For Whatever It's Worth, Charlie Brown, You're You

WELL, IT IS DEFINITELY A SHOW!

Or maybe not. Who knows? Do I know anything about theatre? No. I have such a quick movement towards judgement, but I know absolutely nothing. Sometimes I don't even know what I like. But I will tell you some half formed opinion based on nothing. And I'll do it loudly. What an asshole.

There is a lot of buzz about this show, and I've never been in a Fringe show that had that kind of momentum before we even started. It's a bit exciting. It also makes me feel that even though I'm still doing Fringe, after all the theatre that I've done and all the work I've put in I'm still back at the same festival, some things have changed. Not everything. But we're different artists and people than we used to be, people know us ( a bit, or they think they do), and we can make waves with the quality of our work, and the way we know how to promote it, and other people will make waves for us for those reasons too. So that's good.

(I'm telling myself this in part to help think that I am moving forward, because I have been doubting that in the past few days. The stuff I have coming up is exciting, and I'm lucky to have any work at all, considering my atrocious looks, hideous personality, and shocking lack of talent. But I always want to feel like I'm taking the next step and moving up and any number of cliched phrases that sound like the lyrics to a 90's sitcom theme song, and I don't think that's happening. Blurgh. )

Or maybe this is just a show with a very large, very attractive cast, and that's all it takes to get people talking. Probably that.

So much of being a good actor is being likeable. Being a person. Having vulnerability and humility and insecurities. I think I have all these in my real life, but then I get onstage and sometimes I find myself doing this hyper-aware-over-articulate-hypenated-fast-talking-girl-thing-who-is-too-smart-for-everyone-and-has-no-soul and I don't even know why. That impulse to perform in a way that immediately turns people off is so strong. I do it. I see other people do it. What's up with that? I guess it is scary, if you let that go, because then you're just some schmuck who is scrambling to know lines and hit the mark and not ruin everything, and you're wading in all of these horrible feelings about your own lack of everything. So it's easier to just talk-loud-with-hypens.

There's non actors in this cast so I've been thinking a lot about what makes people work onstage and why we bother going to school to learn to do this human thing. And, yes, you can see training. I didn't use to, but you can. There's being comfortable onstage. Having the muscle and the awareness to know that everything you do onstage is magnified, so there has to be intention behind everything (no scratching your eyes!). And that's a thing you learn doing shows. And talking loud enough, and speaking the speech in a rhythm that makes it clear, and all that stuff, which is just time. You spend enough time onstage, you get it. NBD.

But then there's this thing about who has a soul and who will let you see it. Who will come out and just go for something, even though going for anything has in it the seeds that you will very possibly fail and it will be tragic. The non actors in this show are so amazingly good because they have this incredible humanity, this honesty and sensitivity that is related to them being good people, more than it is to them being actors. You see it onstage in a way that, when you see it in real life, you fall in love with them. I worry that I'm experienced enough to have lost this quality. It isn't so clear to see this in real life, the moments aren't magnified in the way they are on stage. Someone really listening to you can go unnoticed in real life, or how softly someone touches your hand, or the specificity of a really personal story that you are lucky to be hearing because they don't reveal it to anyone, those moments are raaaaare in real life, and I think you can miss how special someone is because we're not used to seeing that. But onstage, someone's heart can just radiate out of them and you all get to see it. And that's worth watching. That's the moment you pay for.

And then there's this chick. She just stomps her feet and makes these ethnic slurs all day. I don't know what's up with that.

Photo Credits: Alex Felipe