Rehearsal Playground
Week Sixteen: 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.
This week … The Dance.
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 Dance.
One single piece you dance to G-d from your raw, character soul.
A dance that speaks your worth. Movement that leaves nothing back.
One single movement piece to earn your character the chance to live again.
Start by embracing the knowings that come from your work finding the Dance of Undeath and the two movement pieces that filled its gaps ... going from its direction to finding your own dance in your own body.
Your dance.
Your body.
Craft the form of your movement piece 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.
Move and express 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 … dance from your soul, knowing the more you get it out - unapologetically, sincerely - the more consideration you earn 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
William and Emily
There is something about Death
Like love itself!
If with some one with whom you have known passion
And the glow of youthful love,
You also, after years of life
Together, feel the sinking of the fire
And thus fade away together,
Gradually, faintly, delicately,
As it were in each other’s arms,
Passing from the familiar room—
That is a power of unison between souls
Like love itself!
The Circuit Judge
Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain—
Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred
Were marking scores against me,
But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
I in life was the Circuit Judge, a maker of notches,
Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
Not on the right of the matter.
O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone
For worse than the anger of the wronged,
The curses of the poor,
Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
Hanged by my sentence,
Was innocent in soul compared with me.
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 conclude our presentation of O. Henry’s Full House (1952) with The Gift of the Magi - introduced by John Steinbeck (!), directed by Henry King, and starring Jeanne Crain and Farley Granger.
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.
