ON JEMMY CAMPBELL: JAMES RANKIN

Last rehearsal I chose to begin to work on my character, Captain Jemmy Campbell. I had been avoiding him. He’s difficult to nail down. The text that is presented for him is broken, parroting, passionate, stumbling. A number of his lines are just him stuttering out  support of others’ opinions. He seems disconnected, but also deeply lost. Like someone who used to be of import, but now he finds himself in a place where even his words, even with his official title of captain, hold very little sway. I think he understands this. 

He could be a drunk, self medicating to cover up his self consciousness. He could be a man with some sort of dementia, struggling to maintain any semblance of who he was. Or he could just be broken. 

“Aah-eeh-a. Confusion.” An example of one of his eloquent responses and also how he makes me feel on occasion.

In the play, he has an arc - he eventually turns more towards the side of supporting this play that has been cobbled together in this new world, a thing that for a while he was against. He blindly supports the opinion of his colleague, Major Robbie Ross. And in the end, his text becomes more literate which is quite telling to me. He also responds to what is happening moment to moment; he doesn’t seem to look beyond that.

But, finding him, discovering him within myself has been difficult. He’s clearly comedic and his text offers a lovely polarizing flavor to everyone’s over-articulated opinion. But I want him to be real, grounded, driven, complex; to get there though, I had to start walking.

In this rehearsal, I did that.

One of the exercises we tooled around with on that day was “Stick/Ball/Veil”, an activity that enables us to explore how either one of those objects may influence our movement and our psychology. Driving us back and forth between our different centers: thinking, feeling, or willing. Creating a safe way to walk in out of our character. Picking it up or dropping it quickly, acknowledging that it is a tool, and not our reality.

For some reason on this day, I fully let go. Keeping Jemmy in my mind’s eye, I took a stick into my imagination and let my imagination and impulse take over. The stick that we began with was a simple oak quarter staff, but in my mind, that quickly turned into a three sectional staff, each  length of it linked together by chains. It created a movement pattern for my body that became almost rooster like, each leg swinging forward trying to hold footing, because my torso felt unbalanced due to the chain links. I felt a tumbling stability from moment to moment. 

We shifted to ball, and the center piece of the staff evolved into the knot of a tree. Round, misshapen, a thing that has lived and has more weight than it has a right to. This informed the movement further, and reminded me of when i injured my back a while ago. Almost like the bottom of my spine was severed, creating two separate moving pieces. The leg behaving loosely and frantically, while the torso was just being carried along bobbing and rebalancing with each new step. We shifted to veil, and then the knot began to try to grow seedlings. An attempt to create anew out of something that can’t even plant its own roots. We moved in an out of each of these for a while, occasionally merging one with the other, exploring different qualities. 

In the end, we stopped and took a second to spyback. I immediately went straight to my notebook and scribbled out what i saw in my mind. An image, that I believe will help me discover more about this man. Looking at the image, and going back through the exercise I realized my Impulse led me down a path that I believe is far more informative and unique. A flavor that I would be foolish to not use in some way. It was a lovely wobbly step toward the end goal. I love when a tool works, but I love more when we can find a way to let it.