We began our second year work last week with the Nursery Rhymes, and with Bill Simmons filling in for Jolene while she is recovering. The purpose of the nursery rhyme exercise is to begin to play one action (or as Meisner calls it, “doing”) fully. In addition to our regular crafting, including the nerve, we must identify our “doing,” or as I understand it, the action or verb that we are playing. We can also add in an “as if,” which makes the doing more specific. For example, we could be pleading (the doing) AS IF our hair was on fire (particularization, or specificity).
The other concept introduced was paraphrasing, putting the text of the nursery rhyme in our own words which helps to reveal the “doing” (I’m struggling to use this term…”action” seems more clear to me. The action describes what I am doing. Semantics…). My first nursery rhyme was “If wishes were horses.” After paraphrasing the rhyme, and saying it out loud a few times, it started to sound like a conservative politician who was trying to shut down the idea of a liberal program. So I came up with the nerve “I must protect my wealth.” I was a conservative candidate for POTUS at a political rally and a left-wing activist just shouted “America needs Universal Healthcare.” My doing is to incite the crowd to attack the agitator, AS IF I had just been exposed for being a fraud. The hot who for the agitator was “communist rat,” and for the crowd it was “loyal troops (could have been a bit stronger – maybe soldiers willing to die for me?).” I have to say, I enjoyed this exercise. Feedback was positive, just needed to tweak a couple of things, for example, it wasn’t clear that I was trying to incite the crowd so I changed the AS IF to “I am a charismatic cult leader.”
This week we continued with our nursery rhymes, adding two more sets of circumstances. I admittedly didn’t work on the other two sets of circumstances as diligently as I could have, and it showed in some of my specificity. For example, my doings could have been stronger and more specific, and my reason for doing (the emotional color) could have also been stronger and more specific. In short, the stakes for both sets of circumstances could have been heightened. I’ll review my next rhyme and circumstances and make some tweaks based on that feedback.
A note on Bill as a teacher – he clearly knows his stuff, and is able to convey the practicality of WHY we are working on this by providing examples from different plays and showing how by changing circumstances the focus of the play or character changes. I will say that sometimes he gets caught up in his tangential stories and we lose class time. It’s just interesting hearing the information filtered through a different lens.