Rehearsal Playground
Week Two: Life Story / The Tree (Part One)
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 + January’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
Divide your character’s life into three chapters.
Find the painting or photograph that captures what the most defining moment in each chapter feels like in your memory.
When we think back to our own childhood or college years and remember a defining moment, there is a knowing of it, a way it has shaped and settled into memory. There’s a feel to it. Filled with the truth of being there and living it, but even more for what it represents, what it’s become. We all have those moments in our own lives so it’s easy to tune into an appreciation that our memories are more than what literally happened. There’s texture to our taste, it’s all wonderfully … more.
Beginning with wonder & curiosity and tasting from within the soul of your character, go on the hunt for the painting or photograph that captures your memory of each chapter’s defining moment … the way it feels inside your head/heart!
It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether “others” would agree. You’ll know you have the moment, the memory, the click of the painting or photograph - when it does the work of filling your soul with the taste of that memory, that defining moment for each of the three chapters of your life.
Allow this to be a hunt … an adventurous search to get closer and closer to The Painting or Photograph by scratching and clawing until one gives you The Click.
You are there when you have no work to do … when what you have found harmonizes with how you remember those moments in your Spoon River life.
3 images total. Maybe they’re all paintings. Maybe all photos. Maybe a mix …
What you’re left with are images that do the work of igniting and carrying you through the defining memories and moments of your Spoon River Life Story.
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 investing in. Worth believing in. This Winter … we begin with The Tree.
January’s Mainstage Project
This month, Creatively Communicate what only you can taste of what it was like to be you at five years old.
Find an image to ignite that taste.
Find a song to ignite that taste.
Find an object (one you can actually touch vs. discover online or see behind glass in a museum) to ignite that taste.
Find a poem to ignite that taste.
Create an original piece of Creative Communication to ignite that taste - expanding on the forms of expression listed above.
Graveyard Echoes
Ollie McGee
Have you seen walking through the village
A man with downcast eyes and haggard face?
That is my husband who, by secret cruelty
Never to be told, robbed me of my youth and my beauty;
Till at last, wrinkled and with yellow teeth,
And with broken pride and shameful humility,
I sank into the grave.
But what think you gnaws at my husband’s heart?
The face of what I was, the face of what he made me!
These are driving him to the place where I lie.
In death, therefore, I am avenged.
Fletcher McGee
She took my strength by minutes,
She took my life by hours,
She drained me like a fevered moon
That saps the spinning world.
The days went by like shadows,
The minutes wheeled like stars.
She took the pity from my heart,
And made it into smiles.
She was a hunk of sculptor’s clay,
My secret thoughts were fingers:
They flew behind her pensive brow
And lined it deep with pain.
They set the lips, and sagged the cheeks,
And drooped the eye with sorrow.
My soul had entered in the clay,
Fighting like seven devils.
It was not mine, it was not hers;
She held it, but its struggles
Modeled a face she hated,
And a face I feared to see.
I beat the windows, shook the bolts.
I hid me in a corner
And then she died and haunted me,
And hunted me for life.
Play Along With Your Own Spring Character …
Read Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River (click here).
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. (click here).
Cinema Elysium Presents … The Saturday Matinee
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.
