Week 5

WEEK 5?

Yikes. Where has the time gone? Quick recap on this week. I'm saving some room to speak thematically.

This week, Much Ado About Nothing got completely staged! We had our first stumble through yesterday afternoon. Sari and I are two watch(wo)men. I can't see, she can't hear. In addition to these specific character traits, we are also hillbillies. Like the girls who get killed in True Detective, I'm going to see if we can be missing teeth. 

We also went to Emerson College this week, aka the stomping ground of Simon and Mitchell. We had a "Teaching Shakespeare" workshop with Robert Colby. There was one exercise where 5 people were the ghost of Hamlet's father and the rest were guards. The guards had to walk around with their eyes closed while the ghosts scared them. Let's just say, I'm still scared.

Emerson has a pretty cool campus. Two of my best friends transferred to Emerson, so I spent some time on campus during my Junior year of college. I never really knew much about their acting program, but now I wonder what it would be like to study acting in Boston. Even though I grew up in Boston, I still feel like I never fully got a grasp of the Boston theater scene.

OKAY. ALSO THIS WEEK. STAGE COMBAT. HOLY. I'm just not good at it. I haven't had the feeling of being completely incompetent at something since I did contact improv for the first time at ETW. You'd think that I'd be inclined to be good at badass things, but this badass thing, I can't really do. I'm taking baby steps.

What I'm learning though is that chemistry with your partner is so important. Edmund and I started working together, and we just get each other while holding weapons. With the rapier and dagger, you can hold them either pronated, supinated, or the wrong way, goofinated. We were goofing with our rapiers, but buy the end of our class, we successfully helped each other not to goofinate. We're doing a scene together from R&J. I'm obviously Tybalt and he's Benvolio. "Have at thee, coward."

Okay, thematically. What's crazy about this program is that so much happens each week. Whenever I sit down to write the weekly blog post, I have to look at the calendar to remember everything. Emerson honestly felt like more than a week ago. 

I'm starting to realize that as we enter the second half of this program, I'm beginning to understand Shakespeare as a playwright. He put so much work into his characters and their relationships. The circumstances only give life to the characters. They really breathe off the page.

This thoughtfulness might be inspired from my view right now. It's our day off, so I'm sitting on the deck of my New Hampshire house.

Actually, this is what I'm looking at as I type this post.

Anyways, experience of the week. Yesterday, I interviewed Mitchell for "Wherefore art thou," and he told me he's never read A Streetcar Named Desire. I was so shocked by this, that today, on my day off, I reread it. I think why this shocked me so much is because Mitchell is the Stanley Kowalski of the Apprentice program. If you don't believe me:

That is the face I got yesterday.

Anyways, I've read this play more than any other play. Arthur Miller says that this play is "language flowing from the soul." It's not just a cry of justice for each of it's characters, but a complete synchronicty of it's characters to their justice. Is that even the right tense for synchronized? It doesn't matter.

When Blanche says the "kindness of strangers" line, she better make everyone in the audience depend on strangers too. The kindness of the strangers in the audience to help each other get through the complete desperation of that line. 

But, Shakespeare. He aligns each of his characters so closely to their dialogue, that their character is revealed in language. Like any good character in any book. Or movie, I guess, I just like to read.

Adam asked me during the first week why I like characters so much. It might be language. You learn so much about someone from the way they speak.

..."Wherefore art thou,"

CC