theater in New York

There's lots more to write about the past week, but first this bit of geekery: On Thursday we saw Patrick Stewart in Macbeth. And Michael Dorn was two rows in front of us.

More when I'm not totally jet-lagged and ready to drop into bed.

So, wow, we did that.

Back from Orlando. If that's what it's like to earn your living as an actor, I have no complaints. We performed the same material roughly 350 times in four days, which is hard but not impossible, especially when you're in a cast that knows how to play well and keep things from becoming too rote. For this we were put up in a nice hotel, paid handsomely, and fed--oh, god, it was just an orgy of food. (From the closing parties alone I remember mini-beef Wellingtons, pan-seared ahi tuna, some sort of stuffed pork chop, roast turkey with cornbread stuffing and cranberry relish, beef something else, beef skewers, egg rolls, pot stickers, Caesar salad, many different kinds of sushi, veggie quesadillas, nachos, shrimp-aioli-and-prosciutto wraps, bacon-wrapped scallops, shrimp cocktail, mini-burgers, cookies, cheesecake pops dipped in dark chocolate, chocolate mousse shooters, some other kind of fruit dessert shooters, fruit-and-cheese skewers, and several other desserts. I know that wasn't all of it. I should note that I did not personally eat everything. But still.)

We also saw Rod Stewart perform on the last night. I think we all went in thinking, okay, whatever, Rod Stewart, and came out thoroughly impressed. If I can still move that well and use my voice that well at that age, I should be happy.

Things I learned:
1. For work like this, comfortable shoes are mandatory. Ditto lots and lots of water and hot tea. And it doesn't hurt to pack bubble bath for an end-of-day soak.
2. I still know how to improvise. And I like it a whole lot.
3. When you have to interact with the audience and be fairly aggressive about it, it's much easier if you have some sort of mask. I think by the end of the week we were all wearing sunglasses for that shift. Likewise the sunglasses (indoors) seemed to make it easier for the audience to take the aggression as humor and performance, not an actual threat.
4. When you're actually being paid, you can abandon the actor's traditional starvation mentality of seeing free food in front of you and eating until the food is gone. In fact, in circumstances like this, you should abandon it.
5. Food and pay and Rod Stewart notwithstanding, a good ensemble is still one of the best rewards of this whole game.
6. I should try to get out of Chicago every winter. I think I need more sun than I've been getting.

Came back just in time for the premiere party of "Julie's House," the web sitcom I shot last fall. I didn't actually see the showing--by then I was crashing pretty hard. (I also really hate watching myself on camera, so perhaps I was looking for excuses to leave.) But the feedback has all been excellent. And it feels ridiculously cool to come home from an acting job to see the results of another acting job and get the first start-up e-mails about the next acting job.

There was some more exercise in there--given the quantities of food, I was not about to skip my time in the hotel gym--but I can't remember what fell on what day so I'm just going to omit that report. Today:
Running: 2.5 miles
Biking: 7 miles (and some lovely scrapes and bruises to show for it)
15 minutes upper-body weights

Orlando

Arrived this afternoon in Orlando for the big industrial acting job at McDonald's annual convention. Holy cow. The convention center has a giant two-story staircase that's just been painted so when you enter at lobby level you see two-story Golden Arches. The stairway-decoration budget alone has to exceed the entire marketing budget of any show I've ever been in. And that's just the outside. Inside...well, they're not done setting up yet, and I'm probably not allowed to describe it much lest I reveal some important trade secret, but let's just say, McD's knows how to throw a convention.

Yesterday:
60 minutes elliptical trainer
15 minutes upper-body weights

Day before yesterday:
Running: 4.5 miles
20 minutes lower-body and core weights

Really have no idea what this week is going to bring. It'll be an acting experience unlike any I've ever had before, that's for sure. I'll try to learn a lot.

Yeah, I said it.

hmmph.

I seem to exercise more often than I have a reason to post. Yesterday:
Running: intervals
Biking: 7 miles
25 minutes upper-body weights
Crunches, pushups

And we watched No Country for Old Men last night. Jeez. What a creepy movie. Flashes of it keep coming back to me with the intensity of memories I've actually lived. Of course, that's partly because that's the landscape I grew up in, and I've seen it be that still and frightening. And it's partly because nobody does silent menace like the Coens. But a large part is Javier Bardem's performance. By the end he's stalking you, you personally, and he's going to get you, because that's what he does.

Chaplin

Watched four Chaplin shorts tonight: Easy Street, The Cure, The Adventurer, and The Immigrant. All the same supporting players, clearly functioning well as a clown ensemble. And they must all have had the same makeup artist too, whose main job it was to draw in ever-more-outrageous peaked eyebrows for Eric Carpenter. (Wait. Carpenter? I just saw this guy's last name in four different sets of credits and now I can't remember it. Someone's last name is Carpenter, that's for sure. His definitely starts with a C, but it might not be Carpenter. But he's the big beefy guy with the eyebrows like bat wings--usually Chaplin's nemesis.)

I watched a fair amount of Chaplin as a kid, and I think I've oversimplified him in memory. It's lovely how Chaplin gives us dirt on the Tramp--he's not an uncorrupted innocent. In Adventurer he's an escaped convict, and though the movie never says outright why he was imprisoned, it's clear from the way he lies readily and cadges drinks that he probably deserved it. In Easy Street, when he holds the baby and thinks it's peeing on him, he gives the kid an honest dirty look--not "I'm a cute clown pretending disapproval with a kid," but "You little bastard, you're peeing on my lap." And even as the slapstick punches fly, the honesty of the reactions--the society matron with ice cream down the back of her dress, the woman realizing the spa's healing waters have been spiked and deciding to let her friends find out for themselves--keeps everything solidly empathetic.

30 minutes elliptical trainer
25 minutes lower-body and core weight training
~7 miles biked
Not even close to enough. I'm not sure I had the energy for much more, but still.

Yesterday:
Running: 3.75 miles
15 minutes upper-body weight training, cut short by evening plans

I think I could easily spend three hours a day in the gym. Clown may simply be an excuse for my obsession.

No...almost certainly not.

Probably.

Good pain.

35 minutes elliptical trainer
20 minutes lower-body weight training
1 hour Hatha yoga

Ouch. I haven't been doing much yoga lately. It's all well and good to convince yourself that you're exercising enough to compensate, but you can't really fool your muscles.

I've struggled a few times to describe clown to laypeople, but here's John Wright doing it a mere 20 pages into his book:

I'm not interested in the big shoes or baggy trousers of the circus clown so much as clowning as a level of play--an imaginative key into the bizarre--and for some people, this key is immensely liberating. This is a place where you aren't required to be clever or witty or obviously skillful. Here, you're simply invited to generate meaning from the inconsequential and the trivial--from the lowest common denominator of comedy.

A normal person can stand on the beach, look out to sea and scan the horizon, but a clown is unlikely to know what the horizon is. The clown lives in a world of bafflement where one thing leads to another. . . . The bizarre laugh comes from a place of immense honesty, simplicity, and naivety.

Amen.

training

Spent an hour and a half learning pratfalls last night: down, sprawl, up again. My butt's not at all sore, so I'm at least landing right. We also worked on the mid-stride trip and discovered that it worked much better--that it looked more natural, less calculated--when we tripped with the non-dominant leg.

John can do a 108, the pratfall that looks as though you flip forward and land on your back. (You don't actually land on your back; you land in a squat and then roll back rapidly, as you do for a standard pratfall.) Of course, he's grown up clowning, but I'm still jealous. The last time I took a tumbling class I was pretty close to being able to do a front flip, but it was over a giant soft mat; doing a flip well enough to a) flip with confidence on a hardwood floor and b) land with the control to go into a pratfall feels way out of my league. I guess that's why we practice, and practice, and practice.

I think I may start documenting my physical training in this blog, just for the hell of it, and because it's been such a critical aspect of theater for me. And because I want to be able to run 10 miles at a go by the time I leave for Italy, and making the goal and the progress public may help me along. Anyway, today:
Running: 3.75 miles
30 minutes upper-body weight training
150 crunches of various sorts, 30 with 10-lb medicine ball

Just started reading John Wright's Why Is That So Funny? A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy. I suspect that, like Impro, this book may turn out to be life-altering. I certainly hope so.