Der emmis in a lign
I auditioned for a zoom "radio play". Vocal stuff is not mega my forte, but I thought I did some pretty cool things during the audition. Not cool enough - the director's rejection included a note to consider varying voices if I read multiple characters. Which I certainly thought I was doing - but I guess it didn't read. That's discouraging.
District Merchants is done shooting, and today's when I get to see the results.
I'm not in love with what I see of myself in the trailer. The director kept saying she likes my work, so I guess it's ok? But what little I have seen of the recordings so far feels off.
It was an interesting project to work on.
I'm fairly familiar with The Merchant of Venice, which District Merchants borrows the structure and basic character paths from. I definitely know quite a bit more than the director.
In one of the early rehearsals another actor asked for an explanation of a line that was a direct reference to the Shakespeare. The director didn't know but promised to research it by next time. I made the offer to explain the reference and was able to quote the relevant lines along with providing their context. "Oh, you've done Merchant? What did you play?" "Assistant Director." "Oh."
Anyway, the director had a pretty solid eye for what she wanted things to look like and a firm opinion on the importance of diction, but a rather light hand otherwise.
I did sometimes wish she had the ability and/or inclination to tell the actors when they were clearly missing the jokes or the references in the script. I am definitely spoiled on my group's propensity towards text analysis. Perhaps I wish I'd gotten more specific feedback than the general everything's great... At least it'd have reassured me that everything is in fact great, rather than just her being in the moment and not seeing the problems that to me seem a bit apparent.
When I direct it's important to me to make sure all the actors are in the same play - the choices are consistent and run along similar parallel in style. In this one I feel like an odd one out. (Which is perhaps appropriate given that the character _is_ an odd one out in his circumstance, but not quite in that way. I hope it reads like I'm doing a thing rather than I'm being a bad actor.)
On the other hand I'm glad there were choices I got to make. When a direction is "sings in Yiddish", it's fun being a person who can do that off the top of their head. (I wonder how many of our viewers get the choice I made there and why. I _hope_ the director did. I am convinced that nobody will pick up on the quirk that the yiddish in my head and the yiddish on the page are slightly different dialects and I did my best to average the two and be a bit indeterminate.)
Anyway. Another character describes this Shylock thus: "He dwells in his own little world of imagined slights and small injustices".... which may or may not be a fair assessment, for audiences to decide. But the accusation feels relatable, anyway - I often feel like I live in a world like that myself, whether or not my slights are imagined.
Many of these slights are off-screen, too. I monologue about the hardships, but they are hardly shown. It's fascinating, being a bitter, broken person whose constant frustrations come out in a continual stream of snarks and snipes, which certainly do little to make anyone like him any better. I like to think my self-control is better than his, but I certainly know it leaks out on occasion, and I have no doubt that some of how people feel about me relates to that, and is a rather self-perpetuating cycle.
Ah well. Soon I shall see if who I am on the screen is more a man than a cartoon, and if others think better of me than I do of myself. They, at least, may have the advantage of being hopefully less distracted by the terrifying eyebrows I was asked to affect for the occasion.) Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/352135.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.
District Merchants is done shooting, and today's when I get to see the results.
I'm not in love with what I see of myself in the trailer. The director kept saying she likes my work, so I guess it's ok? But what little I have seen of the recordings so far feels off.
It was an interesting project to work on.
I'm fairly familiar with The Merchant of Venice, which District Merchants borrows the structure and basic character paths from. I definitely know quite a bit more than the director.
In one of the early rehearsals another actor asked for an explanation of a line that was a direct reference to the Shakespeare. The director didn't know but promised to research it by next time. I made the offer to explain the reference and was able to quote the relevant lines along with providing their context. "Oh, you've done Merchant? What did you play?" "Assistant Director." "Oh."
Anyway, the director had a pretty solid eye for what she wanted things to look like and a firm opinion on the importance of diction, but a rather light hand otherwise.
I did sometimes wish she had the ability and/or inclination to tell the actors when they were clearly missing the jokes or the references in the script. I am definitely spoiled on my group's propensity towards text analysis. Perhaps I wish I'd gotten more specific feedback than the general everything's great... At least it'd have reassured me that everything is in fact great, rather than just her being in the moment and not seeing the problems that to me seem a bit apparent.
When I direct it's important to me to make sure all the actors are in the same play - the choices are consistent and run along similar parallel in style. In this one I feel like an odd one out. (Which is perhaps appropriate given that the character _is_ an odd one out in his circumstance, but not quite in that way. I hope it reads like I'm doing a thing rather than I'm being a bad actor.)
On the other hand I'm glad there were choices I got to make. When a direction is "sings in Yiddish", it's fun being a person who can do that off the top of their head. (I wonder how many of our viewers get the choice I made there and why. I _hope_ the director did. I am convinced that nobody will pick up on the quirk that the yiddish in my head and the yiddish on the page are slightly different dialects and I did my best to average the two and be a bit indeterminate.)
Anyway. Another character describes this Shylock thus: "He dwells in his own little world of imagined slights and small injustices".... which may or may not be a fair assessment, for audiences to decide. But the accusation feels relatable, anyway - I often feel like I live in a world like that myself, whether or not my slights are imagined.
Many of these slights are off-screen, too. I monologue about the hardships, but they are hardly shown. It's fascinating, being a bitter, broken person whose constant frustrations come out in a continual stream of snarks and snipes, which certainly do little to make anyone like him any better. I like to think my self-control is better than his, but I certainly know it leaks out on occasion, and I have no doubt that some of how people feel about me relates to that, and is a rather self-perpetuating cycle.
Ah well. Soon I shall see if who I am on the screen is more a man than a cartoon, and if others think better of me than I do of myself. They, at least, may have the advantage of being hopefully less distracted by the terrifying eyebrows I was asked to affect for the occasion.) Originally posted at https://leiacat.dreamwidth.org/352135.html. Please comment either there using OpenID or right here. I read both with the same distracted semi-frequency.