As the semester winds down, my thoughts turn to summer and the prospect of acting work. As you know, last summer I played 40 roles in Becky Mode's one person show, FULLY COMMITTED, at Shadowland Theatre. I was terrified. But I faced the fear, jumped onstage and made it through the summer, relatively unscathed. A few weeks ago I got a call from Brendan Burke, the artistic director or Shadowland, saying that there was a possibility of remounting the show in Binghamton, NY. We went up there to meet the artistic director and I launched into a few of the lines, which surprisingly, I still remembered. But the the old fear crept in and I went up on my lines and stopped. The director was interested and worked out a deal with Brendan so that we'll put the show up in June and July. And now, I need to prepare for another battle. The show is a monster of memorization and I'm starting to work on each section now so that I am not gripped by such terror when I'm standing at the top of those stairs waiting to enter. I want to be in a place where I have excitement and anticipation about how the audience is going to react rather than a heart-pounding, brain wrenching feeling that I may get completely lost at any moment. I will probably still use my cheat sheets, but I'm hoping that they will be there just for emergencies. I work a little more each day, getting clearer, trying new character choices, deciding where beats need to land. This is the work. This is the joy. This is the life...LLC!
It has been too long since I've last blogged about my experience acting in Becky Mode's one person play Fully Committed, but the journey has been an intensely fascinating one and I am going to be publishing a lot more commentary about the experience soon. I've learned a hell of a lot from this job and I'm eager to share a list of about 30 amazing things that I have learned or have been brought to my attention by doing this show. I stopped blogging right about day five or six into the rehearsals not because I was too busy or didn't get "around to it" but because the time and energy it took to get this show up and running left no time at all for sitting and thinking about the experience while I was in the moment of experiencing it. I had imagined when I started the process that I would be able to recap each day's rehearsal after I got home, but I often found myself continuing to work on the show long hours after I left the theatre and just crashing after the work. Now that we are open and heading into our last two weekends, I want to look back on the journey and share my thoughts from the past with this, my now future, self. Needless to say, I survived the rehearsal process, but there were times when I was not quite sure that would be the case. I'll share all of that with you as well, but for right now, let this short blog be a placeholder. Here is a link to a review of the show for now and I may have a few comments on that review at a later date, too. A review:
In the meantime, if you've seen the show, please contact me and let me know what you thought. We still have two more weekends and we play on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Shadowland Theatre in Ellenville, NY. Thank you for your patience while I explored the play as deeply as I was able to. I look forward to sharing more of this all-engaging, sometimes-frustrating, ever-fascinating, often-humbling process with you soon. Keep Living Life Creatively and I'll see you on the boards!
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
Wayne Pyle as Sam (and 40 others) in FULLY COMMITTED at Shadowland Theatre, Ellenville, NY.
This has been a particularly productive
time in my actor's life. I played Franklin in Liza Johnson's film
RETURN, starring Linda Cardellini and Michael Shannon, ended up in
the trailer and it opened in some great theaters and had great
reviews and lots of press across the country. I directed BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS at SUNY Dutchess. I just finished working
on Eddie Mullins' new film, DOOMSDAYS, with Heidi. I'm
prepping right now to perform in Becky Mode's one-person comedy FULLY COMMITTED at Shadowland Theatre in Ellenville, NY. I'm directing
staged readings of two ten-minute plays for Half Moon Theatre Company
in Poughkeepsie, acting in another, preparing two other readings
for another Half Moon event, recording voiceover work for clients and working on
my own scripts as well as finishing up one semester of teaching and
trying to prepare for another at SUNY New Paltz.
Let's talk about the summer today. I've been
working on Becky Mode's FULLY COMMITTED for a few weeks now, trying
to get the 40 different characters I have to portray to play nice
with each other and working on a few pages each day to get a vague
idea of what each character wants, how they might sound, what
physicality they might embody and what else I might have to do to
fully commit to this whirlwind of a comedy. Each day brings new
insights and new challenges and I'm looking forward to working with
my director, Brendan Burke, to really get the play up on its feet and
try to figure out to make this farce fly.
At almost 90 intermissionless minutes, the memorization
task seems enormously daunting right now, but I know with steady work and
concentration I'll soon have the whole story in my mind and be ready
to explore these people and situations out there on the stage instead
of in my cramped living room. This is the first time I'm taking on
such a huge actor's task and looking at what I still have to
accomplish, I would say that the emotion I'm mostly feeling
is...SCARED.
I think it's healthy to be scared of
certain things like heights, snakes, weird looking plants, some
people, daunting acting challenges, because it's our body's way of
telling us, “Proceed with caution. Harm could be done.” Even
though it can be extremely painful at times, I do like to do things
that scare me, that take me out of my normal comfort zone, because I
know that in the past when I've “faced the fear” and done it
anyway, I've always grown as a person and an actor. I've definitely
gotten a few bumps and bruises and cuts and scrapes here and there,
but what an adventure I've had in the process.
Usually when I feel that fear coming
on, about memorization, auditioning, a role that I'm not sure I'm cut
out for, I try to focus on the work process and see where it leads
me, rather than focusing on the outcome that hasn't occurred yet. By
focusing on what I'm doing now, how I'm doing it, and why it is being
done, I become more present and that chattering voice that says
things like, “You'll never get those lines memorized, you're not
really very good at this, don't try THAT, that will never work,”
starts to get quieter. If I don't do that, that little voice gets
very, very LOUD.
By engaging in the struggle, feeling
the feelings of unworthiness or inauthenticity or stupidity or
whatever else might come up and acknowledging that those feelings are
there, I find that they dissipate much more quickly than when I try
to resist them and pretend they don't exist. By acknowledging the
fear and focusing on the process, I'm often left tired, but with a
great feeling of having done something worthwhile just because I did
it despite being afraid that I might fail.
What are some things you've done that
you've been afraid of but were later really glad you did them? I'd
love to hear from you.
Gotta go memorize some lines, but I'll leave you with this video of my first tandem skydive at The Ranch, in Gardiner, NY. I recommend jumping out of a plane to get your mind in the present pretty darn quickly. Scared, yes, but an amazing day and an experience I won't forget.
