Underground — An Actor's Perspective

The great theatre director Peter Brook called it Rough Theatre.  I call it Punk Rock Theatre.  Theatre produced on a shoestring both in money and time.  Raw theatre, no-apologies theatre that confronts, challenges, mocks, laughs at itself, weeps, and hollers.  All of the work The Inkwell has produced over the past month has been just that — honest and direct with writing that's in your face and action that happens practically in your lap.

Although The Inkwell's primary purpose is to incubate new plays and to give playwrights an opportunity to see and hear their work with hopes toward future revisions and drafts and productions, I've found that this process has also been transformative for the actors involved in bringing this work to light.  I know it has been for me (I'm Clay Steakley and I play Bones in James McManus's Underground, by the way).

As our director Chris Niebling said to the cast last week, we've done two months of work in three weeks.  That's what Punk Rock Theatre is all about.  Get it up on its feet, don't give it time to get self-indulgent, and throw it in people's faces.  That's just what we've done, getting a complex play about the lives of West Virginia coal miners and those they love up and running, blocked, off-book, lit and designed with minimal opportunities for full runs, dress rehearsals, or the niceties of previews or — God forbid — table work (for those of you less familiar with the rehearsal process, table work is when the actors gather around the table to read and talk through a script moment by moment).   

For an actor, there's something both terrifying and exhilarating about this.  The limited time and the shaky, changeable nature of a new work force you to strip everything down to its essentials.  You can't waste time with narcissistic character exploration.  Instead, strip your character to his or her core attributes.  With my character of Bones, I found that he is honest, innocent, ambitious, and fiercely loyal.  That's enough to begin with — especially since some of these basic attributes have their own inherent conflicts.  Next, you identify the basic actions within the individual beats of scenes.  Bones, for example, defends, deflects, attacks, protects, retreats, and pleads.  Find the simplest, most playable and straightforward impulses and intentions, and trust them.  Trust your fellow actors.  Listen.  Communicate.  Sure, you're not positive just which line comes next, and yeah, you have no idea which scene follows this one.  But, if you relax, trust yourself and your cast mates, let the language do its own work and just go out there and act, listen, and communicate like a human being, all those other pieces fall into place.

In other words, rather than complicating or destabilizing the actor's process, the limitations of the past month's work have served, for me, to distill it to its basic, most honest and direct components.  Honesty is the key.

And having fun.

This, combined with our director and stage manager's shepherding (and cajoling and arguing and exasperation), our designers' brilliant, intuitive work, and, most of all, our playwright's beautiful language and rich characters, have made these plays produced by The Inkwell burst forth into real, gritty glory.  Call it Rough Theatre, Punk Rock Theatre, plain old Theatre or old-fashioned Entertainment — it works.  And, as Peter Brook described it in The Empty Space, it is by its nature, "anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional, anti-pomp, anti-pretence.  This is the theatre of noise, and the theatre of noise is the theatre of applause."