Tag: Everybody Loves Opal

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My odds are better when I don’t audition

It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s been true when it comes to me and Expressions Theater.

Years ago, I auditioned for Mind Over Matt and was cast in the main role. In the spring, I auditioned for Wage Warfare and got shut out. 50% success rate. That by itself sounds pretty good, right?

However, for this summer’s production of Everybody Loves Opal, we were scrambling for a cast: not enough people auditioned for all of the roles. I was supposed to be just an assistant director, but since I’d been reading the Brad role during rehearsals for everyone else’s sake, I ended up playing that part for the performances as well.

Then there’s the fall/Christmas show that Expressions is putting on stage in November. I was planning on taking some time off, just relax and enjoy the season without acting, working backstage, etc. I got an email about auditions for Trials, Tribulations and Christmas Decorations and promptly deleted it. Life was spiffy.

Then I got a random phone call one evening about a month ago. At least I thought it was random. Erin, the director from Opal and the assistant director for this show, was calling to ask if I’d accept a role in the play. (Cindy, someone who’s worked with Expressions in the past, was yelling in the background that I was accepting the role whether I wanted to or not.)

There are two males in the script: John (the main character) and his son-in-law, Dennis. John is supposed to be of grandfatherly age and four or five people auditioned for that role. With about an hour left of the second day of auditions, they were distinctly lacking in a Dennis. No 30-somethings showed up, so they called me.

I suppose I could interpret that as “We’re desperate, you’re at least a marginally okay actor and won’t make the show suck too bad.” I prefer to put a more positive spin on it: “We’re desperate, you’re a slightly-more-than-marginally okay actor and could make people not thoroughly regret the fact that they paid for their tickets.” It’s all about stroking my own ego, right?

And it turns out that my luck for lack of auditioning has continued outside of Expressions. I’ve mentioned playing trivia on Thursday nights here before, but I haven’t mentioned is that a lot of my teammates attend the same church. They’ve put on a production of Scrooge every year since… I have no idea how long. I’m guessing they started sometime after “A Christmas Carol” was written, but that’s the extent of my knowledge in that regard.

I also know that one of them is the director this year and she’s been sounding… reminiscent of Erin this summer when we were having trouble finding people to put Opal onstage. In this case, it’s because they’re having a problem finding male townspeople to sing and dance in the background for Scrooge. A MAJOR problem.

Because I remembered everyone’s distress this summer, I volunteered to help out. Up until the last few weeks before performance weekend, my rehearsal schedule for the show will entail about three hours every Saturday. Learning music and choreography… I think I’ll be okay. I hope. We’re doing this for a church, I’m sure God will forgive me if I totally screw up.

I discovered how big the problem was when I got to the church last Saturday. I had no idea where I was going, but I walked in the front door, followed some voices I heard in the distance, then got pointed in the right direction. When things finally got organized, we had all the townspeople in one room to practice choreography. There were 10, maybe 12 females there? And I was one of four guys. FOUR. When you need to have couples dancing and have to tell the girls, “Pretend there’s a guy here and a guy here”… that helps explain the tone of desperation.

So now I’m committed to two shows in the next few months when I didn’t audition for either. And if I could apply that luck to finding a girlfriend, I wouldn’t care nearly as much about what Cindy might be yelling in the background during a phone call.

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Curses! Opal’s murder foiled again!

I’m trying to think of when it started sinking in: “Everybody Loves Opal will be done soon.” Suddenly, after so many rehearsals and two weekends of performances, my schedule would be almost completely empty. No more evening plans on a near-constant basis. It was like hitting a brick wall on Monday night. Still, we all had a blast doing the play (if anyone didn’t, they hid it very well) and I think it was a worthwhile endeavor.

That said, I’m in kind of a reflective mood, so in writing about some of this stuff… I should probably include a generic POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT! After all, some of you might see a production of Opal somewhere else and those people might not want the audience to know what’s going to happen the entire time. I don’t mind if you find out or not, but I’m trying to be considerate. So again, POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!

I didn’t get much work done during summer camp. That week was pretty much a wash when it came to learning my lines. I had a lot of fun at camp as usual, but my knowledge of the script didn’t change much between the day I left and the day I returned. I don’t have a calendar, so I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I think with that loss of a week, I had… three fewer weeks to prepare for Opal versus Mind Over Matt? A pretty significant number.

I could feel the difference onstage. When we were performing these last two weekends, I was always thinking, “What’s my next line? It’s coming up here in a second…” It just didn’t feel as fluid. And I don’t think I ever completely screwed up any of my lines before, either. I did on Friday.

It was weird: I was more nervous about the second Friday than opening night. I imagine it was because we’d had a week of dress rehearsals, then moved directly into performances. Between Sunday and the next Friday, we met once for a “speed-through”, which is basically just the cast sitting down and saying their lines, no actions involved. I’m guessing that week away let some rust accumulate in my brain, which led to… ugh.

In a way, I was fortunate. My character, Professor Bradford Winter, went to prison a long time ago because he killed someone while driving drunk. While in prison, “one of his lungs went.” I don’t know whether it collapsed due to the harsh conditions or he got shanked by one of the other prisoners, but given his pompous attitude, I’m leaning toward the latter. Thus, when I started stumbling over my line, I burst into a giant coughing fit—something that happened several times during the first scene of the play—which gave me a chance to regroup. And did I mention that this happened on the night we were taping the show? Yeah…

But I don’t want to focus on the bad stuff. Saturday and Sunday ran soooooo smoothly in comparison. We got offstage to meet the audience afterward and it just felt great. And perhaps the greatest compliment I ever got from people was their hesitance to shake my hand. I knew they were just teasing, but as the baddest bad guy—the last one to “love Opal”, so to speak—I took that as a way of them saying I was pretty bad up there. I mean “bad guy”, not… you know what I mean.

Plus there was the final show. Sunday afternoon. A pretty solid performance and I was happy with it. I was especially happy with it because the last people to leave the theater were members of my family. My 95-year-old grandma was there and I’d asked for tickets in the front row ahead of time so she’d be able to see and hear more clearly. (She didn’t catch all of the words, but being able to see our body language helped.) That also meant the rest of my family was sitting in the front row, too.

Or at least I assume so. I opted not to wear glasses during the production—it was written in the 60’s and the style of my glasses… more modern by 50 years didn’t feel appropriate. I didn’t need to read anything, so I had no problem acting with a bunch of giant fuzzballs onstage. That also meant the audience was comprised of fuzzballs as well, so I had no idea I was staring directly into some of their faces during part of Act II.

Okay, OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT! (In case you ignored the earlier warnings.)

There were three of us conniving crooks who put a life insurance policy on Opal and wanted to murder her for the insurance money. After each unsuccessful attempt, she believed one of us saved her life, so she lavish that person with love and affection that would eventually be returned. The first person to cave was the girl, Gloria. When Sol and I were planning the second murder attempt, Gloria wanted out. After several failed attempts at coercion and threatened violence, Sol pushed her down to the floor, at which point I walked up, squatted down to get close and delivered this line:

“Maybe Sol won’t kill you, but I promise… if you oppose us in any way, I WILL SLIT THAT SLIM THROAT OF YOURS!”

I used my thumb to make a slashing motion across my throat… you know, just in case she didn’t know what I was getting at. I kept yelling at her as I stood up and walked away, but that part was pretty badass.

Now flash back to the part about my family sitting in the front row. When I delivered that line, I was looking at Gloria and also staring directly at the face of my older brother. When he gave me a hug after the show, he asked me where I was channeling that rage from. That was an even better compliment than people not wanting to shake my hand. (I’ll get back to the rage part in a bit.)

And that was only a part of Act II. It was the hardest one for me to get used to, maybe because I had so much to do: talk to Sol about killing Opal, coerce/threaten Gloria, get Sol prepped for the murder, seduce Gloria (yes, it’s only ten minutes between me threatening to kill her and us making out on the couch), then try to make sure Opal dies. Completely switching emotions and behavior on a dime so many times… that was the exhausting part of the play.

Act III was a lot more fun because I got to be a lot more loose and casual. Professor Winter was terse, stern, proper, snooty, condescending… I could come up with a laundry list of adjectives, but most of them go out the window when I spend all of Act III being drunk. I couldn’t slur my speech very much because I still used a large vocabulary, but stumbling around a bit, doing more random movement, talking louder and acting like a petulant child at times… it was fun. Whether it was more fun than making out on the couch… that’s a toss-up.

Being drunk also meant I could laugh while preparing my own attempt at murder. My evil plan? Drug Opal’s tea to knock her out, then set the house on fire. “It’s a tinderbox!” The first part worked: she passed out with her head on the table. Within the next few minutes, I ran around the room, dragged her out of her chair and fell down on my butt to get her on the floor, poured “kerosene” all over her (well, up to chest level so she wouldn’t get water in her nose), threatened my former cohorts with a pistol when they walked into the room… I did a lot of giggling and some singing in the process. Ultimately, my plan failed, but I enjoyed the attempt.

(As a side note, it was pretty cool to hear the audience gasp when I poured water on Opal so they could see it sloshing on the stage and getting her clothes wet. “That’s right, I’m not just miming pouring this stuff on her!” I’m not sure why they thought it was so shocking, but I thought their reaction was pretty cool.)

Ah, I almost forgot the rage part. I was never in a drunken rage in Act III, but I’ve never been drunk before. At all. Ever. I don’t drink and don’t plan to. Alcohol ain’t my bag, but some people told me to call A.A. after a performance just to make sure. (To create the drunken movement, Andy Wilkins said to pretend like I’m standing on a raft moving around on a lake. You keep your balance by bending your legs and shifting your weight around, so doing that on flat ground makes you look drunk.)

Two things I’ve never been—full of rage and drunk—but I don’t think I “channel” anything. I couldn’t tell you where it comes from. It just seems like the right way to act in that situation. If you’re really pissed at someone, you yell, bare your teeth, clench your fists. If you’re drunk… well, I’ve seen drunk people who can’t walk in a straight line, wobble around, throw up on their shoes. Maybe it comes from being a people-watcher, but it just seems like the right way to respond to those circumstances.

There are plenty of other stories. Sol reading the obituaries, trying to think of ways to kill Opal and making up a different headline every night. Officer Joe Jankie’s first play ever. (The first time he came offstage on opening night, it immediately hit him: “I’m an actor!”) Shuffling people around to ensure we’d have at least two crew members every night—I don’t think any of them made it to all six shows because of schedule conflicts. It was an interesting ride, to say the least.

So to the cast, crew, audience, the kids at summer camp, everyone reading this… probably to the dude who wrote Everybody Loves Opal, too… thanks for the memories. Except for the memory of me screwing up my line. That one, I could do without.

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I know it says “Samuel Johnson”, but…

I can’t help it. When I read the line in my script, the name “Samuel L. Jackson” popped into my head. I’m sure slipping that into a performance would get some laughter from the crowd, but the Samuel L. Jackson version of the line? We could lose half the audience, easily. And for the sake of said audience, I’m going to keep the revised version off the main page via a “Continue reading” link. Continue reading “I know it says “Samuel Johnson”, but…”

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I didn’t think being onstage would be so draining.

It didn’t seem like it during Mind Over Matt, but I may have simply forgotten: that play was only almost three years ago. In retrospect, though, I might not have been out of shape back then. Or I might not have had to be “up” quite as often. Or I might not have needed to “act” as much.

The character Matt was a lot like me. There were a few personality differences that made it a lot of fun, but it wasn’t really a stretch. Bradford Winter? Not me. Not at all. I mean, he even likes wearing a tie, for God’s sake!

Regardless, everyone both onstage and off survived Opening Night, no one broke their legs and we’re looking forward to five more excellent performances. After that, well, I don’t know about waiting three years to be in another play, but I’ll definitely need a long nap.

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Me? I—I am Professor Bradford Winter!

Tonight is the final dress rehearsal; tomorrow is opening night for Everybody Loves Opal. (Oddly enough, I was having trouble sleeping last night, so we’ll see how tonight goes.) I think it’ll be a good show with a lot of laughs and we’ve got a lot of good performers… well, there are only six cast members, so maybe that’s not a lot… but it should be good anyway. Here’s some more specific information if you’re thinking about attending.
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It’s at the Lakeville Area Arts Center in downtown Lakeville (20965 Holyoke Ave, Lakeville, MN 55044) and it’s running from August 9-18.

August 9-10 & 16-17, 2013 at 7:30 p.m.
August 11 & 18, 2013 at 2 p.m.

Tickets are $14.50 apiece.

There’s a Facebook event page that has a description of the play plus the above information. (If you’re addicted to Facebook, that might preclude you from attending, but I suggest you tear your eyes away from the computer monitor for an afternoon/evening to come see it—I think you’ll find it worthwhile.)

This website includes all of that plus a separate link to buy tickets online and a phone number to preorder them.

You can also buy them on the date of the performance—if I remember right, they start selling tickets at the desk an hour before the show and the doors open up half an hour after that.
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I hope to see whole bunches of you there. Well, I’m not sure how many of you I’ll be able to see since I won’t be wearing my glasses onstage, but I hope whole bunches of you show up.

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Chaff (n.) – Results of overacting

First off, a partial explanation for my prolonged absence. Over the last few weeks now, I’ve been focusing my attention on a play called Everybody Loves Opal, my third show with Expressions Theater here in Lakeville. I played Matt in Mind Over Matt a few years ago and my duties with Wage Warfare this spring included creative consultant (giving the director suggestions he’d usually reject), swing (filling other actors’ roles for rehearsals when they were absent) and “Smoke Machine Guy.” Yep, I got to operate the smoke machine backstage. And I was GOOD at it!

But now we’re preparing the summer show and things haven’t been moving quite as smoothly, in part because people are taking a break from acting for the summer. We didn’t have enough people audition, so we didn’t have a full cast when rehearsals started. I was supposed to be an assistant director for this show, but since we were short on male actors, I ended up being a swing again right away. No big deal, right?

Except we finished the first week of rehearsals and still suffered from a distinct lack of a male actor to fill a major role. I wasn’t really comfortable doing it because this upcoming Thursday, I’ll be heading to summer camp for a week.

Missing a week of rehearsals… not really comfortable.
Having no one to fill that major male role… even less comfortable.

There’ll still be a few weeks between my getting home and opening night, so I guess the kids will have to deal with me occasionally trying to learn my lines during free time at camp. (The fact that I’ve already been reading that role as the swing means I’ve got a head start!)

The other actors seem pretty awesome and it should be a good overall production. However, there’s a little bit of scar tissue in my memory banks because I’ve seen other actors who seemed pretty awesome, but they thought they were more awesome than they actually were. They thought they were more awesome than the script, the other actors, the director… those people drive me nuts.

(Note to the Grammar Police: Yes, I know I’m about to use the plural forms “their” and “they” to refer to a single individual, but it seems like the easiest way to conceal that individual’s gender. Or I’m doing it because I’m lazy, take your pick.)

The most recent example I saw was when an actor got some terrible news on the phone, then dropped their head on the table and cried out, “WHY ME?!?!” Three lines later, that actor provided the answer. When I mentioned it afterward, they replied, “Oh, that’s not so bad.” HEARING THAT MADE ME AN UNHAPPY CAMPER.

For those of you who have read this blog in the past, you’ll know that I’m very particular about how I phrase things, the words I use, etc. If you read an entry just after it’s posted, then refresh the screen half an hour later, you may notice some changes. I’m nitpicky like that, which means the Grammar Police might be even more pissed off at me for what I just did.

Being a playwright isn’t much different than writing blog posts. Well, aside from their needing to develop a plot. And characters. And making sure it doesn’t suck. Okay, so maybe it’s pretty different. However, there’s one thing that holds true for them as it does for me: they choose their words carefully. They are particular and nitpicky because what actors say onstage affects how the audience perceives their characters. If someone screws up a line or two, hey, shit happens. I can accept that. If the actor starts changing lines intentionally, IT MAKES ME AN UNHAPPY CAMPER.

And that’s what brought about the title of this blog post. When people are overacting and adding extra lines or even just “y’know” and “or something” to the ends of their sentences, yes, they get to say more and draw more attention to themselves. They also add chaff to the script. Shitty little bits and pieces of dialogue that would get wiped out by a halfway decent playwright. It rarely adds anything beneficial to the production and could potentially harm it (even if the actor thinks “that’s not so bad”), which makes me want to stab that person in the brain.

I don’t expect that scar tissue to affect our play. The fact that no one got overly anxious and demanded that we find someone when that major role wasn’t filled yet probably indicates that everyone wants to make it a good show (i.e., chaff-free). If that’s not the case, I don’t care what the title of the play is, Opal COULD MAKE ME AN UNHAPPY CAMPER.