(Or, “An Actor’s thoughts to her playwright.”)
Dear Genet,
Seriously? What the @#$&, man!
…Have you any !&#%!%# idea how #^&%$@% insane this piece of political diatribe is?! No! You don’t care! You just @#*$^&# wrote it! You sat there, ruminating over a long-time fascination of a famous, grizzly murder one day, and somehow thought, “Dude, I can totally make this more #^&$%# up than it already is!”
…And then you took out a pen and some paper, and (with the aid of a #^%@-ton of drugs and alcohol), free-formed this massive mind-#%$^!
…It’s like a twisted Salvador Dali painting threw up all over the pages, and just dried there.
…Bouncing from one character to the next, within a single actor’s role, within a single monologue…hell, often within the same sentence…you’ve given no aide in where one bounces out and the other “in” until the occasional name reference will jar you to halt and say, “What the #^@%?! Am I her now? Or me? Or me playing her? Or her playing her? Or her playing her playing me? And when the hell did it change?!?!”
…Regardless of time and space, you’ve made past, present, and future tense all bleed into each other, without rhyme or reason, switching on and off, throughout…none of which is helped by the self-incestious, continual first-person and third-person flip-flop, mid-line, while often two layers deep in “you playing her” to begin with.
…What with your from-out-of-nowhere suddenly grand word usage, amidst random short Hemingway simplistic sentence structure, then forcing through a page and a half without seemingly completing or ending a single sentence…attempting to commit your words to memory has usurped even the two-hander Mamet “Oleanna” in frustration; as though you both have problems finishing thoughts (or even showing where in the #^$# they come from to begin with), at least HE has a rhythm you can ride…a wave you can catch to help a poor bastard out! Learning your text is like trying to play new-form jazz with a tone-deaf person! Who is mentally unstable! And possibly drunk!
…All of which, is only “the words.” This is before the marriage of endless maniacal “business.” Before the dressing and undressing, the sexing and unsexing, the cleaning, and destroying, tea-pouring, whip-cracking, attacking and choking, slapping and spooning…before your every facial orific is leaking all over you (and all the other people you and the others play) within the show, within the show.
In short, your “little one act” is kicking my #&#^@^# ass!
We Open in TWO DAYS.
With only 15 days of rehearsal under our belt.
…And THREE of them were spent SOLEY in bookwork…trying to figure out just what in the #&#% you are talking about…
…So that we can strip down to our skivvies and hysterically interpret it to other people…
…WITHOUT the drugs and alcohol you used to get us into this mess in the first place.
So, thanks for that…you Absurdist asshole!
Signed,
A Very Tired Actor, Mid Tech-Week