After a disappointing rehearsal on my end, I came to Marc and had a “come to Jesus” moment from the following points:
“Don’t wait to play”
I absolutely am waiting. I’ve been justifying it away by saying I’m not ready because I’m not memorized, but there is room for me to play more.
“I feel like I can’t go all out with a script in my hands”
“Bullshit” -Marc
He is absolutely right. He continued by saying my favorite bit of his advice “Prepare like mad and then go with the flow,” and he said I already prepared like mad, I need to work on going with the flow. He specified that I deserve to be ‘carefree’ in performance.
I identified some cognitive dissonance in my mind as well. I feel like I’m not prepared enough, yet I also feel like I don’t have enough rehearsals to try out my ideas. If I have too many ideas for our finite amount of rehearsals, then it seems like I’ve done plenty of preparation. Thus I can’t justify not playing. Marc reassured me that I certainly wouldn’t be able to play all the ideas, but the course of rehearsal would bring about even more ideas, and eventually, all the branches of ideas would build a beautiful tree with bad limbs trimmed off. To be successful in rehearsal, I need to fail.
I want to translate this into action terms. Yeah yeah, there’s memorizing, but I need to go all out. I have yet to make myself look like a fool, nor provoke my fellow actors by going all out. I need to stop anticipating what that would look like. Once I’m inside rehearsal, I just want to go absolutely crazy and give it all I’ve got with the script. I think I have more passion than actionable items, but hopefully, this mindset will give me the freedom to play in rehearsal, which I have yet to do fully.