I think it's about adventure. The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you feel like saying to yourself: "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure. What we would like for you is that you have just the right amount of sitting quietly at home, and just the right amount of - adventure!-from the final monologue of The Matchmaker, spoken by Barnaby
The play we performed was not exactly the play we'd started with. Partly that was because ten people quit the cast, and partly it was because one of those who quit was the director. When Erika took over, most of what we were doing got changed. New edits, new blocking, new character traits. Our version of the play would still be in the 1960s rather than the 1880s, but because she didn't feel the characters' behavior made sense for hippies she pulled it back in time a few years to the beginning of that era. She swapped the two main actresses' parts, she officially fired that one guy who'd run off to Europe and never let us know when he'd be back, and she quickly cast someone in the role of Cornelius. She designed a new set for the show. Anything which didn't make sense to her, anything which didn't seem professional enough, she tried to personally fix.
My name is Mory, I'm playing Barnaby, I previously played tiny parts in 1776 and Oklahoma! but this is my first major role so it's going to be a learning experience for me. Oh, and it's also my first time working with JEST.-me
I was given two parts because after giving me Barnaby, our first director couldn't find anyone suitable to play Ambrose, and I'd demonstrated in auditions that I was somewhat flexible in my acting. She looked through the script and found that the two characters never have any interaction with each other, and there's no need for Barnaby to even be on stage when Ambrose is on. There were two points where a line of Ambrose's came thirty seconds after Barnaby being on stage, but she wasn't too worried about that -we'd just dress up a doll as Barnaby, or something. And if this experiment didn't work out, she'd consider playing Ambrose herself. But I refused to admit defeat, so I spent many hours in Illinois staring at myself in the mirror making silly faces and movements and playing around with my voice, to try to figure out how I could pull off this acting challenge. It wasn't enough for me that I'd just be playing two characters. I needed to
justify the confidence the director placed in me, by being so different in the two performances that some people might not realize I was one actor. That was my goal. I was crazy, and she was crazy, and that's how -
by the end of the first rehearsal- I was cast in two prominent parts even though I had never had
any major acting role before. I no longer had the luxury of approaching the process as a "learning experience"; I was in the deep end and it was time to swim.
How do you feel about playing two characters?-Erika
Erika has told me that she would
never have given me both parts. She talked to me shortly after she came on, to have me choose one of the two characters. But I had a hunch where that conversation was headed, so I said very emphatically that I absolutely
loved playing two characters. Erika told me much later that talking to me in that moment, she felt like making me give up a character would be "
like kicking a puppy". That's the only reason she let me keep them.
She even let me play the characters
my way. Barnaby, as I was playing him, was unbelievably weird. He probably had Asperger's Syndrome, though it wasn't clear from the story what his affinity was. And Ambrose I played in a way playwright Thornton Wilder couldn't possibly have intended: in the script he seems almost as timid and subservient to authority as Barnaby, but in order to both differentiate the two characters and take advantage of the 1960s setting, I'd been playing him with an exaggerated amount of self-confidence. Not knowing Erika, I was afraid she'd want me to stick closer to the expected performance. And if I did that, how would I prove that she was right to let me keep the part?
So on the first rehearsal under Erika I said to myself "Let's go all in, and see what happens.", and I told Erika that with her permission I was going to try something new with the character in the next few minutes. I gave him a swagger, I spoke in a deep voice, I only used the right side of my mouth, I stuck my tongue out a bit whenever the character thought he was being funny, I had a huge smirk through the whole thing, I walked barefoot, I threw my arms around in giant gestures with everything I said, and then I waited to be told which elements to cut out, hoping it wouldn't be all of them. But she didn't tell me to cut anything. She really latched on to the fact that this character I was playing was an "
A-hole", and she pushed me
farther in that direction. She had me put my dirty feet on Vandergelder's table. She had me look away from Vandergelder as he was talking to me, as though he were totally irrelevant. And then we moved on, and suddenly that
crazy version of Ambrose I'd proposed was the version I was committed to.
So the performances were as different from each other as I'd hoped. Barnaby used my face differently, had a different voice, and moved in tiny little nervous movements and twitches. Also, Barnaby would be wearing shoes and my glasses, and Ambrose wouldn't. Erika decided that the hair should be different as well, so Ambrose was given a ponytail, and I decided that Barnaby should have my hair pulled out over my ears. But most importantly, Ambrose and Barnaby had entirely different
personalities because I was allowed to go as far over the top as I wanted with each. The only time I can recall that Erika pulled me back at all is when I got a tiny bit too obvious about Barnaby's crush on Cornelius. I still think it made sense for the character, but Erika felt it would confuse the audience because he falls in love with Minnie (played by Sarit) later.
But you must have an opinion on what you're going to wear!-Sarit
I genuinely didn't care what the costumes would look like, because it seemed almost irrelevant. I had a very clear image in my mind of what Ambrose and Barnaby looked like, and my performance would bring that idea across to the audience. The costume was just the clothes they decided to wear that day. The first piece of prop-clothing I tried on was a dress for Barnaby, for the point in the play where he's dressed up like a girl. (Don't ask.) I had some trouble getting it on, never having worn a dress before, and I realized I'd have trouble getting it
off as well, so while everyone thought it looked funny on me it wasn't right for the scene. There were two fast costume changes in the play. And when I say "fast" I mean thirty
seconds fast. Thirty seconds to get off the stage, run around to the other side, get changed, get back on stage, and say my next line. So the dress wouldn't work.
One day () I went to a warehouse in Jerusalem together with Doron, who had been cast as Cornelius. Doron was actually playing him not all that differently from my Barnaby, which brought an entirely different sort of dynamic to the pair than our first Cornelius, who'd played the part with simple confidence. Anyway, this warehouse is where JEST keeps their costumes and props from previous productions, and it was where Erika was taking us to pick out our clothes. Ambrose's outfit had already been decided: a beret, a paint-spattered green jacket, and a ponytail. A simple costume, so that I could get it on quickly. The pants would have to be shared between the two characters, so we found the most bland pair of pants, and added a bland white shirt, and we had Barnaby's costume. Incidentally, Barnaby's costume looked nearly identical to the clothes I wear every Shabbat. What Barnaby had that I didn't was a really cool belt made of slits that could all be used as notches for the buckle. I say it's really cool because it's the first belt I've worn which actually holds up my pants well. The people who make belts don't think about people as skinny as me. So we had that. But we still needed to find two pairs of shoes.
Let me describe the dilemma we faced, because I find it amusing. The theater we were in is small and awkward. The stage is round, there aren't many lights, but most problematically, there's no backstage. All the actors need to come in from either the same entrance the audience is using, or an entrance on the other side. If you come in from outside, you then need to go up a rickety metal staircase with your back to the audience to get to the stage. No one likes this theater, but the theater JEST
used to use raised their prices, and JEST can't afford it anymore, so it's the theater we had. Sometimes you need for a character to leave without actually leaving the room, so we had flats in the center of the stage that we'd hide behind to leave the scene. Okay, so here's the dilemma. Ambrose and Ermengarde come in from outside the house act 3 is set in, just a few short lines in the script after Barnaby has been onstage. At the end of the scene everyone (including Ambrose) leaves the scene for another room of the house, which for us meant behind the flats. Then Barnaby runs onstage at the end of the play, everyone follows him and Barnaby delivers the final monologue (quoted in part at the top of this post). If you've been paying attention to this scenario, and understand that there's no way out from the flats except for through the stage, then you'll have already figured out that the shoes are a problem. Erika and I worried about this for a bit, until I suggested (as a joke, really) that logically I'd need two pairs of shoes, and she accepted my logic. So before each showing of the play, I planted an extra pair of shoes behind the flats.
So anyway. We needed two pairs of similar shoes, and Erika was looking for loafers because they needed to come off really quickly, and she were hoping for black or some dark color like that. But it turned out that the warehouse didn't have many men's shoes at all. Lots of women's shoes, but not men's. And certainly not anything as specific as black slip-on shoes. So Erika looked at the black sandals I always wear and said they'd do. (The second pair was an old pair of sandals I've held on to.) We also looked for ugly tight dress-suits, because there's a part of the story where Cornelius and Barnaby ought to be more dressed up than usual. There was one suit which was bright yellow, and they both laughed and told me to take it off immediately because that was going too far and I looked like a banana. Which surprised me, really: looking at it in the mirror, I thought it looked like a bold fashion statement, and I imagined that if I ever decided to get serious about my appearance in real life, something like that would be the way to go. I guess that says it all about my fashion sense. In the end we didn't wear any suits onstage. I'm not sure why.
When we left the warehouse there was still time left before that day's rehearsal, so we went out to lunch at a nice café. I think that was the most fun I had socializing during the entire production. It turns out Erika is very
much crazy, but she balances that out with professionalism. It's an interesting mix.
The problem is that I'm standing up. I can remember the lines when I'm sitting down.-an actress who I will do the courtesy of not naming
Our first run-through started out strongly. It was funny, it was moving along at a brisk pace, we (mostly) hit our cues and remembered our lines. But then we got to the introduction of a certain character, and it seemed as though that actress had never tried running through her lines without the script before. "
Line", she called. And then again. And again. There was one line, where she stood for ten seconds trying to remember, then called "
Line", they fed her the beginning of the line, she said the beginning of the line, then she stood for a few seconds and called "
Line" again, they fed her the middle of the line, she said it, called "
Line"
again, and they fed her the end of the line, so she made it all the way through. This was devastating for me. All that energy Erika had gotten going, all the hard work I'd put in, all the hours memorizing lines, none of it mattered. The harder I tried, the more humiliated I'd be come opening night. If it were just
me in the play, I'd spend 100% of my time and energy on the play and everything would be fine. But if I had to rely on other people, and they let me down, then why was I even bothering to be there? Our director had left. Our actors had left. Our assistant director had left. Our assistant stage manager had left. I had been working on this production for five months, and now with two weeks until the show it was all falling apart. Once this one actress started calling for lines over and over, everyone else lost their energy. We were all making mistakes, we were all missing cues, we were all giving dull performances. We didn't even
make it through the run-through, because the place we were practicing in closed up long before we got to the end.
Back at home I didn't know what to say to people. Should I tell them that the play wouldn't be worth their time to see? Because that was how I felt. I felt like this play had been doomed from the start, with everything that possibly
could have gone wrong going wrong, and there had never been even a possibility of something worthwhile coming out of all of it. Why was Erika pushing herself so hard on this production, trying to make everything professional and entertaining? It's just a silly play which no one's heard of. If we never went on stage, no one would care.
There were five days to go until opening night, and finally we got to rehearse in the actual theater. I ran around from one side to the other, to make sure I could do it fast enough. I noted that there was a big puddle in the middle of the hallway there, where the ceiling was leaking. I'd need to be careful to run
around that. I took Ambrose's jacket and hair elastic and started practicing the change, timing myself with a stopwatch. Hit the stopwatch, put my glasses in my pocket, get the elastic out of my pocket, pull all my hair back, make the ponytail, get my arms into the jacket, snap up the finicky little snaps on the jacket, kick off my shoes, put on the beret, hit the stopwatch. My time was worrying. To be safe, I really needed to do all that within fifteen seconds, and my time... well, let's just say my time was significantly more than that. So I practiced over and over and over, but I couldn't get my time down to the necessary level. It wasn't even a matter of skill - it just wasn't doable.
The rehearsal didn't go smoothly. People were forgetting their lines all over the place. But I couldn't worry about that; I had my
own problems to worry about. The first of the two changes, that one would be fine. I had a good thirty, forty seconds there. But the one where it was just half a page of script, that was where I'd really need to rush my brains out. Because of this attitude, I approached the first of the fast costume changes a bit more slowly than I should have. I was only halfway through the change when I heard the line on stage that was supposed to be my cue. I threw on the beret and ran in, the jacket open, my shoes on, my hair a mess, but it was too late. The scene was already over. The second change I did indeed take more seriously. It still wasn't nearly fast enough.
By the end of that rehearsal, I felt like I'd like to hide in a corner somewhere. Erika was giving critical comments to all the castmembers, and I was waiting for her to say "Mory, you were the worst of all. You need to be in the room in time for your cue. Be faster.", but she didn't say a thing to me. I arranged with Elinor the stage manager that she would help me out with the costume changes. She would do the hair, and I would do the jacket and shoes. I felt like I absolutely needed to practice that right away, again and again until we got it down to the right time. But there wasn't any time left. The rehearsal had run very long, and Shabbat was coming. My first chance to try again would be in three days.
Thank God for Shabbat. I talked with all my friends, described my problems, and suddenly it didn't seem like such a big deal anymore.
I know, it'll be fine.-me, brushing away Erika's reassurances about the costume change
Erika's biggest problem with the performances is that they didn't move along quickly enough. We'd wait around in between cues, trying to remember what the next line was. And as the first dress rehearsal had shown, that kills the play.
The Matchmaker is a comedy, and a comedy needs to move forward in a quick and bouncy manner.
She told us to just say our lines as fast as we possibly could, on cue, with no acting whatsoever and while pacing around the room. The pacing around the room bit was to separate our memories of the lines from the context of where we were and what we were seeing when we said them. Or something like that. I tend to
always pace around the room when practicing lines, or when doing pretty much any thinking at all for that matter, so that wasn't too unusual for me. But Erika also said that as we walked we shouldn't focus our vision on anything in particular, so I took my glasses off as I paced. Most of my fellow actors couldn't help but bring their performances into the reading, because the particular way they always said the lines was so ingrained in their minds -this slowed us down and didn't fit the exercise. So we started out just barely faster than we normally act, but as the evening went on we got faster and faster, and some of us started to really have fun with the challenge of hitting our cues as fast as possible and being as bland as possible saying them. After a while the timing of the lines started getting kind of funny, with deadpan deliveries of funny or emotional lines. By the final act we were racing forward; it had turned into a sort of competition, where everyone wanted to be the fastest and the blandest. In the end I said my entire final monologue (enunciating clearly) in one breath, and received some clapping.
I waited around as Erika worked on specific scenes with other people, and finally the two of us would work on Barnaby's monologue. Every single time I'd done it in rehearsals, Erika had a problem with it. The first time I tried to be awkward, as though Barnaby were making it up on the spot, and Erika said it should be more of a final statement. This was strange to me, because it seems like the charm of that final monologue comes from how unsuitable a way to end the play it is, how quirky and bizarre a way to leave the audience it is. (As written, I like the final monologue very much.) But Erika didn't like it, so I tried to have Barnaby say it with a quirky kind of conviction. But Erika didn't like that either. I'd tried a bunch of different performances for that monologue, and none of it was clicking with her. But there were more important things to worry about, so we hadn't gotten around to working it out until now.
Most of the cast had already left, but Rachel (the head of JEST) had been helping out and she was still there. So I got in front of Erika and Rachel and said my final monologue the way I'd been saying it, with a few new little quirks I'd worked out as I'd been waiting through the other actors' work, and Erika again didn't like it. So she told me to try speaking as myself, while still doing the Barnaby performance, just to see what it would look like. This was very confusing for me, but I tried it that way. And then she said that she was tempted to make me drop character entirely, and I panicked a little as I thought she might be talking about the way I'd been doing Barnaby for the entire play. But no, she just meant to say the monologue not as Barnaby but as myself. As Mory Buckman, an actor who's talking to an audience. This sounded to me like a very silly idea, but she was the director so I gave it my best. I took thirty seconds to clear my head, said Barnaby's last line, then said the final statement of the play in my own voice and personality as though it weren't Barnaby telling what he's learned, but me commenting on how strange and hard to wrap my head around the process of being in this play was. Erika loved it, and Rachel loved it, and there was another member of the cast in the room who also loved it, and suddenly I'd committed myself to the very strange position of making the last thing people see in the show be myself being myself, as though the play were a personal blog post I was sharing with them. Which I guess I was okay with, but it was odd. Actually, it might have felt a little bit nice for some reason.
Look, I'll show you how this will work.-Erika
I tried timing the costume change when Elinor helped, and it was still much too long. So I started looking for convoluted workarounds involving snapping up the jacket
before putting it on, but then Erika showed up and told us what to do. Elinor would be standing with the jacket open, which would make it quicker to get my arms in. Then I'd hunch down, because Elinor is much shorter than myself, and she'd put my hair in a ponytail while I snapped the jacket closed. It went smoothly, we moved on, and that was that.
At 5:50 PM, I and the two other actors who open the play hid behind the flats and waited for the audience to come in. There was lots of noise outside, and even some voices I recognized. And yet, this was a new experience in my very short time as an actor, because the play was about to begin and I wasn't nervous. Excited, certainly. But not scared. I knew exactly what I was going to do, and I knew it would all turn out great.
And it did.
The next day (before the second of our five performances) I found out from one of the actresses that her parents didn't realize I was one actor until she told them. I tried to seem cool about it, but oh my god was that awesome to hear. For that evening's performance, some of the actors were concerned about a "second night slump" because our first night had gone so well, so we all kept giving it our all and we had another good show. Afterward I heard from Tal's father that he too had thought I was two actors, and was confused when Ambrose (or "
Tally's boyfriend" as he called him) wasn't on stage with everyone else as I gave the final monologue. This was especially neat because this man has
met me before, though maybe he didn't remember me.
So I ended that week very proud of my work. Some of the other actors had made very embarrassing mistakes, but the audiences were laughing throughout the show, it moved along at a nice pace, and there was lots of energy. Photos had been taken during that second performance, which would reach me on Saturday night.
This being the first time I've seen what I look like on stage, I have to ask: from the audience, do I really look as horrifying as I do in these photos? Please be honest, as I don't have any patience for people who lie to me to spare my feelings.-me, in an e-mail to Erika
I had a very clear idea in my head of what Barnaby and Ambrose looked like. I wonder, when I looked at myself in the mirror playing them, what was I seeing? Was I actually seeing the image of myself playing the characters, or was I looking
past the image and seeing the faces I imagined? What got me thinking about such things was the photo gallery of the show, which was the first time I saw Ambrose and Barnaby as they
actually looked. "Horrified" was the
toned-down version of what I felt, seeing that. "Mortified" is closer. Who
were these people? They had the wrong face! The side-of-the-mouth thing just looked disturbing. And the hunched shoulders made Barnaby look like Frankenstein's monster. To be sure, part of the problem was the thick stage makeup -I find that
all make-up looks creepy to me, and that night it was particularly overused- but it was more than that. These were not the characters I thought they were. The idea in my head had not come across to the audience, and that meant that whatever they were seeing, it
wasn't something I was in control of.
And if that was the case, then why was I even trying?
Erika talked me down and convinced me that I was doing great, I apologized for bothering her and blamed it on Asperger's Syndrome, and everything snapped back to normal, more or less.
I think this was my worst performance, of the three.-me, to anyone who'd dare to compliment me
My friends showed up (Moshe, and even Nati with Ayelet), some random acquaintances showed up, the performance was taped, and I didn't do a very good job. Isn't that always the way it is? The voices weren't as clearly defined as usual, the timing of the Ambrose performance was a little bit off, and in general I just wasn't as funny as usual. It wasn't the greatest performance for the other actors, either, who stumbled over lines and missed cues. But Moshe was laughing the whole time, and Nati and Ayelet said they enjoyed it, and a bunch of random people complimented me on my performance. So I guess it couldn't have been
all bad. The following day I borrowed the camcorder that was used to tape it, I reviewed my performance, and I didn't make the same mistakes again.
After one of the performances I walked outside and was stopped by a group of old people.
"Excuse me, are you an actor?"
"Yes, thanks."
"We have a question for you. Where's the artist? We didn't see him at the end."
"You do know that I played both parts, right?"
"What?"
"Look. [as Ambrose] Ambrose ... [as Barnaby] Barnaby."
"Oh. We should have looked more closely."
One morning a week later I went over a line that I hadn't been doing as well as I could have. I had a new idea of how I could do it better next time, so I worked on it for a few minutes. And then it occurred to me that there
wasn't a next time, because the last performance had been a few days earlier.
The show was a financial success, in that JEST only lost a
little bit of money on it. It was popular and we got a lot of positive word of mouth. And as for me, everyone kept asking me afterward what I'd be acting in next, and if my response sounded too uncertain they'd tell me that I
had to act in something again, because I'd been really good. I'm not certain how much of that was flattery and how much was real, because I
can't really watch the DVD and see what anyone else might see, but I'm definitely going to keep looking for opportunities. Who knows, maybe I'll get a lead someday.
You know, I really only joined
The Matchmaker because I was getting
lonely sitting quietly at home all day.
My only company each day was a cat. I'd invented a girlfriend character on the blog just to have someone to talk to, but even she couldn't stand me. So I figured, if I were in a play with people, they'd
have to tolerate me even if I acted like myself all the time. I think they did; I think the people in this cast were strange enough that they didn't have a problem with me being me. But in the end I got more out of this than just some human interaction. I got - an adventure!
Video: Cornelius and Barnaby sing
Is the black and white problem caused by trying to use NTSC consoles on a PAL TV? If so, you could try using AnyRegion Changer (http://wiibrew.org/wiki/AnyRegion_Changer) to change the Wii's video mode to PAL.
For your other consoles a SCART RGB cable should work, provided that the TV has a SCART socket, the console supports RGB output, and the cable is carrying a RGB signal, not composite.
Thanks, I'll try that.
I used AnyRegion Changer, and it worked. Unfortunately, the majority of my Wii games do not support PAL, but a few of them (including The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword) play in color now. And now that I see that the Wii can output PAL, I've taken to running my Gamecube games from Gecko to force PAL mode and all of them seem to work like that. Thank you so much.
I do think I'm going to get a different TV, though. This one causes way too many problems.
Ah moving out..
I remember discovering that living in dorms was the best time of my life. Not because I had better conditions (I didn't) but because there was something beautifully mine about the tattered mattress and bare shelves.
I felt like a real person in ways I never did before.
Re: your latest status update. well done on a productive day!
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