Asher Lev II: Finding Asher

Every actor has a different process for learning their lines.  I alone have a few different styles which I use depending on what I have to learn.  

If it is quick dialogue, short responses, I usually just work on memorization and then I move to playing with my fellow actor to get the beat/rhythm of the dialogue.

If it is longer dialogue, full sentences, conversations etc. I tend to learn it in sections.  Reading mostly but still heavy on the "line drill".  Again working with fellow actors to get rhythm.

For solo shows, I am constantly running it with my director and tying the movements to blocking.  Thus the lines start to fall into place before I think of memorization/learning.

For Asher Lev, I have monologue after monologue.  Quite extensive, most of the play is me talking.  I was unsure how to approach this much solo work, as the other actors are on stage and integral to the scenes, so the director can not focus with me as in a one man show. I thought about it for a few days and decided to try something new.  I would simply read and read and read some more.  Constantly reading this play.

Well as I moved to line drill I realized most of my lines were in a great place and ready to go.  I found something new, or found it again as I had forgotten it, the more you read a piece, the deeper the understanding gets.  With this in mind, I began reading even more frequently.  In doing so I am finding Asher Lev as a person, which makes it easier for me to move him out of my head and onto the stage.  It is an interesting process delving into a character this way, one that I am enjoying.

Asher Lev I

Yesterday was the first day of rehearsal.  We joked about the monologue which is the play called Asher Lev, interrupted occasionally by the other characters.  Upon reading it with the other two actors, and hearing my own voice, continuously, it is...overwhelming. There is a lot of monologue, broken by some dialogue, and the challenge of learning it all is, at the least, daunting, at the best foreboding.  However, it is a task I know I can face and overcome.

I say learn, not memorize.  For in memorizing something, it removes it's heart and soul. To memorize another human may look good, but it would never have the soul of that person.  A play is, in its own way, a living breathing, entity.  Thus to memorize it would remove that which makes it move, breathe, beat, and show its flame...its scream to get out and be told.  So I must learn this play.  If I am to do it justice, and justice is the only thing that will do it well.

As I read it, time and time again, I am haunted by the words, "conduits of the story".  They don't leave me.  They come at me without warning while I walk, talk, move, and exist in every aspect of my life.  So as I read, I think more and more on the idea of what is this story?  It sings in me, I feel it, sense it as truth, but how do I say it? Tell it? Give it life? Make it true, so that you the audience will feel and understand it? For I want you all to feel and understand, to get that meaning of what it is to find your own voice against all odds, against the challenges that are so great they could kill you.  It is a universal theme, which my life, my art has touched on many times.  Never in so graceful a manor as Asher Lev.

And so I work to learn the words of the playwright, translated from the author, given to a character and brought to life by me: the conduit of the story. At best frightening.  But as I read, I am discovering a lilt, a song to his voice, one that is touched by pain and anguish for the trials and tribulations that make him the artist he is.  That I am.  I understand that pain.  No, maybe not at the cost he has felt, it is after all a play, and we do not go to plays to see the ordinary, but rather, the extraordinary.  So I have felt that pain, and I understand that lilt.  It is interesting to how the lilt changes at different points in the story, how it does not exist, but manifests itself in other tones.  Tones that hint at its coming, the growth of, the life of the character.  It is interesting to start the play, as the character, knowing the outcome. It is interesting, as the actor, to find the character's growth and discover something new about that which he already knows.  

The teachings of my teacher, mentor, friend, supporter, come to mind and I think it will be good to talk to her.  This is deep, it is wonderful, it is a "challenge!".  I have lived my whole life for this, this moment to be nothing more than "the conduit of the story."