a real live damsel in distress

The Internet’s back on! (For those with 10th Kingdom experience, imagine the village idiot with the well.)

I hurt my calves. I’m not one hundred percent positive how, but I have a 99.9% guess. I think it’s just a compression injury. Amidst all of the balancing today, I was dropped quite a lot and kept falling on my feet (better than my head?), and now it’s hard to walk. Doing typical running stretches helps (foot up against a wall or stair and lean forward), but I’m not entirely sure what to do tomorrow, as we have ballet. So that will be interesting. I am open to suggestions. I think I’m just going to ice it for the time being?

Saw another show on Sunday night. I had to talk myself into going instead of being at our group etude meeting for the whole time, and apparently no one minded too much (?). I saw The Tempest. Viewed at the Et Cetera Theater. I went with my friend Matt, and our MXAT student IDs work wonders. We got into the show for free and had good seats.

Technically and design-wise, the show was awesome. But over-directed. The director very clearly had a lot of awesome pictures in his head, but such that all of the acting was based on these stage pictures. So it was pretty, with some really awesome lighting effects. But the ideas could have been spread out over three shows, not shoved into one. And the acting was pretty bad. I think they might be good actors. But there’s no way to know, when an actor is directed for the sake of a picture.

Acting was good yesterday and interesting today.

Yesterday we had Sasha and Oleg before the break, and then just Sasha after the break. And all of the Chekhov personal etudes performed their Love Letter etudes...

My letter: a letter to Ivanov from her death bed. She writes it after their argument at the end of Act Three. (I’ve just attempted to describe the etude several times, but I can’t. I’m going to describe my actions, then put up the letter.)

Sarah in her room, sitting at her desk. A bottle of prescription pills, several crumpled tissues, some bloody from coughing (again, if you’re reading for the first time, she has TB), and several different notepads with writing on them. She’s piecing together the letter from several different drafts, snapping pills in half as a nervous habit at one point. She takes half a pill, finishes the letter after some time. Understand that the letter was not read as is written below. Below is one of the drafts. A lot was left out, rearranged, some was ignored, some was improved, some was repeated over and over, etc.

“Nikolai.

I never thought, at any point in my life, that I would write a death bed letter to my husband. I thought we would pass away together, wrapped in each others’ arms and slowly fall asleep and drift away. But Lvov can’t find you, and I’m dying, and I have to tell you how I feel and how much I love you and how much I miss you and will always miss you, past death and this world. I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to see you before I go because you’re not at home, so here they are, the final words, the last statement from the wife who loves you. Perhaps it’s silly of me to write this letter, maybe you’ll walk in just now, but I don’t know.

I think that perhaps there are inevitable people in our lives. I think there are people who will be there, always. You want to kiss them and you want to kill them. You want to wish they were dead. You want to hate them. You want so desperately to love them. But no matter what, they’ll be there. They will exist in your life, whether you want them to or not. Five years, and we’re still here. We’re inevitable. We’ve been each others’ world until the end. You’ve been with me, always. I’ll be with you, always.

And I didn’t mean those things I said. I didn’t mean to tell you that you’re a liar, because you’re not a liar and I know that. I know that you loved me and that you married me because you loved me. And we loved each other. I loved you, down to the very bottom of my soul.

(I don’t think you still love me. I think that you’re a coward. I think that you didn’t know what to do, so you did nothing. You did nothing at all, you didn’t even attempt to save us, to love me. You didn’t even pretend to love me. You didn’t want to save me. You chose to kill me rather than to try and love me again.)

And I love you. If there’s one last thing I have, that I can give us and the life we had together, it’s my love. I can give you my love and hope that you keep it with you, carry it with you until you’re an old and gray. And maybe we’ll find happiness later on. We’ll find each other somewhere, I’m convinced that we will. You’ll live the rest of your life and one day, later, we’ll see each other and fall in love all over again, I’m sure of it.

You deserve to hear how much I love you. You deserve to know how much I care and how sorry I am that I said the things I said because they weren’t true and I know that you love me. I know that you’re having a hard time and I wish that I could understand it all and I wish that I could stay here to help you, to talk through it all. I hope that you figure it out and that our love carries you through, because it’s strong enough to do that. It’s strong enough to last for always. You remember that, you do, I know you do. You remember that happiness, and the plans we had and the family we imagined and the life we were going to lead and the loved that we shared.

I’m dying. I am, and you were right to tell me. Because without that, I would never have been able to tell you these things. I never would have known to write them down. I love you, my dearest. Past death and forever. You are my inevitable.

Sarah.”

An incredibly useful exploration of the depth of Sarah’s ties to Ivanov. And creating the story of his disappearance after their argument at the end of Act Three gives me a chance to wonder whether or not Ivanov was present when Sarah died. How horrible. And perhaps this is one of the (many) reasons that he commits suicide at the end of the play?

Sasha told me it was good, and that I can take a lot of the things I used in the etude for my scene... thinking as I speak, taking time to find words, repeating words or phrases that make sense to repeat, finding the swings in temperament, happening upon those unplanned nervous habits, such as snapping the pills in half. It was good to get good feedback. Always love working with Sasha.

And today, we had Sergei. Oleg and Sasha were told that we’d be going to the Stanislavski museum, which didn’t happen, so Igor took the other class and Sergei took ours, as both Sasha and Oleg made plans to go out of town. For those of you Russia people who remember, we had Sergei for acting class when we were here in January. And he remembered me, which was pretty funny. We did a group etude for him, then training, then dream etudes. Our group etude was badass, but too rushed and therefore very much like a movie trailer. More story than acting... which was something that I think we all needed to hear. We’ve all learned to work creatively, with extraordinary imagination and ensemble work, but we create such brilliant stories that sometimes the fact that the etudes are for character exploration and therefore we must take the time to explore. And later on in class he said “You are your character’s lawyer.” And then explained that that meant that we had to justify absolutely everything that the character does. You can’t think that your character is a jerk. Because your character thinks he’s a nice guy. You think “Well, duh.” But it’s not something that we think about all the time, especially when playing the bad guy.

That’s all to report for now?

EXCEPT! Today, during Doctor Lvov’s dream etude, I got to be a real live damsel in distress!

The evil Ivanov dragged me into the room as I desperately clung to the door jamb, wrenched me away and fireman carried me to the “train tracks” that ran the width of the stage. The train was coming down the tracks, and I screamed for Doctor Lvov! Save me! Save me! And Lvov (aka Donovan) kicked in the door, broke the door frame, fought Ivanov (aka Darren), and saved me from the train. Then, as he got ready to kiss me, I started coughing and died of tuberculosis. No matter what, Lvov could not save me.

Best parts of this etude:

1. I got to be a damsel in distress.

2. Donovan broke the door frame.

3. When dragging me into the room, Darren was supposed to be yelling as the evil monster Ivanov. So he starts yelling as he pulls me from the door jamb “MWAHAHA! I AM DOCTOR... (pause as he realizes that he’s not Doctor Lvov and not even a doctor at all)... CRAZY! EVIL IVANOV! MWAHAHA!”

Good day.

M