Thanksgiving

The AC's off. The heat isn't on. The windows are open. Happy Thanksgiving Eve Day!
It's surreal. I think this juxtaposition of the Texas weather and the (lack of) change of seasons is a perfect analogy to graduate training. It's bizarre.

I'm two weeks away from being done with my first semester of grad school. That means, I'm about 25% complete with the degree. It's scary. It's empowering. I undulate between feeling good about it all and then feeling completely inadequate and wishing we had another month. But then I wish we'd be done with this semester yesterday.

This is the paradox.

Another paradox is the auditions we've been having every weekend. We've got one round left (next weekend for another Shakespeare Festival). This is when we've got to shed our "training" skin and step up to professional actor status (that should never really leave, I suppose). We're looking for summer gigs. I'm hoping for a summer Shakespeare gig (if it could be in rep with something, that'd be great too). It's kind of hard to tell where my leads are at the moment, and I probably won't know too much until February or March with these. The best I can do is follow up with directors without pestering.

The casting and artistic directors know my class is in training. We've been getting some notes about how eager they are to see us in a year (or two), which is good to hear...I guess, but it still feels a bit backward. Then I have to remember that most of us have virtually NO SHAKESPEARE experience. The second year of our training is devoted to the Bard. We're basking in the poetic realism of Tennessee Williams right now and applying what we can to the Shakespeare.

Letsee...what have I been working on?

A lot.

Yesterday, we presented our final combat scenes. We've paired up and picked scenes where a single sword fight would logically make sense (quite a few Shakespearean options, Jacobean, shoot, there are some Greek possibilities too). Something that wouldn't make sense is George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Gwendolyn and Cecily in The Importance of Being Ernest. I worked on a Three Musketeers scene with a duel between Athos (me) and his ex-wife whom he thought he had hanged (Milady). In the scripts/book, it's a pistol ultimatum scene, but we took some liberties. Everyone had the same choreographic sequences, but our job was to orchestrate them with the text and have them make sense. Combat is probably the more difficult part of training for me, but I think I'm getting a handle on it.

In Speech, we're working on the RP (Received Pronunciation) British dialect. This is the standardized dialect they taught in British schools in the early 20th century. BBC announcers were required to have it in probably through the late 70s/early 80s. We presented 10-minute scenes in RP the other day. I'm doing a scene from Shaw's Candida (playing Marchbanks). I'm having a lot of fun with it. We also have to present 2-minute RP monologues for the final (and a 2-minute General American monologue). General American isn't a "real" dialect, but it's ideal for translation pieces (like Ibsen and Chekhov) to get everyone in a cast on the same page (wiping away regionalisms and colloquialisms in someone's speech). Additionally, we've got a long(ish) passage of text to transcribe in IPA.

The Acting final is the biggie. It's hard to fully describe without writing a whole book about the sub-textual technique we're been working through the whole semester. In any case, I'm presenting the final Stanley/Blanche encounter from A Streetcar Named Desire, in which I provide a score of every single focus of attention that I have throughout the scene (basics: every noun has some kind of sensory attachment, every moment has some kind subtext, and it's all blended together in a logical, evocative composition). We've also got to present a 2-minute Anger/Tears monologue. This means flipping between legitimate fury and real tears throughout the whole monologue. We've done this before, but our teacher provided some "help" in coaching us throughout the pieces. It's all gotta come from ourselves.

In Voice, we're continuing to work on various placement of the voice through different resonant chambers. Yesterday, we worked on the break (the point at which my voice leaps into the head--falsetto--voice), flipping through it (which gives you a yodelling quality), and voicing in the crackle of the break (it sounds awful, but it doesn't hurt, or it shouldn't). This is paving the way to screaming on stage in a way that is healthy and supported (and visceral)!

There's a lot more to reflect on. I'm trying to wrap my head around it all. I'm also trying desperately to move away from the fact that all of this is "school"--as in I have to please my professors. I need to own this stuff and take charge of the short time I have left.

But now it's Thanksgiving Break! About 17 of us are all gathering for Thanksgiving tomorrow. I'll do some more work on the monologues today and work big time on my TA grading (so many essays....). Tomorrow is all about turkey.