24-Hour Theatre – My Brain is Full!

Phew! I’m finally getting caught up on my blog entries, so sorely neglected thanks to end-of-school stuff and my desire to, immediatley afterward, spend an inordinate amount of time drinking. I’ve been looking forward to this one. There are only a couple of pictures, because being a genius and having spent the past week on constant picture duty, it totally slipped my mind to, like, take pictures during this thing. But the story is worth it anyway, trust me.

On Thursday I got back from the airport at about 9:30pm, and it wasn’t too much later that I crashed for the night, one blessed night of sleep in my own bed. On Friday I had to catch a train at about 2pm in order to get to Wollongong for this crazy theatre thing, but there was one problem: the dryer in my apartment was STILL out of commission for week numero THREE. So I was forced to pack some dirty laundry to take with me to wash there, which was funny and sad at once. College life at its best. Luckily my host was willing to put up with this kind of hilarity.

Said host – really, “hosts,” since they all went out of their way to make me feel completely welcome in their home – were my Script Frenzy friend Laura and her family, consisting of her husband Houston and daughter Margaret. (It feels kind of funny to be blogging about them, because I know for a FACT that Laura will be reading this blog entry. I promise I am NOT just trying to suck up when I layer them all with praise. They’re just awesome, that’s all.) I was told to sit on the left side of the train on the way down for amazing ocean views.

Honestly, the cost of the train (about 4.50$ for me, as a student) was completely worth the view alone. This picture is a pale approximation, taken through the scratched-up, dirty window of the train. It’s also from the trip home, since I was too stunned (take that how you will) to take pictures on the way down.

I got to the station and Margaret waved me over to their car so I wouldn’t wander forlornly around the parking lot for an hour, which was mighty nice of her. We drove up the hill to end all hills to get to their house – a humerously inept bit of 1970’s-ish archetecture that redeems itself almost entirely by way of the ocean views at the doorstep.

I met Houston and dropped off my things, and then we were off again – to go drink some free beer at a self-brew place. If there has ever been an auspicious beginning to a theatre-related weekend, I haven’t heard of it. Except for the fact that our writer, Laura, was coming down with a terrible cold at the time and could hardly even TASTE the free beer. Woe! Gotta love that kind of timing, eh?

After a quick bite of supper we went to the theatre to get our instructions for the crazy 24-hour endeavour. The thing was basically set up like this:

Four groups were participating. Each one had a writer and a few actors (ours also included a director, Tim, a friend of Laura’s/Houston’s and a completely great guy to work with.) The general theme this year was SHAKESPEARE, which I find kind of ironic since I only recently took my first course on the Bard since high school (after IB English I was kind of burned out for a while). Our play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream and had to include a guy with a donkey head, as well as a communal “red herring” – this line from Hamlet (Act I scene v, I think?): “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Once we got back to home base, Laura locked herself away to write. Margaret and I watched the first episode of “Dr. Who” (I was told, in all seriousness, that I could NOT stay at her house unless I watched it) before we youngins* hit the sack. Because a 10-minute play wasn’t, apparently, enough of a challenge (or maybe just because the concepts of “writer” and “masochist/sadist” are intrinsically linked) Laura wrote the words to a song to open the play, which Houston then wrote three-part barbershoppy harmony for. It was completely mind-boggling and very invigorating for me to be in that environment – the very air in the house is THICK with TALENT.

(* Margaret was totally fun to both work with and generally hang out with. She’s got just the right mix of smarts, responsibility, geekiness and fun wackiness going on. I get the impression that we would have gotten along extremely well if we’d both been twelve and on the same continent at the same time, though we already get along well enough that Laura called us something akin to “the unholy aliance.” Screw turning 25 in a couple months, I think I’ll halve my current age instead.)

The weekend had been kind of laid-back for me up until that point, but at about nine in the morning on Saturday things picked up significantly when I was handed a copy of the script – entitled “Real Shakespeare” – and a cup of coffee. We three actors (Houston, Margaret and me) and Tim the director had a bit of breakfast and started working with the script, reading through it a couple of times and then just chatting about what we thought about our characters – where they’d come from, their motivation, that kind of thing. On the first go I just read my character straight, but that wasn’t working for me for some reason – I tend to find a character through a voice. I tried a kind of vaguely New York-ish accent in a higher register, and the character popped out much more clearly. (And she was also about 115% more annoying that way. Always a plus!)

Our coffees and breakfast-type foods devoured, we braved the outside in order to make use of the back deck to start the blocking. Tim was amazing, very encouraging, and he had a great sense of how to use the space and get us to move around in it. Laura, meanwhile, tried to relax a little and nurse her evil evil sickness after a hard night of writing, as well as adhere to one of her tenets of good leadership: feeding us. Once we got the blocking figured out we had a break for lunch and learned our song. I’m forced to toot our own horn for a minute here, because we sounded AWESOME. Too awesome, actually, since the point was that we sound as hammy as possible. With some overwrought physical actions and facial expressions, I think we hit just the right balance.

After lunch we went to the university where Houston works and started trying to drill the blocking and lines into our heads. This is where it got scary and the hours started to seem entirely too short. I know that the music and the rhyme and the iambic pentameter SHOULD have made the song easier to learn, but for some reason it really didn’t want to stick in my brain. I drilled that mofo I don’t know how many times, but I never felt perfectly confident about it, especially the last verse, for some reason. The rest of the play felt quite good, though – I was one of the lucky ones with no big quotes from Shakespeare to remember (though let’s face it, doing big dramatic speeches also MAKES you a “lucky one”).

Then it was time for supper, and then – good holy crap, was it already eight o’clock?! Suddenly we were in the audience watching the other plays. A couple of them were pretty good. And we were last to go on. And on we went.

The lights went up. Margaret started the song by herself flawlessly. I joined her for one line – and then MY MIND WENT BLANK! AUGH!! And of COURSE this is not the verse that I had been worried about. (ALWAYS.) So I kept a hammy smile on my face and frantically tried to figure out what the next line was while Margaret kept singing by herself. And then SHE blanked (I don’t blame her, suddenly singing by yourself when you’re SUPPOSED to have harmony can have that effect). And we stood there with hammy grins on our faces for a few agonizingly-long seconds that seemed about three minutes long each.

Then Margaret said, “We just learned this song today,” and everybody laughed and applauded, and then Houston stepped up and got us started into the third verse and we found our harmonies and finished the song. It ended with one of those unison dips in pitch (I think that was at least partly my idea), and we all physically dipped down together and back up again when we did it. Hammy as all heck. Recovery! More applause.

The rest of the thing went pretty much without a hitch. Shakespearean quotations were remembered. Blocking happened naturally. The cardboard donkey head that Laura made for Houston to wear for one part looked great. Lots of laughs were had. And then it was over! Twenty four hours of work and stress for ten minutes in the spotlight. Clearly we artsy people are out of our minds. (Having said that, I would NEVER want to be sane.)

We went back to the home base on the hill to drink some beer and celebrate. Our fellow Script Frenziers had come to see the show and intended to come back for the fun and to help devour the rest of the snacks, but they decided to have a Scooby Doo-like adventure involving an abandoned mine before they joined us. This is when I say again that I AM GOING TO MISS YOU GUYS! It would have been a great experience anyway, but it’s always fun to know that you have friends in the audience. It’s motivation, I will say that for sure.

The next day, after we’d all slowly dragged ourselves out of bed, I was dropped off at the train station in order to make the hour-and-a-half trek back up to Sydney. But not before Margaret and I ran around on the beach for a bit in the whipping wind.

The train SHOULD have taken an hour and a half, but in actual fact there happened to be MAJOR delays that day. Everything from the train just sitting on the tracks waiting for the signals to change to “this train no longer goes to the station you need – enjoy!” I eventually got home, but not before 6pm. It would have been more annoying if I hadn’t had some good music to listen to, and Isaac Asimov short stories to read. And stunning ocean views, of course.

It’s weird – this kind of whirlwind theatre experience is both draining and invigorating. If I could have done it again the next weekend, I would have in a heartbeat. The timing was also perfect – I had just spent the better part of two weeks either sequestered away in my room working on school stuff, or zipping around on the west coast. I love spending time alone and travelling by myself, but I also crave contact with other people, particularly folks who are on some of the same kind of wavelengths as me. Working together was great, but so were just having conversations, laughing about an ever-increasing stock of in-jokes, and playing vocabulary-based word games (the topic for this weekend: words that have a negative form, but don’t really have a positive one. Like “Disturbed” – can one be “Turbed”?) Not once did I feel uncomfortable or out of my depth all weekend.

Of course, maybe they couldn’t STAND me, but are just really good actors. But then, I have this thought about everybody I know. (Doesn’t everybody? … I’m not alone here, right? … Right?)

All in all: Great writing, great directing, great acting, great singing, great people, great beer. What more can a person ask for in a weekend?

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