Jason Alan Griffin :: The Blog

Tonight is the closing performance of "Pleasures of Peace" at Medicine Show. It's been a wild ride. I came into the project 'already in progress' and had some catching up to do to get up to speed with what they had been working on. We opened the show without really feeling ready, and actually had a few performances in that first week that weren't exactly as polished as we would have liked. The show found its stride by the third performance and has been growing, evolving and improving ever since. I am particularly appreciative of Paul Daniel Cloeter, who played Franz, the Swiss Guard, to my Tim, the Buckingham Palace Guard, in John Gruen's lovely play "Guards in Love." We literally rehearsed this intricate play twice before opening night. Were it not for our strong abilities as actors to be present and aware in moments of unknowing, we could have had a disaster. Instead, we grew with each live performance as we basically 'rehearsed...

This is the final production of Medicine Show's 38th season. Which is impressive. This is the fourth full production I've done with Medicine Show. I've also been involved in a number of staged readings there. Barbara Vann is the artistic director there and has directed all of the productions I've been involved in. Barbara has a unique way of working. She loves chaos and inspiration and being fresh and always breaking convention. She has a certain genius to her work. The downside of all this is that, as an actor, one never knows from one moment to the next what your intentions will be, who your character is, or what lines you will be saying. You could be working on a scene for a week and then she can come in and tell you she's decided we've been wrong all along and its totally something else. I've seen her take whole scenes away from actors who've been working on them for weeks, because they weren't present at a rehearsal when she wanted to reh...