By Heart

When I auditioned for "The Foreigner," the play I'll be appearing in next month, I didn't give much thought to what getting the role would entail.  Of course I knew there would be rehearsal and lines to learn - but I guess I'd forgotten how hard it is to learn something by heart.  We have just about two weeks left before we open and I still have a lot of lines to memorize. It occurred to me that it's been a good 15 years or more since I really had to memorize something sizable like this.  And unlike things I had to learn in school for a test, this 'oral exam' is in front of up to 400 people in the audience on six different performance nights.  Fear is a strong motivator.

When I gave trolley tours in the early 1990s, I had to learn several scripts - one for Boston, one for Cambridge, another for Key West, and yet another for Portland, ME.  Each time it seemed like more information than my brain could organize and recall.  But eventually, I'd internalize the words and be able to spew out the stories time after time after time.  But with a trolley tour, one is not required to use the same exact words each time; there is a bit of latitude.  One is not required to say those words in response or with the exact timing that a play's dialogue requires.  And with a trolley tour, you're often driving by the site or attraction that you're talking about.  There are visual cues to prompt you as a guide.

There are some similarities between the trolley tour and the play, though.  There are certain parts of the play where you're cued based on what is happening on stage.  You get to a certain part of the play and you know what the topic is.  Still learning the exact lines, knowing precisely where you're to stand, on what line you're to move elsewhere on the stage - these are things that come with practice - and it seems to me that we need more of it than we have allotted.

For the past several weeks, we've been rehearsing a couple of hours three days a week, but that will increase in the final two weeks before the show opens.  The set is still being built and we haven't worked in the various effects that take place.  In short, there seems an awful lot that has to happen before opening night on March 12th.  I've been told by some of my fellow and far more experienced community theater mates that we're no worse off than is normal for them.  There is a certain urgency in our discussion, but panic has yet to prevail.

And for me, there's an acute sense of immediacy in my learning my lines.  To complicate the effort, the character I play, Charlie, is thought to not speak or understand English - though he very much does.  To perpetrate the ruse he has to often make up a language - a language that I as the actor have to be able to speak as if it were my native tongue.  At other times I have to effect a slight British accent.  And in other scenes, I have to become something like a possessed entity from a science fiction story.

A friend of mine recently told me that if he had a choice between being ill prepared for running a 100 mile ultra marathon through the desert, such as the Badwater race, and performing in front of a live audience, he'd choose the race.  The comment served to remind me that despite the natural anxiety I feel in making my theatrical debut, I am not pathologically afraid of public failure.  And in many ways, it's the same way I feel about my life's endeavors.  One instant in time does not define who you are.  If I should stumble over a line, it will exist only in that moment after which I'll necessarily move on to my next line.  The show, whatever the show, must go on.

You can come see "The Foreigner" at The Bradley Playhouse in Putnam, Connecticut March 12, 13, 19, 20 @8pm and March 14 and 21 @ 2pm.  Click for ticket information.