The process of producing a play begins long before the first rehearsal. It begins at the theater when the focus is on finding a creative team and cast of actors to bring the play to life. But once the team is chosen, each member begins to work on his or her own to prepare for the rehearsal process. Jonathan Lincoln Fried, seen at Arena in Born Yesterday (also directed by Kyle Donnelly) and last season's A Time to Kill, will be back to help kick off our Eugene O'Neill Festival by playing Sid in Ah, Wilderness!. He will chronicle his process with regular blog posts in a series called An Actor's Journey into the Wilderness. Stay tuned for more posts from Jonathan leading up to the first rehearsal of Ah, Wilderness!, only on Stage Banter!
In the previous post I wrote about visiting St. Louis to prepare for a production of The Glass Menagerie. However it’s often neither possible nor even useful to be so literal with one’s research. The Glass Menagerie is a self-described memory play and Tom’s experience is site-specific; so it was of enormous help to experience St. Louis itself. But it’s frequently not possible to visit the exact location of a play, and sometimes it doesn’t actually exist. Shakespeare’s settings are a good example of this; they are often either fantastical (“This is Illyria, lady.”) or generally historical (Coriolanus). Equally, the exact experience of a character’s childhood or profession is often beyond our reach. I, and many actors, past and present, often use substitute locations and experiences to form initial connections to our characters. Here are two examples from my own work:
When I was preparing to play Doc Gibbs in Our Town, I was geographically far from the small towns of New Hampshire that were Thornton Wilder’s inspiration for Grover’s Corners, the setting for his masterpiece. But when I was 8 and 9 I lived in a different small town– the little fishing village of Cassis in the South of France. Although Cassis is now a bustling tourist destination, particularly in the summers, in the winters of the late 1960s it was as small and insular as Grover’s Corners. So when it came time to personalize Grover’s Corners, the intense inter-connectedness of the people within that kind of community was already deeply familiar to me. And like many childhood experiences, those memories had a vitality that made them instantly accessible. The fact that Cassis is a French town which dates back to the Roman era didn’t prevent it from being a perfect emotional stand-in for Grover’s Corners. As in the fictional Grover’s Corners, the real-life Cassis had its collection of idiosyncratic personalities. And the rhythms of an average day were similar too. Just as Doc Gibbs chats with the milkman every morning, I was greeted by the local fishermen at 7am every weekday with offers of a breakfast of raw sea urchins. The two towns were worlds apart and yet completely identical.
The challenge of playing characters who commit murder is a frequent subject of acting teachers and actors alike. Uta Hagen writes about this issue in her seminal book, Respect for Acting. She believed anyone who has ever killed an insect in real life can begin to identify with a fictional killer. When I was preparing Macbeth, I thought long and hard about this, and try as I might, I never discovered any emotional connection between swatting a fly and murdering my way to the throne of Scotland. But eventually – as often happens - a memory surfaced, of a time in college when the curtains in my dorm room caught fire, and of a violent focus that overtook me as I extinguished the flames. I was possessed with a ruthlessness of purpose as I ripped down the curtains and stomped on them. And then, even after the fire was mostly out and the danger was past, I continued to search for signs of fire, unable to stop until I knew I had killed every last smoldering spark. There was something in the violence of that singleness of purpose that opened that imaginative door between myself and the fictional killer. I felt a mysterious but undeniable link between the image of myself searching for dying sparks on a pile of half-burnt curtains and of Macbeth on a battlefield, searching for wounded enemies to finish off. I don’t mean to suggest that during performances of Macbeth I was busy recalling a 20 year-old dorm room fire. That dorm fire, and my childhood years in Cassis, served only as the connective tissue – a means to an ever-evolving process of identification.
It’s always astonishing to me just how much creative material we all have available to us, and that it can come to us from our most ordinary histories. Sometimes it seems like every single thing that has happened to any of us can be put to creative use. We only have to look.
Next up: Ah, Wilderness!
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