This one fucking monologue…
…I gotta figure it out.
So far have tried 11 different ways, and so far have found 11 ways how NOT to do it. It’s killin’ me. It starts my second Act, and is all high hysterics and ridiculousness, but not quite farce…which is really fucking difficult to gauge, not least of which because everyone on stage just looks at me with egg on their face watching it like a freak show, and it is the total opposite to my natural style of humor.
…I am dry and bitchy, by nature. (hello, have we met?) If you exaggerate that, you get dryer and bitchier. “Hysteria,” is this whole other deal.
We do things to challenge us as performers, so I’ve done my fair share of farce and comedy, and though I’m not horrible at it, it ain’t exactly my forte. So, the information I get outta rehearsals like last night’s, is that: “It didn’t work. Again.”
…Now, I don’t always know WHY it didn’t work, in fact, most times I don’t at all…but I know when it does, and it has nothing to do with the reaction from the house right now…because this many weeks in, people never laugh at anything anymore, anyway. Cuz shit is only funny the first 20 or 30 times you try it. After that, you’re kinda “over it.” You just have to sorta trust it’s still funny, and go with it, until previews and things.
…Only I know it isn’t working. I can feel it. But I don’t know “why,” or what the answer is to MAKE it.
Here is how I look at comedy: Comedy is to timing, as Fosse is to a choreography.
…That dude was fucking intricate. One half millimeter of a finger arch and you were out of sync. It’s like “this,” not “This.” Specificity is the KEY.
Comedy is like that.
…One hair of a beat is the difference between HILARIOUS, and absolute crickets. I don’t know why, but it is a fact. Which is why Comedians don’t get NEARLY the credit they should, for an artform where one breath in the wrong place screws the entire joke up…but some chick blubbering in a corner, with snot running all down her face, will win the Oscar. Every. Single. Time.
…The snot isn’t “timed.” I can almost guarantee you that anyone playing a rape victim, or watching a loved one die, would be able to work themselves up to that level of disturbed ugliness, with very little imagination and timing involved. Drama is all on your own clock, at the viewer’s expense. Comedy is all on the VIEWER’S time, with phantom rule books of how long to hold, turn, smile, nod, grin, hiccup, slip, fall, smack, pop, bash, wink, slobber, flash, burp, squash, run, jump, or shriek, at any given time with constantly changing table-ratios of balance, depending on which order they fall in, at what point in the scene, which characters are involved, and if the audience is sleepy, bored, restless, horny, infectious, or has indigestion.
…It’s like the most intricate math formula ever.
It’s ALL of that, (aka: reading the room) PLUS, just knowing what works and what doesn’t…when to “play” it big and when to play it “straight,” (which is also funny, but a different kind.)
…I KNOW funny when I see it. And I can figure out most the time, when I DO it…both while throwing it away, and doing it on purpose. But so far, top of my second act, all I know is: It isn’t working.
We open in 18 days.
So that is really starting to bother me.
…And I’m not goaling for a milk-sop fest of feedback, here. I don’t need hysterics from them. All I need is to complete the take without feeling like a giant scene-deflating asshole, or freak other-worldly alien, directly ending into a set change.
So far, I have not once accomplished this.
…And I’ve totally done it in legit, no-holds-barred, hysterics at least twice…so it isn’t that I ain’t willing to “commit.”
I need another way to look at it.
…But I don’t know what.
…Time to hit the books (aka: the DVD collection) and fish out some instances that someone used, at some point, sometime, to help me figure this out. There IS a way to make it work. People have only managed it for several hundred freakin’ years is all. And if THEY can do it, I can do it! And I can do it MY way! I just need some quiet time, in an open space not shared amongst apartment dwellings, where I can beat the shit out of it, at full vocal level, until it knows it’s place.
And I need to not panic that I WON’T find it in time, cuz that just is NOT fucking helping me right now.
~D
