High Status, Low Status

Because my job had assigned me to work in New Jersey the past week, I was initially forced to maintain a long-distance relationship with the Grimm rehearsal process.    

I still did what I could.  Each night after work, I’d sit in my king-sized bed, cuddling my laptop and a bag of Cape Cod potato chips, and read about story-telling, fairy-tales, and the Grimm brothers.  I took notes in between episodes of Family Guy and American Dad, and soon figured out the hard way that you should always remember to turn on safe-search whenever you google “fairies.”

It was ten-thirty Tuesday night when Olivia called me after the first rehearsal.  I listened, grinning, mindlessly pacing the carpet back and forth, as she recapped the night -- everything from the improv games she taught the cast, to the read-through of the script (or perhaps more accurately, a “let’s get up and pretend we’re actually doing the show” read-through).  I could hear it in her voice, that “holy shit I did it” sense of elation whenever you kick your invasive stressor directly in the balls.  

My bad.

“Ok, I’m off the to the library now.”

I crawled into bed beside all fifteen pillows.  “Nice!  Yeah, you deserve a drink.”

“Dude, not that library.  Library, as in the New York Public one.”

“Oh.  Right.”

I had a long week.

Finally, at 5:00 PM yesterday, I punched out of work, hopped in my car, and began the fifty-mile trek back to New York.  I would have three hours to get to rehearsal in midtown where I would reintroduce myself to the cast and hopefully teach them a thing or two about my research.

3 hours.  I won’t go into too much detail, nearly hulking out on I-80 when I saw that the upper level of the George Washington had a sixty-minute wait, or that I somehow managed to navigate the lower-level, take some highway to another highway whose entranceway cryptically said “Queens,” only to find myself at the toll booth for the Triboro, all the while lamenting the fact that I should’ve thrown out the banana peel currently festering in my passenger seat.  

Fortune favors the Grimm.  It was a quarter-to-eight when I finally walked into the studio space, sweating like I’d just jogged said fifty miles.  I took my place in the circle where Olivia and the cast already sat, and I knew instantly, by the energy I felt stepping into the room, that I couldn’t have asked for a better, more engaging group of people to work with. Everyone listened intently as I talked about the art of story-telling.  Oral tradition.  What spinning wheels symbolize.  The fact that Disney exploited the tales to build their anticommunist empire.  

After my dramaturge-spiel, I watched as Olivia led everyone in a series of games, one of which involved walking as a “high-status” or “low-status” person to the opening song of the show.  Over the course of the exercise, Olivia would prompt everyone to switch up their status, to walk with their feet, chests, or chins first, making their actions bigger and utilizing the space, as well as each other.   Soon I watched as a room filled with ordinary New York actors on the third floor of an ordinary New York building, transformed into a wonderfully manic display of peddlers and paupers, warlocks with pink highlighter wands, prostitutes, prisoners, and priests blessing themselves before witches.   

Walt Disney might be rolling in his grave (and by that, I mean his cryogenically frozen tank full of excrement and pixie dust), but I know Wilhelm and Jacob, the real masterminds behind the macabre, must be raising their glasses of Jaegermeister.