In rehearsal...

Day 10.

It's an emotional role. I was ready for the heavy lifting, but not the residual soreness. For hours afterwards my head was messed up. Images. Etc. The same stuff you use to get where you were going hangs around at the edges for a while since.

I studied this stuff. Once upon a time, in the same rooms I'm now rehearsing, I spent three or four hours a day four days a week for a year coming up with new and exciting ways to make myself feel terrible. Eleven or twelve of us in a room for an entire year with a misery sherpa pushing his students to go deeper inside of themselves- antagonize griefs, stoke childhood grudges, find your id and flog him with a coat hanger.

And we did. I did. With my mind I murdered, mangled, deceived, crafted scenarios of violation- for a year. And came home every day afterwards. The teacher taught this class used a term "acrobat of the heart". I think the term is clumsy, but it's meaning to me- the effortless taking of terrible emotional risk is very clear.

That year, 2002 to 2003, I felt a kinship with the people with whom I studied. We weren't curing cancer- more often we were doling it out and grieving over its occurrence for some assignment- but I think it's safe to say that we felt like we were. There was a genuine sense that we were hot shit- and this might be the natural outcropping of indulging every deep-seated, mean-spirited, childish fantasy we could come up with. (I use the first person plural here and irritates me- but I can think of no other way to show how dialed in I was to these other peoples frame of mind- there were no secrets- secrets slowed you down. Everything was shared. One guy tried to hide his sexual orientation during the year and it was painful to watch...)

We were good at angry- both the boys and girls. People could find rage. Everybody thinks they've been done wrong. Sad came slower for the boys than the girls, but one by one the tears came for the boys and the subsequent congratulations. Also, there was the spectre of being CUT from the program hanging over every class. So a nice emotional breakthrough could keep those feelings at bay for a couple days.

As a rule the class was not able to do sex. A part of the training centered on sex- and getting "related" to sexual activity. Horniness, as anyone who has seen a live sex show in Amsterdam knows, is difficult to reproduce on stage. True also in the classroom. The sex-based assignments (catchy turn of phrase, no?) were almost uniformly disastrous and far too embarrassing to list here (comments enumerating said assignments will not be published- you have been warned.) There was sex occurring licitly and illicitly outside of the classroom, but I couldn't say any more than anywhere else.

A siege mentality set in after six months of emotional work. Classes would be met with a hardness from the students. The eyes, once soft around the edges and quick to moisten, steeled over, strayed from the work on stage to smuggled crosswords puzzles and mindless doodles. February and March lasted a year and a half. Good work was greeted as indifferently as bad, weeping became a minimum wage job.

This may have been necessary. "Acting," as my then-girlfriend then pointed out to me, pointedly, after being treated to another of my lengthy whining screeds, "is hard." And it is. Or should be. And after a while, it became better to treat it with a little less respect and awe.

So now I'm back in rehearsal, doing the heavy lifting of emo-work (we never called it that, but my calling it emo makes me feel more ridiculous about it and somehow better) and I need to get my after work detachment back. Indifference has to be cultivated. Again. I punch in again at noon.

btw,
2 things that I share here.
1) Excellent article shared by stillman (whose blog still rules)on whether or not to respond to your critics...
2)This is a poach from beatdown's excellent screed re: toilets.
"I haven’t even talked about the toilets. There is a huge handicap stall, which I could never use because I don’t need to feel like I’m shitting in an open field."

Seriously, beatdown, I've walked by a half a dozen handicapped accessible bathroom stalls and I giggle every time. Thanks for that.