Tuesday, January 22, 2008

What was that?

Wow. Okay. What the hell just happened? I cannot remember being so ridiculously busy in ages.

This first day of filming was kind of a slog. I arrived at 10:15 am ready to go but we didn’t actually start filming until 12:10. Out of 36 shots we did 6 ending at 2:30. The whole process if pretty exhausting. It’s repetitive and tedious. We are also filming in a cold space with a concrete floor, so standing continuously begins to get to my back. I also began to get pretty darned tired so I had a lot of trouble with scene 7 and it ended up not getting shot.

The auditorium scenes with the extras were a lot easier. It went faster. I had far fewer shots and was in and out in about an hour. Tonight we should be finishing the scenes in the cold concrete location. I’ll probably be there all night. Yippee.

I also had three rehearsals for J16. We did Act III on Friday. It went alright. I mostly knew my lines. Although not as strongly I would have liked. But we went through it twice and it was okay. Sunday we did I single full run. We were missing some actors but that was okay. Monday we had a full run and that was hellish. Everyone was there and we staged the end of Act III and curtain call. When you try to jam everyone on stage I’m completely amazed by how many we really are. I’m still having a little trouble with a couple of the Act III lines. But I must say I am incredibly irritated with some of the actors who only have ten or so lines and are still calling line. I have pages and pages and some of them are paragraphs and they have ½ a page and can’t remember? What the hell? It was way too much for me to be able to recount what happened in great detail. It seems to just blur into one big clusterfuck of a rehearsal.

I decided I’m going to take the part of Sammii (yes, it has two is) in Proposals at PRP. The director told me that P, who I worked with in Reckless, is going to play the character opposite me so I couldn’t say no. I’m actually really looking forward to it now that I read it. So I’ll have the month of March off and then back onto the stage. The part is much smaller than my current one so I’ll have more time off than I currently do.

2 comments:

Joe D said...

I feel your pain about long blocks of speech compared with people with only a few lines.

I wonder if you've played opposite someone like me. I internalize the character and try to respond to the dialogue and action around me. During off-book rehearsals, the lines don't necessarily come out verbatim, but do flow with what just happened and what's about to happen. Afterwards, I compare my performance with the script (especially checking for places where I must be verbatim!) and that way, get closer and closer.

I have had other actors get spitting mad at me for doing that rather than calling for lines, because they've memorized my lines and can get completely thrown off if I don't end with exactly the right last four words. I don't know what to tell these actors; how would you deal with it?

Muzak Box said...

I wouldn't mind that so much. Intent is more important to me than the words on the play. My problem isn't that it's that they don't have intent and because the play is courtroom drama there are very specific bits of information that each character HAS to give and they aren't doing that.