Tympanic Theater Company Blog

I came into this project having only a basic knowledge of Kurt Cobain: I understood a little about the impact Nirvana, and then Cobain's death, had on the culture of the early 90s, and I knew that many believe his death to be a murder.  I also know a very vulgar joke about his death which I won't repeat here.

The audition was one of the most rewarding audition experiences I've had in quite some time.  I may be the harshest critic of my own work, and I often beat myself up for not being able to connect with the material as much as I would like. But that night, I felt particularly "on," probably in no small part because I got to read against Susan Myburgh.  In the original version of the script, our characters were a couple, and the scene we read went to some creepy, disturbing places.  About a year and a half ago, Susan and I worked together on another show where we played a couple with a twisted relationship, and that history, knowing that she would "have my back," gave me the freedom to try a couple of things I might not have tried another wise.

After being cast, I described the show to my friends like this: "In the first act, VCV is to Kurt Cobain's death what Oliver Stone's JFK was to the Kennedy assassination.  Then in the second act, the play becomes…something else."

The rehearsal process was not exactly what I anticipated. I didn't realize the script would be evolving and changing so much as we went.  I expected we would present the script as it was, with maybe a few tweaks, then it would be retooled based on feedback from the reading.

As the script changed, I frankly began to lose interest in it, becoming less interested in auditioning for the full production in the spring.  As Randall explained in a previous blog, he had created a complicated mythology, and we, the cast, began to immediately crack it open with a multitude of questions.  And as the rewrites attempted to answer those questions in a more clear way, I felt like the play – in particular, Mason – was losing its edge.  I had loved the ambiguity of the original version.

Then about two weeks before the reading, we came to a rehearsal and was told the script was completely changing. The second act?  Gone.  This was now a one act play.  We were essentially asked to forget almost everything we knew about "Verse Chorus Verse" and look at it with fresh eyes. Then we read aloud the first twenty pages of the new script.

I wasn't sure what to think at first.  Mason appeared a couple of times in those twenty pages, but the arc he would take in this new version wasn't clear yet.  Then as Randall began to explain where Mason is going now, I found myself getting excited again, guessing in my head what the end of Mason's story will be, and was pleased when Randall confirmed my guess was right.

This play has now become about the often times deceptive narratives we create and tell ourselves and others, why we create them and what happens when those narratives start to break down. It doesn't matter if you know everything or nothing about Kurt Cobain: These are compelling questions to explore.

We rehearsed a few more times, new pages kept coming in, and when we got word on what we needed to do sign up for auditions for the full production, I jumped on it. Knowing where Mason goes now, I'd love a chance to play him again.

The workshop reading was two nights ago.  During the valuable talkback that followed, I was disappointed to hear that many thought Mason had come across as two-dimensional. A couple even suggested he could be excised from the script entirely and not be missed.  That very critical part of myself took that personally.  I was afraid I had failed to do justice to Randall's writing.  Am I being unnecessarily hard on myself? I don't know. My girlfriend says yes, but she's obviously biased.