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Community Performance Inc.

August 28, 2008

Yesterday began kind of tired and groggy. I had a 10:00 meeting. Usually I'm up and ready for the day by then, but I was just tired. I had a fitful night of sleep. I knew why, but only after I’d sloshed around in bed for about four or five hours before I finally fell asleep. It was the work of the evening before. Two of the main characters in the show have a really interesting relationship, and we’re exploring some really strange/spooky/difficult territory. These characters have several scenes together, three of them emotionally intense. It was those scenes we worked through together, and I was really trying to get the language and the story to read perfectly. When we started, the scenes were very close to being “there”. So we worked them until we really had them right. All of the actors, the doubles, are really invested in this story, so we read through, rehearsed, read through some more. I really had to go into the place of Margaret, the crone character, who is also a sort of “seer”. In her youth, she often tried to warn people about the things she saw, so she could change them and help them, but she was soon ostracized, because people didn’t see her as trying to help, they saw her as calling down these events upon them. There was even talk of burning down her home, but people were too afraid she might do something to them. So, they decide to do something else. They leave her alone. Completely.

In this piece, we really explore the idea of what it is to be human, what it is to be monster, what it is to be both, depending on how people see you. Margaret tells Grace about another character who unnerved Grace by his difference: “that person is a human or a monster, depending on how you see him. And so am I. The monsters in this world are our own making.”

We hear the story of Margaret the monster, and how she became the monster, as Margaret, the human, tells us. We also get to explore the importance of story, and what happens when someone else tells your story. What happens when your own story gets lost, and the far reaching consequences of that happening. If you do not use your voice and claim your own story, people will never know who you were, or why you were.

This play, more than any other I’ve written for Swamp Gravy here in Colquitt, deals with this notion of the importance of claiming your own voice, standing in your own story, and facing your own mortality. Our rehearsal of these scenes ran for about 3 hours last night. Maybe a little more. During a dinner break (it was Wednesday night, church night, so we break between 6:30 and 8:30) kate had told us that she left rehearsal feeling really down. I told her I’d felt heavy, like a weight on my chest and shoulders. She didn’t sleep well either. I told her I think it’s because we left with the emotional baggage of the scene still in our hands. She said she hadn’t thought about that, she just didn’t know why she was feeling this way.

When our rehearsal with the same group began at 8:30, Every single actor said they’d experienced the same thing. Except Gayle, who said she didn’t have a problem sleeping because she took a Tylenol PM before bed. Marie got up around 1 am and took a shower. Sara Ann said she was walking all over the house until 3 in the morning and said “I might as well stay up, cause I have to get up to teach school in just a little while” And Amy said she had a dream, a very strange dream, which was a cross between the premonition dream Margaret had, and the scene hiding under the house in “To Kill A Mockingbord” And she said in the dream, She was Scout, and we were running over to Margaret’s house so she could help us find Boo. She said it was a fitful night of sleep for her as well. None of them had thought about the connection between rehearsal and work-through of the scene and the feeling of heaviness- that emotional hangover.

I had told Richard earlier in the dayhow I’d felt, and like I think it’s because I didn’t step out of Margaret after rehearsal. He said he was keyed up by the rehearsal, and how we were working together so well, but it didn’t bother him in any emotional center. But when he heard Kate, and then the rest of the women, he was like “OK, I hear ya” And we decided after we work these scenes from now on, he’s going to lead us through some actor cool-down techniques. He did this two years ago in a difficult Swamp Gravy scene because actors had invested so deeply into the scene, which also went to some very difficult places. One of Richard’s first big papers was on the crucial need for actor-cool down. I think with some of these stories, its especially important, because we are playing people we know, or know of. These are real people and places we are going to. It’s important to remember to step out of them.

I could be that it’s because we didn’t work as long last night, or because the exercises worked, or a combination of both, but when I woke up this morning, I didn’t feel the same heaviness. Hope it worked out that way for everybody else, too. Well, rehearsal begins in a couple of hours, so I think I’m going for a walk. I’ll be careful, though, walking around the outside of my house, as just a little bit ago a HUGE limb from the pecan tree fell mere inches from my bedroom, and part of it is still hung up on the lines. It’s so huge that is covers the front yard at the corner of the street. And it doesn’t even seem that windy here. Weird. OK, enough for now.

   

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