Containing Multitudes.

 

Containing Multitudes.

I'm currently playing 20 characters in a 5 actor adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. One actor plays the unflappable Phileas Fogg and the rest of the cast plays key parts like his erstwhile servant Passepartout, the dogged Detective Fix and Aooda, the girl he rescues plus a few assorted British noblemen and Indian elephant sellers.

I play everybody else.

20 characters.

20 different accents.

20 different costumes.

20 separate and distinct body types.

20 velcro enabled, dresser assisted whirlwinds in the wings to change everything from boots to facial hair and everything in between.

All packed into 1 sweaty, frantic and strangely invigorating evening of performing.

9 shows a week.

For 4 weeks.

That's 720 characters in 1 month.

But who's counting.

And each character is clamoring for his (or her) own respect, truthfulness and integrity. Each character possesses his (or her) own gait, gestures and grievances. Each character is trying to get his (or her) laughs.

I've done this kind of thing before. Most recently I played 20 characters in a one man adaptation of The Dybbuk at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Previously I've played 28 characters in a one man adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, 22 characters in The Boneman of Benares and 38 characters in The Thousandth Night. In those one man shows the costume changes were usually done in full view of the audience. A scarf or a hat suggested the new character. A pillow became a hunchback or boobs or a pregnant belly. The rest was up to me.

 

Playing 20 Characters in The Dybbuk.

But in Around the World in 80 Days I get the whole enchilada. Costumer extraordinaire B. Modern and her team assembled a whole closet full of period garb, rigged it all with snaps and magnets and Velcro patches, attached beards and mutton chops and mustaches to hats and caps and helmets and for 2 hours each night I dive in and out of it all while trying to pop onstage with the right lines in the right accent spoken by the correct character.

Breathing

This is just the kind of demanding fun I like. Most actors give themselves a little moment to settle in to who they are portraying before making an entrance. I don't get that moment. A fully fledged character has to be put on in seconds, then erased and replaced by the next one while desperately trying to put my hand in the right sleeve or apply the next mustache. And then bang, I'm back on. Sometimes you come on so flushed with the fact that you made the quick change in time to make your entrance that it takes a moment to remember who you are. You are out of breath. But the character isn't. He (or she) is just coming on to play the scene. So one of the delicious challenges of multi character work is respiratory. How to keep breathing onstage while a breathless scramble awaits you offstage at every exit. How to give each character at least a fighting chance to play, have fun and be his (or her)self.

 

Ralph Gautier of the Reform Club starts in on a monoclelog.

Tethers.

Finding these characters and distinguishing them from each other calls upon some particularly keen observation. I generally start with the chin, one of my favorite body parts. Where a person wears their chin can color not only their posture and attitude but their entire outlook on life. And when you're playing multi characters distinguishing chin placement goes a long way. The arrogance of the upturned chin works nicely in contrast with the tucked chin of a shy person. Angle that same chin and suddenly we don't trust this guy.

But that's just the beginning. Actors talk of a character's center. (My Colonel Procter in Around the World in 80 Days is decidedly belly centered for example) but few actors speak of a character's tether, that part of them that leads, that moves them through space, ambulates them from one place to another.

 

Colonel Proctor. (Photo by Kevin Berne)

Gravity.

Each character (person) has a different relationship with gravity. This may manifest itself in how the spine is worn. Which may in turn color the baseline emotional state of the character. Truly, the body has a sense memory.

Try saying "It's a beautiful day" while wearing the body of someone beset with heavy gravity, bent spine and tucked chin and you will feel what I mean. 

 

Kabuto.

Sculpting.

Other questions I try to answer for each character include:

Is he large or small, fast or slow?

Where does he keep his hands?

What is his "home"? (The posture he is most comfortable in.)

What personal quirk, tick, twitch or habitual mannerism does he rely on?

What is his relationship in space to the other characters? (Is he a space invader or a space evader?)

Does he flow or is there something more jagged there?

What is at war within him and what side is winning?

Acting is the study of everything. And coming up with 20 separate and distinct characters for Around the World in 80 Days has tested my resources. Sometimes you borrow from our shared culture.

 

Captain Bunsby. (Photo by Kevin Berne)

Captain Bunsby.

My Captain Bunsby of the Tankadere, who takes Phileas Fogg from Hong Kong through the storms to Yokohama sounds a bit like Quint from Jaws and a bit like Sterling Hayden. (Who was originally slated to play Quint in Jaws by the way.) 

He has a mouth full of gravel, an erect chin, a bent spine and lives in his own cloud of increased gravity. His center is his grizzled beard and for a tether he sports a wooden leg. A fear of the sea and a thirst for adventure are at war within him. His hands are fists and they're most at home in his pea coat pockets. He has a habit of stroking his beard that he's not aware of.

He's on stage for about 5 minutes and then limps off, his wooden leg leading the way, never to be seen again. But 2 seconds later I'm back on again, wearing a maid's dress and bonnet and a whole new set of decisions sculpting me. 

Bobby.

Emperor Norton.

Suez Consul.

Beautiful Contradictions.

Sure there are stereotypes here. Easy ways to latch on to a character and pigeon hole him into an easily recreate-able cypher. And that's where an actor's malleability and keen sense of observation comes in. To look for not only the broad strokes of what makes a character recognizable but the deeper exploration of the qualities (and contradictions) that make him human.

A line from Song of Myself from Whitman's Leaves of Grass reminds us that we are never just one thing, and all the quirks, imperfections, and contradictions are par for the course. And what differentiate us. All 20 of us in Around the World in 80 Days.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself;

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

      -Walt Whitman

Life size game of Risk ends badly.

Finding Eddie at The Speakeasy

Over the Moon at The Speakeasy (w/ Jon Deline)

You find yourself in a random street corner somewhere near the border of North Beach and Chinatown in San Francisco. The smells of simmering garlic risotto and sizzling Szechwan mingle in the evening air. You've been told to keep your eye out for a fellow in a faded overcoat and a canary colored fedora. You see him slouched insouciantly against a lamp post. He whispers a password to you past his down turned brim and upturned collar, gestures with a granite jaw towards either a Chinese laundry or a dusty clock shop. A goon at the door puts a hand the size of a porterhouse steak against your chest.

"Password." he grumbles.

"Skidoo." you reply.

With a grunt he lets you pass and you make your way down the rabbit hole.

You're in one of two places: either Sam Lee's Laundry Emporium or Joe's Clock Shop. Let's say you're in Joe's. The place is littered with clocks in various states of disrepair on every available surface. A desk bristles with springs and cogs and clock faces from every drawer. There's no Joe. Instead a dame in a sequined dress that fits her curves in all the right places reclines on a bentwood chair. Her gimlet eyes smolder at you. 

"Are you here to get a clock fixed?" she murmurs, lips painted the color of a day old bloodstain.

"Not really." you manage to stammer.

"Then you've come to the right place." She purrs and gestures you with lacquered nails towards a grandfather clock that probably last worked sometime around 1902. 
You open the door that should contain the innards of the clock. That's when you hear it. Music. Ragtime. A honky tonk waltz. You step into the clock and out the other side...

And you are in an illicit gambling den filled with flappers and dandies, swells and slatterns, bootleggers and roustabouts all decked out in the full regalia of 1923. You make your way past a Bellows boxing painting that hangs above a roulette table, past craps and blackjack players hunched over the green felt of the gambling tables, their chips clicking together in their sweaty palms and past an outstretched gloved hand holding a long cigarette holder belonging to a women resplendent in spit curls. Everyone is drinking. 

A bookshelf glides to one side on hidden wheels and you find yourself in a bar where a mustachioed piano player named Oscar Frost plinks out some forgotten moonshine sonata on a creaky upright. A bouncer with a face like a clenched fist and tougher than the calluses on a barflies' elbow gives you a wink and sends you through a secret passage marked only by a Dégas forgery. You make your way down a long hallway. Still more music beckons you past a velvet curtain the color of a bottomless lake. 

You emerge into The Palace Theatre Cabaret, swollen with swells swilling in the sepia glow of their table lamps or spilling over the mezzanine above the bouquets of drunken boozers in the booths. 
And onstage, caught in the glare of the footlights is a bevy of beauties in matching sequined hot pants kicking their long legs in perfect unison to the din of Mr. Arnie Topman and his Infamous Five. 

In the center of the chorus girls a man in a top hat and tails sings. He's the master of ceremonies, an ever ready joker with a bucket full of clever asides in his brain pan, sporting a jet black wig and a powdered face. His name is Eddie. The song ends and he raises a flask in your direction, his lips inches from a 1923 vintage microphone and says in a voice redolent of that era "So glad you could make it. Welcome to The Speakeasy!"

Three swells swilling.

Under Construction.

It started back in 2016 and even before that at another venue in 2014 and is the brainchild of Mr. Nick Olivero of Boxcar Theatre and his peripatetic business partner David Gluck. I was brought on to create the role of Eddie the Unlucky, the irrepressible gadfly emcee of the cabaret (loosely based on Eddie Cantor and a host of other comic luminaries of the Prohibition era) in their immersive theatre  recreation of a 1923 speakeasy.  I had just emcee'd the Theatre Bay Area Theatre Awards at the Geary Theatre for Nick and he asked if I was interested in creating Eddie for this 3 million dollar project he was embarking on in San Francisco. The venue was still fully under construction. It was a dusty, echo-y inhospitable environment to do theatre in. Now, almost a year later it is one of the hottest tickets in the city. And "Eddie" is at the center of it.

Becoming Eddie.

First was finding the material. Nick had done the heavy lifting of creating a cabaret order of where the specialty acts, the chorus girls, the comedy vignettes, the dream ballets would go. Eddie would be the one to tie them all together and keep the ball rolling. The only rule: nothing written after 1923. Authentic vaudeville humor. That plus what turned out to be seven songs, mostly from the Eddie Cantor songbook; If You Knew Susie, The Dumber They Come, She Don't Like It Not Much, etc. along with classics Lonesome Pine and even Those Were The Days are sprinkled throughout the evening with patter and plain ol' stand up of the time which needed to be part history lesson and part crowd control and all funny all the time. That's not true. When things go awry Eddie waxes philosophical and even holds forth with a Shakespeare soliloquy.

The Flannerelles.

Body of Work, Work of Body.

Luckily, Eddie Cantor was an extraordinary source of wit and ribald humor for generations and we were able to cobble together a kind of greatest hits and misses into Eddie's monologues from his vast body of work. And after a couple of months I started thinking like Eddie. Seeing the world through his cockeyed eyes. 

But then came the physicality. There's plenty of footage available of Eddie in the 30's and 40's. (He was one of those rare ones that went from vaudeville to radio to television without losing any of his well deserved popularity.) But there is precious little of the work he was doing pre 1923. Just a few grainy kinescopes and some scratchy audio. 

My first clue into him was his eyes. Throughout his career he affected a goggle eyed look, eyebrows in a perpetual state of astonishment. Next came his hands, splayed and fan like, as if the palms were capturing the limelight and the fingers were directing it directly to his garrulous face. His hips were square, retaining some of that early 20th century Puritan stiffness above feet that were like mirrors of his inner state: lively, jivey and almost irrepressibly delighted at everything he saw, heard or suspected might be on the horizon.

Coy/Decoy
The interesting challenge was that he was small in stature. And that was part of his charm. And I wanted that. I wanted to cram his Napoleon complex into my 6' frame. I went to my favorite body part: the chin. By tucking it, while still letting my eyebrows have that Cantoresque buoyancy, I found I could feel like the world was a little bit bigger than me. Eddie is almost coy. But because he's got a trick or two up his sleeve, it's actually decoy. That along with a slightly oversized costume seems to do the trick.
 

Giggle Juice and Tonsil Varnish

Since developing the role, they've had 2 others playing Eddie in The Speakeasy (including the aforementioned impresario Nick Olivero) but I like to think that Eddie Cantor himself, up in front of those footlights in the sky, is looking down with those big eyes of his and smiling, knowing we're all doing our best to give the swell swells of 2017 a little glimpse into a time when girls had gams, goons packed heat and giggle juice could get you daffy at The Speakeasy.

Eddie the Unlucky at the afterparty.

Akuma Barai. 悪魔払い

 

Akuma Barai. 悪魔払い

New Year's Eve.

Don't get it. Never got it.

It feels like a completely arbitrary chronological indicator of unrealized potential. Yes, there is physical evidence that 365 days is a worthy placeholder in our collective book of days with the seasons and their ancient and mostly forgotten- unless you're a farmer or a haiku poet-  inexorable march through time. But in a world where climate conditions have gone wonky and unpredictable and the only rituals that still make a blip on my personal radar are year's end top ten lists and the arrival of Screen Actors Guild screener DVDs in the mailbox.

So I don't get it.

The screaming, the goofy 2o17 goggles, the seeming requirement to gulp gallons of bad champagne like a man gasping for air at an oasis of bubbles. The standing in public squares with thousands of others waiting for balls to drop in the freezing cold while their own retreat up into their bodies.    

I'm not one for crowds anyway but multiply that by thousands of crazed imbeciles celebrating another tick on the mangy back of a dog of a lifetime by shooting live ammo into the air (I live in Oakland) like manic children playing cowboy while quaffing adult beverages by the bucketful.

Yes, New Years celebrations are a ritual and I'm all about ritual but all that rampant enthusiasm just doesn't jibe with the solemn fact that the previous year, however celebration worthy it may have been, is still packed with 365 days worth of dire events, dreadful occurrences and let's face it; Death.

And the next year will be too. Yeah, one night of unbridled optimism doesn't hurt anyone and it's good to blow off steam at least once a year but

you just won't find me pressed up against a metal cordon with two thousand strangers in the middle of the night to yell at a clock.

That said, there's something to it. This out with the old, in with the new positivism has ancient roots and I wanted in. My Druid forebears probably partied pretty hard on those prehistoric evenings when the heavenly stars and their towering stones aligned. The turning of the great wheel is measurable perhaps and I didn't want to deprive myself of the mystery of renewal and rebirth.

Sensei Diamantstein

My Sensei at Nishi Kaigan Iaido Dojo, Andrej Diamantstein, Kyoshi, has a New Year's tradition. At 11:30 on December 31st we have a practice. We swing into the new year with the swinging of steel blades. After practice we have a potluck and lots of toasts and hilarity. But at the moment the clock strikes twelve the only sound you hear is the squeak of bare feet and tabi on polished wood and the unmistakable swish of three foot razor blades cutting the air.

Hannya Mask. Actually a wronged woman

Everyone has demons.

We face them all year. The demons of procrastination, addiction and apprehension prey on us all at one time or another.

And anyone who says they don't is probably under the influence of yet another manifestation: the Demon of Denial.

That's why, on the final hour of one year and the first hour of the next we only do three Waza.

 (Waza are forms of imagined scenarios that include unsheathing, cutting imaginary opponents in meticulously prescribed ways, clearing the, again, imagined viscera from our blades and re sheathing (noto) and returning to our starting position.)

One of the Waza we only do at this time of year. It's special. The last time I saw it was seven years ago. It is called Akuma Barai which basically means "Cutting down the  demons". I can only describe it as a piece of physical poetry. The scenario, or bunkai of a this Waza involves no less than five opponents and when performed well looks like a flower opening in one of those time lapse shots you see on the nature channel. Only this flower is deadly. And when it's done, the imaginary opponents, in this case demons, should crumple softly like fallen leaves around the iaidoka as he returns the blade quietly to its resting place scabbard or saya in Japanese.

The general feeling is one of profound resolve as the opponents attack from all sides. You can't help but feel after performing it a frisson of triumph and a delicate unveiling of the possibility of a world where the demons lay vanquished and the future stretches out before you, untarnished by the past. It is the perfect Waza for a new beginning. And a perfect way to greet a new day. Or a new year. Even if it is just an arbitrary tick of a clock.

Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu.

明けましておめでとうございます。

Happy New year.

遊 Play.

A recent article in The Japan Times concerning the findings of a group of researchers using "baby-cams" to capture footage of babies playing jokes on one another with no ulterior motive than to get laughs was the kind of underwhelming revelation that goes viral these days.

It struck me as a bag of grant money thrown into a well to prove gravity.

Of course babies like to cut up when they get together.

They've just been through a major experience.

Being born is at least one of the top five things you can do in your life.

There's bound to be some stories.

It must have been scary.

And humor is how we frighten the scary away.

So when they put a group of babies in a room and the red light of the baby-cams starts glowing they must be like a green room full of comedians after a bumpy flight in from Denver.

Dismantlings.

What I found interesting is that the games the researchers observed the tiny tikes making up were fundamentally the same games we clowns play in Kooza.

The simple yet perfect patterns of three.

The creation of expectations and sudden dismantlings.

The there it is, there it is, there it isn't rhythms.

As clowns we often refer to the various sections or to use an acting term beats of our time onstage as games. What is the game now? Are we moving on to a new game? Or best yet: I found a new game. Games are fun. Especially if played with absolute conviction. But in order to participate in any way you must first be willing to play.

The fact that babies are working the room before they can walk across the room is no surprise. What perhaps those same researchers should be looking at is why those of us more ambulatory (and potty trained) humans can lose the awareness that everything we do can be a form of play.

Ohtaki Hunter

Between Osaka and Nagoya I had a couple of weeks off from the circus and went to the southernmost tip of Japan, Yakushima Island.

UNESCO has designated Yakushima Island as a World Heritage Sight. It is easy to see why.

Because of a fluke in the geography, the gulf stream and I'm sure a thousand other factors it is both sub tropical and sub arctic at the same time.

What this means is that you can be hiking amongst pines and junipers and turn a corner and be amongst palm fronds and sand and turn another corner and be plunged into a land of ferns and moss.

All within a hundred yards of one another.

The trail maps look like something Tolkien might draw up.

Primordial doesn't begin to describe it. I tried, failed.

Momoko and the path taken.

Yakushima is also famous for two things: Ancient cedars or cryptomeria (the Jomon Sugi is estimated to be 7,000 years old and is protected from huggers like myself by a network of exquisitely laid out trails) and ohtaki or waterfalls. I became an Ohtaki hunter. But there was neither the time nor the stamina to bag them all.

I stayed in the little town of Anbo half the time at Yakushima San Shu and the rest of the time in Onaida at the Shikinoyado Ryokan with Kentauro San and his lovely family.

After a week of not performing in a sold out big top Ken San asked if I wouldn't mind making a appearance at his kid's school.

"You're a clown. Can you do something funny for them?"

Little did he know I had been jonesing for an audience during all those grueling hikes to the ohtaki.

Sure, I wanted to play.

And this would be as pure as you can get:

1. Walk in room.

2. Forget language.

3. Play.

A couple of hours later I was drenched in sweat and ready to go play "Ohtaki Hunter" once again.

Screaming and Playing.

遊 is the kanji for play in Japanese.

Variations of this can be found in such meanings as "To amuse oneself", "to blow life into" and even "to do nothing".

Since a lot of what goes on in the martial arts would qualify in the scratching your head while rubbing your belly category, perhaps play is the perfect way to deal with the difficulty of doing two opposing things concurrently.

For example the game we play in Iaido; presenting a calm exterior while at the same time demonstrating a life or death encounter.

Cool on the outside.

Coiled on the inside.

Playing.

In fact, when someone engages in any of the martial arts, be it kendo, judo, iaido, kyudo, whatever, it is said that they play the particular art.

Someone plays kendo.

When they start class they say "let's play."

They may be trying to score points by bashing each other over the head while screaming their bone shaking kiai but inside all that gear kendoka are playing.

And the best players win.

Play Ball.

The Setting:

The 35,000 seat Fukuoka Yahoo Dome.

The Teams:

Team Fuji Television.

The undefeated victors of every Cirque du Soleil/ Fuji Television game since the beginning of the partnership six years ago. Athletic, smart and wearing lots of micro fiber stretch pants, plus they bolstered their roster by enlisting a hulking security guard who used to play pro and a bus driver with his own batting glove.

Team Kooza.

A rag tag band of guys with a passing acquaintance to baseball. Riggers, follow spot operators, sound ops, lighting designers and a cook. A Russian acrobat in right field playing for the 2nd time ever. And on the pitchers' mound, a clown.

The Fans:

In this giant room that dwarfed us all and made me think how wonderful it must be to be a major league baseball player and get to play on this gigantic astro turfed stage, a group of no more than 30 filled the air with cheers and chants.

They did the wave.

A singer and a trapeze artist had pom-poms. Sergey, master of the hand to hand act, screamed himself hoarse.

The Game:

Softball.

From the pitcher's mound it was pure psychological warfare.

A game of very precise catch with one major difference: A guy with a stick is trying to bash the hell out of the ball just before it reaches its destination in the catcher's glove.

Getting it by that person is pure play. Towards the last couple of innings Team Fuji was changing their batting order to get their best hitters up. They didn't want to be the team that ended their winning streak by losing to these bad news circus bears.

Plus there was a trophy.

It got serious.

And quiet.

I was glad I had the iaido to fall back on.

To drop back to stillness before each pitch.

To remain cool and coiled concurrently.

To play.

The Final Score:

Fuji Television 1

Team Kooza 3

Kooza Photos by Miron Rafajlovic.
Yakushima School Photos by Kentaro Mizoguchi.
Yakushima bridge photo by Momoko Shimokado.
Softball Photos by Billy Riske.