Tonight is the closing performance.  I think if I took the time to sift through my thoughts one by one I’d miss the show… so I will simply say that I am filled with gratitude and energy and deep happiness. What a kickass group of people to tell this story with… and all the funny… and the sad… and the — the, the – you know!?

And, since words are mortally failing me at the moment (how Hamletesque), I will give the rest of the words, words, words of this entry to Groucho Marx (from GROUCHO MARX and Other Short Stories and Tall Tales):

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Mark Rylance as Hamlet (1989)

I first saw Mark Rylance as Viola in Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre in London in the summer of 2002. Then Valere in La Bête in 2010 in NYC. Then Johnny “Rooster” Bryon in Jerusalem in 2011 in NYC. He’s also had his go as Hamlet (a few times), though I haven’t seen him in the role, televised or otherwise. Based on what I have seen him perform, though, I have to ask: What Would Mark Rylance Do?

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Mark Rylance is his command of the audience. When I saw him as the tight-fisted, stiff-collared Viola, I watched his every move. I mean, I didn’t know him from Adam at the time (sorry, bro-in-law Adam (and Mr. Rylance; ignorant youngsters of old beg your pardon)), but who the hell were these jerks to be doing an all-male Twelfth Night? So one was watching closely. But nothing went wrong! In fact, it just kept going righter and righter.

I think that first instance of seeing him perform came together and made a gabillion times more sense when I saw him perform in NYC years later. It became clearer to me after my many more years of performing (particularly as a musician – a singer / songwriter on my own in front of an audience with only my music and my patter to defend me) that he was a master at living with his performative being in-between private and public command.

For instance, something I heard about his Valere performance floored me. Apparently between the London production and the Broadway production he changed up the accent from a cockney slob to a sort of American South hick slob. That, in itself, is at once an egregiously superficial character feature and a deeply significant identifier-clue to the audience about where from and what this dude is. And, in true Rylance fashion (if the unqualified can take a leap), that feature was highly personalized and “private” and therefore utterly commanding. In fact, it kept getting righter… from righter to righter to right-est…

There was a moment in Jerusalem, very early on in the play, when Johnny Bryon was – by my recollection – spouting quite a bit of exposition and character for the audience to absorb and enjoy (particularly for later payoff). He was rolling a cigarette and during his “patter” was all but looking directly at the audience. Not “direct address” – but so close to it that you wondered if he wasn’t sneaking secret smiles right at you. “Hi! Yep, I know we’re in a theatre together…”

So What Would He Do (were he playing Hamlet right here, right now, in my place in NYC at the in-aptly named Access Theatre)?

The cool and kind and awesome William Sadler gave me some unexpected advice on my first turn as Hamlet on Cornell University’s professional stage. He was visiting an old friend an ex-professor of mine Stephen Cole (he studied with Prof Cole while receiving his MFA from Cornell) while we were in rehearsals. He happened to stop by during a rehearsal of the nunnery scene and during break I asked him what he thought – did he have any advice? “Oh, man… “ he mused – having played the part when he was a younger man, “Just… enjoy it.”

And you know, as oversimplified as that may sound, I think that that’s exactly what Mark Rylance would do. During curtain call for La Bête, I watched him bound off the stage like my old black lab mix Devony when she got excited at the prospect of playing catch or going for a walk or getting a treat. He had just delivered an exhausting and hilarious and disturbing performance – and wanted more.

So. I will remember to look for joy. In the personal and the public – from what is experienced through me as character and with me as audience. It’s all right there. To be toyed with, enjoyed – “Important – but not a shrine” (Tony Greco). And part of that joy will be knowing there are human powerhouses out there (though perhaps none the likes of Rylance) that stir up the imagination and the soul so much that they cannot but help to affect the lives of performers and their renditions of timeless characters from here to the end. Form and pressure – it’s the age and body of the time’s form and pressure!! “O ho – do you mark that?” (Polonius, 3.2).  It only gets righter and righter…

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PLAYING HAMLET MENU

Opening tonight.  I am ready.

Five “Playing Hamlet” entries in the cue, but have been focusing on the role these past few weeks. Takes some time and focus (SHOCK & AWE!).

In the meantime, enjoying the excitement and the nervousness and anticipation.

BRING US THE AUDIENCE!

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Not sleeping so well, but my imagination is what is most awake. Been fighting off a cold/cough and so my hours are all turned upside down. More on fighting through the cough in rehearsals later.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (I.4). This is what Hamlet first exclaims when he sees the ghost of his dead father. Underneath this, I’m starting to hear a song from my high school choir days, John Tavener’s “Song for Athene”, a musical palindrome which stretches out beauty, pain and awe without relent — a song he wrote in honor of a family friend, a young actress, who was tragically killed in an auto accident. I find great danger in this piece, as well as joy. A well of grief topped with a surprise of the insidious and the power of terrible glory. “… and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” (I.1). “I’ll speak to it though hell itself should gape / And bid me hold my piece” (I.2). “O all you host of heaven! O earth!” (I.5). And the well of grief continues after the climactic pitch(es). In the song, certainly and in the play, certainly.

PLAYING HAMLET MENU

“2-26-13 Tuesday
a bit after 12PM on the subway to Brooklyn

My father’s shoes. Really they weren’t actually his shoes. This is what my emotional brain is calling them, but they were the shoes my mother bought for me at Kohl’s Department Store (I think) for my father’s funeral in Wisconsin in August 2003. She also bought me a suit. Black suit and black shoes. Lots of buttons on that suit coat. I still have them both. The shoes; “those shoes…” “with which [I] followed my poor father’s body” (Hamlet I.2). And I am carrying them now on the subway in NYC in 2013. In my gym bag. And I was planning on having them cobbled (the left shoe is splitting from the sole) but I am hesitating. I pause because I am fixing these shoes to wear as Hamlet this time around and honestly after today’s morning simply examing these things on the way to the city and facing the sense memory of the Kohl’s Department Store in my Method Practice Group session I don’t think I would be repurposing these shoes with anything less than an “overburdening” of my work on this play.

It is not imagination, it is a visceral distraction. Can I use it? I want to be “good enough” to use it too, but all the same sometimes emotional memory is not necessary. Am I scared of where it will take me? Of course. But I am also aware that the anxiety it is producing may not actually be helpful. (Until it is.)

Why shoes? I don’t think it matters why. I think what matters is that the response is there and that on its own it matters. No help needed. It creates for me the sense of absurdity and wonder and helplessness of having to carry on with the ridiculous simplicity of purchasing shoes when your world has been drastically shifted — and for the purpose of attending the event which emblemizes the formal recognition of the drastic shift! It’s like buying a clown costume for your own funeral.

Shoes. These worn out shoes that have seen 10 years of use and memory, loaded, might be “fixed” for use in a show largely about the loss of fathers and sons and youth and manhood and growth and despair? As I write it it makes sense. As I write about the new meaning they might have, these old shoes become magic — more magic than they were before. If they are now set pieces — costume pieces — they are reinvigorated as I am and as my audience may be by the exploration of the sorrow of objects in painful memories that we all share because we all have loss and, here, there or everywhere we all remember. And we can’t help it. It sticks like viscous but it also changes with the gentle force of time, kind will, and simple improvisation. Play. The play[ing]‘s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of humanity — my dear audience — my masters and patrons, my dear idiots and geniuses who can always know the truth if they care to see it, to hear it, to breath and feel it with the exploration within and without which we are all given as opportunity in all things great and small. And in art most especially. One human speaking to a roomful of humans for something approaching an understanding. A verge, a cliff, a falling into each other with the grateful abandon of trust — however momentary — in play.

“Play, play every day, play and play away, and then play the play you played to-day, the play you play every day, play it and play it. Play it and remember it and ask to play it. Play it, and play it and play away.” — Gertrude Stein

Barefoot or otherwise, shoes notwithstanding.”

PLAYING HAMLET MENU

The bare bones approach of Folding Chair is remarkably effective and refreshing — essentially nothing is added in terms of props/costumes/sound unless absolutely necessary as per the text. And even if something is “added”, it is almost always constructed through the creative collaboration of the ensemble via body, mind, voice and imaginative staging: Theatre in its most fundamental and therefore compelling form.

Don’t miss it!

Best,

Ben

The WATCH & LISTEN sections are now live, giving you my acting reel (also featured on the Homepage), a couple music videos and a couple demos.

Currently, “Up, Up, Down, Down” is going very smoothly; wonderful cast, crew; sweethearts and talents all around. Playing the unrequited love interest gamer geek guy, Ian Cobb; having a blast.

Come and check it out if you have a chance; def’nitly a fun night for anyone who ever had a video game and/or love crush – and only one more week of performances left!  CLICK HERE FOR DATES/TIMES/TICKETS.

Always yours,

Ben

Next on the agenda: “COMING UP” section.  After that, “WATCH”, “LISTEN” and “LOOK” sections (videos, music, pictures — and more!).

Enthusiastically yours,

Ben