REHEARSING

Joe is currently playing a hobbled actor with a tailbone/rollerblade incident, and a roofing nail into the foot accident. But, the memorization work continues. Act I is pretty much nailed down, and he's working on some of the longer pieces from Act II, which includes the scenes where he goes after Matthew Harrison Brady pretty intensely.

I was curious why he would be jumping around and not just pushing forward learning the lines as they come. Joe says that some passages are less comfortable to articulate than others. They are different in tonality, inflection, and emotion. They require more work to make them feel totally original and totally his. When they're finally right, he can comfortably move on, but not before. When they're done right, he can hear and feel it in their delivery, and then repetition is the key to any measure of confidence.

Joe mentioned something that I wouldn't have considered relative to the learning of lines. He pointed out that we all have a vocabulary which is uniquely ours. We're comfortable with it. We speak it fluently. When you start using unfamiliar words, or combining them in unfamiliar ways, it can feel awkward. That's acting and that is what he does.

Note: 5000 may be the number of words a typical person uses. When it comes to vocabulary, it is important to distinguish between the words someone understands, and the words they actually use. An average adult with English as a first language understands between 50,000 and 250,000 words. Some people with very large vocabularies, such as Winston Churchill, have been estimated to understand up to 400,000 words. Most people actually use about 10% of the words they understand. So a person who understands 50,000 words probably uses about 5,000. Shakespeare used about 29,000 words in his plays & sonnets, so we might estimate that he had a vocabulary of 290,000 words. There are at least 475,000 words in the English language, with some estimates as high as 1,000,000. And there are thousands added every year (Twitter, anyone?). So, there’s a lot to learn. (from Wikipedia)

Joe discussed becoming tongue-tied. It is an actor's bane, and can cause the rhythm and momentum of the moment to be lost. (Think Perry Mason in the midst of one of the cross examination zingers. Stopping to repeat a line wouldn't have been acceptable, and that is why live TV all but died.) Jim Burr is the actor who will be playing the part of Brady. I wondered if the two of them might be rehearsing together outside of the scheduled rehearsals. It turns out that Jim will be taking a little time off to have one of his factory-installed parts replaced. Here's hoping the new knee is better than the original!

Perhaps during recovery and rehab there will be some Brady/Drummond sessions. Joe has promised to stay off the rollerblades until after the performances, which sounds like a wise decision.

There might still be jurors needed. They are nonspeaking roles and will not likely be required to rehearse until the week before the performances, but would be required to be available for all performances. This could be your golden opportunity!

I will be attending a rehearsal tonight, and that will be the subject of my next post.