4/16/2014 1 Comment My First Equity Card!It's official! My first Equity card arrived in the mail! I had a tough time signing it, though . . .
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4/9/2014 0 Comments Vlog: Keep on keepin' on . . .The admin side of acting! Exhilarating! 4/2/2014 0 Comments Opening! Hello hello hello! Greetings from a much warmer Portland, ME (we’ve reached the 40s, and we’re SO EXCITED!), where the sun is shining and the snow is almost starting to melt (baby steps, baby steps). So, Tribes opened last Friday, and it was a marvelous show. The performance was energetic and truthful, the audience was fantastic, and – best of all – my parents were there to see me! So, all of last week was “preview week.” We had Monday off, and Tuesday we rehearsed noon-5pm, then did our first performance in front of an audience at 7:30pm. The audience understood that these previews were still rehearsals – that we could call for line if need be, or if we monumentally effed something up, we could go back and do it again. Fortunately, neither of those things happened. But on both Wednesday and Thursday as well, we rehearsed noon-5pm, making adjustments in the staging and working some trouble-spots in the show. The preview audiences gave feedback to the artistic director Anita Stewart who passed it on to our director Chris Grabowski. Some issues/suggestions/complaints were addressed, others ignored, and Chris continued to shape the play during rehearsals until Thursday. We tried to work in the adjustments made during rehearsal into the preview that night, and we were usually fairly successful. (It usually takes a few times to permanently remember a change in blocking, but I thought we did fairly well!)
After the show, which was a whirlwind of adrenaline and nerves, we had an opening night party put on by the theatre. It was so great to celebrate opening, because in college we would always celebrate closing. That made sense, because in college the shows we did were one or two week runs, only on weekends. Once it was over, we would celebrate the accomplishment of an entire run. It’s the norm in the professional world to celebrate after opening, because the accomplishment is opening a new production, then the work becomes sustaining what you’ve created. A more pragmatic reason for having the party after opening night instead of closing is because immediately after we close, the theatre strikes our set and starts building the set for the next show. So there’s little time for pomp and ceremony when everyone has already moved on to the next show. While this run is relatively short – only three weeks, this is definitely the most I’ve ever performed one production (with the exception of when I took The Celtic Cross on tour, but that was spread out over 5-6 months). We perform Tuesday-Sunday, with two shows every Saturday. We’ll also have an early show (10am) here and there for schools that want to see the play (which is what we did today). So this averages out to about eight performances a week, which is just enough to keep us busy! I actually should get going – I’m off to my second performance of the day, and I want to get to the theatre in plenty of time to warm up and get ready. Y’all be in touch now, ye here? 3/22/2014 0 Comments TECHnically . . . Hello everyone! I’m writing this from my dressing room at Portland Stage Company. It’s my very first tech rehearsal as an Equity Actor, and honestly, it’s not that different than other tech rehearsals I’ve done before. It’s incredibly slow moving, a lot of stopping and starting, and it’s the time when everything should and does go wrong. But that’s ok, because now’s the time to fix it! For those less savvy with theatre lingo, a tech rehearsal is where all the lights, sound, furniture, props, and costumes get sorted out. Every cue that happens, every scene change, every transition of any kind gets ironed out in tech rehearsal. We have two days of tech, Friday and Saturday, and each is a twelve-hour day, from noon to midnight. Actually, it’s called a ten-out-of-twelve, because we get a two-hour break in the middle (from 5-7) for dinner. While these are two very long days, they’re mitigated by the fact that we have an awesome crew (most of whom are interns), headed by our ultra-great Stage Manager Shane. We also have a BOSS design team (sound, lights, set, costume, props), and of course the cast is always a joy to work with. While there is a large amount of waiting around while the design elements are hammered out, it does give one time to converse, sometimes about rather significant things: I had a conversation about the struggles Garrett (the deaf actor playing “Billy”) has during tech, because it’s often so dark on stage (as they work out the lighting issues) that it’s hard for him to see his interpreter. I had a conversation about the difficulties and benefits of being an actor in New York; I’ve gained some great advice from Elizabeth, who plays my mom in the show, about how to navigate such scary waters as being a starving artist in an expensive city. And I’ve had time to bond with my stage-siblings, finding the brotherly/sisterly love. It’s actually insane to think that this show opens in less than a week. We have tomorrow as our first dress rehearsal (even though we’ve been in costume all through tech, we haven’t actually RUN the show in costume), then we have Monday off, then Tuesday is our first preview! Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are all preview days, which means that they are still dress rehearsals, but they are at the same time our shows will be, and we will have a paying audience seeing us run the show (so we sort of treat them as performances). Things are still liable to change during this part of the process, and we have rehearsals from 12-5 each of those days, then a performance at 7:30.
So we are very much still in the rehearsal stage, but we can feel the clock ticking down until opening night. There’s a new energy now that we’ve moved into the theatre (as opposed to the rehearsal room we were in during the first two weeks of rehearsal); suddenly the play feels that much more real. Working on the set makes me feel like I’m in this family’s kitchen, and working with the props makes the acting that much more authentic. This show is really starting to come together, and I’m excited to see the progress in the coming week! 3/17/2014 0 Comments As Johnny Depp Once Said . . . It’s my second day off since I’ve been here, which seems slightly bonkers. The second week of rehearsal was much more exhausting than the first; maybe it’s because we’ve graduated from table work and are doing much deeper character work, maybe it’s because we’re doing a full run of the play each rehearsal, or maybe it’s because I got sick at the end of the week . . . oops. I’m using my day off to recuperate, do some of my own character work (digging through the script a bit more for character traits/quirks, researching bipolar disorder and stammering, finding deeper connections between my character and the other characters), and catching up on household chores (dishes, laundry, etc.). Quite the glamorous life! There’s been a clear difference between the first week of rehearsal and the second, a distinct shift to the next level of work. I haven’t been able to do this level of character work in AGES, if ever. Being able to spend six hours a day in rehearsal – exploring freely and collaboratively – and then to spend several hours a night working independently on my own character . . . it’s so nourishing as an actor. Working at Portland Stage Company as a full-time professional actor honestly feels like a wonderful, hot, home-cooked meal after months of eating ramen in college. One revelation I had this week was that from here on out, the majority of the audiences I see in front of me are not gonna have the FAINTEST clue who I am as an actor. This was so important for me to realize because for the most part, I’ve played to academic audiences (i.e. my high school or college), and they are made up of my peers, many of whom know me. So in college, I was always paranoid that some part of myself would appear on stage, rather than ONLY the character I was playing. I was afraid of any overlap, in case someone in the audience thought to themselves, “Oh, that was SO Matthew.” Well, with regards to the audience that is going to see Tribes, hardly ANYONE is going to know who I am, so how the hayballs would they know if a face I made or an intonation I used was “Matthew” or not? THEY DON’T KNOW ME! This revelation made me think of a Johnny Depp quote I heard once (and I’m paraphrasing here), where he said that “you have to put a little bit of yourself into every character you play, because if you don’t, then it’s not acting: it’s lying.” So this whole last week I’ve really been trying to relax into the role; not obsessing over whether something looks too “Matthew.” If infusing a lot of “Matthew” into the character makes it more real and believable, then that’s what it takes. The audience isn’t going to know if I infused a “Matthew-ism” so that I could find the truth of the character; what they will notice, however, is if there is a lack of truth in the character I play.
What I’ll be focusing on in this coming week of rehearsals is finding that next layer of truth, the naturalness that will bring this character to life, into the lives of the audience. I have a lot of work to do, but it’s all work I want to be doing, so I consider myself lucky! |
Matthew Stuart Jackson
Actor, writer, comedian, cat-lover, scratched-dvd-hater, and aspiring helicopter pirate. Archives
July 2014
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