The rehearsals for Cannibals, the play I am now doing, are well on their way. Things are starting to come alive. The first few rehearsals, for me, when I am getting the words in my mouth, trying to make them sound like they come from my own brain and not off a piece of paper, are always challenging. I go through it every single time I do a play. I feel like I am under water. I feel like a big phony. I feel like I am miscast. I feel like nobody else in the cast feels as I do. I feel like everyone has been lying to me all these years, and that I actually am a very bad actress.
I have been through this phase so many times now that I now accept it as a natural part of my process. And it never lasts long. I will find a way to make it work. I trust that now. But for a long time, when I was a younger woman, my swirling doubts and private angst seemed completely real to me … I believed all of it.
Now I just say to myself: “Ah yes, I am going through THAT phase right now…Today is Wednesday … it should be over by Friday.”
And lo and behold, I am always right.
Cannibals is a lovely piece of writing. It lends itself to actors. It is dramatic, it is funny, it is complex … The playwright, Lesley Scammell, writes in her own style, and I know that comparisons are odious, but her writing reminds me of Harold Pinter’s writing. She writes in the “pauses”, just like Pinter does. Pinter wants to make sure that the actors (and the director) slow the damn thing down, and honor the pauses he has written … treating the pauses like they are another line of dialogue. This is why when Pinter is done and done well, you, as an audience member, are filled with a sense of tension, of things unsaid, of … at times … violence beneath the well-polished English surface.
I’m pissed off at Harold Pinter right now, but my anger at his political beliefs does not take away from the fact that The Dumb Waiter is one of my favorite plays. I have worked on it numerous times, and I have never had so much fun.
In Cannibals I play Mary Agnes, a girl from the west of Ireland. It is not specified which county but I imagine it as County Mayo. Real country Ireland. Isolated. I have gone off to university (again, it is not specified … but I imagine that I am going to UCD in Dublin … because I want to get the hell out of dodge.) And I am playing a very bitter very caustic very single young woman.
This role is going to be a real stretch for me.
