Being David Freud
reflections on the rehearsal process
from Seamus Sullivan
The thing about theater, the real infuriating, invigorating, defining thing about theater in DC is how community-based it is. It's infuriating because of limited audience exposure in the age of Netflix and YouTube: tell me it doesn't make you cry inside to know that no matter how good your production of Angels in America is, probably not as many people will see it as have seen Pants on the Ground. That's a topic for another post, though.
The invigorating thing about working in a community of artists is that, in addition to forming partnerships and friendships, everyone who stays here and works for a few years gets to see all the other artists showing off their abilities over time, and learns their strengths and weaknesses. Such-and-such a director has a knack for staging epic plays, such-and-such a writer churns out fantastic situations with naturalistic dialogue, such-and-such an actor has precision comic timing but room for dramatic growth.
This familiarity with someone's skill set is a big help when figuring out who to work with on a given project. It also makes bucking people's expectations an exciting and scary thing for an individual artist.
Acting again two years after my last role at Georgetown University (Hans Blix in Stuff Happens) has been like that. People in the greater DC theater community who know my work (all eight of them) know me as a playwright. A few months ago I acted in a ten-minute play about college baseball, which we used to test acoustics in the new theaters at my workplace. I have a dirty line about how a used baseball glove smells like your hand when it's been inside a special someone, and when I reached this line during a run-through, one of the actresses who was also performing later, an actual professional who's probably played to more people in her fullest house than I have in everything I've ever written, directed or acted in to date, a remarkably sweet and good-natured woman with whom I've attended church, gasped and said "Seamus!" as if she'd never expected me to reach such depths of even fictional depravity. That's something I'll cherish.
Which brings me to Freud Meets Girl. When fellow Waywardian and Georgetown theater veteran Hunter Styles gave me the chance to play David Freud in the fallFRINGE remount, I was all kinds of excited because:
A). It's a tremendous script- subtle, ambitious, thematically deep without hitting you over the head, fast-paced, way funny. As a playwright I'm still jealous of it.
B). The character has a tragic arc right out of Frankenstein and does a half-dozen other things I've never gotten to do even when acting at Georgetown. I've gotten to dress up as Charles Guiteau and dance my way up the gallows, but I've never played someone in a fraying marriage, or made the impassioned pleas David does for his life-threatening experiments, or faced the devastating personal revelations that flatten poor Dr. Freud by the story's end.
C). While I'm nervous playing a leading man, this leading man is a neurotic, distracted creator fueled by too much ego and too little sleep. So that's not exactly outside of my range.
Rehearsals with Mr. Styles, producer Jewell Fears, and the shipshape cast they've assembled have born out my suspicions that this process would be crazy fun. We've made new discoveries almost nightly, and everyone's shown a lot of invention and openness to exploring the very best ways to have all the characters bounce off each other onstage. Punches fly, clothes are torn off, and Spanish-speaking zombies lurch into scenes.
Come see us at Fort Fringe starting November 5. You'll see something new- not just from me, but from the whole cast, and from Hunter, who's tweaked the script for the better, and who's building a Kirby-esque, light-up dream machine for this production.
- Seamus
