Just when I thought I wouldn’t have anything to blog about, I discovered Miss Castaway: the movie that will single-handedly re-invigorate Michael Jackson’s acting career.
Really.
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On Wednesday, I met Frank, the Producer at One Life, and read again for Julie Madison (head casting director). Everything went well, and I’m hoping this means they will be calling me in the future. My consultant at TVI said that getting called in to read for a Producer’s session is a really good thing, so I’m just thankful I seem to be heading in the right direction.
I’m sending out a mailing tonight about the auditions I’ve been on recently and the plays in which I’ve been cast: I haven’t had the time to send anything in recent weeks, and I feel as though I’ve fallen a bit behind. Between now and Christmas my schedule is packed, so I’m finding it hard to do anything at all… much less sit down and type up postcards.
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Wednesday was the first rehearsal for The Long Christmas Dinner and consisted of meeting the director and having a table read. A table read is when the whole cast just sits at a table and reads the play#–the emphasis is on taking notes and asking questions in light of fully understanding the text. For this play, because the story takes place over an extended period of time (90 years) and the characters age accordingly, it’s incredibly important that for each scene, every actor is on the same page (what year is it, how old am I, etc).
Thursday’s rehearsal was table work: reading one scene and then stopping for discussion (asking and answering questions about the text, making notes for answers that cannot be found during the rehearsal, hashing out the given circumstances of the scene). We didn’t quite finish our work and decided to follow up with the rest on Friday.
The action of the play is confined to the many Christmas dinners played out by the Bayard family in their ancestral home. It’s a Thornton Wilder play, and that means a mostly bare stage, minimal props, and a lot of experimental movement. The director felt it would be an interesting exercise to allow all of the actors to eat an actual "Christmas Dinner" in order to observe what really happens physically, vocally, and emotionally while eating together. We ordered a family meal from Boston Market and served it up in the rehearsal hall, the director, stage manager, and dramaturg observing. After the initial weirdness of being observed while eating wore off, the dinner was an opportunity to get to know my cast members a little more intimately. It’s funny how a limited relationship grows after sharing just one meal: it’s impossible not to feel a little closer to someone having broken bread with them.
At the end of the process, we all talked about what we had noticed about behavior while eating a "dinner". We all agreed that our perception of what we would be doing physically in the play had shifted after doing the exercise. After all, it’s one thing to "play" at having dinner, and another to actually "have dinner". For me, it helped to distinguish that some of the dialogue in the play is not as pointed as it might appear while reading it. Some of the dialogue is color#–phrases meant to evoke memories and feelings of dinners had in our own pasts.
I hope that we are able to translate some of the energy and intimacy we found in the exercise onto the stage. If that happens, this will be a really quaint, warm show.
