When Work Collides with Out-of-Work

As an out-of-work actor, that means I have day job.  I work as technical support for a software company and I'm pretty good at my job.  I'm one of the subject matter experts for the underlying software and in addition to responding to user issues, I do trainings, develop new business functionalty, etc.

But what this means is that I am often asked to go on business trips to conduct large-scale trainings of our software for the users.  This can cause problems when I actually get into a show.  My schedule suddenly becomes strange:  Well, if you want me to do the training, then if it's during this month, I can leave on a Wednesday, train on Thursday, and return on Friday so that I'll only miss the Wednesday rehearsal.  But during these two weeks, I can't go at all because we're rehearsing every day.  Once the show opens, I can fly on Monday, train on Tuesday, and come back on Wednesday so I can make the Thursday performance.

At which point, the project manager looks at me with that look of, "You're trouble."

In this particular case, I've got it happening twice.  There's a show coming up that I'm hoping to get into.  However, work has got a potential training situation they want me to do.  I have a colleague who can also do trainings, but he's currently overseas for two weeks doing them so it would be inappropriate to send him immediately after he comes back.  Auditions are next week, but I don't have a solid schedule for when the training they'd want me to do is.

Fortunately, it's early enough in the rehearsal run that I should be able to do it without too much trouble, but there's always the issue of the director preferring to have someone without schedule conflicts.

And then, later in the year, there's another show that a director has asked me to do, we've been planning it for about a year, and it's all set...except work is gunning for a new contract that will involve sending a tech person out to guide the new clients in how to use the software.

Oh, and did I mention that this would be in Hawaii?

Now, we don't have the contract yet and therefore I am in clearly counting my chickens before they have hatched.  But man do I have to hope that everything works out so that I can do my shows and be able to do the Hawaii job.

Third Midnight Gone

So Into the Woods is over.  We had a good run.  I had the hardest time feeling the flow of the show, and this is one of my favorites.  I saw it when it was on its original tour in Los Angeles with Cleo Laine as the Witch and Charlotte Rae as Jack's Mother.  I've been trying to get into a production of this show ever since.

But I was playing the Narrator (without also being the Mysterious Man...a mistake, in my opinion) and all of his lines are the same:  "And so the Baker, having adverbly verbed the noun, went after the object.  As for the other character...."  His lines are the connecting glue between the scenes and thus there isn't any real flow to help me remember which one is which.  He doesn't have very many lines, but trying to remember that this time it's "continued his search for the cape as red as blood" as opposed to "went after the red cape" and that the next scene I'm introducing is about Rapunzel and not Jack just kept on eluding me.

So I had to do what I've never done:  I wrote down all of my lines on index cards with my cue line.  Now, this is hardly a bad method of dealing with your lines.  Lots of actors do it and I'm not saying anything against it.  It's just that my own method of working a script is to get a handle on the flow of the show such that everything seems to naturally come from what happened before.  It makes me feel better internally to have that in my head.  This doesn't mean that I've "memorized the whole show," as such.  It's not like I can pull any line from any point at any time.  But it does mean that so long as I know what just happened, I know what's coming next.

But because of the somewhat disjointed nature of Into the Woods, what comes next often has nothing to do with what just happened and the Narrator is the one charged with keeping the continuity between scenes.  So throughout the run of the show, I'm pulling out my cards just before I walk on stage to remind myself of which "gazinta" this is, to borrow a term from Tommy Tune (the "gazinta" is the transition between scenes...this scene "goes into"..."gazintas"...the next.)

But even then, there were times where I was wondering what on earth was coming out of my mouth:  "Jack and his wife."  His wife?  When did Jack marry his mother?  I mean, I know it's Sondheim and he's not above such bizarre scenarios, but really.

"After having cast out Rapunzel to a remote desert, the Prince returned to take the Prince by surprise...er...the Witch returned to take the Prince by surprise."

All sorts of instances of what I call the "five foot phenomenon" happened.  The "five foot phenomenon" is that ability to have your lines down perfectly when you're standing in the wings but when you move five feet so that you're now on stage, they all seem to vanish.  But if you were to immediately step off stage, they call come back.  There's something about breaking the sight line that makes you brain go crazy.

But in the end, the audiences loved the show.

But my plans for what I'm doing for the summer have all fallen through.  I was originally set to be playing one of the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace.  This was an idea the artistic director for the theatre had:  To have me and another male actor friend play the aunts.  Not so much as a gimmick (though there is some of that) but rather to have a new take on the performance.

But alas, despite having planned this for about a year, the other actor had to bow out.  We scrambled around to find another actor to replace him, but we were looking for one with whom I had a good rapport.  We didn't want this to be a gimmick of "It's two guys!" but rather to have a good pair of men who can work together in those roles.  The director didn't want to have to worry about having a bad fit through an open audition process (since we don't have the time to search for the perfect counterpart to me), so they're going ahead with women in the roles.

So I'm somewhat sad:  When I do drag roles, I win awards.  Hmm...maybe that should tell me something about my career path.  Anybody up for Where's Charley? or Hairspray?

So I move on to audition for The Importance of Being Earnest.  I had just won Best Actor for my performance as Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes' Excellent Adventure at the theatre company putting on Earnest literally the day before the audition.  Earnest is being directed by the vocal coach we had for Sherlock and while I never expect connections to get me a job, it's good not to go in as a complete unknown.  The flip side of that is that directors often wind up stereotyping you.  A director who I was in grad school with was auditioning for Pippin and had me up for Leading Player.  He was having us sing "Simple Joys" and after I was done, he blurts out, "Wow!  I really didn't think you had the chops for that."  He had a vision of me from our past and I had to work through that preconception.  I didn't get the part, but it was good to show him that I am more versatile than he thought.

But, as was the case then, I didn't get the part in Earnest either.  There was a lot of depth in the talent that showed up, so I expect it'll be a good show.  Wish I could have been in it.

But, this means I'm open for Arsenic and Old Lace to audition for Mortimer.  Maybe I'll be in that show after all.