Day 15: Conquering

This will be a sit-down line-through. No movement, no sound cues. We just recite our lines around a table. The trick to this, at this point, is that I've started latching my lines to movement. I ran my lines at lunch and during the commute home, hoping to improve on Monday's weakness. I was thinking earlier in the day that the reason the theatre mounts so many plays with older characters is because the actors would mostly be retired and have much more time to memorize their lines. The murderer said he skipped school today to give his brain a rest, and I don't blame him.

He's thinking of his costume and wants to ape Heath Ledger's Joker outfit in the final scene. He's also using the character as a template for his own. I'm not sure how that will play or if he can reconcile the wilder behavior of the Joker with the early subdued scenes of the play. We're told that we will have Wednesday off, giving us two days' break before Friday's runthrough at the stage location. This might be our last night in the warehouse, and we'll have ten scheduled rehearsals before we open.

While we run our lines, the director sits with a script and makes marks on a sheet as we go. This is very much a test, and he's keeping score. Maybe it helped me, because I had the best night so far. I bobbled some words, but the lines were there. I was on a divine roll after hours of certainty that I retained nothing. The others were complimentary to the point I got a bit embarrassed, but I felt better when the mistress joked she wanted to kick my ass. She and the murderer were reading their scripts as we moved to Act Two. I cracked my script open to mark the words that gave me trouble. The director was, as usual, supportive and understanding but gently pressuring us to get on the ball with lines. I joked that I did so well because my brain was amped on panic and terror.

When we get to the last ten pages of script, we move to the set; we didn't finish the blocking on Monday. Because the line-through didn't require so much energy, I was able to goose my character with more emotion than normal. Maybe too much. I shake and wring my hands during the confession and I try to shudder with anxiety as I threaten the murderer with the gun. I'm the emotional one in the play; I do the heavy lifting there, whereas the murderer has the longer chunks of dialogue. Because he has line trouble, the director suggests he needs more audio feedback, and he and I recite most of Act One for the other actor. The kid looks beat; I can't imagine doing a show this size as a high-school student. We'll have to meet on weekends to run lines, and I suggested our house for it. We can host the whole show, if need be, and sit around the place and recite lines.

Picture of the Day
Stars in prolonged exposure.

Well, that sounded tabloid.


In the News
Once again, the most telling information from the primaries lies in the partisan voter turnout. Lookee here, and remember that McCain won each primary for his party.

Ohio
Democrats: 2,180,292
Republicans: 1,004,391
Obama came in second and still beat McCain and Huckabee combined.

Rhode Island
Democrats: 181,092
Republicans: 25,434
Obama came in second with 73,000+ votes, and that was four times as many as McCain's 17,000+ votes.

Vermont
Democrats: 139,935
Republicans: 33,589
Four times as many people voted for Democrats. Clinton came in second and doubled McCain's totals.

Texas
Democrats: 2,807,329
Republicans: 1,317,008
Again, Obama came in second and still beat McCain and Huckabee combined.

It would take an unprecedented party scandal for the Democrats to lose the election in November. Their second-place candidate beats the GOP leader every time.