For the last few weeks I've been spending most of my evenings investigating a possible murder at Ravenscroft Manor. Rehearsing the investigation, at least. Starting on Friday, November 16, I'll be doing the male "lead" (there's only one male part, so it's sort of lead by default) in the Don Nigro play Ravenscroft at the Little Theatre off Broadway, in Grove City, Ohio. I'm having a ball, frankly, especially considering I didn't really expect to get the part, which really calls for a somewhat younger man.
This was one of those cases where you go to the auditions with the expectation of getting nothing, but you figure they're doing something else where you'll fit in nicely not too far in the future and you can at least be seen and maybe when those auditions come up someone will remember what you did this time and it might help. Of course, when the director called and said, "I'd like you to do the part," I jumped at it, even knowing ahead of time that it came with virtually zero off-stage time and a couple hundred more lines than Shakespeare gave to Hamlet. After all, I get to dress up in Edwardian clothing, put on an English accent, and there are even one or two places where a little intentional overacting fits in nicely.
Don't let anyone kid you, actors like to overact if there's a good reason for it. Most often there isn't, but once in a while that sort of thing just fits in with the plot and you get to ham it up. Actors like to do accents, too, as long as they're confident they can get away with them. I do, admittedly, subscribe to the John Hillerman philosophy of British accents, which he once suggested was to develop something that will sound as authentic as possible to an American audience, while also recognizing that it's rather unlikely you'd ever convince an actual Brit. Hillerman supposedly based his Magnum, P.I. Higgins accent on Olivier; mine tends more toward an approximation of the received pronunciation with maybe a little Burton influence.
The photo with this blog post is almost, but not quite, what I'll look like as Inspector Ruffing. The clothes are right, but the glasses are much too modern and they'll stay in the dressing room. That makes getting the blocking just right extremely important, because without the glasses I may have a little trouble telling just who I'm talking to at any given moment. As far as I know, Lasik really doesn't do that much for presbyopia.
The clothes, by the way, came out of my closet, though this show did give me a good excuse to pick up a pair of two-tone "spat" boots. This should not be construed as suggesting that I've ever even heard the word "Steampunk," and I obviously know nothing whatever of what happens at cons of any sort, goings on at a certain fictional Baker Street flat, or anything remotely resembling that sort of thing. That the outfit might be considered appropriate for a certain slightly nefarious late-Victorian professor of mathematics is entirely coincidental.
Yeah, sure.
This is really going to be a lot of fun, so I'm going to encourage anyone who follows this blog, or keeps up with my life on Facebook and happens to be in the area when the play is running, to come out and see it.
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