Théâtre de Poche in Sète
After a fifty-minute walk from the train station in the old sea city of Sète to the quiet Hotel Venezia on la Corniche near the Mediterranean waterfront, I find out I’ve been pronouncing the French word for twenty incorrectly all these years. The kind hotel clerks are comfortable enough to give it to me straight: I’m saying it more like the French word for wind, vent, instead of the more nasally short “i” sound: vingt. Not the higher up nasal sound vin, the word for “wine,” but lower with more short “i”: vingt. Voilà.
The way you first learn something sticks with you and I realize that the lifetime journey to learn French has its disadvantages. In my young years, I learned a lot of mispronunciations. So now, as I discover them, I must unlearn them.
They give me the key to room 20 for two nights and as I find the elevator, I think about how this applies to more than pronunciation.
How do you unlearn not feeling comfortable in your own skin?
I suppose it is my attempt to be confident in French that enables some fluent and friendly conversation with the hotel front desk staff before my foray to the beaches of Sète where I am soaked by an utter downpour. The stairs to the beach become waterfalls and the rushing sound is beautiful even as I am getting chilled to the bone. There is a surfer in the water. Not just any surfer, but a very tough female surfer, out in the storm, riding brutal waves and getting completely thrashed by them and yet getting right back up there on the board.
Foolish? Brave? Is there a difference?
I return to dry out and the next morning, the front desk staff provide me with a local newspaper, which they would only have done were they confident in my abilities in French. I am very thankful and find something I would not have discovered without the newspaper. There is an advertisement for a show at Théâtre de Poche. Pocket Theater. Cool. There is a show there this evening called Laissez Parler Les Petits Papiers (Let the little papers speak). It’s a Spectacle d’improvsation. Does that mean it is stand-up comedy? I’m not sure. There is no explanation. So, I look it up on my phone to find out more. This is what I read on their website roughly translated into English:
You enter the room.
We give you a paper.
You do not have a pen.
You are looking for one.
You write a subject on the paper.
You cross it out.
You start again.
Someone picks up all the papers.
The show begins (finally).
The actors enter the stage.
You applaud.
They improvise skits for a few minutes.
You applaud again.
You laugh, too.
Sometimes, on stage, a comedian improvises to music and light.
You still applaud.
You always laugh.
At other times, they improvise with some constraints.
It’s weird, but you applaud.
It’s weird, but you laugh.
Then your subject is drawn.
You are embarrassed, but you are happy.
At some point, someone announces that it’s the end.
You applaud.
You applaud.
You have pain in your hands.
You applaud anyway.
Your hands hurt too much.
You go.
When you get home, you laugh…
Again.
I must go!
After a day working from my room, I walk along the cape at sunset, thankful that the rain subsided. The salty smell of the sea, the sound of its crashing waves, the dramatic contrast of the brooding black clouds and the blazing sunset fill me with beauty in all the immediate senses but one, so I find a little restaurant willing to seat a single traveler at a little table.
I do something that I told myself I would never do again after the Andouille, a word that fittingly also means “dummy” in colloquial French, at the restaurant in Rheims two years ago when I ended up with a plate full of intestines that smelled as bad as they tasted. I order something I don’t know. This time, the result is thankfully different. Rouille de seiches turns out to be rusted cuttlefish, a traditional dish that originated in Sète, with cuttlefish pieces cooked in a tomato, onion, white wine, and garlic sauce. Exquisite! And there was an intriguing yellow sauce on the side that is called aioli, a staple of northwest Mediterranean cuisine with garlic, salt, and olive oil. The cheese salad starter is heavenly.
The timing works out well. The streets are wet, but the sky is no longer weeping. I follow a winding of steps going up to walk the brightly lit Grande Rue Haute where it feels like I’ve gone back in time with tightly packed stone buildings and forking narrow streets and laundry dangling from high balconies in the yellow light.
Suddenly, as if it were an apartment off the street, I’m at the address. People stand at the doors warmly greeting those arriving, handing out slips of paper. They project a nervous excitement that makes me suspect they are the actors themselves, which proves to be true. I enter a dimly lit theatre lobby, like so many dark and mysterious theatre lobbies anywhere in the world. I love the theatre. The creativity, the genuine greeting, so genuine that I can tell the ticket seller is not happy to provide a ticket to an outsider, a non-French person, but I keep quiet and she keeps quiet and none are the worse for it. And children! I didn’t expect children at a 9 pm improv show, but why wouldn’t there be in France where children are included more than excluded? Most of the children frantically write on as many slips of paper as they can find, ideas flowing everywhere.
On the slip I received at the door, I write Le loup qui a de la compassion pour les poulets. (The wolf who has compassion on the chickens.) It may not be quite right, but they’ll understand what I mean. I fold it once and put the paper in the bag extended by an usher as I enter the seating area.
It’s an acting troupe of four people: three men and one woman. They call themselves la Cie Moustache (the Moustache Company) and it sounds like they are based out of the larger city Montpellier.
They clip the papers along a clothesline and select from left to right. The actor who introduces the show instructs us to “boo” when they unclip the last one.
It’s a bombardment of times and places and characters with brilliant acting and stunning pantomime that creates visible things out of thin air. This is at the heart of theatre. And it is very often funny. An electric car women swoon over. An outrageous farm milking scene. A bizarre seasoning at a dinner party causing guests to react different ways. A love potion causing two young princes to fall in love with a gnarly old witch. A man trying to figure out how to propose marriage. An overattentive mother helping her son get ready for a date.
The actress in the group is Martine Monteiro. Again and again she blows me away! She moves easily from one very different character to another, changing her voice, her mannerisms, every time, and creating anything, TVs, cars, boxes, animals, out of nothing with expert pantomime. You are sure you actually see the items. She plays a woman who says “UP- la” a lot, which is very idiomatic French and I’ve heard it many times on trains and in shops. It’s a filler sound, usually the person saying it is moving or thinking from one thing to the next. It’s exciting to recognize the idiom. Martine also does a rap about a food market. Incroyable!
And then, a paper is drawn and the master of ceremonies actor shakes his head. They can’t do this one. He shows it to the other actors. Oh, no. Christmas without Santa Claus. A little boy in the back of the room, sounding eerily like Tiny Tim, cries, “Pas Noël sans Père Noël!” and everyone, regardless of age or gender, just melts right there. The master of ceremonies says that he has an idea and they’ll do it. It’s a delightful little scene where a rogue and rather raucous Santa regains his faith and redeems Christmas. I’ll never forget the sound of that boy’s voice and the audible hush.
It is a night like no other and I feel part of the culture of France if only for an hour. As I leave the theatre, I shake hands with Martine Monteiro and tell her that I really enjoyed her brilliant acting. Or something like that because it is in French. She is very nice, asks where I am from, and enjoys hearing that I’m from Alaska, so unimaginably far away.
It’s a long, late walk back to the hotel and Sète is just edgy enough that I’m a little nervous walking alone. It’s rare that I’m out at night while traveling, generally I chose the early morning for activities, but I’m very happy to sacrifice sleep and a sense of security for a wonderful, warm evening.
As I walk, I remember my own experiences picking scenarios or words from a hat to improvise scenes with other fledgling actors. I must have been in some kind of acting class, but I can’t remember when or where. I just remember how much fun it was to make it up out of thin air. The adrenaline of spontaneity. You might fall flat on your face. Or you might nail it. Most of the time, you just keep going, feeding off of one another, exploring the craft.
The craft of acting I’ve loved since I was a girl.
It started outdoors in the summer with my brother. We would act out scenes we’d make up. Usually murder mysteries because we liked to watch Agatha Christie movies. We had the scene from “Death on the Nile” down.
“Stop it, Jackie!”
“You can’t treat me like this! I’ll kill you first!”
“Jackie!”
And I’d fumble a gun out of my “purse” and my brother would grab his knee and collapse to the deck. Cut. I think we actually said the word “Cut” aloud between scenes.
We’d get the neighbor kids involved in it, too, sometimes, and I remember one rainy afternoon in the gravel under the deck, pretending it was a bunker, when our friend Carson “died” from his battle wounds and my brother gave a moving speech that brought us all to tears and ended, “War is hell.”
In Junior High, I auditioned anytime there was an opportunity. The most exciting role was playing Rochester’s “little French monkey” daughter Adele in “Jane Eyre.” I hadn’t studied any French yet, so I was thrilled to sound out and memorize the foreign words written phonetically for me by the director and, even at my young age, I enjoyed the challenge of bringing the meaning of those words to life. Great fun.
In High School, I was in the play M*A*S*H as a character part called Major Dodge. It was during M*A*S*H that I realized my love for the craft. Being a leading role like Hawkeye or Houlihan didn’t matter to me. Playing a part and playing it well did. The Major Dodge character had long monologues and, hard and severe, she was a completely different person from me, so I really had to work and I loved it.
I joined the Speech and Forensics Team and went to State with two very different pieces: a dramatic monologue and a comedy duet. I won second place in the State of Alaska for my interpretation from the dark autobiography Don’t Ask Alice. And I loved the scene from Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park that I played opposite an upperclassman. The writing was so smart and I enjoyed the comic timing.
A couple years ago, I happened to see an old friend from High School. Among the many things we participated in together and the stories that we could share, he remembered best seeing me perform that romantic comedy sketch from Barefoot in the Park. I didn’t even known he’d seen it. He said he was so surprised. The part I played was so different from me. Hearing that, even after all these years, makes me feel good because that’s what matters. The craft. Believably becoming someone other than myself.
I went to a college that had what is called a Block System. For three and a half weeks, we took one class and one class only. Or that was the idea. I somehow still managed to have more than one item on my report card for the Block because I took voice lessons and jazz band and choir. Music, Writing, Acting. Music, Writing, Acting. These are the three loves that vie for craft development time in my life. The three loves. The three monsters.
I was an English Major and the Shakespeare Block was taught by a revered professor who believed that you had to perform Shakespeare to have any idea of him, so each year, his class put on a play along with reading sonnets, listening to morning lectures, and writing papers. I remember blowing him away at the audition. I spoke Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained” aloud on stage for the first time in my life for that audition, and now it is one of my favorite Shakespeare monologues. It was controversial, but he cast me, a mere Freshman, as one of the main female roles: Shylock’s spoiled daughter Jessica. I had a wonderful time.
The next year, I took the Opera Workshop block and auditioned for the part of Eliza in My Fair Lady, my dream role. I’d been in My Fair Lady as a chorus member before, I’d worked for years on my cockney accent, and I positioned myself strategically to take voice lessons with the director. There were a number of viable young women auditioning and I was honored to get the chance to play Eliza. The upperclassmen cast as Higgins, Pickering, and Mrs. Pierce were concerned that timid little me wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Again, I surprised them. They told me at the end of the production, and I became a short-term celebrity around campus with people asking me to repeat that “Owwww…” and “Garn” thing that I’d done on stage.
The dancing terrified me, but the director was not a big choreographer, so the moves were simple and once I knew what was expected, I could relax. The singing was challenging. I had a high A to hit for “I Could Have Danced All Night,” but I could do it. The harder singing part was cutting through the orchestra with low notes. I realize now that this may have contributed to some vocal damage I’m struggling with today.
The part I enjoyed most about My Fair Lady was exercising the craft of acting. Each night, I strove to hit new marks. The moment when Eliza realizes she’s actually saying the words correctly just before singing “The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain” was one of my favorite moments. Even more, I loved the scenes near the end of the Second Act when she’s in the garden with Henry Higgins’ mother and then with Henry. There’s so much to work with as she establishes herself as a strong, valuable woman. I strove for more every night. And never felt I’d arrived. I wanted to keep performing it.
I auditioned for a play put on by the Drama Department. It was a musical, but the focus was on the acting craft rather than the vocal one. It was Bertold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and they went all Brechtian acting on us and we were trained to do 60-40 acting, 60% character, 40% ourselves. And it was a very dark portrayal of a dark play. The acting exercises were fascinating, if you like psychology, which I do. I’m convinced that they managed to hypnotize us back to our childhood selves in one mass exercise. It was interesting to find out more about all of us that way, but some people had great trouble going back. Some even left the play at that point and I’m sure they made the right decision because it only got more invasive from there. We did a lot of manipulation exercises, two people eyeing each other for power and determining who was in control. We’d march around saying the F word to each other. When we were asked to imagine something we’d done that we were ashamed of doing and then imagine feeling good about doing it, I didn’t go there. For me, there was a line and that was messed-up psychology. I would never direct a play that way with a group of young people. With adults, maybe, but only if a clinical psychologist was on hand with instructions for the cast to speak with that psychologist regularly. I think the exercises did mess-up a few people.
I learned a lot from Threepenny Opera. One of the drama teachers taught me about moving like the character rather than bringing my own movements to the part. Changing motions, weight, centering, habits. It was eye opening and I’ve used it since.
And locked forever in my memory is our enunciation exercise, which happened to be from The Mikado: “To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark, dock in a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.” Say that three times fast. I still can.
And I learned where my boundaries are. The directors wanted the play to be dark and uncomfortable, but looking back, there were places where the line needed to be drawn. I was out to prove that I’d be willing to do anything for the craft, but it was so dark that one of my friends came backstage afterward to make sure I was still me because the someone else she’d just seen scared her a little. From that play I learned that boundaries are good. You just have to know what yours are and be ready to set them.
In my senior year of college, the director from My Fair Lady talked me into playing one of the three little maids from school in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado because she hadn’t found anyone else she thought could cut through the orchestra with the low notes. I didn’t see how I could do it. I was taking Biology that Block, which meant morning and afternoon classes. Plus the Jazz Band was getting ready for a tour and I was their vocalist, so we rehearsed each afternoon. Plus I was on the selection committee for the new English Professor and we met at lunch. Where was there time? When would I learn blocking?
Oh, it was just a little part, she said. She walked through the score with me. She said some of the songs could be given to the other little maids, but then proceeded to change her mind as we walked through the music, so I ended up with the entire part. I felt a bit swindled.
It was one of my favorite theatre experiences. It taught me a crowning lesson about the craft of acting. Enjoy it! I didn’t have time to overthink the part. I just had to do it. And I quickly realized that everyone doing the blocking without me was an advantage. It was easy to pick out where I needed to be and what I needed to do without having to muddle through it with everyone else. Pitti Sing was the plucky, adventurous one of the three sisters, at least that’s how I played it, and so I relished in it. She kind of goes rogue from her other sisters in the Second Act and I decided she had a crush on Pooh-Bah. And I think we decided that he was secretly gay, so he was horrified. It was fun to play and I got to sing about a “snickersnee.”
After college, life hit. My first goal was to pursue the music craft as a jazz singer. Instead, I started a family and became an accountant. How life changes things.
Once my children entered their elementary years, I auditioned for The Diary of Anne Frank directed by a woman I greatly admired. There was no part appropriate for me, but I really wanted to be in that attic with that director, so I poured it on in the audition. I remember the chill that went through me when I read for Mrs. Frank, Anne’s mother, in what we later referred to as “the potato scene.” Starving, scared, and suspicious, Mrs. Frank loses it in this scene. With so many people auditioning, so many people of the right age and stature, I was amazed when they gave me the role.
Remembering what I learned from the drama teachers in college, I determined to move differently as Mrs. Frank. She was older than me, so not as fluid in motion, slower, but I couldn’t go too far and come off as an old woman. I just had to be a bit stiffer. I knew that I pulled it off when I was leaving the theater after a performance and someone said, “Oh, were you just in the play! Were you the daughter? What’s her name? Margaret? Margot?” Margot was Mrs. Frank’s oldest daughter, a teenager. What I picked up from that was that I moved differently in real life than I had on stage, and that’s what the craft of acting is all about!
I pushed the barrier with the role. In opposition to Brechtian acting, I wanted to see just how much Mrs. Frank I could be without losing my place on stage. I guess we could call this 90-10 acting. I’m sure I was close. The man playing Mr. Frank was a local celebrity and complimented me by saying that he never felt like he was on stage with Kat. He was always there with Mrs. Frank. Even in my eyes. I did a lot with my eyes in that play, which proved to be a challenge because I didn’t have contacts at the time. There was one moment Mrs. Frank had with Mr. Frank from across the stage that I don’t know if it really worked because I couldn’t see. Frustrating. I learned that I’d need to get contacts if I was going to be serious.
A few years later, there was an audition call for my favorite comedy, Lend Me a Tenor, so I tried out. There was no part for me, no age or personality match whatsoever. And yet, I was cast as the femme fatale role Diana. Wow. How did that happen? It could have been the senility of the revered aging director in what turned out to be his last play. I decided if I could pull this off, I was really an actress.
I loved the witty dialogue, the doors opening and closing, the mistaken identities, the comic timing. I didn’t love having to wear skimpy clothing. At one point I was in a slip. At another, I wore nothing but a towel. I started doing sit-ups as soon as I got the part. And I had to flirt! I’d never flirted before!
While not academy award winning, I pulled it off. They believed I was a femme fatale. I was an actress.
And, sadly, I haven’t acted since. Twelve long years. I miss being on a team and doing my part. I miss the relief of being in someone else’s skin. I miss the timing of dialogue. I miss the risk of dropped lines and being ready to ad lib in a way that supports the story. I miss the craft.
The next morning, after breakfast and making my report to the front desk at Hotel Venezia, I walk to the train station and prepare for my next location. In the station, the people are very open and friendly. A woman asks me to watch her luggage so she can use the restroom. A man asks me to use my cell phone to check what time the bank closes in Agde so he can decide whether to hop on the train that’s about to depart and I’m able to look it up and give him a time, all in French, and he races for the train and makes it. It’s good to feel helpful. Is it that I look trustworthy? Or is it that the people of Sète, perhaps all of the Languedoc, have a sense of community and are trusting?
It is time for my train.
Next France for Two Months: Climbing Into Vallon-Pont-d’Arc
This is #17 in a series of stories: Two Months in France. Follow the links below to read the other parts of the series starting with the first:
1. Santa Fe Depot Departure
2. Return to the Great Lady
3. Shakespeare and Company Bookstore
4. Paris Stroll
5. Paris – des heures exquises
6. Train to Thonon-les-Bains
7. Château de Ripaille
8. Getting up with the Birds: Lac Léman to Lyon to Lille
9. Navigating to Avignon
10. In the Walled City of Avignon
11. Inside the Rich Ochre of Roussillon
12. Up the Steep Calades to Gordes
13. Retraversant à Fontaine-de-Vaucluse
14. Diving Deep in the Closed Valley
15. Défense de marcher sur l’eau
16. Tout Seul in Carcassonne