The Cane Dance

Marilee has purchased/borrowed 4 different canes for this production. Each one has a unique height and personality. There's a fantastic white cane that slides in on itself, easy to unfurl and easy to pack away. Let's call the white cane Fluffy.

Now Fluffy is featured in The Cane Dance -- a gorgeous and surprising section in which Marilee wrestles with the cane, rolling it along her body, conducting with it in the air, and carrying it on her back. Fluffy becomes an extension of Marilee's body, exploring the space through different shapes and pulsing rhythms.

But Fluffy is extremely temperamental. Sometimes she refuses to slide back to the short 1 foot length, and jams half way. Marilee, Fluffy's closest confidant and care taker, has been heard shouting "Come on bitch!" to Fluffy during rehearsal, huffing and puffing to push Fluffy back down to the shorter length.

It's not Fluffy's fault that she gets stuck and won't collapse -- she's only accustomed to being used gently to guide someone down the street, and not as a dance partner.

Here's the truth about Fluffy and the other three canes -- they reside safely in our theatrical world of the play, and at the end of the night, Marilee breaks them down, and tucks them carefully into the bottom of her bag.

Marilee's Bruise -- she loves beating herself up!

The Stillness Reigns

Yes, yes, it's true I am a complete sucker for movement. And working with an actress like Marilee, who will come up with a gorgeous movement sequence for just about anything, well it's just so delicious. (seriously, you could say, "worm infested apples" to her and she'd find a way to beautifully express that in her body).

BUT. Are there moments when the movement, instead of unleashing another level of rich storytelling, actually serves as a distraction from the emotion?

There's a new section in this piece and it starts with "Love me. Hate me....Hold me. Don't touch me..." followed by a tirade of disgust against blind people. At first we tried to physicalize the scene. The conflicting emotions in the language formed a sort of push-and-pull in Marilee's body and we had her bouncing across the space, tugged and groped by the invisible hands of fraught emotions.

It was pretty.
But safe. Not too emotional. Nice and safe.

After several rounds of working on this section's choreography, Marilee boldly suggested we see what happened if she spoke the text in stillness.

Here, finally, when it was just Marilee facing the world, just Marilee, standing vulnerably before us, no movement to transform the moment, but only words rich with meaning, did the emotional weight of this section suddenly begin to percolate.

And it was here, in the stillness, that the heart of TRUCE revealed itself to us, week 2 of our rehearsals.

Actor as Movement Coach: Suck. It. Up.

We're choreographing a section in which Marilee is playing basketball on stage -- dribbles, swooshing net shots, and behind the back passes. She looks up as we're working and says, "In high school I had bruises all over my body, and I fucking loved it."

As an actor, Marilee moves with grace and muscular dexterity. She strides boldly towards all forms of physical engagement on stage -- It's amazing! Just give her a solid wall and she'll find a way to make running and jumping off the wall in high heels an integral part of the show.

Marilee Talkington is also movement coach extraordinaire. Now, when Marilee did the movement coaching/fight choreography for DRIP with Crowded Fire she was strident about precision and safety. She had the actors practicing each tiny step, each flick of the hand over and over for hours. One misstep and back to the top we'd go. And she was gooood! Even the most movement-adverse actor was gliding across the stage with elegance by the time Marilee go through with him.

So here we are in the TRUCE rehearsal room, Marilee is standing far upstage, and she's whispering to herself about the basketball sequence. The movement coach is having a private conversation with the actor.

But here's the thing about this actor, she loves beating herself up on stage. The Narrator character says, "If I could totally disregard my physical self, I could totally forget about my eyes, right?"

And how can the movement coach do her job here of keeping the actor safe, when the actor (who is indeed the movement coach!) thrives on the physical exertion and pushing the physical bounds of this role?

Marilee, like myself, is a perfectionist. If the actor is frustrated with the final basketball defense and shooting sequence, the movement coach pulls her asides, makes her breathe, and then, rather harshly says to her "Suck. It. Up."

This is a line from the play. But it's exactly what Marilee is whispering to herself under her breath as an actor.

And when she comes in to our next rehearsal and gives a little moan as she gets down on the floor for a scene with her daughter, she smiles at the pain, because this actor loves bruises.

A Poem

Here's a poem I shared on our first rehearsal...

COME BACK
by C.P. Cavafy (1912)

Come back often and take hold of me,
sensation that I love come back and take hold of me --
when the body's memory awakens
and an old longing again moves into the blood,
when lips and skin remember
and hands feel as though they touch again.

Come back often, take hold of me in the night
when lips and skin remember...


(Here is a photo of our rehearsal mascots that Marilee got us...)

Channeling our Mothers

Our rehearsals are in a gorgeous studio that feels like a tree-house at the top of Bernal Heights. Three women, Marilee, our Stage Manager, Ashely, and yours truly, perch high above San Francisco, watching a dark sky dotted with lights from the city and the Bay Bridge. In the foreground there's an old grand eucalyptus tree, framing our view.

Marilee's grandmother planted the tree 40 years ago. And here we are, looking out the window, three young women together in one room, as Marilee's mom, Lucinda, slowly takes shape before us.

In Marilee's body, Lucinda walks with a slow deliberation, holding her arms stiff, her chest out. She looks the other characters in this play directly in the eyes, and she gently (and almost imperceptibly) touches the walls as she walks to orient herself.

Our Lucinda is sharp and fierce.
"I'm just toughening your up for the real world. The world is a cruel place for people like us," she tells Marilee.

And then Lucinda sings the most beautiful lullaby you've ever heard. It makes me ache to hear it.

It starts to rain. Hard. In the break Ashley tells us a story about her mom, a fraught moment of tension in the distant past. I think of my own mother -- the way everyone says we have the same gestures & mannerisms. The way she knows me to the core; the way she can see through my brave fronts of indifference. The way she says, when I have worn myself out with care taking for others, pretending I don't notice how it's affecting me, "I don't know Riss, I'm afraid you inherited that from me."

...Here is an image of our beat up actress after a long night of wrestling with her mother character (just kidding, she's trying out a series of different gestures)

Rehearsals and The Cane

I've known Marilee Talkington for two years, and she is an incredible force to be reckoned with. She has a commanding presence (have you seen her biceps?), and she has this sexy, self deprecating humor that makes the room buzz with laughter and warmth. Marilee and I have talked theater; we've talked grad school and career choices; we've talked romance and lovers; we've talked great triumphs and sorrowful failures. But we've never once talked about her vision.

Until now. Here we are in a rehearsal room with a script she has written with Justin Quinn Pelegano, and we're faced with the incredibly intimate task of peeling back layer after layer of the script, Marilee's life, and the complicated overlapping landscape of the two.

How do you approach a text that has come directly from the inner stirrings of an actor's heart, and say to her -- "nice, but try it again with less irony this time"?
Not an easy thing to open yourself up to material that, although it's on the page, and although you penned it yourself, is rich and fraught with emotions. Material that cannot offer an answer, or a pretty bow all neatly tied up at the end -- "that was hard, but now I've solved everything and all of my vision has been restored." Material that is still living inside of you now, whose source you wrestle with daily.

Marilee, generous, gracious, and well trained MFA toting actor that she is, always takes a note. She opens herself up to finding a new color, a new way into a scene or descriptive passage.

I've taken to calling the Marilee character, "Narrator," because that can sometimes allow a thumb nail's worth of distance between who Marilee is in real life and who she is on stage. All theater is a construction, of course. No "mirror to reality" here -- just our construction of images, sounds, and gestures, compiled together. As the incredible performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena says in his book DANGEROUS BORDER CROSSERS, performance is not "a mirror, but the actual moment in which the mirror is shattered."