My Harold Diary: Harold Number Fourteen
With the holiday break in my practices for my performance groups – especially my team A Dangerous Woman, which is going to perform Harolds – as well as the two month gap between 301 and 401, I was pretty rusty for this, my fourteenth Harold. Add to that that it was my first Harold of my 401 class and even more awkwardness abounds, as most of us do not know each other. 2/3 of A Dangerous Woman is taking 401 together, so there is at least that, but we were all split up for this, although C and R did end up doing their first scenes of the three beats together.
Anyway, Harold #14 was performed on Thursday, January 7th. One of the things that complicated this Harold for me, besides the above, was that the night before, in practice for my other performance group Player Piano, we had worked on not arguing during our scenes, on yes-anding in a literal manner to build them up, and I was still very much stuck in that mode when it came to my scenes today. In fact, when left to my own devices, I tend to badly fall back on argument as an easy dramatic device. That much was proved today in my first session of Armando Diaz’s Instant Brilliance class. We were supposed to initiate one-person scenes off a suggestion, and both my initiations for the exercise started arguments. I argue with myself in a scene! This is a personal defect, one that helped lead me into philosophy in the first place, but one which really stands in the way of certain scenes, scenes which might advance to interesting and funny places out of agreement, scenes that just get stagnant otherwise. Thus an entire practice where we weren’t allowed to argue was extremely beneficial. But as we’ll see, some scenes need an argument because that would be the honest reaction to what is going on.
While I don’t remember the suggestion, we did the pattern game, but while we had fun with it, we didn’t create a lot of games. There were some, maybe one or two, a lot of half-ideas, and mostly just words. We managed to do something though.
1st beats: R stepped out, which was rad because one of Kevin’s notes to her in 301 was that she didn’t take the initiative enough, and so I thought it was awesome that she was the first one out for the first Harold of our 401. C stepped out with her. The scene centered around her having a sprained ankle and claiming she could drive. C was too young for his license, and R demanded that she drive to pick up supplies for the party they were throwing later. Then myself and a classmate A stepped out. I thought she might initiate, but she didn’t so I had something ready from the opening which was “seeing someone you know in porn” and said, “Hey honey, I was just watching some pornography, and I saw you in one.” She replied that it was indeed her. The scene then needed an honest reaction from me, which should have been something like, “What the fuck?” or “Oh my god.” Even a yes-and answer, “I’m ok with that. We have an open marriage. I didn’t expect it to be this open, but you know,” would have been ok, but drilled into my head from the night before was “NO ARGUING” and my first instinct was to “What?!” it, but instead I did a tepid in-between an argument and a yes-and. The scene was funny, mostly because of A, but my attitude definitely dragged it down. Then three of my classmates did a scene off of something from the opening about panning for gold. They were 49ers and Native Americans were after them. It was mostly them talking about what they should do about the Natives.
Group Game 1: Someone initiated, off of a mention of toilet paper in the opening, giving away free charmin. Then someone else was giving away free baby wipes and then free leaves. It turned out we were in Charmin Land, a part of the Mall of America. Then everyone was tagged out and we were in a Quilted Northern sweatshop. Someone hoped that the Brawny guys didn’t kick the place in. C waits a few beats and kicks in the door. Edit.
2nd beats: C initiates with opening the door for a party guest. I don’t see anyone hop out, so I do. R still wants to do things for the party on her bum ankle, C and I try to stop her. Maybe a bit too much, as I physically picked her up and sat her down. I kind of expected her to fight back though (in my defense). Prior to this, I was trying to figure out what the game of my scene was. Terry, our coach for A Dangerous Woman, has been working with us on game, and we’ve all come to an incredible realization that once the game is named, it is ultimately a million times easier to play it. The best I could come up with for my scene though was that it was something like an off-handed remark (A mentioned in beat 1 that I said she wasn’t spontaneous enough which led her to do porn while we were married) led to broken marital bonds, so the game of the scene might be something like Breaking Norms From Minor Comments, so I thought a good second beat would be something like us robbing a bank because I said to A that she wasn’t spontaneous enough. In retrospect, this was difficult, and we 1) didn’t have to be the same characters. What is difficult about it is that I would make her that character and then have to convey the information to her. I could have been that character myself and initiated, “You said I wasn’t spontaneous enough? Well, everyone in this fucking bank put your hands in the air [shoots a shotgun at the sky].” 2) The spontaneous thing doesn’t make a lot of sense in this, and I would have to come up with a different off-hand comment. As I am writing now, it might make sense to have the offhand comment be about my wife not making enough money, and then initiate with, “Honey, I was just in the basement, and I saw all this counterfeit money lying around.” We conserve the pattern of breaking some kind of norm, and the justification can come out of that later (I don’t have to build the offhand comment into the initiation). However, I was too much of a pussy to initiate, so A did it, and said “I let another family adopt your son.” Honest reaction would have been something along the lines of “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I instead staid sternly, “That’s negligent.” Halfway is not a good place to be in. Scene three was s time dash with the 49s tied to a stake trying to communicate with the Natives.
Group Game 2: Someone initiated with kneeling to pray. There was a lot of confused stuff, but the game turned out to be that this was a church in Williamsburg, and we all thought it was cool to attend it. We didn’t really play that very hard though. All I could think of for some reason was crucifix-shaped sunglasses.
3rd beats: C and R just played the Ailment Won’t Stop Me game hiking on a mountain. Blackout by Kevin.
Rusty!
Filed by andyb at January 11th, 2010 under Harold