I mentioned some time ago here on the blog that I was working out some details of another acting related sort of project. It is more finalized now, and I will share it with you.
Plus, in the time since first mentioning it, something else has been added to my theatre life. But first things first.
I have secured a temporary, part time job, as a tour guide. I will not give the name of the company, because I have not gotten permission from them to do so, and it is probably bad form to mention them by name in my personal acting blog. But the gist of it is...there are various haunted locations in a city I live near, according to legend. Throughout the Halloween season and a bit beyond, tours are conducted down some of the streets of these locations, guides giving the story, and keeping the paying tourists entertained. Basically,your typical tour guide stuff.
They encourage you to give a little character to your tour when you give it...so it is, in a sense, acting, though perhaps not technically. It is also not technically amateur, as I will be getting paid. But it is my blog, and the news was relevant enough to include, by my judgment.
Some time this week I will meet with the supervisor, and give him the tour, to make sure I will be on track for the October busy season. The script does not have to be memorized verbatim, so it's not exactly like a play. But there is a lot of information to absorb. But I have been working on it, and would say I can recall about 65% of what I need right now. I should be fine.
Again, for the sake of discreetness, I will probably not be related stories of my encounters as a tour guide here on the blog. But I might, if I can keep it anonymous enough, so the company is not identified. We shall see.
Now, for my other, more to the topic news.
A few weeks ago, a director I worked with back in 2003, in my first production at the Old Opera House, emailed me, and said his wife had started a new theatre company. One of their actors had to bail out, and he wanted to know if I would replace him. After much haggling over schedules and such, I agreed to do it...mainly because I wanted to work with these people again. Also, because it is a collection of really short plays, and i will only be in two. The memorization burden should be minimal. (Though concurrent with committed the tour to memory.)
The production is All In the Timing; a collection of 7 short plays by David Ives. I will be appearing as Mark in The Philadelphia and as the Baker in Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread.
Many actors are familiar with Ives. Indeed, I myself had my first lead role ever in Ives' Variations on the Death of Trotsky back in college. That play too, is part of this collection, so I was a stone throw away from being in a play for the second time. (Something that as of yet, has never happened.)
Like my recent turn in the New Voice Play Festival as JFK, (see my postings in and around June of this year for more details), this production will have only a hand full of rehearsal, before going on during the last weekend in October, and the first one in November. One is a fairly complicated text, so all of you blog readers out there who follow my adventures, i need you to pull for me, and the power of my brain in the coming weeks!
So, that is pretty much what alot of my time leading into Thanksgiving will be about. I will keep you posted regularly about the Ives thing, for sure.
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5 comments:
Oh...hearty congratulations, Ty.
I'm so happy to read all of these and you will do very well I know.
Have dropped you a reply. Also, just wanted to remind you that you've had quite a bit of acting roles these year. Not bad at all. :-)
I love All in the Timing! I keep waiting for someone around here to do it so I can audition. You said you have a short rehearsal schedule so my little two cents is learn all the lines before you even begin so you can use the whole time for doing the real work and skipping the whole adjustment that happens when you go off book.
Good luck! I hope you have a fantastical time!
I'm not sure whether to talk to you here or there...oh well. I was just curious what your memorization method for lines is?
What I usually do is read through a script one whole time, and then right away read through it again, highlighting my parts.
After reading through that, i will record it on my micro-recorder. I will read other people's line in a heavily altered voice to distinguish them from my own. (You should hearsome of the tapes when I played women voices!)
Then I often listen to the tape while reading through the script, and eventually, listen to just the tape, pausing it after each of my cue lines, so I can recite my line. (I usually break it up into French scenes to do that.
Eventually, I will go over increasingly larger parts of the play at once with the recorder until I feel comfortable.
I also try to visualize scene by scene in my head, what each person is saying, when I do not have the recorder.
Neart the end of a process, I will say all of the lines in a scene/act to myself, as fast as I can, while doing something like taking a shower, or cooking a meal.
I do not memorize everyone else's lines verbatim, but I always have a gist of what they are saying.
May no have time to do it all forthis show, (and in fact it will not be possible to use that method for Philip Glass, as my most recent post indicated.) But that is usually how I go about doing it.
How do you proceed to memorize lines?
I write all my lines as one long sentence. I probably do that four times. Then I write them scene by scene using a / when someone else is talking. Then I do the whole thing again but REALLY messy so that when I scan over it I have to have pretty good idea what they are to even read it. And then I write the whole thing using only the first letter of each word.
I don't like to speak my words aloud except in rehearsal and when I am driving to and from rehearsal because I find that I start to assign weight to them and don't respond as naturally on stage.
I'd have to say for the Glass play though neither of our methods are good. I do think a digital recording that you can listen to over and over again though sounds extremely helpful.
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