I got to have a really phenomenal experience today, and I want to share it, because I'm pretty sure I won't ever really have this kind of opportunity ever again.That is the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut, the summer home and only real home the young Eugene O'Neill had while growing up. We took a college field trip there today since all my Acting 2 class does is O'Neill scenes and it was somehow relevant. New London happens to be right next to my hometown, so I know this area quite well and have been to the cottage before, so it wasn't really super special to me, but it's always neat when history becomes just a little more real.
We got an off-season tour of the house, got to explore a bit and look at things, try and imagine living there with a family like the one described in Long Day's Journey Into Night. The banister of the stairs has initials carved into it, and the curators believe that it was Jamie who etched his mother's initials into the wood, a faint but very readable "M.E." for Mary Ellen.
The view out the front windows is basically the same as it would have been for O'Neill way back when - instead of a street and the houses on the opposite side and the buildings across the river, it would have been grass straight down to the beach of the river, and nothing but trees across the water. A lot of the house is now museum-esque, with two mannequins in the front with original costume pieces from productions of LDJIN, including one worn by Collene Dewhurst in 1988.
The photo to the right is the living room where LDJIN takes place, and where I got to perform a scene from that play this afternoon. Many a famous stage performer has done character work in that house, and there are videos of actors like Collene Dewhurst and James Robards doing scenework in that very room. That room is where O'Neill's childhood is embodied, and there is a very, very strange energy in that room. It's dark and small and cluttered, and the windows stare straight out onto the river. I was sitting in the wicker chair on the far side of the table at the start of the scene.
None of the furniture is original, of course, but there are still memories and lifetimes of emotions trapped in the house, especially that room. I felt it trying to rehearse. I got this chill that I couldn't shake, this uneasy feeling that made me want to get out and forget about the whole thing. The feeling never truly went away. I kept trying to get myself mentally in the state of mind I needed to be in to perform that scene (which is somewhere dark and loathing and lonely), but as I became more vulnerable, the wierder I felt about being in that house, until finally we had to just perform it.
I had this fear in the back of my mind that if I did poorly, the ghost of Mary was going to haunt my ass until the day I died - I had to do justice to her. She was real, I was in her house, not on a stage. This was her home, though she hated it and never called it her home, it was her only home with her family. This house was this play. I was sitting in a wicker chair in that room with my classmates scattered in the doorways and in the corners of the room, their eyes flickering from me and Meg to the mannequin in the corner to the pictures on the wall and the light reflecting in hollow squares off of the windows. I was terrified of forgetting my lines, of doing worse than the first time I performed, of looking like a silly theatre student in front of the curator, of being a pathetic Mary Tyrone in her own home, of failing to fill the shoes of so many gifted, heavyweight actresses who had tread the floors before me looking for character, so scared I almost froze - then I looked out the windows and started talking.
I don't remember much, I was so nervous. I remember saying lines (not anything specific, though), I remember moving, I remember continually looking out the windows and seeing nothing but the night slowly drawing in around the river and the yard, I remember a few actions, but nothing is solid and I really have no idea what I even did. I didn't feel like I was even trying to do anything, and I thought it was a really shitty performance until people started praising me. I still don't even know what happened. Did I channel something, did I just find something inside? I don't know. I really, really don't.
But the fact that I got to be Mary Tyrone in her house was so unreal and incredible - I don't think I ever really want to do that again, it was so creepy, but it was absolutely amazing and I'm incredibly grateful to have had that experience. Gives me a new appreciation for character work and O'Neill's writing.
Next up - off book for my one act.
