What is the program?

Like a lot of programs in Chicago and elsewhere, they start with exercises used in Meisner classes. You learn to observe your partners behavior. You do repetition. Repetition is something that I’ve done for years. I thought this part of the curriculum would be old hat for me. But I certainly did learn new things.

My favorite lesson was how important it was to fight to see your partner. In my previous acting classes, there were often moments of vivid emotional life in the exercises. Sometimes people would be overwhelmed with feelings sparked by the exercises. I certainly had experiences like that. What was new for me at Black Box was how important it was to fight when you start to feel overwhelmed. That is the moment to push yourself to see your partner, and to know how they are behaving. In the past, I would just allow myself to get lost in my own emotional experience. I’ve certainly seen others do the same. I’m betting at some point, someone else gave me a similar note, but Black Box is where I first really heard and understood it.

By the second level, you are doing improvisations. These aren’t improv scenes where you create dialog, these are scenarios which you choose beforehand and spend time imagining the circumstances. The words you use are limited to repetition. They are similar to the independent activity exercises that Meisner pioneered. This is a particularly interesting class which forces you to really stretch your imagination. It’s a tough class. I remember agonizing for days over whether or not my activity would work, but it definitely gets easier with practice.

The third class really switches gears. This is when things start getting very physical. Here you get an introduction to viewpoints and a few other tools, and it’s where you begin to work with text. It felt a little crazy at first, all the things they were throwing at me. But as I used these tools with text in different combinations, as realized how powerful things like gesture, body shape and tempo were for grounding me into the circumstances of the text.

The fourth class is where things come together. You do a variety exercises, mostly with text. I worked on three different scenes and a monolog. We did mock auditions and rehearsals and used different tools from the previous classes to prepare. It really brought things together and gave me a sense that I was ready to tackle a show in ways that I never have before.

Why study at Black Box?

The program is fairly new. Laura Hooper and Audrey Francis, the owners, started the studio about two and half years ago. Most of the other teachers have been added in the last six months. I’ve met and worked with most of them too. I don’t think there is a bad one in the bunch. I’m been impressed with them all.

There are a couple things they do which I love and I hope they continue. One is team teaching. Every class I’ve taken has had at least two teachers. They don’t switch off. They both show up, they take turns running exercises and giving notes. In this last class, there were four teachers (three in training I believe). It was an incredible luxury to have that many eyeballs watching you work and thinking about how to improve your performance.

The other thing is that their teachers take classes there too. They are encouraged to be students and take the classes again periodically. In the class with four teachers, there were also two more teachers taking the class with us. So on most days teachers outnumbered students. That probably won’t happen again soon, but it’s an added perk when the person with whom you are doing a scene is a teacher.

Lastly, they listen. From the first class, I had the direct email addresses of my teachers and whenever I had a problem or question, I could contact them. They were very generous with their feedback. They were also very responsive to feedback about them. At the end of the second level, I was loving the program, but I had a couple issues which I wanted to discuss with them. I sent a long email with my thoughts. In the third level, Audrey approached me and thanked me for the feedback, saying that they had made some adjustments based on my feedback and they were working well.

Is it a perfect program? No. I wish it were longer and more intense. I’m sure some of my classmates think it was intense enough, but I wish I could train like that everyday. I’d like to learn more about viewpoints. What they taught me was very useful, but it’s obvious there is much more to learn about it.

I am very happy I went through it. I got two key things from it. First, I have a set of tools from which I’m putting together my process. I didn’t have this before. I feel like I could use these tools every day for the next few years and continue to learn. Second, I am ready to get out there and audition for shows here in Chicago. Last fall, when I returned to the theater, I didn’t quite know where to begin. Now, I feel ready to get back in there.

You might ask, why am I here? I’m here to get better. I feel out of shape as a performer. As an actor, I never really nailed down any particular process. I’d get a script, memorize it, go to rehearsal, try to absorb the blocking and direction, and try to figure out the best way to say my lines. It’s not a great process and it doesn’t seem to take advantage of all that early training which encouraged me to work off my partner. So the first priority was to find a studio, go back to class and figure out a process–a real process that starts with a script and ends with a full, dynamic, grounded and improvisational performance.

I’m in my third class at Black Box Acting Studio and I feel like I’m on my way to that goal. In the first two classes, they use exercises that are drawn from Meisner training, mostly repetition and independent activity exercises. In the next level, they bring in viewpoints and punctuation walks. Their process is a hybrid of things. It’s good practice and I feel a lot closer to that goal of a repeatable process.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gradually fallen out of shape. I’m still well below my New York average weight, but I had lost enough ground, that I decided I had to do something about it. I’m back on a diet that is similar to the one I used a long time ago, when I first exercised seriously in my 20s. And I’m back in the gym. I’m reading the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris and taking ideas from there. For instance, yesterday was my first day doing kettlebell swings, an exercise he recommends.

I’m doing other things too. I completed a few classes at the Annoyance, and now I’m in writing classes at Second City. I’m also taking guitar classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. This upcoming year, I’m thinking as my DIY MFA project. My longer term plan is to start focusing on getting cast in some plays by the summer or fall. I want to get through one more class at Black Box and find a good scene study class that I can use to practice my process.

As usual I’m having trouble fitting everything in. I want to work on everything at once. I realize this is not the optimal way to do it. Eventually, I might narrow things down to writing or acting or improv again and focus my full force on that for a few years. But for the next 3-6 months, I’m going to continue down this path. It gets overwhelming if I try to think too many moves ahead. I want to keep focusing on what is the very next step and put my energy there. I’m going to trust that it will take me somewhere interesting.

Years ago I took a series of acting technique classes. The instructors didn’t mention Meisner, but it was obvious that the exercises and methods were similar. We used repetition. We improvised scenes using imaginary circumstances. It was exciting and visceral and raw.

I took those lessons and tried to apply them to my improv. It taught me to be present, to pay close attention to the emotional life of my scene partner and to act on my gut impulses. For years, I’ve taught workshops that try to bring those ideas from Meisner to improv. I’m teaching one of those workshops this weekend.

But I’ve always felt that I didn’t know enough about those techniques. I never fully integrated the lessons into my acting. I felt like I needed to start again, to study those ideas more deliberately and most importantly, practice them over and over until I could achieve those raw, exciting, visceral performances in scripted work. So that is why I’m back in Chicago and back in class.

I settled on Black Box Acting Studio, in part because I had heard some good things, but mostly it fit into my schedule better than the alternatives. I’m in the middle of my second class and it’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. The instructors are good and have created a good head space to do these exercises. The work is challenging and tough and the results so far have been quite satisfying.

The first thing I noticed is that the exercises seem to be a bit more connected to Meisner than the previous technique classes I had taken. They resembled the exercises described in Meisner’s book more than the ones I had used before. This isn’t necessarily better. I loved the technique classes I had taken in the past, but it did mean that I was going to get a different angle and learn new things.

I would think that if you were to observe the classes, you might think the class was about having emotional experiences. There certainly is a lot of crying. Emotional outbursts of all types are common and encouraged. But one thing I find particularly interesting about their approach is how much they force you to fight through your emotions at the point when you feel most overwhelmed. If you are hurt or upset or happy or angry, you can’t just wallow in your emotions. Feeling something is good, but it’s just the beginning. Instead you have to fight.

That fighting might be to hold on to your circumstances–the work you have done with your imagination before the exercise. But more likely, they want you to fight to put your focus back on your partner. It’s not enough to create circumstances which evoke deep feelings in yourself. It’s not enough to have the guts to reveal that emotional life on stage. That’s not acting and it’s not great theater. But watching someone who has achieved that and then is willing to fight to get what they want, now that is interesting.

I’m not sure if I was taught that before. I probably was, but I think I missed this particular idea. It’s that at that moment when you feel most overwhelmed, that you must push your focus outward and at your partner. How are they feeling? What do you want from them? And now what are you going to do to get it?

John “Dr. Wimpy” Ward, was a very dedicated and passionate member of the New York improv scene over the last eight years. He took classes, performed and was a huge supporter of others. He often appeared as an agent with Improv Everywhere. He was a funny man and by all accounts a joy to play with. He started doing improv in his mid 50s. This last Sunday he passed away very unexpectedly.

Auditions for improv teams were held the weekend before he died at the UCB Theatre. It’s a collective freakout the community goes through every year as hundreds of UCB students compete for a handful of coveted spots on Harold teams. And among the hundreds of hopeful 20 something kids, desperately wanting to be on a team, was John Ward, a man in his 60s who looked remarkably like my childhood vision of Santa Claus. He was one of the few that got a call back, and I bet he was as thrilled as anyone to be seriously considered for a team.

It’s hard to resist the urge to reduce a man’s life down to a simple life lesson. I’m sure there was much more to John than his improv career, judging from the stories trickling in about his life before improv. But his example is an obvious slap in the face to anyone who thinks that it’s too late for them to be an actor, a musician, a writer or a comic.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about John, I’ve included some links:

• A tribute on the Improv Everywhere site
• A thread on the Improv Resource Center following the news of his passing
• John’s page in the IRC wiki

If you knew John and have things you’d like to share about him, please feel free to add them to his wiki page.

When you drive around central Illinois in the summer, motorcycles are everywhere. Harleys seem to be the standard, but there are plenty of others as well, including big cruisers as well as gangs of 20 something Ninja riders screaming through downtown Peoria at night. For me, there seems to be a dearth of things to do around here, but I’m beginning to realize that if you live here, you need to make your own fun. Boating, dirt bikes and street bikes are all popular choices.

Last summer I started thinking about getting my license, but I didn’t get around to it. At the local community college, they offer a subsidized class to learn to ride. They even give you the actual test at the end of the class, so you can get your license without any further hoops to jump through. The problem is that the class is such a good deal that all the spots fill up many months in advance. If you don’t sign up for one by the beginning of May, odds are you might not get in one. My schedule is so hard to predict, that it was close to impossible to pick a weekend to take the class.

I kept thinking to myself, there must be a place where you can sign up for basic riding classes a week or two before. Sure, you will probably pay considerably more for private classes, but there has got to be a market for people like me who find themselves in the middle of the riding season and can’t get into the ones held at community colleges. Sure enough there are two such places in Chicago, Motorcycle Riding School and Ride Chicago. There may be more. I went with Motorcycle Riding School mainly because their class fit into my schedule (the whole thing takes place over a weekend) and because they had decent reviews on yelp.

Once I had decided to go however, there was a lot to do. Step one was getting my permit. In illinois, getting your class M license (for motorcycles 150cc or bigger), requires two tests. First you take a written test (actually a test via computer terminal). When you complete that, you have a permit where you can ride in the company of someone who has had their class M license for a year or more. The second exam would be an actual riding exam. This is the one that happens at the end of a basic riding class typically. You don’t have to take a class, you can have a state examiner give you the test right at the DMV if you choose. If you have some experience, you might choose that route, but if you want a break on your insurance rates or you are like me and have next to no experience riding, a basic class is the way to go.

Next I had to get some gear. For the class, they want you to have over the ankle boots, gloves, eye protection, long pants at least a long sleeve shirt to cover all your skin. Before the class, I also got a leather jacket. I didn’t end up using the jacket much in class however. It was hot and the ratio to standing around to riding was too much for a heavy coat. As you can imagine, this turned out to be a little more expensive than I first thought. If you decide to get a motorcycle, you may end up spending several hundreds of dollars on riding gear. It’s probably easy to spend well over a thousand dollars just on a helmet, boots, leather pants and jacket and gloves. Please note that the helmet isn’t necessary for the class. They provide those. They also told us to bring something to protect our eyes, but most of the helmets had a visor so that wasn’t strictly necessary.

The class began at 8am at their office on Halsted Street. There were a few tables set up and most of the students were there when I arrived. The participants were there for different reasons. One young guy had bought a Ninja that spring, but hadn’t learned how to ride it on his own. Another guy had bought a Harley and was taking the class with his dad. One woman was there because she was tired of riding on the back of her husband’s bike and wanted one of her own. Another wanted to ride, but her friends refused to let her until she had taken the class.

Why was I there? I still have a little trouble with that question. I wanted to learn something new, develop a new skill. Motorcycles scare me a bit, and I like facing fears. Having a bike, might provide me with a much needed pastime for the many days and nights still ahead of me here. Perhaps I bought into the idea of being a biker and screaming down the road with a girl holding on tight behind me. Whatever the reason, I was here, and already several hundred dollars invested in this new activity. I intended to follow through, take the class and get a bike.

The first day started out slow. We watched some videos and read through a booklet. The teaching method seemed to be, assign some questions from the booklet and have us look up the answers. Then go over the questions and answers together. Then after every section, we would watch a video. Some of the information was helpful, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. There didn’t seem to be much actual teaching going on. We forged through the questions, trying to get done as fast as possible, so we could end up on the range with the bikes.

Once we got out on the actual riding area, the class picked up. They took us in baby steps at first, learning how to ease out on the clutch, finding the friction zone, power walking the bike and finally getting it into first gear and riding it across the parking lot. Very soon after that, we were riding and turning, shifting into 2nd and then 3rd gear, practicing stopping, slowing before curves, and more. The exercises in the first day were all quite easy to accomplish and by the end I was quite confident that I would soon be riding the streets of Peoria on my new bike.

The second day was a little bumpier. The classroom instruction was stronger. We had two instructors and the more experienced one was in the classroom. The material was more involved and practical the second day, but also the guy was a better teacher, actually going over the material more carefully than the previous day. When we got out on the range is when things started to get a little rough for me.

The first exercise of day two consisted mainly of doing figure eights in a small boxed area. I had a real tough time with this. The first few times, I couldn’t do it without putting my foot down. And the last few times, I couldn’t stay in the box. It ended up cutting into my confidence a bit and I started musing once again, “What am I doing here? Do I really want to do this? Or am I going to spend a couple thousand on a bike that I only use a few times? Or worse am I going to get myself run over by a minivan the first time I’m out on the actual road?”

By the third exercise, I was quite distracted and in my head. We were practicing stopping in a curve. We had to start from a dead stop, shift up to 2nd gear almost immediately, go into a curve after about 20 feet, then straighten up, hit both breaks and downshift back to 1 simultaneously. It was too many balls in the air for me. After the third rather choppy attempt, the teacher asked me if I was alright. I nodded and lied, “No, I’m fine,” and headed for the back of the line.

I’m not sure if quitting actually crossed my mind (one woman quit at the end of day 1, despite doing quite well in the class), but I quickly got a hold of myself. I reminded myself about how well I had done the day before, that I really wanted to succeed and become a skilled and safe rider. I quickly went through the steps of completing the task in my head and got myself to the starting box. The teacher signaled to me to go and I nailed it, completing the task perfectly. From that point on, I did quite well, completing all of the exercises easily. It was a good lesson on how important it is to be focused and confident while riding.

The last part of the day was going over the actual riding test. We couldn’t take it right that afternoon. Instead, they arrange for a state inspector to do tests every Friday. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to return to Chicago to take the test or not. Anyway, the test doesn’t look very difficult. The cone weaving is a little tight and they want you to do a u-turn in a 20 foot space, the thing that gave me the most trouble from the class. I’ll want to practice that some more for sure. Still it looks like you can make several small mistakes and still pass. The most important things seem to be, don’t put your foot down, don’t stall the bike and whatever we do, don’t drop it. That’s an automatic fail. In two days no one dropped their bike, so I’m not too nervous about that.

So now I’m stuck in a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma. It will be easier to get my license if I had my bike already, and it will be easier to get my bike when I have my license. And it would be easier to do both if I had a schedule with more time available during the day. It might be weeks before I can take the test. In the mean time, I’m looking for a bike.

My goal is to get a small street bike for under $2000, a used Rebel, GZ 250 or similar. I’ll ride that for a year or so and if I like it, I’ll get a bigger bike for longer rides.

UPDATE 8/6: I’m officially over the Honda Rebel. I took another one out yesterday for a test and I didn’t like it all. I think that I’d get a bit annoyed with it very quickly. It’s a bit too small for me, my legs feel cramped on it, and I’m skeptical that it will feel good when I get close to highway speeds on it.

I realized that I was unhappy in my administration job at the theatre where I worked, so I quit (although I kept teaching). I started winning at poker and began to think about pursuing it professionally. I found another new source of income when a hobby became a business. I left New York to spend some time with my father in Arizona, and finally I moved back to my hometown to take care of my mother. My old life has been completely interrupted.

This is not all bad. I’m very glad that I’ve been able to spend time with my family and being a caregiver for a parent does have many rewards. It’s hard not to feel a little lost at times though. Eventually, I will leave again, pick up my life and start over. And I’ll have many options in front of me.

Do I return to the theatre? If so, do I go back to Chicago, return to New York or join many of my friends in Los Angeles? Maybe I should go back to Arizona where the weather is amazing and theatre culture is still young, or perhaps I should reconnect with some of my oldest and best friends in Seattle. Do I teach for someone else like I have before or do I teach my own classes or even start my own theatre?

Part of me longs to travel, both here and abroad. Perhaps I should return to poker, hone my tournament skills and spend a year or two traveling from one tournament to another.

My business may still be doing well when it’s time to leave here, perhaps I should throw all my energy into that. I don’t think most people get several chances to build up a successful business. Second Life may peak and fall apart within the next 5 years. I should strike while the iron is hot, make as much money as I can before people move on to something else.

Still, perhaps this is the time to return to grad school. I could get an MFA in acting or directing. Perhaps teaching at a university would be great fun and a good way to spend the next twenty years or so.

But if I return to school, maybe this is the perfect opportunity to nurture a different interest. Maybe computer science is still something I could pursue and enjoy. Of course, I’m also very interested in mathematics, biology, economics, diet and nutrition, and a half a dozen other topics, so saying I’ll return to grad school only expands my options.

In part the purpose of this blog is for me to hone my sense of what things are most important to me. I know that I’m getting ready for the second big chunk of my adult life and I want it to be meaningful and satisfying. I don’t want to simply see where the wind takes me (or do I? Perhaps, that is exactly how I should spend life, hopping from opportunity to opportunity, never quite knowing where I will be five years from now).

Of course, I don’t need to decide this today or tomorrow. I think this blog will help me figure out just where my path lies when it comes time to move on to the next part of my life. You could call it a mid-life crisis, but I don’t think it is. It’s more of a mid-life pause. Life has forced me to narrow my focus, give up most of parts of what was my life temporarily. I’m determined to use it as an opportunity.

However, since I’m taking some classes at the local community college, I do have access to their journal resources. I decided to check out what’s available at the library. When I got there, I started by searching for some of the articles I had found before, ones which only had the abstract available publicly. When I brought of the article on the screen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could read the whole thing online. Apparently if I access the article directly from these computers, I don’t need a subscription.

Next I noticed that the article was a bit long and I only had a few minutes before I needed to leave. I considered printing the article and then I remembered that if you send HTML documents to your Kindle email address, the document will be sent to your Kindle for only $0.10, a lot less than printing it out on paper.

I was very excited as the first few papers showed up on my Kindle only a few minutes after I had emailed them to be processed. I’m guessing that I’ll be doing this quite frequently in the future. If I have a document that I need to bring with me, I’ll send it to my Kindle instead of printing it.

When I was in Phoenix, I was attending a book club fairly regularly and struck up a friendship with the facilitator. We met for lunch one day and because she knew I was an improvisor, she brought along a friend who had also done some improv. The friend knew that I had worked at ImprovOlympic in Chicago and for the UCB in New York, but she didn’t want to know those theatres. Instead, the only things both of them wanted to hear about were the missions I had done with ImprovEverywhere.

Now tonight, across the country in Illinois, I’m sitting in a computer programming class at the local community college and the teacher spontaneously brought up ImprovEverywhere. He talked about the Frozen Grand Central mission. He was giggling with delight as he told us about it.

Here I am in the Megastore mission:

Not long after this, I begged my mom for an Atari 800 computer. I spent so many hours programming it in my basement. I made all kinds of visual experiments, writing programs which exploited the incredible graphics modes like 160×96 screen pixels and even 320×192 pixels (these modes only allowed for 2 colors at a time). I attended an Atari computer camp in Minnesota the summer of 1983, where I completed my first computer game, a text only ripoff of Risk but with a more geographically accurate map.

Later when I first started playing poker in high school I made a computer program that dealt every possible hand for a 4 card poker game called 442 and analyzed them. It took an entire weekend for the computer program to run. I was so nervous that somehow the computer would lose power before it had finished it’s run. One of my first jobs in high school was creating a series of macros for an early version of Microsoft Works.

And this was all before the internet boom. You would think a kid like me would have looked at the Internet and realized that there was a huge amount of money to be made. I bet I could have been a dot com millionaire. I could have become a computer game innovator or even just fairly successful web designer charging $75 an hour to set up websites. But two things diverted me from what was probably a career that perfectly fit my abilities and aptitude. First, I got involved in film and theatre in college. I was seduced by the thought of being a film director and later an actor. Second, I made what was a serious blunder in judgment. I thought, “Nobody is going to make any money programming for the internet.” Yep, that’s right, I nearly completely missed it.

You see when I first started exploring the web after college, it was all HTML. And HTML was simple, clumsy and easy to learn, especially as used in the first burst of HTML web pages. I looked at those pages and thought, “Sure people are making a lot of money creating web pages now, but it’s just a matter of time before everyone learns HTML. It’s so easy! Once that happens, nobody will make any money doing it.” I knew the web would be big, I just didn’t see much of a role me. And besides I was far too infatuated with improv.

As I devoted myself more and more to my mistress, the theatre, my knowledge of technology began to wane. Sure I would have short periods where I focused my attention on computers again and tried to learn C or PHP or MySQL. Often I would get somewhat proficient doing these things, but I always returned to improv and acting.

But now I’m back living in my hometown in Illinois. It’s not exactly a bubbling cauldron of theatre here. I’ve been forced into a trial separation from improv. So I looked up my high school sweetheart to see if we still have some chemistry. I decided to take a class or two from the local community college. When I went through the catalog, the classes that kept calling out to me were the kinds of classes I should have taken 20 years ago (if they had been available). I signed up for a computer science class and a web design class.

So now I’m learning XHTML and CSS. It’s quite a challenge. While the basics are simple enough, it’s not at all like it was laying out pages with tables 8 years ago. I suppose the CSS revolution was well underway by then, but I barely had seen a <div> tag before and I certainly never coded a page that conformed to any HTML or XHTML standards. So even with my experience coding numerous small websites, a lot of the stuff I’m learning is new. CSS is proving to be a particular challenge. It’s a bit of a black art. You poke a parameter and see what it does on the final page. Most of the time the effects are just what you wanted or close, but often changing one thing on your style sheet can have very bizarre consequences on your page, especially with all the different browsers (Internet Explorer is the worst offender).

I set up this site about a week ago and thought it wouldn’t take long to tweak the style sheet to get a smooth look and feel. Instead it took many days. I would get one element correctly placed on the page only to find another pushed into the wrong spot. Finally I just started from scratch, building up a brand new style sheet one class at a time. What I’m finally left with isn’t bad. I like the general look, but I’m not sure about the colors. I’ll probably tweak it as time goes by, but it’s good enough to start writing entries (if you have any constructive criticism on the blog’s look, please let me know).

So after 20 years in the theatre, I’m back to my first love, computers. It takes me a little longer to figure out the solutions. And I don’t have the focus (or the time) to code for 12 hours straight like I did when I was a kid. But computers still offer me a very specific kind of problem that I enjoy solving.