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Cayle Chernin Blog
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Two Weeks In Another Town: playing a Jewish writer who exists in another Time - 1990’s and Place - New York and Space: the Tarragon Extra.
Living on stage in the Play, acting out ‘the story of Ruth’, once a day and twice on Wednesday and Saturday –:6 scenes spread over 6 years and 13 performances.
Theatre is ‘day for night’...it turns the world around, even given matinee days or other interventions, it becomes the time of day most important, most alive, and I prefer Night-time to Day.
From: Review of Collected Stories in NOW MAGAZINE:
"...it's refreshing to see such a true and impassioned portrayal of writers, as well as the real questions that plague them."
April 23rd, first read through of the play COLLECTED STORIES for Director and Crew.
June 5th: I’M BACK HOME. I don’t live at Ruth’s any more, Good bye N.Y. C. Hello Toronto. And as fabulous as it was, and I wish it wasn’t over, it’s always good to be home..a fire in its place, popcorn, TV, Lucky the Laptop who needs to plug in, as do I, to recharge.
A GOOD ACTING EXPERIENCE - meeting of minds and hearts, of talent and desire to communicate, of figuring out human behaviour in the context of a well written ‘true’ work such as Donald Marguelis’ Collected Stories which I have just has the privilege and consummate pleasure of exploring with a brilliantly talented, beautiful, kind, lovely young actress: Erin MacKinnon and another great beauty: Sasha Wentges, director, who steered us through the swirling waters of Ruth and Lisa, who never skirted the issues, who was 8+ months pregnant, proving my theory, that if you want to get something done, hire a pregnant women, this applies in the Arts anyway..! I don’t know if it’s ‘artistic sensibility or a pregnant thing’
i have worked with 3 pregnant directors over the past few years, and they’ve been amazingly marvelous, resolute, resilient, knowing what they want, full of ‘life’….
Myself, like Ruth, the person who’s life I have been inhabiting for the past two months, I have no dependants .. i so enjoyed having most days free to prepare and have always enjoyed being left to my own devices..
(It was weird that we couldn’t get into the Theatre til an hour+ the half hour..had to leave for the dinner hour on tech, first prevue and matinee days..Tarragon Extra Space..like Malabar’s, not so ‘actor-friendly’?)
‘the acting experience’ is like NONE OTHER, because the work of acting, emoting, of expressing the story, an inter-play of life and fiction, of fact and imagination and of being as my cousin David would say: “a clog (sic) in the wheel” is a dramatic exploration.
Spiritual studies tell us ‘the Secret’ : You are what you think and I’ve been thinking Ruth Steiner’s life since we began.
I resurface Monday morning the day after the final performance – the final inhabiting of Ruth’s New York ‘digs’ with Sasha’s furniture and my ‘chotsch-cas’ (sp?) and Akiva’s excellent concept of Delmore Schwartz’ words surrounding us..walls of words on paper, fluttering. To know where you are, to be cogniscent of what’s happening around you, awake and alert, to have everything asked of you..to test stamina, and excite imagination. To thrive!
I come up for air..i stop running Ruth’s thoughts and my lines through my brain on a regular basis, stop vibrating with Ruth’s passion and distortions. I pick up Saul Bellow’s ‘Humbolt’s Gift’ bookmarked at half way, and trudge on still looking for clues about Delmore Schwartz..for me a combination of the first love: Eli Rill, the other loves and Dwight who knows everything about acting explains, that I’m caught in ‘the interregnum”..
I am such a positive child, that I insist I’m not ‘grieving’ the run. But feel very non specifically sorrowful on a Tuesday night subsequent, and though I miss the screening of Car Lady and Bike Girl at the NFB, (I was Car Lady), I get there in time to make the second half screening of Making The Cut a delightful short from Sheridan College, that I also played in, with great work all around - Cyrus Lane.
Wild Card, our hosts (WILD SOUND) have been running these monthly film festivals in conjunction with the Wednesday night reading series, so successfully, giving it their all, and coming up with novels at the same time. I’m thrilled that three of my pieces will be available for viewing on site.
It was sweet at the Wild Card Screening when all the actors and team of Making The Cut who were present were introduced. I think if you’re in the room and you were involved in the making of The Film, even if you’re not the film-maker per se, your presence needs to be acknowledged.
in this collaborative biz’ness we are all “clogs”..
I resurface from ‘the acting experience’ and experience ‘the actor in the World: the mind reels - Thou shalt not worship idols: eva avila, paris is burning and someone released another new scent in a perfume free zone..OY! Is Paris Hilton Patty rehearsed? Hummer Sisters remembered.
‘the interregnum’
what do I do now, what am I supposed to focus on, what have I learned in this run at it, this kick at the can. Should I go back to that script I work on from time to time, do a scene with a fellow actor, take a voice workshop, submit my one act to about a west coast competition for a workshop, you know, 5 will be chosen.
The greatest gift i think i got from this play: inhabiting Ruth, I had a license, no, a necessary committement to the moment, to be present. Forced to allow the character’s right to exist where I may not allow myself the excesses of drama, of feelings.
Ruth may not be right or justified in the final analysis, but she is true to her sense of integrity and perhaps to her life's journey. if I every get to play this role again, that's where I would start..I would see if i could get Ruth to go against her own nature..the struggle she explains to Lisa in the her last and new story is: "not about (her) illness, but her inability to tell her darling girl that she's very very sick", and perhaps that goes to why she never confronted Delmore about the other girl she found lovingly washing his socks in her place: she says: "i turned and left and i never came back" She lets Lisa leave her life at the end of herstory because she feels like she's been robbed, 'bugged'..: Ruth's final story, "my dear young friend turned out to be a spy, a spy who sold my secrets"..
Summer in The City, in some ways we Humans don’t ask much..the simple pleasure of being able to breath and feel good ..feel good, that’s the key, we love to feel good, can you blame us, or do I just speak for me.
I said in a Movie once: “if it feels good, do it”, a kind of existential hippy response, which I’m necessarily particularly proud of, but I didn’t write it, though I did say it, which sometimes feels like the same thing.
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