So it's over, with a bit of relief and some contentment. It's the longest stage time I have had over my fledgling amateur acting career. And I was surprised by how many new things I learned all this while.
I am trying to enlist them now, because I tend to forget lessons learned in life too soon, and have a tendency of making the same mistakes again and again. At least this note should serve as a good reminder before taking up a new challenge.
Lesson 1: I cannot act: Before I did this play, I was fairly confident that I was a decent actor by amateur stage standards. During the play I realized that it's quite the contrary. All I have is some command over spoken Marathi (by Seattle standards anyway) and a decent stage voice to go with it. Now I know that I can mimic better than I can act, and hence when time comes to play a normal person, who has no identifiable characteristics, I struggle. But then at some level, I probably knew that before we began, which is why, I wanted to do this play at my own pace, with maybe 3 months of practice, as opposed to the 40 days that we gave ourselves. I can see a pattern emerging here, because after we won a regional cricket league here last year, I realized through it that I cannot play cricket.
Lesson 2: Acting picks up rust faster than other skills: I had to pretty much re-learn looking up at the audience, or the black line as they call it, and avoiding bending my knees leading to awkward postures. As someone once said, you can forget acting, unlike swimming or biking. On that note, writing picks up rust fast as well, as I am realizing while writing this post.
Lesson 3: It hurts to be the slowest in the herd: Until now, I can safely say, that I have always acted in plays with other actors, who were either less experienced / had not so well written characters. So it was easy to avoid being the one who is always picked on. It goes for many other fields, e.g. hiking (pick up someone who is slower than you, so that if a bear is on the loose, it catches someone else before it can reach you). I completely realized this time that being the slowest in the herd is not enjoyable.
Lesson 4: It would have been nice to have trained: While working as a teaching assistant at my grad school, I realized how awesome it would have been had I trained on Computer Science with focus during my undergrad years. I had a similar realization this time around, while diving on stage, eating stuff, drinking and staging mock fights. I would have hurt my knees less, and not broken the other actor's glasses.
Lesson 5: Acting is all about making unnatural things look natural: There were parts of the play, which came naturally to me, given the kind of people I have been around. But that created a huge confusion about the definition of acting. A good actor would appear natural in settings/characters that (s)he hasn't seen in real life. But is that humanly possible? Paresh Rawal was really really good as Baburao Apte, but watching him as a Marathi guy, I was still not convinced. My mind is all messed up now.
Lesson 6: Stage acting is all about keeping the audience interested while staying in character: What's more important, risking the audience's disinterest or staying in character? There will be moments when you will have to make a decision one way or the other on stage, but you may not realize that (that you have to make that decision) until you have played that character a few times before a live audience. And the unfortunate part for an amateur actor is that a few times is all that he has got.
Lesson 7: A big part of acting is looking the character: It was a 2 characters play, inspired from an English play. This was made in an English movie twice (35 years apart), with 1 actor being common to both casts. This actor played the 1st character in the first version and the other in the second version. I had watched only 1 version of this movie. So when our director suggested that we should present this play such that we alternate between characters over different shows (ala Sanjay Mone and Girish Oak in Kusum Manohar Lele, incidentally another play we performed here and when we thought we should implement the same), the idea seemed outrageous. But as soon as I saw the 2nd version of the movie, I saw the director's point. You cannot look younger than you are, but you can definitely look/portray older characters. We never got to it due to time constraints, but I must confess, that I tried acting out a few scenes as the other character once, after our show was done.
Am I qualified enough to write about acting? What the hell, I have a lot of respect for my director and he showed faith in me to play such a big role in this play. The least I can do is have faith in myself to write about what I felt.
I have had to force myself to write this, especially when I had the options of -
1. Listening to Norah Jones on youtube (watching rather).
2. Going out for a run on a rare sunny Seattle day.
3. Playing tennis.
But I have successfully convinced myself, that writing this post, is a non-trivial task and would serve as a good reminder of this time, in the time to come. Reading my blog, I have found it very surprising what I was thinking of in the past. Many a times I have even forgotten that I ever wrote down such confessions. And maybe that's just a good thing. Maybe that's the only thing that is still telling me that I am not getting rapidly old.
(I just realized that I have used "I" in this blog so many times, it's obnoxious :))
P.S. I wrote this post on March 9th, 2013, just published it 3 months later on June 9th.
I am trying to enlist them now, because I tend to forget lessons learned in life too soon, and have a tendency of making the same mistakes again and again. At least this note should serve as a good reminder before taking up a new challenge.
Lesson 1: I cannot act: Before I did this play, I was fairly confident that I was a decent actor by amateur stage standards. During the play I realized that it's quite the contrary. All I have is some command over spoken Marathi (by Seattle standards anyway) and a decent stage voice to go with it. Now I know that I can mimic better than I can act, and hence when time comes to play a normal person, who has no identifiable characteristics, I struggle. But then at some level, I probably knew that before we began, which is why, I wanted to do this play at my own pace, with maybe 3 months of practice, as opposed to the 40 days that we gave ourselves. I can see a pattern emerging here, because after we won a regional cricket league here last year, I realized through it that I cannot play cricket.
Lesson 2: Acting picks up rust faster than other skills: I had to pretty much re-learn looking up at the audience, or the black line as they call it, and avoiding bending my knees leading to awkward postures. As someone once said, you can forget acting, unlike swimming or biking. On that note, writing picks up rust fast as well, as I am realizing while writing this post.
Lesson 3: It hurts to be the slowest in the herd: Until now, I can safely say, that I have always acted in plays with other actors, who were either less experienced / had not so well written characters. So it was easy to avoid being the one who is always picked on. It goes for many other fields, e.g. hiking (pick up someone who is slower than you, so that if a bear is on the loose, it catches someone else before it can reach you). I completely realized this time that being the slowest in the herd is not enjoyable.
Lesson 4: It would have been nice to have trained: While working as a teaching assistant at my grad school, I realized how awesome it would have been had I trained on Computer Science with focus during my undergrad years. I had a similar realization this time around, while diving on stage, eating stuff, drinking and staging mock fights. I would have hurt my knees less, and not broken the other actor's glasses.
Lesson 5: Acting is all about making unnatural things look natural: There were parts of the play, which came naturally to me, given the kind of people I have been around. But that created a huge confusion about the definition of acting. A good actor would appear natural in settings/characters that (s)he hasn't seen in real life. But is that humanly possible? Paresh Rawal was really really good as Baburao Apte, but watching him as a Marathi guy, I was still not convinced. My mind is all messed up now.
Lesson 6: Stage acting is all about keeping the audience interested while staying in character: What's more important, risking the audience's disinterest or staying in character? There will be moments when you will have to make a decision one way or the other on stage, but you may not realize that (that you have to make that decision) until you have played that character a few times before a live audience. And the unfortunate part for an amateur actor is that a few times is all that he has got.
Lesson 7: A big part of acting is looking the character: It was a 2 characters play, inspired from an English play. This was made in an English movie twice (35 years apart), with 1 actor being common to both casts. This actor played the 1st character in the first version and the other in the second version. I had watched only 1 version of this movie. So when our director suggested that we should present this play such that we alternate between characters over different shows (ala Sanjay Mone and Girish Oak in Kusum Manohar Lele, incidentally another play we performed here and when we thought we should implement the same), the idea seemed outrageous. But as soon as I saw the 2nd version of the movie, I saw the director's point. You cannot look younger than you are, but you can definitely look/portray older characters. We never got to it due to time constraints, but I must confess, that I tried acting out a few scenes as the other character once, after our show was done.
Am I qualified enough to write about acting? What the hell, I have a lot of respect for my director and he showed faith in me to play such a big role in this play. The least I can do is have faith in myself to write about what I felt.
I have had to force myself to write this, especially when I had the options of -
1. Listening to Norah Jones on youtube (watching rather).
2. Going out for a run on a rare sunny Seattle day.
3. Playing tennis.
But I have successfully convinced myself, that writing this post, is a non-trivial task and would serve as a good reminder of this time, in the time to come. Reading my blog, I have found it very surprising what I was thinking of in the past. Many a times I have even forgotten that I ever wrote down such confessions. And maybe that's just a good thing. Maybe that's the only thing that is still telling me that I am not getting rapidly old.
(I just realized that I have used "I" in this blog so many times, it's obnoxious :))
P.S. I wrote this post on March 9th, 2013, just published it 3 months later on June 9th.
No comments:
Post a Comment