Louisville Magazine

DEC 2015

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.15 87 THE ARTS Seasoned for the Stage By Mary Chellis Austin/ Photo by Mickie Winters "Te question is: Was a 400-word essay on our character due today?" a woman asks. A group of eight men and women between the ages of 63 and 80 are sitting in a circle of foldout chairs in a rec room at St John's Church, at the corner of East Market and Clay streets in NuLu. It's late October, and the students are in their fourth Acting Over 50 class. Te woman is asking instructor Kerk Fisher if an essay was due today. "Tis is so funny," Fisher says to me. "Tese people are 60 years old and they're re- verting back to, I don't know, grade school?" Troughout the month, the group has met twice a week for two-and-a-half hours at a time. Tey have worked on 10 or so lines of dialogue that have no characterization or situation. Once they clear up the "missing" essay, they go over what they took away from last week's class, when they worked on a few dramatic scenes about marital issues and a turbulent mother-daughter relationship. "Once you do one of these scenes, you need to process to get rid of those emotions or you take them home with you," says Jim Boswell, a large man with a deep voice in a green wool sweater. "I really was projecting on my wife. I had these feelings of separate- ness and being hurt, and so I was taking everything she was doing very personally. All my antennae were out. I had to sit down and talk to her the next morning. Now I know I need to sit and spend a little time with myself and understand who I am before I get engaged back in life. I was really embedded in that character." "I'm a tremendous idealist in terms of what I think theater does and how it works," says Fisher, a thin, energetic 67-year-old. When he speaks, he carefully seems to select each word and say it with enormous enthusiasm. When he got onstage in high school, the frst applause got him hooked on acting. "People who think about trying out acting probably want to touch people and move people the way they've been touched in movies," he says. Fisher grew up on the East Coast and worked in theater in Philadelphia for a while before coming to Louisville in the late '80s to work at what was then Jeferson Community College, now Jeferson Com- munity and Technical College, and U of L. "Tis," he says, "is my frst time teaching this kind of group. I thought, Can we get to this level in four weeks? Tis age group moves more quickly. Tey're eloquent about their lives." He and Juergen Tossman, the producing artistic director at Bunbury Teatre Co., got together to organize this pilot class, with plans to ofer more classes for this age group this winter. Tey considered making the class for ages 60 and up, decided to open it to 50 and up, and then only got those above 60 anyway. "Fifty's too young," Boswell says. "Yeah, 50 is too young," a student agrees. "Fifty-year-olds are what 40-year-olds were when we were growing up." "Tey haven't gotten to the refective stage yet." Most of the people in the group are new to acting. "Well, I do Santa Claus," says Boswell, a retired school administrator. "Oh, I've done Mrs. Claus," another student says. "Tose of us that have acted were doing it as the ingénues and times have changed," says Linda Tuley, a retired teacher. "Older actresses and actors are now getting those prime parts in movies, whereas, when I was in my 40s and 50s, you didn't see older actors getting good jobs; they'd just retire. (Productions) would make someone look old with makeup." "Te guy who wrote Te King's Speech (David Seidler) was, what — 76, 77? And he won an Oscar," says Sharon Sullivan, who is currently a nurse. "I think that's been very encouraging to say, well, you're still out there and you still got stuf, and you look back and think, how awful not to have all the experi- ences to draw from." After group discussion, one pair gets up to perform a scene using the contentless dialogue they had learned: "Hi." "Hello." "How are things?" "Fine." And so on. "Te fear of never being able to memorize all these lines was paramount," Fisher says. "We memorized them but made it so it doesn't really matter if they remember them at all. In fact, not remembering them means that they're doing more of the most important work, which is being with each other and doing the scene." Boswell stands beside Sullivan, a petite woman in sweatpants, and Fisher gives them a situation to apply to the dialogue. "You're married," he says to Sullivan. "And for some reason you ended up going to a doctor and you found out you have an advanced stage of HIV, possibly AIDS. You just found out. And the only thing you can think of is it's your husband." "No shit, Sherlock," she says. Te actors discuss how their characters are feeling, what kind of day each of them has had. Ten they deliver the lines. Fisher has them do it again. And again, until she comes of as enraged while Boswell's char- acter seems more or less oblivious. Te group splits into pairs, each to work on a diferent set of dialogue. Boswell's character is an old man in a nursing home while his partner, Mike Blair, is playing his son, who seldom has time to visit because his wife has cancer. Tey do the scene for Fisher. "How does that make you feel?" Fisher asks Boswell. "Angry." "Yeah, so let it out! I want to see how utterly frustrating this is. When you throw that blanket of, throw it of with such force that you fall out of the chair. Don't be safe anymore. Let it go." Te men do the scene again and this time it's more believ- able than before. "I've always wanted to be an actor, and life never allowed me to do that," Boswell says. "I'm fairly dramatic, but I thought acting was about lines and words. I have learned to be more attentive to the person you're with and to listen, feel, concentrate on them. In my last part of my life, all I want to do is be more loving and caring for my family and friends, and this class fts right into that. It allows me to pay atten- tion to them and to be aware of their emo- tions and support them. And be entertain- ing. Granddads love to be entertaining." Mature roles aren't a problem for these acting novices.

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