Broken Glass

photo by George Schiavone

I just finished stuffing some tuna fish into a green pepper, when I bumped my dish strainer and a glass plate came crashing down on the tile floor in my kitchen. I could hear it shatter into a zillion pieces. “Don’t panic, don’t move,” I thought, “and eat your lunch.”

I did and it was tasty. The problem was that the thousand shards of glass were still there after I finished eating.

I employ magical thinking at every opportunity, and when that doesn’t work, I turn to wishful thinking. I believe these sorts of sophisticated thought strategies are practiced by most everyone. A fine example of this is the decision we all make everyday whether or not to wash the dishes right after eating, or wait till tomorrow. If we wait till morning, the dish-fairy might just get them done for us.

Usually both the magical and wishful tactics come up short in solving real problems, and then I find myself resorting to reality, which is not as flexible as the magical approach. So, the myriad slivers of glass didn’t all by themselves suddenly wind up in the garbage can, migrate to a neat little pile to be sucked up easily into a vacuum hose, nor did they find their way back together again into a useful saucer.

What to do. Blind and barefoot in a kitchen with broken glass frosting your floor is a difficult situation.

Rule 1: Obtain a layer of protection. Rule 2: Move slowly. Rule 3: First, finish your lunch.

Fortunately, within arm’s reach were some paper towels. I grabbed several, crouched low and slowly ran the paper towels along the floor, moving the sharp little slivers aside and creating safe passage out of the kitchen. All 3 of my “call-me-anytime-if-you-need-any-help” neighbors were unavailable. I put up a blockade at the entrance of the kitchen so my guide dog Billy wouldn’t wander in. Six hours later, a friend swept and vacuumed my kitchen floor. I suppose she was a fairy of sorts.

So, when you’re blind and live alone and your dog throws-up, what do you do? Yep, magical thinking aside, obtain a layer of protection and move slowly (with some Lysol spray in tow). But first, finish your lunch.

We're Open!

After a couple of dress rehearsals and a preview, we’re open! The three sisters are all in various stages of their young lives, somewhat unhappily, and for different reasons, feel that moving out of their small town to Moscow will better their conditions. The town Chairman (who is never seen) conducts some of his business through the visually impaired messenger Ferapont.

For Ferapont’s first entrance, I enter carrying a cake from the Chairman to the Prozorovs. The housekeeper (Linda) leads me to the kitchen door and places my hand on it so I can go through without banging my nose to get my slice of cake. In the next act, I enter to deliver a book and some documents from the Chairman to Andrei (Theo), the sister’s brother. Here I’ve worked with the maid (Ana) for the smooth stage moves, like her placing my hand on the back of my chair which gives me my orientation where to sit and begin my dialogue with Andrei.

I’m reminded that some ‘sightlings’ are naturally in tune with blind folks. When Ana approaches me to exit the scene with Andrei, she silently and gently takes both my arms so I immediately orient and then leads me off stage right. Ah, were my world as graceful as Ana!

Another trick of the blind guy trade is the hand squeeze. I later enter a scene to ask Andrei if the fireman can go through his garden to get to the river to help fight the blaze which is consuming the town. I enter with Ana holding my arm as I chase Andrei, Ana squeezes my hand at the right time and I speak on cue.

Connect and Disconnect

Throughout the play, different characters step out of their scene and approach the audience to deliver a few poignant lines. Director Stephanie calls this a “connect” and when moving back into the action, a “disconnect,” complete with special lighting and sound cues to highlight the actor addressing the audience. On my connect, I employ another trick – counting steps. I’m sitting at a table with Andrei and after he asks me, “Have you ever been to Moscow?”, I stand and take 3 steps to the audience from my chair and tell them, “I’ve never been to Moscow. It’s not in God’s will.” At this point I’m  about 2 feet away from the onlookers.  Another step and I’m in the lap of the lady in the first row with the nice pearls.

On Stage with the Audience

How do actors react to the audience being on stage with them? Emily, who plays the middle sister Masha, said, “I like it. Let’s me know if the audience is taking the ride with me. It helps me expand my energy. When I’m not facing them, it energizes the back and side of my body.”

Different Audiences

You never know what kind of audience you will have for any given performance: some are lively, some pensive, some inebriated. If I get a laugh, I hold a beat before delivering my next line. If no laugh, full steam ahead.

Live Theatre

Every performance is different. Actors can be “on” one night and “off” another night. A bad tuna sandwich at lunch can make for an uneasy evening performance. Props and set pieces can malfunction – the smashing clock doesn’t smash (veteran character actor Howard picks it up and tries it again!), or the door knock doesn’t knock, or when I’m making a point to Andrei, I hit the table and it starts to collapse. That’s actually part of the fun of live theatre – you can’t stop the camera and do it again. All you can do is carry on. Like life.

Great Cast

All 16 of my fellow actors are first rate. Working with a bunch of pros doesn’t always happen, and when it does, it’s a blessing. We move this classic play along in 2 hours’ time without a lull.

Reviews Favorable

Critics Dolen and Hirschman said this Three Sisters “is an enchanting, unique South Florida experience…” and “a celebration of theatrical imagination.” Elaiza (Executive Director), Stephanie, Fernando, Octi, Luciano (sound design), the entire cast and crew, and the audience, all came together to create this enjoyable time on stage.

And “in a comic turn as the befuddled messenger” I have another line on my resume and another notch in the boards.

Rehearsal and Opening

Our director Stephanie “blocks” the show, positioning the players to fit the action of the dialogue. In my case with “Three Sisters,” I’m playing Ferapont, an 80 year old messenger who is hard of hearing (according to the script) and whom we made visually impaired to boot. So in my case, my blocking was for 2 characters – me and the maid, the faithful Ana, who leads me wherever I need to go.

Usually I play sighted characters, keying off set pieces, changes in flooring, other actors, to get my bearings, but when I have the opportunity to play a blind character, I’ll have a timely cane or a sighted guide. (I’ve never used my guide dog on stage, though once I forgot to tie him down backstage and while dancing in the streets of Paris in “Hunchback of Notre Dame” came the familiar jingle of a dog collar and suddenly, there was my guide, bouncing in the streets of Paris with the ensemble. The audience loved it. After the show, the director said, “Let’s keep it in!”

Stephanie, an attractive brunette with piercing eyes behind rectangular glasses, sees and conveys a clear image of the “where, when and why” of each action for each player, choreographer Octi often assisting on the “how to get there.” With 16 actors, set pieces, flower arrangements, books, a smashing clock, toys, bottles, glasses, and dishes, which all move, there is a lot of constant traffic during the 4 acts of this show, both on and off stage. Everything is blocked precisely by Stephanie so the show runs like a well-oiled machine with no interruption in the action, and with no actors bumping into each other or the set. For this special show, the audience is also on stage on a movable riser which is repositioned 3 times during the play for different views in and around the Prozorov house.

The Candy Set

In order to get a sense of the surroundings on stage, Ana grabs some of my leftover Halloween candy and creates a model set, a colorful array of Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers, and Sweet Tarts. She puts my hands on it so I can feel the set pieces, giving me a real sense of the space. My cell phone plays the part of the audience riser.

Miami Shores isn’t Flat

I have to remember that the 3 different staircases in the theatre I use during the show all have a different number of steps leading up and down from the stage – stage left has five, stage right has four, and the steps at the back of the house have six. As I go up and down these suckers, sometimes quickly, I gotta concentrate. I’m happy to report so far so good.

Costumes

The costumes, designed by multi-tasking Fernando (who is also the set and lighting designer), are quite elegant, the ladies in corsets, beautiful floor length dresses, boots with heels, the men bedecked in military garb, the maids in formal servant dress, and that messenger for the chairman (yours truly) looking a bit disheveled.

Lights and Sound

Once the entire play is blocked, we start back at the top and do a “cue-to-cue” where each action starts and stops so the lights and sound effects can be added to the action on stage. With doorbells ringing, a violin playing offstage, fire truck bells sounding, birds chirping, barking dogs and over 170 different light cues, this process alone takes 2 weeks to conclude.

All Hands on Deck

Once the show is blocked, lit and sound-synched, it’s time to work the transitions from act to act. The 5 Stage hands, including the lovely Tammy who does double duty as a maid on stage, strike and add the massive amount of set pieces and props during the transitions between the acts,and pivot the 49 members of the audience on the movable riser, smoothly and efficiently.

Downtime

You become a family when you work on a show. You nap backstage when you’re not working, eat together at the local bistro, and play with Billy the Dog whenever possible.

Opening

Once we open, Stephanie turns the show over to the stage manager Naomi, and the assistant stage manager Amanda, who “call” the show from top to bottom, making sure that the actors are in place and the almost 300 cues for lights, sound,set changes and actors goes off without a hitch.

It’s show time!

Flying Actor

Actors need to condition themselves, like an athlete, exercising and training to prep their mind and body for the work.

My day starts out at 9 a.m. with a series of exercises that loosen the limbs and voice, employing old school and new school techniques.

Being a blind guy, it becomes challenging to keep up with the various moves and positions being demonstrated by the leader. Thank Thespis for Ana! She is a petite, fit dancer who spots me and corrects my movements. We’ve gotten so good working together that our exercises resemble a choreographed dance.

Octavio, Resident Artist at Miami Theater Center, is the choreographer, movement and voice trainer for “Three Sisters.” With a larger than life presence and a smile to match, the salt and peppered Octi keeps us, the army of actors, in constant motion for 90 minutes, applying the “Sausage” – a mixture of movement, voice, theater and dance methods – yoga, GaGa (not Lady), Meyerhold's Bio Mechanics, FloorBarre, myriad voice techniques from Linklater and Grotowski, and basic composition tools developed by Anne Bogart.

So here I am lying on my back on my yoga mat attempting to strengthen my core and straighten my spine, a real good thing as I always have a tendency to lean a bit forward when I walk. I’m inclined to think this is a blind guy tendency, but my father who could see perfectly well had the same posture. Apparently, so did Abraham Lincoln.

We go from twisting every limb of our body, to crunches, to moving torso, head and  legs like a toy, and then suddenly lying still and moving only one index finger to gather whatever information we can. (It is remarkable how much information you can receive through a finger.) We imagine our hands like feet, breathe in through one nostril and out the other, at times taking dragon breaths (short puffs of air in and out), float through “the lake” and climb up and down “the mountain,” all designed to distract us from our normal frame of consciousness and put us in touch with new feelings and perspectives. At one point I was actually flying, with of course, a little help from my friends.

The music of Tommy Dorsey, Bob Dylan, Petula Clark, Stevie Nicks, Mary Poppins and Madonna provide the soundtrack underscoring the drill. (When Madonna roars “Die b**ch!”, I’m crunching with a vengeance!)

Occasionally in the mix we lie quietly on our backs while Octi takes us on a guided meditation. This is my personal favorite.

Once our bodies are tuned up, we condition the brain with improv. The improvs, led by artistic director Stephanie and Octi, are situations that are set up to inform and help us discover useful things about our characters – it’s putting wood into the fireplace.

Speak and Repeat

One actor faces a second actor, the second speaking with the first actor’s character voice while making a specific movement, the first repeating and copying, and then they switch. I didn’t do so well copying the movements but kicked butt with the voice.

The Ghost

We might create an internal emotion and turn it into an emotionally charged action, then repeat the action without any vocal sounds, then without any facial expressions, finally moving the action into an empty gesture, becoming a ghost, rotating from full out action to ghost and back to action. This helped put us all at once on opposite ends of our characters being.

Swarming

One character sits in the hot seat while all the other dozen actors slowly approach them, speaking lines or thoughts from the play, saying something nice about them and then turning combative, elevating the noise to a fevered pitch until the actor in the hot seat stands and shouts: “Moscow!” which silences the chaos. This helps the actor in the seat to experience a wide range of emotions. (It probably was a bit curious to the UPS guy who showed up at the door during my turn.)

Shared Objects

We each brought in a favorite object and shared a story about it with another actor. Later that actor repeated your story – an excellent listening exercise. Ah, listening! The actors best tool in the toolkit.

Walk and Talk

Before we took the stage to rehearse the play, we all moved around the rehearsal room together, exploring the mock set and prop pieces while speaking our lines out loud. This helped break vocal and body patterns that might be forming prematurely as well as amplify the silence between the lines. Pauses during the play are essential, especially with Chekhov – it’s often what’s not being said that has real impact.

Shoe Training

With a period play, boots are abundant, and loud. We put on our footwear, and walked the stage like cat burglars, our legs absorbing the energy, the women running on the balls of their feet in their heels. This was to reduce any distracting noise we might make as we tripped the boards.

On to the rehearsal and opening night!

Getting the Play on Its Feet

Folks rarely think about the dynamics that produce creative results. We may read a novel in a few hours but don’t ponder the years it took the author to research and craft their book. An audience likewise doesn’t think about the weeks of preparation it takes to produce the show they watch for 2 hours. We won’t examine the year Chekhov took to write Three Sisters, but instead take a peek at the process of mounting his play.

A theatrical production has body parts that include feet and legs. “Getting a play on its feet” refers to the rehearsal process and the show “gets its legs” after it opens. Other important body parts include hands, head and soul but this is a blog and not a primer on acting or an anatomy text. I’ll leave that to Mamet, Stanislavski and Dr. Grey.

Now back to the feet.

No surprise that there are 2 feet in the rehearsal process: training and blocking. Training includes table work, improv and exercise to help understand the text and build the character. Blocking is where the director moves the players to their actual positions on the stage. Both feet steadily keep walking (Yikes! Here come the analogy police!) toward opening night.

The rehearsal process gives the actor the opportunity to bond with fellow actors, create a deeper family connection, mine their character more thoroughly, And of course, get their actions and words deep into their bones so they appear natural and truthful.

Table Work

Table work explores what is on and off the page: the backstory, the actual lines, and what lies underneath or between the lines. (Chekhov was famous for “subtext” – the important stuff that isn’t actually spoken.)

Table work begins with a “read through” of the play from top to bottom so that the cast can hear it with the actual voices. As with every play I'm in, I get my script in advance and memorize my lines so I can participate in the first table read. (I use my talking computer which speaks the text aloud so I can memorize it. It’s also handy to run my sides against the machine as it reads my cue lines.) After the first read through, we start at the top of the script again and go line by line to clarify what is being said. It is during the table work that the actor gains understanding of context and intention.

Since “Three Sisters” takes place over the first few years at the turn of 20th century Russia, some understanding of Russian life at that time was needed. Fernando, our dramaturge (specialist in dramatic composition) gave us some insight into the essentially Russian feudal system prevalent during Chekhov's lifetime. Let’s see if I can give it to you in one sentence: If you were a fellow and owned land you were at the top of the food chain and could vote in the local government, one moved up in Russian society via military or heredity, and a woman’s career goal was to marry — hopefully a military bigwig.

The “backstory” is the family history that leads up to the first words spoken in the play. We uncovered the ages of the characters (Ferapont, my character, is 80) and explored the family events from 1880 to 1901, when the play begins. Daddy Prozorov, having moved his family, 11 years earlier, to a small provincial town from urban Moscow, dies one year before the first lines are spoken. His daughters, the three sisters, Olga, Masha and Irina, muse about returning to Moscow throughout the show.

I’ve included a few sample pictures of some of the actors (not in costume) portraying some of the characters in the backstory. (This was an exercise to flesh out some of the family history and is not indicative of the aesthetic of the production.)

My next post will eyeball some of the exercises and improvs we do to help tease out the useful stuff which informs and builds our characters, even as our feet keep on truckin’.

Stay tuned.

New Gig!

Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters", Miami Theater Center There’s a professional live theatre located in convenient Miami Shores, originally a single screen movie house built in 1946. I remember going there as a kid to see The Beatles travel with Captain Fred in his Yellow Submarine to defeat the music-hating Blue Meanies. That was 1968. The movie theatre eventually closed in the late 1980s, remaining dormant until a group of investors transformed it into a live theatre in the early 90s, and The Shores Performing Arts Theatre (SPAT) was born. Chita Rivera was the principal headliner for the first SPAT fund raiser and soon after, the musical “Chicago” was the first show to trip her boards.

Over the next dozen years, SPAT went through a series of iterations and artistic directors. It was here where I first returned to the stage after leaving it for the previous 20 years to work the “real job” and raise a family. The only difference was that, in the late 70s, I could see and I didn’t know if anyone would hire me now as a blind performer. I decided to give it a shot and find out. After all, blindness didn’t bother me, I just wanted to work as an actor.

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend. The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage…” I was hired by artistic director Christopher Bishop and performed in some classic theatre, playing Commander Harbison in “South Pacific,” Fleet Foot, a 105 year old Indian guide in “Little Mary Sunshine,” and the Narrator in Rich Simone's production of “The Rocky Horror Show.” In all of these roles, I played sighted characters. Most memorable was having to light 5 different cigarettes at different times each night while narrating the plight of Brad and Janet during the run of "Rocky Horror." I had an antique cigarette case and a classic flint-wheel Zippo lighter, but it didn’t always light, so we replaced it with the less attractive but reliable Bic, which worked like a charm. Manipulating the cigarette was another issue. I would slide my index finger to the end of the ciggy and then ease back about a half inch so when I brought the flame toward me, I could feel the heat at my finger tip, close enough to light the ciggy and far enough not to char my finger. I got pretty good at it until I lit up a couple of filters. At that point, the stage manager started loading the filter side opposite the case latch so I knew which side to place in my mouth. Every night I challenged myself to see if I could have a perfect ciggy night, lighting up all 5 cigs correctly. I had 6 flawless ciggy nights out of 21 shows. I made up for any imperfect choreography with the cigarettes by dancing a mean “Time Warp.”

The theatre was in serious need of an internal and external face lift, but funding was tricky. Then, in 2005, Stephanie Ansin, a keen,  forward-thinking grad fresh from Columbia University, put her arms around the theatre, became its artistic director and  began to helm it’s transformation. She combined her business instincts with her MFA in Directing and through renovation and expansion, Stephanie has turned The Shores into a vibrant theatrical hub of activity, launching The PlayGround Theatre, offering contemporary and classical plays for young audiences, morphing into the Miami Theater Center this year, serving up contemporary and classical fare for adults as well.

Stephanie cast me on the early stages of The PlayGround as John, a wheel-chair spinning old coot in “Brooklyn Bridge” and the befuddled blind King Silvio in “The Love of Three Oranges,” a delightful show that is now part of the rotating PGT repertory.

Currently I’m playing the character Ferapont, the messenger in Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” the first show under the MTC mantle.

"Three Sisters" will open on November 17. I’ll be blogging on the rehearsal process and theatrical run, so stay tuned. And, oh yeah, my character is visually impaired and hard of hearing!