[col-sect][column]Did my second acting class last night. I wouldn’t have thought that the actual memorization of the lines would be the challenge that it is relative to the other parts of the craft, such as delivery, timing, positioning, working off your partner. The one act play that my partner Katie and are doing (called “Domestic Violence” – the name is a play on words as it’s not about domestic violence – by Frederick Stroppel) runs about eight minutes. Short. But still, that’s eight minutes that have to be burned in your head. The short quick exchanges are simple enough to keep track of and simultaneously easily command your delivery & pace and mind your movement as you fire them back and forth. But the lengthier lines are tough, especially if they are accompanied by emotion. Example: this diatribe to be delivered with explosive anger:

For Christ’s sake, we’ve been married ten years, and for ten years you’ve been the perfect wife. You never complain, you never demand… you completely subordinate your own wants and needs for the sake of my casual comfort. I lift a finger, and you jump. I get drunk, you tuck me into bed. I gamble away my paycheck, you console me. I take off a dirty shirt, it’s clean by morning. I go to work, there are flowers on my desk. I go to the bathroom, there’s a full roll of toilet paper. A full roll! Every time! How do you do that? Any other woman would castrate her husband if he went to a football game on their anniversary. Not you. You buy me tickets! How do you think that makes me feel?

This is how I practiced it and intended to play it: I’m sitting on the bed with my head in my hands and shaking my head in frustration with wifey’s quest to be a perfect wife by some external standard such as Cosmo to keep her husband “happy”, but without actually dealing with the real me. I’m pretty disgusted but have been keeping it pretty much under my hat for the last few minutes of the discussion. I’m also drinking, which I added as the catalyst for the explosive burst of anger. So At “For Christ’s sake…” I stand up and just yell out “we’ve been married ten years!” Just blast it out. Then when I notice my wife’s shock, I pause and try to cool it a bit and deliver the “and for ten years…” with restraint but not really concealing the anger. I had this entire sequence memorized and ready to go. Rehearsed it many times. Right. ok, so it comes time to do the scene in class and yeah I explode just as planned and then yeah. Forgot the next line. Fuck. So I’m fumbling through and Instructor is feeding me the lines which was nice, but would have been easier to just try again rather than go one line by one line. So I grabbed the text and just went off it. Which was fine, but I thought I was ready.

Ok, so when we’re done Instructor had some suggestions based on the Uta Hagen approach: “everything referred to must be substantiated” and “don’t play the general; play the specific.” Ok, so what does that mean. It means that if I say, “I lift a finger and you jump,” then I have to have a SPECIFIC incident fully described in mind so that i can mentally refer to it when doing the line. Like that time I was watching the game at 8:15 2 nights ago on the couch in my sweat pants and I asked her to bring me another beer and I snapped my fingers. Specific. Everything must be substantiated: a specific incident that I’m referring to – I have to have a perfect mental image of it. “I get drunk and you tuck me into bed.” So say I came home from a guys’ night out two weeks ago and stumble in the door with some girl’s number in my pocket and lipstick on my collar. And wifey is there to greet me with a cheerful smile and cleans me up while I’m talking total nonsense while half awake and stumbling all over the place. Instructor said that doing this will also me you memorize the lines.

Katie’s wrestling a bit with the ridiculousness of wifey’s lines. Her character is too extreme to be realistic. Like who would say to her husband, “I’ve tried to be the perfect companion, I really have. I’ve studied all the articles in Cosmopolitan and Glamour and New Woman about the care and nurturing of husbands. And I’ve tried to apply their principles unquestioningly.” This is so far off i don’t know where ot start. [TANGENT] Ok, I don’t think there’s a woman on Earth who takes Cosmo seriously. That’s exactly the point of Cosmo. That’s the reason it’s still around: because it can’t be taken seriously. It’s fluff and the readers know that and they don’t care. That’s the idea: the disposability serves to affirm what she already believes – which is what a woman wants when she seeks “advice”. She doesn’t want answers; she wants validation and support for the course of action that she knows she’s going to take. She’ll follow her gut. Every time. Like how about if I call him twelve times today. I know you’re not supposed to do that, but I really need to. You don’t understand the situation. Each is a princess for whom the rules do not apply. “That wouldn’t work on my husband.” “Well I can see how that advice might work for some women’s situations, but it doesn’t apply to me.” No woman thinks it applies to her. Fluff advice poses no threat to a woman’s inner belief that her romantic situation is perfectly unique and therefore circumstances so extenuating that the rules don’t apply. [/column][column]Fluff advice on the other hand is intended to be easy for readers to go, “That’s stupid” and toss the magazine aside. It’s for quick consumption. Ok, next point: “apply their principles unquestioningly.” This writer doesn’t understand women. Women don’t apply principles in relationships. They act off their gut. And refuse to see how what applied in one situation may apply in another. I haven’t figured out why this is yet; it baffles me, but let’s put it this way: do you think that dating advice books would still be top sellers if someone – anyone – had written the definitive gospel on how to deal with men, and women embraced and understood the principles behind it and applied them in their own relationships? There would only need to be one book. And it would only need to be three sentences. But no. Hundreds of books out there. Thousands of magazine articles and newspaper columns and advice websites. If women followed principles, surely you couldn’t talk endlessly about the same stuff and it come across as “new!” every time. Principles are off-code. You can’t sell them. Women don’t want them. They prefer the state of mild confusion and challenge of men. They don’t want control; they want to be swept away. They don’t want to be in the driver’s seat. So they resist advice that really hits home and will in the end just follow their instincts. [TANGENT OVER]

That said, I feel for Katie, but she’s being a good sport. My role is not too far from the mark of who I am: needing my space, irritable, quick temper. But Wifey is not anything like Katie. She’s doing great though.

A quick update on Pickle (pictured above). Pickle is a grown man who has innuendo ADD. He can’t go very long without making a sexual joke of almost anything anyone says. And once he starts that’s it. He’s interrupting Instructor and making non-stop cracks. A little funny, but more just ‘what’s with this guy? Can’t we turn him off? Or at least down?” The thing about acting is that someone can be an ass like that between scenes and there are no real consequences. The guy’s actually a decent actor. He had put a lot of effort into his performance and had thought about the role over the past week and it was apparent. But everytime Instructor cuts the scene to point out certain helpful notes, he’s straight into in dumb-ass mode again. It’s amazing how quickly he gets out of character and shifts into his real self. The dumb-ass just has to come out- and when he’s acting, his internal dumbass is on pause just saving it all up for when he’s free to strike again. And again. And again.

The other part of the class I’m quietly enjoying is Instructor’s commentary on relationships. I doubt that even she realizes how often she makes generalizations about the sexes when she’s trying to elicit the right kind of emotion out of the actor. She was trying to get Pickle’s scene partner to get down to the reason why she’s blocking Pickles advances. Oh, i didn’t mention, his role is this womanizer who actually chases the girl around the sofa. Instructor was prompting girl actor (forgot her name) if she wants to sleep with Pickle or not and why she think she’s resisting Pickle’s pickle. She listens for the student’s answer and then loves to explain afterwards with her own view which always ends up being some ‘truism’ about men and women. Her follow-up was, “Women lose their power when they give it up. Or at least women think so.” I smiled and thought to myself, ‘the first part’s true; the second is not.’[/column][/col-sect]

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