Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrence McNally

So, as you can probably tell, I have been reading a lot of LGBT themed plays lately. One of the big reasons is because I am looking for one to produce and direct next year at state. And I believe I have chosen the one i'm going to do and that one is the play from my previous posting "Jeffrey" by Paul Rudnick.

My most recent play that I have read is "Love! Valour! Compassion!" by Terrence McNally. This play is about a group of friends, all gay, who decide to stay in a lake cabin during the three summer holidays. This play is all about there lives up at this cabin, and betrayals that occur, and love that forms between other members of the group. During the course of the show, while all of the personal lives of the characters are being made or falling a part they are putting together a dance routine for a benefit. This play has every type of gay man and does a really good job of portraying the gay community. Shows that we are no different then the straight community and that we go through the same problems and issues and that we too go through all of the same range of emotions that everybody else does.

A Challenge for the Actor by Uta Hagen Part I

So, currently I am reading the acting book, "A Challenge for the Actor" by the famous and influential actress, Uta Hagen. Uta Hagen is a very big follower of Stanislovsky and uses his method of connecting past circumstances to a circumstance of the play. Reading the book was very interesting to me. I had never actually read a book that was all about acting before, so reading it gave me many insights into things that I really need to do and things that I can try for my next character.

Uta Hagen talks all about producing real feelings inside of you that then translate outword. For example if your character is supposed to be upset she thinks that you should think of a circumstance when you felt particularly upset, even if it has nothing to do with the circumstances of the show, and apply that same feeling to the character. This will not only create a realistic feeling inside you but a realistic portrayal of that feeling to the audience. She talks all about what you should be thinking as a character, including your relationships to the other character. She wants everything to be well defined in your mind.

The body of course is also a major tool for the actor and Uta Hagen talks about the bodys use and how the actor should really familiarize themselves with the body and its functions to be able to get across a full range of emotions. The actor should be both extremely in tune to the mind as well as the physical body. These two must portray the same thing at all times in order to be real for the audience. The mind must always be communicating with the body and creating real emotions for both the actor and the audience.

Uta Hagen also stresses how important listening is to the actor and how its a very crucial detail. If you are not listening and you are just thinking about a bunch of other stuff, then you are not really acting, but saying words and lines. When you listen is when you really are able to react and act. When truly listening to your scene partner you are able to react naturally and the emotions will come to you a lot more easier.

I find this reading very interesting. Uta Hagen is a very talented actress and reading a book by her I believe is a must for all actors. I never really thought about all of the thought it takes to create an actor and just how much it takes to concentrate on stage. Basically everything has to be forgotten about on stage and only the character should come out on stage. Even if you are recalling your own memory to recreate a feeling, then you still have to really think and put it in the context of the play to make it work for your character. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book and hopefully learning some exercises I can do to help myself concentrate and create these emotions that are able to realistically fit for the characters.

Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick

The play that I just finished reading was the play "Jeffrey" by Paul Rudnick. I liked this play immensely and thought it delivered a good message in a comedic way. Jeffrey is about this gay man who decides to give up sex because he just feels its too complicated. The play is a fast-paced show about Jeffrey living his life and meeting all of these different types of people and his interactions with these people that he learns from and realizes so much. His love interest of the show is an HIV-positive man, but Jeffrey is afraid to get anything started with him because of the man, Steve's, HIV status. Jeffrey soon learns just how fragile life is and that nobody should live afraid or unhappy, like Jeffrey is living. Why give up on pleasures because of fear. He learns that everybody should live happily and do whatever they want, so by the end, he realizes that he really does like Steve, and it ends with them kissing.

The play is a fun, comedic, but still very impactful gay pride play that breaks gay stereotypes, and celebrates the gay culture. It celebrates acceptance and every humans desire for happiness and pleasure that is always there no matter the orientation of the person.

For pride month at my school next year, I really want to do a gay themed play. I have been searching and searching for a good play with a good message to direct and currently "Jeffrey" is the one that I am leaning toward. If anybody has any ideas for any other "gay" plays it would be greatly appreciated if you send me the names of any plays you know.

Thanks,

Ryan

The Days of Wine and Roses: Joe character analysis

The first scene of the semester that I will be in will be from “The Days of Wine and Roses“ by JP Miller with Hannah as Kirsten and myself as Joe. Now, I have had a moderate amount of experience with acting. I did six of my high school plays and of course I have done scenes while in college and other types of acting projects. Until I got to college, I thought acting was simple and that I was just amazing at it. Once I got to college though, I realized just how much work acting and developing a character really takes. It takes much more than just acting as a person. It takes emotional recall, and producing realistic emotions and motivations while on stage. It also takes an in depth look into the play and character to figure out just how the character ticks and what kinds of physicalizations they will have. I have realized that I have a lot to improve on, but am ready for whatever acting throws at me.
The play “The Days of Wine and Roses” is about a guy named Joe and his story about struggling with being an alcoholic. The play is basically told by Joe at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Joe meets his wife Kirsten and they bond over liking to drink alcohol. The play is all about them struggling over this addiction and them living their life as an alcoholic. They have a child and they are not the best parents because of their addiction. In the course of the play, they then decide they want to try to quit drinking and during this scene, we see that they are not handling quitting very well. They are shaking and having a very hard time. Eventually they just get so desperate that they decide to resort to drinking vanilla extract which has alcohol in it. Eventually during the play, they are doing a lot better with quitting, but Joe mistakenly decides to celebrate their success with alcohol. This plan does not go over as well as it was supposed to and at the end of this scene they end up tearing apart Kirsten’s dad greenhouse looking for a bottle of alcohol. Eventually, Joe is able to succeed with quitting alcohol, but Kirsten ends up having a much harder time. Joe eventually has to leave Kirsten because Kirsten remains an alcoholic and gives up trying to quit. Joe realizes their relationship has been founded on alcohol and realizes that it can not continue until Kirsten also quits, so Joe ends up leaving her and basically tells her to come back to him when she has quit and recovered.
The character I am playing is Joe and changes a lot through out the action of the play. What’s interesting about this character is that in the time of the play, he actually remains the same because the play is him talking at an alcoholics anonymous meeting, but Joe changes immensely throughout the story he tells. Joe starts out as a guy who is having difficulty with alcohol and at first does not really realize that he necessarily has a problem. But once him and his wife, who are both alcoholics, have a child and realize that what they are doing could be destructive to both themselves and the child, they decide they need to make a change. So at this point they are going to try to quit, which is the first big change. The next one occurs after they have been off alcohol for awhile and are starting to go through withdrawal. They end up giving in and looking for anything with alcohol, they get so desperate. Arnesen, Kirstens father is the next person who tries to make a change with them. He sees his daughter drunk and thinks Joe is a bad influence and decides to take them away for a little bit to work hard with no alcohol. Kirsten and Joe go and after this trip is when the next big change can be seen.
For the first time we see them acting fine and healthy again. They are no longer going through major withdrawals and are finally happy. They also seem very comfortable since they decide to celebrate their success by drinking alcohol. It shows their confidence that they were able to quit. Another change occurs right after this scene when Joe tears a part the greenhouse looking for his last bottle of alcohol. This shows them relapse back into who they were before this scene. Joe makes one final, what seems like permanent, change at the end of the play. It seems that he sees how destructive the alcoholic lifestyle is and decides to really go for quitting and putting his life back together. By the end of the play we see that he has finally put his life back together and has given up on alcohol. In contrast his wife has stayed in the relapsed state and never is able to recover from alcoholism and gives up on quitting.
The objective of my character in the first part of my scene at first is to figure out any way to get around having to tell Kirstens dad that all of the money he lent them was spent on alcohol. All the while he is also trying to compose himself for his business partner who is coming by to discuss a big deal. Towards the end of this beginning part, Joe basically gives up on trying to act “cool” and is now craving alcohol and is trying to find alcohol somewhere in the house. By the end of the first part he is ashamed that he is so desperate and is again trying to tell himself that his business partner will understand why he is so shaky and jittery.
The second part of the scene has a whole different list of objectives. At the beginning, his objective is probably to sleep with his wife later on that night by seducing her with alcohol that he has obtained as a prize for them being so “good.” His objective gradually shifts to him trying to convince his wife that it is okay for them to drink just a little bit, but then shifts to obtaining more alcohol after they have had a little bit to drink.
So far, the rehearsals for our scene have been going great. Hannah and I have been getting our blocking down. Performing in front of the class and getting Professor Cirino’s advice has also been very helpful. I also believe the exercise he did with me, where he had me run around to get tired for my scene and had me lifted and pushed randomly has also really helped me develop my character more. Through the rehearsal process, I have been experimenting with my character and ways that my character would move and I think it is really coming along. The last time Hannah and I rehearsed, I was really happy with the way my character was coming along and thought that so far the scene is going very good. The thing that we really have to think about now is props and using the props. Our scene requires a lot of props so we really need to find what we will be using and we need to start practicing with them.
So far so good, and I believe that when it comes time to perform our scene, it will be very good and very entertaining for the audience.

Tom and Huck and Jim

Today, I went to see Tom and Huck and Jim at San Diego State University. This was a very good show and one that was a great tribute to the writer Mark Twain. Act 1 of the show was the story of Tom Sawyer and then Act 2 followed Huckleberry Finn with his story with Jim.

This play was a nice adventure with the characters from these books that included everything from singing to dancing. The actors that played these well known characters did a great job. The characterizations were phenomenal and each character created was different. The characters Huck and Tom, are younger characters, and the actors playing them did a great job getting the age across. This was achieved through use of voice, facial expression, and of course movement. These actors used a voice that sounded young, and used very big facial expressions and movements that are typical of a child.

What I really enjoyed was how while watching the show, I really felt that I was in the deep south. All of the actors used a southern dialect which I thought was both necessary for this show and very impressive. It built up the belief that the play was taking place in the south and that is where we, as an audience were going. Two of the characters that I thought were very creative characters were the characters of Doubletake and Topsy-Turvy. These are not real, concrete characters. These characters are more of the spirit of the book and tell the story rather than be characters in the story. These parts were probably exceptionally difficult for the actors. Since they were not solid characters, the actors had to create a spirit like character that was both physical but at the same time not a real character. These actors did a great job creating these abstract characters and I enjoyed these characters and how they told the story.

All of the characters in the show were great and very interesting to watch and I applaud every person in the cast for putting in so much work and creating such a phenomenal show.

On a side note, since I have not updated the blog recently, I'm just going to update you all on whats going on right now. Over the weekend I had another film shoot for a film. The shoot went great and I really enjoyed the experience and am very excited to see the final product. I'm soon gonna be called in to do the voiceovers for the film. Midsummer right now is also going great. We have a rehearsal tomorrow night and now that the blocking is over, we are going to be able to completely focus on characters.

Soon, I will be finishing up a play I am reading and post the review here. Well everybody talk to you soon,

Ryan

Closer by Patrick Marber

The most recent play that I just finished reading is "Closer" by Patrick Marber. It was also a movie. This play was about 4 peoples lives getting intertwined due to betrayal and infidelity. There were two couples in the play that all ended up cheating on each other in some way, and all about the story of these people that leave eachother for somebody else, but then realize that they still have feelings for the other person. Honestly, this play was pretty hard for me to follow. Throughout the whole thing there were only 4 characters and sometimes it got hard to remember who is who and what person belonged to what person.

This play was still very interesting. Basically everyone cheated on somebody in the play, and there was a lot of emotions at play in this piece. Everybody in the play had their own problems so there was not really anybody I felt bad for. They all strived for something more than just sex, but they all just could not seem to find it. The play was actually rather confusing and hard to follow, but it would definitely be a play that I'd want to see.

On a side note, I did a filming for a graduate film yesterday and it went very well. I'm excited to see the final product.

Class 3-2-10

So, today in class we did more character work with our characters that we created from our statues from last class. This time though we incorporated other people into our characters. First we used our partner and had to do all of theses activities with our partner that had to do with our character. Then we had to greet our partner like our character would, and then he had us walk around the stage and greet people that we passed as our character, with our speed gradually increasing. Honestly I found that this helped very much. I'm really creating a character out of this statue. I'm figuring out so much about this character and I know that this is how I'm gonna wanna create characters in the future.

Today, me and Hannah also read our scene in class and he told us what we could do and where we could go with the scene.

And on a side note, my first rehearsal for Midsummer was yesterday and it was a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to creating my character and bringing him to rehearsal. This will be a very fun show, and I'm excited to be working on it.

Bent by Martin Sherman

So, I just finished reading a play called Bent for my theatre of diversity class. It was a very touching and sad story about the Nazi concentration camps and homosexuals in these camps. Generally people associate Jewish people with concentration camps and you forget that there were so many minorities in these camps including homosexuals. The story was about a man named Max who gets taken to this concentration camp and meets another man there. Max tells the guards he is Jewish so gets sent there not because hes a homosexual but because he is "Jewish." He does this because he has learned that people in these camps for homosexuality get treated the worst. He meets this guy who is in there for being a homosexual and thus has to wear a pink triangle. They develop this friendship and eventually the man gets shot and killed by a guard, and Max is deeply upsetted about this and feels this guilt for not being who he truly was and in a way I saw that he felt like he abandoned his community (homosexuals) by not telling the guards who he truly is, so he feels like he must die just like his friend in order to make amends. He kills himself at the end while wearing his friends jacket which has the pink triangle on it. This shows Max finally being who he is and telling everybody that he is proud to be gay by doing what he realizes is happening to his community. Very powerful last moment because it shows him reuniting with himself and his community.

This story was a very touching and sad story. I myself am gay, so just reading this made me cringe and almost cry. I mean I could not imagine being taken somewhere like that just because I am gay. But what is very scary is how that was a reality at one point. People were taken away from their home just because they were different then another group of people. This play is supposed to shed light on the fact that not only was this happening to Jewish people during WWII but that this also was happening with gays. It tells the audience what it means to be part of a community and the importance of sticking by your community no matter what the hardships. It sheds light on discrimination and shows just how inhuman our world was at one point and its also trying to prevent this from ever happening in the future, and in a subtle way is telling us that the discrimination that we face in our country now could cause this horrible event to happen again. Doesn't want anything like this to happen again and does this by telling a story about two gay peoples experience in the concentration camps during WWII and what they had to endure and the relationship and community they had to build in order to survive.