Navigating and Shaping
Posted by Martin McClendon on 7/16/2009
Martin McClendon, who plays Martin in Ensemble member Eric Simonson’s First Look play, Honest, is a professor of Theatre at College Carthage where Honest was first commissioned.
The role of Martin was written for him.
Honest was performed in an early student production up there with an all student cast, and Martin’s students were all invited to audition for this First Look Production.
Martin is blogging regularly to his students about his experiences here at Steppenwolf, and we thought we’d share them with you.
Blog #1 (June 27)
I have just finished my first week of rehearsals at Steppenwolf. Working at this level of theatre is great. The complete commitment of everyone involved is so reassuring. You know that everyone here has worked very hard to be doing what they do, and there’s nothing they’d rather do. It’s the big leagues.
We did table work for the first three days. We just read the script over and over, sometimes straight through, sometimes stopping to ask questions. Having the playwright there is, as our Honest cast knows, a huge advantage. I thought I knew this play pretty well, but Eric (Simonson) has pointed out many subtleties I hadn’t picked up on. I just hope I can portray them as the show requires.
Sometimes people come in and watch our rehearsals. They are “First Look 101′ers”, people who have paid to attend rehearsals and watch the show progress. It’s weird to have an audience for a rehearsal. You don’t realize how sensitive you are to people viewing your work before you deem it ready! But they are quiet and very enthusiastic about this opportunity.
Blog #2 (July 7)
We are entering our third week of rehearsals already. Time is flying by.
Today we worked the two Guy/Martin scenes off book for the first time. I find that knowing the play as long as I have is a bit of a hindrance. I fall into the trap of “knowing something before I know it.” My actor brain knows where the scene is going, but my character brain should have no idea. As always, being off book allows new connections to be made that we hadn’t seen before. All the disparate moments begin to knit together into something resembling the natural flow of a spontaneous conversation… well, I’m not there yet, but it’s a start.
Blog #3 (July 9)
Yesterday we did a full run-through of the show. Eric has written some new material for scene two (Madison). Guy impresses his date with tales of his youth in Brazil, hanging out with a witch doctor! We discovered a lot of new angles in the Guy/Martin scenes. Being off book and running the scenes without stopping starts to reveal the through-line of the action in new ways. Suddenly the disjointed moments we’ve been picking apart and examining under the microscope start to hang together and tell a story.
Blog #4 (July 13)
We are about to enter our final week of rehearsals. I’ve been thinking about that old saying “practice what you preach.” I remember being young (dimly) and wondering why we had to learn all this analysis and technique: I just act, I don’t think about it! It is true that much of acting is intuitive, but good technique is also essential. For three weeks I’ve been trying to get a hold of all the things my character must do. The layers are complex.
I navigated as far as I could on intuition with the help of three table reads and numerous discussions with Eric. Then last week I added some technique. I went through and scored my script: each line has an action word or action phrase scribbled alongside it. Each beat has been defined in some way, however imperfectly. I just needed to see it all on paper. Now I can really start to see the arc of Martin’s journey in the scenes. Yes, I’m actually practicing what I preach, that stuff is not just busy work I give my acting students. And even though I’ve been acting professionally since I was 13, I still need to reach for some tools to help me do my job.
Eric told us in notes it’s time to get back to storytelling. You can’t just recite words; they need to spring from somewhere, just as your real-life words spring from your own inner world.