This week, I’ll catch us up on two weeks of rehearsal as the opening date of Waiting for Godot at BFT barrels toward us.
Week 3
It is a sad but true fact of theatre life that, when you’re in a play, your haircut is up to the director. While many have recently encouraged me to grow it longer (which I can’t stand as duck tails [woo-hoo] and curly hairs start to emerge), I gingerly asked Keke how she wanted my hair for the show, hoping to keep my hair a bit cropped.
One of the reasons I was concerned about the hair length was because, by day, I live the corporate life and there are certain haircuts that just don’t work well in that setting. Her response was “as messy as possible,” so I figured a haircut was out of the question (and it was already getting too long; when I start parting it, I’m unhappy). But, as soon as she saw how quickly my hair grows, she gave me permission for a haircut prior to this week of rehearsal (phew!) so it would be appropriately “messy” by the time we open.
The hair is shorter, but the lines still loom as we must be off book on Monday, August 7th. You will be reading this and wondering how that process is coming along. My fingers are crossed but time is of an issue. I still work, work out, eat a quick dinner, and head to rehearsal only to be at home by ten depleted enough to crash. The weekend of the 5th and 6th were, as Didi says in the play, “my only hope” to get these lines down as best as I can.
There is a special kind of anxiety when learning lines for a Beckett play. I’m not saying I’ve fiddled with authors’ lines in the past, but often you would say the lines as you memorized them, forgetting commas, dropping/adding words. This is fine if you’re doing a lesser writer, but not Shakespeare and not Beckett nor any other writer from the canon. However, I would argue Shakespeare (at least in verse form) is easier to memorize. Beckett is, quite sincerely, the greatest playwright of the 20th century and I don’t want to do him a disservice. But we are talking about a French play translated into Irish-affected English spoken by American mouths, so the words come out as, as the play has been described, absurd. Or at least affected. It’s hard.
As we could not have the space Monday night, we walked into a theater Tuesday night that had about the same heat and humidity level of Miami, Florida. A special event the prior Friday had accidentally either left the air conditioning running (freezing some filters) or it had something to do with a new unit (don’t worry, it’ll be fixed by the time the show opens). But, that night, we were in a hot space with no fans. My standard rehearsal attire consists of long, light, black sweatpants for easy movement, a light (materially) black tee-shirt, and a short-sleeved button down over it and unbuttoned. Add to that fact that we’re rehearsing in the worst August heat of an Alabama summer plus I have to wear an ill-fitting rehearsal bowler hat, it was a miserable night full of hat-fanning and peeling our shirts from our sweaty bodies in between scenes. But we made it through.
During the rehearsal break, we made our way to the darkened, perfectly cooled lobby with an ice machine and we discussed the play. It’s weird to admit this as I consider myself a fairly intelligent person and I’m in the play, but I have always been confused by what the characters Pozzo and Lucky represent. My go-to assumption is one that comes right out of Beckett’s experience. As a member of the French Resistance, he spent many a night crawling through fields, grey and unfeeling spaces like the ones Didi and Gogo find themselves in. So, my thought has always been that Pozzo represents a kind of fascist dictator (maybe Mussolini because Pozzo sounds Italian?) and Lucky represents one of the many slain during the war as his speech reflects a kind of broken remembrance of academic knowledge and therefore could perceivably be seen as a broken intellectual persecuted during the Holocaust. But, then again, that doesn’t totally hold water ‘cause why Mussolini rather than Hitler? I could be wrong. I know I’m wrong. So, I dared to ask Keke who Pozzo and Lucky were.
Her response was that of a director to an actor. “They’re your friends who you keep forgetting.” Her responses were appropriate and ones I already knew having performed the scenes, but I guess I wanted her interpretation of them. Finally, she said, “That is something I wouldn’t tell you because if I did, then we would go on to paint that picture for the audience and their chance at their interpretation would be robbed from them." A totally accurate and sensible response. But I made her promise me she would tell me after the play closed. It is open to interpretation; I was just curious of hers as she is directing and, therefore, smarter than me as far as the play is concerned. Again, this is part of me having not been an actor for many years. I should only be concerned with my character’s baggage. Hard to remember when you’ve principally worked as the author of a play for so many years.
The next night, we went back to the Pozzo and Lucky scenes—two gargantuan sections in the middle of the acts which require a physicality I’m simply unused to now. I had mostly forgotten the blocking because we had been away from them for a while. We fine-tuned and made some changes, including some brilliant choreography that should soar once we open. The Lucky is a very fine actor and moves like a ballet dancer or at least someone so comfortable in her own body, she makes her walk even like a graceful ballet.
The stage director Robert Wilson once said no matter what body type you are—short, skinny, fat, tall—if you are comfortable in your own skin, you can master stage movement. I have never felt comfortable in this body—as if it were a wonky vessel from the factory given to the wrong soul. So, Gogo is especially hard as he is mostly physical. My recent attempts in life to walk with better posture are all shot to Hades as Gogo is slumped over and dealing with foot problems throughout the course of the play. So, in a way, I can lean into my natural stance. Although my feet are in fine fettle, I do recall recovering from knee surgery last November and the pain that preceded it (it will have to be replaced in 10-15 years alas, but what can you do? Shortly after the play closes, I will be forty and I just have to get used to these sorts of things).
Week 4
The majority of the next week was more of what the director and I call “Pozzo and Lucky Land.” The two characters, who I still haven’t figured out, break the monotony of just Didi and Gogo and trying to entertain ourselves while we wait for Godot, who never comes (spoiler alert).
Keke has devised a hysterical physical comedy gag during Lucky’s infamous speech—a two-and-a-half-page nonsensical diatribe that sounds like AI writing an academic paper on the existence of God. One famous actor who played Lucky played the role (an old man, being played in our cast by a young woman) as if he was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. When he shared this with Beckett, whose mother died of the same illness, he seemed pleased at the interpretation, but that is not what we will provide. Our Lucky scene is a lot more physical.
The stage directions call for the other characters onstage to get consistently more irritated with the speech leading to a melee in which we wrestle Lucky’s hat away from him (in the play, hats tend to represent the characters’ minds and they often peer into them when trying to recall information). Rather than having us stand around jeering, the rope by which Pozzo controls Lucky becomes one in which all the characters are tangled as Lucky pounces round the stage. It is an ingenious bit of directing which may help audience members enjoy the scene when they would otherwise simply be slack jawed by a delivery of the monologue.
The rehearsals were tedious as the actor playing Pozzo is still trying to pin the character down; the actor playing Lucky seems to have a clear idea of what she’s trying to accomplish, but we all have work to do. The physical movements are still arduous, and I discovered a physical ailment later in the week. The knee that was operated on last November is acting up again and it might have something to do with the fact that I do lots of physical gags in the first act wearing only one shoe. A knee pad may need to be a part of my gym bag as I make my way to rehearsals next week.
The last time I acted was in late 2006. The iPhone had yet to be invented and most of us were still carrying around flip phones with limited texting plans. I had taken for granted how ubiquitous cell phones are now. In this production, we all find ourselves, during breaks, checking text messages, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, etc. Sometimes the phones end up being tossed out of pockets onstage as one forgets they are now part of our regular anatomy, shoved into various pockets, and I daresay “notes” are even being typed into them rather than the old-school way of jotting them down on paper (paper? what’s that?).
I should be relieved at this as the day before I was prepping for our Lucky scene, I realized I couldn’t read a single note I had made in my script. Surrounding Lucky’s block prose, there might as well have been Chinese symbols—my handwriting is that atrocious. But even though some say I might have missed my calling, I can almost guarantee I wouldn’t have made it through medical school.
My day consists of leaving home at 7am, working from 8am to 5pm, working out from 5:00 to 5:30, then rushing to the theater to make sure I get what has become my parking space (just in case you were misled). Rehearsal runs generally from 6:30 to 9:00-9:30pm whether we’re onto something or not. Keke has been very conscious of our time. I probably live the farthest away from anybody—about half an hour north. So, at 10:00pm or so, I pass out and wake up to do it all again the next morning.
Which, as you can imagine, leaves little time to really work on the lines, many of which are repetitive and sometimes come out of unnaturalistic places in unnaturalistic ways. Since we changed the date for being officially off-book to Tuesday rather than Monday, I spent the day with the text the Saturday after this week’s rehearsal and Cliff, my Didi, did me a great kindness on Sunday morning (I played hooky at church) and we ran lines over the phone, assisted at one point by Cliff’s daughter Velma reading the lines of Pozzo.
As mentioned earlier, Cliff has become a valuable collaborator. Once an actor in New York and Los Angeles, he also worked in production and his work ethic and dedication is all an actor ever desires in another. Hope to work with him again in the future—but I’m finding this might be the last acting gig (it’s exhausting!). Of course, as you remember from Journal Entry #1, I’ve said that a few times in my life only to renege.
BFT once again has the space for other events the week you’re reading this, so we’ll be rehearsing at the Martha Moore Sykes Studio at the lovely Virginia Samford Theatre adjacent to Linn Park. VST is one of the oldest theaters in Birmingham that came from the “Little Theater” movement that swept America post-Depression and has, at various times, been named the Clark Theatre and Town & Gown. In its “Town & Gown” days, they held a day camp for budding actors/actresses aged elementary through high school. That is where I acted in my first musicals which were not church plays (my elementary school was run by a church, so the school cantatas were still “church plays”). There, I also met my acting teacher, Elizabeth Adkisson. She taught speech and directed the mainstage show T. H. E. Club: Try Helping the Environment, which was, as you can suspect, an eco-protest play for children in which I got to do a couple funny gags, which got some attention in an article from the much-missed Birmingham Post-Herald.
But the Sykes Studio in particular holds difficult memories for me as that is where my play The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me (then called And They Heard the Thunder of Angels) premiered in 2007. It was a financial disaster because it was shoved in mid-season with no advance notice to VST ticketholders. Also, it failed as entertainment, being an attempt at modern tragedy that depressed literally everyone who saw it. I hope I can shake off the haunting and go on with our first full-runs of the show. And hopefully, I’ll be off book. Fingers still crossed.
Do you have your tickets yet? They’re on sale here!
By the way, I did some of this last weekend too.
New Publication Announcement!
Still a writer first and foremost, I'm also excited to announce my poem "Toast to Renée" has been published in the July 2023 issue of Literature Today: An International Literary Journal!
It has been a great year for publications and I am most pleased that my poetry is finally beginning to get some recognition. The journal is available in electronic form, but I encourage you to purchase the print edition which is available at this link. Follow Literature Today on Facebook and support the over one hundred writers who are represented in this volume!
Toasts all around!
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