Rehearsal Playground
Week Three: 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 object that feels closest to an object that was your “best teammate” during each chapter of your life.
When we think back on our lives there are certain objects that just have our backs. Maybe it’s a pillow, a briefcase or backpack, that pen, the frying pan, pair of pants, those socks, that chair, the couch, the lock, the car, the radio …
We have relationships with these objects, there is a real taste there.
Beginning with wonder & curiosity and tasting from within the soul of your character, first discover the one object you appreciated most from each chapter of your character’s life.
Then our hunt continues into the world around you, searching for something you can hold with eyes closed, something you can touch in the world today, that fully and freely feels the same as your old teammate.
Allow this to be a hunt … an adventurous search to get closer and closer to The Object 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 tasted those objects in your Spoon River life. No carefulness needed.
3 objects total. Maybe they’re similar to the Spoon River object. Maybe not. Maybe too modern. Maybe too old. If it does the work, it’s more than just right.
It’s meant to be.
What you’re left with are objects that do the work of igniting and carrying you through tastes and memories 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
Benjamin Pantier
Together in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law,
And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.
Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women,
Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone
With Nig for partner, bed-fellow; comrade in drink.
In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory,
The she, who survives me, snared my soul
With a snare which bled me to death,
Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent,
Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office.
Under my Jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig
Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!
Mrs. Benjamin Pantier
I know that he told that I snared his soul
With a snare which bled him to death.
And all the men loved him,
And most of the women pitied him.
But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes,
And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions,
And the rhythm of Wordsworth’s “Ode” runs in your ears,
While he goes about from morning till night
Repeating bits of that common thing;
“Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”
And then, suppose;
You are a woman well endowed,
And the only man with whom the law and morality
Permit you to have the marital relation
Is the very man that fills you with disgust
Every time you think of it while you think of it
Every time you see him?
That’s why I drove him away from home
To live with his dog in a dingy room
Back of his office.
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.
