Thoughts

I admire anyone doing a good monologue, whether  that be a solo performance or an audition.  It's so easy to the let the nerves get to you, to lose focus when it's just you up there (I suppose that's when it's good to work with a director or a coach, and just keep running it.)  When there are other people on the stage, you have the luxury of needing to focus back on them, and going for what you want.  When I walk around and say it, I can connect to what I want, and why she'd say those things, but I know I'll have to have the wants much more solidly in focus, or the nerves will just take control and I'll spit the whole thing out without connecting to anything.  You get 90 seconds.  I guess that's why it's good to use material from plays you've worked on before, it'd be kinda' built in after a point.

Saw "Before Sunset" (Richard Linkletter, dir, with Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke - it's the middle of three) last night.  It's like a much better version of "Serendipity," i.e., better dialogue, higher stakes, no cheap laughs or comic relief, more raw, more urgency to the words.  Both dealing with what if you actually met the "right one" (is there a "right one?") but left the chance of meeting again to fate rather than having the courage, or trust, at the time to claim it.  (Or perhaps, you need all the experiences you had in the intervening years to make it more meaningful...but then, they are pining for each other for all those years..."Hedda Gabler" is in that territory, too, but with a less happy ending - which I also have sitting around waiting to be watched.)  "Before Sunset" came out first.  Julie Delpy's dialogue ran true for me (she wrote it).  And while I'm grateful I didn't marry the one I was with at 21 (mostly for the experiences I've had since then, and the person I became, and none of those would have happened had we stayed together, other things would have, obviously) I'd like to be as open as I was then, have been guarded since (all the things she says.)  We're friends and, unlike the movie, I don't want to be with him, I just want the openness I had toward him, and myself, back.  Watching it, listening to her, made me realize that's been missing for me.

Or maybe it's just a current cycle of high stress talking.  Or this monologue character getting under my skin.

(Darn, the batteries seem to have corroded, and the charger's not very good...so, still no camera.  And now I have to clean up after the batteries.)