BD Wong

Well, you know, it’s not NORMAL being in a “one person show”.  There’s nothing traditionally “fun” about even the IDEA of a “one person show,” as far as I’m concerned.  And I’m talkin’ as either a performer or an audience member.  As a performer you think, “well I’m all alone on stage, which I suppose is ego gratifying, but in the end of the day, it’s an awful lot of work, and very difficult to reinvent the form, so why bother?”  And as an audience member, you’re thinking, “well he’s all alone on stage, which I suppose is ego gratifying, but in the end of the day, it’s an awful lot of work, and very difficult to reinvent the form, so why bother?”  You know?

But this is different.  This is a really cool show.  It’s a musical.  It’s a one person show that’s not a bunch of monologues with lighting cues in between and clever pauses where the actor changes sombreros or gets a drink of water behind a screen while making shadows of bunnies and flying birds with his fingers to keep things interesting.  It has a linear story like a real musical, it has a complete roster of characters like a bona fide three-dimensional musical, and the characters actually talk to each other and sing to each other and argue with each other and dance with each other and do stuff like ride in a car together.  It’s just that there’s really only one person on the stage.  And if, as an audience member, you just get on the train, you might just get sucked into the story and all the characters and possibly FORGET that there is just one person on the stage you might just have a satisfying storytelling experience.  Which is, of course, the goal for me.

Roger Rees (director), Darren Lee (choreographer), Dan Lipton (music director and pianist) and I worked on a kind of studio theater workshoppy production of Herringbone at the Williamstown Theatre Festival last June.  Roger was the Artistic Director of WTF  (which stands for Williamstown Theatre Festival, you pottymouth) at the time.  The production’s success eventually brought us to McCarter, but more than that, the time away from the material to reconnect with it months later here in Princeton has made the work much more interesting, and my connection to the material and the characters considerably deeper, as Roger had predicted last June.

I find myself remembering that 10 months ago in Williamstown my feelings about myself, and the play, and the way I approached the entire task of performing the play were completely different, almost as if I am now a very different person.  There are a lot of complicated reasons why this is true that I won’t go into, but basically what’s pertinent here is that I am hearing the words and telling the story now in a way that feels much more honest and deeper than before.  I, for example, no longer need to resort to “primary colors” in order to simply delineate the characters from line to line in a scene.  Instead, a more real rendering of the characters behavior and emotions can be kept alive as a character plays a scene simply because I know the material better and I have a more deep and complex understanding of the people and their feelings than ever before.  Might be interesting to ask someone who saw Williamstown and McCarter whether that’s true for the audience as well.

Before even knowing that the McCarter production would be scheduled, I made a New Years resolution last December to study voice with a more consistent commitment, and this seven month investment has paid off handsomely.  My teacher, Bill Schuman is a world class teacher of voice and a great supporter of my work and career for years.  As a result of seeing Bill faithfully I now have very little of the residual fear of singing the show and blowing my voice out than I have had in the past (I vocally limped through a two week run at the Musical Theatre Festival in Philly after bursting a blood vessel in my chords, not only extremely frustrating, but it planted the seed of “fear of singing” that has haunted me for a few years prior to this new chapter of my singing career).

So the word for this production, for me, seems to be “relaxation.”  I am working my way through the show without pushing, or over-energizing, or exhausting myself with stress (vocal or otherwise) because I genuinely feel pretty confident that it is all falling into place quite naturally and effortlessly, and that feels very mature and conducive to being in command of the evening in a way that I don’t believe I have ever fully experienced with this piece.  I have always thrown myself into most projects including this one with a kind of reckless abandon and tireless manic need to perfect every moment as soon as possible—exhausting for not only me but everyone within a fifty yard radius of the rehearsal room I’m stressing out in.  Onstage on opening night in Williamstown, in fact, I threw myself into a piano bench executing a bit of moderately challenging choreography and cut myself so severely that I had to stop the performance to go to the emergency room, where I got 30 stitches in my thigh.

I vividly remember that feeling of unbridled energy that in some ways was great for the production: I was fully committed, gung-ho and absolutely determined to ingratiate myself to the audience.  The end result was admittedly far from a failure, but what I guess I’m really trying to say is that this production may have a “intensely quiet focus” to it that is going to allow it to be taken to a whole other human level.  So I’m real psyched about that.

Another big difference this production offers is the “Dream Design Team”:  Eugene Lee (scenery), Ken Posner (lighting), William Ivey Long (costumes) and Scott Lehrer & Leon Rothenberg (sound).  Google them if you don’t know, they are phenomenal Broadway artists.  Only William designed Herringbone at WTF.  This time around, with a combination of resources—including our ability to access some of McCarter’s favorite designers—this team was assembled.  Well, it couldn’t be more freakishly wonderful.  I can’t even begin to describe how enthused I am by what these guys are bringing to the table.  The set is my dream set for this play, the jungle gym I’ve always wished someone would build for me to play it on, the costume is going to be fashion/function/magic/wit and intelligence and VERY William.  Ken’s contribution combines his impeccable taste and boundless knowledge with a real desire to serve me as the performer to elevate the performance to a kind of transcendent level with the lights.  Scott Lehrer, who just won the first sound design Tony for the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center (with his associate designer Leon Rothenberg) will not only give me the technology I need but add a soundscape which Roger and I have never explored for this play.  The week or two of “pre-production” meetings, phone calls, and emails with these wonderful artists was among the most stimulating and creative fortnight I’ve ever spent.

We began the rehearsal process with a few days of brush up on music and choreography with Dan and Darren; Roger was finishing up a run of his own one-man show in San Francisco and joined us shortly.  All four of us are pretty synchronized, healthy, good natured, and good humored; there’s nothing like people who like a good laugh in rehearsal.  Rounding out the energy in the rehearsal room are Cheryl Mintz, an immaculate Production Stage Manager in residence at McCarter, her assistants Samantha Flint and Liz  Malta, and Roger’s directing intern Sarah Wansley:  all three of the latter bring something unique to the process with a youthful, buoyant degree of “love of theatre’.  At first I was worried because I love lacing rehearsal with, how shall I describe it delicately, INAPPROPRIATE HUMOR.  But Cheryl assured me that she picked young women “who could handle it”.  And she was right.  So just around now, in our second week, we are starting to “work blue.”  OK, well I am anyway.  More on that later on, if I can find a way to do it without being shut down.

Eugene’s set, which is a basic system of furniture/objects that can be configured gracefully to serve an infinite number of scenes with economy and real theatrical imagination, has been a joy to employ in staging the show.  I hate spoilers, so I don’t want to describe it, but I will say it takes a fair amount of ingenuity, patience, time, and trial and error to figure out how to stage a scene with just the right amount of theatrical suggestion to make a time or place clear, because the way the furniture is configured and “moves around”, each piece of furniture needs to be placed rather precisely by me in order to avoid mishaps later in the show.  And so finding that placement and choreography and timing of moving an object and having it fall into place with all of the other moments of the show, that all depend on one another, is awesomely satisfying to me.  We go over and over and over and over a moment to try to find exactly the right configuration, and just when we are about to get frustrated at a dead end, someone makes a suggestion and then the light bulb goes off and suddenly you can’t picture it any other way.  And I love that.  For the record, producing director Mara Isaacs was not 100% convinced about the complex concept for the set in the beginning, and urged Roger and me to be absolutely sure it was what we wanted.  Even Eugene had second thoughts (it has tricky components the McCarter scene shop has never attempted) but I was absolutely positive, as was Roger, so McCarter went for it, and now I am extremely jazzed about showing them how we have made it work.  I think it’s friggin’ dreamy.

Michele Sammarco is the head of the McCarter prop department, and she’s probably the best propmaster/mistress/person/human/dude/etc. that I’ve ever worked with.  McCarter itself is run pretty immaculately and has tremendously impressive resources, so the arduous path of finding the right props (there are relatively few) in the show has been turned into a creative field day with Michele at the helm of the department.  I just love working with her; she’s a gal up for a creative challenge and never “makes that face;” the face people make when you ask them for something challenging and they look like they wish they could turn back the clock to before you asked it so they could get in their car and drive away first.  Something as simple as finding just the right book, an instrumental prop for a certain sequence—it must become two different women’s purses, a legal brief, and a child’s book—is met with enthusiasm and gusto.  The perfect book became completely shredded in Williamstown, so here I am now with several semifinalists in the Olympic event of selecting the McCarter replacement.  After auditioning copies of “The Hobbit” and a handsome small volume of the United States Constitution, the winner (I believe) is a hot pink copy of “Train Wreck:” the unauthorized biography of Anna Nicole Smith.  I love this, except for when I am miming the moment when the little boy reads the book, and I open the book to its center where there are full color photos of Poor Anna and her hapless family distracting me and making me want to stop the number so I can show everyone my theatrical secret.

I have found it difficult to negotiate the commute.  (I am just writing random thoughts at this point, it’s 11:00pm and I want to go to bed early and I am writing this during Olympic women’s beach volleyball.)  Commuting to McCarter from Manhattan is a piece of cake per se, but the main problem seems to me figuring out when to eat and do other “life things.”  I am determined to eat properly in prep for this show (my pre-rehearsal training has included bikram yoga, a high colonic, drinking raw vegetable juice every day, cutting back on carbs (a weakness), the singing, and generally eating well and regularly) and somehow simply taking the train throws a huge wrench into that intention.  I have taken to ordering take-out (thanks to McCarter company management’s help) that arrives for the 20 minute mid-rehearsal break, and that seems okay.  But to be honest, I sure wish I could just subsist on a diet made up entirely of white pasta, white rice, white chocolate, white sugar and other unmentionably unhealthy (white) ingredients, without blowing up like, well, ahem, Anna Nicole Smith (who, come to think of it, was pretty white herself).

Today Ken Posner came into the rehearsal room to watch us work through most of the numbers.  Up until now we’ve pretty much tracked the entire show staging and furniture wise, and have not yet really gotten into the deeper, more detailed work.  So it was a pretty perfect day for us to show Ken the staging and discuss with him what we’re going for and how his design can enhance it.  This show is a great playground for a lighting designer, and I think Ken is in many ways the perfect imaginative designer for the job.  He has the freshly laundered, youthful quality of an eagle scout and speaks with such high intelligence and clarity without any trace of rambling.  Believe me, this is rare.  I mean, look at this blog.  It’s as long as a book about, well, ahem, Anna Nicole Smith.

Suffice to say I am kind of loving this.  I have always felt that if I could present this show the way I see it in my head, I could move on from it and be quite content, and I do feel that way about this production so far.  I am just dying to get to the run-through stage and to really fine tune the details of it—that’s the fun but very hard part for me—and in the meantime we are finishing up on the basic staging for the end of the second act, and singing through the entire score with Dan nearly every day simply for stamina’s sake.  I also can’t wait to get on the set and feel how elegantly some of these scene changes and transitions can play.  I have a great hunch about how fun that’s going to be.

Today’s rehearsal ended a bit early today for the annual McCarter Staff BBQ, a summer tradition.  McCarter is staffed with a family of positive, supportive, creative people, many with children.  It was fun to watch my son frolicking with a new extended family.  As an artist and as a neighbor, it felt like home.

More later from the ‘bone,

bdw

p.s. we got the gold in women’s beach volleyball.

Posted by BD Wong, who stars in McCarter Theatre’s production of Herringbone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Actors' Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.