Rehearsal Playground
Week Nine: The Elysium Etudes / 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 + March’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
Nightmares & Dreamscapes
Nightmares do something to us. They leave something behind.
Dreams open doors and possibilities. Tastes we never considered possible.
This month we’re gifting our transformational growth with the ability to live through our character nightmares and character dreamscapes.
Up first, The 10 Scenarios.
Begin by specifying 10 nightmare scenarios for your character.
Whittle each nightmare down its most concentrated core … a flash of a moment carrying the pure taste of that scenario.
Next repeat the process, now specifying 10 fantasy scenarios for your character.
Whittle each fantasy down to its most concentrated core … a flash of a moment carrying the pure taste of each scenario.
Finally, translate each (concentrated) taste into a piece of Creative Communication.
Use movement, poetry, music, object, imagery to find the click of what will push your buttons, play your keys, affect you.
You know you’ve found your “button-pusher” when there no work left to do.
You, the actor, can disappear.
Simply by tasting your own Creative Communication, by experiencing it, your instrument ignites with a visceral taste, a seductive shiver, of your nightmare/fantasy scenario.
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.
March’s Mainstage Project
After reading all of these short stories by O. Henry - step away for a day.
Your character will be the one most living in your soul after that full day is up.
This month, please Creatively Communicate what only you can taste of the heart/soul connection you feel to your character.
Find the image that captures the connection.
Find the song that captures the connection.
Find the object (one you can actually touch vs. discover online or see behind glass in a museum) that captures the connection.
Find the poem that captures the connection.
Create an original piece of Creative Communication that captures the connection - adding/expanding on the forms of expression listed above.
Graveyard Echoes
The Town Marshal
The Prohibitionists made me Town Marshal
When the saloons were voted out,
Because when I was a drinking man,
Before I joined the church, I killed a Swede
At the saw-mill near Maple Grove.
And they wanted a terrible man,
Grim, righteous, strong, courageous,
And a hater of saloons and drinkers,
To keep law and order in the village.
And they presented me with a loaded cane
With which I struck Jack McGuire
Before he drew the gun with which he killed me.
The Prohibitionists spent their money in vain
To hang him, for in a dream
I appeared to one of the twelve jurymen
And told him the whole secret story.
Fourteen years were enough for killing me.
Jack McGuire
They would have lynched me
Had I not been secretly hurried away
To the jail at Peoria.
And yet I was going peacefully home,
Carrying my jug, a little drunk,
When Logan, the marshal, halted me
Called me a drunken hound and shook me
And, when I cursed him for it, struck me
With that Prohibition loaded cane—
All this before I shot him.
They would have hanged me except for this:
My lawyer, Kinsey Keene, was helping to land
Old Thomas Rhodes for wrecking the bank,
And the judge was a friend of
Rhodes And wanted him to escape,
And Kinsey offered to quit on Rhodes
For fourteen years for me.
And the bargain was made.
I served my time
And learned to read and write.
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
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.
