, the Bacchae) is played by a trio of bouffons. I really, really like this idea, and not just because I get to play Orpheus. Omen--the director--is an alumnus of the Accademia dell'Arte, so we've trained with many of the same people, and as we rehearse I'm finding the direct, practical lines between our classwork and production.

In unrelated news, I don't usually use this blog to plug specific projects, but this one is a bit different. My song "Half" is in the running to be on the soundtrack for a documentary about the Cubs. Which is really exciting. It's open to audience voting until April 17, so if you're looking for ways to kill a little extra time at work, please visit the movie site and vote for me.

Miscellany

Two readings this weekend--The Nose with Piven and Rhinoceros with Signal Ensemble--confirm that, yes, I'm back in Chicago theater, and yes, I'm enjoying it, and yes, certain things have changed in the way I approach the work. In The Nose there's a doctor character whom I recognized instantly for a Dottore--and that makes sense, since Gogol did a lot of writing in Italy (and said he had to come to Rome to see Russia properly). And in Rhinoceros I spent a lot of time thinking about masks, how you'd create them, how you'd perform with them.

The absurdity of The Nose is very much of a piece with Rhinoceros, despite the century or so that separates their creation. Gogol and Ionesco both managed to tap into a certain motherlode of absurdity that transcends eras--certainly one that goes beyond any specific movement of absurdism. Certain writers can do that. I'd also place Molière, Plautus, Kafka, and Cervantes in the group. There are others--we can all get to that frame of mind, which is part of why it's such effective art--but getting there as an artist is damn hard. I suppose that's part of why I went to Italy.

This weekend I also learned that a really splendid Chicago actor I know has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And he doesn't have health insurance. And because of that he had to leave the hospital.

I don't care how much lip service we pay to the importance of the arts; this is a damn shoddy way to treat our artists.

The Chicago theater community is rallying with all sorts of benefits and things--carpools to give him rides to chemo, for example--that make me proud and happy to be an actor here. But as a citizen, I'm embarrassed that these measures are necessary. As my friend Josh put it, American taxpayers now own the largest insurer in the world, and we still can't manage to offer health care to everyone. There has to be a better way.

Happy New Year

2008 has been the kind of year that defies synopsis. There was the whole long wretched winter, the loss of far too many beloved people, the layoff, the car. But there was also clowning, working with Strange Tree, going to New York with Joe, starting a couple of really exciting writing projects, and of course studying in Italy.

I haven't yet made any resolutions for 2009, because it feels as though as soon as I came back from Italy I dove into something quite like the life I want to have. I've been pursuing performance and writing opportunities with a vigor (and, to my own surprise, an enjoyment) unlike anything I've had before. It feels strangely good. Really good. Strong.

To some extent, I guess, this is just the confidence born of experience. I've been out in the world doing this stuff for about ten years, now, and apparently that's the magic amount of time. And it's hard not to emerge from a program like the ADA without some concrete knowledge of your own abilities.

Some of this confidence, though, comes from the really astonishing and wonderful support of my friends and family. This was a big, risky year for me, involving several giant leaps of faith. It would have been so much harder, if not impossible, without all the little messages of support, the hugs, even the comments on this blog--to say nothing of the car trips, the visits, the mail collection, subletting the apartment, watering the plants, saving copies of the November 5 Chicago newspapers.

For 2009, I wish you all this kind of sustaining love, support, courage, and passion. And I hope you use it to challenge yourself in some crazy, ridiculous, wonderful way.