Break a Leg

I was recently invited to attend an acting workshop for a new version of Shakespeare's The Tempest.  It was run by an independent theater company in Sebastopol caled The Independent Eye.  Now, one thing you should know about Sebastopol is that it is where alll the hippies went.  They have signs posted banning nuklear weapons and styrofoam within city limits.  The Whole Foods there is always crowded.  On average, the men have longer hair than the women.  It's that kind of place.

The concept for this workshop was to mix Shakespeare and puppetry.  Now, puppetry can be pretty interesting to watch - if done right.  I think there is a convention in a lot of theater to over-embelish actions and charicatures, where you feel like the fact that it's a surealistic sort of genre is basically crammed down the collective throat of the audience, and that it is easier to do this when working with puppets than it is when it's just people and a set.  Additionally, I think it takes a certain kind of outlook to resist the instinct to over-act.

The people running the workshop didn't have this kind of outlook.

One of the things that always makes me squeemish about theater is the word "experimental".  Now, I understand that no progress can be gained without trying new things, but there have got to be times when somebody looks at what is being tried and says "Just because we can doesn't mean we should."

The space that the workshop was being held in was basically a garage converted into...well, a workshop, with the walls painted black and the floor carpetted.  Half the space was filled with racks and boxes holding various puppets, which were pretty much just heads with a draped cloth "body".

The workshop was being run by Connor and Elizabeth, who introduced themselves as "life partners".  At first, this threw me a little bit because I usually only hear the term in regards to gay couples.  I mean, I just didn't think it was necessary.  It was obvious they were living together.  It's like two people walking hand in hand and pointing out to people "this is my boyfriend."  Good for you.  How is this relevent?  Connor has long, white, bushy hair always slightly in disarray.  Elizabeth has blonde hair and that sort of weathered look that only a truly organic lifestyle can provide.  Both were extremely soft-spoken, which to some people, to me, is just fucking annoying.  They had us do several vocal and physical warm-ups which involved moving randomly and making sounds that supported the movement, which I have always hated, but always tolerated because it's just part of theater.  I have my own ways of warming up.  For instance, on that day, I had just come from an hour and a half of ballet practice.  I was pretty friggin warm.  SO, eventually we had 10 people in a tiny space moaning and flailing all over the place like a pack of possessed epileptics.  We did one other excercise where we had to think of a traumatic moment in our lives and speak out loud to the circle things we would like to say to that moment or like to hear from that moment.  Then we had to improvise one of the other actors moments without quite knowing the context and that actor got to direct how they wanted the moment to have happened rather than how it did.

Finally, we got into some basic puppet technique, which was pretty interesting.  But that was the last half hour of the 3 that the workshop had been scheduled for.  Now I'm all for learning new things and trying new stuff, but when I show up to a 3-hour class and I'm looking at my watch before 10 minutes has passed, I begin to consider the possibility that maybe this isn't quite one of the chances I should have taken.  Of course, the Catch-22 there is: you'll never find out that you shouldn't have gone unless you go.

There are supposed to be about 12 more of these workshops that will then lead into the actual production of The Tempest.  Right now this process threatens to contain a lot of the things I hate about theater.  The dinger here is that there are some people involved that I really enjoy working with and would feel somewhat bad about leaving them to put up with that stuff by themselves.  I'll have to think about it.

Happy Jenday