Acting Manitou Reunion Recap
Thanks to all the campers who made it out to our Bowling Party Reunion! It was great to see everyone!
Tim and Steve were thrilled by the bowling talents of Kristin, Madison, Gillian, Gabby, Charlotte, Izzy, Spencer, Simon, Carolyn, Nikki, Clare, K-Bar, Kyra, Charlie and Savannah. Carolyn and Simon were smart enough to bring food from home, while some of us endured the Bowling Alley’s famous Chicken Fingers and French Fries platter and the vending machine’s Smart Popcorn.
Could a BOWLING elective be in Acting Manitou’s future? Maybe. Our campers really did their best. They utilized the baby bumpers, navigated through the “alligator bowling slide” excelled during Extreme Bowling (complete with Extreme Lighting) and watched the many odd Bowling videos that one gets for Spares, Strikes and Gutter Balls.
Even Tim and Steve participated in a very close game! (Are you surprised to hear that Steve won?)
It was a great time and we can’t wait to see everyone this summer at camp!
Can’t wait for camp? Not to worry. Additional reunions are in the works for the Boston and NYC areas. Stay tuned. And as always, please let us know about upcoming show that you are in!
Tim and Steve
Playwright Jonathan K has a reading!
Update from Jaron on his album
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Jaron’s big announcement!
Do the kids still call them albums?
Strange Jobs to Pay the Bills! (Tim)
Hello Acting Manitou,
So we begin our blog series: “Strange Jobs to Pay the Bills” with an entry by Tim entitled: “Corpse Duty”.
Shortly after graduating college, while Tim mixed theater education and acting from his home base in Princeton, NJ, Tim stumbled upon a lucrative but bizarre acting gig: corpse duty. For $100 an hour (!), Tim would wake up at ungodly hours and travel to the Hyatt Regional Hotel outside Princeton. The assignment began at 7am and Tim was instructed to wear “clothes that will best show off massive amounts of bloody make-up”. Grey jeans and a white t-shirt were selected (little did he know he would be buying a five pack of white t-shirts at Walmart and going through them rapidly). The Hyatt, besides its regular hotel duties, served as a corporate conference meeting center. Companies could hire out Tim’s programs for a very unique brand of corporate training for their employees. Instead of spending the day doing trust falls and sharing intimate secrets, employees would start a pretend meeting about job safety but then be quickly interrupted.
Into their meeting room would burst an out-of-breath hotel employee, shouting about an emergency and having to evacuate the room immediately. The confused employees would grab their coffees and croissants and hustle frantically outside where they would be confronted by….
THE SCENE OF A MURDER! Sirens wailing in the distance, the employees would see on the grass by the edge of the woods, a grizzled detective bent over spent bullet casings and a white blood-stained blanket covering a body-like lump. As they moved closer to the crime scene, the grizzled detective would stub out his cigarette and bark at the startled employees to stay quiet and listen up…pointing at the white blood-stained body-shaped blanket, he’d say in a growl: “There’s been a murder. And I need your help to solve it.”
Cut to Tim. That’s him under the blanket. It’s early December in South Jersey so the ground is frozen and the grass is wet. He’s trying not to shiver under the blanket. Any move and he may lose his 100 bucks. Easy money, right? Just lie there and pretend to be dead while a crime scene is investigated. How hard could this possibly be? Very hard, actually. When you try not to breathe noticeably, you end up breathing much more noticeably than you had hoped, eliciting comments like: “if he’s dead, why is the blanket moving up and down?” To which the detective replies: “that’s the body going into rigor-mortis.” Plus, Tim forgot to explain to the company that he was allergic to cut grass and the grounds had been mowed that day. Sneeze! ”If he’s dead, why did it sneeze?” ”Rigor-mortis.” ”If it’s dead, why is it laughing” ”Rigor mortis.”
What Tim never could have anticipated was that the corporate trainees weren’t buying what he was selling. And they would do anything they could to pull away the curtain to reveal the man behind the wizard voice, or in this case, the bloody white sheet. He was kicked, poked, and pulled all the while trying not to breathe or laugh or sneeze. One woman, perhaps her coffee had a little extra kick to it, even went so far to say: “the dead body underneath the sheet is gorgeous. I like its curves.” Ick. And the detective was no help, always turning his back and letting the trainees abuse the corpse, never warning when a group of trainees was coming down the hill and it’d be best to stop talking.
Somehow, some way, the higher-ups thought Tim was excellent at the job. So, they asked him to recruit other actors for corpse duty. Suddenly, he was a corpse duty administrator, pro bono, of course.
And then his big break really came. He graduated to murder mystery dinners on cruise ships. He got to burst into a room, wearing a ski mask and flailing a gun around before being taken out by the handy detective on the scene. Tim would sit in some closet dubbed the green room, eating the entree the guests were being served and mentally preparing himself for his big moment as “The Gambler” when he got to re-enter without a mask or a bloody sheet, talk to guests for a few minutes, before dying a second time, this time apparently from a poisoned cocktail. Finally, when the guests stared in horror at the corpse on duty, he was not hidden under some sheet – his hair was slicked backed, he was wearing pinstripes and he was trying his hardest not to breathe.
Tim had made it.
A.M. Playwright Jonathan has a reading!
Hey, Acting Manitou!
This is Jonathan Karpinos, Teaching Artist and husband of All-star Teaching Artist Leah Gotcsik. I recently started a MFA playwriting program at Queens College (http://qcpages.qc.edu/Creative_Writing/). Our playwriting workshop has an exciting relationship with The Actors Company Theatre (http://www.tactnyc.org/) aka TACT. Several times a year, TACT actors give readings of our scripts-in-progress, which (as all you AM playwrights know) is a great opportunity to garner feedback about our work. Our first reading will be Thursday, October 21st and will feature an excerpt from a play I am working on (a comedy called “Stay With Us”).
Details are below. If you look a couple posts below this one, you’ll see that my reading coincidentally/unfortunately starts at the exact same time as Leah’s sketch show (Somebody’s in the Doghouse). So, basically, come October 21st, you will have to choose which one of us you prefer. Just kidding! If you are in the mood for sketch comedy, go check out Leah’s show…but if you want to hear new plays, I’m your ticket. We are both grateful for your support either way!
Who: Queens College MFA playwriting students
What: Readings of plays-in-progress
Where: TACT Studio, 900 Broadway, Suite 905 (Broadway & 20th St)
When: Thursday, October 21st, 6:30 pm
Cost: Free
Be advised: Some of the plays contain strong language
Thanks & hope you are well,
Jonathan
Marci’s web tv show strikes again!
Here’s a new “Office Hours” episode!
You can go here:
http://junipercollege.gloriousrobot.com/video/index.php
Or here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdBmz1bXRv8
Oooh silly Jenny Clancy…
Hope everyone is well & I miss you all deeeaaarly!!!
Enjoy the lovely crisp fall weather, colors and apples 
-Marci
Happy long weekend!
Happy Columbus Day Weekend,
It is a beautiful day in NYC, part of a particularly lovely long weekend for many of us who are off today. The Acting Manitou 2010 staff took part in a celebratory barbecue in Brooklyn and looked forward to the coming 2011 summer. Every single staff member in attendance took time to remark about the character of our campers. The new staff were particularly amazed by how friendly the campers behaved towards each other, how accepting, how in awe of each other, how generous. This spirit of camaraderie was with us at our barbecue and because of it, everyone had a great time!
We are four days away from the deadline for Early Bird registrations and the $100 discount for 2011! Take five minutes today and register for next summer: http://www.actingmanitou.com/Registration.html
Have a great day!
-Acting Manitou
Come see Teaching Artist Leah perform!
Hey Acting Manitou!
This is Leah Gotcsik, Teaching Artist, wife of All-star Teaching Artist Jonathan Karpinos, and Acting Manitou’s own professional toilet fixer. I am sure you are all still laughing from the many hilarious things I said and did this summer, but guess what? You get to keep laughing! We all get to laugh… in-person! How? Where? Come to my two-person sketch show: Somebody’s in the Doghouse is Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!
Who: Somebody’s in the Doghouse, the two-lady sketch group I have been touring all over the U.S. since 2003
Where: The UCB Theatre, 307 W 26th St (between 8th & 9th Ave–take the C/E/F/1/9 to 23rd St)
When: Thursday, October 21, 6:30 pm
What: The show is part sketch comedy, part ridiculous travelogues about what it was like to work on a cruise ship
How much: Just $5
OMG how do I get tickets: http://newyork.ucbtheatre.com/shows/178
LOL I want to read more about Somebody’s in the Doghouse: http://www.somebodysinthedoghouse.com
Hope to see you all there!
Leah
“My Favorite Theater Game” a Story by Steve
In 2003, Tim and I started co-teaching classes together at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. Co-teaching with Tim was always fun, always exciting, and often a bit silly. Over the years we developed and created many of our own theater games to help demonstrate a certain point or highlight a specific theatrical element. My favorite game, which I believe we invented, although perhaps I’m wrong, was simply called: Tim is a Camel.
1. Tim (“in role” as a camel) pretends to be asleep in the center of the room.
2. Next to the sleeping camel sits a small block of wood – representing the camel’s food. (Did I mention this game is intended for first graders?)
3. One student tries to steal the camels food without waking the camel! If the camel wakes up, the student must run back to their seat.
A good exercise on tactics, objectives, and obstacles! A huge hit. The students love it. One by one the students would slyly and cautiously attempt to steal the camel’s food. The camel would yawn, stretch, make sleepy noises – all of which would terrify the young camel food poacher. Just as a student thought she may get the food, at the very last moment Tim the Camel would dutifully wake up, scaring the kids as they ran back to their seat!
However, one day, after a long week of teaching and directing, Tim and I were asked to come in to teach a group of 30 first graders. Tim and I panicked; what can we teach 30 first graders on such short notice, and more importantly how can we survive teaching while so exhausted. “Tim is a Camel!” That will occupy the kids for a large amount of time. Into the classroom we went. I took charge as the host of the game, Tim took his place on the floor. The first student attempted to get the food. He was very close. “Surely Tim will wake up and scare the child at any moment.” – I thought. Nope. The student successfully stole the food. Hmm. That never happened before. Okay, we’ll try it again. Same thing. The second student snatched the food, and the third and the fourth. Was Tim trying to teach some magnificent lesson that I was unaware of? What was happening?
The answer was simple: Tim the camel, as well as the human, had actually fallen asleep!
Share your favorite Theater Game story with us and take our Theater Game Quiz on our facebook page!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Waterville-ME/Acting-Manitou-2008/9805351124?ref=ts
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