Curtains! (Part One)

I've made reference a few times to a one man show I was putting together over the course of the last couple months. It's been a long, initially frightening and thereafter merely stressful process, but one of great fun and self-improvement. Week by week, I and the others in the one person show workshop made incremental improvements in conception and execution of our respective pieces. Some came to the idea that would become their show later than others, and most worried over memorizing lines amidst the necessity of devoting time to more immediately profitable endeavors as the time to perform drew near. Others, meaning mainly myself, found the most worry in the mundane details of being an actor: acquiring a headshot, costume and set pieces was more injurious to my mental health than the idea of getting 'off-book'.

To go back some, it seems as if it was months and months ago that I submitted my name for the free workshop. It was easy to commit myself, as the prospect of actually performing something was so far in the distance as to not be real. Even the start of the class was so remote that conceiving ideas for my show seemed like getting ready to leave for my new life on the Mars colony. Soon enough though, the first week's class was upon us, and I jotted down some ideas in the days beforehand. There was one which appealed to me more than any other, having as it did a kind of provenance for the task at hand and for me personally.

I knew little about one person shows, except that actor Hal Holbrook performed one for decades, going back to the 50s and as recently as just a few years ago. Though I'm of no relation to him, sharing a surname makes me feel a very mild kinship- not one which extends to befriending strangers with it on Facebook, but a kinship nonetheless. The show he did was about Mark Twain, and I kind of liked the idea of reaching back to make a connection with one of the great shows of this form. I also happen to think I am of some small resemblance to a young Twain physically. Our instructor loved the idea of a show based on Twain's lectures, and I went with it.

Some had material they wanted to develop already written, and others as I said needed time to find what they were passionate enough to stick with. For many, the show was an opportunity for catharsis, and so they set upon telling their life's story. As I said following one of our performances, while I enjoyed what came from those, doing so myself seemed to be equal parts boring and painful. Immersing myself in my own history would not have been either stimulating or easy on my psyche. I could probably have made a fine show from it, but don't imagine that the product would have stood out among autobiographical offerings from people of more eventful backgrounds. Really I wanted to attempt to grow as an actor, but stay within my capacity. I would do one character, but really put effort into it in order to break from my pattern of essentially playing myself in improv scenes.

Writing was no problem for me. That is to say that the initial process of writing was easy. Writing twenty minutes of material was a snap. Preventing myself from writing any more was tougher. Condensing what I had to ensure that I stayed within my allotted time as I found how long what I had would take to perform was very difficult. As I've said, you have to steel yourself to sacrifice parts that you love in order to serve the greater good. I decided that unlike Hal Holbrook's Twain, who delivered his written works as a speech, mine would endeavor to "set the record straight" on his life, avowing that the truth was something stranger than what ever appeared in biographies of his life. Suffice it to say that what flowed from that decision was neither educational nor factual, though I always did jump off from a point of reality.

Tomorrow, I'll get into the process of putting my written concept into practice.