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Community Performance Inc.

May 07, 2008

I was letting my blogs stack up, and some were getting out of date. So I'm publishing all of them at once and catching up.

Mother and daughter. Her name is Leslie, she is Carrie. It was Leslie's rehearsal tonight but Carrie came. Leslie is thirty something, pretty, short hair, generous in her proportions. Carrie is eleven and a half, just turning toward young womanhood, pretty, as well. Mother and daughter are both pert. They make me sit up straight and engage fully.

Leslie has two roles, "Oh, Baby," and " Growing Out the Hogs," not her first love as we began at 8pm. Oh, she liked it, but she loved "Oh, Baby." I smiled and told her we were here to change all that.

GROWING OUT THE HOGS

When we was down on the farm it was hard times. I don't reckon there's ever been easy times in these parts, you couldn't get a hold of money anywhere. I finished high school and my parents wanted me to go to college. I said it takes too much money. Let me try making a living. We had five milk cows. So I talked mama and daddy into selling cream and buttermilk and whole milk. I decided why couldn't we get a route in the mill village and sell from the farm? I set up Monday-Wednesday-Saturday to have a route through the mill. We had a colored section, and they had money too. We sold to everyone. We grew everything on our farm. Corn, carrots, tomatoes, chickens, eggs, milk in all its stages. We sold fifty dollars, three times a week.

ANGIE
That much? That’s a lot of money back then. Even today.

Then we decided to do one better. Make money on the things people was throwing away. We’d go through the mill village and places they’d have scraps for slop, and we’d buy them for a few cents. We grew out the hogs on the slop. Slaughtered them, and then sold them back to the people. That’s back when we made something out of everything, and found a way for even throwed-out scraps to be of use. We had to. We were farmers.

Growing out the hogs is the story of a girl who never went to college and stayed home on the farm and made it pay. It's a man's story actually, but we cast women to do it because we've got 'em. And the spontaneous capitalism is more audacious with a thirties woman than a thirties man.

It's a good piece, good information, and it wants an action. That's where I knew I'd hook Leslie. We read the piece a few times through and she suggested several changes. "So I talked mama and daddy into selling cream and buttermilk and whole milk," became "So I talked mama and daddy into selling cream and buttermilk and sweet milk."

"[Y]ou didn’t get a hold of money anywhere at that time," became simply, "you couldn't get a hold of money anywhere." Like the older folks in the rehearsal the night before, Leslie had an ear for her native speech.

Leslie's double got caught up at work and couldn't make the rehearsal, so we had time on our hands. After we'd read the scene half a dozen times and fitted the words to the mouth, we were ready to work. I got a wheelbarrow from props, nice and rusty, and an enamel pan for the slops. We'd just today finished our first prop meeting with Kathy, but she already had 50 items or so stacked around in the prop and costume room.

I put the wheelbarrow at the bottom of the bow zag, the switchback ramp across the front of the mainstage and explained that the piece divided in two pieces. As she told about selling the vegetables, milk and eggs she would go up the bowzag. At the top she'd turn the wheelbarrow around and go back down taking slop buckets from folks as she passed by their doors and windows. The challenge, I said was the with each person who came to buy she could either mime the transaction--haggle price and quantity, hand over the food and take the money--or she could interrupt her main story and ad lib the sales talk and then return to the story. Either one could be wonderful. If she chose the last one, she'd have to be sure not to drop the energy of the story in her sales chat with her buyers.

You could see she loved a challenge, and she did the piece several times with Carrie playing all the buyers as well as the slop sellers. I told her I wanted to bring her to the place where if the scene was anymore complicated she'd be anxious about it, and if it was any simpler, she'd start to get bored. I was describing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's state of "Flow," peak experience, being in the zone. In the first rehearsal we were able to glimpse were we were going with the scene, see it as a place, the place of flow.

My object with every actor is to find that place. For a child it can be as simple as pounding with a hammer, or catching an imaginary butterfly. For an eager performer, like Leslie, it is as complicated as selling a wheelbarrow full of vegetables and buying that same wheelbarrow full of slops during the course of a two paragraph monologue.

Update: the teenager lonesome for the part in "Write to Me, I Am Lonesome," now has it.

   

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