Traces of Lipstick

Voice, Emotion, Movement. It's like an equation; you combine those three words and you get the skeleton of a character. Toss research and dramaturgy into the mix, you find muscles. Repetition and risk sculpt your character with the appropriate perspectives and imperfections, all the while spinning that eventual, elusive breath that gives dimension--heat and scent, a soul--to this channeled person. You seek balance, ultimately, between work and play, and this enlivens the character and allows a real existence, albeit stylized with floods of colored lights, orchestrated silences and noise, and words prewritten, nested in the sky.

At this stage in our rehearsal process--a little over two weeks before opening night--the cast seldom relies on the script and, under Dave's direction, primarily spends time honing their particular nuances and smoothing the various edges off one scene or the next. We still stall or bumble during a few transitions and I, personally, still need to find the heart in a couple of key moments. Each actor performs one or more major monologue during the play, must master at least one passable English, French, or German dialect, and invest themselves in a minimum of two different characters. To better explain, I am primarily playing the English-speaking Londoner Malcolm McLaren, but I also play the old British talk show host Bill Grundy during a furious scene of laughing, expletives, and clear generational discord. Juggling those two voices--making apparent their marketable personal differences--truly challenges me, and I'm Bill Grundy for all of five minutes.

Dave and Jeremy (our affable stage manager) successfully blocked the play and continue to make adjustments to create natural movement and intriguing stage pictures while maintaining each actor's sense of freedom. At the end of every night, more color appears within the framework of the collective vision. Our growth and rapport as a cast, the critical timing involved with motion, music, and lights, the burgeoning strength of our confidence and excitement...we're getting closer and closer and closer to that balance, to truly creating and believing in the story's illusion.

And it's allure.

Post Script

Okay now, I know what you're thinking. "Zach, why tease us with a new blog if you're not actually going to update it?" Yes, it's true, in the past I--like many millions of other bloggers--would occasionally lapse on updates. This time, however, it's not (entirely) my fault. You can blame Google. Or, at least, how they define and recognize potential spam blogs. Here's a snippet from an email I received like a day or two after my very first post:

Dear Blogger user,

This is a message from the Blogger team. Your blog, at http://beingmalcolmmclaren.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog...We will take a look at your blog and unlock it within four business days.

I filled out a quick spam-killing form-thing (you know, they show you a box of what look like drunk letters and you have to type them in the same order below the box) and waited a week to return to the blog. Anyway, that's the reason for my lack of action. So check back soon for updates!

Rehearsal One: The Bottled Ship of Lipstick Traces

Seated in a the AV-earie on a Sunday afternoon with the At-Last Spring Sun freeing specks of dust, sparking bluer blues and greener greens, shadows that move and disappear; the wind breezing through recently opened windows, tugging at the corners of pages, forcing your hand between T-shirt or hoodie; the echoing chug of metal wheeling across metal and the distant city sirens of distress and disinterest; we, seated in the AV-earie on a Sunday afternoon at the respective epicenters of Chicago's hidden industrial purgatory and nature's own wielding cape of change, discussing the intricacies of Sex Pistols punk rock, the fuse-lit Situationists, the sentence-slashing Lettrists, the murderous peace-mongers of Dada, all the human wars and the art it bore, and all of this swirling in the that spring air as we sat on a Sunday afternoon inaugurating the journey. Day One writing our own history.

David Perez, the Artistic Director of Pavement Group and the director of the play itself, delved into his first address with the deliberate abandon of a pre-dissected moment, a scene long ago
festered in his brain. He produced, for the present team, a measured, seismographic exuberance for the vastness of the content and the process. "It," he said, referencing the text, "will be difficult. It'll be fine, but it will be difficult."

The same, too, goes for me, in my role as Malcolm McLaren. We read the play aloud and I discovered quite quickly that the words continue to jump from the page just as they did during my very first read almost a year ago, but I do not yet jump with them. One of the biggest challenges in assuming his character relies on my ability to speak not as the Malcolm McLaren that lives and breathes in this world, but the Malcolm McLaren that lives within me and exists in the world of Lipstick Traces.

Somehow, I think, the stage is being set.