Theatrical News

Wednesday evening was the acting class at Jace's new home and it was good to get back into the troupe's endeavor once again.

Jace's new home is a very charming early XXth Century house in the Craftsman style which has been rennovated so that the attic space has been turned into a second story with a larger family room, a second bedroom and a half-bathroom. The backyard is small but equally charming with two small flower beds and a little garden area. It's a very cozy, pleasant place and the only drawback that I could see is that you are literally three feet from your next door neighbors.

I arrived early and Jace and I hunted high and low for two books she picked up at the Ahsland, Oregon Shakespeare festival, but to no avail. One of two things had happened Jace said: the books had either fallen out of her tote bag in the rental car and were still in the car (she had a call in to the rental agency), or they had been packed up with other books by her husband and where in one of the numerous boxes scattered around the house.

Jeremiah and Rose arrived next and we went upstairs to begin our acting excercises. Well, in reality, we just jumped right in and began with the Hapgood scene with Rose and myself. The two week hiatus showed. Our scene was flat and awkward, all the energy we had built up was dissipated. The blocking was also awkward and Rose kept bumping into me whenever she had to pass by me. Bleh. It didn't help that we had scripts in our hands, either. We stumbled through it, but it was a pretty sorry sight.

Next Jeremiah and Rose had their scene from Hapgood. This ran a little more smoothly, but it is a long and complicated scene filled with technical physics jargon and emotional highs and lows. Jeremiah has lengthy chunks of dialogue and Rose has fewer lines but the lines carry emotional weight. Her final lines in the scene are very emotional and Rose couldn't get herself quite to the right pitch so Jace made her push against a wall (really, you'd've had to have been there) repeatedly. What Jace wanted was for Rose to let the emotion go and to throw it at Jeremiah on her final line. By this time Rose was exasperated and the line didn't quite work.

Jeremiah and Rose had to leave early so I worked on my Pygmalion monologues with Jace. Both monolgues are fairly short and Jace wanted me to do them without script in hand but each time my mind went blank. So I ended up with the scripts in my hand again. Everthing, though, went very well. The blocking was a lot simpler and easier to follow that the Hapgood scene and I progressed from giving a good reading to acquiring a sense of spontanaiety, as though it were all just happening on the spot: which is, of course, what acting is. Once I get to the point where I don't need the script any more, it will become even better and more naturalistic.