Exercises in Acting and Writing

[thehefner]

Had Acting II yesterday, wherein I performed the only funny scene from King Lear, the scene where Edgar leads his father to the edge of the "cliff," and even then it's a pretty grim scene. Everyone's favorite blind, non-crippled Duke of Gloucester was played by Carrie Chapter, who played the bitch in "Blue Surge" and has since become a good friend of mine. Odd casting, I admit, but the result was better than I could have hoped. Dale, teacher and head of the Drama Dept. loved it, saying it "gave him chills," and it left him with very few suggestions to make it better. After seeing us, he said that he "couldn't imagine seeing it done any other way." I'm still riding the euphoria of hearing that.

Edgar, along with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is my favorite Shakespearian character, but is also the most maligned major character in an already maligned play (Lear gets the least respect and attention of the Four Great Tragedies, IMO). Lots of productions give the brothers subplot the cold shoulder, some omiting it entirely. My Adren Shakespeare Lear, my favorite edition too, even asserts that the evil brother Edmund "offers a more satisfying part for a modern actor than the role of Edgar." Me, I completely, wholeheartedly disagree, and am desperate to play Edgar someday. The comments from yesterday's class only strengthened my resolve.

Then, it was on to Playwrighting I class, where I submitted a scene from my novel that I adapted to play format (and those who have read portion of my book know this is not difficult task). Wellllll... bad idea. While I am still clinging to the hope and belief that my off-beat mixture of coming-of-age, murder mystery, drug war, cop story, superhero, and swashbuckler will work in novel format... uh, as a play somehow I don't think it's as easy to swallow.

If I learned anything from the excruciated experience of hearing this scene read aloud and then torn apart by a handful of the folks in class, it's that I know there will be some people for whom my novel is *not* intended. Anyone who has the slightest personal distaste for anything other than real-life, down-to-earth relationships isn't gonna "get" it. So at least now I have a better idea of who my target audience is, and that is a good thing. I know some dialog and fights and whatnot may turn off some people, but at the end of the day I'm gonna write what I want to write and let my editor do the cutting.

I would very much still like, if I can, to make a career of my acting and writing. But for now, I know that only one is better suited for live public performance. At least I won't have to watch people as they read my novels.

Comments

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

The IMDB lists 19 Lears, 53 Hamlets, 29 Othellos, 33 Macbeths, and 34 Romeo and Juliets. I'm not sure which of those five is left out of the Big Four. By this heuristic, it ought to be Lear.

I can't say if it's the text's fault or not. I've done all five plays, but I didn't find Lear to be more or less suited to performance than the others. It's not quite as quotable as the other four. From Bartlett's Familiar Quotations:

Lear: 233
Macbeth: 307
Hamlet: 555
Romeo and Juliet: 195
Othello: 270

I can't really vouch for the validity of the results. I think that the R&J number is artificially low, leaving Lear on the short stick.

My guess is that the problem is Lear himself. Everybody wants to play Romeo, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. Young men, all. And young women. But the number of actors who are old enough to play Lear convincingly and are still involved in acting is fairly small.

The Great Old Men of the sport should all play him: Mackellen, Holm, Hopkins. I hope they've played the role, but I don't know if any of them done film productions.

But not yet for Branagh, which I think is the real problem. It's a demanding part for an old man.

I would have the RMs avoid Lear until we find the right Lear. We have dozens of candidates for the others, but not a single on for Lear. Bimp, someday, perhaps.

And yet... the thing would commit well to film. The play shifts settings frequently, and such things tend to end up with a black-box staging. How much better it would be on film, where you could really go to town on a moor, as it were, and have three different castles: Lear's, Gloucester's, Albany's, plus woods and battlefields and all that rot.

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[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I've seen Holm's version, and I recall it as highly disappointing on a large scale. Personally, I'd kill to see Derek Jacobi or McKellen do it, and I would be EXTREMELY curious to see Branagh when the time comes. Hopkins had so much Lear in his Titus than I was also love to see him take on that role.

Okay. McKellen and Jacobi will both work for scale if the project is intriguing enough. How much money/production value would I have to scrape together to entice them (preferably the latter) to be in a film version of it? Come on, it'd be a great RM project! You've already explained how well it would work as a film!

...Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, if we're getting such good turnouts these days with auditions, perhaps if we held an open casting for a Lear we might have better luck. But then, finding a Lear strikes me as immeasurably harder to find than a Hamlet or even an Othello. Which brings me back to the point of hiring Jacobi! Dude, he's a sweet, humble guy, I'm sure he'd be up for it! Whaddya say? Huh? Huh?

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[tazira.livejournal.com]

If we were to do Lear without an obvious lead, we'd have to do what I did for Othello, cast the lead a month or two in advance (and hope this one doesn't get a paying gig at the Folger like the last one did.)