Tag Archives: acting

Full Moon Cartoon: Surreal Apocalypse

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If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I did a scene in my stage combat class playing a very strange fellow, Lenny, from a play called Marisol.

A very talented cartoonist, Brian Douglas, was tickled by what he saw, and, unsolicited, he made a cartoon from the first few minutes of the scene, dubbing in the actors’ voices. The sound quality is a little off, because of the sound quality of the original cellphone video, but I think you’ll be very entertained at Brian’s animated interpretation. He really captures the lunacy of it all in a short two minutes.

You can compare with the original scene here.

Maybe if we ask nicely, he’ll come up with Part Two . . .

Are Your Lessons Done?

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I’m going to talk about something that I don’t think I am able to talk about directly. So let me tell some stories.

When I was in college, I had a very strange and seminal experience with my acting teacher.  During his office hours, I asked him an acting question. He told me to stop and try an exercise. He told me to focus my attention on exactly what I could sense with my senses, one by one, at that moment.  And as I did so, I sensed his aura grew stronger and stronger. My teacher was a short heavy African-American man. From the cloud of that aura, he transformed into a tall, thin, Russian man, who I recognized as Stanislavski.

I was not under the influence of any drugs at the time.

I was somewhat alarmed and told my teacher why; he was calm, and said, just remember what brought you to this place.

Sometime later, I performed a scene in his class, and as was his custom, after the scene was over, he said to me and my scene partner, “What were you working for, and how did it go?” I forget what the scene was, but it was always a little nerve-wracking to have to speak about my work, and I muttered something. Then he pointed to my foot which was jiggling up and down. “When,” he asked, “will we see that in your acting?”

From a different field: magicians have a way of shuffling a deck of cards that they call a faro shuffle. I’m not going to go into why magicians like to shuffle this way, but suffice it to say that there are certain properties of the shuffle that are inherently useful to a card magician.

Now the faro shuffle is not simple to acquire. For better or for worse, once you can faro shuffle, you generally are not considered a beginner at cards anymore. You can read a number of descriptions in the magic literature about learning this shuffle; how to place each finger, what the action of the left pinky and right forefinger are, how to adjust for the varying qualities of card stock and brands, and so on. But one thing almost all the books agree on is this: the way to learn how to do the faro is to find someone who already knows how to do it. Then you ask them to teach you.

American actors classify themselves into the Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, or Spolin camps. Magicians trace their lineage to Vernon or Marlo.

There is the written law, and there is the oral tradition. Furthermore, every religion has its exoteric and the esoteric traditions. Actors and magicians too.

Another time, I did a scene where I played a character who uses racist language. Afterwards, my teacher asked me to take a moment, and think back to when I–not the character–first saw my first Black person. My thoughts raced back to my childhood. He looked at me for a few seconds: “That.” My mind jumped at the indication. How did he know I was thinking that, then?

What book? What text? How is it preserved? What, exactly, is transmitted? Can the thread be lost? How far from me to you?

Knife Fight onto the Apocalypse: Video

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Some people have asked me to post video from my final stage combat scene. I’ve been hesitant to do so because all I have is a less than ideal handheld cellphone video, but if you’ve followed me on this journey so far, I guess it’s only fair that I share this with you.

I wrote about this scene in a previous post, but here’s a brief re-cap:

I was assigned to play a part in a three-person scene from the surreal play Marisol.  The scene is New York City. The streets are on fire; the apocalypse is raging outside. On the news, a woman named Marisol Perez has been found murdered in the street.

My character is a delusional man named Lenny who, on recovering from a suicide attempt, experienced angels forcing his soul back down into his body. In his deranged mind, he was spared from death in order to warn the rest of the world of a coming war between God and the angels.

Meanwhile, Lenny’s sister, June, who he lives with in Brooklyn, has brought home a friend from work named Marisol Perez. They both must endure Lenny’s ranting. June spends the scene demeaning Lenny, who in a fit of anger, chases her with a knife.

We were in a new acting space, so our timing was off on some of the stage combat, but we had a great time doing it. You can read more about the class here, here, here, here as well as here. And, finally, you can see the animated, cartoon version of this scene here.

Final Combat: The Last Days of Class

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So let’s fast forward to the final days of my Stage Combat class. (You can read about the class here, here, here, and here.) Well, having recovered from the slings and arrows, or at least the bumps, of outrageous fortune from the earlier classes, we were ready for scene work. Doing scenes from actual plays in combat class makes a lot of sense, because the form that stage combat takes depends heavily on the context of a scene. Think about it–a slap in an Abbott and Costello scene is entirely different from a slap in a domestic tragedy.

I was assigned to play a part in a three-person scene from the play Marisol. My character was a delusional man named Lenny who, on recovering from a suicide attempt, experiences angels forcing his soul back down into his body. In his deranged mind, he is spared from death only because angels want him to warn the rest of the world of a coming war between God and the angels. Lenny’s sister, who must endure Lenny’s ranting, spends the scene demeaning Lenny, who in a fit of anger chases her with a knife. Complications, as they say, ensue.

Our teacher had given us a repertoire of moves to use to work into the scene and so we choreographed a set of knife lunges and falls, and a cool part where my sister appears to twist my thumb. But really, for me, the most fun was just working seriously on the scene as an actor with the two talented women who were in the scene with me. They were both very good and I just wanted to be able to keep up with them.

We performed the scene twice: the first time was during our class with an invited audience. That was no problem, and we were in our own space. The folks who were in the audience liked the scene and thought that the violence in it was very realistic–they said they felt scared at times.

The next day, however, was more difficult for me. Instead of performing in the comfort of our own space, we were performing as a guest scene for a different class in a separate theater space–the acting technique Scene Study class. Not only were we in a different space, worse, we were with actors who were performing their own final scenes. I have to admit, I felt very intimidated and competitive as I watched those talented actors perform. I was shaking when it was our time to do our scene.

We arranged our set and soon I heard the opening lines of the play as the two actresses began the scene. I took a deep breath backstage and then looked at the words that I had written on my palm as a reminder of my acting objective: I am there to warn the two women about the coming struggle between God and the angels.

Before I knew it, the scene was over and the class was applauding. The fight scene was a little off because we were in a new space and we didn’t have the chance to adjust the movements to the new space. However, I was really happy with our acting. The best times in stage acting are when truthful things happen in the scene that you didn’t plan on, and you end up surprising yourself. We had a moment like that in the scene last night. Unplanned, I grabbed the hand of one of the actresses in a fumbled attempt to seduce her. The other actress playing my sister gave me a dirty glare, and again unplanned, we had a silent showdown where it took several moments before either one of us would back down. When I eventually did, it felt great, because as actors we had laid the foundation for that brother-sister relationship which we were able to fulfill in that moment spontaneously.

So that’s it. Combat operations have come to a halt. I’m frankly glad. Not because of the combat–it was great to learn all the techniques and it gave me a lot of confidence. Our teacher was really excellent and patient. But, for now at least, I see that in some situations, acting is just too nerve wracking and stressful for me. I like writing more. If I screw up in writing, I can just revise it, and no one is the wiser. But with stage acting, my very self is on the line when I screw up. That said, I highly recommend that all actors take a stage combat class. Really what better way to fulfill the word “play” than to go back to those childhood days when you found sticks, and you had sword fights with your friends?

This way you can have your childish fun, but with complete safety.

And that ‘s better than a poke in the eye.

Mission Accomplished.

Embedded Reporter: At Long Last, Sound

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Last week, I posted a review of Roger Guenveur Smith’s remarkable play about Rodney King. I interviewed him immediately after his performance, on the night the news broke that Eric Garner’s killer would not be indicted. Although I included a link to the interview in the previous post, I’ve now learned how to embed audio directly, so I thought I would put up the interview separately. The interview was originally broadcast over WBAI 99.5 FM NYC.

Frabjous Day! Calloo, Callay! It’s now easier than ever to listen. Just press the orange button.

Lie There, My Art: Magic, Will, and Ego

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The magic happens, but where does it come from?

In traditional stage magic, it comes from one place—the magician. The will of the magician, to be more precise. The beginning student magician is told that if s/he is going to enact the part of conjurer, then there must always be a moment during each effect when the magic is accounted for, when seemingly that will has  been exerted.

The Abracadabra, the hocus-pocus moment—when the magic happens—or so the magician would like you to think–represents the moment when the magician is exerting will. The plot is almost always this: something impossible is about to happen, and the will of the magician is what makes it happen. The magic moment is invoked and the magic occurs. The impossible conclusion is revealed.

Stephen Greenblatt has written a wonderful book about William Shakespeare, his life and his plays, and how each informed the other. The name of the book is Will in the World, and Greenblatt consciously uses the word Will in the same punny way that Will did. Humankind’s need to exert will is a constant theme in Shakespeare’s plays.

Whole worlds are created by will. Prospero, the magician from The Tempest manipulates a magical world, just as Will did, and all writers do. The power of creating a universe from one’s will is a heady potion indeed.

How does the magician get such power? Sometimes the power is not in the magician per se, but contained in the artifacts of the magician—the magic wand, the woofle dust, the incantation. But Shakespeare gives away the secret of the magic: when Prospero decides to be a magician no more, he puts down his magic staff, and utters the words, “Lie there, my art.”

“Lie there, my art.” I love the multiple meanings in that phrase. It is Prospero’s and Shakespeare’s secret: art is a lie. That is, a series of carefully planned and calculated lies. Harold Clurman, the influential stage director and critic, entitled his autobiography, “Lies Like Truth.”  The magic “as if.” Treat that cardboard tree “as if ” it were real. The imagination brought into play with the act of will.

There is a problem, however, with all this exercise of Will. The artist might become obnoxious and swell-headed. Fortunately, in a good play, the author’s personality and ego are subsumed by her or his characters. The audience does not have to deal directly with the willful artist.

In a magic show, however, the creative ego is not as easily hidden. After all, in the traditional magic show, the magician’s ego is often the point, plot, and theme of the show—“Look at what I can do. Look how strong my magical will is!”

This can be entertaining for a while, but it can also be highly irritating. Okay, you showed us once you can do the impossible, now what. Oh again? And again? And Again? Boring. How does the magic performer get out of the trap of constantly displaying, over and over, his or her naked will in the world?

When I first delved into magic more seriously as an adult, I was infatuated with the idea of what I then called “Accidental Magic.” My idea was this: I didn’t exactly do magic, but magic seemed to happen when I was around. Example (I never actually did this, I just thought it would be neat): I would just happen to be having a casual conversation in a restaurant with a friend. I steer the talk to asking him to name his favorite card. He does, and all of a sudden the music playing in the background has a lyric about that card. Or, I am at the beach with a friend and as we walk together along on the shore, he discovers a newspaper with the exact date of his birth. Well, I may have been infatuated with that idea, but it turns out magician Gerry Deutsch was doing this way before I had thought of it. He called it “Perverse Magic.” And he has since come up with literally dozens and dozens of such effects, the defining feature of which is that the magic is not caused by the magician’s will. Like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the magic is situated elsewhere, outside of the performer. The audience can’t get tired of the magician’s ego, because the magician makes no ego claims at all.

Here are a couple of Gerry Deutsch effects from the Genii Forum. The how-to is not really important. We will leave that as an exercise for the reader (I’ve always wanted to write that).

“I have a card selected and say it will come to the top and it’s not there — another card (say 4C) is there. I bury the 4C and try again but again the 4C is there. I spell the selected card but at the end it’s the 4C. Finally I say I’ll do the trick with the 4C and say it will go to my pocket but when I reach into my pocket it’s the selected card. I’m surprised and frustrated.”

And for outdoors: “You give out a cry of pain and look at your right foot as if that’s the cause of your pain. You pull your shoe off with your left hand and dump out a rock the size of a strawberry. The right hand then reaches into the same shoe and pulls out another rock, this one the length of a playing card . . .  You shake your head as you limp along.”

Little sketches of eccentric happenings.

No one’s Will or ego. Just whimsy and fantasy and lies.

The stuff that dreams are made on.

Rodney King: Roger Guenveur Smith’s Startling Performance Piece

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The first sound you hear over the loudspeakers is that of water. What? It doesn’t make sense. Is something leaking in the theater? No, as the evening with Roger Guenveur Smith in Rodney King progresses, we discover that Rodney, like Hamlet’s Ophelia, has had too much of water. He meets his end at the bottom of the pool, a pool bought, literally, with his own blood.

Smith’s one-man show is a mesmerizing account of the incident and the man that sparked the LA riots over two decades ago. The evening I saw the play at the BRIC House Ballroom in downtown Brooklyn, the air was thick with the just-announced news that Eric Garner’s killer would not be indicted. The play could scarcely have been more relevant than at that very moment. Smith’s prescient fascination with Rodney King hit us between the eyes that very night.

And what a story. With just a microphone, on an illuminated square platform, Smith tells the story of what happened to King–this ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances. Smith moves and swings through the story, playing all the parts like a John Coltrane quartet, showing us the very soul of the man who would have much preferred just to go home and finish his malt liquor. This is Rodney, an uneducated man, who at his moment realized, Hamlet-like, that he had the lead part in History’s play, and must try his best to fulfill his responsibility. This inarticulate man who was forced to be silent during his entire trial delivers some of the most famous words ever said about race in America.

I can’t think of a more important performance playing today in America. Roger Guenveur Smith has grappled with history and responded splendidly, in a truly artistic way. He plays a variety of characters in the story besides King and creates a prism of history with all of its facets. The final image is a haunting one that left me shaken, and asking where do I stand in all this.

You can listen to the interview broadcast on WBAI 99.5 FM that I did with Roger Guenveur Smith  by clicking here. He is a fascinating man and the 15-minute interview is well worth your time. He talks about the genesis of the play and his work as an actor, director, writer, and historian. Smith will be performing the play all around the country. You can go to his website for more information about his performing schedule.

Mom Always Liked You Best: The Smothers Brothers

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Nobody explored the comedy inherent in sibling rivalry like The Smothers Brothers.

Important Advice for a Monday

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“In the words of that immortal bard, Samuel J. Snoddgrass . . .” The best movie musical ever? I dunno. But Singin’ in the Rain is certainly my favorite.

On Patience

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The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.–Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

Max Malini was a magician who came to America from Austria at the turn of the twentieth century. He made his fortune performing for the rich at their private soirees. While seated at their dinner tables, he would lift his bowler hat which had been lying on the table all evening, and reveal, underneath it,  a large solid block of ice. It was stunningly mystifying. Where could it have come from? It couldn’t have been sitting on his lap or hidden under his hat all evening without melting. There was no explanation. (If you’d like to see an encore of that performance, pick up the DVD of the excellent documentary tribute to magician Ricky Jay, Deceptive Practice).

“Max, how do you do the secret move without anyone seeing?” asked his fellow magicians.

“You vait,” he replied.

“How long?”

“You vait a veek if you must!”

Patience in art is a virtue if only because the audience cannot conceive that anyone would wait that week.

Or spend ten years to write that novel. But sometimes that is what it takes: the willingness to live with the anxiety of not knowing the outcome until a time far into the future. Really, when you think about it, the profession of a novelist is an absurd one. How can one possibly plan to spend a good chunk of one’s adult life working on a book only to find out later that no one likes it? It’s much easier to write a poem or short story, find out what people think, and move on to the next one.

Philip Roth in an interview once said that the first few hundred pages of writing a novel is agony because he knows that he’s going to throw away most of it in search of the one little seed from which the novel will eventually grow.

The readers never know of this wait. To them, the final product is given all at once like a Christmas present. They can devour the novel all at once. They don’t have to have the patience of the writer. That is part of the writer’s gift to them.

But the novelist has played a trick on the readers. The trade-off is this: the writer can take all the time in the world to achieve her or his effects. There’s no pressure because without a time limit on the creation, anything is theoretically possible to achieve. Write, edit, write, edit; rinse and repeat until it works.

My favorite Malini story concerns the time he accidentally picked up the wrong overcoat from his tailor. He realizes that it’s the coat of an acquaintance., so he returns it to the tailor that evening.

A few years later, Malini runs into the acquaintance. Malini asks the man to pick a card from a deck of cards. It is the four of hearts. Malini asks the man to take off his overcoat. With a pen knife, the magician slashes the lining of the coat. In the lining of the coat, behold, there is a matching card: the four of hearts.

Yes, Malini had sewn the card into the man’s overcoat the night he received the coat from the tailor all those years ago.

That’s artistic patience.

Stage Combat Part 4

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I’ve met my downfall. Literally.

If you’ve been following this series of posts on Stage Combat ( here, here, and here), you’ll know that I prided myself on keeping up with the rest of the class despite being a whole lot older than anyone in the class.

Pride goeth before the fall. Literally.

I know, I used that joke already.

But that’s what it was: Monday was the day for practicing stage falls. All five kinds. With no mats. The theory being that if you are doing it right, you don’t need a mat. The operative words being “if you are doing it right.” I guess I wasn’t doing it right because I was banged up and bruised badly by the end of the class. I could accept the fact that falling down and getting up over and over would be tiring and give me reason to huff and puff, but I was not expecting to be aching all over.  I had to excuse myself towards the end of the class and beg off the last few exercises. The next few days did not see much improvement.

Well I think nothing was broken except my pride, but some definite sprains and strains. At least next week, we will be moving on to something else–knife fight!

The Size of Truth

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What size is your truth? A funny question. But as I explore different media, this keeps coming up for me.

I was primarily trained in theater work. In a large theater, in order to communicate effectively, your acting has to famously reach the little old lady sitting in the back of the theater. Otherwise nothing; you’re performing for yourself. You learn to use your whole body, you learn to project your voice. The great days of theater before electrical amplification meant that the use of voice was almost synonymous with acting. When the great Italian Shakespearean actor Salvini was asked to name the most important requirements for an actor he said, “Voice! Voice! And more Voice!”

Today’s film actors would of course cringe at such a notion. Were a film actor to perform as if s/he were on a large stage, the results would be ludicrous. The camera picks up every nuance, every breath. There’s no need to do anything large. I once had an interesting conversation about film acting with magician Simon Lovell. He had acted in a few films and television shows (he has a very funny Jack Nicholson story I’ll tell sometime). His comment about film acting was that to get it the right size you have to feel as if you are doing nothing. And then cut that in half.

Radio, too, is an interesting medium. Unexpectedly, for me, I found radio to be much closer to film than theater with regard to the size of truth. Radio, it turns out, is an extraordinarily intimate medium. Listeners feel as if they are being directly addressed one on one. Any exaggeration in the voice is immediately discernible. The actor just has to trust that being truthful is enough. I recently was asked to take a poem I had written and record a reading of it for the radio. Despite recording it several times over, I was too big each time. I never did do it satisfactorily, in my opinion.

What would this mean with regard to writing? The size of truth in writing in some sense is just another name for good taste and sensibility. Some styles of writing are going to be big and baroque, while others will tell their truths in a more quiet way.

So far, when talking here about the size of truth, I have been talking about the “how” of communication. That is, how should we regulate the amplitude of our communication to fit the medium we are working in? But when talking about the size of truth we can also talk about the “what” of communication. That is, how important is your truth? The actor may have convinced us that there’s water in the glass, but who cares–why did your character need to drink it so badly in the first place? Some actors get stuck in the first obligation without meeting the second.

What about writer’s truth in this other sense, that of importance? Here lies the essential difference between non-fiction and fiction writing. The non-fiction writer achieves greatness the more general the truth–a paper that describes the general principle of the ability of all mass to warp the structure of space-time in its neighborhood would understandably cause quite a stir. But fiction writers–indeed all artists–are only successful to the degree that they can describe the particular. “There is no place for the general in art,” the Russian actor Stanislavski insisted. The artist’s truth is found only in the particular. We do not care about Danish Princes “in general,” we care about Hamlet.

So what are the important fictional truths? Not so easy to say. Easier to say what it isn’t. Pornography, for example, fails at art not because it shows us too much, but because it shows us too little. The truthful particulars of human relationship are obscured in favor of the immediate thrill. That may be fun or even useful, but it’s not the same as art. What kind of truth can writing deliver? It can deliver James Joyce truth, it can deliver Joseph Heller truth or it can tell us the truth regarding the slant of light through this particular window on this particular day at this particular time. I don’t know that I can do any better than that. The best art perhaps is that art which engenders an audience’s internal response which is not able to be reduced to another form–not even the form which first engendered that response. Then we know that art has done its best work.

Stage Combat Part 3

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Last night they kicked me, punched me, pulled my hair, grabbed me by the ears and legs, then kicked me in the crotch. Then I got to return the favors. That was enjoyable.

Acting!

If you’ve read the last two installments of this series in Stage Combat Part 1 and Stage Combat Part 2 you know that I’ve been enrolled in a  Stage Combat class and I’m learning how to pound, punish, and pummel without hurting anyone or getting hurt. It’s an awful lot of fun.

But at first I ran into an unexpected difficulty. It was harder than I thought because of the emotional consequences the first week. Let me explain. The first week, I was paired up with a a young woman who was very serious. As the teacher explained to us how to simulate violence without any actual contact, I thought this would be a fun set of exercises. What I did not count on was what actually happened. We took turns being the aggressor and the victim. My partner was the aggressor to begin with. And as she raised her hand to me, a hand that would never actually hit my cheek, I saw in her eyes pure hatred. I was not prepared for this. The hatred flowing through her eyes was palpable and scary.  And then when we reversed roles, as I raised my hand to strike her, the look on her face of horror and betrayal was enough to jar me.

She is a gifted actor. Her emotions flow without blocking. It was not just a physical exercise for her, but an acting exercise. I was not prepared for that.

I thought to myself, oh these people play for keeps. In the context of a play, I readily accept that as actors we use our real emotions and that that is part of the job. I was taken aback, however, at the real emotion in this exercise. It felt much more raw than dealing with emotion within a play, because in a play you are sending and receiving emotion within the context of a character. But in this exercise I felt naked, emotionally naked anyway, and it was hard not to be affected by the strength of such emotion. We were involved in something we both knew was forbidden.

As the class was wrapping up and we were putting on our coats and so forth, I tried to make some small talk, just to try and defuse some of the charge in the air. But I felt the small talk was not reciprocated. We left and went our separate ways.

I was disturbed, but my pride said, okay, I’m here to act, I’ll play by actors’ rules, I’m not going to wimp out.

But this current week was much more fun for me. Something happened. Time? We were all a lot looser with each other. Shyness and distrust started to break down. What I felt was standoffish behavior, was just basic tentativeness in a strange new situation. We didn’t choose each other, we didn’t know each other. But now that we know that we are not going to really hurt each other, and now that we know that we are all actors who respect each other, we can leave it on the other side of the studio doors and relax and play.

Ooofff!!! Powwww!!!  Onward!

Fumbling, Failing, Falling: Wild Mind–Living the Writer’s Life

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There are lots of good books about writing, but this one is still reverberating. The premise of this little book is that the essence of good writing comes from being able to access that part of us that doesn’t know what it is doing: the Wild Mind. We are lurching through a desert in a car with no brakes at 150 miles per hour, our eyes straining through the windows and our job is to write it all down as fast as we can. Better yet, kick out the car windows, feel the hot air rush against our cheeks, smell the sulfur night, hear the wolves bay.  And when we crash into the twelve-foot cactus that was hidden around the bend, at all costs hold onto your pencil. Your Monkey Mind has just crashed into your Wild Mind and the skid marks are your next poem or story.

Natalie Goldberg’s book is part memoir, part writing advice. She does not separate life from writing. Life is practice; practice, life.

She writes about the day she got permission. About how every artist needs that nod from another, more respected, artist which says, “It’s okay, you’re one of us, you have permission to continue.” Permission to fumble, fail, fall. Who would want permission to be in such a club! But the journey is helped with the encouragement of others.

Her writing exercises are very practical but not at all like What I Did on My Summer Vacation. Start with “I remember” and keep writing. When you can’t remember anymore, start again: “I remember.”  Do this for ten minutes.  When you are finished, repeat, only this time begin with, “I don’t remember.”

I like her recommendations for revision as well. In order to keep the new material as fresh as the original, she suggests you make a notation next to the paragraph that needs revision. Then on a separate paper let yourself run free with that paragraph’s subject. It may go anywhere. The idea is to let your Wild Mind out so that even in revision the language is chewy and alive.

She talks of her life, how it is not different from writing, how lovers, family, jobs have disappeared and changed but the one commitment she could keep, she had to keep, was her writing.

The sickness and the cure are the same. Pick up the pencil, keep the hand moving.

Stage Combat (Part 2)

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Last time in Stage Combat Part 1 I spoke about the relationship of theatrical stage combat to stage magic illusion. So, intrigued by the idea, I sought out a Stage Combat class. Here’s what happened.

The first session of the weekly class (an eight-week class) we are introduced to our teacher Gael, a small lithe woman who I am glad to see is closer to my age than to the age of the others in the class. I am hoping she will be merciful.

The class, she tells us, will focus on training in unarmed stage combat. The tradition she uses consists of techniques where no real contact will happen between combatants–it will only be the illusion of it. “No matter what anybody says, in the heat of acting passion, accidents can happen if you really slap, punch, or kick someone. If a director insists that you do it for real, just smile and go about using the proper technique that you will learn in this class. Remember one thing. The only one who cares about your next job is you. Get hurt on this one and there may not be a next job.”

After a few suitably gruesome cautionary tales about cases where directors helped to cause permanent injuries to their actors, we get started.

The warm-up begins. And so, though I am of an age where I get spontaneous offers of a seat when I am standing on a bus, I am soon rolling around on the floor with students half my age, stretching, bending, and kicking. Finally warmed up (and trying to hide my puffing and huffing) it is time to learn the basic techniques.

We start off with the most-used method called “wall technique.” We pair off, standing facing each other. I am paired with a young woman with dark hair and intense eyes. We are standing so that my back is to the audience, while my partner is facing the audience head-on. This time, I am the aggressor, my partner is the victim. We will switch roles afterwards. We stand an arm’s length away from each other plus six inches. I am to imagine a wall six inches in front of my partner’s face. Okay.

First, eye contact with my partner. Nothing happens before that. Second, a physical cue. I raise my right hand. That’s her cue to get ready. Third, I wipe my right hand in front of my partner’s face, brushing along the imaginary wall from right to left. I follow through with my hand, making sure that my right hand passes through the audience sight line on my left. This crossing of the sight line is crucial for the illusion to work properly.

Meanwhile, it is my partner’s responsibility to provide the sound of the slap. As my hand comes towards her, she “knaps.” That is, she makes a sound by hitting her two palms together in front of her body, clapping once sharply. Her action is hidden by a number of factors. First, because of the positions of our bodies relative to the audience, if she keeps her knap low, the sight of it will be blocked by my back. Second, even more importantly, the moment after my right hand appears to be croosing the line of her left cheek, she simultaneously turns her head to her right and brings up the left hand she just knapped with to her left cheek in one motion.

That’s the magic moment. That’s what sells it. Not so much the aggressor’s motion, but the victim’s reaction. Her hand to her cheek tells the audience where to look. That in combination with the sound is irresistible. The audience’s attention must go to that spot. The amazing thing is that the audience’s collective brain fills in the missing pieces of what it didn’t see as if it did and interprets the actions as a full-bodied slap.

Gael encourages us to take turns seating ourselves in the audience in order to watch the other pairs working. The illusion is perfect. The simultaneous sound and motion are compelling and fooling–even when we know that it is a fake. It’s just like good magic. I am thrilled.

But there is one thing I am not prepared for. The emotional consequences. More of that in Stage Combat Part 3, later in the week.

Rocco: The Art of Giving

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Rocco the magician walks among us like an ordinary man.  He offers you a friendly smile and nods towards the shelled peanuts in his hand, encouraging you to eat some of them.  He walks through the audience, an amiable man. He is not here to take anything from you—not your dignity, your intelligence, or anything else. Nor is he demanding anything of you, your loyalty or even admiration. After all, you have just met. He offers you some peanuts. Simple. Peanuts. You liked those peanuts? Fine. Here’s something else.

Imagine you are watching, as the famous French conjurer Robert-Houdin put it, an actor playing the part of a great magician.  He approaches the audience. You are nervous because you have been insulted by one too many performers who call themselves magicians. You are mistrustful because you are tired of the demands of the magicians’ ego for applause for their pointless “tricks.”

If you are watching Rocco Silano however, you feel differently. He is an artist. You will applaud not just because he has flawless technique—more of that later—but because he makes the kinds of decisions that other entertainers don’t think about.

We are in a little backroom of a bar, The West End in NYC. If a magician were to unleash all of his or her power here it would be too much. After all, we are just here nursing our drinks looking for a good time. We don’t want to be transported to Asia to ride the back of a Siberian Tiger. Let’s see what fun we can have here.

So Rocco and his audience eat peanuts. Then he pushes the remaining peanuts into his empty hand and when he opens his hand a brief second later, in it are peanuts in the shell. As if time had been reversed. It’s a startling moment. And now he offers you the peanuts in the shell. Then the remaining peanuts go back in the hand and it can’t be, but it is: a Snickers bar.  He gives it away. Then a pack of gum and he breaks open the pack and offers the sticks. Then the sticks turn into more packs like the parable of the loaves. You don’t like the green-wrapper kind, poof, here are the yellow kind. It’s something small, but he does it for us because we’re friends. Soon pretzels appear from nowhere, large pretzels, small pretzels, pretzel sticks, pretzel rings.

I am sitting three feet away from him. I, like most of the others here who are versed in things magical, know exactly what must be happening. And I am still mesmerized. Misdirection works whether we know about it or not when performed by a master.

His empty hands are the horn of plenty. Here’s a lollipop for you. Now an orange for you. A miniature bottle of vodka for the gentleman. A tube of lipstick for the lady. He gets what so many performers can’t seem to understand. It’s about giving to the audience and that’s what he literally does. Look, if you had the power, wouldn’t you do the same for your acquaintances? You wouldn’t rain down jewelry and money—that would make their lives too complicated and they would be too beholden to you; look what that did to Elvis. But, hey, a couple of drinks and eats for my friends when we got together—that’s exactly what I would do.

We’ve established our relationship, there’s nothing to worry about, now we can watch his stronger magic.There are some beautiful moments where he tears up a newspaper piece by piece and then restores it. And for the magicians in the audience he does a beautiful coda. He now takes the restored paper and tears that again into little pieces. The little pieces transform into a lit pipe between Rocco’s lips.

He closes, finally ready to show us a “trick.” A card is chosen, signed. He cannot find it. He pulls cards out of the deck, but they are all wrong, not the card. He throws the deck away and then plucks cards out of the air, one after another from nowhere. But they too are not correct. The venerable Magician in Trouble plot. How will he escape? He puffs on what is now a cigarette and then smiles. He removes the cigarette from his mouth. Behind his lips, is a folded card. There can be no doubt now. The card is removed from his mouth and opened up. It is the signed card. He has just given us the gift of the impossible.

Kish Kush

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Six oranges; a pocketful of sand; a wall. What might these mean to a person? I went with 25 middle school children to see Kish Kush and find out.

As we entered the theatre space–a square with seating on all four sides–we realized that once seated, because of the three-foot high plastic wall bisecting the space diagonally, we would only be able to see half of the performing space from any particular location. As a natural result, we could see the actions of only one of the two men seated on either side of those walls.

We had only our own point of view, stuck behind a wall.

Isolation. Slowly, slowly, the man becomes aware of something. A sound? From where? Over there? Oh, this is a wall? There’s something on the other side? How could it be? Tentative experiments testing the shadows projected on the wall from the other side. Finally the bold ripping of the wall to reveal: The Other.

Tall and short. Mutt and Jeff. Abbott and Costello. Vladimir and Estragon.

Circling. Who is this Me-Not-Me? Sound. Then the Tower of Babel. One man is speaking English, the other some mix of Hebrew-Arabic. They are attracted and repelled by each other. They see each other’s possessions which they envy and covet. However, they also know if they are to survive with one another in this wall-less universe they must find some way of communicating.

Kish Kush is the creation of two actors from Italy, Daniel Gol and Alessandro Nosetti who call themselves Teatrodistinto. They have been performing this piece all over the world in many languages for over six years. One actor always speaks the language of the locality where they are performing, while the other always speaks a gibberish mixture of Hebrew and Arabic.

The actors play with humor and specificity, enchanting a roomful of young students and myself. When the wall came down in the middle of the 60-minute piece, members of the audience were able to look across the actors’ space so that we could see each other, and so, ourselves. Delight, whoops of laughter, understanding. Two artists engage and the children engage.

It is Samuel Beckett for children, only this time Didi and Gogo, perhaps, have some hope. Godot does not come, but they have found each other. The students later talk of miscommunication, love, difference, oranges, language. I think of Marx, Gaza, imperialism, Plato, loneliness.

Spoiler: the characters do not hang themselves. They do not sit waiting. They pull out crayons. They draw together, filling the empty space with color and connection.

Combat! (Part 1)

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When I was eight years old, my mother found me in front of her make-up mirror, my forehead, cheeks, chin, and hands covered with large swatches of her green eye shadow and brown eyeliner.

I was trying to look like Vic Morrow in the World War ll television series Combat! Tough guys had green and brown mud on their faces. Anyone who watched Vic knew that.

Fast forward to this February. I had stumbled into acting a small part in a production of Romeo and Juliet in Manhattan. There were a bunch of young actors who had worked together before, and several of them were quite proficient in armed and unarmed stage combat. We were a modern dress production, so we had knife fights along with the usual slaps, kicks, and punches.

I was enchanted watching them work the fights. It was everything I loved about the theater; that part of the theater which overlaps stage magic. We were creating an illusion and the illusion looked so real, there was real doubt as to whether the violence was genuine or not.

The magician and the actor work at different purposes with regard to “suspension of disbelief.” The actor asks us to accept that the cardboard trees in the set function as if they were real. No one thinks a play is unworthy if the interior of a house is indicated with a few blocks of wood.  We expect emotional truth, but not necessarily physical truth. The audience is expected to play along.

But the magician has a different task. S/he doesn’t care about “suspension of disbelief.” In fact the magician challenges the audience not to suspend its disbelief. Even if you remain skeptical, I will still fool you says the magician. It doesn’t matter whether you want to play along or not, you will be forced to confront the fact of the woman who has just been cut into two–and your eyes will not be able to disprove it.

So stage combat and special effects make-up belong to that specific realm of theater which seems to duplicate physical reality and hence fools the spectator whether s/he wants to be fooled or not. This has always been a delightful aspect of the theatre for me. I loved the stories of the teen-age Paul Muni dressing up as an old man in make-up and character so convincing, that when he rang the front door of his house, his own mother didn’t recognize who he was. There were leading men, and then there were character actors who could do the transformation. I always most admired the transformers.

Which brings me to this past week. I found a place where I could take a class in stage combat. I had my first class. I’ll tell you more about it later this week in Part II.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Elephant (Part I)

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An elephant that draws. How can that be? Not just abstract blotches we agree to call “art,” but real recognizable drawings of, well, an elephant. A self-portrait of sorts.

Evidence of self-awareness we could never have predicted or is something else going on?

The magician Ricky Jay, besides being a world-class card magician with two Broadway shows to his credit, is also a respected historian of the strange. One of his books is entitled Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric, and Amazing Entertainers. Therein you will find true accounts of Toby, the Amazing Pig of Knowledge who was able to add numbers; a goose who was able to perform card tricks; Clever Hans, the psychic horse; and a bevy of Singing Mice.

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But to the best of my knowledge, not even Ricky Jay has documented the phenomenon of the artist elephant.

So what is going on here? Other than footage that was sped up from the original, there is no trick photography. Your intrepid reporter will tell you his findings in Part II, later this week…

The Actor Who Made Me Gasp

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In 1974, Hume Cronyn was on Broadway in a Noel Coward play called A Song at Twilight. I had standing room way back of the theater. Unlike most of Coward’s plays, this one was not a comedy.

Cronyn’s role was of an older married man. At one point in the play, his wife, played by Jessica Tandy, finds an old letter of her husband’s and reads it to herself. She then runs out of the room, crying. We, the audience, already know from a previous scene, what was in the letter. Curious to know what was in the letter that made his wife react this way, Cronyn picks up the letter.

The letter, in fact, was an old love letter from another man to Mr. Cronyn’s character.   The two had had a deep relationship, but Cronyn’s character had tried to forget about it.

Cronyn, alone on stage, read the letter in silence for a good three, four minutes. An enormous amount of time to be on stage saying nothing. There was not a sound in the audience. And then as he was reading his face turned beet red–I could see it from all the way in the back of the theatre. He was blushing.

I will never forget that. And he did it eight times a week. Pure belief in the truth of what he was doing, thinking, and feeling.

Daily Rituals: What are Yours?

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Writers, painters, and other artists often live outside the 9-5 office life. Still they must structure their days in some way in order to produce their creative work. I’ve always been fascinated by the different approaches people take. The book Daily Ritual: How Artists Work by Mason Currey is a wonderful compendium of approaches taken by over 150 famous artists from the last few centuries.

Stephen King, Jean-Paul-Sartre, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Benjamin Franklin, Patricia Highsmith–it’s an eclectic, eccentric mix of capsule creative work biographies. The styles of getting the job done are more varied than you might think.  Some set work quotas, some set time quotas, while others work intensely for a period of months and then don’t work at all for the rest of the year. The book is a quick fun read and it will probably give you a little boost of confidence that your way is no crazier than anyone else’s.

But there is one area that the book does not address: what about performance artists who do not work in solitude? An actor, dancer, or musician might be onstage tonight, but what is happening during the day? Even more to the point, since even successful performing artists can have long stretches of time between gigs, how do they structure their time so that they can continue to perform at the necessary level?

We might keep in mind the difference between “rehearsal” and “practice.” Rehearsal is what an artist does in order to bring an intended performance piece to fruition. Practice is what an artist does to keep her or his skills at an optimal level. There’s a lot to be explored here. For example, just how much practice does an actor do compared to a dancer, musician, or magician? And what does the practice of each of these different kinds of artists look like? It could make another very entertaining book as well.

“When the goldfinch cannot sing,
When the poet is a pilgrim,
When prayer will do us no good.
‘Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…’

Beat by beat, verse by verse.” –Antonio Machado

Nixon’s the One

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Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a political post. I’ll try for the most part to keep politics out of this blog, because otherwise like kudzu the blog would be overrun with nothing but political posts. This post is about acting.

Harry Shearer has a new YouTube series called Nixon’s the One where he plays Richard Nixon. It’s a six-part series and a new episode comes out every Tuesday. All dialogue is verbatim from the White House recording system that Nixon had secretly installed in the Oval Office. See Harryshearer.com for episodes and some terrific acting by a largely British cast that includes Shakespearean actor Henry Goodman as the manipulative and lugubrious Henry Kissinger.

Shearer held a live event last week promoting the show and he said a fascinating thing about acting. In a Q&A I asked him how he approached the part of Richard Nixon. He replied that he was basically an outside-in actor–he was very concerned about a person’s physicality, movements and so on. And then he said something I don’t think I’ve ever heard any actor say before, or read in any acting text, but I thought was very interesting. When imitating a real-life person, he said, it helps to figure out who that person was imitating. In other words, who were Nixon’s body influences, perhaps unconsciously? And after a while it came to Shearer. Although Nixon’s words were very macho: “Strength,” “Hard,” “Manly,” his physical movements were sometimes more feminine–especially when he loosened up a bit. So in one scene, Kissinger comes to visit Nixon in the Oval Office late in the evening and Nixon is pretty tipsy and feeling good. And Shearer said, he finally realized who the two people were that Nixon was channeling at that moment physically.

Would you like to take a guess? Spoiler below.

The relevant scene is here if you’d like to look before you guess:

*Spoiler:

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Shearer felt what helped him nail Nixon were the movements of Jack Benny and Bob Hope!