“I like this place, and willingly could waste my time in it.”

If I was to ever find myself in some kind of Miss-Congeniality-style Q&A scenario of ‘describe your perfect day’, I would tell you in detail about four days I’ve been lucky enough to experience in the span of the last week. I would then probably fall flat on my face during the catwalk portion of the competition, but that’s beside the point. 

Perfect Day Number One fell in the kind of week that’s busy in the way that makes you grateful to be busy with so many wonderful things – our second week at Notre Dame. Scott and Peter gave us the challenge of trying to get three runs of the show in before we got in front of our first crowd, and throw that into the mix alongside my first time planning and leading workshops, plus just generally living our lives, and my diary got stacked up pretty quickly. The workshop part of the job was something I was definitely intimidated by at first – I’ve never taught anything before in my life, and going into prestigious establishments where these students are going to be not only intelligent and perceptive but also have the potential to be intimidated at the prospect of using tools from an actor’s toolkit, rather than their tried-and-true methods of learning, was a challenge I was nervous to rise to.

Benjy and I sat in on Jo’s class on Monday to see a true master at work and get a little bit of inspiration as to how to run our rooms – how to coax out some students that may need a little more encouragement into our way of working, or distributing the confidence of the folks who threw themselves straight into things. We got to see which activities were best suited to which focuses, and what level of interaction to maintain with our professors to make sure they’re getting as much benefit from having us there as possible. Jo is one of the most diligent workers I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with – academically, as an actor, and as a social scheduler, a brilliant friend to have across the board – and she was gracious enough to let me pick her brain during my planning process so that I felt I had a solid foundation by the time my first classes rolled around.

I was fortunate enough to get a real mixed bag of subjects on my ND class roster – an English class, a seminar on collaboration in written media, and new readings in transgender studies (side note – As You Like It is a fascinating play to examine from a trans/queer perspective, and there’s so much woven into the very fabric of the play that’s interesting to dive into if you are so inclined). My first class being 9:30am, I was expecting to be greeted by half-asleep students that I would have to really energise into the work – and frankly, I owe the students an apology. ND is a truly special place, with students across every subject that are curious, engaged, and willing to throw themselves into whatever crazy things I asked of them (such as mime-constructing a sandwich or moulding each other into a physical representation of safety, for example). As a first-timer to this kind of thing, I couldn’t have asked for a warmer welcome – something of a recurring theme across working with this company. 

But the first perfect day in question – Wednesday. Also known as show numero uno. My day began by sleeping through my alarm, so I was off to a sleepier and more hurried start than I would have liked, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My class that day was Introduction to Somatics for Singers; a group of 10 lovely grad students and a large studio full of natural light and fabulous amplification. As you can imagine, I was immediately in a better mood. My plan was to lead them through the vocal warm-up I’ve been devoted to for the last five years and use religiously before every show, hopefully giving them some exercises they may find useful in connecting breath to diction to support to sound – a perfect check-in for myself before our first show, too, as to why we make these strange noises and what the outcome of making them manifests itself as.

With plenty of time to kill and plenty of nerves to thwart, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the campus’ art gallery, with Arden and Rosalind at the forefront of my mind as I strolled from impressionism to sculpture work mining for any fresh inspiration. To my caffeine-addicted delight, the cafe there also did the best latte I’ve had since leaving London, so I managed to steal a bit of time there to consolidate the mad scrawlings that populate any blank space in my script and get my head in the game before the show that night.

We all arrived early to the theatre, excited and anxious for whatever will happen on that stage in a few hours time. We check in with each other, as we do before starting any work day – how are we feeling? What might we need from each other? It’s been a practise we’ve implemented from day one, and I think has been crucial to the alchemy of the five of us – I keep coming back to that word, ‘alchemy’, but it feels an appropriate mix of science and magic for describing how we all work so well together. We pre-set, we fight call, we run our music one final time, and before we know it we’re marching out to Al’s militant drum beat and we’re a train on the tracks, with no idea on where the route may take us next. I, for one, am grateful that Rosalind’s arc finds her a little less confident at the start of the show, as it’s a wonderful mask for my nerves, but I realise pretty quickly that we might very well be onto a winner.

The whole show felt buoyed by this electrical current that the audience gave us, and the play we’ve been with for six weeks now felt undiscovered all over again; one of the many pearls of wisdom that Scott gave us was to add in a ‘doing!’ moment for Rosalind and Orlando, where they first see each other and there’s this instant attraction. Hearing the audience gasp and giggle when Sam and I first made eye contact let us know from early on that what we’re doing not only works, but resonates – it’s what I love about Shakespeare! It’s five hundred years old and written in prose or verse but we see these moments of things we recognise and it sings out to us! Having people to talk to in the show’s epilogue and really lift the text off the page and into their eyes made a little emotional that first time around – to really see people listening and engaging and wanting to hear this story and the way that we’re telling it is all you can ask for as an actor.

We celebrated in O’Rourke’s after – naturally – and the whole evening set us up to sail through our remaining two shows in Indiana with a focus on urgency, clarity, and not letting things drop now that we have the audience to factor in. It was a glorious first performance – not perfect, by any means, but it never will be and that’s a beautiful thing to realise and let go of early doors. It felt like leaving something behind when we said goodbye to ND to head out on the road just the five of us, which is a testament to all of the talented, passionate people there who welcomed us and our work with open arms. It’s a special place, made so by the people there, and I’m incredibly grateful we got to be a part of that community for a short while. 

Perfect Days 2 and 3 comprised our weekend in Chicago – I’ve been fortunate enough to tick off a few of the larger American cities, but this place was, excitingly, new to me. Plans had gone awry once again, this time in the form of too much ice on the Chicago River for the architectural boat tour I had booked to go ahead, so instead I dragged Sam and Jo to accompany me on a quest for a bonafide Chicago hot dog, which we found in a place called Portillo’s and I can confidently call the best ‘dog of my life. Jo has family in Chicago so headed off to catch up with her cousin, and Sam and Benjy had plans to see a play at Steppenwolf, so the afternoon was my own to do my favourite thing to do in a new place – walk around until I get the perfect balance of immersed and straight-up lost.

That evening we had a proper blow-out planned – a seafood dinner at Shaw’s, followed by drinks and music at Andy’s jazz club, and then a good old-fashioned dive bar until we all piled in an Uber to retreat back to our hotel in the early hours of Sunday morning. Oysters, martinis, and running a jukebox like I’m a Navy drill sergeant – I couldn’t ask for anything more. There was also the added novelty of seeing each other out of our rehearsal joggers and T-shirts – I may be biased, but we scrub up pretty well. Coincidentally we had to scrub up pretty well the next morning and shake off any residual hangovers that may or may not have been hanging around from the night before, as Sam had a tour of the Art Institute planned for us – I told everybody in no uncertain terms that I would cry the second I laid eyes on ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’ and was nothing less than a woman of my word. It’s a gorgeous gallery and I really lucked out on the opportunity to take in art alongside fellow artists, followed swiftly by a pilgrimage to Chicago’s Chinatown to eat an inordinate amount of Szechuan food alongside them as well. Al, Sam, and I wandered out for a little bit of exploring before jumping on the L train and then into our beds before another travel day. If they made my ideal weekend in a lab, I think this is what the final product would look like. 

The final perfect day is, funnily enough, the one I’m currently in the midst of. I’m writing this in Conway, Arkansas, specifically in the very good coffee shop over the road from Hendrix College, our very lovely home for the week. The welcome here has been as warm as we can hope for – it’s a difference in size from ND by roughly 10,000 students, but the passion and curiosity still burns as bright as ever in both students and faculty alike. We have a slightly quieter week on classes and workshops, however we have been carpe-ing the diem all over the place – so many people have been kind enough to send recommendations our way, and we’ve been working our way though them at an alarming rate.

Last night we drove into Little Rock in the Toyota we’ve all fallen a little bit in love with, blasting a playlist of pure Americana my best friends presented me with before I left the UK. I can’t explain it but there’s a certain something to the sunsets here – that heady mix of golden-pink light and highway and great music and better company – that makes every evening feel that little bit more unique. We had dinner at a gorgeous farm-to-table cafe and then hit up the White Water Tavern, a roadside dive which apparently is the place to be on a Tuesday. Two words – karaoke night. Four more words – Sam doing Sweet Caroline. Arkansas, you’re far too good to us. 

But that was last night – today, in this sun drenched little cafe corner, I’ve started my day with no cancelled plans or unheard alarms, but instead by looking at the Act IV prologue of Henry V with an Acting Fundamentals class. The particular challenge I threw at them today was the focus of intentions and how to affect the person that you’re speaking to in order to get what you want from them – what words do you emphasise? How do you alter your pitch, or your pace? They performed the speech as a billion-dollar sales pitch, as a half-time locker room pep talk, as a marriage proposal. They ran head first into the challenges I threw at them at nine in the morning, and they knocked it out of the park. Still riding that high, Sam and Benjy picked me up after class to head to a local yoga studio to get a brief but very needed practise in, before we headed in to set up our space for the week ahead of tech rehearsal this evening and our first show tomorrow. And now here I sit – a great week behind me, a cardamom latte before me, and who knows what ahead. Based on the experience so far though, I think things might just turn out alright. As a friend of mine once sang, good times never seemed so good.