I had to play Curly's wife. For another person's final exam in acting class in
college. Oh it was disastrous. It was so hard to keep lying there
imperceptibly breathing wishing I could just have collapsed in such a way as to
let my upstage hand be obscured by my body. To have a chance of giving "Lenny"
the clue to salvage the scene. In rehearsals the guy could not ever bring
himself to strangle or smother me. The person playing Lenny was caught in a
loop of lines where he could never seem to get to the part that would move us
through the scene.
He would just start over the same loop of lines. To break the spell I just had
to have some hidden medical event like a brain aneurysm, and collapse. I
thought this would help him skip to the part after the section that had made
him nervous. Something had to happen to make him call out to George, and he
simply never would. I thought, "If I could just get him to see my hand make
the 'little bunny Foo Foo' shape!" He would eventually start yelling for
George to come and tell him about, when times were happier.
Of course this was peer reviewed.
I wished we could just turn on a dime to dark farcical improvisation to save
it, but they (our audience) had seriously gone with us into the idea of Lenny
perhaps being even more innocent than the usual implication, with yet another
layer added on.
There was just never any alert to cause the other actor to just run in and
finish out the scene with him.
I was trying so hard to not break down like Harvey Korman with Tim Conway.
After several more very full minutes, of Lenny just shuffling around the barn
never getting unstuck, I could tell some of our audience was feeling the same.
They had been genuinely crying before enough minutes went by that it was clear
he, my acting partner, would never call for George, or run out of the barn, and
it would never end, and he'd never be caught either, at which point the
professor had to just end it, and we all broke up laughing and crying on the
floor, from the tension of the uncanny valley effect of the too real loop he
was in. Now it would seem to me like he was just in a partial complex seizure,
but he wasn't. He was just flummoxed Plus they knew I was trying to figure out
how in the world to fix things without looking undead, and became fixated on
whether or not I looked to be giving any clues, or how it was going for me
staying still that long.
Audrey
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 24, 2017, at 1:35 AM, Bonnie L. Sherrell <blslarner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
_Of Mice and Men_
by John Steinbeck
read by Gary Sinese
George and Lenny were pals--buds. When Lenny's Aunt Clara died, she'd left
Lenny in George's care. Lenny was big, stronger than he realized, and--well,
Lenny was plum dumb. George would have been better off without Lenny, but he
couldn't leave Lenny to the questionable mercies of a world that didn't
realize
that Lenny didn't mean any harm, but simply reacted to threats by holding too
tight.
But how is George to act when Lenny manages to unwittingly do something bad
once
again?
This is a short book, lasting only three hours or so in audio format, and
excellently read by Gary Sinese. Sinese captures George's cynicism, Lenny's
uncertainty, Curly's belligerence, and Slim's quiet competence and compassion
perfectly. Definitely a period piece in its language usage, but still a book
that is timeless in its story. Got it on sale from Audible, and I am very
glad
I finally read it all the way through.
Bonnie L. Sherrell
Teacher at Large
"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very
wise cannot see all ends." LOTR
"Don't go where I can't follow."
We gave the Goblin King control of our nation!
