Published on Wednesday June 30, 2004 .
With two weeks left in the program, I am almost done with my training. Tom has said we are close to finishing our scene from “She Stoops to Conquer” but now we just need to have fun, relax and own our parts. Technically everything is in place with a few adjustments but he says that my performance still looks more like a “performance” and needs to be more relaxed, spontaneous and organic. I need to go back to my first year training of really listening and reacting to my partner.
As for the beta-blockers I have been taking for my excessive sweating/stage fright, it didn’t really work. Even though my scene is very physically demanding it does not justify the amount of sweat I’m having. I think I sweat more during this scene than I do when heavy lifting in the gym! So I think I need to address my relaxation on stage.
Published on Friday August 22, 2003 .
I was talking to Heather after class on Wed trying to decide what impediment I should try for Sat class. My first thought was to try acting out a short-term memory loss type of condition. After watching the movie Finding Nemo I thought that this might be an interesting condition to try. Heather instead convinced me to research germ phobia since she thought I could draw from my family growing up. Although no one in my family really had an OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) or any real serious germ phobia, my father always put an emphasis on cleanliness. This possibly stemmed from his many years working in research labs. Anyway, my research turned up interesting information on Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla who both had eccentric personalities and habits due to OCD and germ phobia. I also found information on the TV series Monk (which is supposedly very good), and the movie As Good As It Gets which both deal with charcters who have OCD and germ phobia.