I was at a rehearsal tonight with a bunch of Romanians. Nice people. We rehearse in the basement of someone’s house. I wonder – how do Romanians always manage to make their houses smell like moth balls (naftalina)? I have never seen this product for sale here, in Canada. Perhaps they bring it in their luggage from Romania. However, there is no need in Canada for this product because the flies that eat your old fur coats are not that great in number. Actually, I never saw one! Can it be that the smell of the moth balls makes the Romanians regain that “home” feeling? Does it procure them the certainty that the house they live in belongs to them? Well, there’s no doubt about that, I mean who in the world (other than maybe another Romanian) would ever want to live with that smell?!?
Anyway, so we’re rehearsing and there’s this character in the play who has to maintain a very high level of energy for about five minutes. Five minutes in stage time is an eternity. This is a very hard task. I tried it myself, at home. I noticed that there were two instances: one – in which I managed to maintain the energy level but I was hitting the same note and the text was becoming boring, uninteresting and the second – in which I found variations within the text but I had trouble maintaining the energy level, especially when I was changing “states”. My conclusion at the end of the night was that the text is bad and it should be altered.
Then I found Lola. And she showed me that there are some who can do it, and do it well. This is how someone can go completely nuts for over four minutes and make the most out of every single second of that performance:
Approximate translation:
“I should have, gorgeous, cut my veins
When during the moaning of one of my couplets
You lifted my brown tanned flesh up in the air
With words I did not know.
How blind I was,
When with your eyes looking into mine
You said like this:
Give me alms of love, Dolores,
Give it to me for charity,
Put some flowers on my cross,
Dolores,
And God will pay you for it.
Don’t refuse me, beautiful, water to drink.
Have mercy, Samaritan, of the bitter in my soul,
Aren’t you sorry to see me cry?
Give me alms of love,
You give it to me, my Dolores
Because I’m going to die.
I don’t need your money,
Nor I want for you to keep your promise,
It is enough for me you crying channels,
With sorrow and remorse making you sick.
But what you will never in life
Be able to know
Is that until the moment I’m in my dying bed
I will love you.”
(curtesy of “Gin1986″)
