Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome to EA’s Rehearsal Playground. Each week we’ll celebrate our Mainstage material and capture graveyard echoes emanating from EA’s Spoon River.
All subscribers have a new Weekly Character Challenge + April’s Mainstage Rehearsal Project waiting below!
How It Works
Each Saturday delivers new weekly character rehearsal challenges straight to your inbox. Something dynamic, something experimental, something transformational. Something to push the boundaries of truth in character. This Spring … the world of EA’s Spoon River.
Your Weekly Character Challenge
Essential Beauty
This month we’re setting our sights on the deepest core of character connection.
Expressing the essential beauty of your character’s soul.
Earning the opportunity of a … deathtime.
It all begins with, The Song of Your Soul.
What if your Spoon River character had the chance to come back to life?
To speak to anyone you wanted and make them hear everything you hunger to say?
What would you give for that opportunity? That reunited love? That lust for revenge?
All it takes … is finding a way to make the case.
Earning that chance.
Let’s get to work.
This week we’re hunting for The Song of Your Soul.
One single song you sing to G-d from your raw, character soul.
A song speaking your worth. A song leaving nothing back.
One single song that earns your character the chance to live again.
Start by embracing the knowings from your work of finding the Song of Your Worth and the two songs that filled its gaps ... and going from that direction to one that finds your song in your voice.
Your song.
Your soul.
Your voice.
Craft the form of your song in any way you’d like, knowing that all it needs - is for you to go for it …
Fill it with the truth of your character heart.
Sing from the rawness of your character soul.
Set-up a camera to record.
When you feel the taste of G-d inside the camera lens … sing from your soul, knowing the more you get your soul out - unapologetically, sincerely - the more possible your consideration for this once in a deathtime opportunity.
Post your video - using your character’s name as the title.
How It Works
On the first Saturday of the month, our Mainstage Rehearsal Project gets posted for subscribers to play with all month long. Each project builds out an array of rehearsal tools, applying them to work you’ll remember forever. The stuff that makes acting worth believing in.
This Spring we’re delving into the works of O. Henry … unlocking deep truths, forging character connection, and working from the depths of artistic beauty and creative love.
April’s Mainstage Project
The Prayer
This month, we’re reaching into the soul of your O. Henry character to capture the most important prayer you have for any one person in your character’s life.
Find the person who you yearn to help the most.
Find the reason you believe they deserve help.
Find the words to make who’s listening feel your true heart.
Add a piece of Creative Communication so you can fill-in any missing pieces, tastes, knowings … to fully speak all of your soul.
Set-up a camera to record.
When you can feel the taste of who you’re praying to inside the camera lens … pray with all your heart, knowing if it’s true your prayer will be heard, believed, and granted.
Share your video - using your character’s name (and O. Henry story) as the title.
Graveyard Echoes
A. D. Blood
If you in the village think that my work was a good one,
Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards,
And haled old Daisy Fraser before Justice Arnett,
In many a crusade to purge the people of sin;
Why do you let the milliner’s daughter Dora,
And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier
Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow?
Robert Southey Burke
I spent my money trying to elect you Mayor
A. D. Blood.
I lavished my admiration upon you,
You were to my mind the almost perfect man.
You devoured my personality,
And the idealism of my youth,
And the strength of a high-souled fealty.
And all my hopes for the world,
And all my beliefs in Truth,
Were smelted up in the blinding heat
Of my devotion to you,
And molded into your image.
And then when I found what you were:
That your soul was small
And your words were false
As your blue-white porcelain teeth,
And your cuffs of celluloid,
I hated the love I had for you,
I hated myself, I hated you
For my wasted soul, and wasted youth.
And I say to all, beware of ideals,
Beware of giving your love away
To any man alive.
Play Along With Your Own Spring Character …
Read Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River.
Choose your Spoon River character or work with one of the echoes above.
Invest in your character over the Spring with our weekly work.
Share your discoveries and challenges.
Cinema Elysium Presents … The Saturday Matinee
We continue our presentation of O. Henry’s Full House (1952) with The Ransom of Red Chief - introduced by John Steinbeck (!), directed by Howard Hawks, and starring Fred Allen, Oscar Levant, Lee Aaker, Irving Bacon, Kathleen Freeman, and Robert Easton.
ALL MONTH ON SUBSTACK
I’ll be providing feedback for paid members posted work and available as a teammate for the discoveries and challenges inspired as you explore.