Sesame Street Workshop, day two.

I am sitting on the couch with a glass of red wine and a bag of frozen peas. The frozen peas are icing my shoulder after today. It’s not so much that I’m in pain as that I would like to not be in pain tomorrow.  Icing after rehearsal used to be part of my daily routine, and it is an odd thing to feel nostalgia for.

Today was another amazing day and we spent a lot of time with puppets up. Today we were put back into our original pods and again rotated through the instructors. The emphasis today was on performance and acting.

My pod started with Peter Linz again, who put us through emotions and common physical movements, like jumping, hopping (not the same thing) and tripping. He set us up in a group of four on the monitor to start and just ran us through the emotional wringer. Since our group was up first, Peter was in with us and would demonstrate what he wanted us to do. Our job was to match the idea of the emotion, though not necessarily do an exact copy. Some fo the things are easy to explain like… laughing. You move the head to demonstrate the breath of the laugh, but you don’t articulate each “Ha” with a mouth movement. If you try a laugh with your own body, even a fake laugh, you can see why lipsyncing each part of “hahahahah” doesn’t make sense.

Other things are harder to articulate, like the specific movement involved in a bashful shrug. Most puppets don’t have articulated shoulders and collarbones with which to shrug, so it’s a head movement, which gives the sense of a character digging his toe into the ground, ducking his head, and hunching his shoulders, while being pretty close to only a head movement. Certainly there are no feet involved.

Most of this was familiar territory for me.

A new piece was fainting — the puppet, not me. Faints are most effective, apparently, when done straight upstage. It begins with a slow movement starting from the fingers, which control the upper jaw. Those tilt up and back, given the sense of the eyes rolling back in the head, until the eyes are basically hidden and then you accelerate down in an arc from the shoulder as if the weight of the head is pulling the puppet down. Surprisingly difficult to get all the pieces put together at the right speeds.

From there we went to Matt, who had my favorite class today (sorry guys) largely because it was the first time that I felt like I was bringing something from my writing life back to the puppetry side. Allow me to explain.

Matt’s sessions are focused on acting and doing scene work. Today we were paired up with scene partners. I had Frankie Cordero, who is a very good puppeteer that I’ve performed with before. This immediately gave me a leg up. The scenes that Matt gave us are called A-B scenes. I have not run into these before, or at least not known that I had. Basically, it is a scene that is dialog only without a lot of detail so you can push it in multiple directions, depending on the context you give the lines. Our job was to decide who the characters were, what the conflict was, and create a beginning, middle, and end. Then rehearse it with puppets. In half an hour.

Anyone who has taken one of my writing workshops — oh, heck, I actually have this exercise on my website — but I teach exactly this when I’m teaching writers about dialog.

Our scene was taken from Spare Scenes: 60 Skeletal Scenes for Actors and Directors by Diane Timmerman and was called “Syllables.” Frankie and I each read through and then talked about the things that seemed obvious. It was a couple who were having an argument. That’s not enough, so we started getting more specific and trying some different scenarios. We considered playing against the text and having it be all flirty instead.  In the end, we decided to go with a couple playing Scrabble, he ticks her off by flaunting his superior vocabulary. She has had enough of this sort of teasing and questions the entire relationship. At first he thinks they are talking about the game, then realizes that he has seriously screwed up. Apologies and happy ending.

So where did Scrabble come from? Part of the dialog was:

A. Now that is rich.

B. Rich.

C. Yes rich.

B. Caloric.

A. Is that a word.

You’ll note that the only punctuation are periods at the end of sentences. The actors are free to change the punctuation, but can’t add or cut words.  So when we did this, I mimed placing four tiles. “Now that is rich.”

Frankie’s puppet looked at it and was all, “Rich?” as in “Really? That’s your word.”

My puppet said, “Yes. R. I. C. H.” (A little bit of cheating there, but I thought of it as altering my enunciation. Ahem.)

Frankie then rapidly placed tiles, looked up in triumph and said, “Caloric!”

My puppet peered at the “board,” which we were totally miming, and said, “Is that a word?” the same way people do at least once in every Scrabble game I’ve ever played.

Then we got up in front of the camera and did it for the group. This was a little nerve wracking because we hadn’t gotten a lot of camera time before doing it, but you know, no one else had either. I did a cross from left to right, that had made sense without the camera, but didn’t actually have enough space to do it for real without breaking the edge of frame, which is a no-no.

(Pardon me while I remove my ice pack)

When he gave us notes after, Matt suggested a cross from center left, which is where my character was seated) to down left and play the depth of frame rather than the distance.  It’s the same idea, but an example of a difference between stage and video.

After the four groups in our pod each did their thing, which was great fun to see, we moved on to Marty’s room.

Here the fatigue began to show itself.

Marty put us through a whole series of exercises again. We did more stop and go. I kept winding up in the back of the group and had some trouble seeing the monitor, which was a problem. Understand, that it is my responsibility to find the monitor, and in a show setting, there would be one back where I was. Here? Wall o’ bodies. So that was frustrating because I couldn’t find a way to fix the problem but felt like I ought to be able to do so.

Then we did this thing where we’d start at the back of the frame, creating a wide shot, and do really big emotion, manipulation, and chew up the frame. From there we’d walk directly toward the camera to a medium shot, with a medium level of excitement and manipulation, followed by Extreme Closeup with small, subtle manipulation. I wish I’d gone later in that round, because I picked up some tricks from the other puppeteers that I would like to have tried, but there are advantages to going first, too. The bar hasn’t been set yet. La!

The last exercise was a focus one. Two puppeteers at a time. I was on the right, Frankie was on the left. The goal was to make hitting clean focus, which means that the puppet is looking directly at the camera, instinctively. Sliding on a plane, we’d send the puppet out of frame to the side and pop the focus when we came back in. Then down and up, same thing. This wasn’t about getting the focus into muscle memory, because that will change with every frame, but to rewire our brains to recognize and be able to hit correct focus quickly. Marty demonstrated first, and as he did it would say when it was correct, and when it was acceptable, and when it was bad. Clearly, he had a high percentage of correct, but it was nice to see that even at his level bad still happened.

Once we started getting a high percentage of correct hits, Marty began to make it harder. First, Frankie and I had to move with synchronization. This didn’t mean we had to move in the same direction, but that the beginning and ending of each movement needed to happen at the same time. He and I got that almost instantly and the folks that went before us took a little longer.

I used a stage trick.

It’s this. Audible breath to signal my partner that I was moving. We didn’t talk about it, but having that additional cue is subtle, and totally natural.

Unfortunately, getting that so quickly meant that Marty felt like we were ready for more challenging things. Now, it was slide in, hit focus, look at each other, look back to front, slide out and repeat. Again, we got this pretty fast. Yay, breath.

So… harder.

Now we had to slide in, hit focus, look at each other, open our mouths, look back to front, slide out and repeat. Right about here is where my brain started just saying “No.” At first, I was fine. I thought we were moving in pretty good sync.

Then Marty said, “You two are doing one thing differently, do you know what it is?”

Frankie and I looked at each other. “Um… No.”

“Does anyone else know? Don’t tell them.”

The entire class said, “Yes!”

“Um…”

“Try it again and see if you can spot it.”

The moment we started again, I realized that Frankie was keeping his puppet’s mouth open as he looked back to front, while I had been closing mine. I tried to change to match him. and my brain completely shut down. I stopped being able to tell right from left and up from down. All of my monitor skills were just deleted from my brain. And here, I can only say, “Thank God, I’m forty-five,” because I had enough sense to stop, laugh, shake it off, and put the puppet back up. Then we nailed it.

Then we went to lunch.

Frankie and I had lunch together so we could work through our scene and make some specific blocking decisions, and refine our beats. Also to just shoot the breeze.

After lunch, all twenty five people were back in the main studio. We were given puppets and half an hour to rehearse. Then everyone started performing for each other. They were recording the scenes (No. I don’t have a copy to show you.) so that we could watch playback while Marty, Peter, and Matt gave us notes. I will just say that Frankie and I showed well,

The format that the notes took was that they would ask the group, “Could you tell what their relationship was?”

“A couple!”

“What were they doing?”

“Scrabble!”

And then from there, they gave specifics about what we could do to improve the scene. Things like, “You could raise the stakes, by standing with more force.” After they gave the notes then they showed playback of the scene so we could keep those notes in mind while we watched. The difference in my performance level between today and yesterday is noticeably improved.

One of the groups in another pod had the same scene and did a totally different interpretation with a teacher and a student. It was a lot of fun to see all the different ways people interpreted scenes.

Though I am saying less about the afternoon, we went from 2:00 until 6:30 on the acting stuff. But since writing it up would involve a play-by-play of other participants’ scenes, and I didn’t ask anyone for permission to do that, I’m going to skip it.

And now, I am going to finish my glass of red wine and go to bed. Tomorrow we have only a half day, but I will still need my full brain to survive.

Bonus random quote: “If you’re going to stuff the chicken, stuff the chicken”