Living in the Moment The stagecraft of consummate actor Ann Marie Hall. BY JON W. SPARKS
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o the surprise of no one, Ann Marie Hall was named this year’s recipient of the Ostranders’ Eugart Yerian Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing a local theater person who seems to be in everything, everywhere. And if you’ve attended even just a few local productions over the years, you’re very likely to have seen her or enjoyed something she’s directed. She calls herself the “consummate community actor,” and it would be futile to argue since she’s been on stages all over town for comedies, dramas, and even musicals although she’s not, by her admission, a singer.
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f that doesn’t sound like fun, you’d be mistaken. Being on the stage is in Hall’s blood and she gives it her all. (She says: “Anybody who tells you it’s not about ego, they’re lying. It’s ego. It’s all about ego.”) In fact, she’s been at it since the eighth grade at St. Paul Catholic School in Whitehaven. “It seemed like I was always getting in trouble for acting out and I spent a lot of time at the principal’s office,” she says. “I was probably talking too much and doing my impersonation of something I saw on television the night before. And the teacher would just point down the hall and I’d say, ‘I know, I know, I’m going.’” One year, a teacher decided to put on a play that was a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. “I got myself in there playing the witch who was being used by the evil stepmother to get her vengeance on Snow White,” she says. “It was a very silly role and I got to do very silly things. One of them, I had to wear a bald-head mask. So when they bring the heart of Snow White in, I’d put it in my cauldron and say it was going to grow my hair back. And when I stuck my head in there, I’d switch to another bald mask with pigtails on it because it was really a pig’s heart — they couldn’t really kill Snow White! That got me hooked because I realized I
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from left: Ann Marie Hall in Hay Fever (Playhouse 1977), All Summer Long with Michael Cherry (Germantown Community Theatre 1978), and her 60th birthday party. bottom right: Hall directed Kim Justis and Jenny Odle Madden in Parallel Lives at Theatre Memphis in 2000.
She is not one to agonize over a role; she just goes after it with zeal. But her view of the craft is crystallized in her approach to a one-woman play she took on in 1994. It was The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin’s 1970s-era solo show, and twoand-a-half hours of solid, unremitting stage work. It involved Hall becoming some 14 different characters. “And you just play it,” she says. “You just play it that way by yourself.” Wardrobe consists of one outfit, so no costume changes, and there’s a nearly bare set. “Right off the bat, we knew the cast parties were gonna suck,” she cracks. “They even asked if I wanted somebody backstage to help. The intermissions were intolerable — I’d take a minute, and then go to the bathroom, and then I’d have a drink of water. And then we still had two more minutes and I was, oh man, I’ve got to get my energy out there.”
So she had only herself — solo on stage, solo backstage. “I would stand there every night and I’d think, just take the first step when that light comes on. Put your foot out there and do it. It’s a ride, just go for that ride, just get on it. And when you’re on it, like my acting teacher told me, you live in that moment. You can’t let those words come out of your mouth and think, ‘Oh, I just said that wrong,’ because you’re going to miss the next thing. And if you think about the next thing, you’re not going to think about where you are at the moment. I just live in that moment and just trust that all of the work has got you there so that when you start speaking, the right things are going to come out. Because if you mess up, there’s no one to pull you out.”
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