T21
- Waking can sometimes be a joyous, gentle transition from peaceful void to sensual reality. Today it was not.
- One does much walking in New York. I probably average an hour or more of walking the streets in a day. Podcasts - God bless them - fill the time nicely, but when one is all out, one must invent more creative methods of amusement. Enter the Imitate-Other-Peoples'-Walks game. It is a game to be played alone and is ideal for young actors training in the art of human observation. I will skip the description of the rules and share an anecdote from my game today. I passed a man with a stiff limp in his right leg on 2nd and 17th. I adopted the limp for some blocks, imagining the cause of my malady (army, accident, defect, disease) and I was trucking along pretty well for a fellow with a hindrance, when I passed a man without any legs. I dropped my limp with guilt.
- "The Politics of portraiture" continues to demonstrate its bullshitiness.
- "721 Broadway" is both the address and the title of the building that headquarters the Tisch School of the Arts. It is strange for the building of an art school to bear so utilitarian a name, but the business school had a previous claim to "Tisch Hall." Seven Twenty One is an attractive, well-equipped facility with 12 floors. It is the high level of decor that further emphasized the anomaly of floor #9. When Chrissy suggested we conduct our Crucible rehearsal on the ninth, I imagined some wonderland of sound-proofed, climate controlled rehearsal studios of which I was unaware. Instead I stepped from the elevator into a destitute, deserted, half-demolished Twilight-Zone-esk dimension of trash and exposed insulation. It was as though a single floor from some abandoned building were wedged into the middle of our high-tech tower of tasteful lighting and Ikea furniture. How truely bizarre. Interestingly, there were two or three other groups of actors rehearsing elsewhere amongst the rubble (I assume from a few glimspes that they were actors; they might actually have been angry, drug dealing squatters). After failing to open a number of locked rooms, we came upon the doors without any doorknobs. A small and relatively uncluttered room proved a fine practice space and we had a productive time. I must return some day soon to this Bermuda-Triangle-Like paradox to take some serious pictures. Until then, I can only hope this Creepy Narnia respects my wishes and STAYS THEY HELL OUT OF MY DREAMS!
- Despite two semesters of groupmatesmanship, Pat and I have never had a scene together. So you can imagine our glee last Wednesday when Jimmy paired us up for The Importance of Being Earnest. In fact, it was so great, we totally forgot about it! The three day weekend came and went with nary a thought to the scene slated for the coming Day of Wednes. It wasn't until today that a fuzzy little memory ticked the backs of my eyeballs. "Oh Fuck!" I may have said. I called Pat immediately and discovered that he had rehearsal until 9. Since another scene scheduled for that day had already canceled, there was no way we could pull out. With script in hand, I trek down to Water St. at 9pm for the cram jam of a lifetime. Well, suffice to say, it was crazy. We cut a third of the lines, drilled the remaining dialouge, watched the Daily Show, ate hotdogs, ran lines some more, paced up and down, took turns on and off book, ran the lines more, until, by 1:40, all of my brains had leaked out through my ears. I crashed on Pat's couch with the script under my pillow. How will this fadge?!
