Curtain Up. Light the Lights.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged.  Before and while I was in New York I always had so much to say because I was so excited about the experience.  Now I’m facing real life and that’s always scary.  On Thursday I sent my headshot and resume to the Shakespeare Theatre Company and to Actor’s Express, which is in Atlanta, GA.  I haven’t yet heard anything from Wells in Norfolk, so I’m moving on.  There are a couple of other applications and mailings I need to get out, so I’m really hoping something will turn up… I’m not sure what I’m going to do if nothing does.  Oh, I have been talking to Kim, the executive director of Lime Kiln, and she said there were a lot of things I could do down there, so if nothing else I could do that.  Leagues aren’t happening this year, something about changing them up to make them better.  I may take Christy Faber’s advice and check out the seasons of the DC theatres and just do some mailings to the theatres, and see if any of them are having open calls like the Shakespeare Theatre is right now.

I’ve also been thinking about my digital project. There are a few people up in DC I’d love to talk to, just to flesh things out a little bit more.  Kate Norris is working up there right now, who I met briefly last year when she came down to speak to a couple of classes, and she seemed very nice.  Whether or not I’ll be able to contact her is up in the air, but it doesn’t hurt to try, right?

We’ve now been back in Fredericksburg for just about a week, and it’s been strangely hard getting back into the groove of school.  Instead of being able to walk anywhere, now I have to get in my car and drive where I want to go.  It’s so quiet here!  I miss going to a show every night and then walking through Times Square to get back to the hotel where we would all have a really interesting discussion about what we just saw.  However, there are some good side to be back here.  I’m really enjoying being back in rehearsal so I can try to apply what I learned when I was in NYC.  The show, by the way, is coming along very well.  I have a ridiculous amount of motivation after that trip to get all of my applications and mailings out to all the theatres I’ve been looking at so that I can really start this new phase of my life.  Now I am 100% sure that this is what I want to do, and I’m so thankful to every single person who helped me in New York, both the people with whom I had one-on-one time, and also the actors and other people on stage.  Many of them told me things I didn’t want to hear, like the pay isn’t always great, sometimes you have to get a job you don’t particularly like so you are able to do the work, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out, for one reason or another.  Those are just some examples, but their passion for theatre, even those all of those things and more were pushing against them, really touched me.  I can’t even express how thankful I am that this trip happened.

My parents are truly amazing people.  My mom grew up in a family of seven children, with two older sisters, an older brother, and three younger brothers.  She chose her own college; strangely enough, she picked Heidelberg College in Tiffin, OH.  They had a study abroad program, and she says that’s why she chose to go there.  In the four years she was there, my grandparents could only make out to see her twice – parent’s weekend her freshman year, and graduation.  Of course, there were kids at home that had to be taken care of.  My dad was born in Ohio, and lived in Oklahoma and Nebraska before settling in Austin, TX.  His father was a Presbyterian minister, and his mom a librarian.  Unlike my mom, he grew up with only a sister.  He also went to Heidelberg College, but for a very different reason – his father had gone there, and was still a very respected alumnus.  They met freshman year, but didn’t start dating until their senior year.  The stories that they have of their college days are fascinating; I hope mine are just as amusing.  One of my favorites is one from my dad.  He says that he and his friends were wondering what to do one night, and he suggested that they get a six pack and drive around.  Naturally, his friends were stunned, because drinking and driving was illegal in Ohio; it was not, at the time, in Texas.

My parents got married in October 1982, and lived lots of places.  Dad decided to get his master’s degree in Classics at UVA, and that’s where I was born.  Charlottesville, that is.  A couple years later we moved to Staunton, where my brother was born.  About 3 years later, we moved to Harrisonburg, where my sister was born, and where my parents have lived ever since.

I say that my parents are amazing because they are unendingly supportive of the three of us.  You don’t always get parents like that.  Granted, my father was not so happy when I told him that I was in a play my senior year of high school, or that I was going to theatre camp in the summer.  I’m pretty sure his exact words were, “Actors never make any money.”  As far as I know, however, he’s pretty much accepted my life in the arts.  My brother, who’s 18, is currently living in Tempe, AZ, with his girlfriend; they’ve been out there since August.  He’s a part of Americorps, and helps build houses for Habitat for Humanity.  Neither he nor Camila were really ready for college when they graduated, and were somehow both accepted to the same program.  Once again, my parents stood by them 100%.  They’re going out to visit them in late March.  My sister, who’s 16, is completely different from me and William.  She’s a jock; she runs cross country and track.  The most I ever did was play soccer and ride horses; William played soccer for years, but only recreationally.  You guessed it – my mom is at almost every meet and race, sometimes with my dad in tow.  I’ve even been to a few.

Now I’m 21 and getting ready to graduate from college; I’m the first in my generation of my family to graduate from a 4-year college.   You’d think I would’ve gotten separate from my family as the years wore on, but that’s totally untrue.  We’ve gotten closer since I left.  Mom helped me research internships over the summer.  My dad comes to see my shows, and gives me advice about my car.  Whenever I need help, or someone to talk to, they’re always there for me.  They have been throughout my life, and those of my siblings.  When we were kids, they took us on road trips, fantastic vacations, and made sure we realized that without family, you have nothing.  I absolutely adore my whole family – all 17 cousins, all 14 aunts and uncles and my grandmothers on both sides – but my parents are the people that I strive to be in my life.

This morning I woke up in Norfolk, VA. It’s okay, I meant to go there. Saturday night, at approximately 1034pm, I got on 95 south and began my journey. I finally arrived at my good friend Steven’s apartment around 1am, and, after a short catch-up session with Steven, who I hadn’t seen in 5 months, I went to sleep. At 10am I was up and getting ready for my audition with the Virginia Stage Company. It actually went really well, which made me really happy. Apparently people were right when they said doing something over and over again makes it easier. Auditioning all alone in front of two men I’d never met was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be; I thought I was going to be incredibly scared. The theatre is absolutely gorgeous; you can look at it here: [http://www.vastage.com/] I won’t hear anything about call backs until about mid-March, since they also cast from SETC. This experience made me think about my mini-digital story project. I have come a ridiculously long way from the first time I auditioned at at Mary Washington. Looking back on it, I shudder a little bit. I’m glad I did it, but I wasn’t prepared, I wore what I was wearing on campus during the day, and I really had no idea what I was doing. Now, after 4 years of auditioning for both Studio and mainstage productions, I think I have a much better idea of what needs to be shown in an audition. As I’ve heard many people say, auditioning is a completely different skill set than acting itself. I think it’s interesting that in almost all other professions, a job interview can last anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple of hours, whereas we get up to 2 minutes, and that’s absolutely it. Where did this come from? Why is this the way that we decide who gets the part? I’m sure I could find out, but if anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear about it.

I’ve started watching Quarterlife online, after reading an article about it in the New York Times. It’s about 20somethings out in the real world for the first time, trying to get their first jobs or working in a job they never thought, in the glittering world of college, they would have to have before getting what they really wanted. Of course it’s part soap opera with all kinds of quirky relationships and unrequited love. The episodes are less than 10 minutes long each, and they come out at 12am Pacific time each Thursday and Sunday. I like it because it shows that not all young people have a clear goal in life, and don’t get their dream job on the first try. Also, it gives me something to look forward to during the week since the writers of my favorite shows are still on strike.

Superbowl!

Here’s the thing. I don’t just want to do Shakespeare forever. He only wrote 37 plays, and not all of them are even that good. Shocker, right? I know… but I want to do other theatre. There are so many plays and genres and roles and playwrights to explore, and that’s what I want to do. Yes, Shakespeare is my favorite and I will always have a special place in my heart, as will Shakespeare Camp, but I realize that there’s more to do. I wasn’t terribly articulate tonight in class, which irritates me, but my question has not been entirely realized. What I want to research and find out is how doing Shakespeare helps an actor’s career, or doesn’t help. I found out last semester that doing a project that I’m passionate about makes me want to do it and do it well, and this is something that I’m interested in. Maybe I’m trying to justify myself too much, but I don’t want to just do “How do I become and remain a successful actor?”; there’s a ton of stuff out there to learn about and wrap my mind around. Okay. Now I feel a little bit better.

Okay. My whole life I have suffered with a terrible affliction, and it goes by the name of procrastination. I learned it from my parents; they admit that freely. For the past 3.5 years I have been battling it with pretty good success, if I do say so myself, which I do. Now, however, it’s time to really beat it into submission, so to speak. It’s simply not going to be an option this semester… and it certainly won’t be when I make it out into the real world. This growing up thing isn’t so much fun. That’s not entirely true. There are some really amazing things about growing up, but there are some really lame things too. Such is life. You all have to get on me about this, because I have to beat it. Wow – I sound like an addict. Fantastic.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately – which is probably a good thing – about what I’m going to do my digital story on, and also what I’m going to do my final project on. The other night I bought a camera from Amazon, so hopefully it will get here in the next couple of days so I can start playing with it. My other one would work, but since the LCD screen is broken, it would be somewhat useless. I have several ideas of what I could do, I just need to make them cohesive. That happens to me a lot. I get ideas about something that I want to do, but they’re all jumbled up so they don’t make any sense when I try to explain them. So my project is going to have something to do with acting, since that’s what I want to do when I grow up. I saw a quote somewhere once – incredibly vague, I know – that said that if you can be a good Shakespearean actor, you can do well at any other type of acting. This intrigues me a lot. Is that true? And if so, why? How many incredibly famous actors got their start doing Shakespeare? I mean besides Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart and Derek Jacobi. Did anyone who’s currently working on Broadway start with the Bard?

Now, I have a good idea of what you all are thinking. There goes Emma, the Shakespeare nut, again. This isn’t just because I went to Shakespeare camp or anything like that. I really do want to know if it’s true, and why that would happen. At first I thought about doing my project on how to become a successful actor, but that seemed incredibly broad. Narrowing it down a little would probably help a lot, and I think that I could find out a lot about how actors become successful and stay that way through the research that I do. Thoughts? While you’re thinking about this, here’s a video about the American Shakespeare Center. I was lucky enough to see a couple of the shows, and I’m also practicing the embedding of videos. Indulge me.

I just returned from the second meeting of Ideas in Performance, and there were many worries voiced. I agreed with pretty much all of them. Here are some of them:

1. Going out on my own in New York City. Now, I know Gregg said that we won’t be alone unless necessary, but most of my research is going to be based on interviews for which I’ll have to be alone. It’s definitely a chance to get to know the city better, which is awesome, but there’s still that fear deep down about being in a huge city alone.
2. Making contacts. This is one of the main points of this course. We need to make contacts to get research done to finish our final projects. And then, of course, once you make those contacts, you have to meet with them which segues nicely into my next fear.
3. Looking like a tool during the interview. I admit it, I’m not always the most articulate person. Along with this is asking questions that will get me the information I want in the shortest amount of time possible. The people I’ll be meeting with have other things to do, and I don’t want to be the kid that took up their whole afternoon by beating around the bush. To solve this, I need to make a very focused list of things that I want to research, and questions that will get that information.
4. Not being able to fund all the things we want to do in New York City. We only have the money that the class fee gives us, since we can’t play with money that we don’t have – i.e., grant money. We won’t be able to do everything that we want to do, and that’s something we have to accept.

Dealing with people in a close space. As much time as we already spend together, we’re going to be stuck on buses, trains and in hotels for a week, and that makes people antsy. Tempers are going to flare, people’s patience levels are going to be low, and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

Naturally, I’m also ecstatic about going to the city and spend so much time up there. All of these fears are absolutely worth it. Fears must be faced if you’re going to move forward in life, and I’m going to have to do all of these things at some point in my life. Meeting the people that I’m going to meet this semester is going to be so insightful and amazing and fun and all of those great things. This is going to be an incredible amount of work, along with the rest of my classes and my job and all the rest of my theatre stuff – I know I can do it. I have to put my mind to it, and do the very best I can, and that’s what you’re going to get!!

So it’s the middle of the second week of the spring semester of my senior year of college. Wow. Like seriously. Already I can see it’s going to be an insane amount of work, but it’s going to be SO worth it. I had my first professional audition this past weekend at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA. No doubt y’all know all about it from my Shakespeare Camp stories. The audition was for the 2008-2009 Stark Raving Sane tour. It was a really fun audition; there were about 16 of us there, and we all sat in a semi-circle and watched each other. The Blackfriars is big on eye contact with the audience, which is why we did that. Each of us did our short monologue, then did cold readings of sides from each of the shows the tour is doing (Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Comedy of Errors, and A Christmas Carol). After that, we all played instruments or sang and then it was over. I’ll know whether or not I got in by the end of February. Honestly, I’d give my left arm to work for these people. They’re so nice, and I love the way they do things. Besides that, I have about 10 other internships/apprenticeships that I’m looking at and applying to for after I graduate. It’s pretty intense, thinking about leaving. I’m excited about graduating, but at the same time I’m scared of the real world. Granted, I think things are going to work out fine, but still. However, there’s plenty to think about that’s happening before May 10, especially the Ideas trip to New York! I’ve spoken to my second cousin by marriage, Richard, who used to be the stage manager for Spring Awakening on Broadway, and he said he may be able to put me in contact with some of the actors he knows in New York. How awesome is that?? Anyway, I have reading to do, so off I go!