Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog

October 29, 2009

Erik Hellman on his “daily grind”

by Drew Dir in 2009/2010 Season, The Mystery of Irma Vep

ERIK HELLMAN, one of the two actors for Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, took a moment to wax philosophical about professional acting, cross-dressing, and rocking out on the dulcimer.

“The supreme theatre is intuitive.  The artists of this theatre…are spontaneous and lucky. Their secret is that of the ancient Chinese marksmen whose every arrow was found in the dead center of a chalk circle.  They shoot their arrows first and draw the circle afterward.”
-From Seven Levels of the Theatre by Charles Ludlam

Recently I was asked to participate in a workshop at Court Theatre. The idea was to share a model of collaboration with another sector of the professional world, to suggest that there was something in the way theatre artists solve problems of interpretation and creation that would help administrators solve the problems they face. Ever since then I have been thinking about how my job is different from other people. The surprising answer is that it is not. Fellow actor Chris Sullivan and I climb into my Honda Civic and crawl down Lake Shore Drive each morning like so many other commuters.  We arrive at work and exchange pleasantries around the coffee machine with our colleagues.  We unpack our briefcases and put on dresses (a necessity of our job that, though perhaps unconventional for many males, still puts us in line with nearly half of America’s workforce), Assistant Director Eric Hoff prepares his legal pad (for notes), Assistant Stage Manager Sara “Damage” Gammage prepares her withering look (our barometer of comedic quality) and we go to work.  Only instead of making washing machines or sorting census data we are working on creating a piece of theatre, ideally, a piece of “Supreme Theatre,” the highest circle of Ludlam’s metaphysical universe.

Erik Hellman as Valentine in Court Theatre’s Arcadia, with Mary Beth Fisher

Just out of school, working for off-off-Loop houses for little more than camaraderie and beer money, the young actor longs for the clout and resource of professional theatre.  Later, spear-carrying for uninspired productions that pay the rent, he remembers when his investment in the play itself was payment enough. Actors balance these desires all the time: want vs. resource, remuneration vs. inspiration. Every now and then one gets both. Here is a list of problems that I have been paid to solve this week:

-What is the funniest mispronunciation of the word “wolf “in the singular and plural form?

-While holding a feather duster upside down, what is the best hand with which to hit a fellow actor in the crotch?

-How does a woman sniff her own armpit?

-What classic rock riffs are easily adaptable to a dulcimer?

I don’t claim that we have managed to solve all these problems to everyone’s satisfaction, but I can say that the way we have gone about trying to solve them would serve as a model for any organization. The actors propose solutions and the director filters them though his experience as an outside eye; the director proposes solutions and the actors filter them through the experience of performance. It is a conversation that builds to an answer larger than any one collaborator could have come to on their own.  We shoot arrows, we draw circles and at the end of the day we have a testament to our accuracy as marksmen, even if the targets were the last thing in place.  In a now much quoted rehearsal report Stage Manager Ellen Hay wrote, “…we all concluded that we did, in fact, get something done during rehearsal.”  In other words: we drew the circle where the arrow fell.”
It is hard to be consistently spontaneous and lucky.  Not every day is successful, sometimes we erase circles we’ve drawn, sometimes someone gets an arrow in the face, but despite the occasional failure or puncture wound, it is the only way we know to work.  At the end of the day Chris and I climb into the Civic for the long crawl north.  As we join the blue and white collar crowds inching towards home we talk about the day and the strains and glories of working in the creative arts, of being the kind of archers that aim for spontaneity, the kind of archers that make their own luck, of our unique position in America’s great, dress wearing, workforce.

—Erik Hellman

The Mystery of Irma Vep opens November 12.

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