I performed my soliloquy for the class last night. It didn’t go too badly. I messed up a line in there somewhere, but I think I covered it ok. The other soliloquies were enjoyable, too, overall better than mine.
Bob did the scene from “A Few Good Men” where Jack Nicholson’s character is all, “You can’t handle the truth!” Bill did this crazy scene where he’s playing a guy trying to sell injections to pregnant mothers to get their kids hooked on TastyCola. Danielle did a scene from “I Love Lucy”, where Lucy is trying to do a commercial (against her husband’s wishes, of course) for this Vitameatavegimin “health drink”, which is actually 23% alcohol and she gets more drunk each time she is forced to reshoot. Deon did a scene where she’s telling her daughter about being a good woman or a bad woman, and about growing up. And Amber did a scene in which she is berating the person who she hired to kill her neighbor, who she feels is responsible for the death of her husband.
In all, every solo was good. I was surprised by my classmates’ improvements in performance since our first scene.
Here’s a thought I had: If we got to perform the soliloquy twice in front of the class - once for practice, once for real - it wouldn’t be so nerve-wracking. As it stood, the only people I performed it for were Dr. Hash, Chris, and Berta, so getting a chance to settle down in front of the audience might have been helpful.
After we did the solos, we read our parts for the final scene. There was much deliberation on our part (Danielle and I) over what we would do.
I had a couple of books with scenes from movies and plays. I had also printed out a scene from “Mad About You” which I think would have been perfect, but unfortunately I left it on the printer at work. Danielle brought in two scripts: one was the soup nazi scene from Seinfeld, and the other was the Saturday Night Live skit where Will Ferrel and Cheri Oteri are cheerleaders. Yeah, I wasn’t so keen on the cheerleader bit (get that thought out of your mind right now!), and I think the Seinfeld scene had too many actors on stage, so it would have been difficult for just the two of us.
We were reading from the books I had, and Danielle had just shown me a movie scene (that she obviously didn’t read all the way through) where the woman strips naked, when I came upon the scene that we settled on.
It’s a couple that meet at a New Year’s party. She’s overtly lamenting that she can’t find a good boyfriend, and he’s secretly lamenting that his marriage is falling apart but he can’t see how to break it off. These facts are made more evident when her date for the party and my character’s wife wander off to the bedroom together.
Danielle has a lot of chunky lines - several sentences - and mine are short and direct. As a result, she gets a good chance to play up the humor, and my character is left as the straight man. On the other hand, she’s got a lot more to memorize. I think our rapport is ok. It’ll play better when we know our lines and are looking at each other.
I get a weird vibe from Danielle and Amber, like they think I’m a stalker or something. This is probably all in my head, or maybe my desperation to involve myself with other humans comes off as “skirt-chasing old lunatic”. An example of what I’m talking about:
Dr. Hash asked us where these two characters end up. Danielle says that they’re just two people who have made some connection at a party and that’s it. But to me, clearly, these people go on to more than that. Where’s the drama in the play if not? And so in response to Dr. Hash’s question, I asked Danielle if she really thought these two just connected briefly and then the play went on. But the suggestion that there might be more led to weirdness.
Danielle said something like, “Yeah, ok, we go off to the guest bedroom.” And, well, I didn’t think it was anything that extreme, but I was getting tired of Dr. Hash’s questions, and tired of being too inept linguistically to explain myself - mostly due to being so frazzled after little sleep this week and just getting that soliloquy off my chest.
What I think is that maybe these two get their champagne and talk. And then, since he can’t stay at his place (his wife is with her boyfriend, remember) they go out, maybe for coffee. And maybe he doesn’t say anything to his wife about his affair, and doesn’t say anything to her about her affair either, and just tries to figure out how to fix his life and leave her, if not for this new girl, then for his own sake. As far as Danielle’s character goes, maybe she’s tired of all the losers and she really likes this guy, even though he’s married. And maybe because she knows his situation, she’s willing to wait and see, but not really commit, and she’s troubled by the fact that she’s falling for yet another married guy.
I think the play has some rich possibilites. At least something beyond shacking up for the night in the guest room.
But the tad of reluctance I heard in Danielle’s voice when she suggested the guest room idea… To my sleep-deprived mind, it sounded like, “Ok, Owen, you dirty old man… I’ve known you wanted to bed me from the moment I walked into class, but I’ll give in to this idea because it sounds plausible, even though I want to avoid showing any kind of impropriety towards you, because I wouldn’t want to give you any… ideas. So, ‘Yeah, we go off to the guest bedroom and do it.’”
Yeah, I’m so utterly insane.
Similar to my imagined plight, I really hope that Bob and Amber can get through their scene without Dr. Hash forcing Bob to grab Amber’s boobs. They both seem so uncomfortable about it, it’s funny. I mean, I wouldn’t make them do it just because it’s in their script, but that Dr. Hash sure is a character. She apparently had Bob grope Amber in all sorts of ways apart from the “bosom” written in the stage instructions.
Ah, yes. Acting class is fun. Especially for up-and-coming skirt-chasers like me.
