Acting update for May 2024

Continuing my updates from Acting update for January 2024, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby.

• I finished  the run of 12 performances of The Artist.  I got a video recording of one performance, but I don’t know whether I’m allowed to share it.
• I did not get cast in The Best of the Rest staged readings, but I did go to watch them. Overall, the scripts were not as good as the 16 shows that were selected for 8 tens @8, but they were not bad.
• I finished the 2024 Readers’ Theater staged readings with NextStage. I was in 9 performances of Check Please! (doing 2 or 3 scenes, depending who else was there) and 5 of Such a Good Listener. There were 3 public performances, but most of the performances were in retirement homes.
• I’ve posted readings of three of my niece Sari’s children’s books (all of the Robotastic! series) at https://tinyurl.com/Robotastic-books.
• I’ve been doing more reading on Discord with  Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre, including a rehearsed Romeo and Juliet, where I read Abram and Paris (both off-camera—only a few of the youngsters were shown on camera).  I also read Angelo and Abhorson in Measure for Measure, Dionysus in The Frogs, and Claudius and the Gravedigger in Hamlet.
• With Saturday Shakespeare, I read parts of Pericles, 1st sailor, 2nd sailor, 2nd gentleman, Cerimon, Boult, Helicanus, Gower in Pericles (we get different assignments each week).
• For the Santa Cruz Shakespeare fundraiser, I read 1.1 Oliver, 2.1 First Lord, 2.7(—line 80) Jaques, 4.2 First Lord, 4.3 Silvius, 5.4 Duke Senior in Hamlet.
• For my theater-design class I read Grigori Stepanovich Smirnov in Chekhov’s The Bear.
• I did watch the Santa Cruz Shakespeare and The Humanities Institute Undiscovered Shakespeare performance and lectures on Henry VIII.
• I also went to Under Ben Bulben at Jewel Theatre and White Sky, Falling Dragon at Actors’ Theatre.  Both were good (though not quite great) plays, well produced. I think that White Sky, Falling Dragon has the potential to be great, if it were tightened to a one-act play—it is has a strong first act, but gets a little rambling and repetitive.

Coming up:

• This afternoon I’ll be doing a staged reading of a small skit for an environmental studies class at Cabrillo (not a class I’m in, but one of the theater students needed actors for it).
• We are about to enter tech (tomorrow) for Harmony in Hollywood, a jukebox musical written by one of the Cabrillo students (David Hamilton) using music that has come out of copyright. Performances are free in the Cabrillo Black Box theater, Thur May 9 through Sat May 11 at 8 p.m., with a closing matinee Sun May 12 at 2 p.m.
  

  Click on the picture for a full-size version of the poster.

• Saturday Shakespeare has just started reading Hamlet, and I have some good parts (only the first 2 Saturdays have been cast so far).
• This weekend I’m going to take a voice class for old people, through NextStage.  I don’t know whether it will help me any (my voice is strong enough), but I might learn something.
• Our improv class has their showcase Improv Follies on Wed May 15 at 7 p.m. in the Cabrillo Black Box theater.  Although the class has been getting better, we are still pretty clearly an intro class and the improv is hit-and-miss.

After that, I don’t have any specific performances planned, but I’ll be going to see at least 10 fully staged performances (Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Santa Cruz Shakespeare) and  at least 6 staged readings over the summer.  I’ll also continue reading with the Shakespeare Online Repertory Theater group on Discord, though I may have to get a new computer, as Discord won’t run on my old iMac any more (Discord updates itself into incompatibility automatically, even if I load an older version) and I’ve not gotten the mic to work with the browser for doing Discord through the browser.

Maquette for theater-design class

For Theater Arts 31 (Introduction to Theater Design), we had to design a box set for Chekhov’s The Bear (sometimes translated as The Boor), a short one-act play that takes place in the living room of a widowed country aristocrat. We read the play in class (probably because the teacher didn’t expect half the class to have read it on their own). I got to read the part of Grigori Stepanovich Smirnov, a creditor coming to collect a debt, which was rather fun.

Our assignment was to take one or more of the walls from the room we had measured and done white-paper models of and use that as the basis for a set, making a full-color model of the set.  I can’t draw or sculpt, so this assignment was fairly challenging for me.  I do have decent Google search skills, a color ink-jet printer, and a 3D printer, so I decided to create and print as much of the model as I could (outside the foam-core walls.

One constraint on my model building is that I have to be able to take the model apart and pack it in a small box (for the set pieces) and a ziplock bag (for the walls and floor) in order to get it to and from class on my bicycle. I got advice from the teacher (Skip Epperson) on techniques that might help with that.  The most useful of his suggestions was to glue pieces of foam core to Bristol board, to make slots for the walls and the flat.  He also suggested using a pin to stabilize the T-connection of the stage-right side wall.

This is an overview from up in the grid of the whole set. There is a short entrance hall on stage right, with a wooden door. Behind the upstage French doors is a flat with a summer outdoor scene (flowers and woods).

Here is a view of the main playing area of the stage from above, showing the rug, table, 3 chairs, sofa, and two pedestals.

Here is a view of the backstage from above, showing the flat for the outdoors and the hallway.

This is the stage from house right.

This is the stage from house center

This is the stage from the house left aisle.

Here is a man entering from the hall door.

Here is a detail of the hall door and the bust on a pedestal by the door.

Here is a detail of the back corner of the room

Here are the french doors, showing peeling paint—I’ve not decided whether it is better to have some shabbiness in the set or not.

The scale of the model is 1/24 (½”:1′), so the ¼” foam core corresponds to 6″ thick walls.

The 3D-printed models are all printed in silk gold PLA, then painted with some 24-year-old acrylic paints that my wife had from when she took a 2D-design course at Cabrillo College.

The chairs have very fragile arms, which is appropriate for the play (Smirnov breaks two of them—one deliberately and one accidentally). I found the chair designs on the web—I think that they are by Kirill Sannikov and licensed CC0. I added a block underneath the chair (so that the legs would not break) and extra supports for the back, since it broke off in the first model I printed. I could not find a printable sofa in the right style, so I stretched the chair using OpenSCAD.

I found the urns, bust, and pedestal all on cults3d (https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/art/bust-of-the-apollo-belvedere and https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/architecture/six-classical-urns), but combined them so that the pedestal and object on it were one item, rather than separate pieces, using one of the pedestals that came with the urns.  I also rescaled the pedestal height and width to fit the objects.

The door and the french doors were my own designs, done entirely in OpenSCAD. They are parameterized, so that I can do any array of panels or windows in any height or width of door. The table is just a pair of frustrums with the small faces in common, since it was going to be hidden by the tablecloth. I also designed the picture frames, though the printing is so small that the details of the design are lost.

The rug and the tablecloth were both from photos of items for sale on the web. All the paintings are out-of-copyright paintings from the 1800s, mostly with images from WikiArt.org.  The floor took an image of a simple parquet floor, that I cleaned up and tiled the page with. The hallway has simple blue walls that have a gradient from light by the door to dark backstage, to give the illusion of greater depth, even though the audience probably won’t be able to see into the hallway much. The wallpaper and Greek key frieze are my own design, done in inkscape, so that I could get the color I wanted for the stripes.

The paintings are made to look like they are hanging from a picture rail, though they are actually glued to the walls.  The picture rail is made of 24-gauge white-insulated copper wire, and the cables for the paintings from 32-gauge hobby wire-wrap wire (which I have not had much use for since my grad-school days, 42 years ago).

In addition to the acrylic paints that I borrowed from my wife, I also borrowed a 23-year-old jar of Yes! paste, which had dried up completely and turned brown. I managed to reconstitute it by adding water and letting it sit for a few days with occasional stirring and shaking (though I added a bit too much water).  The paste is still somewhat brown, but it seems to work just fine.

Overall, I’m fairly pleased with this model, though it took me far longer than the 9 hours a week that a 3-unit course is supposed to take.  The next assignment (costume design) will be even more of a challenge for me, as it calls for some sketching skill.

Theater power failure

I was doing a matinee at Actors’ Theatre yesterday (2024 Feb 4) as part of the 8 tens @8 short-play festival), and I was in the second play.  It wasn’t quite a full house (8 empty seats in the 88-seat theater).

We had a few power flickers just before the start of the performance at 2pm, and about 4 minutes into the first play the lights went out completely. The theater does not have a backup generator nor much in the way of contingency plans. The tech crew ran around for about 10 minutes, trying to find anyone with emergency lights in their cars—they found one battery-powered emergency spot light.

We went on with the performance lit by the one spot light and about 10 cell-phone flashlights (held by actors not currently on stage, sitting on the floor in front of the first row). The play most affected by the loss of power was the one I was in, in which one of the characters had pre-recorded and digitally manipulated lines as sound cues. The actor had a full-face mask with no mouth hole.

The actor had never attempted to memorize the lines (having only delivered them using the script in early rehearsals and in a recording studio). We ran the lines while the tech staff was running around looking for lights, and she had learned the lines just from having heard them often enough. We went on, she did not miss any of the lines, and she was audible from the back row of the theater, despite the mask!  The audience did miss one cool lighting effect, but the mask was almost as good as the digital manipulation at distorting the voice into the uncanny valley.

One other play had some crucial sound effects, but they were just thunderclaps, and the stage crew had found something to use as a thundersheet that was good enough.

The power was out for most of the city and did not get restored until about 5:30, well after I’d gotten home from the performance.  PG&E is still reporting some outages today (Monday), but most of them are up in the mountains, where it takes longer to fix the problems.

Every actor should have to do a performance with a power failure in their early years, to see how much can be done with minimal tech at a moment’s notice.  My son had a similar experience when he was 6 or 7 in a performance with a Santa Cruz Parks and Recreation theater class, where the power went out in London Nelson Center during their performance.  (I forget now whether it was Sleeping Beauty or Kamp Kaos.)

Incidentally, I recommend people go see both parts of 8 tens @8 this year—there are some good plays this year (I’m in Part 2).  There are still 5 performances of each show to go, but there aren’t many tickets left.

Reflections on Theater Arts 10A

For my intro-to-acting course, our final exam period required us to reflect on what we had learned (in writing ahead of time), then present snippets from that in person (in-person attendance for the final exam slot was a requirement of the college).  There were four questions as prompts.  Here is what I submitted as my reflections:

1. What are three things you learned about acting this term that made an impression on you? Explain why for each thing.

Although I feel I’ve learned a lot in the past 15 weeks, it is difficult for me to identify what things I learned specifically from Theater Arts 10A, as I also

• read books on acting;
• read several scripts;
• spent a lot of time reading and commenting on subreddits r/acting, r/Theatre, and r/Shakespeare;
• took a 24-hour workshop on radio acting with Bill Peters;
• did a 10-hour table read of Hamlet with Santa Cruz Shakespeare;
• attended lectures and read As You Like It with the Aptos Saturday Shakespeare group;
• took a 10-hour Meisner/Chekhov workshop with Bruce Avery and Lana Palmer;
• attended Paul Whitworth’s emeritus lecture on playing Lear;
• auditioned for 8 tens @8;
• rehearsed The Artist for 8 tens @8 (about 13 hours so far, with 10–20 still to go);
• read Chekhov’s Three Sisters aloud with Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre (Chebutykin and Ferapont);
• read Twelfth Night aloud with Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre (Malvolio);
• recorded a few monologues on YouTube (https://tinyurl.com/Kevin-Karplus-monologues); and
• recorded a reading of a children’s book on YouTube (https://tinyurl.com/Robotastic-books).

I also attended 4 play performances:

• Rough Country by Tom Stoppard (Jewel Theatre)
• Authentic Creative Works: 8 micro plays (Cabrillo College)
• Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl (UCSC)
• Rimers of Eldritch by Lanford Wilson (Pacific Collegiate)

Scripts read specifically for this course:

• In the Middle of Nowhere by Kent R. Brown
• Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan
• True West by Sam Shepard

Some of the books I read include

• Sanford Meisner’s On Acting
• Michael Shurtleff’s Audition
• Margie Haber’s How to Get the Part without Falling Apart
• The Arden Shakespeare (3rd series) edition of Hamlet (cover to cover)
• The Folger Shakespeare Library update edition of Hamlet (cover to cover)
• The Pelican Shakespeare edition of As You Like It (cover to cover)

Some of the other scripts I read include

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• Kodachrome by Adam Szymkowicz
• Proof by David Auburn (read for a monologue, before you put it on Canvas)
• The Thin Place by Lucas Hnath
• All 16 of the short plays to be performed in the 2024 8 tens @8.
• Great Short Plays (Vol 4) by Playscripts, Inc (10 short plays)
• One Act: Eleven Short Plays of the Modern Theatre (Ed. Samual Moon)
• Noises Off by Michael Frayn
• Trifles by Susan Glaspell
• Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (translated by Carol Rocamora)
• Twelfth Night

Pulling out three specific things from that firehose of learning is not easy, and identifying those things that were from TA 10A even harder.

• I learned a little about the rudiments of scene and character analysis—not enough to get really good at it, but enough to be able to identify obvious beats and get some idea how to play a character based on information in the script.
• I learned a fair amount about the Group Theatre, which brought Stanislavski’s System to the United States (and modified it into several competing schools of modern, naturalistic acting: Strasberg, Meisner, Adler, … ).
• The showcase was the first time I’ve performed with stage lights, and the monologue the first time with a spot light.  I had not expected the spotlight to be as blinding as it is (despite having heard sometime in the past about stage lights being blinding).

2. What did you discover about yourself as an actor this term? Address these questions:

*** What are your strengths as an actor? Did you have any breakthroughs?

My voice is loud and projects well, and I articulate fairly clearly. I put in the time to analyze the characters I’m playing, and I can more-or-less get into their mindsets—I can come up with interpretations of the lines without relying on someone else telling me how the character should behave. I can memorize lines, at least for short monologues and scenes—I’ve not yet attempted anything longer than a 10–20-minute play. I can collaborate with others and run through a scene many times without getting bored.

I think that there has been some improvement in my acting over the past fifteen weeks, due to the amount of time I spent rehearsing, if nothing else.

*** What are your challenges? In what ways can you continue to grow?

I generally speak too fast for stage acting, and I need to work on being conscious of the pace and slowing down. My pace is more appropriate for radio acting (where dead air has to be avoided) or audiobooks (which are generally targeted at 150wpm). In delivering monologues (particularly Shakespearean ones), I sometimes add pauses to slow the pace, which makes the flow unnatural and reduces rather than enhances comprehension.

My body is generally too static when I’m on stage, unless I have scripted blocking. In contrast, my initial gestures tend to be too big, stagey, and indicating; and they need to be toned down to get a more natural appearance.

I need to get quicker at getting off-book—it takes me a really long time to memorize things. Because it takes so many repetitions for me to learn the lines, I tend to get stuck in a rut in how they are delivered—I can’t easily separate the lines from the delivery. The same is true of blocking—I have a hard time changing blocking or gestures once they has been rehearsed a few times, even when I see the need for different movements.

3. What’s next for you as an actor? Do you plan to take classes, do auditions, or ? Are there roles you would like to play or plays you would like to be in?

I have signed up for both TA 13A (beginning improv) and TA 31 (intro to theater arts design) next semester. I’ll probably take more workshops at Actors’ Theatre, but the ones currently on their website don’t seem very enticing to me. I’m also in the middle of reading Michael Chekhov’s On the Technique of Acting, and I have a copy of Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting that I’ll probably read also.

I’d like to participate in Actors’ Theatre staged readings (both Best of the Rest and the 36 North Playwriters’ readings, neither of which have auditions, but are directly cast). I’ll most likely do NextStage Readers’ Theater again next summer, and audition for 8 tens @8 again.

I’m now on the board for the Saturday Shakespeare group in Aptos (though we’ve been meeting on Zoom) and will continue to read with them (the plays this year are

• Pericles: Jan. 20, 27, Feb. 3, 10, 17.
• Hamlet: Apr. 20, 27, May, 4, 11, 18.
• Much Ado about Nothing: Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26, Nov. 2.)

I also plan to continue reading with the Shakespeare Online Repertory Theatre group.

I don’t have specific roles or plays in mind, though I like doing Shakespeare, and I am not attracted to the shouty, weepy scenes that seem to be popular with the youngsters.

4. Do you hope to make acting a career, or a hobby? Explain your choice.

I plan for acting to be a hobby—I’ve had a career and I don’t need another one. I’m financially quite comfortable and settled in my home—I don’t really want to move around the country the way professional actors often have to.

Audition Monologues

In the post Upcoming public performances, I said “I’m also starting to work on audition monologues, which I will record and post to YouTube once I have polished them a bit.”  I have now recorded two monologues and put them put them on a playlist:https://tinyurl.com/Kevin-Karplus-monologues

From the “Robert in the library” monologue (from Adam Szymckowicz’s play Kodachrome).

I welcome constructive feedback on monologues (as comments on YouTube, as comments here, or via email). I don’t expect to use these recordings for anything but getting advice from people, as all the local community theater groups seem to prefer live auditions, but I might well use one of these monologues in a live audition.

So far, I’m working on modern comedic monologues, but all the ones I’ve found are really for younger men.  Does anyone know any good comedic monologues (90 s long ±20 s) for older men that are neither misogynistic nor racist?  After I’ve done some comedic monologues, I’ll try recording some modern dramatic ones—again suggestions are welcome!