Are you a Bricklayer or a Paintballer?

I'm not a person who like to make generalizations.

That being said.  I think most actors can fall into more or less two different methods of work durring rehearsal.

Paintballers and Bricklayers.

Bricklayers, spend many hours constructing (preparation) bricks (their playable choices) and will bring the bricks over to the worksite (rehearsal) and lays the brick with cement, but will let someone else do the brushing with the foxtail (the director)

Paintballers are the more chaotic of the two.  Paintballers come to rehearsal with a paintball gun (preparation), some paintballs (their playable choices), and an infinite row of canvases (rehearsal).  The Paintballer simply shoots the living crap out of the canvas and asks what the art critic (the director) what thinks.


the thing is that both these approaches lead to the same thing.  A practiced and well prepared performance.

So are you a bricklayer of a Paintballer?

A milestone!

Today i signed a W4 for an acting job. While i've been paid to act before, this is the first time I am officially declaring a portion of my yearly income as an actor.

I consider this one the first significant milestones of my career in Acting.  Often a lot of actors will consider themselves a professional once they get paid, but i find that criteria a little off target, because i've been paid to be an actor plenty of times, however it was usually a payment of maybe a hundred bucks or so; more of a 'Hey thanks for doing this, we can't pay you a real wage but here's some dough for transportation/drinking money."

Some background information, i'm spending the summer out in Massachusetts with the Plymouth Players, a Shakespeare company in residence at the Plymouth Plantation, a museum dedicated to educating people about the lives of the original Mayflower Colonists.

So i guess the next three months of blog entries (because i update sooooo regularly) will be focused on my experience out here in Plymouth/Cape Cod, and the joys of preparing two of Shakespeares plays in repertory.

More to come!