Advance Man and The Coffee Shop - I make some nasty!

Howdy howdy ladies and gents – time to get back to regular posting, since it’s been noted how absent from the Small and Brutal blog I’ve been for awhile. Yes, Walking Dead is good TV. I’m glad you get it.

SO, for the past several weeks I’ve been up to my usual activities, stage handing, carpentry and choreographing isolated moments of violence. In particular, I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with one of my favorite young directors, Ms. Olivia Harris who directed John Doble’s “Coffee Shop” an odd little play about a first date that goes horribly wrong/right. A young man pushed to the unthinkable limits of good taste and how to impress a lady decides that knifing the snarky waiter at the small coffee shop they are in is the way to go. Well maybe he doesn’t decide it, but his impulses get the better of him either way. They certainly get the better of the poor waiter, played to irritating perfection by another of my favorite younger professionals – Alex Enquist. By the way – they aren’t kids. They’re just not 30 something. So they seem young to me.

For this stabbing I went to the spare bedroom workshop to grind down a piece of old steel bar scrap from the Public Theater into a prop hunting knife. Since this is a prop is it is never intended to take or hold an edge, plate steel is fine, hard enough to withstand rigors of prop usage yet soft enough to never be workable as a real blade for very long. It’s about as sharp as a thick spoon.

That said, it’s still a chunk of steel, and handled poorly it’s still not the kind of thing you want clunking into someone. The murder is conducted in the span of just a few seconds – and due to the constraints of budget and time onstage for this little one act shorty, this is also a bloodless effect. But working out the details in what was a rather intimate space meant I had to go back to my trusty Gray’s Anatomy for some quick bio-mechanical analysis. One stab, and the victim drops is what I needed. Dead quickly.

I surmised that the best way to stab someone in the back and have them drop like they’d been poleaxed would mean somehow disrupting the controls from brain to body. That, to me, suggested a strike to the base of the neck, into or damaging the spine, and possibly some major blood vessels. Except, let’s also be honest – it’s very very difficult to do that. Even on purpose. Especially for a character who is NOT a proficient user of the tool.

So, the stab is on purpose, but the rapid demise of the victim is somewhat of a surprise. The move was choreographed as a roughly overhand strike, in reverse grip with the edge pointing up. This – by the way is similar to the “Psycho” shower stabbing scene, except that the edge is facing out at the victim, not back towards the attacker. Don’t get me started.

As the blade is coming close to the victims back, the attacker needs only to bend his wrist so that his knuckles (gripping the handle) tap the victim on the back, to the side of the spine. The victim goes rigid in the upper body, and immediately collapses to his knees, and the attacker simply “rides” the hand down. All the while seeming to struggle to remove the blade from the victims back. The yanking and tugging is done by the victim, only for a brief second or two before the distraction of the blade coming loose is covered by the victims head bouncing off of the table in front of him. He slams to the floor, dying very rapidly, and capable of no further purposeful action. By the way – the audience is facing the victim directly, so they never see the blade once it is past the victims shoulder, allowing for very safe and very fast movement.

Yes, in the real world this would be a VERY twitchy, bloody, and disgusting thing. But as I mentioned, it’s a one act and they have to get offstage for the next play in the festival, so no gore.

It’s hard to describe the movement, and I would like to start getting some film footage up here, so we can all see what it is I’m talking about. But alas, apparently that’s not always allowed. Ah well…

Simultaneously, while working on “Coffee Shop”’s little moment of nasty, I also had the distinct pleasure of working with Gideon Production’s latest, Mac Rogers’ “Advance Man” – part I of the Honeycomb Trilogy. I won’t review it – there’s enough great press about it already. It’s awesome. Go see it for the fight work, and stay for the far more incredible script, directing, and performances that my own work.

Which brings me to my next point – if there is a playwright who understands the general nuances of violence on stage, it’s Mac Rogers. Some limited gunplay in this show includes a young woman NOT holding a weapon properly and a resulting shot that goes a little wild. The very next line? “You have to hold it with both hands.”

I love that. There’s someone who’s paying attention.

However, I discovered that sometimes there are actors who are either unfamiliar with stage combat in general or actors who are very familiar with highly stylized stage combat. A single punch to the solar plexus between two such individuals, which I assumed would be simple, easy and the least time consuming and worrisome moment required quite a bit of finessing as we went along. This is not to say that the actors themselves were the problem – quite the opposite.

The actors were game. They were great. They ARE great. The problem is their fight choreographer. He (he being me) seemed to have a hell of a lot of trouble communicating his ideas clearly and succinctly. In retrospect, I believe I’ve discovered what the issue was.

In my haste and hubris to steer clear of the stylization of SAFD type of work, I glossed right over my OWN basics and workouts. What could have been and should have been more time spent at the top of the process developing an open and concise language and getting it into their bodies was skipped. The result – a lot of nerves and questions down the road as I worked to fine-tune the moment. In the end, it comes off rather well, but at the expense of performer anxiety. Next time around? I’ll be taking everyone to my school up front - so to speak.

And hopefully, next time around will be Part II of Mac’s trilogy of plays. “Blast Radius” has a scene consisting of two very pregnant women going at each other with vaguely scythe-like weapons. Neither of the two characters is a trained combatant with this “reaper” weapon, both are a little wobbly from pregnancy. I am excited because it is also a fight – a real fight, to the death between very desperate characters. It will be fast, it will be brutal, and assuming I can get a solid 9-12 hours with the combatants, it will be horrifying to watch.

So, until next time _ which honestly will be soooo much sooner, since I’ve also got a line on a doing some work for Boomerang Theater Company, which may include a rock fight, a broadsword and something entirely weird. Heh heh heh.

Stay small, stay quick, stay quiet, and stay brutal.

Oh and p.s. – the home knife shop is also churning out some nice blades these days. All stock removal, but I’m having fun.