We’ve started working our way through Act 1 of The Hypochondriac. It’s been an intuitive hunt to figure out the style and the world of this piece. I don’t have all the answers yet and don’t want to lock into something too soon. 2 big questions brought up today: how did Argan make his money and how did his hypochondria begin? Other things came up about the relationship with his wife and the basis of that relationship.

Matt, the director, feels my Argan isn’t stupid. This makes it difficult to get away with some of the trickier sections. I’ve developed a pretty sharp b.s. detector in real life so playing the opposite is tough. It goes against my instincts and comes off as being put on. Argan is being kept closer to my real age, which also doesn’t allow me to be dottering or foolish from having lost it upstairs. I believe he is addicted to the medications, the enemas and, above all, the attention. His world would fall apart without that. It’s what he uses to control a world he can’t.

What I’ve come up with for his back story is pretty sad. In the way that Malvolio’s story is sad if you think he is going off to kill himself at the end of Twelfth Night. As I was going through and analyzing Act 1, the obvious dawned on me. He’s getting his affairs in order. He’s paying off his medical bills, he’s arranging a marriage to a doctor for his only daughter and he’s writing his second wife into his will so she gets everything. He wants to have a child with his second wife but that’s not working out. His personal assistant keeps agitating him, making him think he’ll die more quickly.

He thinks he’s going to die soon from some mysterious illness no one has been able to identify. His time is limited.

Something about the hypochondria is being used to protect him and the people he loves. It’s a way of warding off something really bad happening. I don’t really get that either. I try to slog through any illnesses until I hit the wall. But then I did take a Zyrtec yesterday when I felt a scratch in my throat. I think Argan’s hypochondria came out of a depression when his first wife went away. Some think she died. I wonder if she had enough of him and left. But that choice might make him more suspicious of others.

Bottom line is I don’t know what I’m doing right now but I do know that this can’t be played for laughs or it won’t have legs. On the other hand, it isn’t Strindberg. For it to work I think he needs to genuinely care about his daughter and his second wife. When he feels betrayed by them, it should cut to the core.

We had our first read-through with the full cast today. It was rainy and gross going to rehearsal. It read just under 2 hours. Still 10 to 15 minutes long for my taste but it should pick up a bit and lose 5 minutes in each act. They say that’s how it usually goes. 2 new additions to the cast, Chris Critelli as Clay and Douglas Sorenson as Barry and Bonnefoi. Very solid in their choices, chops and seemingly as people. It doesn’t seem like there will be any problems interpersonally in this cast. That would be a first. For the world.

Since I’ll be in the bed most of the show, I decided to play around with my voice and settled at a deeper pitch than my normal speaking voice. It gives me more places to go both silly and serious. They say you either pull the character to you or travel to it. In this, I feel I’m doing both. There’s so much in this play I can’t imagine doing, if I simply play myself it would never get off the ground.

We had to look at our schedules. As always there are conflicts that come up for people. The rehearsals are going to happen days, nights and weekends at various times and I have to be there for all of them. Juggling the Clark Kent job with this won’t leave much time to run lines outside rehearsal, except on the subway and in my sleep. But it’ll come together. I have less to learn than any of my solo shows and more than double the rehearsal time.

I feel ahead of the game having worked on the adaptation. I know the order of events. The play is divided into French scenes (short scenes with the entrance or exit of a character). A lot of plays are written like this today but the trend is to make the scenes more cinematic with shifting scenes so you wind up with longer transitions as sets go on and off dragged by a character or an unlucky boyfriend or girlfriend of the director dressed in all black. We have one set. The script will have very little changed at this point. The director has worked on 2 versions of this so far this year. More than 1/2 the cast are returning or really familiar with the script. What if this works fine and the show is great and we have a good time and the audience loves it?

For some reason, my spider-sense is tingling.

We had a writer's reading of The Hypochondriac for the producers this past Thursday. It's been tricky business whipping the adaptation of Moliere's play from 300-plus years ago into shape. So much of it is just changing words or syntax but a good chunk deals with the big issues of character and plot through dialogue.

Between the 4 of us, there are many ideas that come and go. Surprisingly, no one's thrown a punch or burst into tears during these sessions.

The reading was a mixed bag. Shira said all of her actor insecurites came up during that read. Mind you, this is someone who knows the script really well from working on the adaptation. I felt a bit of that too. 3 of the cast were in previous versions so they were giving polished performances. I had my actor hat as well as my writer hat on at the same time. The trick to doing that is not having one fall off or looking weird from trying to have 2 heads.

A couple actors didn't know the play and were feeling their way through the script. I'm kind of bad about pacing myself through that. I race ahead only to find my acting muscles are cramping from lack of oxygen and endurance. I was shaking off what the guy who played the part last (he was cast back-to-back in 2 shows at The Mint off-Broadway) to find my own thing. The rhythms and relationships are important. Also, I have to let go any notions of being the funniest one in this show. That contest has already been won by Kyle so I'll need to work on more levels of Argan.

I'm a good 10 to 15 years too young for this part and will be shaving my head tomorrow to have time for the underbelly-color skin on my cranium to even out. I hope I don't find anything weird my nearly purposeless, baby-fine hair has been hiding. You will probably not be seeing me as I will be hiding under the couch until it looks somewhat normal.

I looked over the script again today. There are a handful of changes I'd like to make. Hopefully, we'll get this ironed out and have the script a week before rehearsals. Then I can wear 1 hat on my shaved head.

For those who couldn’t make it, here’s my piece from the One-Minute Play Festival at HERE tonight. It got a decent response. Big thanks to Toby Knops and Dominic D’Andrea for putting this on. Incredible writing from the other writers, sharp direction, and pretty amazing acting. The night flew by and was really satisfying. Check it out next year, if you missed it.

Another Day in the Equity Lounge
By Chris Harcum

ACTRESS
And that is why I haven’t talked to him to this day.

(She lowers her head for a brief moment and then raises it and looks at the Casting Director.)

Thank you.

CASTING DIRECTOR
What? Oh, yes. Thank you. Let me just, uh, take a look at your resume before you…oh, I see you went to—

ACTRESS
—We went to the same school, yes. I was a couple years behind you. You don’t remember me. That’s ok.

CASTING DIRECTOR
No, I was just trying to place—

ACTRESS
—We did three shows together. You used to make fun of me in the dressing room mirror when I looked down. Can I ask what you were doing?

CASTING DIRECTOR
I don’t remember.

ACTRESS
No, not back then. Fuck back then. I know what you were doing back then. You were undermining my chances of getting Lysistrata. That’s fine. Water under the bridge. I meant now.

CASTING DIRECTOR
I was looking at your—

ACTRESS
—No. During my audition. You were tweeting, weren’t you?

CASTING DIRECTOR
No, why would I do that?

ACTRESS
Because you’re a bitch. Was it my hair? My outfit? My monologue choice? Doesn’t matter. Why? Because that cute guy who directed Lysistrata, he’s my husband now. And the whole department had a Dark Days Are Over Party in your honor after you left. Three of the faculty came and danced for hours. No one would cough up a good recommendation for you so that’s why you’re sitting over there instead of standing up here. In fact, your name is evoked in audition technique classes to this day as a prime example of how not to do ANYTHING. So write about how much you’ve fucked up your life in under a hundred and forty characters and see if anyone cares. And thank you for your time.

The 3rd Annual New York One-Minute Play Festival

September 12th and 13th 2009, 8:30PM at HERE Arts Center

145 6th Ave, (between Spring & Broome, enter on Dominick)

Tickets are $15 dollars. For tickets: Visit http://www.here.org or call 212-352-3101.

Molière is my hero. One of them anyway. If I were asked outside of a grad school application what my main artistic goal is, I’d have to say to be the Eddie Van Halen of theater. Whatever I do, I want it to be kick-ass dynamic, full of energy and feeling, have tasty chops, and fun. And it better rock or why are we there?

I wound up working with this guy named Matt. Sometimes I call him A.J. or Dude. He’s a big Molière freak. He was hired to direct a production of the Imaginary Invalid out in Queens. The actor playing Argan had a shit fit after the first week and decided to check out of the show. I don’t know the details but I think it was bad news. I wound up boppin’ down to audition to replace him and after 2 hours of reading got the role. I read entire sections of the play 100% cold, ten to fifteen pages at a time. The plan was to rehearse 6 days and go up totally off-book to close out the last week.

I asked the director to request an emergency Equity showcase code for this. They asked if he had rights to this version of the play and it turned out that the producer didn’t bother, even though he said he had. The next night, I went to a wake at the local Irish pub rather than a rehearsal and stayed until the last cast member left.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and A.J. gets with his producing partner, Greg Tito and they approach the Cell Theatre on 23rd. It’s a gallery-cum-performance space. It hits me to just go ahead and write a new adaptation. A.J. takes the lead on that with his wife, Shira. I put in several rolls of my two cents. It goes up with a more age-appropriate Argan and is a hit. Nice write-up in nytheatre. Overflow audience turned away at the door. And the Cell decides to pick it back up in November to fill in a hole in their schedule. Lucky us because it’s a great space in an even greater location.

In the meantime, A.J. or Matt or Dude has me working on a new adaptation of Scapin. Ideally, we will put this up in the spring and I’ll be Scapin. The Molière role. The Van Halen in that concert. I feel like I need to get into shape for it. More mentally than physically. He made comedy that’s precise and built to last. I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live or in something like Monty Python growing up but this goes to a place beyond that. Sometimes it gets dark and serious. It says things about the way the world works that’s kind of chilling. But it’s also hilarious.

And you gotta respect the guy. He went to jail because of his first theater’s debts. I don’t know if he was the first indie theater guy but he sure sounds like it. Then he fell on stage, coughing and hemorrhaging, and died shorty after his last performance of Argan in Imaginary Invalid. I’ve heard of actors passing kidney stones on stage or being so sick they run off to puke in a bucket close by, but Molière takes the cake. At age 51, he died. But his work keeps going.

Since we’re doing more with the script, it’s going to be called The Hypochondriac and it will have lots of nudges to the current health care fiasco. The big thing is trimming it down to a good running time. It was a little fat last time. Like 30 minutes fat. It will happen. For me this has been an exercise in working on a bigger canvas and making all the moments worthwhile.

Scapin has me stumped.