by Kirk Woodward
[In my introduction to the first part of Kirk Woodward’s “Performance Diary,” posted on Rick On Theater on 25 August, I wrote:
Life in the theater is complex. It covers a gallimaufry of fields, disciplines, and specialties. It’s also labor-intensive, taking more time in one’s day, week, and month than most other endeavors in which people engage. Many people, both theater folk and “civilians” (as one of my teachers referred to non-theater people—muggles, if you will), see a life devoted to the stage as more a calling than an occupation. It’s what we do for love—to paraphrase the lines from the impassioned song in which Diana leads the dancers in A Chorus Line.
As Kirk writes in his “Performance Diary”:
I hope this account indicates some of the many practical issues one encounters when putting on a performance, no matter which kind of performance it is. Few things are “easy” in performing, no matter how small the show or how expert the team.
I told Kirk, after I read both parts of his diary, that it made me reminisce some, so it obviously rings true. I assured him that it's exactly what I want for ROT, along with the performance reports. He chronicled the day-to-day activities of a theater pro—in Kirk’s case, a director, actor, teacher, and a little bit of a writer—when he’s involved in actual theater work.
[The second half of this diary, posted below, focuses on the production of two new one-act plays in which Kirk had two roles. Kirk’s aim is to point out more of the interesting challenges he encounters while working in theater.
[I don’t think that reading these diary excerpts in any particular order will make a difference with respect to comprehension; nevertheless, I suggest going back to Part 1 either before or after reading Part 2, is well worth your while. (Readers may find that there are things mentioned in the second installment and explained or identified in the first part, but which aren’t elucidated in the second part.)]
During the period between the middle of April and the middle of June 2024, I was involved in a number of performance activities, all but one of which I described in Part 1 of this series. In this article I describe, from an actor’s point of view, my experiences doing two one-act plays in a local theater.
APRIL 10 – I was asked to do a role in a long one-act play in June, playing a guidance counselor, and I've printed out my script to start learning the lines.
APRIL 28 – I’ve been cast in a second one-act play for June, also without auditioning, and not particularly gloriously – it’s wonderful to have someone cast you because they think you can do the role, but I meant to go to the auditions last Saturday and completely missed them, which is embarrassing. Oh well, now I have two roles in the production, which will be staged at the Union Congregational Church (UCC) in Montclair, New Jersey, by the UCC Players.
The two plays are:
Rosaline Wrecked It All (Stephen Kaplan) – Rosaline from Romeo and Juliet, who didn’t go to the party with Romeo, deals with everyone’s blame for the subsequent suicide of the ill-fated lovers. The play is a dramedy set in a high school and many of the characters are students in the school.
You’re Bound to Come Up With a Good Idea, written by Peter Felicia (b. 1946), longtime theater reviewer for the Newark Star-Ledger, is funny. In the play, a writing student tries to convince her instructor that she can plot a good novel. A two-character play; I play the instructor.
APRIL 30 - Meanwhile I’m realizing that my task for the next few weeks is basically memorizing, getting the lines for the one-act plays in my head – and I don’t have that many of them.
I know, I know, people always ask actors, “How do you remember all those lines?” Well, to be honest, it’s a good question, and the answer is something of a mystery, and I have never understood how actors manage to memorize their lines. I know ways and techniques; I just can’t visualize how it works inside the brain.
So far I’m just reading the scripts, trying to get the sense of the lines (that’s definitely task #1) and trying to start making connections between what the other actor says and what that leads me to say.
MAY 8 – First cast readthrough for Rosaline. I like the play.
First readings are nearly always ghastly experiences, with actors trying to impress the other actors and no one knowing much about what the play is about. Adding to today’s difficulties, the rehearsal was a Zoom hybrid, with the high school students in a classroom and the adults at home. But the cast can relate to the play, especially the teenagers in it, and by the time we were halfway through the play the reading was going smoothly.
The next step is learning lines, some of these young actors have long speeches and scenes to get into their minds. I’m having enough trouble with memorizing my one short scene.
MAY 9 – First rehearsal for Good Idea. Janet Aldrich, the director, is a formidable actor in her own right. She told my partner and me that she had no preconceived ideas about how to stage the play, but right away she started making suggestions about physical moves that would emphasize what the players are saying. In many cases the suggestions amount to her saying, “Visualize what you’re talking about, look at the visualization, and physicalize it,” an approach that my wife used to call “theater for the deaf,” but for this particular script her ideas were usually good ones.
MAY 19 – I’ve continued reading my lines daily – not really working on memorizing them yet, just reading them. But this afternoon was our second rehearsal for Rosaline, the first with both adults and students in the room in person. Several actors were missing but the director had us do the scenes we had people for, plus some large-group work. Janet Aldrich, the director of this play, doesn’t seem to be over-prepared, but she has self-confidence and a good eye, and her blocking seemed fine.
Early rehearsals can be agony, since everyone is deep in their scripts. I don’t usually like it when a director gives acting notes while still in the blocking phase, but we don’t have a great deal of time. I tried to stay calm, breathe, listen, and not get irritated when the director tells me to do something – a bad habit I have, and a crazy one. I try to remind myself that directors are only trying to help you.
MAY 23 – Theater can be so simple, can’t it? Actors act, directors advise. Sometimes it’s like that.
Rehearsal for Good Idea tonight. Janet told stories about the great director George Abbott – she worked with him on a show when he was just turning 100! Like Abbott, I think, she doesn’t do a lot of pre-planning but watches the actors closely and responds to what she sees. She had an angle for my character tonight that we hadn’t discussed at all last week; the new approach strikes me as excellent, and I’m almost “off book” with my lines memorized, so at the next rehearsal we should have some fun.
MAY 26 – A rehearsal for Rosaline with most of the cast present. For a one-act play it’s long, which gives the director a lot of challenges, but I’m not the director! More power to her!
MAY 27 – Still working on memorizing my lines for the one-acts. The process feels like building connections (bridges? synapses?) among the words in the lines, so eventually they are structured in the brain the way they need to be. I wonder if others feel the same way about how memorization happens.
MAY 30 – Rehearsal for Good Idea tonight, and an interesting situation for an actor: at our last rehearsal the director had given me an approach for the character to take. Tonight, before we’d read a line, she gave me a different assignment for how to perform the character. (I think she had been talking with the playwright, whom she knows, and he might have given her the idea.)
I was taken aback, but what can one do in a situation like that? There’s only one right answer as far as I know, and that’s to try it, so I did, and by the end of the rehearsal I felt things were going well, not exactly with either of her suggestions, but with a mix.
Also, my scene partner and I are both almost “off book,” not needing the script anymore.
JUNE 2 – How do directors do it? We rehearsed Rosaline today and, with three weeks to go before we open, the director listened patiently while actors read scenes in low voices, as though they were talking to themselves; I was the only person who did a scene without a script, and I’m barely in more than one scene. It will come together, but what a journey! A worthwhile destination, but full of perils.
I had a real Actor’s Ego (or My Ego) moment today. I spent a great deal of time thinking about how the cast would feel if I knew my lines, or if I didn’t and blew them. How wrong is that! My job is to focus on what’s happening in the scene. I had to continually remind myself of that. Shame! (I wasn’t perfect with the lines, but I was all right.)
JUNE 6 – Both one-acts cancelled a rehearsal this week. More time to learn lines, which are still being stubborn in the details.
JUNE 11 – Rehearsal tonight for Good Idea. Janet, the director, is an extraverted and talented performer – think Ethel Merman (1908-1984) – so her suggestions to us sound like she’s giving line readings – “do it like this.” However, she’s not – she doesn’t ask for imitation, she’s just giving ideas.
Good Idea has nine very small scenes, and she asked us to paraphrase each one before we did it with the written lines, just for this rehearsal. I was leery, partly because I was afraid I’d start using paraphrase in the performance. However, it loosened our acting up a lot, and we had fun. Paraphrase is a technique I’ve used when directing Shakespeare, but almost never with modern-language plays. I may start, now, though.
JUNE 15 – Today’s rehearsal for Rosaline was a preordained mess, with almost the whole cast together, something between 12 and 15 people, in a different space from before, with blocking and lines still uncertain. Kathryn, the director, wanted to get a timing for the show, but the workthrough took at least twice as long as it should have.
She was frank that the purpose of the rehearsal was to show everyone how much work they still had to do, and it did, so it was useful, but I had almost no concentration and couldn’t think of lines I’ve known for weeks.
I still feel that a director should define for the cast a single, definite purpose for each rehearsal, or for each run through, with the choice of purpose determined by whatever needs the most work. Today we had at least a double purpose (both lines and blocking) instead of a single one.
JUNE 17 – A four-hour rehearsal of all the one-acts, half an hour of it devoted to getting the room in shape to work in (not the large room where we’ll be performing – it’s not available yet – but a smaller room in the church), and half an hour to put it back.
Janet, one of my directors, said, “I don’t know how anyone can remember their lines in conditions like this,” and she’s right, which again is a reason for a director to define what’s expected of the actors at each point of a rehearsal, and to reassure them that it’s okay not to try to do everything at once, especially since each time something new is added or something major changed, the acting falls back to an earlier stage. It will recover, but not until a subsequent rehearsal.
Kathryn, the principal director, became so frustrated at having to repeat things she’d already emailed the cast that she said, “Does anybody read what I wrote?” The answer, not just in this show but in nearly everything, is no, most people don’t read what someone wrote, especially on email.
They may glance; they may overlook; they may ignore. They seldom if ever study the message point by point and try to retain what they read. They just don’t. At least that’s my experience – I’ve seen this in the business world repeatedly. (I had a bread-and-butter job in an office until I retired a few years ago.) Also, of course, the younger the people involved, the less they want to do with email at all. They prefer texting, or whatever has superseded that.
For myself, I tried to work on relaxing and concentrating in the moment tonight. Kayla, my scene partner in Good Idea, told me afterward that she’d decided the same thing, and both of us felt the rehearsal was useful for us.
JUNE 18 – A technical rehearsal in which we didn’t do any acting, just working on transitions and scene changes. That’s not entirely true – Kayla and I got to do our scene a couple of times.
A famous director – or maybe all directors – once said, “No matter how much you rehearse, you always need two more weeks.” That appears to be the case with our show – Rosaline needs more work on the acting and the scene changes have difficulties and will take a while to settle down – longer than we’ve got?
Also, we have a new lighting board and lights. They’re run by computer, and from what I saw of the program that operates them, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to make them work, and last night no one else did either, so we only had two working lighting instruments. (That bread-and-butter office job I had? It was in IT.)
Overall lesson from last night: improvisation is a useful tool in theater, but not for the technical aspects of a play.
JUNE 20 – Last rehearsal (“final dress”) before we open tomorrow night. The show ran 2 hours 15 minutes, which is a little long, but it should compress a bit tomorrow night. Many set changes were botched, and Rosaline had a number of technical breakdowns; otherwise the show seemed pretty good, particularly since we hadn’t run it in several days. I attribute my big blunder to that fact: I made an entrance in Rosaline on the wrong side of the stage, but it was the first time I’d done the scene on that stage (the night before opening!) so I didn’t feel too incompetent. Besides, it’s easily fixed.
I spoke up about one thing, the curtain call, which was a mess, long and difficult to follow. I believe curtain calls should be quick and effective, because they’re the last thing an audience will see, and audiences mostly remember what was most recent.
JUNE 21 – Kathryn sent out the following this morning: “Curtain call: no individual play bows, only one company bow, then up to Kyle, then another company bow, then off or out.” Thank goodness.
I also had a separate email asking if I’d mind cutting a long section of one speech I have. (I don’t mind.) A little late in the game? Well, yes, although of course line changes – even changes of whole scenes, or acts for that matter – used to be standard in out-of-town shows headed for Broadway, hence Sheldon Harnick’s well-known curse on Hitler, “He should have had to be out of town with a musical!”
My friend Nick, drawing on the legend that a bad dress rehearsal means a good first performance, said, “Now you’re bound to have a great opening night!”
After all the above, it was an acceptable opening night. We arrived at the theater to find that there was no power – and this in the middle of a heat wave, with temperatures in the 90’s. The power came back but the air conditioning never did. Peter Felicia, the former reviewer for the Newark Star-Ledger who wrote Good Idea and was there tonight, texted Janet, “Well, truth to tell, my wife just couldn’t take the heat, so we had to leave after my show. I was sorry, because I would have loved to have seen the others. You have VERY talented performers!”
In my experience actors won’t let a show fail – they’ll do something to keep it afloat. Everybody tonight seemed to have a commitment to the project; our Rosaline in particular was staggeringly good. I was happy with the couple of scenes I was in, and all in all we got through the evening well enough. But it was hot!
JUNE 22 – The air conditioning was back, the cast was confident, my scenes went well except that I could not remember the concluding phrase of my last speech and kept trying out substitutes. No harm done as far as I know. The show was videotaped, so presumably I’ll be able to check my performance at some point, if I want to. A more lively audience than the previous night’s.
In one scene, on a contentious point a husband is supposed to say to his wife that “I said yes” to another group of people, and the play went on from there. Tonight he said, “I said no.” She was dumbfounded and responded, “You said what?” Eventually she ad-libbed, “I know you, you really said yes,” and got the scene back on track. I’m not sure the actor ever realized what he’d said.
This incident reminded me of a story that Ken Barnes, a technical director at my college, told about a melodrama in which an actor supposedly entered late in the first act and announced, “I can pay the mortgage!” The entire play, the story goes, was derailed for some time . . . .
JUNE 23 – Our final performance, a matinee, followed by “strike,” in other words taking down the set and putting everything away. A quiet audience but they cheered and stood at the end – you can never tell how an audience will ultimately feel. Much of the cheering was for a high school student named Camilla Perez, who played the role of Rosaline and knocked it out of the park – she was strong, dynamic, and letter perfect in a huge part. I’d be astonished if she doesn’t go on to other notable things. I had one scene with her and one with an actress named Kayla Jackson, who was a pleasure to work with.
So I got some major breaks in the production, and all in all it was a good experience. I learned, or reinforced, some points about both directing and acting, and I am filled with admiration for everyone who undertakes the adventure of doing a play. Much more goes into it than many people realize. Theater must be a worthwhile activity – we all keep coming back.
[I said in my introduction to both parts of Kirk’s “Performance Diary” that reading it had caused me to reminisce about some of my own theater experiences. I made note of some of them, so I thought I’d share them with Rick On Theater readers.
[I’ve recounted some of these tales before, including in various posts of ROT, so you’ll pardon me if you’ve read them before.
[In Part 1, Kirk writes about performing with his colleague and friend Martha for the New Jersey Mental Health Players. In the scene he describes, Martha played a woman suffering from depression and Kirk was her “oblivious brother.”
[The issue about which Kirk writes in the diary is the confusion experienced by some members of the audience about whether he and Martha were actually siblings and if she was depressed in real life. Here’s the memory that anecdote jogged for me:
I played Mother, the drug-pusher in A Hatful of Rain (Michael V. Gazzo, 1955), when I was in the army in West Berlin (1971-74). An Air Force NCO who’d seen the show spotted me when I was out in the U.S. military compound doing tasks related to a security investigation. (I was a Military Intelligence officer and we wore civilian clothes on duty, not army uniforms.) The non-com actually threatened me, saying I was a real bastard and he'd like to take care of me some night in a dark alley! I pointed out I was a U.S. Army officer and he needed to back off.
[I remarked in my note that that was audience confusion!
[In his 21 June entry in Part 2 about the opening performance of Rosaline, Kirk recounted that there’d been a heat wave and that the air conditioning in the performance space had gone out. “It was hot,” recorded Kirk. This reminded me of another experience I’d had in the summer of 1977, when the tri-state area was in the midst of a severe heat wave.
[I was working on a master of fine arts degree in acting at Rutgers University’s School of Creative and Performing Arts (now the Mason Gross School of the Arts) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That summer, I was part of the Rutgers University Summer Theatre, a two-play presentation that combined MFA actors and professionals from New York City. Here’s my recollection of that experience:
I was playing “Gunner” in Misalliance (1909-10) by George Bernard Shaw. We couldn’t run the A/C except before curtain, at intermission, and after the final bow because it was too noisy. It was so hot in the Philip J. Levin Theater on the campus of Douglass College, I sweated so much—partly because I started out in the “Turkish bath,” a wooden box enclosed on all six sides—that my green plaid suit looked black by the end of my first scene. (That’s not a joke or even hyperbole. It’s absolute emes.)
[For the record, the heat wave started on Wednesday, 13 July, and lasted through Thursday, 21 July. On the last day of the heat wave, the temperature reached 104 degrees, just below the all-time record for New York City of 106, set in 1936.
[On the first day of the heat wave, New York City suffered a blackout that lasted 25 hours, caused by a lightning strike that tripped two circuit breakers. When the circuit breakers didn’t reset, the city was sent into darkness as all electric power was lost.
[I drove from New Brunswick into the city (where I lived during my time at Rutgers) after the performance that night, with a carful of New York actors I was chauffeuring back and forth. I also had my dog with me because I was in New Jersey too long to leave him home.
[That night, I packed the dog, his things, and clothes for a few days, and the next day, when I got back to New Brunswick, the dog and I moved into the apartment of a couple of MFA classmates and stayed in Jersey until the power in the city went back on.
[In his entry for the next day, Kirk related an incident in which an actor flubbed a line and said the exact opposite of what he was supposed to say. It took a few more lines until the actress in the scene with him ad-libbed a line that got them back on track. That reminded me of another Rutgers performance, a year earlier than Misalliance:
One night in a performance of Devil Take the Hindmost by my classmate William Mastrosimone, a playwriting candidate at Rutgers, I also flubbed a line.
Devil is an epic play about the Battle of Trenton in the American Revolution. (1976 was the Bicentennial Year, of course, and Bill is a native Trentonian.) I played Colonel Johann Rall, the Hessian mercenary commander of the garrison at Trenton (for readers who didn’t get history in a U.S. school, the Hessians were paid allies of the British), an actual historical figure who died of wounds received at Trenton.
Mortally wounded, Rall was captured after the Battle and when I surrendered to George Washington, I was supposed to say, “I beg you to treat my soldiers as men of honor.” What came out of my mouth one night, however, was “I beg you to treat my soldiers as men of iron"! (I don’t know where that even came from.)
The actor playing Washington, Jeffrey B. McLaughlin, a New York pro hired for the production (a huge cast representing three armies—American, British, Hessian—and a number of civilians, the company included not only MFA and undergraduate actors from Rutgers, local residents who were frequent participants in university theater, members of the university theater faculty—I got to act with my own acting teacher—and Actors’ Equity Association professionals), was standing face-to-face with me, a few inches apart at center stage.
As I spoke those nonsensical words, I knew I was screwing up, but it was too late to stop, and Jeff had a look of perplexity and, yes, fear, on his face which he was fiercely trying to hide from the audience seated on all four sides of our environmental performing area.
We nevertheless went on as if I’d said the most appropriate thing imaginable!
[Devil was Bill Mastrosimone’s playwriting MFA thesis script. Johann Rall was my thesis role for my acting MFA. The university theater production of the play took place in November 1976. (The Battle of Trenton, the first major American victory of the Revolution, took place on the night of 25-26 December 1776, almost exactly 200 years before our show.)
[It was Rutgers’s entry in the Northeast Regional Festival of the American College Theatre Festival IX. We were selected as a finalist and went on to the regional festival, hosted by Cornel University in Ithaca, New York, in February 1977. Unhappily, we didn’t place in that competition, so we didn’t perform at Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts that April.
[(I don’t know if Bill had to write anything other than the play text, though he, like all of us MFA candidates, had to face an oral defense before the faculty degree committee. I had to write about the work that I did to create the role of Colonel Rall, which is on reposit in the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers. I also posted the thesis on Rick On Theater on 10 and 15 December 2009.)]
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