The Long and Short of It or Leaving It All On The Stage


First: 

50% of Marriages End in Divorce
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Then:

In 2011 I sat in the audience of the Music Box Theatre and watched something magical. It was my last semester at NYU and I had somehow made it through my whole acting career without ever hearing the name Mark Rylance. Yet because of a happy accident I found myself witnessing what I consider to be one of the greatest performances of all time.
            Now I suppose there’s nothing special about a three-hour play. Hell, Arcadia skated in just under that mark. But something about Jerusalem, and specifically Mark Rylance’s performance in Jerusalem, makes it so those three hours will be forever cemented in my brain. I’ve always struggled to describe the experience to people:

What made it so special? 
It’s hard to put into words. 
Was it his acting? 
Well sure, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be privy to plenty of spectacular performances in my day. 
Well what was it then? 
I DON'T KNOW I CAN'T EXPLAIN IT.
Well jeez, sorry I asked...



            It wasn’t until reading Jonathan Kalb’s description of the actors’ transformation while performing Speak Bitterness that I began to maybe be able to identify what was so remarkable about Mark’s performance that night. After two hours of non-stop performance in Speak Bitterness, Kalb writes: “The actors had to expend a great deal more effort now to maintain a semblance of sincerity, and that straining, along with their visible fatigue, altered the show’s tone. No one entering at this point could have suspected these people of glibness, because it was costing them so much perform. Something important was obviously at stake for them.” In all of Jerusalem, Johnny (Mark’s character) leaves the stage for what might add up to a total of 20 minutes. And when he is onstage, he speaks for PAGES. And in true Mark Rylance style, not a single line was thrown away. Every. Single. Word was used (and thank goodness because Jez Butterworth has crafted a stunningly beautiful albeit complex and challenging script with Jerusalem). But this type of performance COSTS something.
            I’m writing this post after a unique personal experience in Stacey’s Meisner class. I don’t need to go in to the details, you all were there (and sorry if someone from the random corners of the internet has stumbled upon this blog and is now completely lost) but the long and short of it (haha, time pun) is that experience in class took it out of me. I went home and fell asleep by 8:30 (and not just because I’m a grandma, Mike). And it wasn’t a cost in terms of mental trauma, I was able to shake it all off in less than 20 minutes. I’m talking physical costs. Actual physical exhaustion. And I could see that happening in Jerusalem too. I could see the sweat pouring down Mark’s face. I could see the effort behind every word of his final 20 minute speech. I could see his desperation to communicate wit the people on that stage with him (and with us in the audience). To borrow from Kalb: “Something important was obviously at stake” for him. It was beautiful and captivating and I felt tears on my face without really understanding why I was crying.


If ya want a little poetic palate cleanser, here's Mark's acceptance speech for the Tony he won for Jerusalem. The poet he's reciting is Louis Jenkins.
What a unique bloke 💜



Comments

  1. MarkMarch 14, 2018 at 4:27 PM

    I’m envious. I wish I’d seen Jerusalem. There’s too few of anything positive that could be described as “forever cemented in my brain.” Good on ya!

    You bring up a significant aspect of time and these durational pieces we’ve been looking at. You talked about the clarity with which it could be seen that the performance was costing Mark Rylance. With the talk of costing I couldn’t help but start seeing the transactional nature of our relationship with time and these pieces: what you pay and what you get.

    Many times a play (or song or a story or whatever medium) is said to be “too long”. I’m thinking that it means that the time spent interacting as an audience yields an uneven return on the investment. Just the other day when speaking of some show that was on the long side, (was it Tejas Verdes?) Austin was amazed to find out that the performance spanned more minutes that he had imagined. He had thought that the experience was far shorter. I would say that this sensation comes about as a result of a generous return on the investment of time: much was given in return for the time and attention spent. It was a worthwhile exchange. A bargain, if you will. The other end of the panorama is described by those times when something seems to drag on forever: poor yield on the investment. The return on the investment of time spent is variable. The vanishing seconds, minutes, moments or however you wish to measure the temporal continuum, is a fixed rate.

    So, in relation to some of these protracted performances we’ve been looking at, the question, for me, is whether or not it’s worth all that time. For the extremely brief (Neo-Futurist, twitter plays, or other nano-dramas) there is simply less at stake in terms of risk assessment. A twitter play that doesn’t do it for me has cost me so little that the temporal price will go virtually unnoticed (I may even read it two or three times). On the other hand, a three-line work of art that speaks far beyond its limited parameters will stand out for its favorable economy and the great bang for your buck as an audience.

    I know that I’ve diverged somewhat from the matter of your post with this reply on the transactional nature of performance and time, but it was your food for thought that sent me on this riff, so I’m thanking ya!


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