The Role of Director

See what I did there?

Well, it is done.

Josh Sohn

's

Flowers --

a ten-minute comedy about a cab ride, estrangement and obligation --

premiered and closed

this weekend past. I should mention that it was all of those things, plus

a production I directed

, and in a breathtakingly limited amount of time at that. Six rehearsals, for a total of 9.5 hours' rehearsal time. That's just shy of an hour of time per page, and that's supposed to be all the time one absolutely needs, assuming everyone gets off book in their own time, and I'm here to tell you that this standard is horse hockey. High-sticking horse hockey. But a good time was had by all, I think, and it was nice to return to directing with such a definitive deadline and good friends with whom to work.

Josh of course is someone with whom I am in collaboration more and more, but the actors were folks I have known for years and worked with on separate but similarly intensive projects:

Nat Cassidy

and

Richard Grunn

. In both cases, I worked with these actors as a fellow actor, so we were all pretty adjusted to my quirks and peccadilloes, I'd say. I hope. You know, it's actually hard to say, because being the director is a somewhat lonely experience. Of course, everyone involved was perfectly friendly and engaging, and I think I was more than encouraging toward nurturing an atmosphere in which we could play and say anything. It's just a different environment for the director. If the director isn't a bit outside, he or she can't really do the job. The whole, brief thing got me thinking about that work in some more specific ways than I have in the past. I mean, part of why I wanted to do it was to dip my toes in the waters of directing again, see how hospitable they felt and whether or not I'd want to go for a swim there again. (My metaphor needs arm floaties, it's getting so distended.)

It seems to me that I used to ask an awful lot of my directors, and I wonder if this is still the case. I never had any of them complain (to my face) along these lines, but in thinking back I've realized I was really looking for a kind of artistic affinity at best, and a sort of grandiose mentorat worst. I suppose it's natural for any actor to seek approval from his or her director, but there are limits and I'm not sure that when I was younger I placed enough priority on exploring my own standards when it came to fulfilling a role. It also seems to me that directing is really not all that different from teaching; or perhaps tutoring may be a closer comparison. That is, if your teaching philosophy is similar to mine, in which it's all about communication and being as prepared to learn from the student as to instruct him or her. If there is a major difference, I believe it's that the director has to apply personal prejudice to the process, simply in the interest of functioning as some kind of leader. Some may disagree, but I think directors should be leaders, in the sense that they should take all of the blame and little of the credit, and give everyone something unified to aim for.

This was not a high-pressure project-- apart from the amount of notice I had upon taking it on -- and I had what turned out to be very realistic expectations for both the process and the venue. Which is to say, the venue met with my expectations, but the actors I was working with exceeded them. (And my contribution? Not sure yet. Need time to process. [But I totally exceeded when it came to a prop we needed, which will have a 'blog post ALL ITS OWN.]) Ten minutes is not a lot of time in which to establish a memorable character and make it both believable and entertaining, but Nat and Rich accomplished all this while scoring laughs and poignant moments. These guys have some very interesting similarities and differences as artists, which played well into their relationship on stage, I thought.

[Spoiler alert:

that of an estranged father and son.

]

They're both excellent with comic timing and self-generated work, which I find lends itself to good strong characterization, but Rich has very different rhythms and a more subconscious style, whereas Nat's approach seems more cognizant and edgy. They did great, and allowed me to relax into the process.

Despite all these reasons for calm, I fretted, like a dual-necked guitar. It's just part of the (read: my) process. I had two primary concerns: getting us together on the same page about the story of the action, and not squelching or (perhaps worse) misinterpreting their contributions. Compromise may seem like a simple watchword given both of these concerns, and it is certainly a necessary skill for a director, but there's also a degree of resolve involved. In other words, that somewhat un-exercised muscle of mine in acting, the one for fighting for your interpretation or point of view, had to be a little warmed up by the experience. The actors never, ever fought me on anything; nevertheless, I was in unfamiliar territory in having an obligation to lead. I think I did okay, for my first real appreciation of this task. Directors get perhaps less immediate feedback -- as compared to actors who have a feeling about the job they're doing throughout the performance -- but I feel pretty good about it.

Horse hockey and all.

You awaken in a semi-dark room...

Thinking...

Oh god...wha...wha....

You think in un-words, it seems.

Wha...whoo...where am I? What happened?

Gradually you realize that the only light, barely illuminating your prostrate form, is the flickering glow of a very tired computer monitor. The computer's exhausted cooling fan whirs dejectedly, intermittently, at you. You realize you're surrounded by ripped paper all over the floor, a cup of eggnog in one hand, a trashy novel in the other, and a pair of tinted glasses on your face that proudly proclaim (backwards, from your perspective) "0102"...

I should have known better than to expect myself to diligently 'blog through the holy daze of late December, early (er...read: "most of") January. Happy 2010, everyone! Or, as Wife Megan insists on proclaiming it: "Oh-10!" Exclamation point being obligatory, natch'.

Item!: My return to directing begins this weekend, with Josh Sohn's ten-minute play Flowers premiering as a part of Where Eagles Dare's short play lab. In the show you'll see Friends Nat Cassidy and Richard Grunn doing what they do best (but also acting). Find out where it's at, in every sense, at this magical button text place sentence.

Item!: Very exciting things brew with The Action Collective this year with the theme, "It's All About You." We are forgoing our monthly event for January to focus instead on structural work for the organization and publishing our first-ever newsletter for our members. People will be published! And sort of syndicated!

Item!: The foolish folks at NYU's film school have invited me back to be a part of their filmic enterprises for what will be a marathon day on February the 2nd.

Item!: I'm producing a variety show to take place as a part of the Electric Theatre Company's "second stage" program, Out On a Limb. It will be entitled The Spectacular Scrantonian Spectacular! (exclamation point being obligatory, natch') and feature song and dance and, above all else, variety. Not only will I be producing this cavalcade of talent, but I'll also be MC. Well, me and my clown character (...cue the My Buddy theme...and go...).

Sorry. That was way creepier than I had remembered. Effin' creepy.

Anyway. 'Tis a busy time, not only creatively (YAY!) but also practically (BOO!), and I miss blogging. Hence this not-a-post. Wait, maybe I can squeeze some meaningful insight into my final few remaining words -

Effin' creepy.

Aw, crap.

Dreamscapes & the Common Journey

A little while back, I found myself -- rather through the invention of necessity -- exploring the surreal in

a clown performance I created and performed

. Lately I've been wondering if that experience might have opened up a new avenue or two in my creativity, as I fantasize about more and more bizarre images on the stage of my mind. This is new-found. You could always describe me as a bit weird, but outright "surreality" has never been a thing I've been interested in creating, much less for the sake of itself. I love the absurd, the sublime, and am just as psyched for the opening of

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

as the next guy, but using it in theatre is a terribly delicate balance. And I have been burned, many, many times before, my friends.

And yet. Yet I find myself dreaming of some particular world that's more a dreamscape than anything specific to history or the here-and-now. It's influenced by a lot of things, and may prove easily categorical, but for now it seems to me to be unique. This is not my idiom, and so I feel a little at-sea. Delighted, too, of course; otherwise why would I be returning to it again and again? I'm challenged by it. I keep looking for a story in its midst, something on which to hang my hat. Surreal or no, I can't bring myself to stick with something creatively unless I'm somehow meeting an audience halfway. So, you know: no worries there, O my vasty Audience.

The surreal or fantastic really is just an idiom, not a goal or even a path. It's become a bit elusive in recent years, as fiction in every genre has accepted everything from "science fiction" to "magical realism" into its official ranks. Things that used to be sublime are given categories and named. And I love those domesticated notions, don't get me wrong. It just makes it a bit trickier to make something to a surreal effect.

The trick, I think to making a successful yet surreal bit of art is to aim not for the "surreality." Rather, aim for a pure connection with the audience. Maybe there are glowing eyeballs replacing your old ones (to take an example from my little piece) and maybe that

is

really interesting to think about in an allegorical way, but what the audience is there for is a connection that allows them to identify with you and be reminded of themselves. So it's not about how cool glowing eyes are, but how they make you feel and function, and what then you do with them. Actually, more immediately and most importantly, it's about your instinctive response to them. This I think might be my favorite part of Terry Gilliam's movies -- amidst all this strange, inexplicable stuff is a continuum of watching people

respond

in specific ways, emotionally, instinctively. That's the scalpel of the sublime, after all. There's little-to-nothing of a cultural commonality, so you damn well better have a human one there.

How shocking that a born-and-raised U.U. like myself would find that situation appealing.

This is part of why the silent comedians were so successful within the idiom of the surreal. (And if you disagree with me about that, shut up, you're stupid.) The formula -- if you can call it that with all the pioneering they were so busy doing -- is of a low-status, accessible character getting into big trouble and struggling to win out over it all whilst incident after incident happens to her, and she has to react. We have to react, instinctively, no matter how little sense may apply to what we perceive. Heck: How much sense could it make to be watching projected shadow and light and be having a hysterical response to it? (Just as much sense as it did to have the same reaction to performers on a stage, or Plato's cave shadows, to answer my own rhetoric.) The supposedly surreal surrounds, and it's a fool's game to try and create it from nothingness. All it takes is a little nudge of people's perspective.

I may be nudging soon. We'll see. It's what my brain wants, anyway. Come along?

Nyuck Nyuck OOF! Bleaah...

One of the things I find interesting about the silly season is how miraculously it makes me multi-task to the point of forgetting really basic priorities. It's a little bit like how I remember skiing to be, back in my gilded youth when I skied somewhat regularly. I would get going on the up-and-down of it all, five o'clock would roll around and I'd begin to wonder why I felt dizzy and my eyes had dried up in my head. I don't forget to eat and drink around Christmas, but it's close. I was fortunate enough last week, however, to have a nice, centering

ACTion Collective

event to anchor me in spot for a bit. Just long enough to plant a cream pie in my merry face.

This, our third event --

ACT III: Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck

-- was an intimate and rather relaxed affair. The "cocktail hour" period was spent with all in a single, spontaneous circle of chairs, which was a first. We had a total of about nine there, including Andrew and myself, partly a result of three last-minute cancellations due to holiday complications. None of this was surprising, of course. We wondered in planning ACT III whether it made sense to adhere to our not-yet-a-schedule in the face of everyone's holiday, and decided we should, for a variety of reasons. Several of the people who did attend last Thursday's event specifically scheduled their holiday plans to make time for it, and we learned a lot as a result of the smaller group.

The goal of the evening was to play comic two-hander scenes as well as possible when they are selected at random. We emailed the scenes in advance, save a couple that

Friend Nat

brought in that evening, and asked everyone to have a passing familiarity with them so they wouldn't be handed a scene with absolutely no context. Of course, how much of those attachments people chose to read was out of our control, and it seemed that some were more familiar than others. Nevertheless, no one was quite out to sea, and some people really brought on some interesting work . . . both intentionally, and accidentally. Nat himself chose a scene from Moliere's

Tartuffe

that, for reasons of an error in transcription, switched the roles midway. He and his scene partner rolled with it, though, and it was a very nearly seamless transition -- it became practically a deconstruction of the scene. Moreover, with the smaller group everyone had a moment or more to really shine and create something memorable.

Our game mechanics did not function quite as well as I had hoped they might, and it's difficult to identify exactly why that might be. Certainly part of it was that very few people were willing to repeat a scene that had gone before, which led to a deflation of a big part of our idea: that actors would build on one another's work. I had every title in the hat twice, to safeguard against this possibility, but it quickly became evident to me that there was in our group no enthusiasm for repetition. I think we'll return to this idea with a different (and stronger) structure, because I'm excited by the possibilities in collaborative character-building and scene-work. When it is the focus of an event, I think we'll have some very interesting results.

The exercises were bookended by a set-up and a payoff (though I muffed the timing of the set-up a bit by brazenly forgetting to mention it until we had already started). We started (almost) out by mentioning that, by the end of the evening, someone would be hit in the face with a pie. This was Andrew's idea at some stage of brainstorming, but I was 100% behind it.

Zuppa del Giorno

has been trying to incorporate pie fights into our shows for years, and I was eager to see it in action. Fortunately for me, I was eager to see it from any perspective. What we did not reveal until later in the evening was that it was a choice between myself and Andrew as victim of the pie toss, and that everyone was going to vote. It would seem I was a little too expressive of my enthusiasm for this idea, however, because the decision to have me picking shaving cream out of my nostrils 60 seconds later was in fact unanimous. Pow. Right in the kisser.

View fullsize

Photo courtesy of Andrew Elliott.

Ba-Dum. Ching...?

Comedy is profitable. It's true. Everyone wants something different from their entertainment, and everyone's sense of humor is uniquely calibrated to some extent, but I think we can all agree that everyone feels better after a good laugh, and few people actively seek to avoid a situation in which they might be tempted toward laughter. It is possibly the most socially acceptable form of catharsis, ranking right up there with the sneeze as a fairly uncontrollable expression of release. Sure, there are "inappropriate" laughs galore, but we're generally pretty forgiving even of these . . . especially in situations in which social pressure to be moral is at a minimum. As a result, comedy is very bankable.

I have mainstream comedy (Define my terms? Heck no -- let's keep this as subjective as possible.) on my mind lately owing to several factors, not the least of which is that the next ACTion Collective event is devoted to comic two-hander scenes. You better hang on with both hands: It's going to be a crazy one. As a result, I've been gathering one-liners and dialogue-based comic scenes from a variety of different traditions, and it's got me thinking both about how important comedy is to business, and how much the two have intrinsically in common. Don't agree? How many major television studios have banked on trained actors for sitcoms, and how many have banked on up-and-coming stand-up comedians? Your honor, the defense rests. Bitterly.

Both comedy and business are modeled on a fairly direct interchange, one related to profit. For one it's money and the other, laughs, and in both cases if you're not growing then you're in trouble. As I read through comic dialogue from the recent past all the way back to the 17th century, I'm struck by how little has changed in all that time. The individual lines have gotten shorter (unless part of the joke is about how long someone speaks) and of course the phrasing has changed, but the rhythms and effects are frankly standard. Particularly looking at two-person scenes, in which communication is really broken down to some pretty basic, ping-pong dynamics. (Hacky-sack would be a better analogy [parenthetically].) A couple of people bat something around until a certain synergy is reached, which results, we hope, in some payoff.

Is this all that different from tragedy and non-profit organizations? (Not that I'm relating the one to the other, mind. [That's for a separate 'blog post {parenthetically}.]) Is tragedy not interested in profit of a different tender, and organizations in payoff in less materialistic ways? Certainly. And then again, no. It's less accountable with these forms, more subjective, and the structures are more complex. We can tie all sorts of genres and business models into this, but there's something about commercial business and comedy that goes naturally hand-in-hand. If for no other reason than because funny makes money.

Certainly that proves true in my own life, because I'm outrageously wealthy. Wait . . .. It does relate, in some way. I just had it. Damn. Oh well . . .

OH RIGHT. I mean to say, in terms of the jobs I've attained. See, in this context, the work is its own payment; which may be why I'm not - parenthetically - outrageously wealthy. Huh. Oh well, I'll figure that all out tomorrow. The point is, I think that the comedies I've been in outweigh anything else by a ratio of something like 5:1. It's what the people want, and I am more marketable as someone who can repeatedly fall on my ass than I am as someone who can make you think of your mother/father/first girl-and-or-boyfriend with a twinge of heretofore unacknowledged regret. Them's the breaks, kid.

Fortunately for us, comedy is a hell of a lot of fun to do, usually. Business, too, if you can get in the right mindset. Lately I've been trying to perceive my money-making as a night of comedy. Thus far "farce" might be a better term, but I'm slowly edging toward"parody," in hopes of eventually hitting "satire" and am confident that -- someday -- I'll have them rolling in the aisles over pure, profitable comedy.