The Play's the Thing

Costume Test #1

Witness for the Prosecution

Role: The Prosecutor

The dress rehearsal was on Monday the 17th and I flubbed my lines badly. Luckily, my partner is an old pro and covered my goof-ups so that we didn't come across too amateurish. But I felt as though I had let him down, and there was no one to blame but myself and my poor powers of recollection. And my excellent powers of laziness and procrastination.

I needed to find a better way to rehearse my part.

A million years ago, I had purchased a tiny reel-to-reel tape recorder to use as my rehearsal device for the Spring Play in my Junior year of high school. The intent was to record all the other lines and leave a blank space where I was supposed to speak, then go over and over and over it until the whole thing was burned into my brain. It almost worked. But I waited too long to make good use of it (and there were far too many other distractions in my life at the time) and so ended up learning my lines the old-fashioned way: having someone else feed lines to me until I could say them in my sleep.

I wish I still had that old reel-to-reel. It was a wonderful antique when I got it (at a yard sale) back in the 70s and would be amazing now. But time and travels pushed it into the dustbin of memory and it is long gone.

But for today, audio is all digital, and I knew we had a digital audio recorder somewhere in the house. Adam had used for college (I think) so it was relatively 'old' but likely would be sufficient for my needs (I thought). But I found it to be somewhat less than useful since it used a proprietary recording format that didn't allow me to edit it on my computer which I needed to do in order to create special versions (e.g. with and without my lines).

So I bought another one -- a modern one -- over at the grocery store. And it worked great.

I recorded the entire script on my computer and then used Audacity to create multiple versions, some with both sets of lines and others without my lines (so I would only have the prompts). I had one copy with timed silence where I was supposed to talk, and another copy where there was no silence, only a minor pause, so I could start and stop the recording at my whim. That was the copy that turned out to be the most useful. So I spent the next several days / weeks walking around the house (when no one else was around) reciting my lines and then clicking the 'play' button to hear the prompt me for the next line, and then clicking 'pause', and going on to the next.

Costume Test #2

It surprised me how hard it was to keep the lines straight. My brain kept wanting to rewrite the lines as I went, morphing words and shrinking phrases, and the only way to get it right was to stop every time I made and mistake and start over from the beginning again.

By the time our first show came along, I was mostly ready, but still nervous. Which is probably why I did OK but still managed to make a few mistakes. Luckily for me, my ever-faithful (and very talented) partner covered for my brain toots and we did fine. And I was ever-so-glad to be done!

Until the next night. Our scene was one of the few that was repeated on both performance nights, probably due to the fact that it only required two actors who did not have a lot of other commitments. Mary's scene was only on the first night (and of course she was wonderful!). I did OK the second night as well, still rehearsing right up to the last minute; and, again, my partner saved my bacon a couple of times during the performance. My brain just locks up under tension! But we got through it, and then we were done, and I'll probably never do this again.

Although they did say that auditions for Pirates of Penzance will be in July ... with performances in October. Hmmm....