So Bea’s husband dies, and there is nothing to keep Bea and Jorgy apart any longer.  Do they move in together?

“Yes” would be the obvious, predictable answer.  So let’s examine the possibility of “No.”  (Did you notice how many times I used the word “perhaps” in the last post?  I’m not making any decisions; I am merely floating possibilities – and believe me, I am also considering all possibilities that are diametrically opposed to the ones I am presenting here.)

At the moment, I am inclined to say, “No.”  I wonder if part of Kate’s anger is because she feels that Jorgy has taken advantage of Bea and also that Bea has let him.  Kate says, “He loses this company, he walks away with millions.  You walk away with memories.”  This says to me that Jorgy and Bea have not married; Kate does not feel that Jorgy has offered Bea any sort of financial protection, and certainly a marriage would provide that.  She clearly doesn’t know about the $1 million trust fund Jorgy has set up for Bea, which while a nice security blanket, is still but a fraction of the $30 million he reaps at the end of the play.

Even if they didn’t marry, living together would probably imply, to Kate, that Bea would be taken care of by Jorgy, if only in a bequest from his will.  Without that, and without assurances from Bea that she has seen the will or has a trust fund, Kate has every reason to believe that Jorgy has been shtupping her mother for decades and that Bea has nothing to show for it but “memories”.

Okay, so I’ve got a textual reason for believing that they aren’t living together; now let’s try to understand the motivation behind it.

Let’s say Bea’s husband died 3 to 5 years ago.  Kate’s feelings are still very raw on the subject, and while there are people who can hold such grudges for many years, let’s say that Kate’s are still pretty fresh.  So let’s say 3 years.

Jorgy and Bea were in love for 34 years before they were both single and could do something about it.  Yes, it’s romantic to want the happy ending for them, and they undoubtedly talked about it after the funeral.  But perhaps Bea didn’t want to give up her house, and neither did Jorgy.  He’s a man of strong opinions and probably not overly fond of change.  At 65, maybe he was accustomed to his house and didn’t want to leave it, and Bea didn’t want to live in Fay’s house.  Or maybe she just didn’t want to leave her own, which has so many memories for her.  They’d had 34 years to get accustomed to living apart; maybe they decided that beginning a physical relationship didn’t mean they had to share the same bed every night.

I’m not committed to this explanation, but I’m leaning toward it, and here’s why:

If I (Bea) have no safety net, then offering Garfinkle my million dollar trust fund becomes a greater sacrifice.  Remember when I talked about raising the stakes for your character?

If we are living together, then I might have reason to believe that Jorgy will take care of me even if I give away the money.  Without that, I may not be sure of what he will do.  I might THINK he will replace it, but I don’t know.  That bit of uncertainty increases my stakes.

But whether we are living together or not, Jorgy might see what I do as a betrayal and reject me entirely.  If that’s the case, then we could be living together.  If he rejects me on principle, then I am without a home (if I moved into his) as well as without him, and no nest egg for my retirement.

Of course, the trust fund would have been set up while my husband was still alive, Jorgy’s way of taking care of me when he had no other way to do so.  So he certainly might replace it after the sting of buying Garfinkle out passes.  But he is a man of inflexible principle – I might very well be uncertain of what his reaction would be, and so in offering Garfinkle the million dollars to save 1,000 jobs, I am risking not just the money and the security it offers, but my relationship with Jorgy as well.

Them’s high stakes!

Where does this leave me in terms of our living together?  Apparently it doesn’t matter, from a stakes point of view, whether we are living together or not, because the stakes are as high as they can be either way.  I am left with the textual reason related to Kate’s understanding of our relationship, which is pretty compelling, although it is more meaningful to her.  Nevertheless, I think it does impact one speech I make to her, so I think I’ll stick with the idea that we live apart, but spend most, if not all, of our nights together, sometimes in his house, sometimes in mine.  I can’t see me giving up my home – “home” is too important to me – but I can’t see Jorgy wanting to change old habits, either.

Did you notice that somewhere in this post, I stopped talking about Bea in the third person and began speaking of her in the first person?  As I think I mentioned in the posts about talking about your character in the first person, I am inclined to speak about her as “Bea” when I am being analytical – that’s an intellectual exercise for me, and I look at her from the outside.  Once I start to get close to the emotional life of the character, however, I automatically flip into first person speak.  It’s sort of like trying on a character’s feelings, so see how they sit with me, but more than that, it’s about taking ownership of those feelings.  Bea isn’t someone “out there” – she has to live inside of me if she is to breathe.

So what clues does the script provide to answer the question, “Are Jorgy and Bea living together?”

They’ve known each other for 37 years.  He was 31 when they met.  She is 5-6 years younger than he is, so she was mid-20s at their meeting.

Bea married at 19, so she was married the day she walked into the office and met “the most beautiful, scared young man I had ever seen”.  Jorgy tells a story about his deceased wife, and given the times, it is likely that he was also married when he met Bea.  It also seems clear that they remained in their marriages until their spouses died.  Jorgy’s wife died 13 years ago, at which time, says Bea’s daughter, Kate, “you almost moved in.”

Those are four very loaded words.  They hide more than they reveal, which is the mark of good writing.  The playwright provides no definitive answers to the nature of Jorgy and Bea’s relationship, which leaves it up to the actors to choose their own “answers”.  However, it is almost more important to ask questions than it is to “decide” anything.  Decisions can be so limiting, and people are rarely so one-dimensional as the characters decisions we are inclined to make.  Asking questions allows our subconscious to do clever things with the input.

So what questions should we be asking?

When Jorgy’s wife, Fay, died, who brought up the idea of Bea moving in, Jorgy or Bea?  What was that conversation like?  How soon did it happen after the funeral?

Bea talks about living a life full of “rumors and gossip and sideways glances”; how much of her relationship with Jorgy was guessed at, and how much was actually known by others in the town?  When Kate says Bea almost moved in with Jorgy, how does she know that?  Kate was out of college at the time and probably no longer living in Rhode Island; did Bea discuss it with her on the phone?  Did Kate’s father tell her about it?  Or did she just hear the rumors?

As for the rumors, how did they start?  What did Bea and Jorgy do that made the rumors start?  How did they fuel them over the years?  And why were they simply rumors, gossip, and sideways glances?  Because there is nothing in the dialogue that indicates that there was anything more than that – that Bea and Jorgy were enjoying a little afternoon delight in a hotel in a neighboring town, or going off on weekends together, or that Bea was spending the night at Jorgy’s after Fay died but before Bea’s husband did.

Which raises another question:  Bea and Jorgy love each other – they frankly acknowledge that.  But was that love ever consummated, and if it was, when?  In their early days together?  A decade later, when both were still married?  Perhaps not until after Fay died?  Or after Bea’s husband died?  Or perhaps never at all?

Next time, I’ll walk you through where these questions lead me.

I am currently rehearsing Other People’s Money, playing Bea Sullivan, the lawyer’s mother.  Bea is a small, but very good, role – it allows an actress to go to a number of different places.  Even when I was younger and coveting the role of the attorney, I appreciated that Bea has some very good moments.  I generally choose my parts pretty carefully, and one of the reasons I choose to do a role is when there are two or three lines I just need to say, or moments I want to be part of.  I’ll sign on to do two months of work and another of performance just for that sum total of 60 seconds.  Crazy, right?

Anyway, Bea is one of those roles.

In this instance, the size of the role is a real benefit for the blog, because it will allow me to comprehensively talk about a character without taking 20 posts to do it.  (I think.  If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll know that I seem to have a lot more to say than I thought I did when I started it.)

I’m not going to try to put much structure to this, but to talk about things more or less as they occur to me, in the rather circular way in which my mind works when I work on a character.

If you aren’t familiar with the play, I suggest reading it.  It’s a well-constructed piece, with five interesting characters.  All could be played two-dimensionally, and you could get away with it.  And if you don’t have a lot of technique, that’s probably what you’d do with them; their layers aren’t particularly obvious.  Dig a little, however, and you’ll find characters rife with inner conflict and contradictions.

Besides, you’ll get more out of these posts if you do read it!

If you don’t know the play, here’s a quick synopsis.  Jorgy is chairman of a wire & cable business in Rhode Island – he’s run the place for decades.  A Wall Street investor, Garfinkle, thinks the stock is undervalued and starts buying it, with the ultimate goal of selling the parts and making a bundle, while shutting down the core wire & cable business, putting 1200 people out of work.  Other People’s Money is about what happens in this “war”.

Jorgy is in love with Bea, his assistant/secretary for 37 years.  When they met, they were both married, and they remained married until their spouses’ respective deaths.  Nevertheless, they were in love for most (all?) of those years, and others took note of the fact.  Bea’s daughter, now a successful attorney for Morgan, Stanley, is deeply resentful of their relationship.

One of the reasons that Other People’s Money is a good play is that it gives you sufficient information about the characters to tantalize you and make you want to know more without weighing the play down with clumsy exposition.  You know enough about them to make the play work, but the playwright, Jerry Sterner, doesn’t satisfy every curiosity – he leaves room for the audience to fill in the gaps as they like.  Different people will likely answer the questions the play raises differently – always the sign of good writing.

So at our first read-through, the actor playing Jorgy, my love interest, asked me this question:  “Are we living together?”

Interesting question, and one I hadn’t considered.  In the many times I’ve read the play over the years, I’ve assumed the answer was “yes”.  But, of course, I wasn’t doing the play and so didn’t need to really think about it.  I glibly answered, “Oh yes, I think so,” but as usually happens when I come out with a glib response to just about anything, I went home and thought about it.  Why did I respond that way, and was it justified?

What happened next is too long to finish in this post, so I’ll write another.  In the meantime, get a copy of the script and read . . .  (It was made into a movie, but how much of the movie contains the meat of the story about Bea, I don’t remember.  But I suspect the answer is, “Not much.”)

Plays are always about dramatic moments.  The most dramatic moments possible.

I’ve said this in a variety of ways in other posts, but it bears repeating again and again.

The most dramatic moments possible.

One person’s life only contains a few stories dramatic enough to make a play out of them.  Stories where there is so much at stake for me, where what I want is so difficult to get that it seems that I’ll never achieve it, and where the experience changes who I am in some important and fundamental way.

These three elements are the foundation of most traditional drama.  Not only does it require dramatic import of this magnitude to make the evening interesting enough that we’ll leave the couch and go the theater, but it feeds the thing that makes theater meaningful in the first place.  That is, it teaches us something about the human experience that we can learn in no other way.

Without that, I’d rather stay home and wash the dogs.

Not everyone’s coming-of-age story is dramatically interesting.  Not every love affair is a boy meets girls/boy loses girl/boy gets girl story that keeps us riveted and hoping for happily ever after.  Since most of us resist learning Life’s Big Lessons, most disputes we have in our lifetime will not leave us changed people.

To find your own dramatic stories (if you are in the first half of your life, you might need to look for the dramatic story of someone you are very close to), look for the experiences that have irrevocably changed who you are and how you view the world or your own situation.  If you really changed on some deep level, it is likely that there was considerable struggle, both internal and external, that led to that change.  And if there was struggle, it undoubtedly meant there was a lot at stake for you in it.

If you can find such a story in your life or in a close relative or friend’s life, then you are closer to understanding what makes for more dramatic choices as an actor.

Despite these dramatic essentials, however, most actors I work with will underplay what is going on in a scene.  “Most” for the simple reason that most actors are “under-actors”, not “over-actors”.  Under-actors can make molehills out of mountains with very little effort.  Sort of like boiling a chicken until all of the flavor is out of the meat and into the broth, and then serving the breast for dinner and tossing the soup.

(Over-actors make the Appalachians into Mt. Everest.  That’s not good, either, but it’s a different problem.)

Why do we do this?

Perhaps because we don’t like to feel our feelings.  Downplaying them is the easiest way to avoid them.  If we do it regularly in real life (“Oh, that’s all right.”  “Bothered?  I’m not bothered.  Really.”  “It doesn’t matter.”), then we’re apt to do it on stage as well.

Darn!  We’re back to the old feeling our feelings problem!

Yup, it’ll keep coming up until you overcome it.  Our Ego, which is the thing busily avoiding our feelings, will find every trick in the book to avoid them.  We have to catch it in the act and remove its disguise.

So when you look at your character’s emotions, ask yourself if you’ve chosen a really strong emotion or not.  If you look at her needs, ask if the need is overwhelming.  Depending on who your character is, there may or may not be an earthshaking change in her by the end of the play, but if there is, you can work backwards to get to the emotions and the needs in the same way that you did when looking at the most dramatic story of your own life.

If you haven’t chosen the most dramatic reasons available to you given the context of the play as written by the playwright, then you are shortchanging both your own acting and the audience.  So keep going back to the drawing board until you are sure you can’t improve the dramatic elements any more.

I’ll talk more about this when I write some posts on Storytelling and “What Would Lucy Do?”