A Yeoman's Job

"A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. "

-George Bernard Shaw


It was the beginning of what would be more than a few day's work. Misalliance, the longest, and most text-intensive play of the season, was heading into technical rehearsals. We had spent all of Sunday wrestling with this play, most of us struggling just to get a handle on the lines.

If it seems like I'm bemoaning the amount of memorizing an awful lot in this blog, let me just put into perspective the enormous verbosity of Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Before becoming a playwright, he worked for a number of years as a journalist, churning out over one million words from 1885-1894, all of which he later considered 'outdated and unintelligible'. Not many of us can blaze out a million words, discard them all and then start writing world-renowned plays.

And in Shaw's dialogue, his incredible volume of language is also evident. Most pages of dramatic dialogue take approximately two minutes to perform. These are also the passages that are often easier for actors to memorize, because you are working with someone, and generally have less text than in a monologue or soliloquy. In Shaw however, each 'line' of dialogue is usually a paragraph. Making every page of Shavian dialogue three or four times longer than normal. And then there are the speeches (at least one per page) that are herculean in their breadth and scope. So that the only way to bring one of Shaw's play in at under three hours is to tear through the text and hope the audience catches up.

So that is what we were tackling on Sunday, and trying to wrap our heads around, with the opening date of Friday fast before us. Our minds scrambled, we were all excited about having Monday off, and as per Mr. Shaw's quote indulged in a night's repose and some due leisure.

A Holiday in Portland

While some of the company members laid low and used the day off to recover and prepare for the coming week's travails, Clare, Julie, Annie and I decided to sneak off to Portland for a little change of pace.

Portland, an hour from Monmouth is the biggest city in Maine and has been a cultural hub since its founding in the seventeenth century. It is a delightful New England town, with red brick architecture all along the waterfront of the Old Port district, coffee shops and restaurants and all manner of funky city-folk about. After five weeks in tiny, rural Monmouth, it was unbelievably refreshing to feel the pulse and vibe of a new city and bask in its energy.

As we walked through the historic downtown, we passed through Longfellow square, with a statue of the famous poet, and his birth home a bit further on. Down in the Old Port we popped in and out of shops and explored all their was to see. An abundance of antiques and gift shops, bookstores and gorgeous architecture, it was a splendid walk. We were led by our incomparable colleague Dustin Tucker, who lives in Portland and works during the year at Portland Stage.

A section of the mural in the lobby

One of the highlights of our day was a spontaneous tour of Portland Stage. We arrived at the theater (now closed for the summer) and luckily ran across the Literary Manager, who knew Dustin and let us in to see the stage, dressing rooms and rehearsal hall. It is a really lovely space and looks like a great place to work. By what we gathered from his colleagues there and as evidenced on the show posters in the lobby, Dustin is making quite a name for himself in Portland. Kudos!

But by far the best part of our day was the feast we had on the waterfront. At Dusty's recommendation we sought out J's Oyster Bar, a divey establishment right on the water, to procure an authentic Maine lobster. Though Clare (not much of a seafood eater) played it safe with the baked haddock, the rest of us got the lobster special, which turned out to be quite special indeed:

This was my first time eating lobster that was not already shelled and artfully displayed on my plate. It arrived with all manner of bowls and implements, straddling a corn cob and lounging on a bed of clams. There were picks and shell-crackers, forks knives and handy-wipes. And through Annie's careful guidance (her great uncle Bob is a legendary lobster-hypnotizer and eater) we hacked and sucked and picked and pried and chewed and savored and butter-ized and played with our lobsters.

So it was that after a lovely day in the city, we traveled back to Monmouth and prepared for the week to come.

But while we were away, other shenanigans were taking place in sleepy Monmouth. And not all of our company escaped unscathed. Here with the story in full is my distinguished colleague Maarouf. Take it away!

ACTOR VS TECHNOLOGY
by: Master Maarouf Naboulsi, Esq.

I would have never thought that a place as quiet and quaint as Monmouth, ME would bring me a near death experience. I had just finished my morning Shakespeare camp for kids. I have no idea why at one point in time I thought it would be a good idea to wake up at eight in the morning to teach elementary students about acting Shakespeare (on top of our already ridiculous schedule), but I did it. Keep in mind the workshops started on Monday, (usually my day off), and the only day that we don’t have the lovely Donna & Sue preparing our meals for us. Waking up this early, I of course skipped breakfast, (my body just wasn't accustomed to the schedule yet). When we got back to Monmouth around noon I was ravenous. I had my heart set on some huevos rancheros with eggs over-easy prepared on that beautiful old-school grill that hasn't been washed in god knows how long, (this gives the eggs that American diner taste) served over a warm tortilla and topped with cheese and salsa. I was so excited about this. I started gathering all my ingredients while blasting The National's new album on my iPod: Eggs check. tortillas, check. Cheese, check. Salsa, check. My mis-en-place is ready to go! To my delight, my roommate Alex is already in the kitchen getting ready to cook it seems. That’s totally cool. This is a huge grill, so we can share. I go up to the grill and notice it's cool to the touch. He must've just turned it on; I'll help him light it I thought. STUPID ASSUMPTION. Suffice it to say Alex hadn't just turned the grill on, and I would come to find out it had been on a while. Why I would ask? Because he was 'warming it up'. I assume he wasn't familiar with this piece of equipment. It is essentially a GAS stove. The grill part on the top is deceiving; you have to light it from underneath in order for the grill to get hot. Let's go back to what I thought I knew; Alex needs help lighting the grill. He was in the room with me; he would stop me if I were doing something I shouldn't be. ANOTHER STUPID ASSUMPTION. I go in with the lighter, hand right near the gas entrance, stooped over looking in so I could see where to light. The next spit second was one of the scariest in my entire life. Have you seen a wall of fire before? I think the thought of a wall of fire sounds really cool. Like that one Disney world attraction based on that terrible 90’s movie Backdraft. Only maybe not when it's blasting you in the face and upper torso. I thought this was it for me. Goodbye Monmouth. You're going to have to find some other ambiguously ethnic man to be in your plays cause this one is either dead or seriously injured. I instantly freak out and bolt away from the source of the brief explosion, batting my body and face, super freaked out like what I was experiencing at that moment was the afterlife. Alex had to shake me 'hey man snap out of it!' 'Am I okay?!' 'Your fine.' 'Am I burned!?’ 'You're fine!' I was alive; thank my lucky lucky lucky stars. There were a few casualties however.... my brand new headphones…my favorite plaid shirt…as well as a few minor setbacks cosmetically. Those being singed eyebrows, singed hair, and completely burned off eyelashes. I sat with icepacks on my face and hand all day treating my burns. What a lovely way to spend my day off. Lesson learned Monmouth. Don’t make haphazard assumptions…respect technology, in this case, huge industrial gas stoves. Oh and another lesson learned, according to Google eyelashes grow back in 6-8 weeks! Best, Maarouf

Man vs. Machine indeed. Glad you're still with us Maarouf. :)

Tuesday was back to the grind, our 10-out-of-12 tech rehearsal for Misalliance. And while the show is by no means tech-heavy, there were a few snags along the way. Namely the timing involved in the simulated plane crash at the end of act one. In the script, a biplane is supposed to circle the pavilion where the characters have been talking and crash offstage in the greenhouse. To achieve this, the lights and sound have to synchronize with the actors so that the effect will work. There were some very convincing plane noises, as well as a simulated shadow passing across the stage from the lighting dept. Unfortunately it took us the better part of an hour to get the timing right. So as we were running this in rehearsal the actors would all react broadly to where they thought the plane sounds would come from, only to have them come out of a different speaker behind them. Thus the cast would then turn in the direction of the sound with a hubbub of: "Oh I thought it was over there?" "That was strange" and "What a strange flying machine" . . . only to have the plane's shadow land a moment later than the sound. So they would react to a sound that came from the wrong direction, dodge a shadow that went from left to right instead of right to left, and generally turn in circles for a while until we finally got all three elements, lights/sound/actors on the same page. Its astounding sometimes how things that are deceptively simple to the audience take the most time to coordinate.
Elsewhere during tech were scene partners furiously practicing with one another to get the lines and the sequence and the cues right. When we finally got to the end of Tuesday, we had not had a chance to run all the way through the play yet. Needless to say we were none of us sleeping soundly that night.

Wednesday came, and with it a run through, which did little to satisfy our anxiety. While we did make it all the way through the show, so many lines had to be fed to the actors on stage that we all began to wonder if we would ever get a handle on this material.

Thursday's run through was, if anything, marginally better. Dave, the director (who had kept admirably high spirits throughout the process) as well as those behind the tech table laughed heartily at all the punch-lines, and we started to feel energized by their reactions. Even though we knew it was forced (those folks had seen the play many times at that point) its funny how a little reverb from the otherwise empty house will pick up the energy of the run. And while we did still have to call for line, and it was by no means smooth, our final dress rehearsal did let us see that there might, in fact, be light at the end of the tunnel. Now it was just a question of how to get there.

Friday, our premiere, had arrived. Instead of a rehearsal the day of, it is a Theater at Monmouth tradition to have an 'Italian Run Through'; i.e. a speed-through (cause Italians talk fast, get it?) in order to keep the play fresh in our heads and get energized for the night's opening performance. Usually, this takes about half the time of a play, averaging out somewhere around forty-five minutes. With Misalliance however, we were there for almost two hours. Again, mountains and mountains of text. But it did really help to keep all those words in our heads and get us focused for the evening's performance.

The time had come: it was 7:00 on Friday night. The patrons were gathering outside, our colleagues from the theater who were not involved in the show, about two-thirds of the company, were anticipating the opening and excited to be in the audience. The cast of Misalliance was in the dressing room, and tensions were high. None of us knew how this was going to go over. Dave had been telling us to trust the material, but no matter how much we trusted Mr. Shaw, we knew that the sheer scope of the play made it a difficult task to sustain over the course of two and a half hours (the best run time we had had thus far was 2:37)--not to mention the fact that we had never had a real audience to see if anybody else actually thought this play was interesting or funny at all.
7:30. Dave made the curtain speech, and Donte & Mike, the first two actors to appear in the play, took the stage and launched into it. The rest of the cast sat silently in the dressing room, staring at the monitors and listening, willing the play to succeed. About five lines in, we started to hear laughter from the audience. By the five-minute mark, there had already been three holds for laughter. Everyone backstage started to relax.

By intermission, we were all pumped. The audience was thoroughly enjoying the show, and laughing at punch-lines that we had thus far not even realized were there, or emphasized at all. In fact, Shaw's writing is so jam-packed with setups and payoffs, that in trying to get to the end of a paragraph there are often a few zingers that sneak by the audience (or the actor for that matter) and are only caught after the fact. We were thrilled that it was going so well, but silently everyone was focused on the last half of the play, filled with confrontations and a long push of verbal sparring right up to the last second of the play.

On stage in the second act there was no time to think about how the audience was receiving it, as we were doing everything we could just to get the lines out and stay connected to the conflicts in the story.. It was like an enormous chain of dominoes that took half the night to set up, but in the end provided a tremendously satisfying display of calamity and causality.
Afterward, everyone in the cast was relieved, exhausted and ecstatic that we had made it through the show. By all reports it was a big success and the audience was blown away by the sheer amount of information and ideas that came at them in such a short amount of time. We played the piece for the rest of the weekend, and by Sunday were finally starting to settle into it. It plays again this weekend, after a week of Pericles rehearsals, and I"m sure that coming back to Misalliance after living in another play for a week will be the true test of our repertory chops . . .

But that is a story for next week! Till then, we continue to press on, with our:

Superabundant Vitality!

BBell


PS: Check out the review of Misalliance here.