Rehearsal Playground
Week Thirteen: Essential Beauty / O. Henry
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 Worth.
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 Worth.
One song that captures an almost complete taste of what only you know to be most meaningful, worthwhile, essential about your character.
Once we embrace The Song … let’s ignite our Olympic Spirit with a hunger to be even more specific. To never be satisfied with just getting close … finding a song that almost completely captures your character’s worth.
Let’s plug those holes. Fill those gaps. Capture those missing ingredients.
Specify two tastes not captured in The Song of Worth.
Find a song to fully captures one of those missing tastes.
Find another song to fully captures the other missing taste.
This week’s challenge is complete when you have The Song of Worth plus two additional songs that add two crucial, missing truths.
Three songs total.
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
Deacon Taylor
I belonged to the church,
And to the party of prohibition;
And the villagers thought I died of eating watermelon.
In truth I had cirrhosis of the liver,
For every noon for thirty years,
I slipped behind the prescription partition
In Trainor’s drug store
And poured a generous drink
From the bottle marked “Spiritus frumenti.”
Sam Hookey
I ran away from home with the circus,
Having fallen in love with Mademoiselle Estralada,
The lion tamer.
One time, having starved the lions
For more than a day,
I entered the cage and began to beat Brutus
And Leo and Gypsy.
Whereupon Brutus sprang upon me,
And killed me.
On entering these regions
I met a shadow who cursed me,
And said it served me right. . . .
It was Robespierre!
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
Let’s continue our celebration of O. Henry’s Full House (1952) with The Clarion Call - directed by Henry Hathaway, starring Dale Robertson and Richard Widmark.
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.
