This is as close to I have gotten to a nightmare recently, and it's mostly a thriller.
I often tell people that I can really only play odd characters and villains on stage, and that other characters, such as a normal person, or even a comic character, are much harder for me to do because I don't have the usual look for either such character. Apparently, my mind believe me.
I've been dreaming that I have auditioned for another classic play, Goethe's Faust, and of all things, I've been cast as the devil himself, Mephistopheles. Like I said, my mind believes me and has taken my statements to their logical conclusion.
In the first variant of this dream, I was attending a rehearsal without a script. However, we were rather far along with the rehearsals, so the other actors were all off-script. It came time for my first big scene and I got the cue to come on stage, but I didn't know my entrance line, nor any of the rest of the lines. I began making it up as I went along, stumbling through a terribly improvised scene. At the end of a torturous two minutes, I found an excuse and left the stage. I woke up feeling so embarrassed that I could make such an ass of myself as to have not prepared for the show at all.
In second variant of this dream, I've been given a script and a costume and have lost both. I'm in such a funk over the loss of both of these things that my mind isn't working, and, just as before, I can't remember any lines.
In the third and most recent variant of the dream, I have still lost my costume, although I did manage to find my script -- not that it matters because I wasn't using it! The play had been converted into a musical and we were now in tech week and had a trial audience. The cue was given, my entrance was played and I came sauntering on stage, having no idea what to do or to sing. I might have also been smoking a cigarette for all I know (which is something that I never do). What I know is that the theater reminded me of a strange mix of the theaters that I have performed in, the audience was packed into it to overflowing (and it was a big theater), and I was on stage wishing that I had never signed up for this.
The fact that it had become a musical and I was on stage either in street clothes or completely naked was about the only thing that tipped me off to the fact that what I was experiencing was a dream. However, this last time, I woke up so fast from this dream that I leaped out of bed and began looking for the script, determined to learn all of my lines in 24 hours. A whole minute went by before I realized that I was not in my shabby actor's studio in NYC; I was in my own house.
Tuesday, May 07, 2019
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)