Oh my...
We had our first read-through of 'The Full Monty' this evening, at the Baird Center, down near the baseball fields in South Orange. This, as the saying goes, is going to be... interesting.
At first, I thought we were all there to sign a treaty or something -- there was a great arrangement of tables and chairs, with white binders at each place -- could I be in the wrong room? Was this a summit on nuclear disarmament, instead of a readthrough about a bunch of unemployed men taking their clothes off?
But of course it was the right place, and I ended up sitting in a corner with a bunch of left-handers. I was interested, of course, in seeing just how much of a role I've got to play, and I hadn't heard all the music yet, nor did I really know how much difference there was, between the original movie, set in Birmingham England I think, and this Americanized version.
I'm going to be onstage a fair amount, but I don't have an overwhelming number of lines -- nothing like the non-stop ranting I had to produce, as the Puritanical Judge Danforth, in last fall's production of 'The Crucible'. I have one song -- actually a duet, but the two of us sing our own verses -- and then I'm kind of chorus for a couple other numbers. The music is actually quite complex and challenging, I think -- I'm wondering how it's all going to come off. And then, of course, there's all the choreography too. I see long, long rehearsals in my future...
But the group seems congenial and warm, so I think it should be fine, overall. My major concerns, right now, are the size of the stage (teensy), the proximity of the first row to the actors (thisclose), and the likelihood that the director is going to insist on more nudity than is called for in the script. (I also think, if I remember correctly, that my character actually sings about having pimples on his butt? I hope it's a nightmare scene, and I don't have to go around, in the scenes where we're less clothed than otherwise, with red dots all over my back end. Oh, for the days when I used to be one of the leads, instead of a pimply character...
On other fronts, I actually made some actual progress on the piece of sculpture I seem to be committed to delivering and installing, at the WheatonArts Museum of American Glass, a week from tomorrow... I wanted to continue painting the cart, and hoped to put on a coat of black gesso, but I couldn't find my black gesso -- no real surprise there, as the basement really might as well have been turned upside-down at this point. I found another can of paint, and used that instead -- white, of course, and I still have to complete this coat, by turning the cart upside-down and making sure every surface is covered. I'm still not sure which pieces of glass I want to use; I'm still not sure how level the cart actually is (if at all), and how I might be able to make it at least look more level than it may really be.
I used to be kind of good at these things. In this case, though, I'm kind of tempted to take the construction out into the driveway, and run it over with the van. If I weren't afraid of doing damage to the tires, it would be difficult to talk myself out of it. There being, in a way, a contradiction between the situations I like to imply or create, with my weird choice of materials, and how rock-solid and secure the underpinnings always are. The closest I've gotten to something really expressive, in terms of support structures, was the cart-like object I made for my show at the GAS Gallery last year. I decided to use plastic tubing instead of copper (well, the copper prices had sky-rocketed, plus I already have the plastic), and at first I was distressed that the plastic wasn't as rigid and self-supporting as I had expected it to be -- but then I decided that I liked the slight bulge and bend the piece took on -- it seemed more ominous and threatening. As if the refrigerator were to begin listing forward at maybe fifteen degrees...
Back to the glass selection, for a moment -- I've brought in about twice as many pieces as I want to use, and I'm not really sure how I'm going to make up my mind. I may just have to start working, and create the collection bit by bit, instead of all ahead of time, the way I prefer. In spite of what I think I was saying yesterday (or was it the day before?) about hoarding favorite items for use in something better, there's a particular piece of glass I've hated since I made it, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be centrally-located in this work. It's a bit on the thin side, and may already have a small crack in it (glass that isn't compromised gives a ringing 'ping' when struck by something like my wedding ring; anything with a crack in it sounds kind of thud-like and a bit dead), so I'm already bracing myself for the need to wrap the whole thing in some old terry-cloth towels, just to keep it from shattering. I guess I could put some expandable foam in it, and see if that stabilizes it, but I haven't really left time for that kind of experimentation.
How impractical -- here I am, embarking on another (non-monetarily rewarding) theater experience, while I spend time and (I'm so thankful) minimal amounts of money for supplies, so I can make yet another piece of sculpture that people will ooh and aaah about, and then go buy a paperweight, like the other thousand they already own. And then I'll have to go back down to Millville, retrieve my work (I'm thinking of pricing it at somewhere between $215 and $572), lug it back north here, and then try to figure out where the hell this thing is going to live.
It's kind of funny, in a totally unamusing way, that I should find myself in this unanticipated predicament. I think of all the advice I was so free to distribute, when I was teaching; the problem of having no place to put the work one desires, more than anything, to create, isn't something I'd ever thought about -- in spite of the many many opportunities I've had, over the years, to stop and look at my seemingly ever-expanding collection of 'art materials', and wonder when I was going to reach an all-too-foreseeable limit. I don't recall any fairy tales or legends or myths that cover this kind of territory. Maybe King Midas, but somehow his problems don't really seem germane. I think about death all the time -- about my death, specifically, of course -- and I work very hard to keep myself from imploding physically (how difficult I've been finding it, of late, simply to stand up straight. I think I'm finally beginning to feel the burden of trying to walk upright, with gravity pulling at me relentlessly, for over sixty years), and here I sit, surrounded by a wealth of sheer artmaking stuff, and I can't seem to justify making the effort -- it just seems so stupid, even if it's also painful, if not immoral, to have stopped making things.
I have the tiniest sliver of hope that, somehow, I'll round some emotional corner, and pick up more or less where I left off. But at the same time, the notion of doing almost anything creative makes me feel sick to my stomach. I talk a lot about behaving as though I've already died -- what if this isn't such a far-fetched idea after all? What do musicians, or dancers, or actors do, when they run into an insurmountable physical blockade? I've heard snippets of stories about Maria Callas, near the end of her life, sitting alone in an all-but empty apartment in Paris and listening over and over again to recordings of her operatic performances. I might have been in my late twenties when I first heard about this, and I remember feeling a kind of contempt -- how self-indulgent. How sad, in a not too smart way. Now, of course, thirty-plus years later, the same image calls up far different emotions: empathy, dread, incredible sadness...
Well, dread and sadness or not, I'm going to continue doing a very bad job on this latest excursion into the laughable world of sculpture, and to hell with everything else. At least with the theatrical endeavors, there's nothing to fold and put away -- nothing to hang up or wrap for safekeeping. Poof -- it's like being a soap-maker, I guess, or a baker -- all the best and most beautiful creations are meant to disappear. Maybe I should start making my work out of chocolate...
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
No comments:
Post a Comment