From an actor’s perspective, if working on a classic piece of theater is a paint-by-number project, then doing new works is a beginner’s pottery class. With the former, you can still make some interesting and unique choices—say, using color #4 where the grid calls for #7—but the structure is basically in place. The resulting picture can be stultifying or electric, but everyone looking at it knows that they are looking at a meadow or a sailboat or an angel. With the latter, you show up on the first day, and there’s a wheel; you understand in a vague way that you’re supposed to spin it around and craft something symmetrical and lovely, but by the end of class you have three broken nails, you’re covered in wet gray clay, and you’re holding something that looks like a cross between an ashtray and a sombrero. You decide to paint it fuchsia. Then the instructor tells you he needs to go home and re-write the course syllabus. You cry, have a cocktail, and go back and do it again the next day.
Or doing classic plays is like working from a recipe, and new works are an Iron Chef competition, where you get a bucket of ingredients and an hour on the timer and you have to come up with something completely original and delicious. When working from a recipe, you can still deviate—add a little more of this or less of that—but it’s been tested over time and many iterations and has satisfied eaters in many kitchens. The Iron Chef meal might dazzle or it might fall flat, but whatever it is, it’s not going to be the same as eating mom’s spaghetti. It’s not going to immediately feel like home. It’s not even going to be someone’s jazzy interpretation of bruschetta. It’s going to be squid soup with morels and olives. Once in a while it will turn out to be something you want to keep in the family recipe book forever and ever. More often it’ll see the light of day only briefly, never to be tried again.
In classic plays, it seems that actors and directors have to make more decisions; in new works, they make more discoveries. You’re in uncharted territory. Rather than choosing among the seven paved paths from here to there, you need to grab your machete, take a deep breath, and start whacking your way through the jungle.
OK. It’s difficult to make an exact comparison between rehearsing a classic play and rehearsing a new one, in part because there’s no way to hold all the other elements constant—the cast, the producing company, the director, the amount of time you have, where you’re rehearsing, etc.—unless you’re lucky enough to be part of an established company. But for your average freelance actor who bounces from show to show, from company to company, from theater to theater, from classic to new work, every experience has a slew of new (to you) elements. So it’s possible that the sense of flailing helplessly at a pottery wheel for the first time has more to do with your director’s style than it does with the fact that you’re working on something that’s never been produced before. Who can say? All I know is that I’ve never felt completely at sea when working on Ibsen or Chekhov. But the times I have gone home from a new play rehearsal and questioned whether I wouldn’t be better suited to flamenco dancing in zero gravity than to acting, well, they’re more frequent than I’d like to admit. Not that flailing is a bad thing. It can be invigorating, risky and interesting and turn into something beautiful. It can also, of course ,be horrifying, like a YouTube video of a big man in a diaper trying to do the “All the Single Ladies” dance in his bedroom.
Difficulty describing new work
I went from doing Hedda Gabler for Gremlin Theatre to doing
800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick for the Workhaus Collective. The contrast first comes into view when my co-workers at my day job ask what show I’m working on. When I say, “
Hedda Gabler,” they say, “Oh. Neat.” When I say, “
800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick,” they say, “Huh?” Then I stumble through something like this: “Well, it’s about Philip K. Dick. Do you know him? He was a science fiction writer. He wrote the book that became
Blade Runner? Yeah. Anyway, it’s about him. Comedy or drama? Well…it’s more like sci-fi. The dramatic version of sci-fi. I mean, like, the stage is going to revolve and stuff. But it’s also really poignant and funny. So…you should come!” (If anyone is interested in hiring me to market your shows, shoot me an e-mail.) The next time the contrast becomes clear is when I try to fit
800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick onto my resume. Seriously, you try it.
Playing Hedda Gabler and playing Tessa Dick are both fraught in their own ways. On the one hand, playing a character that Cate Blanchett, Mary Louise-Parker, Kate Burton, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Annette Benning, and Martha Plimpton have all played is incredibly daunting. How could you ever hope to fill those shoes? On the other, all those varying interpretations have left a discernible range of possibilities, choices, and options that I could sense in the ether surrounding the character and choose among. Hedda is really a distinct, separate, vivid thing by now.
With Tessa, I’m starting from scratch. The fact that she’s an actual, living person is no help because she doesn’t exist in the public consciousness at all—there are no easily accessible videos or audio recordings of her; the audience isn’t going to have a clear image of who I’m emulating. So I get to make her up, with the help of what’s on the page. And the easiest thing to do in that situation is to make her me—put myself in the circumstances of the script and play me. But what fun is that? That’s what I find most challenging about working on new plays: fleshing out vivid and distinct characters from scratch, not playing subtle variations on myself. (And now I’ve jinxed myself by writing about it while I’m still trying to do it. Good grief.
Fringe Famous, when I publically do the opposite of what my stated ideal is, please don’t come for me. )
More similar than different
Ultimately, though, the process of working on a new play is not that different than the process of working on a classic. You have these words to say and these relationships to inhabit and you try to figure out how to do it in a way that is true and interesting and dramatic. Sure, it can be useful to have the playwright in the room if you need some clarification on the text, but, in the end, it’s you up there saying the lines, and you need to find your own way into them.
There is the politics of the playwright-director dynamic to be aware of (assuming they’re different people). You don’t want to rely too much on the playwright telling you his or her intention because a lot of those choices are in the director’s job description. On a new play, I usually get the sense that the playwright built this motorcycle, and has now climbed into the sidecar to watch the director drive it, with a mixture of trepidation and glee. Still, in the end, it’s not that the processes of putting up new works and classics differ in their fundamentals; mostly just in ambiance – doing the same dance to different music.
Three out of the four productions I’ve done in the past six months have been new works. Even the one classic was a new adaptation by the director. This town is lousy with creative people churning out new work, for better or for worse. As an actor, I like doing a healthy mix of the classics and the new.
I’m an analogy junkie. Allow me one more: If I think of my acting career as a yoga practice, it’s easy for me to see the need for working on both classic and new plays. Down dog is your staple pose—the tried and true—with infinite room for sinking deeper, holding longer, surrendering more. Crane pose is scarier—you’re balancing your knees on your elbows and you might do a face-plant at any moment; your arms are shaking and you have to remind yourself to breathe. Anyone watching is a little nervous for you. But you keep working at it, developing new muscles and physiological stamina, until it looks lovely (or you can at least lift your toes from the ground for 2 seconds before collapsing). The combination of both poses in one practice offers the opportunity to grow in two directions—to root down and dig deep, and to strive up and out. I wouldn’t want a career of doing just one or the other. I want both. I want it all.
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