Last night I listened to the audio recording of a talk David Milch gave a few years ago during the writers strike. He told a great story about writing and problem-solving for NYPD Blue, a show he co-created and was head writer on for many years.
NYPD Blue's whole deal was that it was an ensemble drama about cops in a more realistic world than had been portrayed on television before (a mantle later taken up by Homicide and then The Wire). It ran for over ten years, with the definitive relationship being between partners Andy Sipowicz and Bobby Simone, played by Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits, respectively. But Smits wasn't in the original cast.
Its first year in, the show was a hit. Problem was, David Caruso wanted to leave for Hollywood after the first season. The show was an ensemble piece, but at that time the partners played by David Caruso and Dennis Franz were the characters most focused on. And, not for nothing, in contrast to Franz's wrinkled, overweight, balding, racist, mean-tempered, alcoholic Andy Sipowicz, Caruso was the young, skinny, sober, pretty one. He was, y'know. The star of the show.
Okay, so you've got a new hit show, but when audiences get attached to a show, they want it to stay the way it is. Your star is leaving, and you know the audience isn't gonna like him being replaced. So what do you do when you've got Caruso leaving and some new guy named Jimmy Smits coming in as Dennis Franz's new partner?
Well, I'll tell you.
What you do is, you have Smits come in as Bobby Simone, all polite and nice and likable. Have him, first thing, introduce himself to Franz's character, Andy Sipowicz. "How are you doing?" and all that, totally innocent. And have Andy be like, "Yeah, hi. Would you excuse me for a minute?" And then you have Andy go into the boss's office. "This ain't gonna work." Have the boss ask, "Why, what happened?" "'What happened?' Guy comes in, 'how ya doing,' and everything! This ain't gonna work!" You have Andy totally overreact, which not only makes light of the situation, but also puts the audience in the situation of saying, "Jeez, look at Andy - this crazy drunk can't adapt to ANYthing! C'mon, give the new guy a chance!"
So now the audience is on the side of the new guy. "Give him a chance. Give the new guy a chance."
THAT'S what you do.
Brilliant.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
MUSIC: Dylan Live 11.11.09
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the 60’s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock. Who donned makeup in the 70’s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse. Who emerged to find Jesus. Who was written off as a has-been by the end of the 80’s, and who suddenly shifted gears releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late 90’s. Ladies and gentlemen, Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!”
Tonight, my favorite artist in any medium played at George Mason University’s Patriot Center in Virginia, backed by a band at the top of their game and armed with an assortment of brilliant songs written by the artist himself and picked from across more than four decades. It was, obviously, an excellent concert.
When I arrived at the Patriot Center with my friend Padraic and looked around me, I was struck by how encouraging it is to see so many Bob Dylan fans gathered in one place. The fact that there are hundreds of people willing to spend an evening at a Bob Dylan concert in Virginia is something that gives me faith in humanity. And it need not be said that there are precious few things in life that give me faith in humanity.
They started off with “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” I had a strong emotional reaction immediately. It was probably a combination of seeing Dylan after a year or two having gone without, having my current troubles and concerns melting away for the night, and the performance of the song itself. It was very strong, and the lyrics wove into my mind in ways that they never had before. The first time I heard that song was driving with my old friend Jeff Skarin on our way home one night from the wedding of our friends Trey and Lori. Along with that ride being my first introduction to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, we played Dylan’s two-disc Greatest Hits Vol. II, and it was a revelation. I’ve always enjoyed this song ever since that night, but I now have a deeper appreciation for it. Strange and majestic. Dylan’s body moving in that quirky way that suggests he’s not from around here, or anywhere, and his hat shining like the moon. The concert had just begun.
Next was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” one of my favorite Dylan songs, and one of the songs I heard at the first Dylan show I went to back in 2000 with my friend Eric, which was a formative experience. Dylan is spending most of his performance time behind a keyboard these days, but he stepped out to play guitar on this one. His vocal phrasing does crazy things to my mind. I love the finger-picking guitar style on this song.
One of the biggest treats of the evening was a radically different arrangement of the relatively-obscure “Man in the Long Black Coat.” It was still very dark and otherworldly, but uptempo with a deliberate rhythm to it. I hope I can track down a recording of this concert, and this song in particular.
Next was “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” with Dylan back on the keyboard but also playing harmonic a bit. I love it when he plays harmonica, and this show had some especially lovely playing. This song was very rollicking and fast-paced. Guitar player Charlie Sexton is back with Dylan’s band after several years away – in fact, my friend Joey and I saw his last performance with Dylan in this same venue, where they brought the house down with a thundering rendition of “Summer Days.” It’s great to have Charlie back – he’s one of the best guitarists I’ve heard live, and the best I’ve heard with Dylan.
One of the songs off the new album, “If You Ever Go to Houston,” had a nice groove to it and was quietly moving somehow. “Can you help me find my gal?” had an extra bit of vulnerability to it.
Dylan’s been playing variations on “High Water (For Charley Patton)” ever since he first recorded it, and this was the best live version I’ve heard. Dylan went downstage center with his harmonic in hand for part of the song, spouting out his song like an old time preacher. “‘Don’t reach out for me,’ she said, ‘can’t you see I’m drowning too?’”
Dylan then pulled out “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” which was a pleasant surprise. He played organ on this one, and his interplay with Charlie was phenomenal.
“Forgetful Heart” was a highlight. It was a much slower, moodier rendition than on the album, and I liked it a lot more this way. More like Time Out of Mind than Together through Life. Acoustic guitar and harmonica were the primary sounds, with a wash of other instrumentation underneath – violin, mournful electric guitar, and I think brushes on the drums. One thing I like about Dylan concerts is that the vocals are usually very high in the mix, so you can hear him (which is extra nice when he’s changed up the lyrics, as he did most noticeably a few years ago on “If You See Her, Say Hello” in a show I saw with my friend Jimmy). Dylan’s singing was just full of texture and emotion on this one. “The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there even was a door.” Absolutely haunting.
Padraic’s favorite performance of the evening, which I also loved, was an edgy new arrangement of “Cold Irons Bound.” It slowly built towards a storm of music, with Dylan’s harmonica and the band like fistfuls of lightning.
A very intimate, pretty “Workingman’s Blues #2” followed. Lilting and lovely.
“Highway 61 Revisited” was next. Urgent, blistering, double-barreled rock ‘n’ roll. Calling down fire from Heaven. Charlie’s guitar was screaming bloody murder. I could hardly stand it, I didn’t know what to do.
“Ain’t Talkin’” is one of my favorite Dylan songs from the past few years. Swampy and dark. Ancient and post-Apocalyptic at the same time. Cormac McCarthy. “I'm trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others, but, oh, mother, things ain't going well” stopped my heart. And Dylan growling, “ain’t no one here, the gardener is gone” is like an indictment of God from the only voice worthy to speak to Him. There are so many sides to Dylan, and we got two handfuls tonight. He has such a variety of material.
“Thunder on the Mountain” was another raucous rock song. Ridiculous. The audience hung on for dear life. Charlie and the rest of the band were really tight tonight. There was, the whole time, a woman doing sign language translation for the concert. Standing up in the audience, but out of the way. She was dancing a bit, enjoying herself, while moving her hands to communicate the words. I thought it was more than a little strange for deaf people to be there, since it was, after all, a primarily aural experience, but I guess it’s because Dylan’s “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll.” On this song, though, Dylan gave her a real workout, spitting out machine gun vocals, running words together. “ThunderOnTheMountainRollingToTheGround, GonnaGetUpInTheMorningWalkTheHardRoadDown.”
And then “Ballad of a Thin Man” came along. It was, in a word, frightening. Dylan stood downstage center with his harmonica in his hand and sometimes raised to his lips. The guitar clanged out the angular, insistent riff that’s played on piano in the 1965 recording. Dylan’s voice swaggered and snarled like God and the Devil taking turns slapping you around. Merciless. Awe-inspiring. There is no one else like Bob Dylan in the world, and no one who could’ve stood up there and charged the room with danger the way he did tonight. Transcendent.
The first song of the encore was “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was everything this song has ever been. A living monument, like Dylan himself. A slightly different arrangement with a pronounced and new guitar riff, but unmistakably the classic kiss-off that will never fade. Bob Dylan is forever, and so is this song.
“Jolene” is a great blues song from the new album, and the band played it with a lot of hips tonight. Full tilt electric blues.
“All Along the Watchtower” burned the whole place down to the ground. Rapid fire explosions happening in the drum set, guitars sending out calls and responses, Dylan’s keyboards signaling the end of the world. Blood and thunder in his voice. A great way to end a show.
It’s good to be alive in the time of Dylan.
[Originally written November 11, 2009]
Tonight, my favorite artist in any medium played at George Mason University’s Patriot Center in Virginia, backed by a band at the top of their game and armed with an assortment of brilliant songs written by the artist himself and picked from across more than four decades. It was, obviously, an excellent concert.
When I arrived at the Patriot Center with my friend Padraic and looked around me, I was struck by how encouraging it is to see so many Bob Dylan fans gathered in one place. The fact that there are hundreds of people willing to spend an evening at a Bob Dylan concert in Virginia is something that gives me faith in humanity. And it need not be said that there are precious few things in life that give me faith in humanity.
They started off with “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” I had a strong emotional reaction immediately. It was probably a combination of seeing Dylan after a year or two having gone without, having my current troubles and concerns melting away for the night, and the performance of the song itself. It was very strong, and the lyrics wove into my mind in ways that they never had before. The first time I heard that song was driving with my old friend Jeff Skarin on our way home one night from the wedding of our friends Trey and Lori. Along with that ride being my first introduction to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, we played Dylan’s two-disc Greatest Hits Vol. II, and it was a revelation. I’ve always enjoyed this song ever since that night, but I now have a deeper appreciation for it. Strange and majestic. Dylan’s body moving in that quirky way that suggests he’s not from around here, or anywhere, and his hat shining like the moon. The concert had just begun.
Next was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” one of my favorite Dylan songs, and one of the songs I heard at the first Dylan show I went to back in 2000 with my friend Eric, which was a formative experience. Dylan is spending most of his performance time behind a keyboard these days, but he stepped out to play guitar on this one. His vocal phrasing does crazy things to my mind. I love the finger-picking guitar style on this song.
One of the biggest treats of the evening was a radically different arrangement of the relatively-obscure “Man in the Long Black Coat.” It was still very dark and otherworldly, but uptempo with a deliberate rhythm to it. I hope I can track down a recording of this concert, and this song in particular.
Next was “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” with Dylan back on the keyboard but also playing harmonic a bit. I love it when he plays harmonica, and this show had some especially lovely playing. This song was very rollicking and fast-paced. Guitar player Charlie Sexton is back with Dylan’s band after several years away – in fact, my friend Joey and I saw his last performance with Dylan in this same venue, where they brought the house down with a thundering rendition of “Summer Days.” It’s great to have Charlie back – he’s one of the best guitarists I’ve heard live, and the best I’ve heard with Dylan.
One of the songs off the new album, “If You Ever Go to Houston,” had a nice groove to it and was quietly moving somehow. “Can you help me find my gal?” had an extra bit of vulnerability to it.
Dylan’s been playing variations on “High Water (For Charley Patton)” ever since he first recorded it, and this was the best live version I’ve heard. Dylan went downstage center with his harmonic in hand for part of the song, spouting out his song like an old time preacher. “‘Don’t reach out for me,’ she said, ‘can’t you see I’m drowning too?’”
Dylan then pulled out “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” which was a pleasant surprise. He played organ on this one, and his interplay with Charlie was phenomenal.
“Forgetful Heart” was a highlight. It was a much slower, moodier rendition than on the album, and I liked it a lot more this way. More like Time Out of Mind than Together through Life. Acoustic guitar and harmonica were the primary sounds, with a wash of other instrumentation underneath – violin, mournful electric guitar, and I think brushes on the drums. One thing I like about Dylan concerts is that the vocals are usually very high in the mix, so you can hear him (which is extra nice when he’s changed up the lyrics, as he did most noticeably a few years ago on “If You See Her, Say Hello” in a show I saw with my friend Jimmy). Dylan’s singing was just full of texture and emotion on this one. “The door has closed forevermore, if indeed there even was a door.” Absolutely haunting.
Padraic’s favorite performance of the evening, which I also loved, was an edgy new arrangement of “Cold Irons Bound.” It slowly built towards a storm of music, with Dylan’s harmonica and the band like fistfuls of lightning.
A very intimate, pretty “Workingman’s Blues #2” followed. Lilting and lovely.
“Highway 61 Revisited” was next. Urgent, blistering, double-barreled rock ‘n’ roll. Calling down fire from Heaven. Charlie’s guitar was screaming bloody murder. I could hardly stand it, I didn’t know what to do.
“Ain’t Talkin’” is one of my favorite Dylan songs from the past few years. Swampy and dark. Ancient and post-Apocalyptic at the same time. Cormac McCarthy. “I'm trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others, but, oh, mother, things ain't going well” stopped my heart. And Dylan growling, “ain’t no one here, the gardener is gone” is like an indictment of God from the only voice worthy to speak to Him. There are so many sides to Dylan, and we got two handfuls tonight. He has such a variety of material.
“Thunder on the Mountain” was another raucous rock song. Ridiculous. The audience hung on for dear life. Charlie and the rest of the band were really tight tonight. There was, the whole time, a woman doing sign language translation for the concert. Standing up in the audience, but out of the way. She was dancing a bit, enjoying herself, while moving her hands to communicate the words. I thought it was more than a little strange for deaf people to be there, since it was, after all, a primarily aural experience, but I guess it’s because Dylan’s “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll.” On this song, though, Dylan gave her a real workout, spitting out machine gun vocals, running words together. “ThunderOnTheMountainRollingToTheGround, GonnaGetUpInTheMorningWalkTheHardRoadDown.”
And then “Ballad of a Thin Man” came along. It was, in a word, frightening. Dylan stood downstage center with his harmonica in his hand and sometimes raised to his lips. The guitar clanged out the angular, insistent riff that’s played on piano in the 1965 recording. Dylan’s voice swaggered and snarled like God and the Devil taking turns slapping you around. Merciless. Awe-inspiring. There is no one else like Bob Dylan in the world, and no one who could’ve stood up there and charged the room with danger the way he did tonight. Transcendent.
The first song of the encore was “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was everything this song has ever been. A living monument, like Dylan himself. A slightly different arrangement with a pronounced and new guitar riff, but unmistakably the classic kiss-off that will never fade. Bob Dylan is forever, and so is this song.
“Jolene” is a great blues song from the new album, and the band played it with a lot of hips tonight. Full tilt electric blues.
“All Along the Watchtower” burned the whole place down to the ground. Rapid fire explosions happening in the drum set, guitars sending out calls and responses, Dylan’s keyboards signaling the end of the world. Blood and thunder in his voice. A great way to end a show.
It’s good to be alive in the time of Dylan.
[Originally written November 11, 2009]
RECIPE: Petite Scallop Pasta
One of those "less is more" dishes.
Angel Hair pasta. Follow the simple instructions on the box. Fill a pot of water, put it on the burner on "high," and add the pasta once the water's boiling and bubbling. Angel Hair is like extremely thin spaghetti (you can imagine how they came up with the name), and only takes a couple minutes to cook. Straining the water out takes a bit more effort; due to its slenderness Angel Hair holds onto more water. You want the water gone, otherwise it'll water down your sauce.
The sauce I made tonight was just olive oil with a bit of garlic. I simmered a little olive oil on low heat, with a tiny sprinkling of minced garlic, which turns brown after awhile. Strain the garlic out before using it, if you want. (I took some of it out and left some of it in, myself.) You don't want too much garlic in there, or it'll overpower the scallops, which have a very subtle flavor.
I bought some petite frozen scallops and used those. One little package is enough for two people. I put some butter in a skillet and turned the scallops over a couple times. Always cook on fairly low heat, unless you're boiling water. Otherwise it's easy to burn your food. The scallops're done when they've darkened a bit. Leave the butter and residue out of your meal; just use the petite scallops themselves.
Once that's done, mix the scallops in with the pasta and pour the olive oil overtop. Don't use too much oil; mix it in while you pour so your food isn't swimming.
I diced some tomato (one Vine or Roma tomato per person), leaving the seeds out. I tossed the tomato in (cold/room temperature) with the rest just before eating.
It was delicious, and not too heavy.
I paired the dish with a simple smoothie. One or two bananas, orange juice, and vanilla yogurt. Put them in a blender, and you can choose your own consistency (more OJ means more liquidy, more yogurt means thicker).
Angel Hair pasta. Follow the simple instructions on the box. Fill a pot of water, put it on the burner on "high," and add the pasta once the water's boiling and bubbling. Angel Hair is like extremely thin spaghetti (you can imagine how they came up with the name), and only takes a couple minutes to cook. Straining the water out takes a bit more effort; due to its slenderness Angel Hair holds onto more water. You want the water gone, otherwise it'll water down your sauce.
The sauce I made tonight was just olive oil with a bit of garlic. I simmered a little olive oil on low heat, with a tiny sprinkling of minced garlic, which turns brown after awhile. Strain the garlic out before using it, if you want. (I took some of it out and left some of it in, myself.) You don't want too much garlic in there, or it'll overpower the scallops, which have a very subtle flavor.
I bought some petite frozen scallops and used those. One little package is enough for two people. I put some butter in a skillet and turned the scallops over a couple times. Always cook on fairly low heat, unless you're boiling water. Otherwise it's easy to burn your food. The scallops're done when they've darkened a bit. Leave the butter and residue out of your meal; just use the petite scallops themselves.
Once that's done, mix the scallops in with the pasta and pour the olive oil overtop. Don't use too much oil; mix it in while you pour so your food isn't swimming.
I diced some tomato (one Vine or Roma tomato per person), leaving the seeds out. I tossed the tomato in (cold/room temperature) with the rest just before eating.
It was delicious, and not too heavy.
I paired the dish with a simple smoothie. One or two bananas, orange juice, and vanilla yogurt. Put them in a blender, and you can choose your own consistency (more OJ means more liquidy, more yogurt means thicker).
ACTING: Adjusting to the Audience
So I've happened upon a concept that has only occurred to me by doing my current play and talking to people about the process of it. It might not mean anything to you (or it might!), but it feels like a bit of a revelation to me.
In every piece of live theatre I've ever been in prior to this one, I arrived at opening night with a performance I was proud of, and I continued to fine-tune my performance throughout the run of the show. My goal in this was to improve my performance, and to ideally get better and better until I arrived at my best performance on closing night.
What I've come to realize doing my this play is that it's not necessarily about trying to achieve "the best performance," as if there was only one right or best way to do it. I've discovered with this play that it's about giving the best performance possible for that audience on that night. Whatever performance that particular audience needs the most, within the confines of it still being this particular play - that's the performance I'm trying to give.
Just as stand-up comedians and rock bands can change their set to adapt to their audience, I've been trying something similar with my acting work in this production.
I've been in many comedies, and in a comedy you often have to hold for laughs. It's not always the same every night (despite a fellow actor calling me a "robot" because I got laughs in the same spots in each performance of a comedy we did together), so sometimes you have to pause a longer or shorter time before saying the next line (and sometimes, lucky you, you don't have to pause at all, because they just aren't laughing). So there you have a small example of changing your performance for an audience.
In college, I was in a comedy improv group. Something I picked up while doing that is being able to read an audience somewhat. The improv was primarily comedy-based, so we could tell when the audience members were enjoying themselves by how much they were laughing. But we could also tell if they were into it by how they responded to the quieter moments. There's a guy I worked with who, if you've ever seen him miming making a sandwich in his kitchen, you know it can be captivating to watch even if there aren't any jokes - just the beauty of improv; making something from nothing, right there on the spot. And some audiences could appreciate that. Also, when we performers weren't in a scene, the set-up was such that we could actually look directly at the audience and see their reactions. So reading an audience and doing some minor adjustments to pace and energy was par for the course in my improv days.
But it wasn't until doing the show I'm in now that I realized just how much adjusting to the audience you can do with a play.
This play is called Dublin Carol - it's written by modern playwright Conor McPherson, who got his start writing one-man shows, which are heavy on dialogue and low on plot. Dublin Carol, while a three-person play, is very dialogue-based, and there's almost no plot at all. The entire play is just three two-person scenes of talk. The main actions the characters have is reaction, and a lot of what they're reacting to happens off-stage. So as dramas go, it's kind of anti-dramatic. I still find it a compelling work, as do many audience members, but it's not traditional theatre. It's also the most realistic play I've ever acted in. It's mostly serious, and gets pretty dark in places, but there is also a sprinkling of comedy throughout the piece that stems from the characters and the dialogue. There aren't jokes so much as dialogue that can be played for comedy.
Comedy often requires precision. Farce requires a lot of precision. Performing in Noises Off was great fun, but as I told someone recently, while that's like playing in an orchestra, performing in Dublin Carol has been like playing in a jazz band. It's a small, intimate group, and the one actor I appear with is someone I've worked with twice before, so there's a level of trust, intimacy, and understanding there that you don't always have. There's a rapport, good chemistry. And the style of actor he is, he can change things up without trouble. So he's a great scene partner for anyone to have, but even moreso for me in the here and now, since we've worked together before. So in this show, because of the lack of plot, the intimacy, the simplicity, the realism of the dialogue, and perhaps other reasons, there's a looseness to the piece that invites improvisation. And so I've been doing more improvisation in Dublin Carol than in any other scripted work to date.
As far as lines go, we do stick to the script, word-perfect aside from adding a few extra "eh?"s and "yeah"s here and there. And we keep out blocking generally the same - we cross the stage where and when we've been directed to. But the speed, rhythm, and inflection of the dialogue, and the body language we use is all malleable. I've been enjoying experimenting with my performance across the span of this show - earning as many pauses as I can, sometimes stretching a silence to a breaking point before releasing it with my next line. Making the awkwardness between the characters palpable.
The comedy in the show is such that we can hit it strongly as comedy, or just pass over it as dialogue if we're keeping it more dramatic and serious.* If the audience seems to be full of laughers, we hit the jokes firmly - never at the expense of the honesty of the piece, but I suppose a bit at the expense of the realism. If they don't seem interested in the comedy, we keep it more realistic and less funny. All this is something I haven't talked about explicitly with my scene partner, so I don't know how conscious of it he is, but I myself am very aware of it.
Friday night, we had our first bad audience. I initially thought "oh, they aren't laughers - it's a straight drama tonight, then." But it became apparent to me later that they were just bored. They just generally did not want to be there. Why they came to the theatre that night was beyond me. But it felt like performing into an emptiness - or worse, a vacuum. So upon my entrance in the final part (I'm in the first and last parts of the three), I decided to change things up a bit. Beginning with my knock on the door at the start of the scene, I gave a higher-energy, faster-paced performance than I'd given thus far into the run. None of it compromised the piece or the character, but I felt it was a good idea to stir things up a bit for this audience, especially since there was a couple in the front row trying their best to take a nap.
There's a moment at the end of the play when my scene partner has a line that can be read as sad or funny. I think it's better for the line to be taken as sad - a nice little poignant moment just before the anti-climactic finish, heh. So when the audience takes it as sad, I give a reaction to him and his line that has a softness to it, but keeps the sadness mostly hidden - the audience already knows it's sad, so I don't need to tell them. But there have been a couple of shows where that line has provoked laughter, and in those instances I let a little more sadness show on my face, to communicate the weight of that moment to the audience, as some of them had missed it. Acting is storytelling.
Saturday night was our strongest show yet. The audience was ready to receive it, and we gave them a powerful drama shot through with as much comedy as the text was willing to bear. I felt a great connection with my fellow actor and with the audience, and it was the most satisfying time I've had in this run.
I know that this concept of adjusting to the audience is not something that can work as well for an orchestra-like farce as it does for this jazz band play, and it's something I'm just beginning to formulate. But it's a concept I hope to play with for the rest of my days as a theatre actor.
[Originally written December 7, 2008.]
*After I watched Stranger Than Fiction on DVD, for some reason I was curious how good the dubbing actors were. There's a scene in the film where Dustin Hoffman is trying to figure out Will Ferrell's mysterious ailment - he hears a woman narrating his life, as if he's a character in someone's book. Hoffman's character is asking a series of questions to narrow down what genre of story they might be dealing with. For Hoffman's character, this is serious business, and Hoffman plays it that way, as does the actor dubbing the performance into a different language. But while the dubbing actor plays it serious and straight, what he doesn't do is make choices that, while true to the character and the seriousness the character believes the situation to have, are funny choices. Hoffman plays the character straight, but plays the scene funny. I have yet to articulate quite how he does that, but he finds a way to play the character truthfully (that is, in this case, seriously) while still hitting the comedy.
In every piece of live theatre I've ever been in prior to this one, I arrived at opening night with a performance I was proud of, and I continued to fine-tune my performance throughout the run of the show. My goal in this was to improve my performance, and to ideally get better and better until I arrived at my best performance on closing night.
What I've come to realize doing my this play is that it's not necessarily about trying to achieve "the best performance," as if there was only one right or best way to do it. I've discovered with this play that it's about giving the best performance possible for that audience on that night. Whatever performance that particular audience needs the most, within the confines of it still being this particular play - that's the performance I'm trying to give.
Just as stand-up comedians and rock bands can change their set to adapt to their audience, I've been trying something similar with my acting work in this production.
I've been in many comedies, and in a comedy you often have to hold for laughs. It's not always the same every night (despite a fellow actor calling me a "robot" because I got laughs in the same spots in each performance of a comedy we did together), so sometimes you have to pause a longer or shorter time before saying the next line (and sometimes, lucky you, you don't have to pause at all, because they just aren't laughing). So there you have a small example of changing your performance for an audience.
In college, I was in a comedy improv group. Something I picked up while doing that is being able to read an audience somewhat. The improv was primarily comedy-based, so we could tell when the audience members were enjoying themselves by how much they were laughing. But we could also tell if they were into it by how they responded to the quieter moments. There's a guy I worked with who, if you've ever seen him miming making a sandwich in his kitchen, you know it can be captivating to watch even if there aren't any jokes - just the beauty of improv; making something from nothing, right there on the spot. And some audiences could appreciate that. Also, when we performers weren't in a scene, the set-up was such that we could actually look directly at the audience and see their reactions. So reading an audience and doing some minor adjustments to pace and energy was par for the course in my improv days.
But it wasn't until doing the show I'm in now that I realized just how much adjusting to the audience you can do with a play.
This play is called Dublin Carol - it's written by modern playwright Conor McPherson, who got his start writing one-man shows, which are heavy on dialogue and low on plot. Dublin Carol, while a three-person play, is very dialogue-based, and there's almost no plot at all. The entire play is just three two-person scenes of talk. The main actions the characters have is reaction, and a lot of what they're reacting to happens off-stage. So as dramas go, it's kind of anti-dramatic. I still find it a compelling work, as do many audience members, but it's not traditional theatre. It's also the most realistic play I've ever acted in. It's mostly serious, and gets pretty dark in places, but there is also a sprinkling of comedy throughout the piece that stems from the characters and the dialogue. There aren't jokes so much as dialogue that can be played for comedy.
Comedy often requires precision. Farce requires a lot of precision. Performing in Noises Off was great fun, but as I told someone recently, while that's like playing in an orchestra, performing in Dublin Carol has been like playing in a jazz band. It's a small, intimate group, and the one actor I appear with is someone I've worked with twice before, so there's a level of trust, intimacy, and understanding there that you don't always have. There's a rapport, good chemistry. And the style of actor he is, he can change things up without trouble. So he's a great scene partner for anyone to have, but even moreso for me in the here and now, since we've worked together before. So in this show, because of the lack of plot, the intimacy, the simplicity, the realism of the dialogue, and perhaps other reasons, there's a looseness to the piece that invites improvisation. And so I've been doing more improvisation in Dublin Carol than in any other scripted work to date.
As far as lines go, we do stick to the script, word-perfect aside from adding a few extra "eh?"s and "yeah"s here and there. And we keep out blocking generally the same - we cross the stage where and when we've been directed to. But the speed, rhythm, and inflection of the dialogue, and the body language we use is all malleable. I've been enjoying experimenting with my performance across the span of this show - earning as many pauses as I can, sometimes stretching a silence to a breaking point before releasing it with my next line. Making the awkwardness between the characters palpable.
The comedy in the show is such that we can hit it strongly as comedy, or just pass over it as dialogue if we're keeping it more dramatic and serious.* If the audience seems to be full of laughers, we hit the jokes firmly - never at the expense of the honesty of the piece, but I suppose a bit at the expense of the realism. If they don't seem interested in the comedy, we keep it more realistic and less funny. All this is something I haven't talked about explicitly with my scene partner, so I don't know how conscious of it he is, but I myself am very aware of it.
Friday night, we had our first bad audience. I initially thought "oh, they aren't laughers - it's a straight drama tonight, then." But it became apparent to me later that they were just bored. They just generally did not want to be there. Why they came to the theatre that night was beyond me. But it felt like performing into an emptiness - or worse, a vacuum. So upon my entrance in the final part (I'm in the first and last parts of the three), I decided to change things up a bit. Beginning with my knock on the door at the start of the scene, I gave a higher-energy, faster-paced performance than I'd given thus far into the run. None of it compromised the piece or the character, but I felt it was a good idea to stir things up a bit for this audience, especially since there was a couple in the front row trying their best to take a nap.
There's a moment at the end of the play when my scene partner has a line that can be read as sad or funny. I think it's better for the line to be taken as sad - a nice little poignant moment just before the anti-climactic finish, heh. So when the audience takes it as sad, I give a reaction to him and his line that has a softness to it, but keeps the sadness mostly hidden - the audience already knows it's sad, so I don't need to tell them. But there have been a couple of shows where that line has provoked laughter, and in those instances I let a little more sadness show on my face, to communicate the weight of that moment to the audience, as some of them had missed it. Acting is storytelling.
Saturday night was our strongest show yet. The audience was ready to receive it, and we gave them a powerful drama shot through with as much comedy as the text was willing to bear. I felt a great connection with my fellow actor and with the audience, and it was the most satisfying time I've had in this run.
I know that this concept of adjusting to the audience is not something that can work as well for an orchestra-like farce as it does for this jazz band play, and it's something I'm just beginning to formulate. But it's a concept I hope to play with for the rest of my days as a theatre actor.
[Originally written December 7, 2008.]
*After I watched Stranger Than Fiction on DVD, for some reason I was curious how good the dubbing actors were. There's a scene in the film where Dustin Hoffman is trying to figure out Will Ferrell's mysterious ailment - he hears a woman narrating his life, as if he's a character in someone's book. Hoffman's character is asking a series of questions to narrow down what genre of story they might be dealing with. For Hoffman's character, this is serious business, and Hoffman plays it that way, as does the actor dubbing the performance into a different language. But while the dubbing actor plays it serious and straight, what he doesn't do is make choices that, while true to the character and the seriousness the character believes the situation to have, are funny choices. Hoffman plays the character straight, but plays the scene funny. I have yet to articulate quite how he does that, but he finds a way to play the character truthfully (that is, in this case, seriously) while still hitting the comedy.
RECIPE: Peanut Sauce Stir Fry
Prep: Rice, grilled chicken.
Cook the following in a stir fry pan, wok, or buttered-up skillet:
Chunks of Grilled Chicken
Pineapple Pieces
Diced Tomato
Cilantro
Rice
a sprinkling of Shredded Cheese (I use an Italian blend of white cheeses)
Peanut Sauce (I use House of Tsang's Bangkok Padang)
and a dash of Kung Pao Sauce (I use Dynasty's)
Stir while it's cooking (hence: "stir fry")
Any of these ingredients can be swapped for other things, of course, but this is how I make it. Pasta can be substituted for the rice, although in that case I'd recommend keeping the pasta separate and mixing it after the rest is cooked. If you're a vegetarian, just leave out the chicken. Probably the most important flavor combination is the pineapple, cilantro, and peanut sauce.
First cobbled together in 2007.
Cook the following in a stir fry pan, wok, or buttered-up skillet:
Chunks of Grilled Chicken
Pineapple Pieces
Diced Tomato
Cilantro
Rice
a sprinkling of Shredded Cheese (I use an Italian blend of white cheeses)
Peanut Sauce (I use House of Tsang's Bangkok Padang)
and a dash of Kung Pao Sauce (I use Dynasty's)
Stir while it's cooking (hence: "stir fry")
Any of these ingredients can be swapped for other things, of course, but this is how I make it. Pasta can be substituted for the rice, although in that case I'd recommend keeping the pasta separate and mixing it after the rest is cooked. If you're a vegetarian, just leave out the chicken. Probably the most important flavor combination is the pineapple, cilantro, and peanut sauce.
First cobbled together in 2007.
FILM: Wilder Stories
Two quick stories about Billy Wilder.
***
On one of the many films they did together, director Billy Wilder was having trouble with actor Jack Lemmon. After each take, Wilder would instruct Lemmon to pull back, saying, "less, do less." Every time, Lemmon pulled back, and every time, Wilder urged him to do even less.
Finally, exasperated, Lemmon snapped, "What do you want, NOTHING?"
Wilder looked to the heavens and said, "Please, God!"
***
When Hollywood executive Harry Cohn died, Billy Wilder was one of many, many people at Cohn's funeral. Someone asked Wilder why he thought there was such a huge turnout for the funeral of such a controversial and reviled man.
Wilder shrugged and said,
"Give the people what they want."
***
***
On one of the many films they did together, director Billy Wilder was having trouble with actor Jack Lemmon. After each take, Wilder would instruct Lemmon to pull back, saying, "less, do less." Every time, Lemmon pulled back, and every time, Wilder urged him to do even less.
Finally, exasperated, Lemmon snapped, "What do you want, NOTHING?"
Wilder looked to the heavens and said, "Please, God!"
***
When Hollywood executive Harry Cohn died, Billy Wilder was one of many, many people at Cohn's funeral. Someone asked Wilder why he thought there was such a huge turnout for the funeral of such a controversial and reviled man.
Wilder shrugged and said,
"Give the people what they want."
***
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