Masha

Unfortunately I have the annoying habit of letting characters I play pervade into the rest of my life. When I was in Marat/Sade, playing a patient in the asylum, I would have to do yoga after every performance just to get back into reality. When I played Thyona in Big Love, I lifted weights and became very bitchy in my personal life. Playing Masha has similar problems. Her melancholy seeps into my life like a leaking pen. Lines in the play, such as "I am in mourning for my life" or "My life drags behind me endlessly like an unraveling scarf," come into my head throughout my day. They are unwanted. I don't want to be a love-starved depressed alchoholic!

But I do the work. And try to maintain some distance, but not too much. I partially enjoy the pleasure of losing myself in the role- enough so that I feel like Masha sometimes even when I am not acting. I know some actors- including the great Stanislavski, would say that is a big no-no, but that is how I do it. I act in juicy parts like this so rarely that I have to relish in it.

In the particular production that I'm doing right now, I have the added challenge, besides playing the part, of also playing the part while someone else is playing it on the other side of the stage. This causes some difficulty, as concessions need to be made about timing and such. But the cast from the other side have been really fantastic, and are great about negotiating what will work best.

We're working on having everything sync up together, and at the same time I still have to do the work of realizing this character of Masha. I pretty much have used method acting in my process, using substitutions from my own life to fit the circumstances of the play. Maybe that's why I have such a hard time separating theatre from reality. But I've found that drawing on my personal experience for a role is the most effective way to create believable actions on stage. At least for a realistic play. And even though the sum total of two casts performing Seagull will be not realism at all, the fact is that the side that I'm on is definitely doing the play as naturalistically as possible.

In any case, I'm really enjoying playing Masha. I'm really going to miss her, if she ever leaves me.