There is no more but so. Say it is done...

 

It's all over but the blues.

Closing a show is usually a bittersweet experience.  You are joyous that you had such a great experience, and also looking forward to the next show, but you're tired from a long run and looking to recover.  This time, not so much.  Theaters remain closed (and although I did get a job offer, it's doesn't perform until March 2022), and who knows when they will open again?  It's not uncommon to get post-show blues.  I get them most of the time.  With this, I'm still in denial.  So they haven't even hit me yet.  I keep waking up in the morning and starting to run the show in my head before I realize my mistake.

It was an indescribable joy to work on this production!  It was an honor to scratch my name amongst those who have undertaken the role of Richard.  It was truly a blessing to have this window during the pandemic to get out in front of a live audience and share this experience.  And my heart is filled with love for those in the cast and crew who made this journey possible.  Old friends and new. Family.  We didn't have the tour this year to test our mettle, but we survived a pandemic, so I think we're fairly tested.  And all of us are vaccinated!  If you aren't, you are a problem.  You are holding us all back.  Either join society by getting the shots, or remove yourselves from society and don't infect anybody.  That's all I have to say about that, although Richard would take matters into his own hands to fix this problem.

As usual, closing night was special.  As my four loyal readers will recall, I almost always have my best show on closing.  And that's entirely because of the way that I work.  My process is to keep growing and working throughout the performances, and then finally to let it all go on closing.  So there is a part of me that is taking in the performance as it happens to learn from it, which I no longer do on closing. It could be argued that I could let it go earlier and maybe have several of these transformative performances, but they wouldn't be as full, because I would have missed out on some more growth.  And the difference may not even be noticeable to an audience.  But there was definitely a freedom on Sunday night that wasn't there before.  Steph can tell.  Those who know my work well, can see a difference.  But I don't know that anybody watching Saturday night who came back on Sunday would register it.  

The recording is online.  I watched it yesterday and we had a little cast chat on zoom after.  It was a lovely day!  I had a friend from Alabama write in with questions.  And on zoom was a woman who used to babysit for me.  Not for my kids.  For me, when I was a kid in Pittsburgh!  She is the best!  I wept a little bit.  But I wept a few times during this process.  Opening night at curtain call.  Closing night after it was all done.  Randomly while watching innocuous television.  I'm a bit emotional.

Now, if you'd like to watch the recording, you can find it here: Buy: Richard III-Get the YouTube Link (force.com)  It's free.  Or you could probably just search Youtube to find it, but I think getting the link from us helps with grants and stuff.

A disclaimer:  And one of my early mentors, Mark Medoff, used to tell us that nobody wants to hear excuses so just say "disclaimer" and get it over with.  He was the best!  May he rest in power!  But I'm not excusing my own work but a word about the recording.  They did a great job in shooting the show, but the fights are all shot from an angle to the side so you see the misses that look like hits when you are at the performance.  Filmed fights and stage fights are very different, and so there aren't any quick cuts or lighting to make it more exciting.  That's it.  That's the disclaimer.  Enjoy it.

Finally, I want to talk a bit about training and my mentors.  I relied on my training more during this production that anything I've ever done. The role is daunting, the process was crazy, but there are no excuses.  Nobody wants to hear them!  So I'm not making any.  I'm proud of it and the reason I could do it was that I learned from the best of the best!  Jack Stehlin gave me a way of working nearly two decades ago now and remains my inspiration and teacher to this day.  Fred Molina, who also sometimes teaches Shakespeare at New American taught us that you can't hit antitheses too hard!  You can try, but the harder you hit those opposing words the more clear it becomes.  Give it a try the next time you're working on Shakespeare.  Hit those suckers!   There are some things in the performance that I also owe to some others.  Denise Gabriel was my movement teacher at ASF, and I don't know that I could have played this role without her training.  I was a little older than most when I went to grad school and people would ask me why I was going, when I had done so much work and was really good.  I would half-jokingly answer that I was going so I could learn what the fuck to do with my hands onstage.  I think any actor out there reading this will immediately know exactly what I'm talking about.  Chekhov certainly understood it and had Nina even say as much in The Seagull: "I became trivial, and commonplace, I acted without thinking or feeling... I didn't know what to do with my hands, I couldn't move properly, or control my voice. You can't imagine what it's like to know you're acting badly!"   Denise taught me a lot more than just what to do with my hands!  I even included an homage to Denise in my performance.  Any time I am being cursed, you may notice me warding my heart.  That's pure Denise!  I saw Ray Chambers play Richard at ASF.  And after I did, I told him that I would be delighted to learn from him. And that I knew that I was not ready for Richard.  His command of the language was (and I'm sure remains) a thing of beauty. This was many years ago, and I was quite jet-lagged, but what struck me about his performance (other than his amazing voice) was that he didn't make it about the deformity.  And this was at a time when everybody had to have some new contraption or gimmick to play the role.  Ray eschewed all of that and did what he always did, sat down with the OED and broke the play down to its bones to understand it inside and out and played his actions!  There's also a little homage to Ray in my performance when I come on to speak to my mother (my ASF buddy, Pantea), I fill out a verse line by extending the word expedition into five syllables.  And doing that led me to realize that Richard talks to his mother in a way that he doesn't talk to anybody else.  He remains ever respectful in his speech to her as she continues to berate and curse him.  Greta Lambert was our acting teacher at ASF, and she always had us look for the heart of the character.  To not judge them but to love them, and I do that with every role I take on and especially with these roles.  Richard does terrible things to just about everybody he comes into contact with, but you can't play him as evil.  You have to find the humanity.  I hope I did that.  I've already written about Dr. Susan Willis and all she meant to me in just gaining an even deeper love and appreciation for Shakespeare (and other great works), and thinking back to her wonderful talks on the Wars of the Roses really inspired me as well.  Finally, some training that I leaned on also came from my undergrad days at NMSU.  Kim McCallum talked about the circles of concentration. This has stuck with me all these years.  The actor's ability to do the blocking and remember the lines is the smallest part of this.  The ability to find your light while doing that, and then to be aware and fully present in the scene is a larger sphere, finally taking in an environment like Pt. Fermin Park and hearing those motorcycles revving and knowing how long to pause until they will go over the hill or subtly increasing your volume as you travel between the mics requires a great deal of skill, but it just exists inside this marvelous creation that is the human brain.  We are capable of all of this and still find our way inside the story we are sharing with the audience.  It's beautiful!