BD Wong

The morning started out with pancakes at PJ’s, which was a first for my son and me. Not only was it yummy, my son was extremely impressed by two very specific things there: the speed with which breakfast was served (prestissimo), and the fact that you could join decades of very expressive Princeton students and write whatever you want on the walls and tables. I was actually impressed by these two things myself. Then we took a gorgeous walk through the campus to rehearsal. It’s pretty neat to walk around and about these amazing old buildings when nobody is around, especially with a little boy who has never heard crickets in the daytime, and doesn’t realize that a lot of those old-looking buildings at Disneyworld aren’t really very old at all.

It has proven to be a safe bet that my son will not complain about going to the rehearsal room because there is so much fun stuff in there. We rehearse with (among other things) a very simple doorway—a mock-up of the actual one that will appear in the show, and simply opening the door and walking across the threshold from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular gives him a particular thrill. On top of that, the unit is on 4 casters with big red handles that make them inoperable, rendering the doorway stationary. He really dug this. He has already suggested we bring this gigantic gray thing home, and has requested we paint it a very specific “medium blue”.

I bring him up because it is rather noteworthy that my son is actually eight years old during the time when I am performing a play about an eight year old boy and his parents, and playing all three of them to boot. Having the lucky experience of becoming a parent has been absolutely invaluable to my work as an actor for too many reasons than I can illuminate right now; working on Herringbone, the effect of this has been quite great. The parents in the play are rather flawed as parents, I must say (admittedly, during very hard times). Having said that, particularly in regard to the mother/child relationship, I’m pretty sure many parents will relate: she is absolutely sure nobody loves her son more than she, and is even surer that every decision she makes on his behalf is for his benefit and his benefit alone and not for her own, when often, the reverse is unfortunately true. Working toward rendering the role of Louise is really informed by my relationship to my son in this production (and my sometimes ironically simultaneous tendency to not only smother him but to immediately squelch that smothering), and equally, attempting to bring honesty to the character of young George is greatly enhanced by my empathy for my son, and my perception of whatever pressures and plans that I may burden him with—thanks to the many great (yet mundanely parental) dreams for him I often wish upon a star to realize all too easily.

So “our” babysitter came just in time for rehearsal to start, and Darren and I started delving into the choreography for the Tango number. This is a very tricky sequence, because we have completely overhauled it for this production from what we did at Williamstown. The material is a dynamic collaboration of dialogue, music and dance, but the story being told within it is sketched rather than completely spelled out. There needs to be an extreme degree of economy in the movement; each choice must provide as much information and depth to the audience as possible without becoming ornamented or over-exerted. We have chosen a nice device for showing the passage of time and place (no spoilers, sorry), as Louise and Arthur Nookin go west from Alabama with their supernaturally possessed son George in tow to Hollywood. The perpetrator of George’s “possession”, a vengeful midget vaudevillian named Lou, is really in charge here, and part of the purpose of the number is to illustrate the war that Lou and George begin over control of George’s body. So imagine illustrating, through dance, everything I’ve just described, without smoke coming out of your ears. We are all determined to make this sequence even more resonant than it was before, and all are enthused by our progress in this regard. It could be one of the cooler pieces within the show that gives Herringbone its singular identity as a theatrical experience and as a piece of collaborative music theater writing.

Dan and I then played/sang through the entire score. Dan is absolutely wonderfully fastidious, partly because he is a crackerjack musician, but also because he knows I want to sing every note exactly the way Skip wrote it. So he really gets in there and corrects me on every minute detail, as well as reminding me of all the previous notes he has given before that I may have forgotten to execute. I think we are a pretty good team for this show, we both approach what we do with a certain passion and desire to do it exactly right, and I am always attracted to people and other artists who live and work this way. I do find that assembling all of the elements (musical, emotional, physical) is an extremely layered process, and I catch myself feeling frustrated when I am reminded I have made a mistake as I am beginning to incorporate all of the elements together: invariably when I have forgotten one of Dan’s previous notes, I am just thinking about the staging or the feelings. Or lunch.

Roger arrived mid sing-through and we continued pressing through the general staging of the show. This means that we are confirming we are sure where all the furniture will go for each scene, and how the changes flow with one another. We’re talking about one chair, one trunk that has props in it, one piano and a piano bench with a guy on it, and the big gray door that my son has dibs on and which he plans to carry home on the dinky. We absolutely agonize over some of these configurations, they are so delicate and always dependent upon whatever precedes or follows them. It is both maddening and extremely satisfying when you find it. And a bad choice sticks out like a diamond brooch on a five dollar hooker.

We spent a few hours doing this and wound up finishing the tracking for all the furniture moves, pretty much. Cheryl really earned her pay today; she does a rather superhuman job of coordinating all of the various departments and apprising everyone of the bigger picture issues. For example, yesterday Roger had a brainstorm about how to retire a certain prop. This brainstorm led to Cheryl putting in a request to the set construction guys, as they are midway through building everything, about creating a contraption built into the set that can dispose of this prop in a witty way. (I think of these three guys, David York, Chris Nelson and Steve Howe as either people you want to be stranded with during a nuclear holocaust or who you hope will end up on your team in a spirited season of “SURVIVOR: PRINCETON;” they really don’t like saying they cannot do something—and it’s rare they do.) Cheryl is not only required to listen to the creative conversation and remember it exactly so that she can convey the director’s ideas to the various departments without variations in interpretation, but to reverse the process by reporting to the director what she has been told is actually possible to achieve in response to such a spontaneous request, and furthermore to economically document this entire conversation for the production report. She is extremely skilled at this; few people could do what she does with such ease and reliability. She is often almost sheepish about her role in the room, and we try to encourage her not to be. The PSM is terribly vital to not only running the show once it is ready to be performed for an audience, but also for her role in actually creating it. Cheryl is phenomenally skilled, and evenly tempered on top of it all.

And once again, we put in a wacky request to McCarter and were met with nary a batted eyelash. Where do you want it? What do you want it to do? These are two of the typical responses around here. I intend to “form a tribal alliance” with them. They actually have the gall to act as if it’s FUN for them.

Earlier in the day I had a meeting with Cynthia Thom, head of the wardrobe department at McCarter. Cindy is another intensely reliable member of the big McCarter team (this is getting boring, the reliability of all these people, I know, but I am not exaggerating). She has an obvious desire to please and a sweet disposition that makes you realize how passionate she is about the theater, and in particular about costumes. She is helping to coordinate William Ivey Long’s (sometimes cryptic) direction with both me and his associate, Jenn Jacobs. We are currently at the stage where we are following certain creative ideas and doing preliminary fittings and discussing fabrics to try to hone in on it. I don’t wanna say a lot about the costume. I will say this process of finding the costume really feels like doing a Broadway show. There’s no rushing or cutting corners or skipping steps, like in most non-Broadway situations. I can feel Cindy chomping at the bit to build some wonderful pieces in the shop, so getting past this stage where William and Jenn finally zero in on the design is something she and I share great excitement about.

I am pretty tired! Tonight the nice folks at McCarter took Roger and I to dinner, and then to a lively moderated discussion about our production at the Princeton Public Library for an audience. Lots of fine folk turned out for this event, it was packed; the conversation was thorough and full of good energy. There seems to be a mood of general enthusiasm about our show. So then I came home and just started blogging again.

At this point there is a lot of detail work to do, and yet, I find myself slightly impatient with all the furniture moving and non-acting parts. I just want to get in there and make these people come to life and rehearse it to the point where I don’t have to over think any of it. Repetition=relaxation.

Sorry this wasn’t so funny tonight. Tomorrow I will excerpt quotes from Vicki Lee Hogan.

That’s Anna Nicole Smith, ya dope! Don’t you know anything about American culture??

Thanks for ‘boning.

bdw

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

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Actors' Voices, Herringbone. 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.