Durham, One Week

Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region 1 2010

This trip, by and large, was much less enjoyable than last year's trip, for many different reasons. We had less opportunity to take advantage of workshops because of the location of our hotel, which was about 20 minutes away from the conference center. We remained locked together as an amoeba-like group, and five days of being stuck in close confines with the same people can put a severe strain on anyone's sanity.

But I did get to do one workshop and I got to see some lovely shows and some less lovely shows, along with see some excellent Irene Ryan competition scenes. Here is the week in review.

Tuesday, January 26:
Prior to being able to do anything, there was major drama in the fact that my entire school was not registered to attend the festival. Good times.

Irene Ryan Scholarship Competition Preliminaries

I performed The Baby Dance in Round 2, at 4pm, which meant there was a lot of time to sit and think and wonder and get nervous, since we got there at around 1, but I felt pretty good all things considered. I'd been working on that scene since before winter break had begun, so I knew the material, and though there had been major professor drama throughout the process, I was at the competition and it was all almost over.

I love doing the scene there and I hate it too, because I know I'm a better actor than the limited moment they get to see me. I'm so much better than what two minutes and thirty five seconds can show, but that's all anybody gets.

We got critiqued afterwards, but it was in a group setting and I didn't like it at all. I felt like I couldn't ask questions and she couldn't go into details like she might have because there were two dozen other students sitting around listening. She liked it overall, wanted more visible moments of understanding, of really hearing what was said and being in that moment and letting it hit, which I understood. After running scenes so long they can get stale.

We didn't move on, so that was the end of my Irene Ryan run for 2010. By the end of the week, I'd decided, in a dual-minded, hypocritical type of way, that 1) the competition is all bureaucracy and not objective at all, so I will never care how far I get because it's no measure of my ability, and 2) that I was going to make a good showing some day, that I would kick ass and refuse to let anyone get in my way, that I would pick perfect scenes, that I would get the perfect partner and I'd make an impact somehow, that Southern would be recognized for its acting achievements. So I'm not sure exactly how I feel.

Wednesday, January 27
A lot of workshops were cancelled over the course of the week, which also posed a problem, since some of what I wanted to do was nixed. But my one workshop was on Wednesday.

Stage Makeup Design with Karen Anselm
(KCACTF Nat'l Chair/Design and Technology, Professor of Theatre, Costume Designer, Director at Bloomberg University)
I was honestly shocked at how much creative thought actually goes into all sorts of makeup design. Every aspect of character, age, personality traits, good, evil, worried, flighty, hints from the text, inspiration from every sort of image possible - there were a million things to learn and take in and it was incredibly fascinating. After a crash course in where to get designs from and how to use design sheets and tracing paper, she let us have a gazillion random pictures and magazine pages and anything to give us ideas. I grabbed a Lichtenstein painting and a photo of the Migrant Mother as inspiration for Meredith from Bat Boy. We got to use crayons. I was a happy camper.

We saw Red Masquerade, a new play presented by SUNY New Paltz. It was about McCarthyism and the story of a woman named Angela Calomiris, a spy working for the FBI as a double agent in the Communist Party. They had a beautiful black box set, and the play was basically a film noir for the stage, which worked for the most part, but sometimes it was a little much for me. Overall I enjoyed it very much. One line from that show became our theme for the week - "Bourgeois Bitch!"

That evening was In Conflict, a Laramie Project style look at war veterans from Iraq presented by Schenectady County Community College. It wasn't executed very well, but the subject was very, very tough. It was especially hard because one of my dearest friends was next to me, and he is an Iraq War vet, so feeling him react to what was being said and trying to comprehend what he went through really hurt.

Thursday, January 28
There were no workshops that day, and no afternoon shows, so we watched the Irene Ryan Semi-Finalists all afternoon instead. They were pretty good, overall, though I didn't understand why some groups went through. But I'm not a judge, so it's not up to me.

That evening was Lorca, presented by Central Connecticut State University, a strange mashup of The House of Bernarda Alba and the biographical poems by the guy who wrote it, Federico Garcia Lorca. It was done well, overall, but it doesn't stick well in my mind. There was nothing "incredible" about it, nothing terribly memorable besides a few performances.

Friday, January 29
This day was dedicated almost soley to one of the greatest pieces of theatre I've ever seen, and I am not exaggerating. I saw this show twice in the black box theatre, and I nearly cried both times, it was so beautiful. Boston University put on a student written show titled diventare, which means "to become" in Italian. It was the story of a woman whose baby daughter had died in a storm, and she escapes in her mind to where her little girl still lives as a mermaid nymph and her life isn't shattered and distorted. The sheer brilliance of this production cannot be expressed in mere words. It was all lights and movement and Sigur Ros soundtrack and the actors were lifted in the blackness with small flashlights on them as they were carried so that they were, in fact, swimming through the depths of the ocean. It was so incredibly beautiful I didn't know how to react. I still don't. That's why we saw it twice. It was too astounding to be real.

That evening's show, All The World's A Grave, presented by Bates College, was a fitting yang to that morning's yin. It was appallingly bad, a strange mashup of Shakespeare to juxtapose the wrong characters together to make some humorous moments, but overall it was just painful and absurdly long. That was the only absurdist humor I could find in it. I was embarrassed for them.

Saturday, January 30
The Irene Ryan Finals were this morning, and again, I was rather confused at a few of the groups who were selected to move on, but again, not my choice. None of them were bad, but I was sure there were better groups to have chosen than some who were there.

There were also the Tech Olympics - I did not personally attend this, seeing as how I have no technical ability, but we had people go, and our techies are awesome.

After that was a delightful presentation of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels by Dean College, where I nearly peed myself laughing. The performances were good, and the dancing was good, but it was really the script that pushed this one into the excellent category. The script plus a good cast and direction made it as entertaining as could be.

The awards ceremony followed, blah blah, people won stuff, blah blah. Dance party after that. Blah blah, lots of awkward dancing, lots of sexual tension, blah blah.

And we went home the next day, none too soon.