IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST! (Sometimes You're On-Fire and Sometimes You Get Burned!)

Villains are fun to play. They have so many intricate layers and they’re usually quite intense. Utilizing your character as the vehicle for your actions, you can act upon thoughts in films and/or on stage you wouldn’t dream of acting upon, let alone even thinking, in real life. It all starts out rather fun but eventually the laughter shared backstage envelopes a more serious tone which in this case affects my sensibilities as an actor. A villainous character portrayal on stage night after night begins to meld the realities of the character into your own temporarily. It is at that point the nuances of darkness in my character tug a bit at my soul and my inert sense of right and wrong. The situation is both fascinating and a bit disconcerting.

Last week I played the “motivation” game. That is giving my character a unique motivation and captivating moment before in that short space in time I waited offstage to enter the scene. The last couple of performances I’d adjusted the darkness of my character dialing it back slightly. I began playing to several comedic moments which had been getting results from the audience in the form of laughter albeit fleeting and fractious on occasion and raucous on others.

There is a scene where I write a check for a fairly large amount of money. The other day the audience seemed to be in a near death trance. All quiet on the western front I said to myself under the lights, with the exception of a gentleman somewhere in the front breathing with the help of an oxygen tank. It gave the scene an ominous fleeting Darth Vader frame. It was at that moment I began writing the check. I wanted the audience to feel me writing that check, to feel what it’s like to have such a check written to you and in your hand.

The audience remained silent as I wrote and wrote and wrote…The seconds ticked on like hours but I was determined to elicit a response from them. After quite sometime the laughter finally came for I was no longer pretending to write this large check but I delivered and not a moment too soon. I was up on that stage to be real and to entertain and I damn well did. The entire cast did. It’s moments like that where each cast member drives the next upward and then all are as one. It’s a taste of eastern philosophy on the boards…I like to think I accomplish this every evening. It’s just that some audiences are a bit more challenging than others.

We’re now in the belly of the beast, halfway through our run. I keep thinking of this analogy that life is like a merry-go-round. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes your down but the cycle continues either way. Sometimes you fall off but you can always get back on and sometimes on a really good day, you get to stop along the way, take a breath and appreciate your mount. Eventually the music stops and we all get off…