On The Road: First Week of Rehearsals

Okay, truthfully, this is our second week. I came into Chicago a week early with a few other principals to lay some groundwork for the family scenes in the play.

The first week of rehearsals for a play is usually spent on tablework. A bunch of actors sit around with the director, dramaturg and stage manager and read through the play very slowly. We talk about a lot of different things, psychology, social mores of the time period, back story, structure. To an outsider it can seem indulgent. But it's actually a very important part of the process. If a play is soup, then tablework is the stock in which it simmers. It gives a subtle flavoring that might not be identifiable upon first taste. But at the end of the day, it's what makes the soup unique.

So here we are, making soup in Chicago. Which is good news because God knows it’s soup weather. At this point, I am nearly unrecognizable when I step outside the door. Bundled up in layer upon layer to protect myself from the Chicago winter, I look like a beached manatee. Although I grew up in nearby Indianapolis, I had forgotten how bone-chilling this time of year can be. The first week of rehearsal it was so cold that the snot literally froze in my nose. In. My. Nose. Perhaps I’ve grown soft since moving east, but shouldn’t there be some kind of warning on the radio or television when bodily fluids begin to freeze INSIDE the human body?

Apart from the weather, though, Chicago is different from New York only on two counts. First, the streets are much cleaner. Walking the dog on La Salle, it’s a relief not to have to scan the sidewalk for discarded chicken bones and other such canine delicacies. Secondly, people in this town actually talk to each other while waiting for the train. I’m still having trouble getting used to that -- but I’m hoping that I’ll warm up as the weather does.


And as for rehearsals. I’ve been here two weeks and the cast is amazing! Week one was spent with just the members of the Banks’ household: myself, Megan Osterhaus (Winifred Banks), Valerie Boyle (Mrs. Brill) and Andrew Keenan-Bolger (Robertson Aye), as well as the four children who alternate as our Janes and Michaels. We spent our time roughing through most of the family scenes. However, at the end of each day we would spend an hour or so learning some basic choreography to spell the letters in “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Five days of work and we only made it as far as “S-U-P-E-R-C-A-L-I-F-R-A-G-I-L…” Believe me, it was quite a haul.Then the second week the rest of the company joined us. That afternoon, our amazing ensemble learned all thirty-four letters in about thirty-four minutes. They are a fast, talented and game group of performers. (Don’t get me started on their morning warmups. At 10am when Geoffrey Garratt starts their warmup, that thumping club beat kicks in in the dance studio and they all seem like genetically engineered superdancers. I’ve never felt older or less coordinated in my life.)

On The Road: First Day of Rehearsal

My freshman year of college, I stole a magazine from the local library. I was eighteen years old and living on my own for the first time. The suffocating responsibilities of college life had made me feel terribly confined and my one brief spasm of rebellious self-determination resulted in the pettiest of crimes. Walking home across campus on that warm October night I was a sad Biff Loman parody.

As it turns out, the magazine was a revelation. It was the best thing I'd ever stolen in my life. Better than the SweeTarts and Sprees that I stole from Osco in the third grade. Even better than the Han Solo poseable action figure with realistic Hoth ice planet winterwear... (you know, the full-sized twelve inch one, not the little one.) I ended up subscribing to the magazine for the next eight years and read it even after I left graduate school. It was a magazine devoted to myth and mysticism and it was called Parabola.

Since I was a kid, I've always loved storytelling. I believe it is the most unique and profound achievement of our species. It sets us apart from all the other animals. It's how we learn. It's how we teach. It's how we become who we are. Our actions are important, yes, but actions are just a series of events. They have no significance until we tell their story. A story gives them shape. A story makes them cohesive. A story gives meaning to an otherwise messy, uncaring, cold and disinterested universe.

In physics, parallel beams of energy reflect on the face of a parabola and gather at a point of focus. If our actions are those beams of energy, then story is the focus. Simply put, our stories are what make us human beings.

That is the reason I chose to become an actor. And it is what I come back to again and again. In the face of commerce, packaging, profit, an impossible standard of beauty, and other such shallow distractions -- my favorite thing about this art form, this industry, is the notion that we are in the business of TELLING STORIES.

Of course when I hit puberty, that love of story took shape in a much more awkward manifestation. At fourteen, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons. And as my interest in fantasy role-playing games developed, my social life atrophied in direct proportion. I lost entire weekends hunched over Mark Anderson's dining room table with a collection of other misfits, rolling our twelve-sided die and having epic adventures. Fueled by nacho cheese Dorito's and Mountain Dew, we suddenly had the chance to tell the story of our alter egos. I became the guy who had all the strength, dexterity and (most importantly) charisma that I lacked in the real world as a gawkish, pimply teenage boy with a four dollar haircut and a Bruce Springsteen underbite.

My Catholic education stoked the fire as well. Eight years at St. Pius X had instilled in me a deep sense of mysticism. And though I quickly lost my belief in the historical veracity of Christ's resurrection, I still appreciated the power of that tale and the sheer theatricality of the Catholic mass. The costumes, the shiny golden chalice, the magic trick of actually turning bread and wine into flesh and blood -- it was, in the literal sense, awesome.

With these seeds of thought, planted firmly in the rich and fecund Irish bullshit of the Sullivan side of my family, it seemed inevitable that I would one day walk out of a college library with that pilfered periodical in my pocket. Parabola.

And here I am over two decades later, in a rehearsal hall in Chicago on my first day of work. We’re watching an Australian documentary on P.L. Travers, the author of the original Mary Poppins books. I am delighted to learn that she never really intended for the books to be read by children alone. I am surprised to discover that she was greatly influenced by A.E. Russell, Gurdjieff and Yeats, who fostered her love of world mythology as well as Eastern and Celtic mysticism. And I am completely awestruck to learn that she was, in fact, the founder of a magazine devoted to “tradition, myth, and the search for meaning”. A magazine called Parabola.

On The Road: The Drive To Chicago

I started rehearsals in Chicago this week for the first national tour of MARY POPPINS. So, last Saturday, I packed up my car and humped it a third of the way across the country.

Growing up in the midwest, I have always loved driving and it's something that I missed during the years when I lived in Manhattan. I thrive on the craziness of public transportation -- but at heart I prefer the size and scope of an automobile over a simple backpack.

A few years ago, I spent a summer at the Old Globe in San Diego playing "Iago". We closed the first week of October and the next morning I piled into the Subaru that my wife and I had just purchased and drove cross country completely alone. Actually, that's not quite true. I had good company in the form of my dog, Po.

There is a slight tinge of sadness that comes with isolation, so you can imagine that the drive was a profound and meditative week. I spent two and a half days driving through the Southwest seeing nothing but desert and the occasional trailer parked off in the distance. I would lose cellphone reception early in the morning and not regain it until late evening when I pulled into a motel for the night. It was very lonely and very raw and very depressing and I could not have been happier.

The highlight of the trip came as we passed through the Rockies. I pulled into Manitou Springs at the foot of Pike's Peak very late one night. Being early October, it was getting cold and I had packed for a summer in San Diego. I found a campground not far from the river that was fairly deserted, built up a big fire and pitched my tent. Then I gathered up every blanket, sweater and jacket I could find and crawled inside with my dog.

In my life, I've kept a running tally of the best naps I've ever taken. And when I'm feeling particularly stressed, I will replay them with an almost pornographic delight. I have dozed off in a Jamaican hammock on the beach at sunset as a storm rolled in off the water. I have hovered between sleeping and waking on a near-perfect Christmas afternoon in a bed and breakfast in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. I've relished weekly between show naps in the dressing room at the Cort Theater on 49th Street, listening to Garrison Keillor as I slipped away. As a child, I even made a habit of curling up in the laundry basket full of warm clean towels. But this beats them all. It is truly satisfying to sleep next to an animal that you love.

Flash forward to the present. I'm in my car on the way to Chicago. Again, the dog is my only company. I drive the first eight hours of the trip in increasingly snowy conditions and decide to call it a night. So I pull over at a Super 8 Motel just past Cleveland (don't judge... it's dog-friendly and affordable) to get a little sleep.

When I was a boy, I would get physically excited at the thought of staying in a hotel. The hum of hotel air conditioning is, to this day, one of the most relaxing sounds of which I can conceive. It puts me to sleep almost instantaneously. However, in ten degree weather this motel room does not need air conditioning. In fact, there is frost on the INside of the window and I can see my breath when I walk into the bathroom. The overhead fluorescent lighting casts a vague Guantanamo pall that makes me want to strip the sheets and put the pillowcase directly over my head. Po is sniffing the carpet, a thick burr canvas that serves as a kind of olfactory history

book. The look on her face tells me that terrible, terrible things have happened within these walls. I crawl under the covers (fully dressed to avoid any possible rash) and try to sleep. More to come, should I survive the night. :-)