Unscripted - A Blog for Actors - Backstage

Stories Impacting Life

I want to talk about the influence of stories.  All actors are storytellers. Remember that, particularly for the end of this post.

Now, see this kid on a horse? He eats stories for breakfast. I should know. That's a decade-and-a-half-old picture of me.

I inhaled stories. I absorbed them through my pores. I didn't even know it half the time. I don't just mean books. Sure, I read stories like a sponge soaking up spilled water, but I would watch TV, movies, listen to my parents and grandparents, NPR, friends, teachers, whatever came within range. I'd play videogames on a game boy with the volume off while re-listening to audiobooks of Sherlock Holmes tracking down impossible criminals, James Herriot getting kicked in the shins by large animals he was trying to take care of, or Patrick McManus hilariously getting chewed out by his wife/best friend/parents/inanimate objects when all he wanted to do was go fishing. 

These had an effect.

I'm sorry, which one of us is the professional?

Several weeks ago I was at a party. It happens. At the party, I met a cute girl. Also happens, though a lot less frequently. After a while, it became clear that the she needed to get a cab home and that after several excellent margaritas from the host, she needed a little assistance to get from said party to said cab. I try to be a gentleman on occasion (we all need hobbies, right?) so I helped spot her down the four flights of stairs and started looking for cabs in the street. While I did this, she spotted a 24-hour taco shop and declared it was time to eat. So we went in and got some food.

Over burritos, she then proceeded to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong with my acting career. Don't you love it when people who don't work in your industry tell you they know what you should be doing with your profession?

Actors Insured

I settled back down into my metal folding chair in the basement studio. The second half of our monologue class was starting up and I’d snuck in just in time. There were some announcements before the next person got up to work, and as usual, a few people were slipping into the room late.

It was about ten minutes in that I noticed someone was still missing. Sean had called me earlier and asked if I was free to grab a drink before the class. He hadn’t sounded like he was in the best shape. I unfortunately was busy, but a bunch of us usually went out to a bar afterwards, so we said we’d wait until then.

But now, looking around, I couldn’t find Sean. I’d seen him in the first half of the night but hadn’t gotten a chance to say hi during the break. I kept an eye on both doors but he didn’t make it back in.

Sh*t Viral Video Auditioners Wear

So the cool thing that happened this morning was that I auditioned for a short with A&E. 

The weird thing? The title of the short is "Sh*t Producers Say." Now if you're reading a blog like this one, then unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably seen the youtube sensation "Sh*t Girls Say" and maybe its many many many spinoffs. I feel like when a large television network tries to do a spinoff, the trend may have gone a bit too far.

That said, there's no way I'm turning down the audition! 

After the Reading

I've gone through post show feelings before. But never this fast.

All that happened tonight was a one night staged reading. It was on a Tuesday. We had a fullish but smallish house. It came out great. My friend, Ryan, told me it was the best thing he thought he'd seen me do. 

Mostly I'd been worried about the length. It was a full length play. Even whittled down through the rehearsal and workshop process, it clocked at least two and a half hours with intermission. I thought it was too long.

The surprise reversal was that, when we finished, we had a quick Q and A... and that was it. We were done. People started putting on their jackets and heading home. We said our goodbyes. There was some talk of a cast something or other to celebrate later, but nobody knew when, really. So. That was it.

There's something really strange about building up this team up and up towards this one performance, doing it, and then just turning to each other and essentially saying "Awesome... see you!" The end. Team dismissed.

So while I was busy worrying about it going on for too long, I found out what really got me was that it was just all over too soon.

There are worse feelings to end something on. I guess that just means it was good.

~Joel R. Putnam

On Apologies

I have an old ex-girlfriend who told me a story about a creative writing class she took. In the classroom was a sign. Often students would read their work out loud, but before they did, they would almost always take a second first to silently point a finger at the sign.

The sign said something like this:

"If you think you're writing is rough, too short, too long, cheesy, choppy, unfinished, something you're still working on, just something you did last minute,  weird, etc, do not say so, just point to this sign."

It saved everyone a lot of time and trouble, and let people get on with the real process of sharing and improving their technique as writers and artists.

Bar Talk

I was sitting in a bar having drinks with some actor friends of mine. We started talking about one of the many common drinking topics among actors: the actors union. My friend is in his late 30s. I'm 25. As many people before him told me, he said I shouldn't join the union until I have to. To illustrate, he told me a story of two friends of his from Philadelphia. I may mix up the details, but the gist remains unchanged.

Both of them were actors, both of them were young, both of them were talented, and both of them good looking. But one of them was exceptionally good looking. He did a ren fair with my friend, playing the part of the executioner. He spent most of his time shirtless. Women swooned over the man just looking at him. This guy went and got his union card, and traveled to Los Angeles to find fame and fortune.

Just because they didn't call you...

Nice object lesson in auditioning last night: I just booked a part in a workshop. I didn't audition for it. I got it because of an audition I had for a completely unrelated project roughly 9 months ago.

Cool, right? I'm betting more people than you probably realize get parts this way.

How'd it Go?

I just came home from performing as part of a Shakespeare workshop. It was a series of scenes and monologues, and most of us spent most of the night backstage on one side of the space or the other.

After my friend, Everett, came offstage from one of his monologues, I asked him how it went. He'd done something from As You Like It and started talking about how he really felt like he had to milk the piece to get any kind of response from the crowd that night.

Our friend, Claire, piped up.

"I always thought that was a funny question to ask an actor after coming offstage." She said. "I mean, I never feel like I know what to say. I didn't see it! I wasn't in the audience!"

I said something about how I guessed I meant more in terms of asking how the actor felt after. But she had a good point. During and after a performance, how do we evaluate our own work?

Tonight until Tomorrow Night: Free Shows at "Occupy Broadway"

I was rehearsing a scene with a friend of mine at my apartment until just a few minutes ago. We're working on the "Tent" scene from Julius Caesar for a Shakespeare workshop we go to.  He's playing Cassius, I'm trying Brutus on for size. After a read or two, when I was getting us a couple cups of tea (electric heat apartments get cold kinda fast), he asked me if I was going to Occupy Broadway tonight.

I'd never heard of it.

Turns out that a bunch of actors (I believe sympathetic to, but not actually affiliated with, the OWS movement) are getting together to put on free shows in Times Square for 24 hours. The lineup is here: http://occupybroadway.net/

Actors Unions Aren't Occupying?

This image seems particularly fitting when it comes to how performance artists identify with the Occupy movement.

I spend a lot of time with actors. Actors are artists. Most (though certainly not all) artists tend to be somewhat liberal. It's pretty simple, the left seems to care about us and the arts a lot more than the right does. So it should come as a surprise to nobody that most of the actors I know support the Occupy Wall Street movement. A sizable portion consider themselves active participants.

Meanwhile, unions are flocking to the Occupy movement left and right. The AFL-CIO unanimously endorsed the movement, for example. Unions see this as a great opportunity to do what they were created to do for their members.

So I was a little startled to hear from some of of my friends that the Actors Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists all have released sgtatements saying they do not support the movement. Especially after the Writers Guild of America publicly endorsed it.

One of my friends, a member of AEA in good standng, wanted to do a reading of the play The Alchemist for the protesters here in New York City. It's a play that actually speaks to a lot of the things the protesters are out there for, especially in the slightly modified form my friends had rehearsed and scripted. But apparently Equity was going to make that difficult because they didn't want to seem allied with OWS.

I understand the delicate position that a union finds itself in, as it must represent members of all political stripes. However, when the unions publicly say they are not endorsing the movement, no matter what the wording, they appear to oppose the movement instead. And trust me, that's going to alienate far more members than an endorsement would.

Furthermore, while a union is a representatitve body, no group of people have identical opioins and beleifs. After a certain point, I think it's in AEA, SAG, and AFTRA's best interest to endorse the things that it beleives are best for the organization as a whole. And if what seems like every other union in the country, including the national writers union, beleives the the occupy movement will be beneficial to them, I'd like to hear the actors unions' specific reasons why they disagree.

~Joel R Putnam

Acting Angry

One thing I've wondered about, as an actor and blogger, is why so many of us talk so much about the non-acting parts of the business, rather than the actual craft itself. I'm going to try to buck that trend with this post.

I've been having an interesting discussion on and off again through a few different classes. It's about how to take on anger in a part.

Negotiations

 

Quick piece today. I'm just curious about the reaction to a conversation I had a few weeks ago that flies in the face of many things I've heard from professional actors.

I was talking to someone who has been pretty successful in the San Francisco acting market and he told me something I haven't heard many people say before: Don't accept a part immediately, always negotiate for more money.

Castable Demographics

Where did all the theater parts for my demographic go?

Lots of things about the business of acting is hard, but this is not usually one of them. I am listed on Actors Access and Breakdown Cervices as a caucasian male able to play 18-39ish. For movies, obviously that range shrinks a bit, but for stage, I could probably pull off even older or younger.

Now, have you ever heard a young white man with a wide age range complain that there aren't enough parts for his type written? No. You haven't. And if you have, that young white man deserves a nice whack upside the back of his young white skull. There are more parts written in film and theater for my demographic than just about any other. It aint fair, and if and when it changes, I'll be happy for society. But on a disgustingly selfish level, this should be good for me, right?

Exit... where?

I just took my girlfriend to see Sleep No More. Yes, that was a little intense.

For the uninformed, Sleep No More is a performance in a warehouse converted into a 200-room maze of elaborately decorated worlds. The audience, in masks, silently explores and follows the characters of Macbeth and they run around the world.

There's one aspect of it that no other performance piece I've ever seen captures:

Priorities

I just had to make a tough decision, acting-wise. I just turned down an audition for a good part in a good show with a theater I've worked with before and liked.

Modern Alchemy

One of my favorite quotes from a professor is one I wasn't ever around to witness firsthand. It was from a good friend's history professor, who would talk about something that happened a long time ago that seemed eerily like something happening now. The prof would look then stop, look at the class, and, totally deadpan, say "Remember kids, history has absolutely nothing to teach us today."

As we watch protests on Wall St unfold, we're starting to see this not only in history, but in historic theater. Last week, in battery park, I watched an adaptation of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. The twist? change the words "alchemists" to "stock brokers", and tweak the names of a few key characters, and you find something that, while full of slapstick, also has the same effect as that prof's statement: Oof. This sounds familiar.

Go Make Some Colleagues

I have a challenge for you as an actor. I just want to see how this works out. If you are somewhere that auditions using monologues, like New York (apparently LA doesn't like them), this is for you.

1) Find a free afternoon or evening in your schedule. You need two hours.

2) Invite ten actors you know and like to your living room for those hours, and tell them to prep a monologue they use for auditions. You don't need to get all of them there, just make sure they've been invited. Tell the ones that say they can come to bring other actors.

3) Get everyone seated, and get as many people as are willing to do their monologue. After an actor finishes, give them feedback as a group, and ask them to do it a second time. Give them more feedback, and then move on to whoever wants to go next.

4)Go out for drinks together afterwards and have some fun.

Solo Silence

Last night I went to my favorite monologue workshop. It’s a Shakespeare “kibbutz” as one of the founders calls it, run by donation. So I end up seeing a lot of monologues and a lot of different ways of delivering them. And one technique I’ve seen a lot of that people seem to have mixed feelings about is silence.

Quite often, before performing solo before a crowd of friends (or strangers), whoever it is will face the wall, or the ground, or the floor, and stay silent for a few seconds. Going over their lines, getting into character, collecting themselves, whatever it is they need before they can do what they stood up to do.

Sleep Audition Sleep

I went to bed a little after midnight and set my alarm for 8:20am. 1am, something I'm supposed to do occurs to me, and I grab my phone. Then my computer. I go to bed well past 3am. 90% my fault, 10% the internet's fault.

I got out of bed this morning, showered, ate, brushed my teeth, and started packing a small bag. Two headshots and resumes, one for my audition, one extra, just in case. My phone charger. A copy of the monologue I wanted to give to skim in the room. A small book on screenwriting to read while I waited. Then I left.