Mosquitoes and moldy jack-o-lanterns

Greetings all 5 of you readers!

Grad school comes and goes in all kinds of waves (as you can probably tell already).

Here I go with an update.

Part of my duties as a grad student is that I’m a TA for an Intro to Theatre class. There are 9 of us and 400+ students.

I’m in charge of 45 students for grading. It’s tedious work and we’ve got play critiques to grade this week (3-4 pages long). Virtually all of them have written about The Hot L Baltimore. One evening this week, I finally decided to hunker down and get some of these done. Even if I spend only 15 minutes on them, which is unlikely, this could take well over 10 hours.

I started with the top of my list, opened up the paper, read a few paragraphs, and stumbled upon this doozy: “The worst actor was Tim Sailer, who played Bill.” And then it continued with an explanation of why the student thought so.

This is not a good way to start a marathon grading session. I swallowed my pride and continued to be as objective as I could.

But the explanation was poor. I think the student had more of an issue with the CHARACTER rather than the ACTOR (a distinction that’s difficult for a lot of these students to deal with; which I can understand, especially if you haven’t seen a lot—or any—live theatre).

In other news…

The university is under attack of millions of mosquitoes. I’m not kidding. People are running from their cars into the theatre today. I think I got at least five bites. Houston had an all-day rain a couple weeks ago. The eggs have hatched and they are hungry for BLOOD! Who knew I’d have to deal with the little buggers at the end of October.

Speaking of that…I carved a pumpkin last week. It’s already mush. The eye started getting moldy.

And since we’re talking about seasons and everything, I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. It’s fantastic, post-modern, sweet, funny, and surreal. Jack had mentioned it when I was saying how our particular acting technique was a bit on the crazy side (we’re leaping and jumping from all kinds of sensorial stimuli—sometimes they are inherent in the scene, sometimes we’re drawing on our own lives). Jack just nodded and said: “Haven’t you ever seen Eternal Sunshine…?!” I said no and he nearly fell to the ground. The thing is, our minds do not work in any kind of clean, linear fashion. Why should that be the case in our acting? The movie jumps and leaps from memory to memory to present day, to these kind of altered memories—it’s kind of trippy. But I understand this notion better.

I DIGRESS! I was talking about seasons. The film takes place in New York in the middle of winter. All the snow and ice scenes were strange. I think I got a little homesick or something. It was strange.

I should stop. My To Do list is LONG. I’ve got a major audition every week for 4-5 weeks. It starts on November 5, so I need to jump on that work. I feel good about most of the pieces. I still have to find one more Shakespeare monologue. That’s a major goal for today.

OH! I nearly forgot: I’m doing a reading of The War of the Worlds next weekend. Should be a lot o’ fun (I better listen to the original broadcast a few more times to figure out the voices work. I’m playing a couple different characters.

Weeks 4 - 8 or something

I'm still in grad school.

It's tough, illuminating, frustrating, strange, and exhilarating.

It's starting to get to the point that I'm becoming increasingly ingrained into the training that the minute I attempt to explain it, it would require a whole treatise to describe.

Right now we're diving into acting technique through Tennessee Williams scenes. I'm working on a Blanche/Stanley scene with another classmate. Gone are the days when you simply run the scene and drill the lines. That's the least of our worries. Instead, we're delving into our senses and histories which fuel our bodies and minds (but mostly bodies). It feels as though the text is hardly there. The work is slow and tedious, but I'm getting a stronger sense of what my job is as an actor.

We're also starting to work on anger/tears monologues in class. It's not easy (duh).

In combat, we've learned three set phrases of single-sword choreography for the Hal/Hotspur fight in Henry IV, part 1. I'm playing Hal. We got some heavier weapons (verging into broadsword territory). And now we're going back to the epee blades for a tighter, quicker fight next week. I'm having a lot of fun with that, and I'm starting to sink my teeth into the final speech Hal directs to Hotspur's dead body.

I've opened Hot L Baltimore. I love the play. I think audiences are enjoying it. We had a riotous crowd on Thursday. The show closes on Sunday. Admittedly, I'm going to be happy to be done with it though. I'd like evenings to dive into work for more than just a scattered hour or two. Already, today has been great. I was able to read The Crucible in one sitting (we have auditions for the spring in a few weeks).

Right now, I'm struggling with the whole notion that I'm not in school right now. I'm working on eliminating "I gotta get the approval of my teachers." This is training. I'm training for an artistic marathon. It kind of feels like my classmates and I are at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters (the X-Men). We're delving into super-human territory so that we can serve others.

I'm kind of in a weird mood. It could be a number of reasons. I haven't had time to just sit in silence for a long time by myself. I just read The Crucible, which is no easy walk in the park. I'll do a bit more cleaning today and solidifying monologues for a whole batch of auditions that are coming up in the next 8 weeks (which means quite a lot of Shakespeare).