Week 5
As mentioned last week, Virginia Samford Theatre, near Linn Park in Birmingham holds a lot of special memories for me. Between 1993 and 1995, I attended their summer musical theatre workshop for children and adolescents. Back then, it was called the Town & Gown Theatre and, before that, it was the Clark Theater. We would take speech, dance, and singing lessons and perform a show towards the end of the summer. My first year, I met the speech teacher, a foreboding figure who clearly didn’t like me. This was Elizabeth Adkisson Tull. She was also the acting teacher at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), where she would accept me for the fall 1995 Theatre Arts department.
She loved education, but in my early years of knowing her, I always thought of her as severe and I hated she didn’t like my jokes. But she clearly saw my potential and I received a few humorous parts. The first year, I didn’t perform in the end-of-camp show. But, in 1994, I had a few memorable comedy parts in T. H. E. Club: Try Helping the Environment. I didn’t know this, but Elizabeth had begun a life in the theatre as a way of doing social work. She fostered many of us and her severity was cut down quite a lot when she divorced her husband. So, I think I know why she always seemed crabby in those early years.
She was not able to teach the final year of the camp. We did a hodgepodge musical revue featuring songs from children’s musicals like How to Eat Like a Child. I missed her that season, but those summer camps were my first introduction to real theaters, the idea of “summer stock,” the process of collaboration, stage moms, divas, the whole sha-bang.
But the Martha Moore Sykes Studio, which is housed in the new part of the building that is VST holds much darker memories. In late 2006, I persuaded a director who was trying to form a new theatre company in Birmingham to produce my latest play. An attempt at a contemporary tragedy, And They Heard the Thunder of Angels, was written right out of my tumultuous final days of college where certain events led to a period of depression that lasted several years. The play, therefore, was appropriately moody and edgy—at least for me, at that time.
We hired the Sykes Studio for the performances, which were in March of 2007. The production was riddled with problems. The director backed out because he was in love and on the verge of marriage and felt my play was saying something that didn’t gel with his head space at the time as it was about the failure of relationships, infidelity, and a young man on the verge of adulthood destroying his life before it had even truly begun. Rough territory—and, although he admired the script—not the right timing for him. He agreed to stay on and produce it and the show effectively ended his desire to continue with his theatre company, which he called The Next Stage.
Angels ran for a few weekends. Although we had posters outside VST, it was shoved into the place mid-season and ticketholders had no advance notice except for articles in the Hoover Gazette and Birmingham Weekly. While Weekly gave a nice write-up based on the script, our seats were mostly empty. Not finding a director, I took on the job myself, which I had never done except for readings of my own plays.
I am a terrible director. If you were to watch videotapes of my productions, they are simply patterns of people standing in triangles and then moving left and right. I never studied directing—I managed to avoid it at both ASFA and Bennington College. I never wanted the job. I don’t have the talent to deal with the varying egoisms, eccentricities, and needs of actors—which can be overwhelming for someone who just wants everybody to show up, learn their lines, speak loudly, and tell the story. Nevertheless, there are always wild ones you can’t rein in, divas who demand prominent staging, and, worst of all, people who you thought could act and you discover in rehearsal, cannot.
I eventually rewrote Angels back into the play I wanted it to be, as I had made huge cuts to account for deficiencies in my casting, and it lives today as The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me. I’m still proud of it, but watching people leave the theater depressed as all get-out is not exactly something you yearn for as a writer. It was too much—people today want to be entertained, let out of the real world for a couple of hours. A tragedy ain’t that and we’ve lost touch with the catharsis the Greeks experienced in the Dionysian festivals.
Monday night, I walked into the Sykes Studio, and it exists as much as it did then—a cabaret space with a small stage. While nice, its inclusion has made what used to be a beautiful courtyard (where us kids would play in between Town & Gown classes) a small patch of grass. Looking around the room, I remembered the fits, the starts, the follies of Angels. But I had to get in the right head space for Godot. We began the week by working on the scenes with the Boy and Tank came in, off book, and delivering a stage-worthy performance. I love to watch him work. He’s bringing an energy to Beckett you don’t often get to see, and I think it works really well for the show we’re mounting.
We also attempted to stumble through the first scene off-book (this was supposed to be the day we were to be officially off-book, but the date kept getting pushed back). There was a lot of “Line!” calling and frustration, but it was nice to have the text out of our hands so we could begin to work on the physicality of the characters. Gogo, my part, is constantly hounded by the pain in his feet and I was able to fully embody such a man—stoop-shouldered, funny walks, etc.
The next night was to be our first official run-through and, as the text is difficult, Keke allowed us to have scripts in hand. All first run-throughs are slogs, like a lawnmower running over too high grass and getting bogged up in the deck. Tuesday night was no different. When Act I was over, I offered, unhelpfully, “That was longer than Wagner’s Ring Cycle.” In another space with little air conditioning, it certainly felt like it. Tightening up “Pozzo and Lucky Land” is the next step in finding the show and right now it feels more like a distraction than an integral part of the piece.
Exasperated and frustrated, we began Act II oddly, but found a rhythm as it went along. It was clear how little off book we are for Act II because our eyes never left the pages. I’ve already opined how little time I have in life right now to learn the lines and I get more nervous every day. The number of times my character says, “And what of it?” in the first act and “True” in the second act leads me to believe I might just throw those out there in case one sticks, which would be bad for a play of this magnitude.
Drained of all energy, we left the Studio much later than our normal end time. The other actors were thrilled to see the work Cliff and I have done in our duo scenes and, for that, I was much edified, but I couldn’t show it. The knee that was operated on last year is aching profusely with all the movement and my face at the end of rehearsal exuded, “I remember why I stopped this.” Alas, it creeps toward us. By the time you read this, we will be fourteen days until Opening Night. I write none of this to dissuade you from seeing it. We’ll bring it together. We’re just in that tender stage of the process where hopelessness and excitement meet and cancel each other out.
Wednesday night, we ran through Act I again. Stumbled-through is the better word. The lines were still giving us pause. We made plans to meet on the weekend to run them because, without them, there’s little work that can be done. Around the time we were about to begin Act II, Paul, the man who arranged for us to work in the Studio, came in and told us a bad storm was coming. We were free to stay and rehearse, but there was a chance of hail, and the lights began to flicker in the Studio, so we were dismissed under the proviso that we go home and work on our lines.
I drove through a torrential downpour with a sky that might as well have been bright yellow from all the lightning. There were brief moments of hydroplaning and never a speed of more than 56 as I couldn’t see with the speed of my wiper blades, but I finally made it home. After that, I took a suggestion from Keke and made four audio recordings: my lines in Act I, my lines in Act II, and then my cues for both. Unfortunately, as I was getting sleepy, I did not leave enough time in the cue ones to respond, so those will have to be redone. But, otherwise, I am listening to my lines repeatedly when I’m not working. To the degree I can learn them through osmosis, I’m not sure. But time will tell.
We resumed Thursday night with a concentration on line work for the Pozzo and Lucky scenes and refreshed our memory of the blocking during Lucky’s monologue (I have learned since that the brilliant choreography was a collaboration between Keke and Sydney Batten, the actor playing Lucky) as we had only marked it the night before (in other words, went through the motions) as Lucky had a splitting headache and needed no jostling from the props and other actors. I think, when we have it down pat, it will be a highlight of the show.
Cliff’s daughter Velma joined us once again. She has proved an excellent person to run lines with, all of twelve years old—obviously intelligent to read Beckett with, perhaps, more fluency than some of us! Her favorite line in the play is when Didi and I embrace and I recoil, saying, “You stink of garlic.” That’s one of my favorite lines too. Friday night was an actor’s-only rehearsal to get through the lines of Act I. More and more began to be consumed by our brains. Sydney was very gracious with her time in being on book and reading Pozzo’s lines for Cliff and myself. We returned the favor to help her with her massive monologue.
We repeated the process Saturday morning, Cliff having invited us to his lovely home. Act II was the focus that day. Clearly, there was still more work to be done, but we made it through, sometimes with the help of a script. We prepared for the next week and hope to surprise Keke with more memorization, or at least enough to be able to get back to refining the staging.
Every rehearsal has tender, scary moments such as these—it happens with every show. It’s all about being there for each other, working together, and getting the job done. That’s what community theatre is all about and I hope you join us. You don’t have your tickets yet? What are you waiting for, Godot?
Week 6
The next week brought with it a breath of fresh air. It is a delicate matter, but sometimes things just don’t work out. In my brief tenure as a director, I found myself in a few instances where someone I thought would be perfect for a role turned out to be not quite the right fit. Such was the case with our Pozzo. Handling the removal is touchy and requires grace and bravery, but Keke has both. Thus, we began rehearsals this week with a new cast member who has stepped in mightily (and already has a good deal of the text memorized).
I had encouraged my friend Raymond E. Cole III to audition for Godot before we began. I know him to be an exceptional human being and I knew of his talent because he graciously performed roles in a reading of my plays ca. 2012 at Pinson Valley High School, where I was teaching at the time.
Ray, a voice actor by profession, brought in a bright and positive energy from day one. Being back in a theater for him was a joy and you could see it on his face. After our first night of rehearsals, we were sharing our thoughts on the special nature of theatre. Theatre began with shamans performing rites and the Greeks celebrating the god Dionysus. “It began as a spiritual experience and it still is one,” I offered to Ray. And it is. Doing theatre blows the dust of your soul.
But we came back to the problem with the lines. It cannot be overstated how so many of the lines seemingly come out of nowhere. But, after a couple of nights of serious script study, we began to see connections we previously didn’t see. We also discussed why we wanted to do the play in the first place and Keke shared her insights on the script as well. The overriding theme of our discussion was that Godot is about the nobility of carrying on when things seem the darkest in life. Such is the state of Didi and Gogo as they navigate their meager existence. They persevere even when giving up the waiting seems like a viable option.
So, after those nights of introspection and hard work, we found a great deal more of the text under our belts—it’s always about making connections—and next week we can get in the habit of running the show. This time unencumbered by the persistent calling of “Line!”
Well, we’ll see at any rate. Buy your tickets now!
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