The Journey Begins...

Studying my script for FULLY COMMITTED while at rehearsal
for Half Moon Theatre's 10-minute Play Festival. 

Here I am. At last. In Ellenville, NY. It's the night before my first rehearsal for Shadowland Theatre's FULLY COMMITTED, Becky Mode's one-person play about an out-of-work actor who works in the reservations office of a four-star restaurant in Manhattan. 

I moved into the actor housing, had dinner with my wife, Heidi, and my son and then saw them off as they headed home, worked on the first third of the play, Skyped with my Dad and Heidi, and decided to log on to Blogger to put down my first thoughts before we begin.

Nervousness is still there. This feeling of a long journey that has to be undertaken in a short amount of time is still there. Uncertainty over lines and character choices and storytelling is still there. The fear is no longer as prominent because I've spent some time with the script and I've been saying the lines and thinking about the people who inhabit this play every day.

It will be interesting to me, and I hope to you as well, how the process will work to get this play to where it needs to be for opening night. As I work through each section, I'm beginning to visualize ways to make the characters more real, more true, more wanting of something authentic and less just "voices" that I change to distinguish between who is speaking.

For those of you who don't know the play, Sam, the out-work-actor, arrives at his reservation job in the basement of a ritzy restaurant and his manager, Bob, and co-worker, Sonya, aren't there. The phones are ringing off the hook and he gets right to work putting everyone he can on hold and trying to handle everyone else's problems as efficiently as possible.

Needless to say, problems escalate at a faster rate than Sam can keep up with them, and as he tries to keep everything from falling apart he is also trying to figure out how to get home for Christmas to stay with his recently widowed father and he is waiting to hear if he is going to get a second callback for a part in a show at Lincoln Center.

The actor playing Sam also plays all of the 39 other characters who try to yell, plead, cry and cajole Sam into giving them what they want. By the end of the play, Sam has grown, based on some feedback he receives from his agent's receptionist and his willingness to stand up for himself.

It's a fun piece and will be physically and mentally challenging. I'm at that point now where I'm looking forward to seeing what the rehearsal process will bring out of me as an actor and a person. I'm tired as I write this, but look forward to tomorrow with a kind of nervous excitement like that feeling I remember getting when I stepped on to the big yellow school bus for that first day of school when I was a kid.

Right now, I've got to get some sleep so I'll be well rested. I'm going use one of my tried and true memorization techniques which is to put on my earphones with a copy of the play I recorded (on a cassette tape, no less, remember those?), so I can drift off listening to the story and hoping my unconscious mind will pick up some of the words and plot points my conscious mind is still resisting.

I've got several places in the script where I'm still not quite sure what happens next, but I know as I take the risks needed to play each character fully and as Brendan Burke, the director, guides the telling of the story, my body and mind will eventually start to know what part of the story needs to be told at just the right time to be effective. It's all a race against the clock of opening night, which I can already hear ticking LOUDLY in my ears. (or maybe that's just my high blood pressure)

They say "the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step," but I say it can begin with one word spoken on a stage. I'll be posting again tomorrow after rehearsal. 

WP
http://imdb.me/waynepyle