To England, Hamlet

Frances departs for England today. I will be taking her to the airport this evening, and we'll have dinner together before she departs. I made her a small token for her to take with her, a little gift I've had in mind for some time now. This will totally ruin the surprise is she sees this before I see her today, but whatever. It's a photo collage of her in my shows and me in hers around a shot of us together out of costume. It has her as Hamlet and Andromeda-- I love how different she looks between the two --and me as Cordelia and the Fool-- I love how different I look between the two --as well as us arm in arm in a picture taken right after Lear.

I learned so much about acting and directing from observing and working with her. Her method of acting was always so fascinating to me, and I think I learned my most valuable directing skill, that of deconstructing and quanitfying what an actor is doing onstage, in the process of trying to figure out what made her performances work and how she built them. When I directed her as Hamlet I fell in love with her physicality and wanted to use it to convey how strange, restless, and dangerous the character had become. She was so much more imposing and effective because of the way the character was invested in her body and in her every movement.

Since then I have worked to integrate her style into my own performances. She is such an expressive, wide-ranging physical actor extended by the fact that she is so strong and flexible, and by watching her I've learned a lot about how to bring my body into my acting. We were cast as twin brothers in A Comedy of Errors, so I did my best to sort of "match" her, be compatible with her portrayal if not necessarily imitate her. Since those were highly comedic characters, we just kind of went for the same sort of exaggerated, slightly spastic silliness, and I think it worked. In King Lear she cast me as the Fool, which is very clearly the Frances-type role in the show, and that time I pretty directly channeled her style. The Fool's strange body positions were directly inspired by her, and the ceaseless moving energy was extrapolated from there. This prepared me for playing Puck, easily my most physically demanding role to date, where I would have to move as inhumanly as possible and would achieve the best effect the stranger and more contorted I looked. Studying and working with her has taught me so much about physical acting, and I know I am way better at it now because I had the chance to learn from her.