The Habit of Art

I saw The Habit of Art Saturday night.

It was excellent and very funny.

Marvelous acting - including Randy of course, whose role called for him to move from a "proper" London accent as Tim and a spot -on Cockney accent as Stuart.

As was reported here and elsewhere, the script calls for Randy's actor character "Tim" to arrive for rehearsal wheeling a bicycle and dressed in a bike helmet and a bikers suit.

However, while he had the bike and the helmet, he wore baggy jeans and a tan Henley shirt.

But in the play being rehearsed, Tim (as Stuart the rent boy) stands on a chair with his back to the audience and drops his pants in anticipation of a sex act with "Auden" he then mimes dropping his shorts

Randy was wearing tight black boxer briefs. After the mimed sex act stops short of completion, he turned to face the audience providing a front view of the shorts.

Whenver he moved from Tim to Tim reheasing as Stuart, he donned a black leather jacket over the Henley.

Since the play is set in a rehearsal hall in the basement of London's National Theatre, The performance area of the Methany Theatre auditorium of The Studio Theatre was tricked out to look exactly like that.

The seating was stadium style arranged in three sections.

I was seated on the aisle in the first row on the left hand section (as it faced the stage)

They used the floor right in front of the first row for part of the staging..it was where the Stage Manager, playwright and Asst state Manager sat while observing and commenting on the rehearsal of the play.

A rehearsal stage was in front of them with furniture arranged to represent the setting of WH Auden's jumbled , messy cottage at Christ Church, Oxford where he was Poet in Residence

The "actors" in the play being rehearsed roamed the rehearsal stage and the floor area.

Randy has more stage time than I expected from reading the play, probably because he is onstage as either Tim or Stuart observing Fitz and Henry or Fitz and Henry when they are playing Auden and Britten.

His facial expressions and reactions at times are hilarious.

When Tim is off stage (ie: off the rehearsal stage) he is sitting on the floor,tucked away behind part of the rehearsal set. At times all I could see were his feet. Friends who were seated in the middle section with a better view told me Randy was doing what Tim would probably do while waiting to go on. Looking at the script pages, texting on his phone and playing with an iPAD.

I had a clear view of him as Tim when he was preparing for his cue to go onstage as Stuart. He would stand, stretch, don Stuart's black leather jacket, do facial exercises and some deep knee bends.

When Tim first arrives and wheels his bike into a storage room, he then re-emerges and does leg stretching exercises (bending each leg back at the knee and pulling his leg up higher toward his butt with one hand.) He was a couple feet from me when he did this.

His three scenes as Stuart in act one are superb. The interaction with Auden is quite funny. In act two Stuart takes on more importance since Neil the playwright argues for the restoration of the original ending of his play wherein Stuart represents Shakespeare's Caliban from"The Tempest".

Randy has some powerful lines as Stuart at this point.

Neil has advocated for Stuart to be naked as Caliban and Tim innocently asks as they read the restored lines:"Do I take all my clothes off here?" and starts to remove his jacket.

Kay the Stage Manager ( the superb Margaret Daly) says something like "We'll deal with that tomorrow" -

There were only a handful of empty seats, and one of the staff told me the matinee was sold out

The audience was very receptive. They got the jokes and laughed uproariously at some points.

It seemed to be a very theatre savvy audience.