You know, two summers ago I wrote a play. It was inspired by a conversation I had on a front porch on the 4th of July. There were about 10 people there at the party, but only three of them were dominating the conversation, and as I’m not very good at group conversations, I just listened. One of the three was a professor, another a student. The third was a girl who was visiting from across the country. In a small town like ours, that’s a huge deal.

She was telling us about her life in another place, and we were all rapt with attention. The student expressed his desire to leave, to find himself, and the professor (in rather crude terms) seconded the notion.

Regardless, I found the conversation to be inspiring. They spoke in a very real, down-to-earth way, but instead of half-hearted smalltalk, this was passionate, fiery conversation. It felt like I was watching a play.

As soon as I realized this, I switched my brain into Line Memorizing Mode, where I remember things accurately and quickly. I dunno, it’s a trick I have, I guess. Anyway, as soon as I got home, I wrote the rough draft of a play. It wasn’t long at 25 pages, but it was a good start.

Over the next year, I polished it and refined it. The character personalities were heavily based on my friends on that porch, with several monologues coming verbatim (at least, as best as I could remember) from that porch conversation. I wasn’t ripping off their ideas — I’d already had those ideas. But they had articulated them in ways I’d never been able to do before.

So the character personalities were based on my friends, but the characters deep down inside were based mostly on my own experiences (which, I suspect, everyone else has gone through as well). The conversations were composed entirely of thoughts that I had had before or experiences that I had actually been through. I wrote the way my friends might say it, but the underlying message came from within, rather than from them.

After a year of polishing it up, I turned in a proposal at my school to direct it. It took six weeks to get a response.

The producer came to me, asked me to come to his office, sat me down, and said “This is crap. Lazy writing.”

His reasoning was the professor’s character cursed constantly. I just nodded. I couldn’t very well tell him that the character was based on one of his employees, that this was very, very realistic writing. If it had been truly lazy writing, then the other two characters would have been cursing as well. As it is, neither of them ever say a curse word.

So, my script sits on a shelf, waiting for a day when I can produce it on my own, when I have the resources and opportunity to put it on stage.

I suspect that many people will connect with it. I don’t think it will make Broadway, by any means. It’s not that good. But it’s good enough for a one-act.

Like the characters in my play, someday I know my dreams will come true.

I got my list of schools that are interested in interviewing me at the U/RTA conference in Chicago next weekend.

One school.  Out of 15 that have the program I want.

Now I’m trying to decide whether to go or not.  I mean, drive all the way to Chicago, spend all that time and money, when the one school that wants to interview me is only 2 hours away?

Oh, I know I’ll go.  I’ve always wanted to see Chicago, and this is a pretty good excuse to go.  And I understand I may get more interviews as the time grows closer.  And there are acting auditions, as well.  Plus, I have some friends out there.  Maybe some of you faithful readers in Chicago will want to meet up for lunch or something.  If so, let me know.  I’ll be in Chicago Friday 2/2 to Monday 2/5.

I’m gonna go in there and give it my best shot, be as passionate and excited as I can, as I really am.

But I can’t help but wonder:  what could I have done better?

I don’t know how many of you actually follow the professional theatre blogs out there, but I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the latest and greatest in the theatre world. One of these is a blog by Scott Walters.

Scott has an intriguing viewpoint in theatre. He believes theatre has failed America, that there is a new regime change, so to speak, in sight. He believes that the status quo is about to change, and a new order will arise.

I’m not going to rehash everything Scott believes. Instead, I’ll refer you to his blog.

In other news, my friend William is having difficulties in his first year as an MFA student. He’s one of the more capable people I know, so the fact that he is having trouble scares me a bit.

As a result of Scott’s blog on MFA programs, the subsequent discussions, and William’s troubles, I’m having second thoughts about joining an MFA program. There are dozens of programs out there, and I’m unsure which is the best to join. I’m not even sure an MFA program is the best direction to go. I’m writing this to sort of lay out my plan, my ideas, and see what I can come up with.

Pros:

- I want to teach college eventually, and I need an MFA to do that
- I want to direct, and my undergraduate training was sorely lacking in that area. An MFA will provide that training.
- I need to make connections with the theatre world, and my undergraduate school was so far removed as to provide no connections at all.
- I need to see more diverse views on theatre than what I saw in my undergrad program.
- Looking at Broadway billings, it’s painfully obvious that the most successful artists are those who have MFA’s and extensive training.

Cons:

- It costs a lot of money
- It’s extremely tough, and given William’s experiences, I’m afraid of getting into a program I don’t fit well with
- I could theoretically get directing training by working independently or professionally
- Working professionally could gain me some networking connections without the hassle of an MFA program (which, according to Scott, is outdated anyway)
- Broadway, while a nice idea, isn’t exactly a priority goal for me, so an MFA wouldn’t help me in that regard.

Oh geez. It’s tougher than I thought. I’m going to say that the training will probably be equal either way, so that’s out. The connections are probably equal either way, so that’s out too. The Broadway option cancels the MFA authority out. So that basically leaves me with one criteria: I wish to teach college at some point in the future.

I need an MFA…

..or do I?

(I’m breaking my posting schedule with this, but I’d like to get this out today.)

This is my last show in my current location.  Once this show is over, I’m moving away, either home or to wherever I’m going to grad school.  There is a lot I’m going to miss about this place, but honestly, it’s just time for me to move on.  However, I intend to go out with a bang.

I have an idea, and I’m hoping some of my friends will be willing to participate. The whole idea of this exercise is to improve ourselves as actors by getting criticism, suggestions and feedback from our peers, our faculty, and from random people who show up to the performance. In addition, this project will be huge brownie points in the eyes of the faculty, for anyone who participates.

I have a book of a collection of 10 minute plays. I’ve been reading through it, and I’ve found several plays that would be fairly easy to do, yet fun as well.  The question is:  will they be interested as well?  Here’s my proposal.

Mission Statement: We intend to produce multiple 10-minute plays for free to anyone who wishes to attend, for the intents of A) having fun, B) becoming better actors and C) helping generate interest in the theatre.

The Plan:

1) Get three or four people together (actually, the more the merrier)
2) Assign parts
3) Either take turns directing or I’ll direct all the plays
4) Spend 2-3 weeks practicing (they’re 10 minute plays, so not a lot of practice required)
5) Perform them (for free) one afternoon in the black box studio
6) Ask the audience for their criticisms (either written or verbal). To increase participation of this aspect, anyone who participates gets a coke and cookie or something.
7) Have a Post-Mortem meeting with everyone involved, go over the criticisms and suggestions. Become better actors

The key here is to offer them for free (to encourage attendance and participation), and to GAIN MEANINGFUL FEEDBACK from others. One of the problems that I see in the department is a lack of feedback from our instructors. Very rarely are we told what could be done better (especially after a play is over with). Every other industry out there does something similar, and it helps them avoid making the same mistakes over and over. Since our instructors won’t give us feedback on their own, let’s do our own project and generate our own feedback.
Hopefully, I’ll get enough participants (only need three!) to get this off the ground and running.  And hopefully, this will be such a success that it happens every semester, even after I’m gone.   Perhaps, in the future, it will become a 10-minute play festival or something.

What do you think?  Do you have better ideas, or perhaps some suggestions to improve this?  I’d love to read your comments!

“Hey.”

“Hey, Director,” Randall says, measuring some fabric. “What can I do for ya?”

“Is Clem around?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

“Can I help you instead?” he asks.

I am skeptical. While he’s a nice guy and definitely knows what he’s talking about, I just don’t ever find that I have much in common with Randall. I prefer talking with Clem about these sorts of things. I shrug and decide to go for broke.

“Sure,” I say, pulling out my director concepts for A Raisin in the Sun, Mother Courage, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I’m working on my concepts for the upcoming conference.” He nods, knowing full well what kind of preparations I’m making for the conference.

“What’s the problem?”

“Well, I wanted to show you my concepts and see if you could give me any advice.” He nods and I hand him the papers. I keep going. “For A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, I’m a little confused. I don’t want to go with pure Elizabethan style costumes, but I don’t want to go modern either. Both are overdone. So I figured I’d go with French Baroque. I like the time period, and it’s different and… well… I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason.”

I pause, waiting for him to respond. He doesn’t.

“Is it?” He looks up.

“Well, do you think it is?” I shake my head. “Then you need to find a reason. Read through the script again, see if you can find some parallels between the French Baroque period and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I nod. I point to the A Raisin in the Sun concept.

“My idea here was–” I begin. He cuts me off.

“Where are the acting concepts?” He shuffles the papers. I stare at him. He looks up at me. “The actor concepts?” I’m dumb-struck.

“Uhh…” I’m speechless. Of course. What’s the whole point of directors? To direct the actors! I had forgotten to include actor concepts!

I had conferred with my friend William regarding the concepts in the first place, and since he’s first and foremost a lighting designer, naturally the discussion centered around technical design aspects. I’d completely forgotten about the acting side of things. How stupid can I be?

By this time next week, I assure you, my faithful readers, that my full director concepts will be posted. Somewhere.

God, I’m a fool.

“Never been to Subway, what do I do?” a foreign accent once called out years ago when I worked at a local Subway as a “Sandwich Artist”. It was a Nigerian who was in the country for school. He had never been to a Subway before. There is quite an interesting story to go along with it (I used it for an audition piece, actually!) but that’s neither here nor there.

Point is, the other day I felt like him. The sad part was that I was in exactly the same industry I claim to profess! But rather than simple ignorance, it was lack of opportunity that had brought me to this spot. I called one of my good friends, William.

“Hey William,” I asked. “Those uh… director concepts. How do those work?” He chuckled and offered to help me out.

You see, I have never sat through a production meeting before. I have no idea what directors are supposed to say during those meetings! And considering that I’m interviewing at U/RTA and SETC in two months, I better figure out pretty quickly how to develop a concept and explain it to the designers. That’s where William comes in. William was the lead lighting designer at the theatre until he left for graduate school.
“You have anything written already?” he asked. I showed him the link. He skimmed through it. “More original on costumes, more specific on lights, more props notes, less specific on set — it looks like you want Carl to do it, and that’s fine, cause he’s the only set designer you’ve really seen.” I nodded.

“The thing is,” he said. “You don’t want to limit the designers’ needs. You want to give them direction, but let them figure stuff out. Give them crazy things to do so they’ll have to do research — designers love that shit — and let them come up with designs. Don’t be too specific, or you’ll be limiting what they can do and they don’t like that.”

I nodded again (which was stupid since this was a phone conversation).

“So,” I said. “I want lights that look like dusk in a–”

“No, no,” he interrupted. “No times. Just describe the feeling you want.” I tried again.

“Okay, so I want a dark forest with scattered rays of sunlight, a place that makes me feel mischievous and sneaky.”

“Better.” Now I saw what he meant.

The problem with developing concepts for me was that I had never had to do it. Yes, I’ve directed three shows before, but one was in Directing class and Dr. C never explained the whole concept idea. For both of the other shows, I was given less than 5 weeks to put the show together from start to finish — concept to strike — and I barely had time to squeeze in rehearsals, much less spend time with designers planning things out. Besides, minimalist shows with basic light plots aren’t that difficult for designers.

Things are different this time. I’m going to U/RTA and SETC in the Spring, and I’m preparing some concepts for my interviews. This is the first time I’ve had months to plan out something like this — and I’m using my time wisely, I think.

If you look to the right, I’ve posted concepts for Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

If you have any comments or suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them. Don’t get your feelings hurt if I don’t follow your suggestions, though — after all, this is supposed to be my take on things.

I already addressed the merest of directing in my post on Three Words Directors Need To Know, but in this particular post, I’m going to address actual classroom ideas. You see, when I took my first Directing class, it was rather… simple. Here’s basically the way the class went down.

1. Intro to class
2. Discuss different directors (Homework: research different directors)
3. Each student presents a 5 minute oral report on their director (e.g. Elia Kazan) and that director’s style
4. Class is split in half — “Team A” directs first, “Team B” stage manages.
5. From among stage managers, “designers” selected.
6. “Team A” perform plays.
7. “Team B” people become directors, “Team A” people become SM’s.
8. Repeat.

As you can see, there is very little instruction on what directors actually do and how they go about their jobs. In fact, of the 36 possible class meetings, we only met, maybe, eight times. Lots of learning going on there, I promise you.

Now, I am far from an expert, but think I can come up with a better solution. This new plan requires a class limit of 8 people. Any more than that, and you’ve got too many people involved. Limit it to eight people (juniors and seniors). If you have more than that, create another section with another professor. Now, the plan:

Week one: Introduction to Directing, discuss chain of command in theatre, history of directing, roles, etc
Week two: Select plays*, write proposals that answer the following questions: Why did you choose this piece? What technical problems do you foresee? How will you solve them? How large is the cast? Male/Female roles? etc.
Week three: Present proposals to class, discuss proposals. Are there any obvious problems? Does the class, in general, think these particular proposals are good?**
Week four: Discuss concepts, show concepts from in-house designers as examples, assign concepts assignment
Week five: Present concepts to class, discuss concepts. Instructor should grade concepts on feasibility, following instructions, etc. Split class into pairs, each pair in charge of one aspect of designing
Week six: Hold auditions for plays, begin rehearsing
Week seven: Production meetings - class discusses problems, solutions, and needs for productions
Week eight: Discuss various directors and their styles, including Elia Kazan, Stanislavsky, etc, assign report on directors and styles
Week nine: Present reports to class, continue production meetings, rehearsals, etc.
Week ten: Tech week, make sure productions are ready to go
Week eleven: Productions — Post-mortem report assigned
Week twelve: Post-mortem report (final exam) due

*Limit cast to 4 or fewer — can be adjusted depending on actor pool. Smaller schools need smaller casts, since fewer actors are available. If possible, could work in concert with acting classes.
**Note: This is not for a grade, but for constructive criticism purposes).

Okay, so as you can see, there are some major differences. I’ve included a few aspects of the original class, since I agree those aspects are necessary, but I do think that if you’re going to have a class called “Directing” then there should be some lessons that deal with exactly what it is that directors do (e.g. production meetings, concepts, rehearsals, etc). Theatre history with regards to directing and studying other director styles is definitely needed, but that didn’t help me at all when I directed my first productions.

So there you have it. If I were to teach Directing 101, that would be my basic course outline.

Any suggestions? Comments? Jokes?

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Adam strolls onstage, dressed as an Irish priest. He has a cigarette hanging from his lips, his hands clasped together into something that looks sorta-kinda holy. The audience laughs hysterically at his entrance. Up until this point, he had been dressed as a school teacher who did drugs and talked about fucking his students, and now, a priest? Hilarious!

“Oh Adam,” Carver says. “I’m glad you’re here, too. I need your help.”

“We all need each other, my friend,” Adam replies, dressed as an Irish priest.

“I was looking through the storage closet, and–”

“Why?!?!” Adam jumps up, frantic. Carver looks back at him, slightly confused.

Silence.

Carver continues, the scene rolls on, and I sit back in my seat, a bit miffed. That is easily my favorite line in the show, and nobody else thought it was funny. Adam’s ongoing difficulty during this particular production is his speed. He rushes through each and every line. At every rehearsal, I would say “Slow down!” over and over. He slowed down enough that we could understand his lines, but we lose the inflection that comes with slower, more enunciating speech. As this was my favorite line, I worked especially hard on this section to make sure it went over well. Obviously, it didn’t.

I mull over the scene again and again in my mind, keeping a facet of my attention on the performance. By the time the scene ended, I figured there was nothing I could do at this point to improve the audience reception.

The lights come back up. The show continues.

Oh well. Win some, lose some.

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I try to keep myself informed on what other people in the industry are doing, and I have recently subscribed to Joe Harmston’s blog (you can find it here). Mr. Harmston has some pretty good articles. Specifically, he wrote about the role of a director. One thing in his article struck me as absolutely brilliant.

According to Frank Hauser, a director, there are only three phrases that a director needs to know:

1) “That thing you were doing in scene two, do it more.”

2) “That thing you were doing in scene two, do it less.”

3) “That thing you were doing in scene two, don’t.”

Brilliant. Brilliant! It accomplishes one of my biggest difficulties as a director (although this is not on my Top 7 List of annoyances) . You see, I have acted for several years, and it takes very little effort for me to begin to crawl into the minds of the characters. I certainly don’t do it as in depth as the actors should (but probably more than some famous ones do), but I do attempt that process. Therefore, it is easy for me to come up with specific reactions that I would do if I were playing that particular role. The problem with this is that the director is not the actor! The director’s job is not to micromanage the actors, but to allow them to creatively explore their characters within the guidelines set by the director.

These phrases effectively eliminate such directorial intrusions. It basically says “I don’t care how you got that, but I want more/less/none of that in the future.”

Brilliant.

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“How is it that I am a good actor? What I do is I.. pretend to be the person I’m portraying.

You’re confused.

Case in point: in Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson comes to me and says ‘I would like you to be Gandalf the Wizard,’ and I said ‘You are aware that I am not really a wizard?’ and Peter Jackson said ‘I would like you to use your acting skills to portray a wizard for the duration of the show.’

So i said ‘Okay’ and then I said to myself ‘Mmm.. How do I do that?’ And this is what I did: I imagined that I was a wizard, and then I pretended, and acted, in that way on the stage.

How did I know what to say? The words were written down for me in a script. How did I know where to stand? People told me where to stand.

If you were to graph my acting, it would look something like this: Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian, action — wizard! “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” Cut! — Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian…”

–Clip from the excellent BBC/HBO series Extras (Youtube).

As stupid as this scene is, it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant, because it’s true.

Acting is really simple. You pretend. That’s it.

There is a catch. It, too, is simple: there’s no science to acting; it is an art.

Granted, you can teach one how to use the tools that are available to you, but without the instinct there is no art. There’s a reason why the School of Theatre is a part of the College of Arts.

You can give me the absolute best box of crayons and the highest quality paper, and I still can’t draw worth a shit. You can give me oil and canvas, marble and chisel, or piano and music, and I still can’t paint, sculpt, or sing. Like the previously mentioned subjects, acting is an art — you can’t teach it, per se. You can teach the methods, but you can’t teach the instinct.

I’m not a huge fan of method acting. Yes, I use aspects of Stanislavsky’s method in my own acting, but my own acting is much like Sir Ian McKellen’s: me, me, me, me, action! (say lines) cut!, me, me, me, me.

One of my instructors keeps trying to cram into our heads that actors should “really do what you’re doing.” This is wrong. Absolutely wrong. The minute you start to really do what you’re doing, you’re no longer acting — you’re no longer pretending — you’re just YOU on stage dressed up like someone else.

In the end, however, I don’t particularly care how YOU act, so long as you act well. I have friends who can’t act worth a shit, and I’ll never cast them unless their actual, real personality fits with the character. I’ve had friends that I could’ve sworn the author was thinking of when he wrote that play — they’re that much alike.

But when I hold auditions, I look for good actors. Actors who do different things, who behave differently than they do in “real life”, who can show me a range of behavior. After all, the best characters in a play change over the course of the play: they grow. If an actress can’t act, if she can only portray herself, then how can she grow on stage?

The simple answer: she can’t.

As stupid as Sir Ian’s explanation is, it is brilliant. It’s true.

Acting is pretending.
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