i'm in a play!

Yip yip yippee! I'm in a play! It's with the Blue Coyote Group, it's called "Coney," and I play a shy sixteen year old on a first date. I'm very happy and now I need to find a time to get my butt out to Coney Island before it closes for the season. I've never been and I'm from New York. Madness. Had first rehearsal yesterday and I just love being in rehearsal. I love how these things start as words on a page and over the course of four weeks, there is this communal effort to create something else. I hope I get to eat real zeppoles in my scenes.

"Coney" at Blue Coyote Theater Group

the crucible

I have recently reignited my love for "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller. To the extent that I've read it at least twenty times, it is my favorite play. I first discovered it my sophomore year of high school, when I was assigned to work on a scene for an acting class. After school, I would go home and for hours, hours, I would act out scenes from the play in front of the mirror nailed to the back of my bedroom door. My favorites to work on were the scenes between John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth-- a marriage shaken by his infidelity, his desire to be a different man, her need to be seen. Hours. 

I'm so excited because I'm going to be working on "The Crucible" again in my current acting class. And since most directors wouldn't cast a black actress in any of the roles other than Tituba (the "sorceress" slave from Barbados), this might be my only chance to play Elizabeth and honor all of the time I spent shrieking back and forth to myself about witch hunts and the importance of being a good Christian. Hmmm, now if only I could find a way to play John-- the "Because it is my name" howl gives me the jitters just thinking about it.   

new hampshire

Favorite things about my New Hampshire trip:

1. The seven hour train ride. Long, yes, but fun, too. I took my shoes off, slept, read, watched my Netflix, stared out of the window, ate a wilty garden salad. The only thing that would have made the trip better would've been the purchase of one of those tiny little bottles of wine. I would've gotten white and poured it over ice-- instant happiness!

2. Spending time on a college campus was all kinds of fun. We stayed on the Dartmouth campus in Hanover, and I found myself thinking about my freshman year at college. How fun it was to meet new people and decorate and grind through finals together. Communal living can be really awesome, and I was reminded of how we always kept our dorm room doors open. Our RA asked us to leave our doors open for the first few weeks, and we did it for much longer, and you could walk by or into anyone's room, lounge on their Walmart-purchased futon, drink their crappy beer, and complain about classes.

3. I know this runs the risk of sound a bit overheated, but spending the week with artists was really, really lovely. I sometimes find myself feeling a little bashful when I tell someone I'm an actor-- I have shame about not getting work, and I live in fear of people thinking I'm yet another attention-hungry, insecure, self-interested aspiring starlet.** But spending the week with a group of people who love to talk about plays and books and movies and art and the big meaning of it all made me feel like I belonged in a certain way. I like dinner discussions devoted to figuring out what we're up to and why we're up to it, I like walks to the river with actors trying to figure out why this particular mode of expression is so useful, I like drinking beer with writers who are contemplating what they want to reveal about the world. Discussions like that are great, they make me feel less alone in the world.

** Which of course, I am all of these things. That's the way it works, right? The qualities you'd like to distance yourself from the most are the probably the things that exist most strongly inside of you. And my adult self is okay with that...for the most part. But I think maybe because I went to a performing arts high school, and drama majors had a terrible, albeit well-deserved reputation-- loud, attention-hungry, over the top, loud, dramatic, loud-- I think I'm still a little reactionary. And while I shook my fist at the time and screamed that we were so misunderstood, fact is that all of those things were true-- we were brassy and bossy. But we were other things, too, and of course that was the lovely part of high school-- that at 15, we could still be sensitive and creative and patient and interested. So I try not to let my memory completely pummel that 16 year old drama student who lived and thrummed with neediness and the desire to belt "Les Miserables" numbers on her way to class.

4. Last thing-- early evenings. My favorite time of the day is between 4pm and 8pm. I don't know why, but I feel it most acutely during warm weather months. I think it's because of the time I spent at summer camp (ten years). After dinner, there was a pocket of time when it was warm without being too hot, when things had calmed down in a certain way. At camp, we had a little break before heading to our activities for the evening, and the whole world felt kind of still and young and alive. I felt like I could feel every rock underneath my shoes. I know some people have this feeling in the morning, but for me, it's dusk. When your belly is full and you're walking a little slower and you're anticipating the promise of the evening. Every one of my New Hampshire evenings reminded me of those camp nights. Pure bliss.

31 plays in 31 days

So I've signed up for this challenge! You write 31 plays in 31 days and you feel good about yourself. Because instead of doing what I always do-- drinking beer, watching Netflix, not doing any writing, texting old boyfriends, reading other people's plays, napping, not doing any writing, fantasizing what my life could be like if only I could write my damn play, not doing any writing-- instead of only doing those things, you're writing, too!

And of course, your plays can be dreck or genius or just kind of mediocre. They can be one page or two hundred pages. The only important thing is that you get stuff down on paper. And I like the philosophy of the organizers:

The 31 Plays in 31 Days Project is based on the idea that to become a better writer, you must write. You must write a lot. And you need to practice experimenting with your writing form constantly. The pressure of this goal will allow you to set aside preconceived notions of what you should be writing and how you should be doing it. You will not have time to overanalyze your work, you will just have to write, write, write and be surprised by what comes out of you. You may love your work some days and wonder what happened on others, but by the end of the month, you will have amassed 31 new plays. Instead of waiting for the breeze of inspiration to blow your way, you will see that writing is a craft that can be called on at any time.
--Rachel Bublitz & Tracy Held Potter.


Wish me luck! Today begins the first day and the first play!

uncle vanya

I'm so, so glad I made myself go see Sydney Theatre Company's production of "Uncle Vanya." They brought it to New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, and because the tickets are expensive, the show is long, and the run is so short, I came up with a billion reasons not to go. But I really loved STC's production of "Hedda Gabbler" at BAM back in 2006, and I feel like it's silly to miss an opportunity to see Cate Blanchett on stage, so I just used that credit card that's always $100 from the maxed out limit anyway and went to see it.

Whenever I'm feel particularly boastful after a drink or two, you might catch me claiming that "Uncle Vanya, hic, is my favorite Chekhov play." When in fact, Uncle Vanya is the only Chekhov play I've read in its entirety (shameful, I know). But I really do love it-- it's slow, not much happens and yet everything happens, and it presents a kind of crushing, acute reminder of the pain of living and trying to love and deal in the world.

This production had all of that, but it also had a bouyancy about it that I can't seem to forget. I've seen productions of "Uncle Vanya" that are certainly beautiful and poignant, but they definitely feel like "eat your spinach" theater-- long, dour, a world without much light. Which I guess might be the Russia Chekhov creates, but he also creates a Russia where people need music, drink like Vikings, sing at the top of the lungs, crave the human touch, and break into dance. Their inability to have all of these things in a consistent way is one of the reasons his work feels so heartbreaking to me. And when you get a glimpse of how these characters might live if they could get out of their own ways, when you see how one's life could be if perhaps fear wasn't such a constant, it is absolutely both the happiest and saddest thing in the world. This production of "Uncle Vanya" allowed us to see how happy these people might be, how their lives could feel like a Saturday night as opposed to Monday morning-- we see that glint of possibility, and when it's taken away, when they realize their dreams are only dreams and life is probably one, long, monotonous stretch, the shock of the realization just takes your breath away.