Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Psst. Hey. Hey, you. Theatre geek. Yes, you. I know you’re a theatre geek, or you wouldn’t be reading the blog on the Steppenwolf website. If you’re a hockey geek, you’d be looking at another website. I’ve got a little inside poop, something we “theatre ah-tists” aren’t supposed to share. And if you’re a fellow theatre ah-tist, stop reading this now; go read BJ Jones’s blog at the Northlight website today, cause this isn’t for you. This is for YOU, theatre geek.

Here’s the poop: actors aren’t always thinking about the play WHILE WE’RE PERFORMING IT. Sometimes we’re thinking about laundry. Sometimes we’re thinking about a hot dog. Sometimes we’re thinking about Sophia Loren. And sometimes we’re thinking about Sophia Loren eating a hot dog while she does her laundry.

This is not right. This is not the way it is supposed to be. But this is the way it is.

See, after the rehearsals are over, and the show has opened, and the director and technicians and designers and marketing people and “administration” types have finally gone away, we humble actors are finally left alone with the play. We’re glad all those people have gone away. Sure, they’re necessary, and we even like them (well, some of them), but by that point we just want to be left alone. We want to start “the run”: eight shows a week, five of them between Friday night and Sunday night.

That’s the job. That’s what we get paid for. But the job is no longer about inspiration, or interpretation, or any other word ending in “ation.” It’s about delivery. Everything leading up to the run has it’s own challenges, but the challenge of the run itself is unique in that it is at least 95% concentration. (Which yes, I realize, also ends in “ation.” Sue me.) And sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, concentration lapses. I’m not proud of it. But five shows in fifty hours is a tall order. And so while we’re performing, say, a scene about two upper class British publishing types negotiating the emotional minefield of marital infidelity, suddenly there’s Sophia Loren eating a hot dog. And doing her laundry. Know what I mean?

Normally, the actor snaps his or her mind back to the job at hand. I might even think to myself, “Christ, these people didn’t pay sixty bucks to watch me think about Sophia Loren. They paid to watch a scene about two upper class British publishing types negotiating the emotional minefield of marital infidelity,” followed perhaps immediately by the thought, “They DID? Why would they do that? That’s a lot of money. I don’t know that I’d pay sixty bucks to watch that. In fact, Amy Morton owes me sixty bucks. Christ, that lady is a degenerate gambler…I wonder if I should talk to her about it. She’d probably just throw hot coffee on me again, and then I wouldn’t have anything to wear until I could do some laundry tomorrow. Hey, know who I’d like to see doing laundry? Sophia Loren…” You get the picture. This thought process is happening in FRONT of you, theatre geek, and you don’t realize it, maybe because by this point in the show you’re coughing and eating candy and answering your cell phone. But that’s a subject for another blog entry.

Ian Barford, a recent addition to the Steppenwolf ensemble (for SOME reason–he must know someone), plays the other British publishing type. One night recently, I spoke the wrong line in our scene. I’m supposed to say, “How are you? Apart from the bug?” and instead I said, “What’ll you have?” The scene takes place in a restaurant and the line I spoke occurs just a few lines later, so you wouldn’t think this mistake was particularly egregious. Unfortunately, I said the line as we were being handed menus and Ian shot me a shocked look that said: “How the hell do I know what I’m having? I just got my menu.” None of this was exactly riotous; it wasn’t anything that would have made a mediocre blooper reel. But it struck us both as funny, and we giggled, first one and then the other. The scene suddenly plummeted us into a kind of actor’s hell as we tried to regain our concentration and refrain from giggling. This was not helped by the fact that I have a high-pitched girlish giggle, not at all in keeping with the chiseled masculinity I otherwise project. And Ian Barford may be the only man I know who has a more girlish giggle than me. So we giggled. A lot. I became soaked in a dripping flop-sweat and I took to pinching my eyelid in hopes the pain would shock me back to the “reality” of the scene. Nothing worked.

We mangled the scene.

This experience was new to me, but the giggles are not unusual in the theatre. Laurence Olivier suffered from them habitually, until Noel Coward shamed him out of them with the infamous description, “a practice to be pitied rather than punished.” Sometimes it’s just funny. Sometimes we’re just blind-sided by how silly our jobs are. We’re dressed in period clothing, wearing makeup and wigs and fat suits, speaking in accents, kissing each other and crying and carrying on…and we’re doing it eight times a week. We are professional pretenders. Plays are our work. Think about that for a second. How do we work? We play. And sometimes it feels silly. And when something strikes me as particularly silly…well, in this instance, I giggled.

Had you been at the theatre that night, you would have seen tangible proof of a lapse in an actor’s concentration. Sorry about that. And if you’re at the theatre tonight, you’ll hopefully never be able to tell if I’m thinking about Sophia Loren.

This entry was posted by Tracy Letts on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 8:34 am and is filed under Betrayal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.