Thank you again for everything! Hold Your Bat Boy, Love Your Bat Boy!
I am drawing to a close on this project. I just looked through the Senior Project brochure today to look for things I may have missed and it seems that it is all there. I was also just looking through the entire blog and I have to say that I am pleased with it. It looks really good in my opinion. The next step is to meet with my advising professor (the director of the show) and make sure it is all there and do the closing checksheet or whatever it is.
I’d like to take a moment just to thank everyone who has kept up with this project throughout the process and those that will come to see the project in the future and possibly use it as a framework for projects to come. I put a lot of work into this, and it would be a shame to not have it available to other generations of students as well as the alumni and professors. I’m proud of this project and I’ve learned from this project. I hope that students can use it to refer to for many things, including their own senior projects in acting and for the acting hints and tips I posted several posts back and that are also available on the Process page. This was for me, but it was also for you, my readers. Please feel free to comment if this is your first or 50th visit to the blog. I will continually be able to keep an eye on the comments for years to come and it will be neat to see what people have to say. Again, thank you all and I hope that you’ve enjoyed this as much as I did. Take care.
It’s amazing how much I already miss the show…and we just performed the last one at 2pm this afternoon. I made a realization today. A few actually…one is very simple…I can’t wait until I finally nail down a real professional show that may run for longer than our shows here can. The second realization is this. It’s funny how in rehearsal I am so scared to go big and to go over the top and make the director pull me back, but when there is an audience, I feel like its so easy to really take it to the limit. I guess that may be part of the “working late” mentality, but I wish that my poor directors could get that out of me before the shows start in front of audience. It may cause less stress. I wish there was a way to harness that feeling that I get when I’m in front of an audience. It’s like, “Hey, everyone’s watching me, and I really want to impress.” That’s something for me to look forward to in the future and to aim to work for in the future. I hope I get more chances in this small department while I’m still at the “big fish in a small pond” stage of my life. I will be posting more while the rest of the semester winds down, but Bat Boy is over and journaling won’t be necessarily the top of my priorities. I hope to hear your comments. And Brian Murray, I hope that you were able to make it to the show, and I also hope that you and I can do a little more talking back and forth on this blog about how we performed each of our Dr. Parkers. It will add a neat dimension to this project. I’d like to hear your reaction to our production. I’d like to know a little more about your process and I’d like to share more of mine with you now that the shows are over. For all my readers, thank you for keeping up with this and stay tuned, I’m sure that there will be plenty more to read in the near future.
Tonight was excellent. It was weird because I started off the show feeling very low on energy. After taking some time to relax, I was ready to get out there. The first number went unbelievably well. We had that moment where we were pointing at the audience on the “and you…and you” lyrics, and I make it a point to point and make eye contact with one member of the audience and I guess I just picked the right person tonight. I made a connection with this guy and it was like he was my own personal cheering section for the entire show. But besides that, it was like that moment was the one time in the show that made me push through the show with high energy.
I love the moment that Edgar is eating the rabbit because I get to do this wild laugh and its absolutely my favorite moment within my favorite scene of the entire show. Tonight’s performance was the perfect example of when the rhythm of the show is perfectly in sync with the performers and the band and the crew. I just cannot say enough good things about tonight. I hope that I can do this two more times. Sis is coming tomorrow, so it better be good.
I have been sick for a week now. I am finally through the worst of it that had been affecting my performance. Now Peter has it. Sorry Pete!
The first performance was a little bit of a disaster for me. The energy was up and everything was going well until I broke the knife…then my labcoat was MIA…then I didn’t have a syringe in one of the more crucial moments of the show…then I broke the knife again and had no way to carry through a crucial moment in the storyline…so I faked it. To top it all off, I was at the climax of my cold, so Dr. Parker was a sniffling crazy man the entire show. Performance…accomplished.
The second performance was slightly better. Energy was down all around, and I still had the sniffles, but it was much better technically. I even sang better and found myself in the moment a lot.
The third performance was my best so far. I was trying to pull out all the stops and really plow through the thing and stay within the rhythm of the show. Was everyone else there? Not really, but I felt good. My parents saw it this night and when asked about how they liked it, Mary Lou Reynolds replied, “I didn’t.” Nothing against the acting, which she later told me, was rather good. The story was just a little out there. The parents also told me I was creepy and that my voice had come double the way since the last show they saw me in (Forever Plaid). I have to agree. =)
Performance number four went well too, with the exception of poor David’s vocal issues. I think all that blood needs to be washed down EXTREMELY WELL during Christian Charity (Reprise). After all, a bat cannot live on blood alone. Otherwise, it was a good audience and a good closer to the weekend.
Ok, so even for the briefest of moments, I have some down time. We have thus far between now and my last post, run through tech rehearsals and opening night of the show. How did that happen? Where did that time go? And how is it possible that we are into the run? I started to get sick on Tuesday of this week and it progressively got worse until it was at its peak on Thursday night, which was opening. Then, thankfully, it subsided and is very near the end and is very nearly gone. So, I don’t really like to think about Thursday’s performance, even given that Gregg called us up afterward to talk to Jenna and David and I about the first show. I was scared to death that it was going to be a talk full of disappointment and irritation. Quite the contrary. He told us that he was proud of the show and that even though some things went wrong, like the syringe not being in the bag at one of the most crucial moments of the show for me to have the damn thing in my hand! It was a good feeling to walk away with knowing that we had done well and that the product we’ve been working so hard on is now finally together.
I have been writing this post in bits and pieces since I started it because I have to encompass a lot of information in order to fill in the gaps between this and the last post. Because of the schedules and the time commitment I have had to make to the show itself over the past few weeks, I have rarely had time to myself to use for the blog. The tech process did not go nearly as smoothly as I would have liked or was used to. However, I believe that we came to a good product in the end.
Maybe I’m a late worker/discoverer. We discovered in directing over a year ago that there are different types of actors. There are the kinds that work throughout the process and get the detail of their characters by working through it everyday, there are the kinds of actors that sometimes don’t get it at all (like I ahve been known to do) and there are the kinds of actors that get it right before the show opens (which can probably cause a lot of stress for the director). I think I’m one of the latter now. I really did not start to understand the character AS WELL until I was a few days from an audience and we were actually running the show full speed ahead without a lot of stopping. Gregg has given me a few reasons to believe that I really have discovered this character and that I have shown a large improvement in the last few years since coming to this school. It’s hard to believe I came here 4 years ago and I’m now starting to show off more of my potential.
I have heard a few people speaking about my recent post concerning actor reminders. I overheard Watt Smith, who plays several characters in the show speaking about it and was amazed to see that there were so many things an actor can and needs to thinks about. And the part that really makes me happy is that, knowing it or not, he has incorporated some of those thoughts into his characters. I think he has great potential as an actor. He’s very honest with himself and everyone around him and he also leaves himself very open and vulnerable to the process. I also like to see all the younger actors taking what the director says to heart. The best of all is that they are continuing to develop their characters up to the very end and its good to see that they have realized things up to this point that are going to help them in future.
I’m nearing the end of this project what with the first weekend of shows behind us and the last weekend only two days away and I think about all the things I wish I could have done previous to the opening. Although a lot of my research and information is in the blog itself, it’s not organized and I know that I will organize it, but it seems so small. There are several things that are written down on post-it notes and at least two full notepads just lying around in my room and I have no idea how I am going to get those into an electronic medium and on to my blog. There are several things in the previous years senior projects that need to be uploaded, but there is so little time now and it seems past the point of putting them in here. I have no photos as of yet and I have absolutely no idea where to begin sifting through all the data. It’s almost like we become scientists in our research for a production.
The post that follows will be a little recap on the performances and how they went this past weekend. Thanks for stopping by. I’m glad to see that even people outside the production and the university are reading the blog and getting something out of it. Comments are always appreciated.
So, we’re using these blogs hosted by wordpress and there are still so many little things that just don’t work right. I find myself constantly going into HTML codes to remedy the problems that are occurring. Like, the page breaks are a huge problem. They sometimes just don’t show up at all, and I have to read my blog every time to see where the problem spots are. Problem is that protected posts don’t show up on the actual blog page, but if I type in the password, there is no way to re-instate the protection, and then I have to go back through every protected post and change the password especially if I use the office or cad lab computers which are used by several other people. It’s just all very irritating. Done.
Today is Halloween. yay…
So, tonight I start rehearsal at 6:30pm with Gregg to work over my monologue in the woods with the baby. He told me last night before leaving rehearsal to look over the monologue and to work it some and think about it. Well, today while I had some free time at work, that’s what I did. And I ran it in the car on the way to run errands and I thought about it on the way to work and I’m thinking about it now.
I’ve come up with two ways of delivering the monologue. One way is a little casual like a storyteller and the other is a little more dark and in the context of my characer in the scene thus far. I started to look at words like “animals” and “thing” and how I don’t say “humans” or “boy”. Those, in my mind, are important words. The playwright gave them to me for a reason. “I had put to sleep countless animals in my work, so killing the thing should not have been a problem.” as opposed to “I had killed plenty of animals in my work, so killing the boy shouldn’t have been a problem.”
I also went further into how many things have I done for Meredith to express the depth of my love for her? Plenty. I told her serveral times. I begged her to marry me so that my child would have a father and so that I was doing the right thing. So, one more huge act should do the trick. I’ll kill this monster that is basically the bane of my existence and then she’ll see how great I am!
But I can’t kill it, because this boy isn’t an animal. He’s part of me…or is he? He’s not really my son, but he’s so similar to a human child that I can’t bring myself to kill him. So instead of finishing what I set out to do, I lied to Meredith and told her I killed the boy when I really just left him out there to fend for himself, 100% sure that he would die. No such luck. 100% SURE. That’s how certain I was.
We’re getting to that point where we’re only 10 days away from opening. We’re in good shape though. It seems like such a short period of time, but we’re making extremely good progress. We did a workthrough of Act II today where not much of my scenes had been worked through, but I feel like Gregg is waiting a little bit because the scenes are SO involved. The flashback sequence is really hard to figure through and Jess and I are slightly awkward in it. Jenna made a comment today about how Gregg seems to be ignoring her, and she feels as if she’s not getting direction. I told her I think a lot of it has to do with Gregg needing to put the younger (less experienced) kids on the right track, and he can just give us notes and expect us to know what he wants. Which is absolutely true, because we’ve been doing this for the last few years. Yesterday and today have been very productive and I feel like we’ll keep going like this. It’s important that we do.
Tonight we made some more progress. We worked on Scene 9 and then did a complete (not stumblethrough and not runthrough) walkthrough. We’re also all almost completely off book. That’s really good news. Tomorrow will hopefully bring many many new things to the table.
