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....

Playing Around

March is a curious time in the midwest. It seems like the weather can't quite make up its mind what it wants to do, and it vacillates from one extreme to the next. We've had mornings in the teens and afternoons in the 50s. Hard to figure out the day's schedule when the temperature fluctuates so much and it takes me til 3 o'clock in the afternoon just to warm up!

Yesterday was quite cold most of the day, only crawling slowly up to near 40 degrees. We had rehearsals in the evening, right after it started getting colder again, so I bundled up inside my winter coat which was wrapped around my costume.

Since I'm playing the part of the Prosecutor in this little scene, there's not much to my costume. It's just me in a suit. I'm not bothering with a briefcase since my scene starts with me questioning the accused and ends with him falling apart on the stand (or "at the bar", since it's a British play).

I couldn't find my suit jackets, though. They were put away sometime last year and I forgot where that was. I forget a lot of things these days. Names, mostly. Sometimes words that dance around on the tip of my tongue but never resolve. It's maddening. If I focus on it long enough, the word will snap into reality. Sometimes. Other times, it just makes me angry and frustrated to realize that my mind is going south.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into acting again - to strengthen my memory retrieval by learning my lines. Not a full-blown play; that would be too much stress and anxiety. Start slow. Just one scene. Just 46 lines. I should be able to handle it.

Right?

We'll see.

==

There are so many other distractions around here, so many broken things that need fixing, so much junk that needs to be thrown out, so many household repairs and patches and maintenance items that I just can't keep up. Then there are also the various trips we have planned for this year, all of which are happening too soon or not soon enough, all of which are going to cost us money we don't have, all of which involve spending time with loved ones who live so far away at moments in their lives when they need the support of other family members.

I don't know how to fit it all into the schedule or the budget and my brain just can't handle all these things right now, so instead I'm going to sit at my drawing desk and make cartoons, which is something I haven't done in a very, very long time.

Maybe I'll share some of them, if they're not too awful. Like I said, it's been a long time.

(That rather frightening thing up at the top is not a drawing, it's a photograph that's been rendered via an edge-sensing algorithm to produce what looks like a drawing. A very scary drawing of me playing the part of an Old Man. Which I am.)