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."