Pretending

STIPIMM: “Yesterday,” by the Beatles

This past Monday night, June 19, I got to do something I’ve essentially wanted to do since I was in college – act in a play. It was a play called “Gin, Love & Kerouac,” by a young lass named Courtney Baia. She also produced the play through her theatre company, Peripitus Theatre Co., and played one of the three roles.

I first got involved with this play, just as I get involved with everything these days, through a Craig’s List posting for an audition. I prepared a couple of short monologues (with the help of my patient wife) and went to the audition, which was held in Courtney’s apartment (such is low-budget theatre). I really wasn’t expecting to get the part, not because I didn’t think I did decently, but because I figured there was probably someone who did better. Turns out, they offered me the role two days later, and I quickly accepted.

Well, let’s back up a second here. Some of you are probably surprised that I was seeking out being in a play in the first place. Truth is, I’ve been fascinated with theatre and acting for as long as I can remember, long before I met a certain girl who was particularly involved in it. Theatre have long been this pseudo-sacred area for me – a near-ritualistic gathering to watch people re-create or completely invent a reality. It was only in the past seven or eight years or so that I began to recognize the importance and respect I attached to the performing arts, and the disdain I feel when people half-ass it, disrespect it, or treat it like a second-class pursuit.

Indeed, when I met Bridget, it was a large part of the mystique that I felt surrounding her – she was a Director with a capital D, not like the technicians I was working with in my film program, but someone who took acting and the art of theatre seriously. Even as she did small productions to occasionally spartan audiences in Washington, DC, there was something that elevated it in my mind above anything anyone at AU’s film program was doing.

A couple of years ago, when Bridget took a directing class at Studio Theatre, I decided to try my hand at a basic acting course. I enjoyed it a lot and did fine in it. I certainly did better than most of the people in the class, which wasn’t necessarily saying much, but still made me feel good about the thought of actually acting in something. But one thing that the class showed me that I hadn’t fully realized before was that I had something in me that has been in me since… oh… I was in middle school: the ability and willingness to turn off my self-consciousness in the interest of performing for an audience. It’s one of the more basic things about acting – being willing to look stupid – and I seem to have it. Now, it’s a big leap from there to Brando, but at least I had that much. There were plenty of people I had seen in college and community theatre that didn’t even have that.

So anyway, that was the seed of confidence that allowed me to 1) perform in Day Old Plays over a year ago in Washington, DC; and 2) try out for a play in a town I had only lived in for seven months. I try to have no illusions about my abilities – you won’t see me trying out for anything more than small theatre stuff anytime soon. But it seemed like “Gin, Love & Kerouac” was something I could do… and I was right.

So anyway, back to the play at hand. This being a brand new play, there wasn’t much of a way to know exactly how good the play was going to be before I accepted and got a copy of it. I suppose I should thank my lucky stars that it turned out to be pretty darn good. The entire play takes place in the course of an evening in a bus station in Illinois. There are three characters, one young man and two young women, who are stuck at the bus station by an extraordinarily heavy snowstorm. They get to talking, as should happen in any decent play, and the things they reveal about themselves eventually point to a common thread between their lives. In between, they flirt, dance, get drunk, ingest biohazardous materials, and debate the merits of Jack Kerouac.

I played Jonas Ashley, a 19-year-old (go ahead, get your laughter out now) who dropped out of college and decided to travel across the country like his hero Kerouac. He is constantly playing with his identity, telling stories that would more befit a seasoned world traveler than a minor-aged wannabe beat. Besides these notable aspects of his character, he also really, really likes to talk. Once he starts talking on page 7 of this 97-page-long play, there are only a few places where he’s not intimately involved in the dialogue. Indeed, I ran a digital copy of the script through my script analysis program, and Jonas has 40% of the dialogue of the play, along with three near-page-long-stretches that count as monologues.

So, here I was, a 31-year-old introvert being asked to play a 19-year-old garrulous, flirty guy. A bit of a challenge, but I accepted it and memorized my lines well.

There are two other roles in the play, both played by young women. The first one, Abby, who is a throwback to the 50s in how deferential she is to the men in her life, was played by Courtney herself. The other, Nona, an anti-social conservative gal who’s on her way back home to get married, was originally going to be played by a friend of Courtney’s, but she had to drop out a couple of months ago (for whatever reason), and Courtney had to scramble to find a replacement. She asked me if I knew anyone willing and able to fill in, and I turned to the theatrical resource I had in Bridget for advice. I ended up asking one of the actresses in Bridget’s production of “Crave,” Liz Rimar, if she would play Nona. And to my surprise, after she met with Courtney, she said yes. This was both good and bad – it was good that we found someone good to be in the play, but it scared the bejeezus out of me at first, because she is someone who I respected and already knew could… well, actually act, and here I was, a wannabe, going to be trying to act next to her. A little bit daunting, but still, I like Liz a lot, and she’s about as stuck up as Jesus, so the initial worry didn’t last long.

The rehearsal process and the performance was a bit different than a typical theatre run. In that way, it was more in line with what is known as a “workshop” production, in that there were limited rehearsals and only one performance night (Bridget’s productions in D.C., for instance, had weeks of performances). Even as a workshop production, our timeline was a bit compressed; we only rehearsed this past Saturday and Sunday for 10 hours each day.

Another unusual (or experimental, as Courtney put it) aspect of the production was that there was no director. The actors were to essentially create their own roles and characterizations from their own work and the rehearsal time with the other actors.

Bridget still smarts a little from the characterizations of directing made by Brian Friel, the playwright of her last play, “Dancing at Lughnasa” (he said something akin to: directors aren’t really necessary; all you need are good actors and a decent stage manager and you have what you need for good theatre). And as someone who is studying directing, it’s understandable that she would be skeptical about a theatrical process that eschewed a formal director. She grumbled about it some, but she was overall very supporting and helped me in the long process of memorization and trying to develop some character for this Jonas fellow.

The rehearsals were long and hot; most of them were done in Courtney’s living room (again, theatre on the cheap!), which had no air conditioner. But it was clear by the end of the first day that we were well on our way to getting this thing together, and the second day was focused on particular gaps in our memory, our blocking and our characterizations. It was whirlwind and exhausting, but a lot of fun nonetheless.

And then, we were as ready as we were going to be for Monday night…

more tomorrow...