Poor Mann's Almanac: August 2009

Been a while since I written for this blog, but I promise more attention will be paid.

There are three performances left of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which I am playing Caliban. The production has run for five long weekends now, and I think everyone is a little over it. During The Three Musketeers, I told my pals in the cast, on the final weekend, that I had “run out of handsome”, meaning I no longer had the oomph to do all the things it took to transform me from the middle-aged, sedentary creature I am to the active, dashing, mysterious Athos. It felt like I’d pitched the performance to run for four weeks, and that last week was a slog to the finish. Couldn’t wait for it to end, though I miss the entertaining folk who made up the company.

Now I am experiencing the same thing with The Tempest. I am running out of monster. Instead of looking forward to getting to the theatre and slogging on all that makeup—which was fun at first—and getting to say all those gorgeous lines, I find myself daily checking the weather reports and praying for rain (this is an outdoor production).

So, I am thinking, in an attempt to jumpstart my enthusiasm, I will jot a few things down about the process of becoming Caliban, the man-monster.

This is a part I’ve always wanted to play, and can now cross it off my list. I’d played Prospero 17 years before, on the same stage, and had failed at it. I was too young at the time, 33, and just didn’t get the character into my bones. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I swore I would never do the play again, unless I was Caliban. The company had produced a couple other versions of the play since then, but I wasn’t interested.

Cut to this spring. My plan was to audition for The Tempest only, and to, in the parlance of the local theatre “suicide it”, meaning I would accept only the role of Caliban. It’s called “suicide”, because you run the risk of pissing off the casting people, by taking the decision out of their hands—I nearly always do it though, because deep down I know that I am only energized by playing the roles I WANT to play. Not for me the buzz of acting just to act. I have never loved doing it enough to do a role I didn’t like.

So anyway, I also listed The Three Musketeers, and suicided it for the roles of Athos and Cardinal Richeleiu, but figured that was going to be impossible. As the rehearsals would run through April and May, my schedule at the school where I work would make it difficult to cast me, because I had many conflicts, and would miss all but about 15 days of rehearsal (last year, in the production of Macbeth, I could only give them 10 days for the role of Macduff). When John Kuhn called me, offering me both Athos and Caliban, I was surprised, but loved the idea of a challenge, playing 2 very physical roles back to back, outdoors in the teeth of the summer.

I am an outside/in actor, always have been, though as the years go by the two directions have gotten closer together. But usually, I need to know how I am going to look very early on. I didn’t want to play a native islander, as is the vogue over the last 20 years. I consider it a very hackneyed approach, to treat the story as if it’s a tale of European conquest of the hapless natives of the New World. I wanted to be a monster, green and scaly and fantastical. Pam Hill, the director, trusted me enough with the character to let me work it out with the costume designer how I would look. This is a positive move, in character with how I think theatre should be as regards costuming. I hate being a meat puppet, forced to wear whatever a costumer has decided I would wear. Especially in Shakespeare. I can pretty much guarantee the costumer hasn’t researched the role as much as me in any show I do, so why shouldn’t I have a say in what I feel my character requires in costuming? I also had misgivings about this costumer in the past—she costumed the 12^th Night I was in a few years back, and had no grasp of the character or the play, it seemed to me. I was Malvolio, and in the scene where he wears yellow stockings, she costumed me in a terrific 1920s era suit—but a yellow suit. So, the reveal of the yellow stockings produced a very understandable “so?” from all concerned. The reason for the yellow suit? She had one in stock, and thought it looked good. Nothing about character. She just wanted that suit walking around on stage. Anyway…

I began sending her tons of pics of creatures and animals and other Calibans, to see what we could cobble together. She liked one pic of a Caliban who wore a unitard, and asked if I was amenable, and I said I was. When it came, it was so hot, I told her I could not wear it for 5 weekends of shows in the summer heat. Anyway, by this time, I was sort of landing on an idea for a look—a sort of hybrid of the narrator/singers from Marat/Sade, and pics of island lepers I’d seen on the interwebs. I also liked the idea of a kind of look from The Fly, in which the character was half man, half fly. Caliban is the son of a witch and a demon—sort of like the Cheneys. So the costumer cut off the long sleeves and one of the legs, and painted the remaining one to look like reptile scales. She also put scales on the chest.

She gave me a bunch of ratty cheesecloth and rope, and a pair of ripped breeches and a torn shirt, and left me to do the rest. I have a set of long rubber finger nails that I applied ( “and I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts”, and I ripped some of the cheesecloth into strips and wrapped them around my hands. Later in the run, I began taping down the ring finger of my right hand, hiding it under the cheesecloth, as if Caliban had lost a finger to leprosy. I used the rest of the cheesecloth to make a turban and a jaw sling that stretched over my head, and under my chin, so I resembled the leper look I’d seen in pictures.

I was also beginning to come round to the view that Caliban was a native islander, albeit one seen through the eyes of an Elizabethan, and backstoried with a demonic, fantasical heritage. His reactions are those of a child brain, a sort of “boy raised by wolves” kind of approach. He had no words to express himself until taught by Prospero and Miranda, and he is certainly a ‘new soul” in his lack of wisdom and foresight. But he is a natural, and survived all those years without his mother by a native cunning and an ear always attuned to the natural earth. And he is enslaved by Prospero, after his failure to control his impulses when it came to the nubile Miranda. Even though this was beginning to inform my choices (GOD, I hate that word “inform” as it used in theatre—so non-specific, so pseudo-intellectual—I heard Jessica Simpson talk about something that informed her choices as Daisy Duke—AAUUGH!”)—I still believed he is more than just a native islander. The language is specific in the play as regards his heritage, and I was beginning to see a marriage of both approaches.

The last addition of makeup was to apply several different shades of green to the exposed part of my body, which takes about an hour all told, and then I streaked it, like veins, with all the colors that appear on the set—reds, blues, oranges, yellows, purples—so he might be a chameleon, if he needs to be, and blend in. For my face, I tried to make it crude and painted—slashes of black for a unibrow and nose bridge, slashes of red around the mouth (we don’t want to imagine what it was he was eating before his line ( “I must eat my dinner”).

Throughout the run, as often happens, the performance changed, grew more detailed within the scenes, and yet simpler. I always remember reading that Sir John Geilgud said a professional actor learns to simplify his performance in a long run, learning how to conserve energy while still producing the same effects. I felt Caliban was too strong and dark in the first scene and needed something to established that he was in fact one of the comic characters, so about 7 performances in I hit upon a bit of business where I try to summon up a curse on Prospero (“ All the charms of Sycorax/toads, beetles, bats light on you!”) and finish with a conjure man gesture toward him, and after a beat during which nothing happens, I repeat the gesture, then give up. This always got a laugh, and set me up for the rest of the show.

The difficulty I had was with the drunkenness. I resisted the director’s insistence that I be more inebriated, because I didn’t want it detracting from the verse. But I found a way to do it eventually, though I confess I always tried to drop a lot of the drunkenness during “The Isle is full of noises” speech, because it just to beautiful to gabble away. I found if I said it simpler, with wonder and a longing for life before the Europeans, it helped with the delivery of it. Made it unfussy, more direct, less singsongy. And I hope, moving, if one can be moved by such a beast.

Physically, the long nails informed (that word again) my movements—I kept them moving, twisting, as if they had a life of their own. I turned one leg inward to give him a sloping walk, a shuffle. Watching my guinea pig gave me the idea of twitching and popping up in surprise or fear. I tried to flinch each time someone tried to touch me. The final physical touch was to create a sense of a “mountainous” throughline—by that I mean in the early scenes I bow and scrape low when I am browbeaten by Prospero, and when I am terrified of the two drunken sots who find me. I fall backward and expose my belly to Stephano when he first comes over (later in the show, when I am nearly passed out with drink, Stephano tickles my belly and I shake a leg like a dog). As his plot to murder Prospero takes hold with his companions, I gave Caliban a taller aspect, nearly as upright as the other two scene partners. Then when his plot begins to unravel, he drops low again, finally all the way to the floor in the final scene, when he is towered over by his finely dressed master. So the shape of the physical performance, if graphed, would look like a single peak of a mountain.

So this was the technical underpinning of the performance. The next post will be a scene by scene description of Caliban’s time on stage. Oh boy, you are all thinking!

Below are some of the pics I used in coming up with my Caliban look...