The Thyme Has Come...

[ceebeegee]

And Thyme is over.  As Duncan said, there was a good amount of stress with its going up, but once it settled in, it was a fantastic experience.  I absolutely love playing my merrie trickster, my id, my easily amused little child Puck.  Not an easy role, though--I worked my ass off on its physicality.  I was going for a couple of things--a kind of animalistic movement, because Puck is so much less restrained by societal norms than a human would be, there's a closer connection to the id, the purely physical.  So I was going for the immediacy you see in animals, especially predators--that springy, immediate action paired with that absolute stillness when hunting animals "point"--that is, when they sight their quarry (you see it in dogs and cats).  The other thing I was incorporating was a kind of cartoonish, exaggerated expression, where every emotion is fully committed to and physically expressed, a la Roger Rabbit.  I felt pretty good about how it came out--it felt organic, I don't know how well it read.  But I did get some nice feedback from audience members so something I was doing was working.  I really would love to do Midsummer again--doing Thyme made a lot of those lines come back.  My mistress with a monster is in love!...The king doth keep his revels here tonight/Take heed the queen come not within his sight/For Oberon is passing fell and wrath/because that she as her attendant hath/a lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king/She never had so sweet a changeling...Captain of our fairy band/Helena is here at hand!...I remember absolutely flying in from stage left for that entrance, so much fun.  I do have specific ideas about how Puck should look, because of all that energy.  He should be small/thin and very fast--there are numerous textual references about how fast he is.  He shouldn't be this huge lumbering dude like Stanley Tucci, ugh!  So miscast...

At any rate it was so completely awesome to get to work with so many old friends again, like Michelle and Kelly, and then to meet new ones like Matthew.  He is such a talented actor, although I REALLY WISH he nailed the lines better.  I think once he'd gottten to the point where he basically knew them and wouldn't go up on them during a performance, he was so relieved (he had to learn that part quickly) that he never looked back over the script again.  Regardless he is terrific, he always made me laugh during the "Demetrius is in love with Lysander" scene.  (My favorite line: "Blah blah blah, your tears do make me yawn."  I just love his unabashed selfishness.)  I told him he made that scene great for me--I didn't get bored with having to stay still for 7 pages or whatever it is, because I genuinely found him hilarious.  He told me "you give the nicest compliments!"  I also loved Rebecca's performance in that scene.  "Does no one want my ladylove?"  So cute!

The one kind of annoying thing was the whole festival thing--argh, I just hate that 15 minutes in/out restriction.  It is SO frustrating when you have very specific hair and makeup *and* you're the first one on stage (I had this problem for Prince Trevor as well).  I loathe getting ready in the hallways or the lobby of the theater, it seems so amateurish.  I get that they want to maximize the theater rental by cramming in as many shows as possible but still *grumble.*