Constipated Olivier

You are riding in the metro and god it suddenly gets very hot. Does it always have to be so uncomfortable in the metro? You turn to your neighbor, the mountain of wrinkles with grey hair curling out from underneath her dirty kerchief. The b idea to make a passing comment about this sudden discomfort is hastily discarded upon meeting her glassly gaze. Back to looking out the window. Chatelet. Les Halles. Reumer Sebastopol. God line 4 is running slowly today.

And now we are stopping in the middle of the track? Great. A complete standstill. These are always so uncomfortable because the one thing that cannot be found in Paris is suddenly bearing down on top of you: complete silence. Ah. The man across the aisle looks at his feet and makes as if to adjust himself in his chair but hesitates for fear of breaking the quiet. Ah Paris. An angry woman standing by the door begins to tap her foot. In your mind's eye, you imagine her with a baguette tucked under her arm. Ah c'est la vie en Paris....Maybe this is a good time to compose an ode to French charm. It will be called "A la rechereche pour le charm perdu."

Finally the train starts up again. Finally at your stop, you sidestep through the aisle to the door. Flip the lever of the subway door and they rush open- you are shocked by a sudden blast of cold air oddly situated down between your...

"How could you be riding the subway, piss your pants, and not even notice for several stops?"

The question is a good one. Here is a better one for you:

"How could you pursue acting and yet make yourself badl onstage on purpose?"

When I first realized that I was actually trying to be bad onstage, it have to say that I felt very relieved. It was as if a huge weight dropped off the euphamistic shoulders. I try to be bad. Isn't that a funny thing?

An actor comes on the stage and acts. If an actor comes onstage and apologizes, well they are bad. They are making themselves bad because they are coming onstage to apologize and not to act.

This may seem painfully obvious. Well, the discomfort of coming onstage to apologize has always certainly been painful. But it has never been obvious. Why?

Because there has always been a good competent teacher or coach waiting offstage to give you a hand. To give you some guidance. That is what they are there for.

Not Monsieur le Professeur. He watches. And he hits his drum. And then he insults you.

Exercise. Drum. Insult. Exercise. Drum. Insult.

But the most import part: the question for the audience.

Your classmates are asked: Do you love it or do you hate it. And they will tell you "Yes, sorry but I hate it." (With few exceptions, when M. le Professeur asks the class whether they loved or hated it, we know it is because there was a big flop).

You look at your friends in the audience. They look at you, wince a little, and say "I could kill you" while at the same time trying to say with their eyes "Sorry my friend."

You look into your friends eyes as they judge you and maybe did you look into your friends eyes the same way during the exercise? Were you off balance and searching for the game? During the exercise, were You looking in your friends eyes the same way you do when you play "Balthazar says" and you had to ask one of your friends to kiss you in order to be spared physical torture at the hands of M le Professeur? Or were you in lala land trying to create something shitty? A big idea that doesn't work.

Ah, my Madame Mao Zedong parody today was not, as one might say, top level.

But after I sat down, and as I was watching my classmates work, I realized that I had gone on the stage to be bad. It was that moment when the metro doors open and you feel a rush of cold air and you say to yourself: "AHA! That is why the temperature in the metro was so strange." To take this metaphor further, I don't know why I went onstage to be bad. And who knows why you would choose to pee yourself on the metro? It stinks, it is embarassing, and no one wants to see you this way. But I did. And I did. And I can see how my classmates make the same choice at times- choose to make themselves small, to make themselves easily forgotten.

And really who is ever happy to watch a performer who makes themselves small or forgettable? It is not about ego or deluded self-confidence. It is about being you and not apologizing.

Well, to return to the piss-pants on the metro. Let us not ask why the pants drip with urine. And I shall not ask why I choose to go onstage and be small. It is enough for me, tonight, to say to myself that yes, I do that. And yes, I will probably continue doing it for a very long time. Until I look at my friends with the sensitivity I have when they are agreeing with M. le Professeur that they would like to kill me and perhaps debating how.

Perhaps it is simply a matter of ceasing trying to be something and instead playing with what you've got.

THE PARODY EXERCISE

Now I have not talked about our exercises for Bouffon yet. And it would be boring to reiterate what "Bouffon" is about at the moment. See Tiff's Blog linked in the sidebar? She does a fantastic writeup on the history of the Bouffon, as narrated by M. le Professeur. But I would like to describe this exercise a bit because it is a fascinating and very fundamental one to this school's pedagogy (Christ I sound like I'm trying to write for an academic journal).

The task is for the actor to parody a bastard. A certifiable "Bastard." Not just a nasty grandma or rude traffic cop. We're talking Hitler, Cheney, Pol Pot level bastard. The audience should feel that, if the Bastard were watching this actor's parody, they would stand up and shout "THAT ISN'T ME!!!" just before collapsing, dead of a heart attack.

The trap is to play a character. The actor does not play a character of the bastard. They are adopting certain elements of the bastard's persona/voice/body in order to have the pleasure of mocking the bastard. M. Prof often makes his point in this way. He has two students onstage and asks one to whisper into the other's ear an insult about the Professeur. Inevitably, as the one student whispers into the other's ear, their entire face begins to glow with delight. This delight, this "pleasure," as M Prof never tires of pointing out, is the beginning of the parody. The pleasure to destroy the bastard.

Another trap is that the actor pushes to play the bastard (Of course, I did not push at all. I never push. I am the king of subtle acting). When the actor pushes to play the bastard, we loose the actor's fun. And we always must have a sense, as an audience, of the actor underneath the parody, having fun to play at the bastard.

So yes, my friends of the american repertory theater training. Yes you do not play a character. You embody NOTHING. You PLAY AT everything. And this is the basis of the parody. In fact, this is the basis of EVERYTHING in theater, as far as this school is concerned. And while you are playing at something, you are never of course hamming or using a lot of shitty acting tricks. It is actually extremely subtle. Because you are playing at the parody with your pleasure and always with your pleasure- your own idiosyncratic sense of fun. This cannot be dictated by techniques, methods, formulas, or nice books. And an actor with their own special fun is everything. On top of that fun they can pile on the techniques and tricks of the trade all they want, as long as they do not bury their special pleasure. But without their special sense of fun to be onstage, all of the other stuff is just conventional garbage.

Well. Am I mouthing this school's pedagogy or am I mouthing this school's pedagogy? And yet I am not just mouthing it. I am seeing, every day, how and why this pedagogy is so nice to have around.

And maybe, one of these days, I will stop making myself small. Maybe even I have a special sense of fun to be onstage. But lately I have been Constipated Jane. Why do I pick on Jane? Sorry Jane. I have been Constipated Chris. No no we'll dedicate this one to my old french landlord: Constipated Olivier.