Free at Last!

22 November 2012

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all!  So the show is over.  My last performance was Tuesday night, and the residual feelings are bittersweet.  On one hand, I am sad that I will not be seeing my new friends very often after having spent the majority of the last month with them.  Pretty much every single day, in fact.  On the other hand, I am thrilled to finally have my life back!  I may or may not have teared up a bit with joy when I walked home with the Hubby after school yesterday.  Not to the train station, not to the bus stop, not to the taxi stand, but HOME!  To my warm and cozy apartment.  I celebrated by promptly falling asleep on the couch, waking up long enough only to eat the delicious bon juk (rice porridge) that my sweet man had gone to pick up from a nearby restaurant while I was napping and then to watch an episode or two of The Walking Dead.  Nothing like flesh eating zombies to help you relax after weeks of a grueling rehearsal schedule.

My participation in the play itself was definitely an experience I would not trade for anything. I met a lot of really fantastic people and undertook a role I have always wanted to play, all while dealing with the incredibly challenging language barrier and inevitable cultural differences.  I will say that I was thoroughly impressed with the dedicated work ethic of the company members, many of whom spent two long days at the theatre building the set from scratch and hanging lights themselves.  It was truly a collaborative effort.

This is what happens when I only understand about 1/16th of what is being said in the rehearsal room at any given time, and you leave me alone with a Falstaff fat suit, and a random witch's hat.

Lord Stanley, Murderer 2, Clarence, Archbishop

Margaret, Clarence, Elizabeth, Anne (foreign cast)

My self-appointed Korean "dad."  He has claimed me as his daughter, and thanks to him, I know how to say "Sit down," "father," and "hurry up" in Korean.

Margaret (Korean cast) and Me

Elizabeth, Margaret, Richard III, Anne

All the Boys and Me; it was a HUGE cast

Hopefully now, I will be able to get back to traveling again and experiencing more of Korea than the inside of the bullet train.  I must say, though, that I have nabbing an unreserved seat on said train down to a science.  The commuter ticket I used all throughout the last month did not, in fact, offer me an assigned seat on each train.  There are, however, precisely two auditorium-style fold-up seats in between each car in the area where passengers ride who have "standing room only" tickets.  If you go up to the platform about ten to fifteen minutes before the train arrives and stand at the number on the platform that matches a corresponding car on the train, when the train stops, you will be positioned right in front of the train door.  When the door opens and the exiting passengers leave the train, you will be the first one to enter through the aforementioned door, thus allowing you to claim one of the unreserved seats by placing your bag on the seat and stepping aside to allow other passengers to enter the train.  Chances are there will be at least one seat available, and if you're lucky, the other seat will not be occupied by a vociferous businessman, slightly swaying from imbibing a bit too much soju, who insists on shouting at some poor soul on the other end of his cell phone conversation, all while staring at you for an immeasurable amount of time while you try to inconspicuously read a book.  Again...if you're lucky.  And if you're really lucky, this garrulous individual or someone equally engaging will be there, giving you fodder for memories to relish for years on end.

I Speak Shakespeare in Korea(n?)! Who knew?!

1 November 2012

Happy Celtic New Year to one and all!  Sorry.  I've been teaching my students here about the history of Halloween, and I've been a little inundated with all things Samhain/All Hallow's Eve/modern-day Halloween.  That being said, did you know that Halloween started as the Celtic celebration of Samhain,  which was the last night of the Celtic year, and during which the spirits of the dead could come back to earth? Yeah.  My students weren't really that impressed either.  They don't really celebrate Halloween here in Korea.

Since the events of my last entry, which was in fact, a record of happenings a few weeks before I actually wrote it, I have been cast in a play.  I will be playing Lady Anne in Shakespeare's Richard III for the Eurasia Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Dalorum Theatre, part of the National Theatre in Seoul.  Not long after I came to Korea, I discovered, through conversation with another native English teacher here, that there are in fact a few expat theatre companies that perform shows in English.  When we decided to leave NYC for the Far East, I was not a little concerned about my acting career going on hiatus.  Well, to put it more accurately, I was totally freaked out at the prospect of not being able to act in anything for more than a year.  Granted, in the U.S. that sometimes happens in spite of being around plenty of opportunities.  One must still get the gig, as it were.  But to have absolutely no chance to perform was frightening.  So once I found out about the acting possibilities for English speakers here, I began Googling for all I was worth.  I located a few companies and their contact information and promptly sent out my desperate creative feelers into the great unknown that is expat theatre in the ROK (Republic of Korea).  I discovered the dates of a few auditions, but the first company to contact me directly was the Eurasia Shakespeare Theatre Company.  I scheduled an audition appointment in Seoul for a Saturday in mid-October, the same day that the U.S. Embassy was planning a voting event in which American citizens could easily cast their absentee ballots in the upcoming presidential election.  The timing couldn't be more perfect.

The Hubby and I arrived at the audition location early, as I was anxious about getting lost on the unmarked streets of Seoul.  A vast majority of the streets in Korea do not seem to have names posted on them.  Navigation can be dubious at best, even with a map.  It was clear that I was the first auditionee to appear, so I set to work, warming up and preparing myself as best I could.  It had been a few months since I had attended an audition at all, but I was confident it would be like riding a bike.  You just have to get right back up on that horse.  'Tis a far, far better thing.  And all that.  <insert your favorite aphorism here>.  I had realized the night before that I didn't even have a headshot to carry with me.  When I left the U.S., I didn't even think to pack any as I was sure they would prove to only take up much needed underwear space.  In spite of this insufficiency, which I hoped the director would not hold against me, given the circumstances, I tried to gather my courage, unsure of what to expect, and stepped through the theatre doors and into the dark rehearsal space when my name (or what kind of resembled the sound of my actual name; Ls and Rs are hard for Koreans to pronounce) was called.  The audition itself was similar to dozens of others I had undergone in America, right down to the apparent ambivalence of the director watching me.  I did a prepared monologue followed by a cold reading of one of Lady Macbeth's speeches, which the stage manager had handed me a few minutes before I was to go into the room.  I only took a moment to curse the fact that my well-worn Shakespeare lexicons were safely tucked away in a climate-controlled storage facility in Queens.  Smart phones, by the way, are excellent when it comes to deciphering Shakespeare in a pinch.

Afterwards, I wasn't really sure what to make of the experience.  I had done the best I could, staying in the present, using the language, trying to get something from my imaginary acting partner (Monologues are really stupid in my opinion.  When do you actually have to talk to someone that isn't there?...But I digress...).  After all was said and done, I collected the Hubby from the corner of the theatre's cafe where he was absorbed in another Cormack McCarthy novel, and we headed out to do our civic duty.  After voting, the rest of the day was spent in Seoul's shopping district where I tried my best to focus, albeit not entirely successfully, on all the distractions that an H&M, a Forever 21, and a Uniqlo in close proximity to each other could provide.  A couple of days later, almost certain that my little venture had been ill-fated, I flipped open my laptop to browse through the spam that filled my email.  There, I clicked on what looked like it might be a legitimate message as opposed to another attempt to win me over to the virtues of male enhancement.  I scanned the missive, my eyes alighting on the words "invite" and "offer" and "role of Lady Anne."  This did indeed appear to be an offer to play Lady Anne in the company's upcoming production of Richard III.  I squealed with delight as I flew into the next room to share my news with the Hubby.  I was to begin rehearsals in two days time, coming into rehearsal late, as they had already been meeting for a month.  My heart fluttered anxiously at the thought of having only one month to prepare to play one of my Shakespearean dream roles.  No matter!  I was in!

Two days later, I walked into the rehearsal room (I always have to come late to rehearsal since I live and work so far away from Seoul in comparison to the rest of the cast; 40 minutes one way on the bullet train (KTX) added to three subway stops with one transfer and a 5 minute walk as well as the 30 minutes it actually takes to get to the original train in the first place).  As I walked in, I could hear them already at work.  "But that couldn't be right," I thought to myself.  It sounded as if they were speaking not in English, but in Korean.  As I tried to inconspicuously make my way to an available chair (I say "tried" since an inconspicuous red-haired, Caucasian foreigner in Korea is in itself an oxymoron), it dawned on me that, yes, the cast was in fact speaking a Korean translation of Shakespeare's English play.  I swallowed and made eye contact with the only other foreigner in the room I could find.  She smiled back at me briefly and then went back to scanning her script, following along.  I sat there, trying to grasp what was going on.  The director did know I didn't speak Korean, right?  I mean, I hadn't auditioned in Korean.  I spoke English the whole time.  And he never asked me if I spoke Korean.  I told him I'd only been here a little over a month, didn't I?  Unsure what to think, I waited until the other actors paused in their reading.  The director acknowledged me and asked me to introduce myself, which I did. In English.  While everyone around me stared at me blankly, obviously not understanding a word I was saying.

After that, we took a small break, during which I sought out the other foreigners (there were in fact two American women in addition to me) and asked what exactly was happening.  Not to worry, they assured me. I would only be speaking in English.  What was different, though, was that the Korean actors would all be speaking in Korean.  Within the same scenes.  So, to put it as clearly as possible, in my most significant scene, I would be an English-speaking Anne who would be answered and addressed by a Korean-speaking Richard.  While my mind tried to wrap itself around the implications of this prospect, I could feel my heart begin to race, and I tried to remind myself of an adage I had adopted a couple of years ago.  "If it scares you, you should probably just do it."  And let me tell you, reader, it scared the be-geevers out of me!  To not know what the other person was saying!  That was crazy!  But at the same time, how challenging would that be!  To have to listen so closely to the other person's body, voice, eyes.  And not only that, but to have to communicate  what I was saying so effectively with my entire being that there could be not doubt as to what messages I was trying to convey.  I had not heard of anyone doing anything like this before, and the concept intrigued me.  I wanted to run far away from this weird thing they were asking me to be a part of, but another part of me that needed desperately to do what I love to do best formed a secure alliance with yet a different part of me, the part that thrives on seemingly impossible endeavors, and I knew I would just have to suck it up and try, come what may.  In the immortal words of one of my most beloved professors, "If you're gonna suck, suck big."  And let me tell you, friends, this whole thing might very well suck, but if it does, I'm gonna be the one left standing with the most air in her lungs.  That's my plan anyway.  We'll see what happens.

I think someone is about to be beheaded here.

Crazy Lady Anne's Ghost surfing backstage?  I don't know what shenanigans were happening. Notice no one is wearing shoes.  Difficult to rehearse Shakespeare in socks, but that's the Korean culture.  No shoes inside.  In this rehearsal space at least.

Studying the script with Queen Elizabeth, Clarence, and a Murderer

Stage combat rehearsal

The younger members of the cast get instruction on how to properly kneel by Lord Stanley / King Henry VI's Ghost