It's About Respect.

When you get down to it, performing theatre, like so many other things, is about respect. The best productions are small, short lived communities, and communities are founded upon respect. That isn't always to say you must love everyone else, and enjoy the company of all theatre people. That's silly, of course. But if we remain honest to why we're in a show, and give respect where it is due, the theatre can be a crucible for not only culture and art, but dignity and perhaps for a special few, spiritual enlightenment.

So where does your respect lie, and how is it shown in a production?

-We need to respect our responsibilities in a production. Cast, crew, director. It doesn't matter what your job is. Respect it. Be dependable. Do your work. Show enthusiasm for what you are creating. Be on time. Go beyond your obligations. This is respecting your position in a production.

-Respect the others in the production. That should be obvious. Yet we often fail in this one. Not by intentionally showing specific disrespect for others, but by forgetting that there are others. By believing that we are the only aspect of the production to which we owe anything. If you come in late for rehearsals, leave your props all over the place, make yourself unavailable to help others out when needed, and other such things, you are being just as disrespectful. It doesn't matter how good you believe yourself to be, you are never the only concern, or even the most important concern in a production. So don't act like it. There are others involved in making this show possible. Help them do their job when you can, and treat them as they deserve.

-Respect the venue. Theatre is anywhere people invoke characters to tell a story. You may never find yourself performing in a large, posh, high capacity theatre. It may be a small black box, a school auditorium, or a converted storefront. How easy to conclude that a venue is unworthy of your respect as an actor. Track mud into the green room, (if there even is a green room). Leave your trash laying around. The place is just a little dump, right? Someone will come along and pick it up, and after all, you can't be bothered. You have your own problems, and this isn't Broadway.

Yet you are here. And others are here. Nobody put a gun to you head and forced you to be in a show. So if being in one is that important to you, consider the fact that performing is an art, as well as a responsibility. To some, a sacred responsibility. Not because anybody involved is superior to the world, but because decent human beings have opted to give of their time and energy so that others can lay down money to be transported somewhere else by your efforts. And it's been that way for for a few thousand years. Perhaps that alone makes any theatre venue worthy of your respect.

You don't have to feel this way about theatre, but if you don't, you are free to go do something else. While you are there, show respect for the craft itself by treating the any venue with respect.

-Respect the audience. I often say that the audience is the unseen character in any production. They come in all types. And sometimes there are cold audiences, and audiences that are asleep. Sometimes the cast will be barely bigger than the audience. Some audiences will never laugh at the comedy, and barely clap at the end of the show. And that can be obnoxious, I won't lie to you. But still, they are an audience, and in most cases a paying audience, and they deserve your best any given night. Unless they are heckling, (which no actor should tolerate), we mustn't pick and choose which audiences will get our best and which will not.

Nor should we try to trick them, or milk them for more. They will give what they feel moved to give. That isn't always as much as we, the actors, want, but it is beyond our control. Don't mug, or overact to try to get them to respond more than they are. Just perform, and receive what they offer.

-Respect the script. As a writer myself, I understand somewhat how testy playwrights can get about every aspect of their scripts. They want them performed exactly a certain way, down to every teardrop shed. Yet as an actor, I feel playwrights sometimes get too testy about their scripts. I like scripts that allow for broad interpretations of a play, instead of those who try to direct the production from the page. Most playwrights disagree.

Yet following lock-step every nuance that a playwright is demanding of the actor still does not show de facto respect for the script. Respect for a script, rather, has to do with internalizing it, and making every effort to understand the intentions of the piece. That means viewing the entire arc of the story, and not just your lines. That means seeking to understand the bits you don't follow. Don't try to blow it over, or hide it as you perform, but actually dig into the material to find what you can find. In a good script the answer is usually there somewhere. Contrary to popular playwright belief you are not a mindless drone on stage. But you do at least need to read a map. The script is your map. Don't rewrite the show. (Which is much different than interpreting.)

-Respect the director. This can be one of the most difficult, because directors often come down with a God complex. You don't have to look far in this blog to realize I am very much against autocratic theatre direction. Leave that to the movies where it belongs. Taken too far, someone barking orders and rude comments at performers doesn't deserve respect. No more than people in other positions that treat colleagues poorly deserve it.

And a good director is your colleague. You work together to put on a good show. You have your scenes and your lines to worry about, but they have the entire show, on stage and off, to tend to. They have to gather things together in a coherent whole. This doesn't afford them the right to establish a dictatorship, but it does mean their job is difficult in a different way than yours is, and you should remember that. If you have a problem, approach them in private, like a civilized human being. Avoid the temptation to confront them while rehearsing. It's a challenge sometimes, but you'll be better off for it, and most directors will appreciate it.

-Respect props and costumes. Yes, there are so many fun objects in a theatre. But it isn't your stuff, and quite often, it takes a long time and/or a lot of money to secure such things for a collection. Don't eat in your costume, and don't play around with props. If you ruin something, the whole theatre suffers. Don't be that person.

-Most importantly, respect yourself. Whatever your skill level, whatever show you are in, whether you make any money or not, respect yourself. When you are in a show you are involved in a tradition that is in some ways part of the bedrock foundation of Western culture. That isn't to say you ought to feel self-important, or ponder the complexities of this statement every time you are in a show. But if you stop and think about it once in a while, it's at least kind of cool, isn't it?

Think of all the others that have done it before you, just on the stage you are on today. Then multiply that by all the stages over time. Lots of people have done what you are doing in this show. Don't let people tell you it's pathetic, a waste of time, or simply, "playing dress up". It's none of those things, if you don't want it to be. It's art, and when you do it, you're an artist, worthy of your own respect.

Bored with Boards

There are several large and well known online gathering places for community theatre enthusiasts such as myself. Message boards. Blogs. But I confess that I am not a part of any of them.

I have tried to be more than once at various points over the years. I may even try to be so again in the future, but I might now. I just cannot "get into" such online communities, even though I know that I should.

I am uncertain why it never seems to take. You'd think with all of the potential benefits of connecting with other actors like myself in other theatres around the country I would jump at the chance. And as I mentioned a few times before, I have. But after a short time it loses its appeal.

Maybe it is just the nature of message boards in general, but I tend to find the same situation in any theatre board I visit. The politics. The less than warm welcome new people receive. The dead threads that leave an open ended question unanswered for months sitting on the same forum right next to a post about something frivolous and irrelevant getting 156 responses and counting. A need to sell one's presence or one's concern before the tribe before any amount of attention is paid to what you say. It's maddening and deflating. If I wanted to bring up a subject and have nobody take an interest in it, I would just hang out in person with 80% of the people I know.

Perhaps such boards tend to attract mostly mainstream thinking. A "hotbed for the conventional" to coin a phrase. And while I am not one to push envelopes or challenge the status quo just for the sake of doing it, my ideas for acting, directing, publicizing and any number of other theatre related topics trend towards unconventional. You would think that artists, performers, and directors would be excited by such a challenge to the norm. And perhaps some are. Yet when I do express an opinion contrary to the standard acting or theatre practice, message board users have tended to respond with silence or with indignation.

Or perhaps I have just not found the right message board for community theatre.

In the end, I know that I need a fresh set of ears for some of my experiences. My theories. My ideas. I work with some talented, wonderful people in my local community theatre circle, but they are the same people over and over most times. The experiences are usually good ones around here, but at the same time I long for a different view from different people. Others who do love theatre, and know what they are talking about, but wouldn't have the slightest notion as to the politics of Theatre A in this town, or the nature of the casting preferences that are obvious in Theatre B. People who can talk of the nature of the craft and enjoyment of same, instead of gravitating towards local personality conflicts and specific tendencies of any given board of directors. I think we all benefit from new perspectives like that.

Any suggestions for such places for discussion online would be appreciated, though keep in mind I have visited the biggest three message boards already so far. Though not for years. Maybe I need to give them a try again.

Happy Birthday Week, William Shakespeare.

Today I am excited to be one of many bloggers from around the world that are involved in the Happy Birthday Shakespeare 2011 project. I hope you will click on that link in the coming days and read how the work of William Shakespeare has impacted the lives of those who populate the blogosphere. And you can start with me and my very own story.

Long before I became part of the theatre world as an actor, I had an eye for the dramatic, and an ear for the well constructed, poetic, or moving turn of phrase. I would spend inordinate amounts of time as a younger person replaying in my mind scenes from my daily life that had impacted me. An argument I happened to see break out in a store, or the interaction between two strangers as one helped the other with a door or a shopping cart. Occurrences that to most others would usually appear to be just part of the every day social fabric of a free society would often to me be for good or bad, microcosms of the human experience. The potentially mundane became noteworthy to me because of the humanity on display.

Of course, I didn't process it in quite those terms when I was a child. I knew only that sometimes a moment, a scene in the street, an encounter between two strangers in a bookstore, or a shouted conversation between two parties working unseen behind a counter at the super market seemed in some way more eternal when processed through my mind, than the same events would be to just about anyone else in all likelihood, including the "actors" in said scenes.

As I got older, the dissemination of things I had seen out in the world became a little more sophisticated. I'd wonder why any given party said what they said. How the sentence they used may have either begun or ended the scene I happened upon. And by high school I would often in my head "rewrite" the scenes, with alternate words, statements, or circumstances that I thought would have made things turn out in a more peaceable, interesting, helpful, or in the very least, dramatic fashion.

Knowing this, is there any wonder why I spend most of my time these days either writing or acting? You would think not, but for the longest time I only wrote casually, and I was not on the stage for the first time until college.

Yet before I got serious about either acting or writing, I was serious about the plays of William Shakespeare.

The first I read was the first that most people read. Romeo and Juliet, in the 9th grade. (Age 14 or so.) It was part of my English class, of course, and we read it out loud during class time, different students taking turns sputtering, fumbling, and hissing their way through their assigned character of the day. I was no different, at least at first. But I found myself going home and reading through speeches and scenes that we would be going over in class the following day. Reading them outloud over and over again until I could construct some semblance of speech, of conversation, and of course, of drama from what I was reading.

Not that it was being read 100% correctly yet, but I found myself wanting to sound like a person in a scene who was encountering other people experiencing something that was happening in a street in Venice. I was trying to make those scenes as real as the scenes from the streets of Frederick, Maryland where I lived, and grew up.

In the end I didn't care for Romeo and Juliet that much. I did not at the time see the hype of it. Nor would I even read it again until two years ago when I appeared in the piece as Friar Laurence. (During which time I developed a greater appreciation of the text than I had as a wee freshman.) \

Yet despite my lukewarm reaction to the overall arc of Romeo and Juliet after my first reading of same, I was already looking forward to future explorations of the world of Shakespeare. And that is because I was beginning to see in him another mind who could, and actually wanted to take even the simplest and briefest of scenes between two walk-on characters and turn it into a high flying and memorable journey through the English language. Like my high school self, the characters in Shakespeare, even the minor ones, strove to use language as their weapons. Their aphrodisiacs. Their calling cards. You may not like what they are saying, but you will love the way they are saying it. Even if you don't yet understand all of it. And in the process, the characters will be reflection of some near universal aspect of the human condition.

That use of language, turn of phrase, precisely timed come back, or searching monologue present throughout Shakespeare was the closest I had come to viewing people behave like they did in the re-imagined scenes from daily life that I played in the theatre of my brain. Every moment potent in some way, and usually thanks to language.

Later on in my freshman year, I enjoyed The Merchant of Venice far more than my first delving into Shakespeare. Language again of course, but to me a far more interesting plot. A court room even! It is hard to beat drama in the form of court rooms goings on.

And so it went throughout the years of my private high school education. Othello. Macbeth. I became one of the only students in my high school's history that actually chose Henry V from the long list of potential summer reading projects that were required. To this day in fact I am one of the few people I know that loves the history plays, though that is not surprising, given that they combine everything I have said about Shakespeare with my life long fascination with monarchy.

Then in 12th grade it was time. The moment I knew was coming for four years. Some dreaded it. Some didn't care. I myself realized it would be important, regardless. Because it was then that we read Hamlet. The play of plays. The one about which virtually anyone, anywhere of substance had commented at least once. The often quoted, borderline mystical piece that I already knew in the minds of many in the know transcended not only all of Shakespeare's other works, but perhaps all English works for the stage ever written.

By 12th grade I was more used to the language. Starting to anticipate the devices used by the Bard. I could actually on occasion read a smaller Shakespearean passage as though I were performing it. (This was years before I was an actor, keep in mind.) So the confusion and question and frustrations of reading the plays of the Statfordian had mostly vanished by now, and it was all about reading the story of Hamlet.

And what a story it was. The impact of Hamlet on my mind cannot be overestimated. Because while up until that point Shakespeare had created drama, characters, and speeches in a manner that gave birth to the type of drama I created in my mind, Hamlet was something even more profound; Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, was me. Fatherless. Intellectual to the point of paralysis at times. Surrounded by people who barely understood him, and a few who wanted him out of their lives. Denied what was his.

So for the first time, Shakespeare went from being familiar, to being personal. I was the only person in the Honors English class that seemed to think by the end of the semester that Hamlet was noble. A hero in a sense. A genius in others. Years and eight readings of Hamlet later, I am still one of the few people I know who raises Hamlet himself to such a lofty position of esteem. And I don't care. All the scholars in the world can write their essays as to why Hamlet is not noble in the end, and it won't change a thing for me. The same can be said on my views on the other plays, unpopular as they sometimes may be.

That is because I see Shakespeare's works as something more than a treatise. Something too masterful to be ignored, but too visceral to be dissected into oblivion. The works of Shakespeare manage to recreate the human condition with virtually every line.

Poetic elevation of the mundane into the realm of angels, as well as acerbic reduction of the momentous and ceremonial down to the bawdy levels of the "common" man. And the universal human drama that plays out as a result. This is what Shakespeare did for me from the first moment. This is what he does for me when I perform him on stage. This is what he continues to do for me to this very day. And there is no reason to believe he will ever cease to reflect the dramatics of the world I see in my mind. And he shall always do it through the use of the English language.

Happy birthday indeed to the Bard of all bards.