Los Angeles Acting blog by David August: Some Days

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Some Days

Some days you don't want to do what needs doing. Maybe it is laundry, or mailing those headshots, or whatever other task doesn't have appeal in the moment. On those days, do what you can anyway. Progress is progress even if it isn't joyful 100% of the time. Or as fast as we might prefer. Push against resistance.

I've mentioned before the value of doing "it" now whatever "it" is. But our characters also have reluctance, and resistance, to overcome. Some do, eventually, like Hamlet, some don't, tragically, like many of Chekhov's.

Often, the scenes we play are the moment they push through, or as the improv guideline states: "today is the day" meaning that right now is when whatever major event or change is happening in the character's lives. Part of why we watch a scene, or why it was written, is because this is not just an average Tuesday. There is something elevated, special and extraordinary about it.

For us, today is the only present we have, so anything we might do can only gets done now. Life is a sequence of now. For our characters, no one sees on stage or screen the years of growing stagnation that lead to today being the day it all needed to change. Only a montage or an example mundane day that must pack years into moments is shown. Nor is the time building up the courage to tell the other character how our character really feels going to be shown. The projects we work on are the highlight reels of our character's lives. Kind of like Facebook, all milestones and high stake events.

Our lives have the everyday, the mundane. If we can, it is good to find joys in them, though some things are more fun than others. And I'm off to annihilate some items on my to do list (I don't fold laundry, I break laundry's will to be wrinkled).