excellent foppery

Auditioned for a production of Shrew tonight with the same company that I did Merchant with last year. One of the guys did this speech of Edmund's, from Act 1 scene 2 of Lear, and reminded me how much I love it. 

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

I think we are less likely to blame stars in modern times as we are circumstance, but the point remains.

on food and acting

This is how you know (or I know) that I'm in a show: my eating habits get completely ridiculous.

Here's a run down of the day:

• ruby red chai with milk and about 6 small peanut butter cups for breakfast, noonish.
• around 4, when I realized I'd eaten practically nothing and that was perhaps why I was feeling a bit peculiar, a cinnamon raisin bagel with butter
• a Venti Earl Grey (though they messed up - it should've been a Vanilla Rooiboos)
• "wine," wine, and a few nips of a rusty nail backstage, plus copious amounts of water
  
• Altoids
• two small slices of cold three meat DiGiorno's when I got home at midnight.
  

I can't really eat before going onstage; if I do, it makes me feel ill. Tonight included less amounts of sugar than usual; normally, gummi bears or cookies or something incredibly sweet gets consumed before or during the show.

The especially odd thing is that my appetite mostly goes away; whatever it is that gives me a performance high apparently functions like cocaine.

(Incidentally, the show is going quite well, as least as far as I can tell from backstage.)

on rehearsal

It's been a long time since I've been in a play.

Well, really not that long, I suppose. "Clue" was only last July, but it seems like eons ago.

I cannot adequately express how good it feels to again be a part of a cast I respect, to be spending hours of time working on a piece of ephemeral art, to obsess over the minutiae of text and character. I spent about four hours a night for four nights at rehearsal this week, and on the fifth night, I was regretful that we didn't have another.

There's something magical, too, in sitting in a park on a blanket night after night, having people come by and watch us, their dogs running through the grass, the stars warm and misty above. The words themselves are beautiful, and they echo over the hill that serves as the amphitheater in a way that regular, unscripted speech never could.

I am nourished and happy in a way I haven't been in a long time. And while it's impossible to tell how good a show is until it goes up, the feeling in the pit of my stomach says we've hit on something good.

(Merchant of Venice opens in three weeks at Himmel Park. Would love to see you there.)