March 02, 2005
I've Got a Puritanical Fever!
About two hours after we took our last bow on Sunday, which would be about 6:30 CST, I felt my strength leave me. My mind began to struggle with new information; refusing to study, read, or even concentrate on TV, but routing itself through cyclic replays of the same moments from the past week. While it quickly became apparent that I had caught Tom Simmons’ vicious cold, at first it felt like withdrawal.
I’ve still got the cold, and given its druthers my brain still retreats to moments in character, repeating scenes and dialogue with monomaniacal fervor, but it’s fading now as new things happen in my life to replace the play. But I think I need to say a few simple and stupid things to finally put J. Proctor to rest.
Since a lot of them lurk about the website (and two of them actually post), I should mention the cast. Lovely bunch. Some of them had very little or no experience, some of them had a whole lot, and it generally didn’t matter. Because, as I’ll get to, The Crucible is hard no matter where you’re coming from. Our director was either smart or lucky in his minimalist approach- he told us very early on that it wasn’t his job to make up our characters for us- because they all rose to fill the dramatic hole he intentionally dug. A special mention goes out to Werner Christensen as Judge Hathorne. Werner made Hathorne rivetingly vicious and haughty, and he also loaned us six of the seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and until he gives us that last fix we will speak of him glowingly on these pages.
But even those cast members who haven’t loaned us DVDs deserve more praise than I am giving them. They made the play entertaining, they communicated its message clearly but subtly, and, as far as I know, they…. I’m trying to think of a way to say, “didn’t pee in each other’s pools and stayed out of each other’s bedrooms” without saying it. Perhaps something like: “Behaved in a friendly but professional manner”? Yes. Good.
When I first started acting, I acted and then reflected. One of the dubious gifts of getting older and doing more plays is that I’m able to reflect in near real-time. That is to say, as a moment goes by on stage, I’m already thinking about it and, usually, mentally wincing at some clunky thing I did. During this last show this mental wincing became a real obstacle, as the din of my mental review threatened to drown out the next moment of performance. My mouth would say lines and my face would… pull faces, but my brain would be grumbling, “Why do you have to shout all the time? And those busy busy hands! Stop flailing them! You’re having a spat with your wife, not treading water! Oh, great, you were late with your cue line. The audience could’ve driven all the SUV’s in Lake Oswego [shout-out to the Oregon gang] through that pause!” And so on.
So, that was the bad thing for me about the show. I mean, aside from the fact that, other than two pushes, a slap, and a sudden lurch toward Putnam, you could pretty much do The Crucible as a reader’s theater. And one can always complain about all the tense anticipation, but that goes with most of your endeavors that are worth writing a weblog about. Athletics, big scary exams, fishing derbies, all require a huge amount of preparation, an interminable period of waiting, and then the briefest sparkle of a payoff.
And those are also all the good things for me about the show. Those moments of distracting self-critique rained down upon me because I’m undisciplined, unfocused, and pretty concerned with the work. The stakes were high for all of us (collegiate theater in South Dakota being the make-or-break game of Russian roulette that it is), and I wanted everything I could control to be as effective and affecting as I could. Sometimes this concern got in my way, and I hope someday to be able to channel it when it’s appropriate and ignore it otherwise, but it really beats doing a play, feeling okay about it, and then realizing all the ways it could have been better years later. Which is how I feel about high school.
The Crucible was really hard to do because it’s boring. We’ve heard its message a thousand times, but usually it’s dressed up with a little kissing/fighting/dancing. We had to make the message compelling in (beautiful) period costume on a proscenium stage (which means we were, for most of the audience, either very small, hard to hear, or both) and with the aforementioned two tosses, slap, and lurch as our main elements of spectacle. And so we worked very hard to make lots of minor moments tell. And I had a lot of fun with that work. I am really keen on rehearsing, with all of its experimentation and discovery. I enjoy seeing things work and not work and understanding the difference. And, while sitting around waiting to work does make me a little crazy, that’s when half of the discoveries come. Besides, I was lucky enough to sit around with my wife who has a love of discovery and invention that surpasses my own.
And the brief moment of sparkle- five weeks of rehearsal for six shows- well, that stings. But so it goes. All my life, the moment I start to really get good at something (which has happened) is the moment I move on to something new. Part of me is very worried about the time when I’ll have to master something and stick with it for a decade or two.
But that isn’t my problem now. I’ve been part of an effort to master a Great American Play and I think we succeeded. Now I have to move on to the next thing, armed with the freshly-forged plough-shares (as Ms. Briscoe would spell it) of wisdom I’ve looted from Arthur Miller’s corpse.
Also, Werner is really great.
