Marriage Story

Just after the new year, our friend Betty suggested we come to the winter session of an acting class in Victoria that she’d been attending, a class taught by Becca Griffin.

We procrastinated: a 35-minute drive? in the winter? every Thursday night? for an hour of out-of-comfort-zone activities with Central Queens strangers? 

That didn’t sound like fun.

But we pushed through our resistance—I can’t remember whether it was me or Lisa who pushed us over the edge—and signed up.

Last night was our last class of 8. What started in March as  a night drive, through blinding snow that almost drove us off the road, ended in an open class, for friends and family, on a balmy spring evening.

The core of the classes was working on a two-person scene. Lisa and I, for convenience of cohabitation rehearsal schedule, paired ourselves and we picked this scene from the 2019 Scarlet Johansson-Adam Driver film Marriage Story. Not a light comedic romp.

Acting, and all that goes into it (memorizing lines, pretending to be someone else, feeling, listening) turns out to be really hard. 

In fits and starts, we threw ourselves into it. By Lisa’s estimation, by the time we performed the scene last night, we’d run through it 100 times together. 

Every time we started with my character’s line:

CHARLIE

It’s not what I want…I mean, it’s what I want, but it’s what was…WAS…what’s best for him.

NICOLE

I was wondering when you’d get around to Henry and what HE actually wants.

CHARLIE

Oh, fuck off—

and finished, 5 minutes and 5 pages of script later,  with me overcome and weeping, and Lisa’s character comforting me:

Nicole stares at him, incredulous.

CHARLIE

What?

NICOLE

You’re so merged with your own selfishness that you don’t even identify it as selfishness anymore. YOU’RE SUCH A DICK.

CHARLIE

Every day I wake up and hope you’re dead— Dead like—

And then Charlie starts crying.

CHARLIE

(through tears) If I could guarantee Henry would be OK, I’d hope you get an illness and then get hit by a car and DIE.

He sinks down, weeping. All this vitriol has taken its toll. Nicole watches, taken aback. She walks over and gently puts her hand on his shoulder. He shakes and cries.

In between, leading up to that, a lot of intensity. 

A lot.

And so much learning.

In the beginning, our scripts closely held to our chest, we yelled our lines at each other, didn’t listen to each other.

Gradually, through repetition, and with Becca’s coaching, we discovered that the key to memorizing is to listen, to cue ourselves from each other, to embody the scene so that the progression from section to section (sections we named “Henry,” “About the Past,” “The Affair”) is not from rote learning, but because it made sense dramatically.

I said last night on the drive home that it felt like we’d gotten to the point where we were ready to start working on the scene now: there remains so much to explore, and getting ourselves to the point where we can just make it all the way through from beginning to end is simply a necessary precondition to truly digging in.

We won’t do that. If only because one can only yell “Every morning I wake up and wish you were dead!” at one’s partner so many times.

But we will go back to Becca’s classes in the fall. She proved a patient teacher with infectious enthusiasm (I went into the class afraid of her infectious enthusiasm; I need not have worried). Our classmates threw themselves into their scenes, and the games and exercises we did every week; they took risks, and that helped us take risks.