A Year of Plays

From Up on High

2011-04-28T16:42:00.002-04:00

(From the Parenthesis Rehearsal Blog for THE LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING)

Last night the cast gathered for one last read through at the table before getting to our feet. This rarely happens in a rehearsal process. There's simply never enough time. And yet these were hours wisely planned for by our director Bryan Close. After a week spent excavating Fry's rich language and complex imagery, we were able to hear the story of the play revealed more clearly than ever before, and to get a deeper sense of how our characters' journeys fit along the spine of this play.

It was exciting to watch each other breathe sense -- and real, human life -- into Fry's words. Several of us remarked that we were inspired by each other's work, which to my mind is the foundation for building a great ensemble. Like watching someone scale a cliff face by finding footholds where none were evident to you, it inspires you to reach beyond your perceived limitations. To see if you can't surprise yourself by finding your own unexpected hold.

I've never gone rock-climbing, but I imagine it's a good analogy for working in an ensemble. The trust you must have with your partners. The communication required to tackle a task in concert. The willingness to collaborate. The support you must lend as well as accept. And when all those things are working well, the enjoyment of the experience is unparalleled.

That's why I'm in theater -- to get a little piece of that high every time. And with only a week of rehearsals under our belt, I'm already getting that taste. Can't wait to discover what the next weeks will bring. Can't wait to find some of those unexpected holds.

Rehearsals Begin!

2011-04-20T13:26:00.003-04:00

Our first rehearsal for THE LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING is tonight and I am over the moon. I am so looking forward to put aside my producer hat and digging into this gorgeous play once and for all. Our cast is amazing, our design team outstanding. I have such belief in our director and our entire production team. This is the point when all the pieces begin falling into place and we see what it is we’ve been working on all this while. What a gratifying moment. Stay tuned and I’ll keep you posted on our journey.

Controversies!!

2011-02-24T22:14:00.024-05:00

Well, hello. It’s been a while, you look good. But we’ve no time for sweet reunion. There are matters discuss. The theater world has been popping with a couple “controversies” lately and I’ve been dying to talk to you about them. Diving into the fray like this will no doubt cause me to speak out of turn, but that has never stopped a Moore before and I don’t mess with family tradition.

First up? You guessed it. Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. I’ll try to keep this brief as I haven’t seen the show. (See? Speaking out of turn already.) But like so many people, I’ve been fascinated by the media spectacle surrounding this mega-sized musical. A veritable feeding frenzy, I’d say. Granted, the show did leak some blood in the water. Whether it’s the record-breaking $65 million budget, the delayed (and delayed and delayed) opening, or actors falling from the sky, journalists and late-night entertainers have not been lacking for fresh meat. Even the less carnivorous content-producers have made a meal of the show’s creative ambition, the challenges of cross-genre adaptation, and the career trajectory of director Julie Taymor. With so many voracious appetites in play, it’s been pretty nigh impossible to tell what’s really been going on in Spiderman-land.

Yet that’s the very question that keeps reverberating in my head as I watch all this go down – what the hell is going on here? What is happening? How has all this come about? What’s the collaboration been like? What have the conversations been about? How did so many pieces of the show – the safety, the storyline, the music – fall through the cracks enough, and for long enough, as to require OSHA inspectors, script doctors, and record producers to be called in months after the first public performance? Is it just because the scope of the show prevented an out of town try-out during which they could have ironed out the kinks? Or is there something more?

From where I sit (which is usually on a couch or in a cubicle, just to calibrate my place of authority), I have to believe that something fell apart here. Some part or parts of the process did not function properly, and I really wish I could find out what it was and why it happened. Not because it would be juicy, but because it would be useful. There is a really great, authentic, and useful story here that we in theater could really benefit from hearing. There are lessons beneath the hoopla. Lessons about process, about collaboration, about mapping vision to execution, about budgeting, about just about everything, I’d imagine. But we can’t get to those lessons from reading the press. The story has to come willingly from the collaborators themselves, and that’s not likely to happen. Which I get. It’s hard to talk honestly about vulnerabilities and still maintain the perception of power. It’s not impossible, mind you – Barack Obama’s speech on race, to pull from elsewhere, comes to mind – but it’s not easy.

Hoopla number two is the uproar over NEA chairman Rocco Landesman’s comments at a January conference on the future of American theater. Asked to provide insight on the decline in attendance for the arts in this country, Landesman responded, “There are too many theaters… Look, you can either increase demand or decrease supply. Demand is not going to increase. So it is time to think about decreasing supply.” In other words, a figure most artists expect to be their advocate in this country said we might need to get rid of some theaters because our audiences aren’t gonna grow. Ouch. Needless to say, many folks were hurt, offended, and frightened by these remarks. But there were just as many folks – including me – who felt Landedman’s observation was valid and were glad he deftly stoked a conversation that really needed a kick in the pants. I call that conversation, “Theater Economics are Broke, So How We gonna Fix It?”

One way to fix it – a way Landesman surely does not discount – is to get our government to fund us better. The NEA has a budget of about $160 million. This pales in comparison to England, which is the worst funder of the arts in Europe with a $900 million budget, which in turn pales in comparison to France. They give $2.3 billion. Excusez-moi? So yes, we must fight like the devil to get our government to better understand and reflect art’s importance in this country.

However. You live in this country. Do you really think that’s happening any time soon? Me neither. So like it or not, faced with such restricted resources, Darwinian forces do apply. I don’t think this means we need to go winnowing out the field with a giant machete (nor was Landesman suggesting that), but it does mean we need to give ourselves a good, long, hard look in the eye. We need to ask ourselves all sorts of tough questions. Questions like, what is it that we do that is truly special, truly unique? Can we focus only on that and let go of everything else? Do we do anything truly special and unique? Anything we truly think is valuable and needed in this world? If we’re not sure, can we hold off on our ventures until we figure it out? Do we need to strive for more audience, or is it okay to give our existing audience a better experience or a greater connection to our organization? Do we need to take on ambitious projects that require large amounts of resources, or is it okay to scale down and redirect that ambition toward community outreach or developing new talent? What can we do to shake up our business model and make ourselves less dependent on donations and public funding? Do we need to be non-profit? Can we have a for-profit model and still make valuable art? What can we learn from other fields – from tech entrepreneurs or cupcake stores or that really great dog-walking service that all your neighbors use? What else should we be asking ourselves?

Clearly, the answers will be different for every organization, and I don’t mean to say no one out there is thinking this way. But the negative and fearful response to Landesman’s comments suggests that many of us are reacting from a place of perceived powerlessness, a mindset in which all the operating forces exist outside of oneself. It’s understandable that artists in this country often feel this way. But it’s also convenient. It lets us off the hook. If all the forces are outside of ourselves then we never have to have look at ourselves to solve a problem. And that’s just silly. Not to mention a waste of your beautiful, powerful, creative mind. So wake up, wake up your friend, and take arms against that sea of troubles. It’s survival of the fittest out there, and you owe it to yourself to make sure you’re fit.

Mamet + Anna = Sam + Diane

2011-01-13T11:10:00.000-05:00

Just read an old post from Ken Davenport's producer blog and it made me smile. In it, he reprints a leaked memo that David Mamet apparently wrote to his writers when he was working on "The Unit." As you may recall from my post about Race, I have pretty conflicted feelings about Mr. Mamet. I keep wanting not to like the guy, and he keeps winning me over. I feel like Diane on a vintage episode of Cheers, utterly repelled by the man in front of me and yet simultaneously wanting to grab his head between my hands and smash my face against his. In the end, I gotta love the man. He knows of what he speaks, and I'll concede that his obnoxiousness is pretty hilarious. Enjoy: How to f-ing write! A mother f-ing missive by David Mamet.

Why NYC needs The Lady’s Not for Burning, and why you just may need Christopher Fry.

2011-01-12T00:12:00.001-05:00

Let’s face it. If you live in New York, chances are you’ve got a bit tough skin. It’s a necessity. The inhuman speed of the place. Strangers shoving past on the subway platform. New York Post headlines blaring out from every street corner. Billboards as far as the eye can see. The hubbub, the pretension. The grit, the grime, the grift. We’ve seen it all, here in this fair metropolis. We have every reason to be jaded.

Add to that reasons why any American might be jaded. The economy going south for two years and just now creeping back up. Joblessness. Lack of health insurance. The endless dicking around in Washington and the vulgarity of the media that covers it. Horrifying acts of violence perpetrated on innocent bystanders.

And if all that isn’t bad enough, we’re smart and informed. We know that even if things get to feeling pretty okay here, they are far from okay somewhere else. Say in Afghanistan, or Burma, or Taiji, Japan where they’re still slaughtering all those dolphins. Have I ruined your day yet?

My point is there are very real reasons why cynicism often reigns supreme, in New York and elsewhere. With everything going on, some days it feels trivial or even downright irresponsible to take an optimistic point of view. But the truth is that optimism is good for the soul. Embracing optimism is what allows the human spirit to soar. Yet how can you do it when the world is what it is?

This is the very question asked by the playwright Christopher Fry in his amazing work The Lady’s Not for Burning. With outstanding humor and largeness of spirit, Fry offers characters who occupy an array of positions along the optimism-cynicism spectrum. A war-torn soldier, whose estimation of the world is so bleak after seven years of killing that he asks to be hanged. An outcast woman who believes the world is what it is and nothing more. A poetic convent girl who marvels at every moment’s new experience. A suppressive mayor befuddled by challenges to his status quo. A judge, both familiar and comfortable with methods of torture. A young clerk in love. These unforgettable people collide amusingly -- yet dangerously -- on the eve of both a wedding and a witch-burning, and what unfolds amounts to a compelling debate on the merits of life and death.

I don’t mind telling you that in the final tally, the playwright embraces optimism – but he does so without denying cynicism. It is not a Pollyanna story. Written amidst the devastation of post-WWII England, Fry’s play acknowledges, indeed emphasizes, that the world can be a very dark place indeed. But he also shows us that the lightness of the human experience will triumph if we let it. He reminds us that even in the darkness, we can still clasp hands and know that we are not alone.

As a playwright, Christopher Fry is fascinating and I look forward to learning more about him. What I know now, I love. He was a Quaker and sought to portray, in his own words, ''a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity, a world which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but a sleeping partner.” I mean, come on. How beautiful is that? And then there's this, from his obituary in the New York Times in 2005:

He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that was ''the language in which man expresses his own amazement'' at the complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface, was ''wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.''

Don’t you feel you could use a little more amazement in your life? A little more awareness that this life, beneath the surface, is wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic? I know I sure do. In fact I’m downright craving it. What else could be a better antidote to the grit and grime and grift? Which is why I’m devoting the next six months of my life to sharing this play with all of you, and all of New York, and all of the world. I think it's that worthwhile.

Top 10 Favorite Theater Memories of 2010

2011-01-03T15:08:00.000-05:00

In chronological order:

The Last Cargo Cult - Storytelling at it's best.

A View from the Bridge - Theater as Fibonacci Spiral.

Venus In Fur - Ratcheting up and up and up.

Next Fall - Patrick Breen, loveable and laughable.

Everyday Rapture - Demand for a pocket-size Sherie Rene Scott skyrockets.

Henry VI Part 3 - Go big or go home.

In God's Hat - The seeds of inspiration.

American Idiot - Personal narrative trumps fictional narrative.

Burning Man: Metropolis - The crucible leading to...

Seeds - Parenthesis sprouts its newborn head.

Looking forward to 2011...

The End of the Year As We Know It

2010-12-31T15:51:00.000-05:00

It’s difficult for me to leave loose ends, and yet I’m going to. Two thousand and ten is coming to a close and there are three shows I saw in December that have not yet made an appearance in A Year of Plays – The Merchant of Venice, Featuring Loretta, and Blind Date. Provocative productions, all, and they each deserve the attention I’ve given so many other plays over the past fifteen months. Yet I find my writer’s heart has been yearning for a change.

For me, writing is a process that clarifies thought. Whatever matters occupy my mind, my thoughts on the subject gain their sharpest resolution only after I’ve shoved them through the churning mill of invention, composition, and revision. Yet since September, I’ve been occupied by a subject I’ve so far sequestered from this blog – which means for several months, I’ve left those thoughts unsharpened. I suppose I should have tended to them in a journal all this while, but over the past year I seem to have become monogamous to A Year of Plays. For better or worse, if I’m writing about theater, here is the lap in which I lay my head.

So what’s got me so occupied? Well, the play I’m producing, of course. Clearly. And yet for some reason, I didn’t allow myself to write about it. Well not just some reason. At first it was practical, I was waiting until I had all my ducks in a row before spilling the beans. But it soon became about perfection. I dreamed of orchestrating an impeccably coordinated launch of a flawlessly devised and perfectly executed marketing campaign that would blow the socks off the theater world. Good god, so that’s how you launch a theater company. But alas, while I have the ambition for perfection, I have not the teeth-gritting, gut-splitting, will of steel that makes perfection come to life. Not everyone can be the Black Swan. But it’s just as well. Life is messy, and first times are messier – just ask all the erstwhile virgins out there (ba-dum-dum). So now I free myself to gush like a giddy school girl after the prom and tell you all about this show. Orchestration will be for the masses. For you, you get the good stuff.

I am so excited about this play. It’s a lovely, lovely, GORGEOUS play. It’s hysterical and timely and political, and yet also overflows with soul-stirring, life-affirming beauty. It’s called…

The Lady’s Not for Burning

by Christopher Fry

… and it’s probably the best play you’ve hardly ever heard of. Set in an anachronistic fifteenth century (no no no, stay with me, it’s good, seriously), it’s about a soldier who comes to a town and asks to be hanged. The mayor and townspeople are toothlessly small-minded folk, unwilling to disturb the precarious order of their lives to handle such a request. A woman soon arrives to seek asylum from a gathering mob that has named her for a witch. The solider, the witch, and two others form a quartet of strangers to this seemingly innocuous town, who soon discover they must either escape with their lives, or die.

There is so much I want to write about this show. More about the play, which pulls of the remarkable feat of choosing optimism without denying cynicism. More about the playwright Christopher Fry, who in the 1950’s was the hottest thing since sliced bread until John Osborne came to town with his kitchen sink. About Parenthesis, the theater company I’m founding to present this show. About the nuts and bolts of producing on a showcase code budget in New York City. About striving to attach one’s personal goals to something greater than oneself – both to create sustainability and meaningful service, and to avoid drowning in one’s own reflection. About fear. And empowerment. And growing up. And on and on.

So that’s what I – and hopefully you – will have to look forward to in this next year of plays. And now would come the time that I wish you a happy new year, except I simply cannot go without at least saying something about The Merchant of Venice, Featuring Loretta, and Blind Date. So here is incredibly short shrift to three exciting and varied productions:

The Merchant of Venice – Exquisitely acted and Pacino did not disappoint. I feel it’s a hard play to present to modern audiences. This production confronts the anti-semitism (and also anti-feminist threads) with incredible smarts, yet those smarts still fight upstream against the prevailing current at the end of the play. Sometimes Shakespeare’s time and ours just don’t connect cleanly.

Featuring Loretta – One of the three Suburban Motel plays that Bryan Close’s Occam Rep produced earlier this month. Site-specifically staged in a conference room that felt exactly like a lower-rent motel, this play proved you absolutely DO NOT have to have an enormous budget to create successful theater. The actors killed with smart, funny, fully-realized performances, and the direction quickly gathered us up in a suspension of disbelief that allowed us to transport elsewhere. Really well done and I’m ecstatic that Bryan will be directing The Lady’s Not for Burning for Parenthesis. In fact, without Bryan handing me that play in the first place, there would be no Parenthesis. I owe him, and will continue to owe him, a debt of gratitude for that.

Blind Date – It was only here for a ten day try-out from Toronto, but mark my words it will be back. Probably one of the most alive nights I’ve spent in the theater in a long time. A hilarious, fully improvised show, where Mimi the Clown selects a member of the audience to be her blind date for the evening. I have never squealed as loud or bit my hands as hard as when I watched our audience member Desmond swoop in to steal a kiss from under Mimi’s adorable, round, red nose. Classic.

And that wraps up 2010. Happy New Year, everyone. May the next year see all your dreams come true.

Suburban Motel - an Interview with Bryan Close

2010-12-06T10:13:00.001-05:00

Trying something new this week -- it's an interview! A first here at A Year of Plays and I'm excited about it. Bryan Close is the artistic director of Occam Rep, which is presenting three short plays from Suburban Motel by George F. Walker at SLC Center in NYC, now through December 17th. Seeing as I'm getting more and more interested in the dynamics of producing theater, as well as this phenomenon of artists taking their careers into their own hands, I thought Bryan -- who is actor-director-producer in some combination for each of these three shows -- would be a perfect subject for a little picking of the brain. And as an increasingly hyphenating theater professional myself, I'm drawn to the idea of hosting a space where fellow theater-preneurs can share their experiences and discuss their projects. As with all efforts on this blog, it's a experiment. You'll have to let me know how it turns out.

I sat down with Bryan virtually. Presumably in our two respective living rooms.

Hey, Bryan, congratulations on opening your show! How did the first weekend go?

Hey Anna. So far so good, thanks! Two of the plays opened last night – including Featuring Loretta, which I directed – and they went great. I’m so happy with my cast.

The very first scene I ever did in an acting class was from Beautiful City – I think I played a ball-busting lady detective – so when you first mentioned Suburban Motel to me, I had an idea of what to expect. Yet I'd venture to say that most Americans haven't heard of George F. Walker. How would you describe Walker's work, and more specifically, these plays?

Walker’s work is incredibly funny and dark and ballsy and strange… I’ve been comparing him to early Shanley or early Shepard crossed with Tarantino. But really, he’s sui generis – there’s no one quite like him. I met a Canadian actress at a bar last night who told me Walker drove a cab in Toronto for years, which I totally get. He has such an incredible comfort level with all sorts of dangerous, marginal people that most of us wouldn’t feel comfortable getting too close to. Unless you’re an actor, of course. These characters are actor crack.

You’re pulling off a bit of a trifecta here – producing all three plays, acting in one, and directing in another. How has that experience been?

Overwhelming. Humbling. Euphoric. Eviscerating… I don’t know. It’s a little like asking a teenager how adolescence is going. I’m way too immersed in it to see it clearly. Ask me again after it’s been over for a while.

Do the plays take on different shapes depending on which hat you’re wearing?

Oh, sure. A director has to see a play in a very different way than an actor does. But the plays are also inherently different from each other. Featuring Loretta (director/producer) and Risk Everything (just producer), the two that have opened are extreme comedies with a lot of dark stuff mixed in. Adult Entertainment (actor/producer) on the other hand is a seriously disturbing drama with comic and noir-ish undertones. Acting in that is another world from directing Loretta.

It’s also harder to be a producer when you’re acting than when you’re directing. A director has a big-picture view, which connects pretty directly to getting the thing done, you know? Acting is totally different. You’ve got to be advocating for your character – often at the expense of the other actors’ characters. So it’s less psychologically consistent with producing. Fortunately I have an excellent producing partner, Shawn Rozsa, who is also directing both Adult Entertainment and Risk Everthing. And we have some other great support people as well.

Considering that these plays presumably exist in a consistent world, did your work as director on one play influence your approach as actor on the other? Or did you find it best to just keep those experiences completely separate?

They’re consistent but not the same. Suburban Motel is a collection of six fully independent plays (we’re producing three of them) that happen to take place in the same cheap motel room. They are all hilarious, brilliant, psychologically rich and wonderfully theatrical. But no two are any of those things in the same proportions. Directing Loretta has no doubt helped me act in Adult, but not in any conscious, articulateable way.

Okay, this part I’m gonna have trouble articulating, but here goes. When I think of these plays – having only read two of them, once – one theme that comes to mind is what I’ll lamely call “Men and Women.” The men seem to be clearly of a group, and the women of another clearly separate group. It’s not that Walker generalizes the sexes – indeed there are a variety of characters represented in both groups – but that he seems to truly delineate between the two. And the character’s sex seems to be central to who that character feels himself or herself to be. Furthermore, my recollection is that whenever man and woman come into contact in these plays, there’s this … I don’t know, a frisson. A charge. Like playing with the different ends of magnets, attracting and repulsing each other. I suppose I would throw all this in contrast to a playwright who writes a bunch of characters, and some of them happen to be men, some happen to be women, and the charge of their interactions – even their sexual interactions – has more to do with personality or background or point of view. So, does any of this ring true to you? And if so, would you have anything to add, or to contradict?

Yes and no… I mean, in a way, yes, definitely: there’s a lot of sex and violence and it’s all right out there. But the sex and violence are just two parts of the cocktail of extreme circumstances he puts these complex human beings into to push them past their normal limits.

And again, it’s so different from play to play. Featuring Loretta (which I know is one of the ones you read), is really fundamentally about a woman being objectified by the men in her life (in hilarious and disturbing ways), who is forced to grow up and take control of the decisions she’s going to make about her own body. It’s about the way these predatory men interact with this smart but troubled young woman, and the way she behaves in response or opposition to that. So it’s overtly sexual in that way. But there is also a wonderful relationship between the two female characters, and that’s actually the central relationship of the play. Ultimately, even though it’s a comedy about making porn, it’s very much feminist work. I would argue that with anybody.

Adult Entertainment has two extraordinary male-female relationships, one of which is dangerous to the point of being psychotic. But the other one, which I would argue is the central story, is a true love relationship. Complex and flawed, sure, but deep and real all the same. Adult Entertainment also has a male/male relationship straight out of Shepard. Or even Pinter.

Finally, Risk Everything. It’s central relationship is generational, between a gambling-addicted mother and her daughter, a former junkie prostitute. Also, there’s the daughter’s husband – another uniquely rich relationship – and the cheesy dude mom’s banging, and stolen money, murderous gangsters and dynamite… But at the core is a troubled young woman who’s forced to take care of her even more troubled mother.

What was the most challenging aspect of presenting these plays, from either an artistic or practical point of view?

Practically, everything. Every single thing has been tougher than I imagined.

Artistically, though, it’s been mostly great. The toughest thing artistically was probably casting. Nearly 1400 actors submitted for our little project. That’s just an overwhelming amount of human energy and talent to try to deal with. In the end though, we wound up with some truly wonderful actors – speaking as the director of Featuring Loretta, I’ve never worked with a better a cast: the gorgeous Jennifer McPherson, the brilliant Brian Lafontaine (who I first acted with 16 years ago in Charlotte, NC), and Scott Kerns and Merissa Morin, both of whom are on their way to being big stars – all professionals who make their living acting, but who were willing to work their asses off for me for nothing. I’m a little in awe of their collective talent. And the phenomenal actors I get to work with in Adult Entertainment – Paul Michael Valley, Jennifer McCabe and Marguerite Stimpson – it’s a dream to work on material this rich with actors of this caliber. I am very, very grateful.

What was the most motivating aspect?

Let me play the Lion too!

Ha! Nice. These plays are the debut productions of your new theater company, Occam Rep. What’s your vision for Occam Rep’s future?

There’s been talk about doing the other three plays in the series: Problem Child, Criminal Genius and The End of Civilization. Whatever it is, though, it’s going to be repertory. I’m committed to that.

Thanks for letting me babble about all this stuff… It’s always fun - and, as you know – challenging - to try to write coherently about an artform that’s so inherently visceral and ephemeral. A play is something you can only learn so much about but writing or reading or talking or listening. You’ve got to be in the room with it. And these three plays, and this great writer, have given me such a great room to be in. Can’t wait for you to see them!

Me neither! I’m going next weekend. It's gonna be great to see this project come full circle. Thanks for your time, Bryan -- and for being the interview guinea pig at A Year of Plays!

Reefer Madness and Wonder of the World

2010-12-02T18:22:00.001-05:00

Performance Date: 11.13.10
The Gallery Players (Reefer)
The CHILDREN's Theatre Company, Triskelion Arts (Wonder)

So as you may recall, I had a walloping weekend of theater a couple weeks ago which included a Saturday matinee of Reefer Madness at The Gallery Players in Park Slope, followed by an evening performance of Wonder of the World from The CHILDREN’s Theatre Company in Williamsburg. It was a Brooklyn affair.

The two productions underscored for me that there are just floods of talented actors in our burgeoning Metropolis. Just floods and floods. They’re pouring out of subways stations, clutching scripts. They’re milling about the bars near 29th and 7th Avenue, nerding out about improv. They’re sitting on their couches blogging about theater. Okay these are just all the things I do about town, but I’m a talented actor so it counts. And more and more, it seems these actors are gravitating to great “off-off” houses like Gallery, and forming hot little companies of their own, like CHILDREN’s.

It's an old story: theater is in trouble, its economic model is broken, jobs that used to go to stage veterans now go to Hollywood stars, which trickles down and leaves the majority of us competing for no-budget gigs staged in crappy digs for no pay and little respect. Old story, but feels like true story. And after a while, that truth hurts. So what do we do? We turn to places like The Gallery Players, an oasis of stability and creativity now in its 44th season, or we group together to create our own “off-off” productions with no budget, no pay, but TONS of respect, because dammit that’s OUR show that WE made happen OURSELVES. Do not confuse my capital letters with irony.

By the way, I put “off-off” in quotes because it seems like an increasingly irrelevant term. With so many artists finding creative fulfillment elsewhere, and often on their own terms, it doesn’t feel right to keep orienting the industry toward Broadway. I mean, yes it will always be the holy grail of stage actors, and yes as consumers we will always partake of and celebrate the Great White Way – but as far as defining one’s creative life and career? For most I know, Broadway dreams hardly enter into it. In this way, New York theater is becoming thoroughly decentralized, which frankly feels like a good thing. And would indeed be really great if we could only fix that economic model.

At any rate, both The Gallery Players and The CHILDREN’s Theatre Company hold cherished places in my heart. The first New York theater gig I ever booked was playing Rosalind at The Gallery Players, and CHILDREN’s is a company comprised entirely of American Conservatory Theater alums. But objectively speaking, each of their productions from the other weekend were really quite special. Reefer Madness, a smartly funny musical parodying an anti-marijuana propaganda film of the same name, sported top notch voices, keen comic timing, and clean design. And Wonder of the World, a wacky comedy by Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsey-Abaire, benefited from the nuanced emotion and genuine charm of its romantic leads, and the bold, playful character choices of its supporting cast. Bravo on all counts, Brooklyn homies. Next time I'll try harder to pimp your shows when they are still running.

All About Audience

2010-12-01T09:50:00.003-05:00

It’s still Thanksgiving Day as I’m writing this, though just barely. I’ve got the last thirty-three minutes of Thanksgiving before me which means I’m just going to get this under the wire: Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring about theater, whether it’s because it’s your passion, or because you’re curious, or because you’re my friend and you’re the type of person who cares about what your friends care about. Thank you for giving me your time, and for the indulgence of your audience. It is an incredible gift.

I’ve been thinking a lot about audience lately. I’m at the point with this show I’m producing – oh, wait, please hold. I’m sorry, I hate that I keep mentioning this show and still haven’t officially announced it to you guys. I’m just waiting until I get the application to Equity submitted before I start blowin’ that horn is all. Dotted I’s and crossed T’s and all that. Okay, where was I? Oh yes – I’m getting to the point where I’m wondering how the heck am I going to get people to this show? How am I going build an audience? Solving this problem all depends on marketing, of course, but before I start strategizing I feel compelled to consider what it even means to have an audience. What does having an audience do for a show? I mean, besides fill seats and create revenue – which is the economic relationship at play but can’t possibly be, to my way of thinking, an audience’s most essential function.

So what could that function be? Well, I suppose it’s right there in the word audience, from the Latin audire, ‘to hear.’ The audience is there to hear you, to listen to what you have to say. And that’s another thing – the audience is actually there to hear you, as in right there in the very same room, changing the alchemy of all that happens with their presence. So they are there, and they are there to hear what you have to say. Which to my mind means: 1) You better acknowledge their presence somehow, and 2) You better have something to say.

That falls pretty in line with my own experience as an audience member. For example, nothing drives me crazier than a production that is too self-involved or too timid to reach out to where I’m sitting and connect with me. And this has nothing to do with direct address, broken fourth walls, or other types of meta-theatricality, and has everything to do with awareness and intention. Furthermore, while I’m not necessarily conscious of it, determining what a production might have to say is exactly how I decide what shows to see. When I scan reviews, read articles, listen to word of mouth, or peruse show postcards, I’m trying to size up what a play might be saying – about its subject, about the world, about theater – and if I I think I'd like to hear more, I buy a ticket.

Which leads me another piece of the puzzle that keeps coming to mind: you can’t beg an audience to come, or to listen. You can’t demand it of them. You can’t even really ask it of them. Whether it’s on stage in performance, or on the page in your marketing materials, if you beg, demand, or even ask, you’re putting the obligation on the audience to deliver. They have to acquiesce, they have to give over to you their presence and attention. And that can put an audience in a rather resentful frame of mind. However, if you invite an audience, if you welcome them, maybe even lure or entice them, then the burden is on the show to deliver. The show must then bear out its promise – or not – but either way the audience is obligation free. Which is a much lighter frame of mind, one in which an audience might feel downright generous with their presence and attention.

So I think that makes sense, but so what? What does this mean for my show? What does this mean for you? Well I’m not sure yet for the show, although I do feel a bit more grounded in how I want to speak to an audience in these coming months. As for what it means to you? Well you’re my audience here in this blog. And I hope I’ve made you feel acknowledged. I hope you feel that your presence, though virtual, is important to me. Because it is. Your presence is the very thing that drives me to discover what I have to say. Without the belief that you were listening, I wouldn’t dig as diligently or explore as deeply, and I certainly wouldn’t have as much fun. So once again, thank you. I am very grateful. Hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

Oh and I haven't forgotten. Reefer Madness and Wonder of the World are still coming your way. This week! A multiple post week!

The Sky Box Aerial and Variety Show

2010-11-14T12:23:00.000-05:00

Performance Date: 11.11.10

House of Yes

It was a three-fer weekend, ladies and gents. That’s right a three-fer. An aerial show at the House of Yes on Thursday night – Thursday counts as weekend in NYC – and a double header of comedy on Saturday, with Reefer Madness at the Gallery Players and Wonder of the World from The CHILDREN’s Theatre Company in Williamsburg. Feels good getting back in the playgoing habit with such a wallop of a weekend.

I had a fabulous time at the House of Yes. Do yourself a favor and go see something there. Please. If their regular fare is as fun and rollicking as the Sky Box Aerial and Variety Show was on Thursday, it will be well worth your while. It was a vibrant and visceral night of vaudevillian circus, lightly raunchy and sweetly twisted, with many moments of both beauty and astonishment. There were aerial acts on the silks and the trapeze, contortionists, a juggler who reminded me of this guy but sexier and without makeup or pointy shoes, a balancing act, a ukele serenade, a charming emcee in sequined hotpants, and a little kid in the audience named Cougar wearing black and white striped leggings and a muscleman mustache penciled on his upper lip. It was awesome.

I kept thinking how whenever I tell people that my friend Gwynne, who performed gorgeously on the silks with her cohort Kate, does aerial performance, nobody knows what I’m talking about. They think of old-timey planes. When I explain that it’s things like silks and trapeze and stuff like that, I invariably have to reference Cirque du Soleil. But here’s what I was thinking Thursday night – this House of Yes stuff is WAY BETTER THAN CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. Now don’t get me wrong, I have loved me some Quidam and Varekai, and I’ve been dying to see O in Vegas ever since it opened. But as beautiful and amazing and inspiring as those shows are, I never really get the sense that anyone is in danger. Where is the danger?? With all the costume and makeup and rock hard abs, with all the precision and perfection that millions of dollars and unlimited hours of rehearsal time can buy you, with the enormous big top that distances you from the action, what ends up getting erased is the thrill of oh my god that man’s neck is wobbling perilously because he has that other guy BALANCED ON HIS HEAD!

Now I imagine the House of Yes people wouldn’t want me to imply that their work is perilous. After all, even though circus and aerial arts are inherently dangerous, those who teach and perform those arts are rigorously trained in safety. There’s a focus and respect level there that is evident when you watch these artists perform. But the fun of aerial arts is precisely that it seems so unthinkable to tie yourself up in a bunch of fabric thirty feet in the air and then let yourself drop, tumbling down until you’re suspended three feet off the ground. You think you would die if you did that. And, unless you’ve been taking classes at the House of Yes, you probably would.

Zat is all for today. Stay tuned for parts two and three of my walloping weekend, where I will reflect upon the societal dangers of The Reefer, and follow some adorable CHILDREN to Niagara Falls.

Seeds

2010-11-04T17:07:00.000-04:00

I’ve been proto-thinking. You know, that low-level, nearly subconscious ruminating that your brain does as you bustle about your day, accomplishing tasks and shuttling yourself from place to place. When my life feels organized, these thoughts find space enough to grow into fully formed ideas that sustain reflection or inspire action. When my life feels disorganized, these thoughts are like sprouted beans trapped beneath a slab of concrete. They exist, but haven’t yet seen the light of day. They are murky and undeveloped. Proto-thoughts. Today, however, I’m taking steps towards organization which includes prying apart the concrete so these little beans can breathe.

The beans all concern theater, or else I wouldn’t bug you about them, and I planted them on purpose. As you know, I’m producing this (still unannounced) show in the spring and launching a theater company to go with. Very soon I will need to articulate what I’m trying to offer the world with these ventures, and why I think the world might need it. Important stuff. Requires serious thought, beginning with answering the fundamental question, What do I like so much about theater? Good thing I had this blog to look back on because reflecting on my first Year of Plays helped me get these seeds to sprout. Here’s the shape of them so far, and remember they are in their primitive states.

>> Sharing space with real live people. Almost all the memorable moments from the blog stem from the excitement of sharing the same physical space with the actors on stage and the audience sitting next to me. I’m thinking of the collective hush we participated in when the Stage Manager in Our Town asked us all to listen for the train. I’m thinking of the titillation in the audience at the interval for In the Next Room: Or the Vibrator Play. I’m thinking of the perplexing fascination I feel watching anyone pretend mightily right before my very eyes.

>> Breath, energy, and connection. These are vague, airy-fairy terms to most people, I fear. To me they mean something concrete. They refer to my belief that breath and energy – and by energy I literally mean the electromagnetic field that all living beings emanate – are conduits of nonverbal communication. Breath and energy connect us without us saying a word. When theater is at its best, when it affects us most deeply, it is because the breath and energy of everyone in the room is flowing freely enough to connect us to one another. That is how theater goes from being an entertaining event to a communal experience. I'm thinking of Burning Man, but not only that.

>> The collective suspension of disbelief. I love that theater requires actors and audience to agree on a common un-reality. In order for it to work right, we must agree to suspend our disbelief and enter the alternate reality of a narrative together.

>> Holding space. Related to all of the above is a notion that theater operates in a space – both literal and metaphysical – that must be created and protected. A space that must be held open by those who create it and, ideally, by all those who enter into it.

So that’s the sum of it for now.

I think I’ll take this unspotlighted moment to disclose the name of my theater company, seeing as I feel it relates to the ideas above. The name is PARENTHESIS. It came initially from an ee cummings poem that is significant to me, but look at this:

( )

Tell me what you see. I see space. Space that is held. Space that is empty, except that it may contain breath. I see collectiveness. What we put inside that space is collected together, protected from what we put outside it. And perhaps – and this is stretching it – perhaps I can even see connection: a parenthesis allows us to present a new idea as separate, but not severed, from the ideas around it. The idea is new but still connected.

Stretching it, as I said. But I’m still proto-thinking, so it's allowed.

Jack of All Trades

2010-10-27T10:20:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the three week absence, folks. My theater brain has been all over the place lately. I’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire, which is fantastic for productivity, creativity, and general artistic fulfillment, but has also left me with precious little mindshare for cultivating cohesive thought. Makes me a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none. I’m okay with that, generally speaking, since donning these different hats is crucial to me determining what kind of theater professional I want to be going forward. I just wish my mind felt less like an overtilled tract of dirt at the end of the day. Still, there’s no way I’m letting another week of this blog lapse, so today I’m taking you on a tour of my scrambled artist brain. No, hang on, let’s be compassionate with ourselves, shall we? Let me take you on a tour of my wisely apportioned and highly active artist brain, instead.

Over here, we have Producer-land.

Did you hear? I’m producing a show in the spring. Hooray! After years of hinting and hedging and hoping and hyping, I’m finally getting off my ass and doing it. The cool thing is that it would not have happened without this blog. After reading my post about Apothecary Theater Company, in which I dreamed of forming a theater company of my own, a director friend shot me an email suggesting we meet to swap theater company fantasies. As part of that conversation, he lent me a play he’d been in love with for years, and as luck would have it, I fell in love with it too. It’s a gorgeous play. I can’t wait to tell you about it, and once some final details are hammered out, I will.

The strange outcome of this exciting development is that it has actually contributed to my constipation in the blog-writing arena. Ever since I decided to make a go of this producer thing, my thoughts have been monopolized by this project. I’m learning so much already and we haven’t even signed a contract on a venue yet. My natural inclination, of course, is to share what I’m learning with you all. At the same time, however, I’m hesitant to chart my course as a first-timer so publicly. How can I debut a theater company from a position of strength, for example, if confessions of my doubts and insecurities are there for the googling? How can I write about the intimacies of collaboration and still honor the privacy of my collaborators? How can I talk usefully about budgeting without disclosing more financial information than I’m willing to share? It’s a fascinating problem, and one I’ll continue thinking on. There’s just no way I can keep this experience completely to myself for the next six months. For now, though, let’s turn our eye towards…

Actor-ville.

Because, oh yeah, I’m acting in this show I’m producing too. Gulp. And the last time I was on stage in a scripted production was exactly a year ago. Double gulp. So in preparation for my return to the stage, I’ve gone back to class. I’m working on a scene from Three Sisters and there’s nothing like Chekhov for oiling up those rusty joints. Yet sadly, I haven’t gotten round to limbering any actual acting muscles because the first week back (last week) was all about massaging my self-consciousness away. It’s amazing how quickly self-consciousness – that basic human response to speaking lines in front of people – returns when you’ve been out of practice. It was a particularly odd surprise because I’ve been practicing saying unscripted lines in front of people all year…

Here in Improv City.

“Yes, and” continues to be alive and well in Anna World. I’m just finishing up my level 5 class at the People’s Improv Theatre (a.k.a. the PIT) and my indie team Student Driver continues to do a gig or two a month. I still find this art form both inspiring and challenging, which engenders in me a deep desire to master it. That’s no small task. Similar to writing where, I once heard, the first million words don’t count, improv requires constant practice. Far more than the five hours a week I’ve been devoting to it so far. I should be performing nightly just to get those first 10,000 scenes out of the way. But, as in all things, you do what you can until you can do more.

And finally, the familiar fields of Play-goer Park.

I haven’t forgotten this was a blog about seeing plays. In the past few weeks I’ve seen Seed – a new play presented in the 10th annual Hip Hop Theatre Festival – and As Is, one of the first plays written about the AIDS crisis when it began in the mid 1980’s. Yet here again, Producer-land exerts its influence. Watching these plays, I found myself paying far more attention to non-artistic elements than I ever have before – the merits and limitations of the venue, the cost effectiveness of the design, the marketing strategy, the playbill format, the front of house staff, and on and on. This isn’t a bad thing, and clearly is a necessary development for my success as a producer, but it made sitting down to write about Seed and As Is another perplexing proposition. Talking about plays from a producer’s standpoint is a far more dispassionate exercise than reflecting on them from the standpoint of art or human experience. Producing is business – business in the support of art, but business all the same. I wasn’t sure how well that type of discourse would blend with the sensibility of this blog thus far.

Back at the ranch.

So there you have it. That’s the landscape of my artist’s brain, and therefore my stopped-up author’s brain as well. My boyfriend remarked last night that I’m happier when I’m writing my blog and he was right. So it seems to me that the focus of my writing here will have to shift somehow to accommodate the changes in my creative life. It will be yet another adventure figuring out how that will go, and as always I would love if you would come along. I’ll try my best to keep it worth your while.

Theater Artists are Insane. But in a Good Way.

2010-10-07T17:31:00.001-04:00

So I just read back on some of my old posts. They’re pretty good. Somebody out there should make me into a book. Because I’m sure that 52 posts about specific theatrical productions seen by a limited number of people who live chiefly in the New York metro area would SELL LIKE HOT CAKES. Sign me up, ye literary gods. Let’s make all those Julie and Julia comments come true.

I mention it only because I am currently reading a book that was made from a theater blog. It’s called Exit Pursued by a Badger by Nick Asbury. I found it by my bedside, last time I visited home, with a post-it note atop that read, “Send to Anna” in my mother’s beautiful, thick-markered script. I suspect it was something she saw in a bookstore, or that dad came across in The Threepenny Review, and thought to send my way. I have such thoughtful parents. Such thoughtful, literary parents.

So I don’t know how I missed this, but back in 2008, England’s Royal Shakespeare Company staged a monster octology of Shakespeare’s English histories. That would be Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, and finally Richard III. I know it looks like I just cut and pasted the same words and letters over and over again, but that’s actually eight separate plays from the Shakespeare canon listed in historically chronological order (as opposed to the order in which they were written).

I can barely continue on to describe the scope of the RSC’s project because I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Thinking about describing it, that is, let alone anyone doing it. But here goes. Basically this was a two and half year project that culminated in the performance of the aforementioned eight plays, back to back, over a four day period, using a single ensemble of 34 actors playing a total of 264 parts, for a combined total of 24 hours playing time. Richard II on a Thursday night, the Henry IV plays on Friday night, three Henry VI plays on Saturday, and Richard III on Sunday. That in itself is a mind-boggling feat of stamina, for actors, crew, and audience alike. But now consider that in the thirty-odd months leading up to this so-called Glorious Moment, the company prepared by mounting the productions in two groups of four, each performed in repertory.

Let me spell this out a bit more. Imagine you’re an actor learning and rehearsing a single Shakespeare play. When you’re pretty well on your feet with that one, you begin learning a second play. Once that second play is learned, you brush up the first one and begin performing both plays on alternate nights. While you’re performing those two plays at night, you begin learning and rehearsing a third play by day. Then a fourth play. Soon you’re performing all four plays in repertory. This includes certain “trilogy” days where you perform three plays in a row on a single day. Finally the run closes. But then you start all over again with a second set of plays. More learning, rehearsing, and performing. More trilogy days. Then, when you’re finished with that, when you’ve survived that marathon for a second time, you go back, brush up the first marathon, tack it to the second, and perform all eight plays together.

Now imagine you’re doing all that for the roles you were cast in, and AT THE SAME TIME you’re also doing it for the roles you are understudying.

Now imagine all the sword fights you have to learn, for your own roles and your understudy roles. Imagine the exits and entrances, the costume changes, the props you keep you track of, the trapeze and flying stunts you have to learn. For your roles and your understudy roles. In all eight plays.

Now imagine stage managing this thing. Imagine sewing costumes for this thing. Imagine rigging safety harnesses for this thing. Running light cues for this thing.

Imagine being the director who has to be there for EVERY SINGLE REHEARSAL for two and a half years.

Are you horizontal yet? I mean, right??? My heart is racing just reading all that over.

And now I’ve taken up this whole post describing the thing without getting back to the book I’m reading. One of the actors in this project, Nick Asbury, started a weekly blog about half way through the whole experience and eventually it got turned into this book. I’m only half way through but it’s a great read so far. Getting a glimpse into the work involved on the project has been fascinating, and his backstage accounts are hugely entertaining. But chiefly, his writings speak to the gratitude that he and his fellow artists felt for having this opportunity at all. The gratitude they felt for participating in a double-quadruple marathon (with an octology on top) for two and a half years. Imagine that.

Well, actually, I hope you find it’s easy to imagine that. That this Histories Cycle happened at all – and didn’t dissolve into a bloody massacre of clashing egos and exhausted bodies inside of six months – is a testament to the love and passion theater professionals feel for their art, and an example of how hard they are willing to work for it. It’s pretty amazing. It’s insane, actually. And if you can imagine the gratitude these folks felt for the opportunity to exhaust themselves at their passion, it means you’ve got a passion of a similar size. Or at least the seeds of one inside you.

And if you can’t imagine that gratitude? Hmm, well, I guess I don’t believe you. You might not have identified your passion yet, but you’ve got that seed in there somewhere. I know you do. If you want to find it, dig deeper. Some people have to risk more than others to get at their passion, and that's unfair, but I'm pretty sure those seeds were given out to everyone. So dig deeper. If you want it, it's there.

Without You

2010-09-30T19:22:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 09.29.10
NYMF, The Barrow Group Theater

There's a scene from the television series "Six Feet Under" where a grieving woman asks the main character Nate, "Why do people have to die?" Nate considers for a moment and then replies, "To make life important."

There is something about that elemental theme - death giving shape to life - that utterly arrests me. I don't know what it is. It could be just a basic human understanding that life is fleeting. But it feels like more than that. Any story that organizes itself around this theme has the power to reduce me within moments to a quivering, tear-stained ball of emotion. It's like I'm mainlining some essential unbearableness. I become instantaneously raw. And it's not so much the dying part that does it. It's the living part. Living in the face of, the fear or, the wake of, the knowledge of, the acceptance of death - a loved one's or one's own. It's terrible yet beautiful. Death and life sharpening one another. It just undoes me.

That doesn't make me special I realize. But it does explain why I woke up with swollen turtle eyes this morning, a full thirteen hours after seeing Anthony Rapp's one man show Without You. Anthony Rapp originated the role of Mark in the musical Rent, and while that cultural phenomenon was happening to him and around him - a period already underscored by the unexpected death of Rent's creator, Jonathan Larson - Rapp's own mother was living with and eventually dying from cancer. Without You chronicles the layering of these events in Rapp's life, a confluence that is somewhat staggering. Given that I come undone by stories of death giving shape to life, and given my love affair with Rent, itself a narrative organized around this theme, I knew walking into Without You that I was hosed. And I was right. My face was simply lacquered in tears from the beginning right to the end.

Thinking back on Rapp's show, though, I realize there's another element to these narratives that sources the rawness I feel. It's not just how death and life sharpen one another, it's how death and life are each sharpened by love. It's the love. Cheesy as it sounds. When it comes to dying, love is both the source of pain, and the way through it. That seemed to be the message of Rapp's narrative, and it was also so in Rent. I suppose if dying is what makes life important, then what makes life important is love. Hey, just because it comes off cheesy written out like that in some sappy woman's blog, doesn't make it untrue. I've got the turtle eyes to prove it.

Serendipity and Chaos: Or, How to Cure Hamster Cancer

2010-09-23T11:39:00.001-04:00

I’m jumping off a bit of a cliff with this post – it’s the first one not centered around a specific performance – and I hope you’ll jump with me. One of my intentions for the blog this year is to allow for a little more blogginess. You know, shorter posts, less forethought, more spontaneity. My hope is that this looseness will provide some new inspiration and eventually lead me somewhere valuable that I can’t as yet predict. The “good student” in me – the girl scout who believes in responsibility and duty – is nervous that this change in affairs is simply slackerdom in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps. But you know what? Lately I’ve been telling that girl scout to stuff it. Her devotion to care and craft, while one of my greatest assets, has no doubt precluded me at times from the serendipity found in chaos. So I’m gonna have my blogginess. And if you’re a fan of my longer, more crafted writings, have no fear. Girl Scout is strong. She usually ends up winning in the end.

Speaking of “serendipity found in chaos”, let’s talk about improvisational theater – or improv – where "serendipity found in chaos" is the name of the game. I’ve been studying improv quite a bit since landing in New York and while I haven’t heard this exact phrase used to describe improv, I think it’s rather evident how it belongs. Chaos is inherent in improv. All the scenes are made up on the spot and no single performer knows what will happen next. It is, therefore, unplanned and unpredictable. Serendipity – or the phenomenon of making fortunate discoveries by accident – comes into play when the improvisers begin making connections amongst all the random material their chaos has generated. The serendipity part is what makes improv so delightful to watch. I hope you’ve all had the experience of bursting into unexpected laughter when the guy on stage suggests they cure the hamster’s cancer with that magic banana plunger from way back in the first scene. Or, you know, something similar. But the serendipity can’t happen without generating the chaos first. That’s what’s so fascinating about improv. It depends on chaos, on barreling into the unknown, and agreeing to embrace wholeheartedly whatever comes your way, no questions asked.

Does this make sense to people who haven’t studied improv? I hope so. If not, I suppose the very basic thing to know is the concept of “Yes, and,” which is how improvisers create agreement and generate new information in a scene. So if my scene partner says, “We’re plumbers,” then I must agree to that reality and also add new information: “YES we’re plumbers AND we have magical powers.” Then my scene partner does the same thing: “YES, we’re magical plumbers AND we’re stranded on a tropical island.” And before you know it, we’re going into business and magic banana plungers are born – which, as it turns out by the end of the show, are just the perfect thing to cure some poor hamster’s cancer.

Chaos is terrifying. Disorder and unpredictability, in life, is terrifying. That’s why I make lists and keep a calendar, and have perfected the art of worrying – all efforts to keep the disordered and unpredictable at bay. But if I get too good at it, all I will get out of life is exactly what is on my list plus a forehead full of wrinkles. So studying and performing improv is a bit of a balm for me. It’s a place where I can practice embracing chaos. And where I can practice creating order out of chaos not by imposing control, but by opening myself to the contributions of others and then adding my own two cents. The reward at the end of it – if I embrace and open hard enough – is serendipity and unexpected laughter, which is very tempting indeed, even for Girl Scouts. So I keep at it, even though it’s not so easy. Not so easy, but at least it’s simple. As simple as saying, "Yes, and."

P.S. - If you're in New York City or Chicago, you owe it to yourself to seek out the improv duo TJ and Dave - whose particular style of long-form improv will have less to do with magic banana plungers than with the hilarious authenticity of being human. Other improv teams I've recently enjoyed, and where magic banana plungers have a greater likelihood of appearing, include: The Stepfathers at UCB, Starkey and Grace and Jenn + Steve at The PIT, and of course Student Driver.

Burning Man 2010: Metropolis

2010-09-14T14:32:00.003-04:00

Burn Date: 09.04.10

Black Rock City, NV

Not everyone comes to see the Man burn. Some people leave early, the better to gain swift passage through the two lane highway out of the desert. Some remain, but at their camps or elsewhere nearby; they are spent perhaps, or simply desire something else from their evening. All of those who miss it are likely regular denizens of Black Rock City. They have seen the Man burn before. They will see him burn another year.

For the rest of us, and it feels to be all 50,000 converging upon the playa, witnessing the burn has suddenly become the very reason for being here. Seems strange to say ‘suddenly’ since this is the ritual after which the festival is named, but the week has already been replete with reasons to be here, even without tonight’s climactic event. I could have left this afternoon with that handful of others and brought back enough insight and inspiration to fuel me into winter. But now, I and thousands of celebrants are bedecked in apocalyptic finery and walking up the long radial streets of this circular city toward the Man – a glowing, summoning, blue beacon – and I cannot deny the atmosphere of pilgrimage. We were here for myriad reasons before tonight. Tonight we are here for him.

The Man stands one hundred feet high this year, a forty foot neon-lined body standing atop a sixty foot wooden base. From where we began walking, at our camp in the outer suburbs, he is a mile distant and difficult to distinguish. Now however, we are crossing the Esplanade, the innermost ring on the city grid, and the Man looms large though he is still two thousand feet away. He seems to hold us each with an invisible string, a piece of each person’s attention is so clearly fixed to him. Yet as we cross onto the playa, the wide expanse of open desert at the center of the city, the Man’s presence is nearly eclipsed by the swirling, blinking, cacophony of humans and mutant vehicles growing around him. Perhaps this is why I have not noticed until now that the Man’s arms, extended down by his sides all week, are raised above his head – the iconic gesture of Burning Man. I get chills. It is time, his arms say. It is about to happen.

Burn night 2010. Photo by David Silverstein

This is my third burn, but my first in nearly a decade and I’ve forgotten what it’s like. The throbbing energy of tens of thousands of people, gathered for a single purpose, united in our anticipation, our excitement coursing through one another like an electric current leaping from heart to heart. We are a swarming mass of calling voices and wheeled pirate ships, thumping sound systems and fire-breathing dragons. We pulse together. We amplify each other. It’s overwhelming. It’s delirious. It’s mad. At my side are three beloved companions who have never been here before, and watching them experience this for the first time makes me glimpse what motherhood must be. I am seeing the world through fresh eyes. I’m a born again virgin.

The ceremony is beginning but I’m too far back to see. It doesn’t matter. I remember what it is – a circle demarcated around the Man, torch bearers, fire dancers – and there is something perfect about witnessing it all from this distance. More perspective and more mystery. Soon fireworks begin to sail up from the Man and the tension of the crowd elevates to a near audible hum. The display lasts a long time and is as satisfying as any Fourth of July. But it only pulls the tautness tighter. Now parts of the wooden base are on fire. The intensity of the moment is swelling in my chest. It is so full it is almost unbearable. I am thrumming. I feel the happiest I have ever been. In an instant, my senses fill with the sound, the brightness, and the wall of heat from an enormous fireball exploding at the center of the Man. For the briefest second, fifty thousand people are snapped to attention and held suspended together in fiery shock. We are daredevils shot from the canon, weightless at the tops of our arcs. And then gravity comes. And we erupt. My arms fly into the air and I scream. We are jumping up and down. We are dancing. We are releasing. He is on fire. He is burning. And we are losing our minds.

Burning Man 2010. Photo by David Silverstein

If you can’t see this as theater, I don’t know what I can say to connect the dots. I feel this must be how theater originated way back before we had words and concepts for such a thing. Fire, community, an event, catharsis. What separates this night from theater, however - at least the theater I have known - is story. There is no single narrative of Burning Man. No single meaning or significance for why this Man burns or why we celebrate it as we do. There are rumors of genesis – that the founder Larry Harvey burned an effigy on a beach twenty five years ago to mourn a passing love affair – but this is mythology, no basis in fact. The effigy was burned, this is true, but Harvey insists it was a spontaneous act of artistic self-expression. The record leaves it at that. And so the meaning of Harvey’s act, the significance of its yearly replication, and the story told by its ritualization are left open. They are left for the participant to decide. For us to invent. The narrative is ours to dream up and then make true by bringing expressions of that narrative to the next year’s burn, and the next. This is Burning Man. A community organized around artistic self-expression and built upon the evolving mythologies of all of its participants. Burning Man is literally what you bring to it. It doesn’t exist without you.

As for me, my Burning Man narrative brews as we speak. I am moved by the size and scope of its art. Look at Bliss Dance:

Bliss Dance by Marco Cochrane. Photo by David Silverstein.

I am moved by the inspiration, invention, craftsmanship, engineering, planning, and reliance on community it takes to bring this forty-foot statue to the middle of the desert and make it stand safely for all to admire and fall in love with it. Funny, that sentence could refer just as well to the Man himself. Replace “forty foot statue” with “temporary city” and it refers to Black Rock City a as whole, to the phenomenon of Burning Man itself. This is a place of impossibility made real, which means nothing in the “real” world is impossible. Nothing I can dream up need remain undone. I want to produce a play? I will do it. I want to become great at improv? I will do it. I want to exercise more? I will do it. These things are nothing when Bliss Dance is in the world. Life is easier than I think it is. I will remember that as long as I can. And when I forget, there will be next year’s burn.

FringeNYC: Picking Palin, Lenny's Dead, and The Hyperbolist

2010-08-25T11:51:00.001-04:00

It’s August 22, 2010 and I have finally finished my Year of Plays. Fifty-two plays in three hundred and sixty five days and I feel fantastic. I was always confident I would pull it off – making myself accountable to you all pretty much sealed my fate on that score – but it was a big undertaking and I’m very proud to have finished. It feels momentous. Of course I’m not truly done, as there is still the matter of writing about these last three shows. Perhaps you’d like to count down with me, 3-2-1?

THREE!

Picking Palin

Performance Date: 08.18.10

FringeNYC Venue #2: Connelly Theater

Ever find yourself wondering, How the hell did Sarah Palin come into my life? I know I have. The woman is just so very special. Thankfully for those of us needing an answer, Picking Palin goes a long way toward providing one. The play takes place during the last week of August 2008, with Barack Obama poised to finally accept his party’s nomination in Denver, and the McCain camp scrambling to decide what worthy candidate will round out the Republican ticket. Under the mounting pressure of night after successful night over at the DNC – recall the huge stadium, Hillary’s unifying address, Barack reaching the apex of his political stardom – McCain’s top-level strategists duke it out in a hotel room over how best to play the election’s endgame, and who best to usher their side to victory.

I love political process stories – both real life and fictional – so I enjoyed tracking the compelling arguments that were ostensibly aired (hopefully aired? regrettably aired?) within the McCain camp before asking Palin to join the ticket. What sticks with me now, however, is the strange effect of watching a play about highly charged events that happened only two years ago. At times, it felt like reading a book with my face too close to the page – not enough distance to have a clear perspective. At other times, I felt I was walking with dinosaurs – so much has happened in our country since then that the events of the play seemed downright, even quaintly, sepia-toned. And yet it was just two years ago. The combined effect made me feel a little queasy, like walking through a funhouse hall of mirrors.

‘Queasy’ sounds like a criticism but I don’t mean it to be. In fact I find that reaction rather telling. Queasy is how I feel, for example, when I wake up the morning after a party and worry about what I said in a tipsy moment. I remember the details clearly enough to know it’s not that big a deal, but the sense of having been just a little out of control, just off-center enough to be unsure of my behavior – that makes me feel queasy. Picking Palin reveals that the last election is an analogous experience for me. I was awash in emotion during that time – the unbearable, swelling optimism that Obama inspired in me, the vitriolic scorn I felt for Palin, the disappointment that was McCain. I remember the details enough to know I wouldn’t take back anything I said or did in those days, and (in case you were wondering) I’ve been happy with the job our President has done so far. But I can also admit to that having that same sense of off-centeredness, of having been just a little bit out of control – and it was not until Picking Palin that I had occasion to notice it.

That’s a useful observation for me. I add it to my evolving perspective on politics and the media. I add it to my growing awareness that when I decide to listen to and care about the arguments presented in the political/cable news arena, I am deciding to enter a meme-war. And in meme-wars, the participants are all conscripted to serve as soldiers for one side or the other. If we have enough presence of mind – as I feel I did in 2008 – we can ensure the memes we solider for align with our values. But even when that’s the case, we’re still following orders handed down from up on high, from somewhere other than ourselves. Our words and actions are not entirely under our control. We are off our centers. And even if we don't want to change that exactly, it’s still a good thing to keep that in mind.

TWO!

Lenny’s Dead

Performance Date: 08.18.10

FringeNYC Venue #3: The Kraine Theater

This play has got me thinking about writing as catharsis. Writing as a way to purge oneself of something stuck inside. Writing as the exorcism of a story from one’s soul. It’s no wonder the play has led me here. Lenny’s Dead begins and ends with a man needing to just that – exorcise a story from his soul.

The man in question is Hank, a veteran of the Vietnam War, and the story is what really happened to his friend Lenny, killed by enemy fire thirty-nine years ago. To aid Hank in his catharsis is Lenny himself – appearing to us and to Hank as a ghost, or perhaps the embodied memory of the man. Lenny insists Hank has been hiding from the truth for far too long and he is determined to see the whole story finally come out.

Augmenting this writing as exorcism idea is the knowledge that Hank is performed in this production by the playwright himself, and that Lenny’s Dead is the gentleman’s first play. This suggests to me the possibility that the story of Hank must be, in some fashion, rooted in the facts of the playwright’s life. It must be his story that we are exorcising here. Of course I could be wrong; it could all be utterly fictional. But there was a certain innocence about the production, a guilelessness that makes me suspect I’m right.

It doesn’t matter either way. What I like is the thought of someone carrying around a bit of shadow inside him, a knowledge within himself that he doesn’t particularly want to see. And perhaps it doesn’t bother him all that much, or maybe it does, but he always knows that its there. And then, one day, rather than continuing to carry that shadow around – which is completely within his right to do – he decides instead to take a deeper look at it. To examine that place inside himself. To shine some light into that hidden space and see just what it is he finds.

What I like even more is using the act of writing to aid in that examination. I think writing is one of the best tools we humans have for self-discovery. And the more we use it for that purpose, the better we get at it. The better we get at precisely defining our thoughts, feelings, and ideas. The better we get at noticing when we have a stone left unturned within us. The more dissatisfied we are to leave those shadows there unchecked.

If you’ve never picked up a pen to sweep out those darker places inside you, I suggest you do it. It feels incredible, as I suppose all catharsis does when it is over. You don’t have to know where you’re going when you start. In fact, you don’t have to know anything at all. Just begin. You will discover what you need to along the way. And you just might surprise yourself and end up with a play.

ONE!

The Hyperbolist

Performance Date: 08.22.10

FringeNYC Venue #18: HERE Arts Center, Dorothy B. Williams Theater

I couldn’t have asked for a better show with which to end my Year of Plays. It was such a delightful experience. It had all my favorite things in it. Wit and whimsy. Words -- such words -- and wiggly eyebrows. Tradition and innovation. Craft and inspiration. Physicality, philosophy, and film. Puppets. Can’t forget the puppets. And of course at its center, the absolutely essential element for all utterly Anna-approved works of art, a great big beating heart. Love! That was the theme of the day in this collection of works by Joe Mazza. And not just any love, but pure love, fundamental love. The kind that makes you blush when you witness it in the physical intimacies of Dante and Florence, your pair of trained circus fleas.

I don’t want to share too much about this show because there are two shows left and I think you should just see it. But I will say that Joe Mazza strikes me as the kind of artist I admire most – the kind who makes whatever art is in his heart, in whatever form, for whatever reason. The kind who follows his own fun without bothering to wonder if others will come along. The kind who gets satisfaction in the doing of art, rather than in doing art “right.” Because the art he does is right, just by virtue of him doing it. He is incredibly talented -- in his writing, his puppeteering, his Keaton-esque clowning on film, his command over his body and face, his music -- and he also just seemed like a really nice guy. Greeting each of us as we sat in the theater waiting for the show to began, Mazza created an atmosphere of creative conspiracy that was warm and welcoming. He was casual, gracious and charming, with a comedic flair somewhere in the vicinity of a refined Robin Williams with a vocabulary the size of the OED. Apocape. I learned that word within four seconds of me sitting down and I knew immediately I was in for a treat.

The Hyperbolist is an entertaining little gem in the Fringe and I'm glad I found it. And I'm glad it is the production that puts the period on my playgoing project. You should check it out and maybe start a playgoing project of your own.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

So that’s it folks. That’s the official end of A Year of Plays. It’s truly been a pleasure writing these posts, and I hope you have enjoyed reading them. I highly recommend embarking on some similar adventure for yourself. There is nothing like immersion to teach you something new about a subject.

As for the future, my immediate plans are to go to Burning Man. Seriously. I leave on Saturday. But when I return, the blog will resume. Come on, you didn't think you could get rid of me that easily, did you? Especially not when I enjoy writing the sound of my voice so much. So meet me back here in mid-September. It will still be called A Year of Plays, but I'm relieving myself of the play-a-week structure. I do plan on keeping up the regular attendance in the theater though and I also hope to keep writing about art without reviewing it. What will change is my scope of inquiry, so to speak. I plan on loosening up on what "counts" as theater and am really looking forward to considering more unconventional forms. Burning Man of course is at the top of the list for new subjects. So you have that to look forward to.

In the meantime, please check out my upcoming appearance on the New York Innovative Theater blog -- should be up some time today. NYIT guest blogger Neal J. Freeman, a good friend and longtime collaborator of mine, interviews me about the conclusion of this year long project and about writing without reviewing it. It was a fun interview and hopefully will be an interesting read.

Until later, my friends. Thank you once again for all your support. It has meant the world to me.

FringeNYC: Running, Get Rich Cheating, and Tiny Geniuses

2010-08-19T10:14:00.000-04:00

Running

Performance Date: 08.13.10

FringeNYC Venue #14: The Cherry Pit

Get Rich Cheating

Performance Date: 08.15.10

FringeNYC Venue #16: The Soho Playhouse

Tiny Geniuses

Performance Date: 08.15.10

FringeNYC Venue #17: Here Arts Center Mainstage

Welcome to the last two (official) weeks of A Year of Plays. Thankfully, these weeks coincide with the New York International Fringe Festival, when the city has plays coming out its ears every moment of the day. If I’m a woman of my word, and I mean to be, I’ve got six shows to see before August 23rd. Thus I am pleased as punch that this past weekend I saw three of them.

I should warn you though that I am currently in a fog of psychosomatic illness. I decided last night to take a sick day today because I was starting to feel run down. I imagined I would spend it as a productive mental health day – sleep late, wake up refreshed, tidy the house, work out, catch up on the To Do list. Instead, my brain heard “sick day” and figured it needed to actually make my body sick. Funny little brain. So now I feel sort of thick-tonsilled and fuzzy-headed which is making it difficult to weave a cohesive thesis out of my Fringe experience thus far.

All the same, I do feel that these three shows – as far-ranging as they are in style – each made me alight near the topic of naturalism. I’m not sure that’s the right word, so I’ll also throw in the adjectives real, believable, and authentic. I fear I’m in danger of making you fuzzy-headed too, so let me dive in, tackling each show on its own.

Running

This play is essentially a long conversation between a man and a woman over the course of a single night. It’s performed by two veteran actors whose ease on stage is apparent the moment they make their entrance together, mid-dialogue. This ease was so great that, at moments, their performances were nearly indistinguishable from real life, as if the audience were listening in on two people’s actual interaction. It was very finely acted – I was particularly enamored of the male actor’s subtle specificity – and yet I wasn’t sure how to feel about the eavesdropping nature of my experience. Not because I felt I was intruding on a private moment, but because historically I’ve considered vérité a liability in theater.

It has been my unchecked belief that theater is not meant to be actual-life-sized. That theater is not meant to replicate life, but to translate it somehow. Make it bigger, make it smaller. Distill it, decorate it, distort it. Shove it through a new lens, like Play-Doh through the Fuzzy Pumper, and extrude it into a new shape. Even when the chosen style of a piece is naturalism (or realism or whatever the proper dramaturgical term is), I’ve always believed it must not be exactly like “real life.” Indeed, the very nature of theater – that there are performers, an audience, a tacit agreement about why we’re there – prevents it from being exactly like real life. (Except when “real life” is going to or performing in a play, but we’ve already covered that postmodern ground together.) When actors seem to ignore this fact, the result feels too private and indulgent for me, as if the performer couldn’t care less that I was there at all. And I guess I take that personally. So I’ve always preferred that performances and productions embrace their not-realness, and that actors lift their energy, even slightly, to include me.

However, this actor in Running – I don’t think I can say his energy on stage was any higher than it would be for a man having a late night conversation with a woman in his apartment. And yet as I said, I was enamored of his performance all the same. I did not find it too private or indulgent. I felt included in his awareness. So I’m a bit at a loss—still confused. Are my tastes for “life-sized” theater changing? Or was this piece of theater, and this man’s performance, not actually life-sized? I think maybe both. I’m just not sure in what proportions.

Get Rich Cheating

Get Rich Cheating is my friend Jeff Kreisler’s one man show, billed as a Tony Robbins-type wealth-building seminar that promises to make your greedy little dreams come true through some good old fashioned cheating. Rife with examples of real-life cheating “heroes” such as Bernie Madoff, AIG, and A-Rod, the show is a flat out satire – but of a surprisingly natural kind.

Jeff has a formidable intelligence, a robust moral center, and a wicked sense of humor. These combine perfectly to create the ironic social commentary that blazes, nearly undisguised, behind his character’s cherubic grin. Yet at the same time, Get Rich Cheating as a seminar feels disturbingly believable, as if it’s just a hair away from being an actual self-help phenomenon that could be sweeping our helpless nation tomorrow. In fact, if you took the glint of intellect from Jeff’s eyes and replaced it with a vacuous sincerity, I would not be surprised to find this show on TV in the wee hours, right between the DebtBuster infomercial and the Shake Weights for Men ad. It’s a bizarre duality. A show that is clearly not what it says it is, and yet is this close to being so. I attribute that to shrewd observance on the part of the show's creative team as well as to the bleak reality of our current culture.

Thinking about that “life-sized” idea again, here is a show that takes a real life truth and translates it through satire, character, and humor. There is nothing actual-life-sized about it. Except, except… I do think it’s worth noting that a few of my favorite moments were when Jeff was playing off-the-cuff with members of the audience, and engaging in some real-time, real-life interaction. Jeff remained in character and therefore within the parody, so perhaps those moments can’t be called “actual-life-sized.” But they did have an authenticity – an actualness – that deeply appealed to me.

By the way, actualness? Who do I think I am? Stephen “Truthiness” Colbert?

Tiny Geniuses

Gosh I just really liked this show. It was just super duper delicious and fun. For starters, everyone in it looked so shiny and new and impossibly young, which is sort of unsettling because I could have sworn I was too young to think any adult person was impossibly young. But they had more going for them than their youth. They were terrific actors, all of them. They displayed playful comedic chops, open emotional access, and authentic moment-to-moment interaction. They were grounded and aware. They handled the absurdist aspects of the play with confidence, balancing exuberance in some moments with restraint in others. Their ensemble connection was undeniable. They were authentic. They were having fun. And despite this embarrassment of riches, there seemed to be nothing smug about them. They just seemed to be doing what they enjoyed to do. Though perhaps if they catch wind of all this effusive praise I’m throwing their way, maybe some smugness will come upon them.

Tiny Geniuses is a comedy about an elementary school for the gifted that has been corrupted by the insecure, narcissistic, and down right batty adults that run the little brainiacs' lives. Nearly all the characters in this play might be classified as over-the-top whack jobs if it weren’t for the fact that they’re so delightfully human. There’s the insecure Principal Pineapple who is so pathologically lonely she conducts a romance with her companion teddy bear. There’s the wealthy Mommy and Daddy who sling their venomous banter just slightly over their young daughter’s head. And there’s the combined innocence and cruelty of the Gateway School’s children, played believably yet with clownish skill by the adult cast. And then at the center of this stylized maelstrom is the charming Finola Applebaum, a teacher with a heart of gold and our relatable straight-man in this sea of insanity.

I find the juxtaposition of outsized abusrdism and relatable naturalism really intriguing in this show. I feel it is handled very well. Ms. Applebaum's character – as "real-life" as she seems – always remains within the absurd world of the show. Her character never comments on the wackiness around her, but deals with it authentically, as it were all just a part of her ordinary life. A similar juxtaposition can be found within each character portrayal as well. In one moment, you gape at the playground tyrant as she viciously blackmails Ms. Pineapple by threatening to withold the principal's regular cootie shot, and in the next moment, you witness the child's genuine hurt at her self-involved mother's neglect. It's a delightful little magic trick to watch the style change so seamlessly moment to moment.

So there we have it. Three shows down and three to go. This whole life sized/real life/naturalistic/authentic thread is a bit of a tangled mess, but there are some good strands in there to keep tugging on. Particularly the bias against "life-sized" theater. I'm pretty sure there are a couple different concepts I currently have confused and need to separate within that argument. Stay tuned.

In God's Hat

2010-08-12T14:16:00.006-04:00

Performance Date: 08.04.10
Apothecary Theater Company, The Peter Jay Sharp Theater

When I think about Apothecary Theater Company's recent production, In God's Hat, I get that street-wise mug on my face that says... Respect.  You know, eyebrows up, pursed mouth with the corners turned down, nodding head slowly. Usually this look is reserved for appraising the impressive work of a rival peer, but to consider these artists my peers, let alone my rivals, is perhaps a mite ambitious. Having mounted this show in an Off-Broadway house, Apothecary seems to have been around the block a few times. My theater company has a total of zero productions to it's name.  In fact my theater company only has a name. And some interested parties. And big dreams. But you can understand why I see my dreams mirrored in this company; they are a group of alums from a respected theater program finding power in their collective talents, which is what my company would look like. So I see Apothecary and think, There is no reason I can't be doing this too. I guess in reality I feel like a good JV player watching the Varsity team bring home another victory. Happy that they'd won, impressed by their feat, but wishing I'd been out there.  So what is it about these guys that has me so green eyed? And what can I learn from them that will get me off the bench?

For starters, they picked a really good play.  Really good.  A tense, character-driven thriller set in an Oklahoma motel room where two estranged brothers (one a freshly paroled pedophile) have stopped for the night. It brought to mind a Coen brothers film by way of Sam Shepard - filled with suspense, pathos, clear but complex relationships, and a dark sense of humor. The dialogue, which was entertaining and tight, seemed to grow organically just from having these men in a room together, and yet it simultaneously revealed the evolution of an enticing plot.  Not only do you wonder what is going to happen in this play, you care about what happens too. A new play with all of this going for it amounts to an enormous leg up for an emergent theater company. New York is teeming with young companies and one excellent way to set yourself apart is to have a brilliant new play to help garner attention. Finding worthy new plays takes time, which is hard when the impulse is to get out there and just do something already, but Apothecary appears to have demonstrated patience. They found this play through their Development Series, where it received a staged reading last year. Duly noted.

Next up - and it's kinda crass for me to talk about this in my oh so sophisticated let's contribute to the public discourse about arts blog - but Apothecary looked like they had money.  And I was impressed. I'm sorry, but it's true. And what is also true, no matter how much it sucks, is that if you look like you have money in this world, people will treat you better. Theater is no exception. If your show looks expensive, audiences and critics will take you more seriously. Of course, looking expensive is no substitute for substance, and killer performances and direction will stand out no matter how poor the surroundings. But if you can demonstrate substance and look good doing it? That's a much better recipe for success.

So how'd they do it? And can you replicate that look without money? Well let's see. The first spendy item on display was their venue - a beautiful 128 seat house on Theater Row. Venue rental is usually the largest expense on a production budget and it's kind of hard to land a great venue at a cheap price. But a good deal is possible, especially if you have connections or are simply a great negotiator. The second high-price indicator was set design. Here there is definitely room to fake it. My brother, who is a sickly talented scenic designer, spent most of his early career making shows look phenomenal on absolutely zero budget. In Apothecary's case, it seems that smart allocation of funds was also part of their strategy. From the looks of it, most of their design dollars went wisely into a believable replication of the run-down motel room where the majority of the action takes place. This left the remaining scenes to fare for themselves downstage in front of a closed curtain with audience imagination filling in the rest, but that didn't detract from the impression the other set left. Third and lastly, cool graphic design put an extra polish on Apothecary's moneyed impression. Their professionally designed playbill cover made them look particularly hip and together. Sounds small, but it's the little details that make a difference.

Finally, I have to talk about Apothecary's ensemble. These actors had the unmistakeable connection that comes from a long history of working closely together. I'm not envious of that in itself because I have the same thing going with my own graduate school cohorts. But what I am envious of is the satisfaction Apothecary must feel in the fact that they are doing it. Actor dreams usually come in two stripes - fame and fortune a la Oscars and Tonys, or making your own success in a tight, ensemble company a la Steppenwolf or Wooster or the Group. Over the past five years, I've worked toward both dreams, but I suspect true happiness lies in the latter. There is something special about the relationships one forms in graduate school - or I suppose any place where artists gather to study intensely and at length - and as you venture forth to seek your success, sometimes it's watching your friends struggle that hurts the most. Why? Because you know, without a doubt, how insanely talented they all are. And you know without a doubt, that when you get on a stage with them, something special happens. So to do what Apothecary has done - to go from dream to reality, to form a company that allows you and your talented friends to work, to organize and fundraise effectively enough to persist over time, and to gain recognition together, as Apothecary has with In God's Hat - whew! I can only imagine how good that must feel.

Only imagine, that is, until I take action and do it too.

-----------
Update and addendum: After publishing this post, I took a closer look into Apothecary's website, thinking I should get in touch with these fine folks and see if I can pick somebody's brain. In so doing I found the following quote, as if in answer to my last line above:

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision raising in one’s favour all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamt would have come their way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

— Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

American Idiot

2010-08-03T12:33:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 07.21.10
St. James Theatre

I tried to make this post on Green Day’s American Idiot about narrative, but it didn’t work. I was probably over-reaching or maybe I was just tired, but either way, I came off sounding like a first year grad student talking out her ass to her Freshman Lit students. Making up all kinds of definitions, generalizing based on hunches gleaned from personal experience, blathering about narratives of plot, personal narratives, and cultural narratives. It was all pomp and no circumstance, and before I got too far my Yada Yada Yada ref threw a yellow card and I had to toss the whole thing out. So Instead, I will tell you this:

In 1994 and 1995, I listened to Green Day’s breakthrough album “Dookie” on a constant loop. I was a sophomore in college. The album made me feel punk when I was decidedly suburban, which I think is an exact reflection of Green Day’s place in the cultural landscape at that time. I knew that Green Day was about as lightweight as you could get in the punk universe without completely ejecting from it, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. “Dookie” made me feel rebellious, alienated, and edgy, and that was exactly what this nineteen-year-old Dean’s List student from Palo Alto needed. Listening to Green Day made me feel that there was more to me than met the eye.

In 1998, my friend Sally took me and twenty of our coworkers to see the musical Rent in Reno. She had been a devoted fan since the first national tour kicked off in her college town and had already seen the musical some 15 times. By the time our caravan of twenty-somethings left that fair city, I was similarly hooked. The central anthem of the musical, “No Day But Today,” twanged a chord in me that I still find hard to describe. Top notes plucking the exuberant yearning of my inner infatuation-addicted teenager – Roger loves Mimi but he’s afraid! – and bottom notes thrumming more philosophically to themes of choosing innocence in the face of cynicism, and optimism in the face of pain. Over the next few years, I too saw the musical nearly 15 times.

In 2001, September 11th happened and so began many years of me struggling to comprehend what the f*ck was going on in the world. In the immediate aftermath, I could not saturate myself deeply enough with the images and stories from the attack. I watched the news obsessively, thirsty for and yet horrified by each new video that captured another perspective on the explosions, the billowing plumes of smoke, the people falling, the streets below. In those few days, the television felt like a tribal elder passing on a history that I was duty-bound to remember. But that quickly changed. I soon learned that the TV was not to be trusted, even as my dependence on it deepened, and that nobody on TV was to be trusted either.

This post is about narrative after all. These three narratives from my life explain perfectly why American Idiot resonated so successfully with me, despite the musical lacking a strong theatrical narrative to tie Green Day’s songs together. Traditional narrative (the story of what happens) isn’t the only way to engage an audience. Reflecting an audience member’s personal narrative (the story of me) or a cultural narrative to which she feels attached (the story of us) can work just as well. Hearing the tight harmonies and driving percussion of Green Day’s music blaring from the stage connected me to that nineteen-year-old trying a new identity on for size. Appreciating the rocking-out performance style and multi-level scaffolding set that American Idiot shares with its predecessor Rent connected me to the exhilaration of that long dormant rock musical addiction. Seeing a wall of television screens replay the imagery of this past decade’s media history, hearing the lyrics of political dissent and social unrest, and watching a projection of a skyscaper's worth of loose leaf paper blowing in the air – these experiences clearly connected me with our country’s journey in the years since 9/11. None of these elements from American Idiot tell the story of what happens to the characters on stage, but for this individual, they do tell in part the story of me and the story of us. And that kept me engaged.

Henry VI, Part 3

2010-07-21T12:36:00.000-04:00

Performance Date:
Wide Eyed Productions

You have to, you just have to. If you’re doing an epic War of the Roses Shakespeare play, with all the battle and all the blood, with all the power that changes hands, with all that drama – you just have to do what Wide Eyed Productions did with Henry VI Part 3. You gotta go big. Go big or go home. But how do you do that on a showcase budget? Wide Eyed did it like so:

With Actors Who Will Pretend Mightily

One my earliest and most influential acting teachers, Chris Herold, once said that to act is to “pretend mightily.” I’ve always loved that phrase. It gets at that sense of play, reminding us of when we could spend hours fully absorbed in our make believe, but ennobles it somehow. It’s that word – mightily. It takes the word “pretending,” which can be used to dismiss acting as deceptive, childish, or insubstantial, and gives it power. To pretend mightily. As though the act of holding oneself within imaginary circumstances were a great test of will, requiring a person of extraordinary strength and admired ability. And so, in fact, it is.

Such admired actors, such mighty make believers, were among the huge cast of Henry VI Part 3. Rather than shy away from the dramatic tenor of the play, these actors immersed themselves in it. Rather than be embarrassed by the emotional hugeness of their characters, these actors embraced it. Rather than pull Shakespearean extremity down to a supposedly more modern size, these actors strove to fill it. And they did so by surrendering to the power of their imagination, with sincerity and seriousness. It was a welcome sight.

With Design that Does Double Duty

I love elegance and efficiency. And that’s how I felt about the two major design elements of this play – a giant wooden chair and a huge wallpaper portrait. The chair – an enormous, tall, heavy-looking thing, with thick, square proportions – is first used as Henry’s throne, which gets usurped again and again during the course of the play. Subsequently, however, the chair is moved, spun, laid on its back, on its side – and thus becomes a battlement, a molehill, a prayer bench. The best part though is that these transitions are accomplished by a lone chorus member, dressed ethereally in white, who effortlessly and balletically uses his body to leverage, twist, topple, and gently lay the chair in position. Just with that much, I’m counting four duties that chair is performing. 1) Looks beautiful and is good design. 2) Serves as actual throne. 3) Represents multiple non-throne objects and locations. 4) When moved, symbolizes the monarchy in this play, so easily manipulated, toppled, and repositioned.

Same with the wallpaper. It's an enormous photograph of Henry the Fifth, our Henry’s dead father, blown up to larger-than-life, Lancaster-legacy-looming-over-your-son's-throne size and pasted on the back wall of the theater. Already that wallpaper is 1) smart design, efficiently filling an otherwise empty space, and 2) communicating the circumstances of our current king's reign as the play begins. But then, at a key moment when the Lancaster power is crumbling, you hear this creepy, slow ripping sound, and you notice that our lone chorus member is up on a ladder tearing a great sheath of the Henry V wallpaper away. A chilling moment. And now the wallpaper 3) produces great sound effects, and 4) symbolizes the peeling away of Lancaster power. Pretty cool, huh?

With Direction that Dares

I can’t remember if I’ve said this in another post, but I actually find it difficult to tell what counts as “direction” when I see a play. As an actor in the rehearsal room, I know very well what a director is responsible for in a production. It ranges from nearly everything to almost nothing, depending on your director. But when I take in a play I've nothing to do with, it’s harder to determine whose ideas and choices and concepts I’m looking at. That said, I’m going to ascribe to the director of Henry VI Part 3 the choices involved in the very last moment of the play.

But first, SPOILER ALERT. You can still see this show this weekend, so if you’re going to go, stop reading now and experience the fun for yourself. Again, SPOILER ALERT. Okay, last moments of the play. Henry is dead in the corner of stage, dripping with blood in a very awesome way that I won’t describe in case you’re still reading this even though you’re going to see it and I said SPOILER ALERT. So stop reading now, for reals, because onto the otherwise open playing space now dashes Richard! – as in soon to be Richard the Third – butt naked! And brandishing a knife! He vaults himself around behind the giant chair, now laying on its side, and with a glorious spot bathing his muscley, Yorky arms in a sunny, summery light, he purrs the first two lines of his own eponymous play. But wait! He’s not done. Now he reaches down behind the chair with his knife, and you think oh my god he’s going to castrate himself just as his arm gives a horrifyingly hidden yank. But instead of revealing an awful act of self-violence, he pulls out from behind the giant chair the throne’s cushion. And with gooey tension in his movement, he stabs the cushion with his knife, rips out some stuffing, coaxes a piece of it into his smugly smiling mouth, and commences on a nice… long… chew… as the lights slowly fade to black. WOW. I mean, wow. COME ON! You gotta admire that. I have no idea if this moment actually “works” and I really don’t care. Because that’s what I’m talking about right there! Go big or go home! The birth of a villain treated with unabashed theatricality and delivered with absolute commitment. Balls to the wall. (Not technically a cheap laugh since that phrase does not actually refer to male anatomy.)

So that’s my sermon for the day, ladies and gents. Pretend mightily. Be efficient and elegant. Go big or go home. Balls to the wall.

And that's all she wrote.

Race

2010-07-15T11:44:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 07.14.10
Ethel Barrymore Theatre

Usually I wait at least a couple days after seeing a play to start writing about it, but today I’m trying a different tack. This afternoon I saw a matinee of David Mamet’s Race, which has been extended on Broadway with a brand new cast featuring Eddie Izzard, whom I adore, Dennis Haybert of “24” and those All-State commercials, Afton C. Williamson, and original cast member Richard Thomas, who, in addition to a vast number of laudable credits, once played John-Boy on “The Waltons”. Now it is a few hours later and I sit on my couch, laptop on lap, ready to jot down some fresh-off-the-presses, probably ill-considered, but certainly genuine thoughts.

The play is about prejudice, so let’s start with some of mine. I was predisposed not to like this play, based purely on hearsay and a bad taste left in my mouth after Mamet spent an hour with us students in grad school. He came off, frankly, as kind of an ass. I mean, I’m sure he’s a really nice man and all, but he came off as kind of an ass. I also find Mamet’s distinctive manner of writing dialogue a hard style to pull off. When it’s working, it’s undeniable and amazing – fast-paced, rhythmic, and satisfying on a deep guttural level. But when it’s not working for whatever reason, it sounds like people throwing typewriters at each other. Or maybe like people printing their thoughts out on dot-matrix printers, ripping the perforated paper off, walking across the room, and reading them aloud in front of the other person.

To add insult to injury, I was further prejudiced by the belief that Mamet’s writing gets the shortest shrift when Mamet himself directs. This is probably residue from the offense I took at Mamet’s oft-cited assertion that since the playwright has already done the work, all actors need to do is just “say the lines.” I think he actually repeated this statement at my grad school which is probably one reason I found him obnoxious. Of course, then I actually read Mamet’s True and False and I now find his advice, when taken in context, rather brilliant. But sometimes I forget I find it brilliant and my prejudice resurfaces.

Oh and then finally, finally, I thought since it was Mamet and the play was called Race and that it was about race that it would be really mouth-piecey and bludgeony and heavy-handed. Don’t know how I formed that assumption exactly, but I guess that’s the deal with prejudices.

But prejudices be damned, I liked the play. It’s imperfect and not Mamet’s most elegant work, but I liked it. Mamet is nothing if not intelligent, and I enjoy the kind of smart debate that is so often featured in his works. This play was no exception. And despite my fears of bludgeoning, I actually appreciated the unabashed and direct approach to a subject – race – that we tend to talk about only indirectly and with great caution. I also liked how, in addition to race, the play spoke to the similarities between the judicial system and entertainment. As Izzard’s character suggests, both arenas hinge on how a narrative is told to a group of people, be they audience or jury, and success depends on how that group receives and judges that narrative. This notion was further highlighted by the set, which takes a typical book-lined, mahogany law office and surrounds it with three huge banks of Broadway flood lights. And finally, I liked the cast. There was some dot-matrix printing happening right at the outset – which had me fantasizing that Mamet actually tells his actors to speak without affect – but they soon settled into a good Mamet groove, which then allowed each actor’s individual charms to shine through.

Funny how that is with Mamet. As an actor, you very often want to tear your hair out when you start working on his plays. His rhythms are so particular that even if you can hear the character speaking in your head, when you yourself try to say the words aloud, it feels stilted and phony. The words seem to block you from your instincts and you find yourself thinking, “Nobody really talks like that.” You feel like a really bad actor. So you struggle and fight with the language, trying to make it your own, but it only gets worse. And then eventually, probably just from pure repetition, you start to tap into the rhythm of his writing. You start to understand how it flows and you begin internalizing it. And finally, once you’ve truly embraced his rhythms, it all unlocks. Your instincts are suddenly available to you again and you’re free to follow your impulses, be spontaneous – you’re free to act. But you have to surrender to the language first. That’s the funny part: only by surrendering to Mamet’s unique, specific style can you bring your own unique, specific self to the role. A very strange but very rewarding experience, and I think partly what Mamet had in mind with his “say the lines” bit.

I think this gets at what I love most about acting. I love collaborating with a playwright, dead or alive, who has a strong take on language. I love the structure it provides, the parameters, the scaffolding it gives me to climb. I love working within those constraints, the constraints of someone else’s aesthetic. Without that force to push against, I often feel lost. Without that flint to strike against, my creativity doesn’t always spark. That probably has more to do with my personal psychology than anything else, as there are plenty actors who feel exactly the opposite. Plenty actors loathe constraint, and feel much more able to express their creativity on a blank canvas. But for me, I need something to grab onto, to sink my teeth into, someone else who will fight back. And if it’s not a playwright, then it’s a director with a strong vision or a scene partner with a fierce point of view. I’m not sure who or what that force will be as I begin writing material for myself. Perhaps that person will be me. I might have to split myself in two and do some battle da solo. Could be dangerous. Could be fun. Could be dangerous fun.

So there’s not going to be a snappy close for me today because, instead, I need to share this bit of information gleaned from today’s Playbill and it has nothing to do with anything. Here it is: Eddie Izzard ran 43 marathons in 51 days for charity. That’s crazypants right there. That’s bananagrams. He’s already the funniest man alive. And the smartest. He needs to stop it. Like right now. Seriously.

Candide

2010-07-09T15:22:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 06.19.10

The Gallery Players

I was once complimented on my rhymed couplets at an audition. This filled me with the same amount of pride as when, at three years old, I was complimented by a waitress at the Hungry Hippo on how well I twirled my spaghetti. So I feel I am well-qualified to offer the following observation: you know rhymed couplets are written and spoken well when it feels like you are whitewater rafting. That I’ve never been whitewater rafting I hope does not undermine my credibility in making this statement.

The metaphor came to me while watching a new adaptation of Candide at the Gallery Players. The verse was flowing fast and fierce, just as it should be in a snappy satire like this one, and my ears were pleased by the rhymes popping out here and there. They were given just the right touch of emphasis – not so much as to interrupt the flow or bludgeon the listener, but not so little as to slide by unnoticed. And then I realized that my ears were actually more than pleased. They were actually looking forward to the rhymes, looking out for them, and using them to help my brain follow along in the tumbling rapids of exposition and quickly moving plot. In other words, the verse was the current in which I was zipping along, and the rhymes were the rocks I was pushing off of with my oars to aid my progress downstream.

I’ve never thought about rhyme in this way. I don’t think about rhyme much at all. It doesn’t seem to have a place in our culture today. Which is a total lie. Rhyme is all over the place in music and is kind of the main event in rap. But rhyme outside of music? Not so much. We’ve got Hallmark, we’ve got Dr. Seuss, and we’ve got “Stop that now, I mean it. Anybody want a peanut?” And that’s about it.

But maybe this was ever so. Maybe rhyme has only ever thrived in song and it just so happens that “song” and everyday life used to overlap more. Not that people used to walk around conversing in rhyme, or anything, and now there’s this dearth of it that old folks bemoan – Back in the day we used to appreciate rhyme structure! If you can’t use it properly, I’ll hit you with this crutch here! But it seems to me that rhyme was once a more highly appreciated form of wit and entertainment than it is today. Today, outside of music, it just seems hokey. And the idea of seeing a play written in rhymed couplets probably inspires most people to bring a pillow and blankey to the theater.

But it shouldn’t be this way! Rhymed couplets are fun! Oh god, look at me. I’m a nerdy, hokey, old person bemoaning a lack of appreciation for rhyme in theater these days. How attractive. But let me own that for a second and say this. What I liked about the rhyming in Candide was that it worked in partnership with the other elements in the script. Rhymes were advanced when needed – to make a point, to highlight or a joke or be the joke itself, or to serve as a mental assist as in my rafting analogy – and left to recede when not needed for these purposes, or when a seeming absence from rhyme would best set up a rhyming punchline down the road. They were sort of used like a star player on a good basketball team – one who can dunk when you need him to but who also knows to pass the ball.

That’s different from how I usually see rhyme used in music. Rap and hip-hop prize rhyme so much that it’s often all you can hear until you have time to really sit down and listen. And of course pop, rock, and country songs usually just reach for the low-hanging fruit, deeming flat, predictable, unnoticeable rhymes sufficient. I enjoy the results of both of these uses, but well-written and well-performed rhymed couplets do offer a slightly different joy. It transcends auditory pleasure and engages the brain a bit more. Makes the brain dance about, mapping meaning and metaphor and other meta M words. And of course there are great songwriters and hip-hop artists who use rhyme in exactly this way, but they are more the exception than the rule.

So yes. Go. Go see a play written in rhymed couplets. You’ll like it. You will. Listen to your old, hokey, nerdy grandma. She knows what’s good for you. And for god's sake, eat something. You look so pale!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2010-07-01T11:10:00.003-04:00

Performance Date: 06.16.10
Mortal Folly Theatre

A Midsummer Nights’ Dream is many people’s first experience with Shakespeare, and it was an early one of mine. In third grade, the sixth graders mounted a production of Midsummer, and I remember Bottom, transfigured with the head of an ass, entering the scene in which Titania falls in love with him. He was humming the theme song from “The Smurfs” and we all thought that was hysterical.

In later years, I myself appeared in two productions of Midsummer. The first production was the first play I was in since elementary school; I was a junior in high school and I played one of Hippolyta’s attendants, a non-speaking role. My costume was basically a green satin bag belted by some copper mesh with matching mesh wristbands. It was hot. I sat on a platform, along with my fellow green-satin attendant, trying to look catlike and unapproachable.

The second Midsummer was also a first -- my first show as an officially aspiring actress, about a year after taking my first acting class. I was twenty-four and I played Hermia wearing a private school uniform. Also hot. My favorite part was launching myself at Helena in the big lovers’ quarrel and I was challenged by the nightmare Hermia has just before she wakes to discover Lysander absconded. I had trouble pretending to be asleep while fighting an imaginary snake and speaking in verse. Ah, the early days.

These days most of my peers profess to have had their fill of Midsummer, but I think it is secretly a favorite play for many of them. Yes it lends itself to hokey insincerity – all that frolicking with Mustardseed in the wood – but it also holds within it a potential energy that I feel could rock me to my primal core, if only a single production could unleash it. In this dream Dream of mine, Oberon and Titania are thunderstorms of sexuality and Nature. The lovers radiate a hormonal heat that fuels their explosiveness in love, lust, and jealousy, and yet they remain uncorrupted by cynicism. Puck possesses a kinetic mystery, the fairies are both flighty and frightening, and the Mechanicals are pathetic, in the very best sense, and hilarious. It’s hard to imagine getting all of that, plus superbly handled language, plus fearsome displays of physicality, plus amazing sound, lights, and design – all essential elements in my dream Dream – together in a single show, particularly in today’s theater climate of scare resources. And thus I feel my dream Dream will always be a dream. But I plan to keep a look out.

As an aside, I feel I should mention here the 1970 Peter Brook production of Midsummer, which of course I’ve never seen, not even on tape, as recordings are very rare if they exist at all. I’ve not yet truly read up on that piece of theater history either, but its legend – as passed down in lore by the participants, or by authors and mentors who saw it firsthand – hangs over me like a tremendous specter, vainglorious and painfully out of reach. It’s infuriating that something so monumental and groundbreaking, that inspired so many legions of theater professionals and patrons throughout the world, happened five years before I was born. It’s like arriving to a party and learning that JFK, John Lennon, and Jesus just left.

At any rate. This is all to say that someone at Mortal Folly Theatre seems to have a similar dream Dream to my own. I saw and felt the intention for nearly all of my Midsummer wishes present on their stage, and the intention crystallized for me in some very memorable moments. Our first moments with Puck, for example – the sprite zipping about the stage as if made of lightening, pounding on the earth as an invocation, then leaping and freezing into a sort of crouching handstand to listen with an ear to the ground. Or the lovers, whose incredibly high-energy, knock-down brawl went farther and longer than any I’d ever seen. Or the live music, played by a cellist with a laptop, creating a depth of atmosphere that gave the giant tree tattoo across Oberon’s back a sort of tribal power. These moments, reflecting as they did my own Dream, made me feel recognized. And with each one, it was as though a little place in me sighed in relief and let go. In fact, if I remember correctly, I left the theater a little more relaxed than I entered it. Just another amazing thing that this art form can do.

Fences

2010-06-22T10:01:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 06.11.10
Cort Theatre

Let’s get the celebrity stuff out of the way first. I saw Fences the weekend before the Tony’s with a friend who knows someone in the cast. After the show, we waited in the alley behind the stage door gate to say hello. There we were had a funny exchange with fellow backstage visitor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was not recognized by security and had to wait in the alley with us peons (he was cool about it), and were charmed by Denzel Washington who goofed with us while waiting for his cue to exit onto the barricaded street. Now, do you remember how once upon a blog I confessed that I find famous people (and Philip Seymour Hoffman in particular) shiny? Well allow me to update you: Philip Seymour Hoffman is still shiny, even up close and personal. Denzel has degrees of shininess – least shiny in person, next shiniest on stage, ultra-uber-ohmygod shiny two days later on television when I actually gasped and did a little involuntary seated-hop on my friend’s loveseat watching him on the Tony’s. I’m not proud of this last bit of information. Sometimes I think I was created in a lab by scientists.

Speaking of the Tony's... Did Fences deserve to win Best Revival? Yes. Though View from the Bridge deserved it just as well. Did Denzel deserve Best Actor? Yes. And Liev would have deserved it too. Did Viola deserve Best Actress? Oh hell yes. Though I didn’t see any plays starring her fellow nominees. What do I think about Hollywood invading Broadway and taking all our jobs and prizes? Ah, interesting. If I became a famous movie star tomorrow, I would use my new celebrity status to enable my Broadway debut in a heartbeat. So I’m not going to say Hollywood should stay away just because I’m on the other side of it. But it is true that the commercialization of theater, and the resulting movie-and-TV-stars-on-stage phenomenon, has had a huge negative impact on my profession. There are simply fewer jobs for the non-famous, which trickles down to make competition at even the lowliest levels tougher than ever. That sucks big time. But whaddya gonna do? I don’t see the trend changing any time soon. So we will adapt. I don’t know how, nor how many careers will be abandoned in the meantime, but we will adapt. It’s the only way.

Finally, let's get to some Fences stuff. What I will remember:

-- Viola Davis’s body in a sudden, violent spasm as her character digests some devastating news. Oh my god, woman. Work. (For the uninitiated of my parents’ generation, “work” is a positive remark, derived from “work it” or “work it, girl,” commonly used in response to a person literally or metaphorically strutting one’s stuff on the catwalk.)

-- Chris Chalk’s kinetic leaping about the set as the adolescent Cory – an apt choice that, in addition to conveying his character’s youth, connected him physically to his surroundings and conveyed a sense of belonging to the home and yard around him.

-- Stephen McKinley Henderson anchoring the stage with grounded energy at the top of the show, when both Denzel and the applauding audience are forced to cope with the magnitude of Denzel’s stardom.

-- Finally Denzel Washington, who balanced an honest compassion for and honest judgment of his character, Troy Maxton, in Troy’s most unlikeable moments of the play. A less rigorous actor would be tempted to win the audience’s approval, either by evoking sympathy for Troy or subtly conveying a personal condemnation of him. Denzel does neither. His performance in those moments remains consistent with his portrayal elsewhere, and in this way he allows the complexity of August Wilson’s protagonist to shine through.

Everyday Rapture

2010-06-15T00:22:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 06.02.10

American Airlines Theatre

Everyday Rapture was completely up my alley. I wanted to take Sherie Rene Scott home with me in my pocket. A little pocket-sized, funny, utterly charming, sprite-like, adorable, self-deprecating, Broadway semi-star (her words) to pull out at work and put on my desk so she can sing Mister Rogers and Judy Garland songs and keep me company in my cubicle. And then I can gaze upon her tiny sparkling eyes and her bouncy long hair, and make her tell me again about growing up half-Mennonite in Topeka and meeting a magician at the TKTS booth on her first trip to New York City. And she can skip about the tiny stage I will make for her out of post-it notes and my paper clip caddy and her presence will remind me of four-leaf clovers and confetti. It will be our little secret here in this grey office building in Midtown and my days here will pass like easy water flowing in a green-banked brook.

Not that I’m writing my blog at work.

Everyday Rapture is an autobiographical one-woman musical that does indeed feature Mister Rogers, Judy Garland, four leaf clovers, and magic. But it’s also an honest story about paradox, about struggling to move forward in life when your world view contains a vital contradiction that holds you in place – which, if you think about it, is probably something to which you can relate. It’s one of those great, personal pieces of theater that works because the more specific someone gets in describing the truth of his or her life, the easier it is for someone listening to identify.

Many times in the show, as she’s telling her life story, Sherie Rene Scott would have these moments where she looked like she was figuring something out. A hesitation coupled with a puzzled frown. A glance away followed by an intake of breath. Those moments endeared her to me. They made her story accessible to me. Because in that hesitation and frown, in that glance away, I immediately recognized the quiet focus that comes over you when an important realization is just on the edge of your consciousness. And in the intake of breath, I recognized the dawning of that realization. I more than recognized these things. I felt them. I felt them with her. And when that sort of thing happens, then this one woman’s specific, unique story of growing up half-Mennonite in Topeka lives in me for a moment. It becomes my story, and the story of the person sitting next to me, and the story of the person sitting next to him. Specific becomes universal. Entertainment becomes personal.

What’s interesting to me is that while those moments of realization were absolutely magical to me as an audience member, as an actor I also recognized them as technique. In fact, I’m willing to bet that Sherie Rene Scott has those exact same moments of realization, with those exact expressions and movements, every evening, in every performance, at exactly the same points in the show. Which doesn’t mean she’s faking it, by the way. When you’re good – meaning you know exactly what you’re doing and you have strong access to your emotions – you can replicate a physical gesture day in, day out and honest emotion will come to you every (or nearly every) time. Maybe not at 100% intensity, but it will come.

I think what I might be talking about here – both with my reaction to Sherie Rene Scott and with the ability to replicate moments of emotion on stage – is empathy. The physical mechanics of empathy. As in, you see in my face and body a pattern. Your body subconsciously mirrors that pattern and recognizes it as one associated with a certain emotion. You then feel that emotion. So, by looking at me, you can know what I’m feeling. (I don't know if that's exactly how it works but it sounds plausible, yes?) So, in this way, I look at Sherie Rene Scott’s frown, glance, and breath and empathize her feeling of discovery. And Sherie Rene Scott, looking back at some former moment in her life, mirrors the frown, glance, and breath of that moment, and she too experiences that feeling of discovery. She empathizes with some past image of herself.

Is that what acting is? Empathizing with some past or imagined image of yourself? Hm. Well it’s an incomplete picture, to say the least. But it’s a notion I like nonetheless.

Three Sisters Come and Go

2010-06-02T16:46:00.001-04:00

Performance Date: 05.19.10
TheaterLab

I am writing this near out of my mind with sleeplessness and jetlag, so I beg your pardon if I am a tad incoherent. I had a really fun and restful time at home in SF for Memorial Day, but our flight was delayed coming back to NYC last night and I’m running on fumes. I used to bounce back easier than this.

I wanted to see Three Sisters Come and Go because the description on TDF sounded very similar to an idea my friends Gwynne, Leslie and I have long considered for a future collaboration; namely, to use Chekhov’s Three Sisters as a point of departure for an original piece for three actresses. In the case of TheaterLab, they also added Samuel Beckett’s Come and Go into the mix.

This in itself makes me think of the notion people sometimes have of, Hey they stole my idea, to which the proper response is usually, Nah, they didn’t. I’m a big believer, effectively if not literally, in the collective unconscious. We all share the same world with the same data in it, so it can’t be much of a stretch for the same idea to arise independently and simultaneously in multiple locations. And in this instance, conceiving an original piece for three women based on Three Sisters isn’t all that unusual an idea to begin with.

Perhaps the idea is not unusual, but that doesn’t make it unworthy. I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. And from here my brain splits in three directions:

1)    I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. And I especially love when several people reimagine, reconfigure, and retell the same material, much as I love when TV food competitions instruct chefs to cook a meal of their own devising out of the exact same list of ingredients. The fun is in seeing what different individuals will do with the same stuff, and the fascination is in learning who those individuals are, or wish to be, through the choices they make.

[Sound of needle scratching off the record…]

2)   I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. And in this day and age, it seems I should add “remixes” and “mash-ups” to that list of words, but for some reason I hesitate to do so. I guess because, to my mind, remixes and mash-ups are less artful forms that rely too heavily on juxtaposition to make their new contributions. (That probably offends some great mash-up artist out there, and I welcome him/her to make a rebuttal.) Juxtaposition – even unconscious or random juxtapositions – can be brilliantly effective, but I feel they work best as a spice not as the main dish.

[Sound of needle scratching off the record…]

3)   I love reimaginings, reconfigurations, and retellings. It is a very human act. We are constantly absorbing narratives from others and emitting them anew as our own. My favorite example of this is when I tell a long, funny story from my life and then close with the sincere realization that it actually happened to my sister. Less trivially, absorbing and emitting narratives is probably how we learn to feel less alone (by connecting ourselves to something larger, or to someone else) as well as more unique (by differentiating ourselves from the existing narrative by adding our own particular spin).

And now, in an effort to find some cohesion for these splintered thoughts and my jet-lagged brain, I’ll return to Three Sisters Come and Go. I enjoyed witnessing what these particular artists contributed to the narratives of Olga, Irina, and Masha, particularly because my own brain has spent so much time considering what I would contribute myself. The juxtapositions of “theirs” and “mine” probably fed the creative process for my future collaboration much more than seeing the Chekhov again would have done. I wonder if, in this way, we are all co-authors of some bigger collaboration, to which Chekhov and TheaterLab and, someday Gwynne, Leslie, and Anna, are all contributing a draft. Perhaps that’s what collective unconscious truly is – the all-encompassing narrative of human existence. We can all tap into it because we all absorb and emit it on a daily basis. Whoa. That got really deep just there. Brilliance or jet-lag? You decide.

City of Angels

2010-05-25T13:20:00.003-04:00

Performance Date: 05.16.10
The Gallery Players

This is killing me. I’ve had this blog post half-written for about a week now but had to scrap the whole thing because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to finish it. And I had some lines in there I really liked. Like how I’m not really a connoisseur of musical theater, and how that statement will come as a surprise to my boyfriend. And how I love singing, in general, and singing in unison especially, and singing with FEELING molto especially, but that makes me a fan not a connoisseur. (I particularly liked the “molto especially.”) And even though I’m cleverly getting those lines in here in this new post, it’s not the same. Context is everything.

This is not a case of me floundering for something to write because I didn’t actually like the show. That has happened before, but not this time. I really liked City of Angels. It’s a smart musical about a writer in 1940’s Los Angeles who is trying to adapt his detective novel into a screenplay. While he struggles with how much to compromise his artistic integrity on the road to fame and fortune, we also watch the plot of his film noir, narrating-gumshoe story unfold before us. While both these narratives progress pretty much the way you think they would, the interplay between them – how his real life affects his adaptation and vice versa – creates a suspense that keeps you engaged throughout. Add to that a pretty much flawless cast and a complex, jazz-inspired score, and I was thoroughly charmed.

No, I floundered on my earlier draft because I was trying to write about “smart writing” and I wrote myself into a corner, which wasn't very smart. Basically, I had no choice but to define what constitutes “smart writing” and connect City of Angels to AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

All I really wanted to point out is that it is so satisfying to encounter good, smart writing these days. It’s almost vindicating: Yes! Thank you! Thank you, [insert author of well-written work]. Thank you for being out there fighting the good fight. Because there is so much bad writing out there. Or perhaps more accurately, there is just so much writing out there period – movies, TV, news editorials, niche-cable shows, faux-reality series, magazines, webisodes, blogs, blog aggregators, tweets, vampire young adult fiction with poor female role models – and the law of averages makes the majority of it, well, average. Dutiful consumer that I am, I absorb a ton of this mediocrity on a daily basis (the diet starts tomorrow), so when I encounter a morsel that is well-crafted and considered, or that takes risks and trusts its audience, it makes me want to dunk a basketball and hang from the rim or something. Tackle a teammate and pound his helmet into the ground. Rip my jersey off and let loose a primal scream in my sports bra. That kind of thing.

City of Angels gave me a bit of that feeling. Not at first, when we were just setting up the two worlds and alternating back and forth, but a little later, when the storylines began to twist into their double-helix. That’s when I started sitting up in my chair, leaning forward and watching closely. Like my dog Gabby used to when I’d hide in the pantry with the dog treats and she knew a biscuit would shortly come sliding out from under the door. That’s when I started to marvel at a film noir musical that could satisfy every last genre expectation but still manage to keep its audience guessing. It’s not easy to do that. It takes effort. And smarts. Just as it takes effort and smarts to write a television show that has never once backed away from the dares it sets itself on a weekly basis (“Breaking Bad”), or a novel with a narrative voice so unapologetically specific it must have made some weak-hearted publishing exec quake with the fear of leaving audiences behind (Oscar Wao).

These are the folks that are fighting the good fight out there, be they battles large or small. You know of many others who are doing the same. Tell me about them. And I’ll tell my friends. And then we can all bum rush the field and pour Gatorade on each other and weep with the relief of having endured a very long season of proliferating mediocrity in popular culture. Sigh. Like I said, the diet starts tomorrow.

The Subject Was Roses

2010-05-18T18:23:00.002-04:00

Performance Date: 05.08.10

Pearl Theatre Company, NY City Center, Stage 2

I hate being late. But increasingly, I find it happening, usually when my vanity has gotten the better of me and I find myself changing clothes multiple times instead of running out the door. But I am rarely, rarely ever late for the theater. And yet there I am, hopping into a cab in Chelsea at 1:52, trying to make it to 55th and 6th in midday traffic for a 2pm curtain. Wishful thinking.

After slinking into the very intimate space, where The Subject Was Roses is 15 minutes into its first act, I very smartly decide not to cross the theater to my ticketed seat. Instead, I quickly try to make myself as small as possible on a step near the door, freezing my body into perfect stillness and training a laser-like focus of concentration upon the stage. I am hoping this will convince those around me that I am actually a deeply respectful theater-going patron rather than an ill-mannered lout.

The usher who was kind enough to let me in, however, decides I look pathetic down there and tries to direct me to some empty seats in the middle of the back row. Loath to attract more attention by climbing over folks to sit down, I shoo the usher away, trying to convey silently that I’m a-okay here on the floor. He thinks maybe I don’t understand, and laughingly tries to point me to an actual seat. I shoo him again, but now we’ve made a bit of a scene, which causes some nice people to slide over a few spots in their row so I can take a seat on the aisle – which I do, sheepishly, but with great relief. The step it turns out was not very comfortable, and Darwin clearly did not bestow me with great powers of camouflage.

With the lateness ordeal behind me, I can finally pay attention to the play. Within moments I notice that I feel very comforted, as if someone has just served me a good portion of a nice, homemade stew. I realize that it has been a long while since I have seen a production this…traditional, is it? Classic? I’m not sure of the term. The set is detailed and realistically appointed – a mid 1940’s kitchen and living room – but it’s a thrust stage in a small space, so my field of vision is equally divided between the stage and the audience surrounding it. I don’t know why but this juxtaposition feels comforting to me. Perhaps because the two realities – the fictional one on-stage and the actual one around it – are so starkly divided. Unabashedly divided. There is no attempt to soften the transition between the two. It's the 1940's kitchen complete with parqueted floor on one side, and row A seats 101-115 on the other. In the foreground, it's a World War II era mother resting her evening bag on the divan while pulling on her tailored overcoat, and behind her a tourist sitting in shorts and knee socks with an umbrella and two shopping bags at his feet.   Two realities, starkly divided. No attempt to soften the transition between the two.

Ah yes, that's it. It's not postmodern, this presentation. It's not trying to break the fourth wall in any way, in either performance or design. There's no attempt to demonstrate that we-know-that-you-know-that-we-know that this is theater here. No effort made to confirm or deny that we are all suspending our collective disbelief. It just is what it is. We’re putting on a play and you’re watching it. No need to get clever, no need to get conceptual. We all know what the situation is, so why monkey around? It's a choice that makes perfect sense for this play, and yet I'm surprised how good it feels to witness. How comforting and familiar...yet startling and unfamiliar too. Like seeing an old school chum after a very long time. It's strange for something so...old fashioned, is it?...to feel so...refreshing.

I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise. Postmodernism is kind of played out, isn’t it? I mean, isn't it? There's no escaping it, that's for sure. It's everywhere. It's the very air we breathe. It's so deeply woven into our cultural fabric that contemporary American life would be unrecognizable without it.   But aren't we just a little bit over it? Maybe I'm a little late to the party to be saying so, but haven't we done the deconstruction thing to death? Aren’t we tired of hearing and using the word “meta”? Tired of being so analytical and self-aware? Wouldn't it be nice to take a break from irony? A break from skepticism? I mean, really. It’s exhausting.

Okay, I'll be honest.   I wouldn’t want to give postmodernism up entirely, even if I knew how to. I'm a fan of irony. And it's fun to be smart and clever. Plus I’d really miss “The Daily Show”. But it was still a little shocking to realize that this not-postmodern presentation of The Subject Was Roses was such an anomaly. Out of the 37 plays I’ve now seen in this Year of Plays, there are only 2 or 3 productions that I can even suspect of not being fundamentally postmodern in approach. Granted, it gets confusing. Take a look at my thought process as I go through the list (sure, I think in bullets, don't you?):

Does a Shakespearean aside count as “postmodern” since it breaks the fourth wall?
Is it postmodern to use a block for a chair, or is it just low-budget?
Am I calling something postmodern just because it’s stylized?
Have I mistakenly identified postmodernism as the opposite of realism when representationalism is really what I mean?
Are any of these actually real words??
I think I've got a case of the I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Regardless of whether I've got my Big Ideas mixed up, I don’t think it insignificant that seeing a play done in this way felt comforting to me. I think it means something that I welcomed having a moment of pure and simple theater in my world - this world where I’m rushing into cabs, and feeling vain, and making quips, and hyperlinking Wikipedia, and making parenthetical statements about thinking in bulleted lists. I think what it means is this: sometimes it's good to slow down for a second and just swallow something whole. Like a nice bowl of homemade stew.

Gin and It

2010-05-06T13:53:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 04.25.10
Performance Space 122

Geez, how did they do this?

That was the recurring thought I had while watching Gin and It unfold it’s beautiful and complicated dance last Sunday eve. And not just because so much of the set-transforming, projection-catching choreography felt like watching one magic trick after another. No, the thought spawned from my insider’s brain which couldn’t help wondering how the hell they developed and rehearsed this piece.

But let me back up.

Conceptually, Gin and It – which lives in a liminal space between theater and performance installation – finds it’s genesis in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 thriller Rope, in which the famous director creates the illusion of filming the entire movie using a single, continuous shot. To pull off the stunt, particularly at that time, required a highly choreographed behind-the-scenes ballet. Grips and prop masters had to dismantle sections of the single-room set to make way for the huge camera as it followed the action, and then reassemble the set and props (in exactly the same way) in time for the shot to swing back the other direction -- all while staying out of the camera and sound operators’ way. Not an easy feat.

Gin and It in some ways replicates this feat in live performance -- and describing exactly how will be another feat altogether, but here goes. As Hitchcock’s film is projected on stage, a cast of four “grips” conduct their own “backstage” ballet, catching the projection on various surfaces that are continuously moved and manipulated throughout the piece. Frequently, the film is caught on mesh screens that permit the audience to see both the projected actor and the live actor (who is holding the screen) simultaneously. It's a clever and spooky effect that is amplified when the grips synchronize their movements with those of the projected actor. Other times, the film is projected onto set pieces that are transformed both physically (by the crew) and seemingly (by the effect of the projection) from box to dining table to piano to armchair. As if all this were not enough, layered onto the entire dance is a tense narrative that develops amongst the grips as they work together, a narrative expressed chiefly in gesture and attitude, but supplemented by the occasional whispered conversation or “backstage” order that is called out with particular subtext. Whew.

Hopefully I’ve described the piece well enough that you can imagine how this highly technical and subtextually nuanced show made my theater brain pretty much explode. How do you develop and rehearse something like this? And I haven’t even mentioned how the projected images were sometimes sliced up into smaller pieces to fit onto various-sized screens, or how there’s this whole thematic thing about closeted homosexuality that is being echoed about. Furthermore, the technical, textual, and subtextual pieces intertwine quite intricately, and of course the whole thing is very meta-meta-meta, very deconstructed-reconstructed. It’s like someone took a macramé dress, unraveled it, and reknit it into a portrait of a macramé dress. And then someone else videotapes it and projects it onto yarn which somebody else crochets into a hat. I mean, how do you do that? (No really, how do you do that?)

Now I have an inside track – I know the lovely Keith Justin Foster, who plays one of the grips – so I can eventually satisfy my curiosity. But I’ll tell you how I imagine it was done. I imagine it was done bit and by bit, piece by piece, a la Sondheim putting it together.

I imagine they started with the technical, with a rough idea of where the projections would go and on what surfaces. And then as they rehearsed the technical, they added the textual, i.e. the cues the grips call out to one another as they work together to hit their marks. And then I imagine in the tedium of rehearsing the technical-plus-textual to a point of precision, the subtextual was born. I imagine the actors got tense or silly with one another. They joked and grimaced and flirted, as actors in rehearsal do, and from these real-life inspirations, they found what eventually became the on-stage narrative of the piece. And I imagine it was an iterative process. I know for a fact it was a long process, an extended series of rehearsal periods and workshops, but it’s not just for this reason that I imagine it was iterative. I imagine it was iterative because that’s the only way I know to build something this intricate and layered.

This is the repeated learning of my time as an artist on this earth. Art takes time. It takes iteration. Revision. It takes doing and doing again, all the while remaining open to the variation of each attempt so that it may inspire new and unexpected directions. The hardest part of this process is that your destination remains unknown – and that in itself is enough to coax an artist off the road. But if you stick to it, you find that when you arrive, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

So who knows, I could be wrong about how it all went down. Maybe Gin and It was actually born whole, like Athena out of Zeus’s head, fully armed and ready to rumble. I suppose it’s possible. But I’m not sure even an Olympian could imagine the totality of the Gin and It experience. There are five performances left, New Yorkers. Go see it and tell me what you think.

In the Heights

2010-04-30T02:12:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 04.16.10

Richard Rodgers Theatre:

I watched In the Heights from the tippy top of the rear mezzanine – literally in the heights – surrounded by a balcony full of high school students who were on some kind of class trip. The girls predictably screamed when the guy with High School Musical in his bio made his entrance, and whenever anyone kissed on stage, the whole balcony erupted in a chorus of woooOOOoOoOOOOOoooOO!!!! After one such kiss and woo incident, a lone male voice advised the characters to use a condom, a suggestion that was met with high-fiving chuckles from the guys and whispered what did he say? conferences from the girls. It was distracting, but for this forever-fifteen thirty-four year old, also strangely nostalgic.

Despite the diversions of my mezzanine-mates, and despite the distance from my seat to the stage, I nevertheless left with some lasting impressions from this show, the 2008 Tony-award winning musical set in the latin-infused neighborhood of Manhattan’s Washington Heights. Let’s go macro to micro:

You should write/produce your own play. This is the inevitable suggestion made by loved ones whenever I get into a conversation about the frustrations of nurturing an acting career without representation. Eight times out of ten (or 4 out of 5 for you math whizzes out there), I respond to this suggestion with about a half-ton stubborn resistance, a couple tablespoons self-pity, and a dash of righteous resentment. A bad mixture of human frailty and the power of inertia. But the other 20% of the time (I can do math too) I recognize that my loved ones are right. Taking my career into my own hands would no doubt be an empowering and creatively fulfilling endeavor. Reading in Lin-Manuel Miranda's bio that he wrote the first draft of In the Heights when he was a sophomore in college was another inspiring push in that direction. Surely I can muster as much motivation as a sophomore in college, right? Right?? 
Paciencia y Fe. Right in line with that inspiration is the guiding wisdom offered by one denizen of Miranda’s Heights, Abuela Claudia. Paciencia y fe. Patience and faith are exactly the virtues required in the life of an under-employed actor. However, there’s a cynical part of me that sometimes views the patience-and-faith mindset as anesthetic. A“you never know” type of optimism that can numb an artist to reality and becomes the perpetual carrot that keeps an unhappy actor hoofing it around town to open calls and pay-to-audition “networking opportunities.” The remedy to this cynism, I think, is to apply paciencia y fe to actions that are more rewarding, more fulfilling, and more personally motivated. Oh, you mean like writing/producing your own show, Anna? Oh, um, yeah…I guess I mean like that.
An authentic voice. The performers of In the Heights were all extremely talented singers, but there was one guy whose voice stood out from the rest. It’s not that his voice was better than the others, but whereas many of his castmates had the same (albeit impressive) belty, pop-vocal stylings that are apparently and enduringly in high-demand Broadway, his voice just seemed to be his own. A singing voice that was simply the beautiful and natural extension of his speaking voice. It was remarkably refreshing, and yet another reminder to me to thine own self be true.

So. It would seem that the sum total of my In the Heights impressions leave me with no other choice that to find my own true voice, write myself a play, and have patience and faith that it will lead me where I'm meant to go. It’s not the first time I’ve had that idea so I wouldn't hold your breath. But one does begin to wonder how many times the universe has to hit a girl on the head before she starts to listen. Perhaps only eight out of ten times?

666

2010-04-19T23:21:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 04.13.10
Minetta Lane Theatre

"Falling behind again...never wanted to...what am I to do...can't help it."

It would seem the change in seasons has not put a spring in my step. I'm in Month 8 of my Year of Plays and it looks like I’ve lost some steam. Three out of the past four weeks have been post-less. Bad Anna. Maybe I burned myself out when I overstacked with theater tickets back in March, or maybe the case of actor blues I recently contracted rubbed off a bit on my writer self. Or maybe it’s just that travel, visitors, and a new job have disrupted more than my circadian rhythms. Probably all of the above. But fear not, my loyal readers. I have not abandoned you. All along, a very tiny Daniel Day Lewis has been in my head shouting, "STAY ALIVE! NO MATTER WHAT OCCURS! I WILL FIND YOU!" and it has kept me afloat. And now at last I am seeing some shore on the horizon.

My first sight of land while adrift in that sea of blues last week was seeing 666, a dose of non-verbal, physical comedy from Spanish theater company Yllana. While I’d like to say it was artistry that lifted me from the doldrums, in truth it just felt good to laugh. Nothing like a little clowning to lighten my load. You know, some slapstick, a little audience flirtation, a stage full of oversized, veins-a-bulging phalluses. What? Did I say a stage full of oversized veins-a-bulging phalluses? Oh yes, this was clowning of a coarser kind. A don’t-take-your-Grandma kind of event. No, I take that back because I think my Grandma would have laughed herself silly whilst hiding behind her lovely arthritic little hands. All the same, the humor in 666 is not for those easily offended, nor for those who wish to keep their clothes dry. Thankfully I’m neither, so I had a grand ole time and left the theater feeling quite light.

Now there’s an aspect of theater I haven’t spent too much time writing about this year – theater as good old fashioned entertainment. Theater as diversion. Escape. A leavening agent. Not unlike baking soda. Because let’s face it, sometimes what we really need is a little fizz in our lives. And while movies and TV are where we usually turn to satisfy this craving, theater offers plenty to snack on as well.

And yet, we don’t tend to think of theater when we’re looking for a lift. When we’re down, we want a quick fix and seeing a play requires a little more effort than following the masses to the multiplex or turning on Real Housewives of New York City. Not that I watch that show. Only bad people watch that show. Only awful people who are shamelessly hooked on the disintegrating friendship between former besties Bethanny and Jill and the resulting gloat-fest from the Countess Luann and oh my god what the hell is wrong with Ramona this season?? And thus theater suffers.

Well, actually, this is a point of some contention. Not that theater suffers due to increasing numbers of self-flagellating Housewives watchers named Anna – no point in arguing that – but that theater requires more effort than movies. Some people say it’s just as easy to buy a theater ticket as a movie ticket, and that oftentimes it’s just as inexpensive, if you know where to look. But that’s the problem – if you know where to look. The average entertainment-seeker doesn’t know what plays are running (if they’re even in a theater town) let alone where to find discounted seats. And while it takes just a few extra clicks of the mouse to figure it out, that’s all that’s needed to keep a consumer at bay.

Or at least so says consumer expert Anna Moore.

At any rate, 666 provided me with some much needed diversion, and according to Yllana’s company bio, that’s precisely what they were seeking to supply. It wasn’t high-brow or revelatory or even truly provocative (phalluses on stage have been old news since the ancient Greeks, after all) – but thanks to them and the tiny Day-Lewis in my head, the blues have been banished and this blog shall live to see another day. Perhaps next time with a little more spring in my step.

Red

2010-04-05T21:31:00.001-04:00

Performance Date: 3.31.10

The John Golden Theatre

People have been asking me lately if seeing and writing about so many plays has ruined theater for me. In other words, has all this analysis ruined my ability to experience a play simply and innocently? Great question.

The answer, in short, is no. My experience of theater has not been ruined. It’s true that when I watch a play these days, I spend much more time contemplating the technical and craft-related aspects than I ever did before. And, true, there’s always a part of my brain that stays occupied with looking for something to write about. But while I concede these facts together may mean my experience is neither simple nor innocent, I hardly think that’s a ruinous thing. The added analysis may leave me more detached at moments, but on the whole my appreciation for theater is much more enriched. And when my attention does get pulled from that meta place and becomes riveted to the action on the stage, then I know that something truly special is happening.

Let’s take Red for instance. I was up in the balcony for this show, a two-hander on Broadway (by way of London) about a late-career Mark Rothko who hires a young painter to assist him in his studio. Thanks in part to my bird’s eye view, but also in part to my blog-related duties, I spent the first section of the play largely in that meta space:

Ah, they’re making good use of their diagonals. Well they have to with all this open playing space. I wonder if that’s the actors or the director? Probably both... Oop, he’s overreaching with his voice. He’s not talking to his scene partner. He’s afraid we can’t hear him up here but we can. Oh, he’s caught himself, now it’s better… You know I bet the play feels entirely different from the second row with all those red canvasses consuming your peripheral vision… I like how they’re not afraid to be still. They’re only moving when they have to.

But rather than alienate me from my theatrical experience, my detachment actually contributed to it, because as I watched the actors move the canvasses around during a scene transition, my next thoughts were:

See I love this. This is what we do. We come together, we put on a play. We make choices and mistakes. We design, we act, we move the scenery. It’s good. This is the work and it’s good.

Now some might say if I’m thinking about moving scenery, then somebody’s doing something wrong. But that attitude just privileges a certain type of experience, one of transportation and emotional investment. I love those experiences, but I liked this one too. I liked having those thoughts. At the risk of being precious, those thoughts made me proud and happy. They were valuable to me. So why would I trade them for some other, supposedly more desirable theatrical experience? I wouldn’t.

And lest you think this is a post that is secretly bagging on Red in disguise, let me say that this show had many riveted-to-the-stage-something-special-is-happening moments too. Most of them involved the younger actor, Eddie Redmayne, although Alfred Molina was also terrific as Rothko. There was something messy about Redmayne’s performance that was very appealing. When his character, the young assistant, finally makes an impassioned stand against his giant of a mentor, Redmayne’s voice was all over the place, dancing in and out of a shrill register, and his body bounced and spasmed as if overloaded with adrenaline and disbelief. Watching him, that busy part of my brain wondered for a second if perhaps it was too much. But another part of me was (simply? innocently?) transported by the mess. This is the mess and risk and adrenaline of breaking away from someone you believe in. This is the mess of life.

Yes, I think after having spent nearly a decade at the altar of precise and well-crafted acting, I’m now in a period where messy is where it’s at. My old acting teacher Gregory Wallace would be proud. He used to harangue me and my classmates, “Where is the mess? Where is the MESS? I want messy!” If only I could've taken that in then. It would have saved me years of confusing “precise and well-crafted” with “polite and predictable.” But no longer! Because messy’s where it’s at. And so am I. Watch out world. Me and Eddie Redmayne are comin’ at ya.

A Behanding in Spokane

2010-03-17T19:35:00.003-04:00

Performance Date: 03.03.10
Schoenfeld Theatre

Speed-blogging (also not-really) Post #6: A Behanding in Spokane

As you know, one of my aims here is to see if I can write about plays without reviewing them. And by reviewing, I mostly mean criticizing. I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna – on the contrary, I believe healthy criticism is essential to art. It’s just that it’s so easy. It’s so easy to talk about what you don’t like, and feel smart and funny doing it. And because it’s so easy, I have often neglected to spend time exploring the other aspects of art that perhaps I did like, or was interested by, or that reminded me of something. So the non-review bent of this blog is an attempt to correct that knee-jerk response in me, and perhaps encourage other knee-jerks like me to do the same.

And I think that’s a good thing. Because if it weren’t for my commitment to non-review plays, I might have stopped thinking about A Behanding in Spokane weeks ago, and missed an important insight I finally had that kinda makes me want to see it again.

So I’ll say it plainly – I was not initially a fan of this play. In truth, it kind of dumbfounded me. And the rest of the audience seemed to adore it, which just dumbfounded me further. And honestly, since seeing the play two weeks ago until about 20 minutes ago, I could not get any further than that.

But 20 minutes ago, I sat to write this post and thought about two images from the play that stuck with me. One was a detail in the set, which depicts an old, run-down hotel room. I noticed, and admired, while watching the play that the scenic designer had chosen to present the room as though it had been sawn in half. The playing space was entirely realistic, but along the proscenium and downstage edge of the stage, you could see a crumbly cross-section of the hotel room’s walls, ceiling, and floor – the wooden studs and joists within the plaster. And around that cross-section was empty space, so that this broken-off piece of hotel room seemed to float within the confines of the actual stage.

The second detail was also design-related. After the first act, a ratty red velvet curtain comes down in front of the set. Sam Rockwell’s character walks out, wearing his beat-up bellman/night reception uniform, and delivers a monologue to the audience, in front of the curtain, lit by a follow spot.

In contemplating these two images, the word vaudeville finally popped into my head. The crumbly set that emphasized the proscenium, the ratty red curtain, the beat-up bellman’s vest, the follow spot, the monologue to the audience. It was all vaudevillian, in a faded sort of way.

And that’s the lightbulb. Vaudeville. All the stuff I didn’t get, all the stuff that dumbfounded me about this play – I now believe it was doing it on purpose and it was doing it with vaudeville in mind. I would need to go back to see if that lens truly changes my perception (and reception) of the play, but considering I completely missed that element the first time around, at least consciously, I can’t with good conscious conscience say I remain “not a fan.”

And that never would have happened if I hadn’t forced myself to think my beyond my first knee-jerk response. Pollyanna or not, it does feel good to not be such a knee-jerk sometimes.

Venus in Fur

2010-03-17T19:29:00.002-04:00

Performance Date: 03.02.10
Classic Stage Company

Speed-blogging (not really) Post #5: Venus in Fur

So remember how I wrote that Arthur Miller plays are like Fibonacci spirals, with the protagonists marching inward and inward towards definite ends that feel impossibly small? Well David Ives’s new play Venus in Fur also reminds me of a Fibonacci spiral, but one that moves the opposite way. It begins with a premise that is small and limited, but then it proceeds to open, over and over again, towards limitless possibility, ratcheting itself up and up with every turn until you are towering with it on the precipice of your own suspended disbelief. Sounds pretty dramatic, huh? Well dramatic is Venus in Fur in a nutshell.

Let me first get something very important out of the way. The lead actress in this play, Nina Arianda, is absolutely phenomenal. Fuh-nomenal. She blows the lid off the place. I haven’t seen an actress this committed, this compelling, this willing to leap into the abyss since…since…nope, I can’t even think of another performance to compare it to. She’s wiped my memory clean. I know I get easily excited about things, but really. This girl ain’t no joke.

For starters – and to fully digress from Mr. Fibonacci and his spiral for a moment – it’s a monster of a role. She plays a seemingly hare-brained actress who arrives late to audition for a fed-up, intellectual playwright; and yet, as alluded to earlier, all is not as it seems and the hare-brained actress reveals herself to be much, much more. It’s a frighteningly intelligent script and the role demands nothing less than the complete suite of actress ability – clownish comedic talent, animal sex appeal, terrifying dominance, genuine vulnerability, and girl-next-door charm. At first I considered it a winning lottery ticket – how lucky is this girl getting to show herself in so many lights? – but I quickly realized how unfair that is. Any lesser actress would have crumbled under this role’s burden.

But you know what? Why put her on a pedestal? She’s a young actress, just like me, not far out of grad school, just like me. Maybe Ms. Arianda did crumble at first – because what actress wouldn’t? But if she did, she clearly overcame it, dusted herself off and tried again. Or maybe she didn’t crumble. Maybe she approached the role methodically, attacking it one aspect at a time, deciphering it moment by moment, bird by bird (see writer Anne Lamott). Or maybe she just played. Maybe she just made a big ole make-believe mess, crayons and finger-paint flying everywhere, until finally she and her director brought out the 409 and edited it into shape. Any or all of these are possibilities. And it doesn’t help me any to believe I couldn’t do what she did, now does it?

Okay, now I really didn’t intend for Fibonacci to be a false start to this post, but in returning to the idea, I see that a Fibonacci spiral isn’t really the right metaphor. A cyclone is more apt. The play pulls you in at ground level to a playing field with limited scope – airhead actress meets frustrated playwright – and while you think oh I know where this is going, you don’t mind because the dialogue is good and the performances solid. The first turn of the cyclone is predictable – he lets her audition and surprise! she is remarkably good – but again the dialogue is engaging and the performances believable, so you’re still along for the ride. And now there’s this tension between the characters that seems to have lifted the play off the ground a little.

The play continues this way, making one turn and then another. And each time three things happen:

1) The scope of the playing field widens – oh my god we’re going to go there?

2) The commitment of the actors digs in even deeper – we’re going there, but I totally believe it.

3) The tension ratchets up – I’m totally believing this and man I feel dizzy!

And so it goes. Round and round the widening gyre, the play flings you up and out with every turn. But the center maintains its hold – that is, the writing and the performances are so strong they keep you from flying off into outer space. It’s one hell of a ride. And what’s more, the ride ends before things fall apart, leaving you feeling like you’d stand in line again just to go another time around.

A Lie of the Mind

2010-03-08T21:04:00.000-05:00

Performance Date: 02.27.10
Acorn Theatre, Theatre Row

Speed-blogging Post #4: A Lie of the Mind

A pawn shop rabbit warren of wooden furniture.

Ghostly lit figures performing eerily beautiful Americana music and live sound cues.

A suite of memorable performances, both varied and uniformly strong.

Another way of saying that: each actor brought his or her uniqueness to the plate, and swung hard.

Painful and uncomfortable, as all Shepard plays are, and performed by feeling actors – yet not a tear in my eye. Makes me think that when I cry at movies, theater, or TV, it has less to do with substance and more to do with form. The right chord progression in a bad musical will choke me up, but excellent performances of Shepard’s strangely detached characters bring no tears, though they may move me more.

Makes me appreciate director Ethan Hawke.

Next to Normal

2010-03-08T21:01:00.000-05:00

Performance Date: 02.27.10
Booth Theatre

Speed-blogging Post #3: Next to Normal

I was genuinely engaged by the narrative of this pop-rock musical about a family affected by one character’s battle with bipolar depression. Which is such a pleasure because can you imagine how much of a train wreck it might have been to explore a potentially psychotic mood disorder with the same instrumentation used on American Idol? But the show manages the juxtaposition well, maintaining complexity in its narrative while benefitting from the accessibility of its score. Some particular highlights for me:

- The seductive and mysterious presence of the actor who plays the son, hanging from the pipe framework set, belting it out with a perfect pop-musical voice.

- The success of the understudy who went on as the father after brushing past some initial nerves (belied by quietly delivered solos in first number).

- The palpable sense at intermission that there were not a few folks in the audience who were finding it easy to relate.

Next Fall

2010-03-03T16:37:00.000-05:00

Performance Date: 02.24.10
Helen Hayes Theatre

Speed-blogging Post #2: Next Fall

Oh my god oh my god oh my god. The flood of tears. The continuous, streaming, river of tears. But also the laughter. Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion, says Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias, and I can relate.

As I've said before, it’s not hard to make me cry and that the presence of tears on my face does not always indicate that I am watching something of quality. However, I’m pretty sure that Next Fall was amazing. I say “pretty sure” because I became so emotionally involved in this play, I don’t think I can be a good judge of its merit. I just sat there in the third row, staring up at Patrick Breen’s loveable, laughable, scraggly little face, and his skinny legs and knobby knees, and thinking things like: god isn't it so wonderfully awful being human?...oh why do we have to lose people we love?... we're all gonna die someday and it's so painful and so funny at the same time. Yeah I was pretty far gone. But I loved it, and particularly loved Patrick Breen. I couldn't clap hard enough or high enough at the end and I really wanted to catch his eye and non-verbally thank him for his performance. So funny and heartbreaking and honest. So human.

I should also say that the play is largely about faith -- as in Christian, as well as "leap of" -- and it handles this very complex, personal, and often opaque subject with incredible insight, compassion, and wit.

Now go see it and tell me if I'm just a sucker or something.

The Tempermentals

2010-03-03T16:18:00.004-05:00

Performance Date: 02.22.10

New World Stages

I think I’ve gone a little nutso. Ever since January I’ve been about three plays behind in my Year of Plays, and it’s been making me anxious. Now no one besides myself is holding me accountable to any sort of schedule with these plays. But I’m a Virgo and an ENFJ (as is Barack Obama, aren't I swell) which means I can create sizeable anxieties over small commitments and I can do it all on my own, thank you very much. So I was anxious, and to quell my anxiety I stacked up on theater tickets. And, well, I went a little overboard. The result is that I’m seeing six plays in nine days time. Nutso.

So to make my life a little easier, beginning with this post we shall commence a brief period of speed-blogging. Six brief jottings – two a week for three weeks. You’ll be happier, I’ll be happier, it will be great.

Speed-blogging Post #1: The Tempermentals.

I had no idea what I was going to see, but it was theater on a Monday night which is rare. I thought perhaps it was a cabaret actually – something Michael Urie (of "Ugly Betty" fame) threw together for fun with some friends. Instead I was very pleased to encounter this great little play about the formation of the Mattachine Society (one of the earliest gay activist organizations) in 1950’s Los Angeles.

I don’t watch "Ugly Betty" so I wasn’t familiar with Michael Urie and was a little cynical in my expectations for the night. But he was fantastic. Charming, present, real, funny, talented. And all this while employing an Austrian accent. Not bad. What he made realize is this -- people are people, and have been so throughout all time. Just because something is a “period piece” doesn’t mean that people didn’t slouch or sigh or slump or roll their eyes. These were the details that made Michael Urie’s character so real to me, even in the supposedly more composed, suit-wearing era of the 1950's.

Now this goes contrary to what a lot of actor training programs teach. These days a lot of us are taught to rid ourselves of “fidgety” habits in favor of a more “grounded” and neutral physicality. There’s good reason behind it – actors usually fidget because we're uncomfortable on stage and don’t know what else to do. When we remove those gestural crutches, however, we're forced to connect more deeply to the material and can make cleaner choices about how to pursue what our character wants. But removing the “fidgeting” can be a bit of a baby and the bathwater situation, where actors end up stripping themselves of the ability to make characters seem like real people. I've definitely been guilty of it, and it's nice to be reminded that it doesn't have to be that way. Now, let me be clear (Obama reference - my we're just so alike!), I’m not recommending that we return to the post-Brando phase of acting where mumbling and picking one’s nails passed for technique, nor am I eager to embrace Tudor queens who sink into their hips like valley girls. But Michael Urie’s performance reminded me that as long as you do know what you’re doing on stage, there’s no need to throw the baby out of that tub.

Caroline, or Change

2010-02-24T23:47:00.000-05:00

Performance Date: 02.20.10

The Gallery Players

“A sad and lovely collage-like valentine/meditation on a time and place from his memory.”

Not the best sentence ever written, but that was how I described to a friend my impression of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change, which I saw for the first time at The Gallery Players in Brooklyn last week.

Whether explicitly or not, I write a lot about memory in this blog. When I sit down to write, I often begin by jotting down what I remember of a play, and from those memories I eventually spin out what you’ve been reading here. It’s a process my dad used to teach his freshman writing students back in the day, and which he later taught me when I began writing essays in high school. Write down what you remember, contemplate what connections those memories share, and before you know it you’ve got a solid argument for why Gatsby was so great. The exercise – rather baldly on display in my Smudge post a few weeks back – leverages the idea that we tend to remember most clearly that which we only partly understand. We remember the things that contain some mystery for us, or are significant to us in some way that is not entirely clear.

Caroline, or Change has that feel to it. While only semi-autobiographical, the musical feels like the well-worn worry blanket of a playwright grappling to understand a few very affecting memories from his childhood. As if Kushner had always carried with him the memory of a particularly troubling fight he had as a child with the maid who worked in his house, when he had said something searing and awful and could never quite comprehend why. And from that disquieting memory, he constructed this quilt of historic context, sensory impression, and personal narrative to reconcile for himself what happened. I guess that’s a very romantic imagining to suggest for such a cerebral playwright, and the quilt and blanket imagery is too sweet for the what Caroline, or Change is in sum. But at least in Gallery’s revival, there is that fuzzy, stitched-together quality to the show, that quality of memory we all experience when recalling something huge that happened long ago.

I suppose fuzzy and stitched-together make it sound like the production was unclear or lacked cohesion. That wasn't the case at all. On the contrary, in fact. I found the production not only clear and cohesive, but also moving, passionate, well-designed, and blessed with a tremendously talented orchestra and cast. I think it might be the best thing I’ve seen at Gallery, which is saying something because I feel like Gallery keeps getting better and better every time I go.

Now, I want to return to the topic of memory and see where that path gets me in relation to Caroline. The interesting thing is that it has now been five days since I wrote the first half of this post, and in the intervening time my memory of the show has altered from that first blush impression. Now when I think of it, I most recall elements that actually give some balance to that stitched-together quality I first noted. I recall the washing machine and the dryer – both the geometric representations of them in the set and the performers who personified them. I recall their muscularity, the Washing Machine in her swishing and rolling physicality, the Dryer in his deep baritone and darting eyes. I recall Caroline’s face, a strained mask of grief and rage, as she sings of doing laundry in a basement sixteen feet beneath the sea. And I recall the music – a score not composed to be especially remembered melodically, and so I remember it instead as music that thumped and groaned, knocked and wailed.

And I think this, now, gives a better impression of what Caroline, or Change is "in sum," as I put it. A worry blanket of memory, yes -- at least for me -- but one that is sculpted into something muscular and alive. Something that still knocks and wails in my mind even five days later. Something I clearly find worth remembering.

Tell a Friend about A Year of Plays

2010-02-16T14:21:00.004-05:00

Hello Dear Readers,

This week we are exactly halfway into my Year of Plays -- Week 26 -- and I wanted to take a brief moment for a few words, and to ask you for some help.

It started as a lark, but I now find I'm really in love with this idea that we can talk and write about art without reviewing it. The idea isn't to disguise our opinions but to remind ourselves that picking over what we don't like is only one slim part of what can be a much larger, much richer conversation. I've gotten so much value out of retraining my brain to think this way that I want more people to give it a try.

This is why I've set a personal goal to double (maybe even triple?) my readership of A Year of Plays -- and I need your help to do it!

If you also support the idea of creating a richer public discourse about art, please tell a friend -- or two! Click on the "Email Post" icon at the bottom of every post, use the "Share A Year of Plays" gadget over there in the sidebar, or just mention it over a beer. Help spread the idea that our conversations about art are not limited to talking about the bits that didn't work!

Finally, thank you! I so thoroughly enjoy writing this blog that it comes as a giant ladleful of drippings-and-cream gravy that anyone should read it or enjoy doing so. (Great, now I've made myself hungry for turkey.) Your support is tremendously encouraging and I thank you for it.

Now go read below about A View from the Bridge!

Anna

A View from the Bridge

2010-02-16T13:35:00.002-05:00

Performance Date: 02.12.10
Cort Theatre

I didn’t major in theater. In fact, aside from a few great experiences doing high school plays, I had nothing to do with theater until I took my first acting class at 24. I never took Theater History, a seminar on Great Plays, or even a survey of dramatic literature. As a result, there are many, shameful gaps in my theater knowledge.

The benefit of this ignorance is that I now occasionally have the pleasure of going to the theater, as a 10-year veteran actor, and encountering a classic play for the very first time. And it is such a pleasure, I have to tell you. To be in the hands of a master playwright with no preconceived notion of how the story will or should unfold is utterly delicious. Especially when the production is good and the cast remarkable. As was the case last week with Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge on Broadway.

So, full disclosure # 1: I’m a huge Arthur Miller fan. I mean, how can you not be? He’s amazing. I know there must be people out there who say they don’t like Miller, but I think they must be lying in order to sound contrary and cool. In fact, I like Arthur Miller so much that if you don’t like Arthur Miller, I am deeply suspicious of you and I don’t think we can be friends. I’m just sayin’. Granted, I only know four of his thirty-five or so stage plays. But those four – All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and now A View from the Bridge – are more than enough to make up for even a million lesser attempts.

Full disclosure # 2: I know the guy who plays Rodolpho in this production. In fact, I’m guessing 3 out of 4 of my readers either know the guy who plays Rodolpho, or happen to be the guy himself. He’s an ACT alum named Morgan Spector and for the 25% of you aren’t acquainted with him, there are two things you should know: 1) he landed his plum role by way of a true Cinderella story, as an understudy called to replace the original actor after an injury forced him to leave the show; and 2) what eclipses that good fortune is Morgan’s great talent and hard work. He is the very epitome of the idea that luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. Mad props.

Full disclosure #3: Antoinette LaVecchia of How to Be a Good Italian Daughter (In Spite of Myself) is also in the ensemble cast. She had me in stitches over drinks post-show and a lovelier, funnier woman cannot be found, well, anywhere. (Incidentally, this means I now have two pathways that make me exactly 2 degrees separated from both Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson. I admit I take great delight in that.)

Okay, have I gotten this far without really writing about the play? Gee, my posts are getting lengthy. I guess I like to hear myself write.

So here’s the thing. The great Miller plays are like the Golden Ratio. They are perfectly proportioned and possess a rhythm and beauty that reflect some kind of inherent natural order. It sounds hyperbolic, but I think I mean it more literally than you imagine.

Take a look at the Fibonacci spiral, a geometric figure that approximates the proportions of the Golden Ratio and is famously exhibited in nature by the nautilus shell. Overall, the shape is simple and pleasing to look at. Although not symmetrical and potentially infinite in size, there is a balance to the figure that makes it feel complete. Looking closer, there is more pleasure to be derived in noticing the structure of the shape. Each turn of the spiral is a proportionally identical curve, and each curve relates to the ones before and after it in exactly the same proportional way. Finally, there is a tension in the spiral that is compelling, if not exactly pleasurable. It begins in what feels like an expansive amount of space, but then quickly – very quickly – it turns inward, tighter and tighter, into what feels like an impossibly small little knot. Something vast and free becomes something cramped and definite in the blink of an eye.

So it is with Miller. The four great plays I named all possess those same qualities. Asymmetrical – no bookending scenes or coming full circle, just a linear march through time – but balanced and complete. Pleasingly simple overall, but possessing careful structure that unfolds in a proportional way. A compelling tension, both pleasing and not pleasurable at all, of an inescapable fate coming nearer and nearer with every turn of the plot. In other words, a man – Eddie Carbone, Willy Loman, John Proctor, Joe Keller – once possessed of a future that was vast and free, turns inward again and again upon his own fatal flaws, and thus marches towards a cramped and definite end of his own making.

Wow. I just made that up right now. But I think it’s pretty good. I think I might be a genius. I think I’ll sit here all smug and proud. That is until someone with a theater history education notices, discredits me, and I implode into a private spiral of shame. Because pride does go before the fall. Just ask Willy Loman, John Proctor, or Eddie Carbone.

Smudge

2010-02-12T17:08:00.007-05:00

Performance date: 02.04.10

Women's Project, The Julia Miles Theater

I’ve been thinking a lot about pictures.

I took an on-camera acting class this week that was organized around the following idea: what a film or video camera captures is a series of pictures juxtaposed to tell a story. The pictures move fast – 24 or 30 frames per second – but that’s really what you’re dealing with in Film and TV land. A series of pictures telling a story. The question then occurred to me – is it really different in Theater land? Or is it actually the same?

This promptly opened a Pandora’s box in my brain that I am still sorting through. So forgive me as I take you on a road that will end at no clear destination. You're thrilled, I'm sure.

One of the most popularly held beliefs in the acting community is that acting for film and television is different than acting for stage. We’ve all heard tell of brilliant film and TV actors seeming to suck wind on stage, and many highly experienced theater actors (not excluding myself) tend to suck wind on camera. So we assume the two must be different. Okay, but how? The clearest reasons I can see are:

In theater, we are not perceiving the illusion of movement on a two-dimensional screen, but actual continuous movement in three-dimensional space;
In addition to seeing and hearing, we also perceive theater energetically (for example, when we notice an actor who has “presence”) as well as via smell and taste (e.g. the yummy bacon from Barrow Street’s Our Town).

But here’s the thing. Despite these differences, doesn’t storytelling on stage ultimately depend on pictures just as much as storytelling on screen? What else is the director doing when she blocks a show? Why else is it an asset when an actor has “stage sense,” or the ability to intuitively determine where he should place himself on stage? What else are designers are for? Furthermore, couldn’t it stand to reason that we process real, live action in the same way a camera does? That is, that we capture a series of pictures in our memory and infer a story from them? I’d need a cognitive scientist to answer that, but I can tell you this – when I think of a play I’ve seen, I usually remember it in pictures.

Take for instance the performance I saw last week of Smudge, a dark comedy about a young couple who give birth to a “smudge” – a female, possibly non-baby creature that the audience never sees. When I think of this play, the following pictures come to mind:

The mother huddled near a filing cabinet, eating a forkful of cheesecake straight from the box, and remaining as far as she can from her daughter’s feeding- and breathing-tube infested carriage;
The baby itself, which is only described and never shown, but in my imagination is a peach-colored, comma-shaped, armless, claw-tailed creature, with a single giant aquamarine eye;
Stacks of generic white bankers boxes, demarcating areas of the stage, all labeled with binary numbers – 11000.11, 0101, 0.11110, etc;
The mother sitting on the floor with a pair of scissors, snipping the arms off a pile of baby onesies;
A giant koosh-ball-like “stuffed animal” the mother creates from all the snipped-off arms and dangles tauntingly in front of the carriage from several feet away.

These pictures tell me a lot about the play. They tell me that the play contains grotesque absurdity (cheesecake, koosh-ball, armless onesies) and cruelty (distant mom). It concerns itself with categorization (boxes, binary numbers, demarcation). It centers around a monstrous image (the baby) that we are never shown but left to vividly imagine. Taking a few more cognitive leaps, I can say the play is about grappling with incongruity, with experience that defies categorization, and about nightmarish, faceless fear.

Yet none of that occurred to me as I watched the play. As I watched it, I was more engaged in the emotional journey of each character, and waiting to see how the story would turn out. As I watched it, the play was just about this young couple coping with having a non-baby daughter. It was about how I was horrified by the mother but then understood and felt for her. It was about wondering what would happen to the baby. Not about incongruity, but about emotion and plot.

So here I am at the end of the post – and as promised, at no clear destination. I have no idea what any of this means. I’m sorting through my Pandora’s box but it remains a jumbled mess. In the jumble, I see potentially misguided beliefs about stage and screen acting, tantalizing questions about cognitive science, and really fantastic images from a very intriguing play. An incongruous pile that defies categorization. An unclear mess. Yes, in fact, a smudge.

As You Like It

2010-02-07T14:27:00.001-05:00

Performance Date: 01.29.10
Bridge Project at BAM Harvey Theater

Blast! I’ve been through four false starts to this blog post already and I’m not any closer to saying what I want to say. Okay, gloves are off. I’m throwing cleverness and insight to the wind. Transitions and subtlety are out too. I’m making a list:

1) I saw As You Like It at BAM. Part of the Bridge Project – Sam Mendes’s three-year long valentine to transatlantic collaboration and classic plays. 

2) It made me think a lot about performing Shakespeare. A topic I quite like.

3) Once upon a time, specifically during my three years of grad school and the year or two immediately following, I had a white-knuckle grip on Shakespeare performance technique.  

4) This is the thing about grad school. You go (and by you, I mean me) and your teachers tell you that what they are giving you are tools. You’re supposed take them, put them in your toolbox, and then pull them out when you need them. But that’s not what happens. Instead, you (and by you, I mean me) take what they say and turn it into gospel. Those tools become the Ark of the Covenant, and you hold on to that holy structure as tight as your grubby little hands will let you. White knuckles, people. Tight. Because you’re frightened to death of being awful and these tools are probably your only salvation. 

5) I wish I could tell you what the result of this white-knuckle grip looks like. But I can only tell you what it feels like. It feels great. It feels like you are the conductor of a massive orchestra that is your body and voice and brain and you are playing THE CRAP out of that Shakespeare. Just TEARING IT UP like the brilliant apex of acting that you are. Like you are laying REVELATIONS out upon that stage. Like no one has ever harnessed the lessons of a masters-level education like you are doing at this VERY MOMENT. You. Are. Awesome.

6) This is what I think it actually looks like: An unnaturally tense person with an abnormally expanded chest, who is possibly experiencing the shimmering instability of a manic episode, bellowing in a peculiar not-quite-British accent and gasping for breath every two-thirds of a sentence. 

7) Needless to say, nothing has pleased me more over the past five years than to observe in myself the gradual loosening of my fearful and misguided grip on all those holy tools. 

8) That said, there are still a few things I believe about performing Shakespeare. Here are four of them:

9) Move it along. The iambic heartbeat beneath the lines is a perpetual, unceasing rhythm that begs to keep pulsing. So keep it moving. Don't labor over every word. Don't pause where none is indicated. 

10) No trochees in the second or fifth foot. Seems weirdly specific and picky but I actually think it’s right. It sounds herky-jerky when you put a stressed-unstressed foot in those positions. The unceasing rhythm gets thrown and it’s like a train going off the tracks. Supposedly, and it’s probably debatable, Shakespeare never wrote a trochee in the second or fifth foot, with Lear’s “Never never never never never” being a notable exception.  

10.5) I think I’ve just uncovered the origin of the phrase, “Never say never.” 

11) Understand the logic. Don’t skip over anything. Follow the logic from the beginning of a speech to the end until you can see how it hangs together as a whole. It’s important. 

12) In fact, choose logic over emotion. By all means, stay open to what the language triggers in you emotionally – in fact you must – but don’t go searching for it. Usually, if you understand the logic of what you’re saying, the emotion will come.

13) Those four things – 9, 10, 11, and 12 – are my real Ark of the Covenant. The tenets I try to keep to in all those Shakespeare auditions I go to, and the tenets I’ll keep to when I’m cast in the final round of Bridge Project plays next year. That’s right. Are you listening Sam Mendes?

14) Everything else I’ve learned is finally just a tool in my toolbox. The tools include maintaining the “integrity of the line” (i.e. finding reason to briefly breathe or pause at the end of every line), leveraging consonant sounds and length of vowels, exploring the use of monosyllabic vs. polysyllabic words, mining every possible resonance of every single word (a.k.a “dropping in”), and connecting emotionally to the character. Great, useful tools, but ones I don’t rely on all the time.  

15) Finally, back to As You Like It. In the performance I saw, the cast as a whole were experts at moving the text along, conveying logic, and not indulging in emotion. I did hear a couple misplaced trochees from one actor, but I’m probably the only nerd who noticed or cared. 

16) And yet ultimately, there was too much logic and not enough heart on stage that night. At least for me. With a few gorgeous exceptions (Jacques, I’m talking to you), most of the evening lacked the spark of life and human connection. Which just goes to show you that there is still something sublimely indefinable about great performances.  

17) P.S. I know that #15 and #16 sounded suspiciously like a review, and this blog is supposed to talk about art without reviewing it. But as Shakespeare apparently said, according to my diligent research, "Never say never." Or as we used to say on the schoolyard, “Tough noogies.”

FELA! The Musical

2010-01-28T16:41:00.002-05:00

Performance Date: 01.13.10
Eugene O'Neill Theatre

In the lobby, I hear music coming from the theater and I think maybe I’m in the wrong place. Did I perhaps wander into a concert venue? I check the sign next to Will Call – FELA! – nope this is the right place. Did I get here late? Has it started? 1:45pm. Fifteen minutes early for the Wednesday matinee. Hmm, okay.

I walk into the theater and now I understand. It’s a party as soon as you enter. Live music is coming from a band on stage – African drums, jazz horns, and something electric rolling together in a forward-moving syncopation. Women in short, ornamented skirts stand near the wings, rolling their hips and popping their behinds to the beat. Men in leisure suits and fedoras saunter about, take a stroll down the catwalk that extends from the stage along one wall of the theater. The house itself is decked out too. Projections of newspaper headlines mix with murals and masks on every wall. Strings of lights are hung from the ceiling all the way into the balcony.

I have entered The Shrine, the program tells me. Fela Kuti’s Nigerian hot spot of the late 1970’s. The bar is open, I’m further informed, and I am welcome to drink in my seat. Okay, I see. We’re trying to create something a little different here on the B-way today. Alright, I’m feeling it.

The show begins and the actor playing Fela addresses us exuberantly as patrons of his nightclub. I enjoy his tight-voweled West-African speech. It’s as staccato and musical as Fela’s songs. And I’m enjoying him, our Fela. I’m way up in the balcony but his charisma is reaching me. I’m guessing this is how the real Fela became such a legend and political icon. He had things to say, and talent, but he must also have had charm.

The lights are still on in the house and I suppose I should have taken this as a clue. Because before I know it we have arrived at audience participation time. Everybody on their feet. Everyone get up. We’re going to learn how to move our hips. Yep, that’s right. This Wednesday matinee audience of blue hairs and tourists is about to learn how to pop a booty.

The reluctance is palpable. Especially up in the thin air of the balcony. We’re a little more exposed up here. Not as many people. The dancers and musicians aren’t so close. It’s a little harder to argue that we’ve been taken over by the rhythm or the moment. I’m torn. I really want to get down with this. If I were down in the orchestra among the masses I’m pretty sure I’d be full-on rump-shaking, even though I’m here alone. I mean, I could use a good rump-shaking. Up here in the balcony, though, I’m in the first row. Everyone behind can see me. I’m not sure I want to give them all a show. Which is strange because I rock out on the cardio machines on the gym all the time. Full on dork disco moves on the arc trainer and everything. Don’t seem to care there. For some reason I’m caring here.

Thankfully, two lovely women behind me are extremely ready to make this happen. They are on their feet and whooping, hips rocking around the faces of their clocks, I’m sure, though I don’t turn around to look. I use their enthusiasm as cover and try to get a little groove on. All I can help thinking though is how I wish I’d come here on a Saturday night. When the audience might be a little more tipsy and, well, younger. Maybe a little less white. No offense to my father’s people, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking at a couple busloads of shocked Oregonians down there. No, wait, look. There are a couple of them doing it up. Okay cool, it actually looks like people are trying to give it a little something here. Doing their best.

Which is good because the performers in the show are definitely giving it up. I’m really enjoying it. The guy playing Fela is hypnotic. So are all those ornamentally-skirted backsides up there. And I think I'm getting a sense, maybe, of what it might have been like in 1970’s in Nigeria. What the import of these songs are. I’m getting a sense. I'm feeling I can guess at how the defiance, pride, and subversion of the lyrics might have fed people. How Fela’s lyrics – coupled with this driving mix of funk and jazz and African chants, coupled with Fela himself – might have provoked a release in people. Caused in them a need to act. An explosive need. Yeah I’m getting a bit of a sense of that. I’m feeling I can guess at that right now. Yeah, I’m feeling it.

The Duke of MIlan

2010-01-14T14:57:00.002-05:00

Performance Date: 01.11.10
Red Bull Theater

I went to see a staged reading of The Duke of Milan at Red Bull Theater on Monday night. Even with the talented cast, a staged reading (which, per union rules, has limited rehearsal and requires actors to hold scripts in hand) of this lesser known Jacobean play didn’t really provide me with enough art/craft/process meat to chew on as I usually do in this blog. Fortunately, there’s still plenty to write about. Because how many of you did I lose with the word Jacobean?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Unless you are a specific type of theater, literature, or history nerd, the word Jacobean probably induces a near total shut down of sensory perception. I say “lesser known Jacobean play,” you fall asleep with your eyes open. I, however, like to pose as this type of theatrical and literary nerd. I’m weird like that. But the truth is that aside from the later Shakespeare plays, I don’t know very much this period in English theater.

Let’s play a game. I’m going to write down everything I think I know about Jacobean tragedy and then I’m going to Google it and see if I was right. I promise not to cheat. Jacobean tragedy is dark, bloody, and gory, with lots of killing. There is a great deal of betrayal, revenge, madness, and even incest. Other words that come to mind are ornate and twisty, and it makes me think of the colors black, gold, and red. I see lots of tall sharp collars behind women’s heads, and men who could probably be teleported to the low, gritty, crime-infested underbelly of Guy Ritchie’s modern day London and no one would notice. People would just think they were violent blokes who liked to wear tights.

Now to Google.

Okay, not bad. Although I can’t find any scholars who describe Jacobean drama as “ornate and twisty with lots of black and gold,” my impressions don’t seem to be far off. So my next question is – why aren’t we all getting down with our Jacobean selves? Doesn’t bloody revenge, madness, and betrayal seem like a rollicking good way to pass the time? We like it in our cinema, so why don’t we see more of it on the stage?

But maybe this line of questioning is off base. After all, Red Bull Theater has shot to prominence in NYC over the past five years as a theater company specifically focused on presenting Jacobean plays. Their productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy and Edward the Second both enjoyed successful extended runs in Off-Broadway houses. Clearly they must be doing something right. They must be serving an unmet, bloodthirsty need in the theater-going public.

Still, there’s something fusty in me that suspects – and then resents – a general lack of appreciation for Jacobean drama. I think it’s because of my love for Shakespeare. I don’t really associate Shakespeare with all that dark, gory, thugliness, but he did write in that era and my resentful suspicions must really be in defense of him. I love Shakespeare’s plays because when I speak the words of his characters, they trigger in me feelings that are very human and have clear emotional logic. His characters make sense to me on an empathic, human level, which I believe is entirely due to the words and rhythms Shakespeare gives them. I’m going out on a limb here, but I don’t think depicting empathetic humanness through language was the concern of many other Jacobean playwrights. They seem to be focused elsewhere. Perhaps on depicting a type of despair in the human condition, on depicting the bloody unfairness of it all.

Maybe that’s the disconnect – if there is one. Maybe it’s easier for folks to connect with four hundred year old plays – with the “old timey” language and costumes and customs – when that human empathy is front and center. Maybe it’s harder to stomach the old timey-ness when it’s all serpentine plot and bloody dark revenge. Perhaps audiences prefer their revenge straightforward -- not so ornate and twisty (ha-HA!). But as I say, I’m talking out of turn here. I don’t have a lot of Jacobean play-going experience to draw on. Looks like I’ll have to check out Red Bull’s Duchess of Malfi in February to see what I can learn.

The Last Cargo Cult

2010-01-05T15:31:00.005-05:00

Performance Date: 12.13.09
The Public Theater

Oftentimes you hear a director or filmmaker say, “Well, what I really am is a storyteller.” And to that I say, “No you’re not.” I get what they mean, and they’re not wrong per se. But to me, a storyteller is a person sitting in a chair telling you a story. And that’s it. No other actors, no jump cuts or soundtracks. Just the person, the chair, and what they say.

By this definition, Mike Daisey is a storyteller par excellence. His recent work, The Last Cargo Cult, features Daisey seated behind a desk, on which are a few sheets of yellow paper and a bottle of water, and that’s it. For the whole show. All two and a half hours. And from this comfortable perch, Daisey tells us a rather uncomfortable story about our culture’s relationship to money. It’s thoroughly engaging, funny, and significant, and I encourage everyone to go see it. He’s going on tour. Check your local listings.

It takes a certain talent to reel an audience in with just your words. My boyfriend and I took note of this after attending a Moth-inspired birthday party a few months back. All the guests were asked to bring a story to share, and the best one belonged to a friend named Brian. His was a long and outrageous tale about exploring Disneyland in an altered state of consciousness while on a high school field trip. It would have been a good story coming out of anyone’s lips, but Brian made it a work of art. Rather than go the obvious route and deliver his nefarious account with bombastic showmanship, Brian spoke quietly at first. He sat there with a soft look in his eye, as he conjured the images from his memory and set about describing them to us. He took his time, but not unduly. He offered detail upon detail, and in so doing captured nuance and tone. But most of all, he allowed the memory of the event to affect him in the retelling of it. So that as the story progressed, we too felt the exhilaration, the wildness, and the fractured absurdity of his journey, as if it were in fact happening to us.

That’s not easy. It takes confidence. How many times have you tried to convey a story that you know is hilarious or otherwise incredible, and yet you find yourself skipping over things, rushing it along? You get skittish when your audience doesn’t immediately respond the way you want them to, and you give the story short shrift. Your fear gets the better of you and disappointment wins the day. Not so with Brian. He took the risk to soften up and take his time, confident it would pay off. Of course, he had told his tale before and knew what parts to enhance or leave out, an advantage over us skittish story-rushers. But that is part of the art as well. Trying again after you flop the first time. Honing the story over time.

Mike Daisey, of course, enjoys all the same advantages as Brian in The Last Cargo Cult, and more so. He’s a storyteller by profession and crafts his monologues for performance over long periods of time. While maybe a little less thrilling than the high-wire act of informal storytelling, the overall effect of Daisey’s expertise is one of relaxation. He sits in his chair behind the desk, flips over a yellow sheet of paper (serving more as theatrical convention than crib notes), opens his mouth, and you immediately know you’re in good hands. Which is helpful when you’re simultaneously getting the rug pulled out from under you regarding our collective faith in the abstraction we call money.

I guess what really fascinates me most about storytelling, though, is that it’s an act of mutual creation. I’ve written about this idea before, in my posts for Our Town and Los Elementos, so it’s clearly an important concept for me. In storytelling, there are two imaginations at play, the teller’s and our own. And there’s this double-translation that happens – sounds a little far out, but follow me. An event happens to the storyteller, which logs in her mind as images. She then translates these images – her imagination – into words. We hear the words, and our brains translate them back into images – our own images this time, our own imagination at work. And it is actually the experience of our own imagination that is so exhilarating when we hear a story. But it’s an experience we could not have had without the storyteller.

This is exactly what happens when we read a book. Or see a painting. Or engage with any art. The artists help us experience our own imaginations in ways we would not be able to without them. And yes, this includes directors and filmmakers. So I guess they are storytellers after all. Go figure.

How to Be a Good Italian Daughter (In Spite of Myself)

2009-12-22T18:04:00.001-05:00

Performance Date: 12.11.09 

Cherry Lane Theater

I wish I could do any impression as well as Antoinette LaVecchia can do her mother. It makes me angry. These people with parents from other countries are so lucky. Not only do they possess a natural ear for homeland dialects, but their family stories are so much funnier because they get to use accents.

And accents are funny. Is that simplistic? Do I offend? Well too bad, because it’s true. Here’s the thing that saves it though – the funny isn’t because of some moronic delight at hearing words pronounced strangely. The funny is because a spot-on accent is like a fast track to a specific and believable character – and that’s what real funny relies on. Being specific and believable.

I say this like I’m a comedy expert. Well I am. We all are. We all know what makes us laugh and what doesn’t. And when someone tries to make us laugh and fails, we all pretty much know why. We say, it was too much of a shtick, or he’s trying too hard, which basically translates to it wasn’t specific or it wasn’t believable.

Now performing comedy? That’s a different story. When it comes to performing comedy, I am squarely at the student level. Sometimes I succeed at making people laugh, sometimes I don’t. Yet when I fail – which feels awesome! – I can pretty much always track it down to that same thing. I wasn’t specific and believable. Whatever idea was in my head, whatever impulse I had – I didn’t commit one-hundred percent to the truth of it.

Unlike Antoinette LaVecchica, who does commit one-hundred percent to the truth in her one-woman show How to Be a Good Italian Daughter (In Spite of Myself). Her portrayal of her Italian mother in this show is hysterical. So complete and whole, so detailed and real, that you immediately get the sense that this must be exactly how her mother really is. And perhaps I’m off base here, but I do suspect that the character’s accent – which was wonderful to listen to and perfect in the way only family can pull off – really might have been integral to all that wonderful specificity. I imagine that for Antoinette, replicating the cadence, tone, and vowel sounds of her mother’s dialect must automatically come with corresponding changes to her body, face, and hands. Or maybe I’m wrong. But whatever the case may be, it worked. Her portrayal was specific and believable, and the natural humor of having an overbearing, unrelenting, she loves you so much she wants to kill you for making her worry, old-country Italian mother simply rose to the surface, ready to be skimmed like so much delicious cream.

Some favorite Mother moments:

Her divorced actress daughter doesn’t want curtains for her new apartment. The mother’s response? An exasperated clapping together and clasping of her hands up to God, accompanied by her head turned away, eyes closed, and brows furrowed with vexation.
After a protracted and infuriating battle of wills, her daughter finally consents to curtains – as long as they are white. The mother’s response? A humoring smile and scrunch of her nose, her head tilted and softly shaking, as she says, “No, En-do-nay, you no want white curtains.”  
Her daughter lets the machine pick up on the umpteenth phone call that afternoon. The mother’s response? To cap her message with the following helpful information, delivered slowly and oh-so-dearly: “My name is Maria. I am your mother.”

You may have noticed – particularly if the above examples incited shudders of recognition – that specific does not have to mean unique, and believable does not have to mean subtle. Dear, sweet, horrible Maria is a universal character, as well as larger-than-life, and the frequent knowing laughter from the audience that night testifies that the comedy worked like a charm.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)

2009-12-14T16:41:00.000-05:00

Performance Date: 12.09.09

 Lyceum Theatre

If intermission at the matinee of In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) is any guide, it seems we all have a need for better conversations about sex.

The play was not a sex farce. It’s not even overtly about sex. In fact, it’s a smart, well-written play (by the on-fire playwright Sarah Ruhl) about connecting authentically with oneself and one’s loved ones. But it does feature a vibrator, and an old-timey one at that.

Set in upstate New York in the 1880’s, at the dawn of electricity, an upstanding doctor treats women suffering from “hysteria” in the manner of the day – by the application of “electrical massage” upon their nether regions. I’m not making this up. Within minutes of the application, the treatment would induce “paroxysms” and dispel “excess fluid from the womb,” which was thought to be the cause of the illness, thereby restoring the women to a more contented and relaxed state. Again, I am not making this up. The treatment was not understood to be sexual at all, but merely medical, and the new appliances invented for this purpose were an improvement upon the “manual treatment” that had previously been prescribed since the days of Socrates. Hand to god. (So to speak.)

Ah, yes. You can imagine the natural comedy this type of setting might inspire. And indeed it did. But it was the laughter at intermission that really caught my attention. As soon as the curtain fell, pockets of laughter erupted throughout the theater, and continued periodically until the lights dimmed for the second act. These were not quiet, titillated giggles. They weren’t even subversive, behind-the-hand snickers. These were loud, cackling, jubilant guffaws. From women, mostly. Who sounded as though they must be turning to their girlfriends and gleefully releasing a roiling, pent-up joy.

I mean, it sounded like delirious relief in there. It sounded like women who were utterly, deliriously, happily relieved. It was a warm atmosphere. A casual atmosphere. As if the formality of “going to the theatre” had been dropped, and now we were all amongst great friends. It felt like family.

Why this reaction? I return to my opening statement. I think, on some level, we all desire to have better conversations about sex. And there’s simply no place in our culture to have them. Not without first having to sweep aside feelings (genuine or feigned for someone else’s benefit) of embarrassment, fear, and shame. So I think when there is a play like this, that speaks of sex humanly, there is relief. When we see women who, due to the limits of their era’s understanding of sexual pleasure, are enjoying the rapture of their bodies innocently, there is relief. When we are reminded that we too can enjoy the pleasures of our bodies innocently, there is relief. And with this relief, with this collective release of pretense by an audience at a Wednesday matinee, there can come a feeling of genuine connection. A feeling of family.

We need theater for this reason. We need theater because theater is a culture having a conversation with itself. And sometimes there are conversations we just don’t get anywhere else.

The Misunderstanding

2009-12-07T15:19:00.002-05:00

Performance Date: 11.19.09

Horizon Theatre Rep, at The Flea Theater

Have you read any Albert Camus? I haven’t. Did you know he wrote plays? Me neither. But that’s one reason I’m doing this Year of Plays. To get me some edumacation.

But I’m gonna leave the playwright of The Misunderstanding aside. And the director and designers (friends and relations, some of them), and most of the cast (including the lovely Ellen Crawford), to focus on the actress playing Martha. Because she had me riveted. Something about what she was doing, perhaps something about her, was so different. I liked it and I wanted to puzzle out what it was.

I don’t like to bother with too much exposition about a play – I get distracted and end up in Review-land – so suffice it to say that The Misunderstanding is not unlike a Greek tragedy, with Martha as the central character. She begins as a quiet and unassuming daughter but ends up as something of an unleashed monster. In between, she journeys through fear, desperation, anger, rage, incredulity, and finally pretty much just goes batshit crazy.

With these circumstances, it seems any talented actress would be well set-up to give a “powerhouse” performance. And this woman did, in my opinion, with the emphasis truly on “power.” Power of presence, power of intention, power of voice. She had all of it going on quietly at the start of the play. But by the end of the play, the power was turned up a notch. She was like a wrathful, Tolkien-esque, spirit queen who rises from the earth, opens her mouth to a gaping size, and spews out a tidal wave of biblical proportions – complete with tridents and kraken and spirit boats filled with doomed sailors – to knock her enemies down.

I have two theories for why she was so powerful. One, it’s the woman. She is actually part spirit queen and the kraken is just part of her particular casting package. Two, and I really want this to be the real reason, it’s The Alexander Technique. I didn’t pull this out of thin air. The woman’s bio proudly states that she teaches Alexander, and I’ve latched onto that fact as the secret behind this woman’s performance.

What is Alexander and why do I so want it to be the cause of such ferocity? Alexander Technique is a way of working with your brain and body to improve ease and freedom of movement, balance, support, and coordination. When you learn Alexander Technique, you essentially learn how to rewire your nervous system for better physical use. It’s used by actors, dancers, singers, musicians, athletes, and many others, and was introduced to me by the great Frank Ottiwell and Glenn Canin at ACT.

Believing in Alexander Technique is like believing particle physics. The evidence is there, but somehow it just feels impossible. In Alexander, what you actually DO is so small compared to what you are trying to GET. In Alexander, what you actually DO is merely think, merely direct your brain to give your body specific instructions, and what you eventually GET is a golf swing that breaks 300 yards, a pirouette that holds it’s center, a voice that reaches the back of the house, a presence that commands attention with no movement at all.

It’s so hard to believe that just thinking makes it so. And in truth it takes a long time of practicing this method before the effects of Alexander truly manifest. Which is why it feels impossible. And while you’re working with it, all you want is a short cut. All you want it to muscle your way to the end result. To end-gain, in Alexander parlance. But when you do that, you just end up with your same crappy golf swing and straining voice.

I do believe in Alexander Technique. I’ve seen the results, in myself and in my friends. And yet whenever I begin to apply the lessons from Alexander to new challenges, all I want to do is skip to the end. To end-gain. That’s why I want this woman to have gotten what she has through Alexander. If it is true, then she can be a beacon for me. A shining light to help me keep the faith.

A particle and a wave.

Ragtime

2009-11-28T16:22:00.010-05:00

Performance Date: 11.11.09

Neil Simon Theatre

I went to see Ragtime and I liked it. It didn’t have me at hello – like the first time I saw Les Miz or the first through fourteenth times I saw Rent (don’t judge) – but I liked it.

I’d come in with high expectations. After all, this is the show that got transferred to the Great White Way after a three week run in DC, giving the musical it’s first Broadway revival a scant 10 years after the original production closed. Talk about buzz. Plus, my friend Jay said Ragtime was one of his favorite musical scores of all time.

I’d never seen the show before, or even heard the music, so some of my enjoyment was from watching the story unfold for the first time. But it was not only that. I liked the performances – a dry humor from the nurturing leading lady, an unnerving intensity from her explosives expert younger brother, the easy charm of the ragtime piano-playing leading man. The voices and the music were enjoyable. The story had enough to it to keep me engaged.   I dug the minimal set. All in all, I left feeling rather satisfied.

But then something funny happened. I started comparing notes with other folks who’d seen it, and began to doubt whether I really enjoyed it after all.

First up I polled some musical theater acquaintances. They weren’t that impressed. I asked what they thought of this one actor and they said his voice was “weird.” Intrigued, I asked what they meant by that. His voice had “no breath” and was “muscled” they reported in a way that made me sure this was a bad thing. Now, I remember this guy’s voice being particularly strong and shiny sounding, like a trumpet hitting a high note. In fact, as soon as he opened his mouth, I had the feeling he would be a star. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe shiny trumpet voices are bad and muscley.   After all, this was niche expertise, from people who know more about singing than I do.

Next I remembered hearing about someone who saw the DC run of the production and had announced that it was “exactly like the original production” and therefore no great shakes. Interesting. More niche expertise, from someone who had actually seen the original production, whereas I had not. Had I been duped by a knock-off?

Finally, I had dinner with a wonderful actress, singer, and musician friend who confided that she didn’t really like the music in Ragtime. That she didn’t feel any of the songs really grabbed her. Aha. Highly valued niche expertise from a trusted friend. Suddenly I wondered if I hadn’t gotten it all wrong.

Well dear reader, you’ll be happy to know I have shaken off this self doubt, and chosen not to believe as others do just because they might know better. Yes, it’s an After-School Special moment, everyone. But of course that’s not the point. The point is that there’s something to this belief in niche expertise. The belief that if someone is more experienced in a subject than yourself, his or her opinions are more valid than your own. As someone who has watched After-School Specials and Flashdance, I know the experts aren’t always right. But that doesn’t stop me from seeking out more informed thoughts than my own. Not a bad thing necessarily, but supplanting my own judgment with someone else’s? That’s like Junior High 101. We’re not supposed to do that.

Still, it’s tempting. Maybe because we all possess niche expertise in some area or another, and when it comes to our own expert knowledge, we believe others should submit. For example, due to my particular training as an actor, I believe tortured, emotional, Method-inspired, acting performances have absolutely no place on stage. (Film’s another story.) I find them horrible, indulgent, nearly offensive, and I think anyone who is impressed by them is a sucker. You, no doubt, hold some similarly dogmatic view regarding your area of expertise, be it language poetry, Fantasy Football, neural pathways, or Season 4 of So You Think You Can Dance. We know how deeply in contempt we hold the fools who don’t know what they’re talking about on our own turf, so perhaps we can be forgiven for not wanting to be a sucker on someone else’s.

And just for the record, I did like the show. And yeah none of the songs grabbed me, but I liked them when I heard them. And I still think that one actor has a knockout voice. Muscley trumpets are where it’s at. Mark my words.

Top of the Heap

2009-11-22T17:55:00.001-05:00

Performance Date: 11.08.09

The Gallery Players

These posts get harder to write each week. Not because the shows I see lack anything to write about, but because my writings all start to sound the same to me. For example, here’s the opening bit I just prepared about seeing Top of the Heap at Gallery Players:

“I love musicals. Not everyone does. Some can’t get over the and now I break into song aspect. Me? I break into song every day of my life so musicals don’t seem so far-fetched.”

Not bad, right? It’s clever and charming and a nice set up to delve deeper into the show, which I enjoyed. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But for some reason it feels stale, this week, to continue on in this way. Maybe it won’t next time, but right now it does. Which makes now a good opportunity to reflect a little bit on what am I doing here?

My secondary mission for this blog is “to discover if it’s possible to write about art without reviewing it.” I suppose it’s debatable how well I’ve kept to this mission so far, but I feel good about how it’s going. I’ve steered clear of feasting on clever barbs when I’ve encountered something I don’t like, and I’ve mostly kept to my personal experience of a show, rather than to sustain some illusion that what I’m doing is objective reporting. Good job, Anna, in my view. But now the question becomes – so what else is there to write about? When it comes to this Year of Plays, what else can I explore next to positive commentary, benign criticism, and personal experience?

I’m not sure, and I won’t be turning the ship sharply in this post. But it’s a bee in my bonnet as I move forward.

Now, back to Top of the Heap. It’s a new musical set in 1955 Brooklyn about an aspiring comedian and his partner who scheme for their big break on a popular, Ed Sullivan-esque variety show. With that bee still in my bonnet, though perhaps not buzzing too loudly yet, here’s a download from my brain:

Cream-puff pastel dresses on cooing backup singer spokesladies. 
Takes place just as live television is turning to video tape, and makes me think of The Farnsworth Invention (about the previous transition from radio to live TV), even though innovation isn't the focus in Heap. It has that end-of-an-era feel.
Enjoyed sitting next to an old cast mate from one of the Gallery shows I’ve done. Hadn’t seen him in long time and we talked about Italy. 
Also hadn’t seen the director in a while, a friend and long-time colleague. Felt good to tell him I liked the show. 
Back to innovations – what is it about these seeming miracles of technology that make for such great storytelling? 
Fantastic lead with a voice that seemed amplified beyond nature’s reason, even though he had no microphone. 
Blowsy broad of a supporting actress, a little reminiscent of Allison Janney. Wonder if blowsy broad could be one place I’m headed?

Hm, alright. End of download. Me and the bee are gonna discuss it now for a while.

Delirio Habanero

2009-11-13T18:14:00.004-05:00

Performance Date: 11.02.09

 Teatro de la Luna, at Teatro Mella, Havana, Cuba

Turns out that this year’s festival coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, and many of the Cuban selections were remounts of successful productions from the past. All the better for me. Because the Cuban theater I saw in Havana was slammin’. (That’s right, I said slammin’. I’m allowed to use that word.) Case in point? Delirio Habanero, a Beckett-inspired fever dream of heartbreak and hope with the city of Havana as its object of obsession.

Three denizens of a broken and crumbling Havana – a legendary barman of a famed Havana nightclub, and the ghosts of Cuban musical giants Celia Cruz and Benny Moré – careen between yearning for the glorious Havana of old and dreaming of the possibility of a brand new future. When I watched the show, I was only slightly aware of the political statement it was making. Instead, I was captivated only by the larger-than-life performances which I found truly superb. Bold, precise, expressive physicality. Giant emotional size followed by moments of smooth restraint – like an expert driver screaming past at 200 mph then deftly braking to swing perfectly into a parallel parking spot. Superb comic timing. Deeply felt passion. This show made me wonder if an entirely Spanish language production could make it on Broadway, because that’s where the play belonged.

Each time I think back on this play, however, its political significance holds more and more of my interest. Especially because I’m still not sure I grasp exactly what that significance is. It’s sort of emblematic of my entire trip to Cuba. When the possibility of traveling to Cuba first presented itself to me, it didn’t immediately capture my heart. I was interested in going – in the adventure and the uniqueness of the opportunity – but Cuba wasn’t a country that held much fascination for me. And now that I’ve been there, the complete opposite is true. I now have an endless curiosity about this country – its history, its politics, its culture, its people. What is it to be Cuban today? To have the pride of the Revolution at your back and the hard reality of today at your feet? How do these conflicting narratives play out? I have a glimmer of an understanding now, but only that. And there must have been so many answers to these questions in Delirio Habanero, as that is the very friction the play explores. I wish I could see it again with two years of Spanish under my belt. Maybe next time, when it comes to Broadway.

Escandalo en la Trapa

2009-11-13T18:13:00.007-05:00

Performance Date: 10.31.09
Mefisto Teatro, at Teatro Mella, Havana, Cuba

Next stop Havana. The theater festival was amazing. Just like any other festival only Cuban, which means they didn’t have a program printed until after the festival had begun (bad) and every show I attended and performed in was sold out and given a standing ovation (good).

Escandalo en la trapa by the Cuban theater company Mefisto Teatro was first up. The story follows a young doctor in 19th century Cuba who becomes the object of affection for all the town’s ladies and one of the young men. It was performed in a highly physical style reminiscent of commedia or farce. Lemme break down the awesomeness:

The costumes!! Made of paper, or seemingly so. Stiff, brown paper, the kind they used to wrap packages in. Imagine it rolled up into giant cylinders like the big ice cream tubs they use at Baskin & Robbins, or like oversized lampshades, and then imagine them tiered one top of the other to make a corseted dress that telescopes into itself when the actress kneels down. Or imagine the paper pasted together into rigid suits with waistcoats, ties, and tails and giant shoes. So that the whole cast – each in their own artfully distinguishable creation – looks like a claymation movie brought to life. Unbelievable.
The movement!! And then you ask, how can anyone move in costumes like that? The answer was that they moved with huge gestures of great precision. The actors must have rehearsed in costume because, in every case, the wardrobe and movement worked hand in hand to illustrate the character beautifully. An ingenue’s dress bobbles and wiggles in an exact reflection of her foolish, bubbly, girlishness. Another man’s jointless pants inform a stiff-legged walk that underscores his character’s stodgy old ways. Brilliant!
The genre switching!! The what?? The gender switching!! The what?? The genre AND the gender switching!! Ordinarily I might consider an abrupt shift in tone from commedia-type farce to epic melodrama a mark against a production, but in this case it was so unapologetic, so passionate that I was delightfully floored. See, turns out the young doctor at the heart of the story is … a WOMAN! Dun-dun-dun! And the man who’s been portraying the role gets replaced, on stage, by a woman wearing the same stiff papery suit. And from that point on, the play sheds it’s farcial, physical focus and becomes a chew-up-the-scenery, woman-and-gay-rights-championing, courtroom drama complete with teary testimonials and a nude reveal! Respect, ladies and gentlemen. Respect.

Una Historia de Amor

2009-11-13T18:13:00.006-05:00

Performance Date: 11.01.09
at Teatro Trianon, Havana, Cuba

The second night of the Festival I saw Una Historia de Amor, a Colombian (or perhaps Cuban -- the festival materials are unclear) production about a man and woman breaking up. It was hot. And by hot, I mean there was no air-conditioning in the theater and it was a packed house. Add patrons seated in chairs in the aisle, and by the end of the show, you’ve got suffocating claustrophobia. Thank god the festival gave us fans in our goodie bags or I might have had to commit seppuku.

The unfairness of that scenario, from the actor’s perspective, is that no matter what you do on stage, a large portion of your audience is just trying to figure out when the hell they’re gonna get outta there. And if you also have a non-representational set design featuring many props, then it’s a sure bet they are calculating the minutes until their escape based on the number of props left to use. They still haven’t opened the second trunk or used the feather boa – oh my god and there’s still that drum kit - somebody give me air! It’s horribly, horribly unfair.

So it’s a testament to the production that through the heat, not to mention the language barrier, I still will never forget the lead actress’s firecracker performance. She had a magnetic pull that was undeniable – and it wasn’t just the fishnets and black vinyl bustier. Playing a woman (a dancer?) confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg, she emanated an animalistic restlessness that I was grateful to grab onto. An electric fury roiled beneath her cat-who-ate-the-canary grins, and her every desperate gesture of acting out was genuinely felt and filled. I learned a lot about taking risks from this actress. Taking risks and taking space. That in itself made it worth it.

Acroiris

2009-11-13T18:12:00.002-05:00

Performance Date: 10.25.09
Teatro Los Elementos, Cumanayagua, Cuba

Cuba seems like a blurry, surreal dream. A sleepless swirl of hot sun and muddy rain, diesel exhaust and blue ocean, camaraderie, strife, and lots of gutsy, visceral, expressive theater.

Our first stop was the artist compound of Teatro Los Elementos in Cumanayagua, a rural mountain town outside of Cienfuegos in southern Cuba. There we were welcomed in the most gracious manner by members of the company and workers on the compound, who soon provided us with the most delicious rice and beans, chicken leg, and guava marmalade an exhausted, travel weary actor could ever ask for.

Later that night, they gave us a preview of Arcoiris, an original play they were preparing for a theater festival in Colombia the following week. Two actors performed in the compound’s open-air rehearsal space – an enormous palapa structure with a concrete foundation, outfitted with a lightboard, a handful of lighting instruments, and a dozen or so wooden chairs upholstered with animal hides. A fantastic space where later we danced, and where later still, in the heat of the next day’s afternoon, a local farmer and his oxen watched us rehearse while waiting for his barrel to fill at the nearby water pump.

Now, contrary to popular belief – particularly in Cuba – I am not Latin and do not speak Spanish. Luckily, language comprehension isn’t always necessary to understand theater and I believe I understood the play well enough that night. Archetypically, the piece seemed to be about Satan tempting a Good Man to stray. I learned later that it also spoke to the prospect of the US lifting the embargo against Cuba, and to foreign influences tempting Cubans to stray from their own culture. A couple impressions from the play:

The rictus smile of the Satan character, wielding two gilded hand mirrors like swords. 
The writhing, twisted physicality of the Man as he conducts rituals of protection within a circle of vessels, sticks, and lit candles.
The stylistic friction between these two characters – the outward, presentational expressiveness of the devil, and the inward, experiential privateness of the man.

Looking back, the lasting impression I have of the evening recalls that same sense of community I noted after seeing Our Town. The actors and audience – in this case a large gathering families and children from the surrounding neighborhood, members of Los Elementos, and our faction of eight Americans – shared the same space as equal partners in storytelling. If you take away either audience or actors, the story cannot be told. At the moment I am quite drawn to theater that embraces this fact and reflects it in its aesthetic. Not just by breaking the fourth wall – a convention that is often an empty gesture – but by, I don’t know, by really sharing the space with the audience. Really truly being in the same room as them. Not just physically, but energetically and intentionally.

I wish I could articulate it better, and without resorting to such hippie speak, but that’s the best I can do at the moment. I think my brain is still sitting in a Coco Taxi flying down the Malecon.

Oleanna

2009-10-23T14:42:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 10.23.09

The John Golden Theatre

Allow me to make some grandiose statements I probably have no authority to make. These are thoughts on various aspects of theater that came to mind during a matinee of Oleanna on Broadway this week.

CASTING: Every actor has certain qualities, inherent to their natural selves, that are more or less irrepressible and shine through in any role he or she plays. True, some actors are absolute chameleons, but most actors aren't and I think that's just fine. These "essential qualities" are kind of like the top notes in perfume or the flavor profile of a wine. So whereas a Pinot Noir might be "black cherry and tobacco," Julia Stiles might be "cerebral and confident" and Bill Pullman "affable and self-deprecating." Part of casting is matching an actor's essential qualities to the requirements of a role.

ACTIONS/TACTICS: Actions and tactics are tools actors sometimes use when figuring out how to play a scene. An action, usually identified as a verb, describes what a character is doing to another character to get some type of desired result. Juliet wants Romeo to woo more strongly. As an actor, an action I might try is to push away. That is, I use the sense of "pushing away" to influence the way I speak and behave towards my scene partner, in order to challenge his Romeo to try harder. A tactic is like the adverb. I can push away playfully, reluctantly, or aggressively. Each tactic will have a different effect.

TEXT: A playwright's text is sacrosanct. Most of the time. If a character describes herself as "stupid" or someone else as "self-aggrandizing," it is important and must be credibly addressed. You can decide the comment is a lie or an exaggeration, or you can decide that it's true. Doesn't matter, as long as your choice is supported by the text, or reinforced by your other choices regarding the text.

So here's where I bring it all together with seeing Oleanna.

In the first half of the play, I felt that these three elements I've just described -- casting, actions/tactics, and text -- were working against one another. It made me feel perplexed and prevented me from really engaging in the play.

In the second half of the play, these elements were working in concert. I was much more engaged. And it resulted in an explosive ending that actually made me feel guilty.

It made me feel guilty! How awesome is that? I think that may be all I want from theater -- that it be affecting. In whatever way. It can be imperfect. It can be difficult. Or silly. But I want it to affect me. And at the end of the day, Oleanna did.

NEXT WEEK:

No post next week as I will be in Cuba -- Cuba! -- with Infinite Stage for some cultural exchange with a Cuban theater company and to perform at the International Theater Festival of Havana. Pin a rose on my nose! When I'm back, I'll have plenty of shows to blog about and keep me on track in my Year of Plays! (Sounds like Pigs...in....Space!!!)

Estrogenius Festival - Week 2

2009-10-14T23:45:00.002-04:00

Performance Date: 10.08.09 

Manhattan Theatre Source

Last Thursday I went in for an evening of five short plays at Manhattan Theatre Source’s Estrogenius Festival, an annual celebration of female voices now in its 10th year. A couple things immediately come to mind upon writing that sentence:

Hallelujah for a festival that celebrates female artists, particularly female playwrights. I’m reminded of a study by a Princeton grad which got a lot of press this year (see NY Times, New York Magazine and LA Times) for demonstrating that female playwrights are indeed discriminated against when theaters select scripts for production. Brava, Estrogenius, for mounting new works by women writers for 10 years strong. 
Manhattan Theatre Source, which has been a lovely artistic home for several theater pals of mine, is in danger of losing their lease. I feel I would be remiss not to mention that they could use your help. Visit their site to throw a couple bucks their way.

So after this night of new works by women playwrights, I realized I don’t often think about writing when I go see a play – whereas when I read a play, or work on one as an actor, I think about the writing very much. Is this true for everyone, i.e. that writing goes unnoticed when seeing a work on its feet? Is it because the elements of sight, sound, and the energetic presence of people are so dominant? Or is it because I’m an actor and I pay more attention to the performances, just as my brother is more attuned to the nuances of scenic design? Or is it a false claim? Is it actually a reflection of the plays I’ve been seeing lately – mostly naturalistic, not much language-driven stuff – and would I not make such a claim if I’d been seeing more Mamet, Stoppard, or Moliere? Or highly stylized, text-based, avant-garde pieces? Yes I suppose it’s all about the lenses through which we see. The lens we use most often, or the one used most recently, filters our experience. That is, unless we are aware and can choose otherwise.

So let’s see if I can’t choose to unearth a few writing observations from the Estrogenius plays, even though it wasn’t my focus while watching them live:

You can pack a lot of information into a few specific details. In one play, a mother mentions her son only twice – once to say that he spends all his time lining up his dinosaurs in neat rows, and once to say that he doesn’t like to be touched. From these two nearly off-hand remarks, I understand her son has autism — a particular that lends great depth to the mother’s struggle in the play.
Gimme one reason to stay here…and I’ll turn right back around. I’ve been taking this acting class lately, and one of the lessons that comes up often is you gotta figure out why your character stays in the scene. What does she want (preferably from the other person) that keeps her from exiting? Most of the time, your playwright has given you at least one possibility, if not several. The plays I remember most clearly from the EstroGenius lineup had characters with multiple reasons for staying in the scene.

Othello

2009-10-08T01:06:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 10.01.09
The Public and Labyrinth Theater, NYU Skirball Center

“Mercury is in retrograde” is a real thing, people. Last Thursday morning someone in my acting class cited “Mercury is in retrograde” as a possible explanation for a fellow classmate’s lateness. I’d never been quite sure what that phrase meant, so I asked for clarification. Apparently this particular planetary phenomenon is thought to cause mishaps in communication and disruptions of technical gadgetry. Trains get messed up, I was told, emails go missing, cell phones break. That sort thing.

Well, apparently so. For that evening I attended the Labyrinth production of Othello and there were some major technical difficulties going on. The actors, poor things, spent half the first act in near complete darkness. At first I didn’t quite register it as an error, but I soon decided that Peter Sellars could not have intended for this play to be performed under work lights. Oh it was sad. Over and over again, specials would go out on actors in mid-soliloquy, leaving them in the pitch black, mustering all their worth for the task of relaying Shakespeare’s story as if it were a radio play. Then the upstage work lights come on, giving everyone a grayish halo around their darkened faces, but at least allowing us to see their limbs move. And onward ho the valiant actors go, maintaining their focus admirably, until hallelujah the lights are restored! Philip Seymour Hoffman is revealed in all his pale Iagoan glory, and we all enjoy some blessedly visible theater – until once again the lights fail. Darkness overcomes the stage, work lights come up, and so on. I felt awful for everyone.

I hate to admit it, but I left at intermission. I know! I’m sorry! It’s terrible, but I couldn’t endure Mercury’s influence any longer. It was too distracting. And it was a long play – four hours total, and I lasted two. Even so, I still found myself thinking of this production for days afterward. Here’s some of what was trolling through my head:

Cell phones are alienating. Not only when they ring unbidden from the audience, but also when they are used as a device in a modern-day Shakespeare production. I can understand the logic of using them – we don’t use horse-riding messengers anymore, we conference call and text. It should make things more accessible. But I found that watching two actors play a scene on opposite sides of stage, facing the audience and speaking into cell phones (rather than engaged with and speaking to one another) distanced me from the action of the play. Now that may very well have been the intent, as the production does make use of several other alienating technologies – microphones, blinding flood lights (they were among the few instruments that were working), and a giant television-screen bed. But I experienced the cell phone thing as an obstacle between me and the story. And that's kind of a big deal when Shakespeare's language is already a major obstacle for many folks.

Speaking of language, it is one of my greatest sorrows as an actor that people find Shakespeare’s language so obfuscating and obscure. My boyfriend claims to hate Shakespeare and it kills me. I guess I felt nearly the same way for a while, until I learned how to play it. How to unlock the language. To use the meter, the consonants and vowels, and the imagery to inform the character’s actions and motivations. How to ride the rhythm of the language – allowing it to carry you forward – so that a long, winding, rhetorical text clips along, revealing itself as a cohesive, comprehensible, musical whole. The language seems so clear when you know how to play it. So why is it so hard to convey that clarity to an audience? Sure, you could say that there are too many “bad” productions of Shakespeare, where the text isn’t treated “correctly.” But Anna the Good Student thinks she knows how to “do it right” and yet when I rehearse Lady Percy for my boyfriend, I still sweat bullets trying to get him to feel the same vitality he feels watching me do a contemporary monologue. It drives me nuts. It’s a puzzle. I’ll keep working at it. Hopefully everyone will.

I find famous people shiny. Meaning they literally seem (can you literally seem?) to shine out to me more than average people. My friends know this about me, that I’m completely susceptible to the specious allure of fame. So whether it was for this reason or some other that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of Phil Hoffman I do not know. Nonetheless, I was drawn to his every move.

Our Town

2009-10-08T00:11:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 09.30.09 

Barrow Street Theatre

It should be said that it is not difficult to make me cry. I mist up easily and often. I get verklempt during refrigerator commercials. I brim over watching flash mobs on YouTube. And if any actual person so much as catches their throat on an emotional word while I am in their presence, I’m done for. Once, I scared the bejeezus out of my boyfriend in the car because that ukelele version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” came on the radio and I promptly and spontaneously burst into tears. I mean, weeping, sobbing, snotty tears. (What can I say? It’s the song Dr. Greene died listening to on E.R.) So it’s almost not worth noting that Our Town at the Barrow Theatre made me cry. I say almost, because while it was unsurprising that I cried, I was very surprised by when.

I should first say that the foundation for tears was laid before I even entered the theater. I felt a very special anticipation for the play that night. My friend Kevin felt it too. In fact, we were so excited – oh boy, the Theater! – that we literally hopped up and down in the lobby waiting to go in. Yes we are drama school nerds, but word on the street was that this production was good. And something about believing that this play – a simple classic play written for an empty stage – was going to be done well, got me excited in a very innocent and child-like way. So when we finally settled in our seats and Kevin, who knows my weepy ways, sang to me under his breath, “You’re gonna crryyyy,” I knew he was right.

But I thought I’d last more than 6 minutes. SIX MINUTES, PEOPLE. That’s gotta be a record, even for me.

So this is the moment I started welling up. The Stage Manager is laying out the town for the audience, gesturing to various parts of the intimate space and telling them where Main Street lies, and where Mrs. Gibbs’ garden full of corn and peas is, and at one point he says, “We’ve got a factory in our town too – hear it?” And then he listens. And we listen. The ambient rustling of the room quiets. A collective stillness comes over us. And we are all sitting there, listening for the factory. For a good ten seconds. It was the most pristine, beautiful silence I’d ever heard. Cue watery eyes.

It happened again later, when the Stage Manager interrupts his narration to listen for the 5:45 for Boston. And later again when Mrs. Gibbs tells her husband to come out and smell the heliotrope in the moonlight. Each time a simple moment of a person sensing, in real time, no rushing. Each time, I tear up.

Why was I so moved by these moments? In part it was the simplicity of the action. How beautiful it can be to simply listen, to smell, to see, and how rarely that seems to happen in modern life. But I was moved even more so by how well those moments were treated. How they were given proper time and breath. And how, in so doing, we as an audience were given space to become complicit in the imagination of the play. And be united in that complicity. To listen together, smell together. Conjure the town of Grover’s Corners together. It’s one of the most beautiful aspects of Thorton Wilder’s play and yet rarely does it get the kind of follow through it gets in this production.

The whole thing makes me happy. Happy that there is theater that makes people hop up and down in the lobby and cry over ten seconds of silence. Even if it’s only the nerds who do. Oh boy, the Theater! I wish all plays did that to me.

We Interrupt This Programming...

2009-09-29T00:43:00.000-04:00

... For a blog treatise. Of sorts.

It occurred to me recently that what I’m trying to do with this blog – besides record the shows I see in my Year of Plays – is to discover whether it’s possible to talk about art without reviewing it. I’m not sure yet whether it is. In my posts thus far, I’ve tried very hard not to engage in the kinds of criticism one typically finds in reviews, but I haven’t succeeded completely. And yet I find myself still needing to try.

See, I have a compelling desire to talk about art. To share what I think and hear what other’s think. I love having conversations with friends about what movies and plays they’ve seen, what books they’ve read, what other art they’ve encountered. In these conversations, we are replete with colorful opinions and thoughtful critique. We are not concerned about sounding self-important, or worried about egos, because the conversation is private and we are among people trust. So honesty and insight abound.

But the game changes once the conversation goes public. Once you go public, those conversations become reviews, and the knowledge that other people are hearing this alters the very nature of what is said. The folks who do the talking (reviewers) start trying to sound clever or wise, or they mince words and whitewash their true opinions. The folks who get talked about (artists) are subjected to public appraisal, which monkeys with the ego and prevents them from hearing any valuable feedback. The end result, at least for me, is that reviews are untrustworthy, potentially dangerous, and not very useful – except to get butts in seats.

But I want to talk about art! With a lot of people! I want to talk about art with everyone, and I want the conversation everywhere, in private and in public! Art is important. And it should be talked about. I want artists to hear all sorts of opinions and thoughts about their work – because then they will make more art in response! I want non-artists to hear conversations about art – because then they might make some art of their own! We need more art!

So can we have a public conversation about art without the entanglements of reviews? Can we have a thoughtful, critical, entertaining, and honest discourse, without stepping on toes or inflating egos? If we can, what does that conversation look like? What do we talk about? Do we speak only positively or neutrally? Do we avoid offering any opinions at all? That seems nearly impossible, and the effort seems bound to produce conversation that is hopelessly bland and inert. But maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe the point is not to avoid making judgments, but to alter the way we make them. Who knows? I certainly don’t. At least not yet. But if it’s possible at all to thread this needle – to speak honestly and insightfully about art, while remaining impeccable with one’s word, while generating material that is still entertaining and useful – I’m determined to find out how to do it. And this blog is where I’m taking my first stab.

(P.S. – Maybe I’m being to hard on reviews and reviewers. I’m sure there are many dedicated critics out there who contribute positively to the public discourse about art. Who manage to check their own egos at the door and who have the guts to stand by their opinions, regardless of how their opinions affect others. I just know I’m not made out of that kind of cloth. My ego is both too unruly and too sensitive for such affairs!)

The Harvard Project

2009-09-29T00:35:00.000-04:00

Performance Date: 9.21.09
Classic Stage Company

Several weeks ago my friend Peter invited me to see him in a workshop of a play-in-development currently being called The Harvard Project. He described it as the culmination of five and a half weeks of exploration, during which the artists involved focused very much on process, and not on product. I believe he intended it as a disclaimer, but in fact it made me even more eager to go.

I love process. I’m a process fiend. To me, how a play got made – or a painting, or a vaccine, or a business strategy – is often more fascinating than the final product. When the final product is amazing, my thirst to know how it was made is even greater. And when the end result isn’t so great, knowing what went into the process, what someone was trying to accomplish and how, makes the whole experience much more satisfying overall.

As it turned out, seeing The Harvard Project was satisfying on both the product and process levels. For a piece that purportedly had zero script at the beginning of the rehearsal period (save for transcripts from the historical event on which the play was based), the result was remarkably confident and clean. There were good performances, beautiful images, funny and moving moments, and a set that had intention and character. In many ways, it hardly seemed like a workshop version at all.

And yet I felt like I got to see a good amount of process too. I guess that sounds like a bad thing. One imagines a well-meaning friend discreetly squeezing one’s hand at a party and whispering, “Your process is showing.” But that’s not how I mean it at all. For a play at this stage in development – with a script all of five and a half weeks old and minimal design elements – you expect to see some threads from the canvas peeking through the paint. Some gears carefully turning behind the illusion. To me that’s a good thing. To me that’s the reason you go see a play in development. Those are the goodies on the plate.

By way of example, there were two or three points in the play where the action broke from straightforward, narrative scenes into more deconstructed sections that included both abstract movement and text. In one such moment, three men face forward, delivering simultaneous monologues which repeat in bits and snatches, and during which one man repeatedly crashes backward from his chair as if being punched. In another such moment, the cast performs a wordless choreography of gesture, each at varying times brushing lint from his trousers, or painfully pulling a string from their throats out their mouths. I found both these moments compelling because they felt very near to the kinds of improvisations I’ve partaken in as an actor during rehearsal, to the improvisations I imagine did take place in this cast’s rehearsals. Maybe that makes them moments of your process in showing, but I enjoyed them all the same. It made me feel near to the piece, gave me great affection for it. Not unlike the way you might feel meeting an infant just days after its birth. I don’t know if these process-originated moments will find their way into the eventual finished product of The Harvard Project, or even if they deserve to, but in this incarnation of the piece, they provided an immediacy that really stood out.

The Memory of Water

2009-09-14T23:00:00.006-04:00

Performance Date: 9.10.09

Dragon Productions, Palo Alto, CA

It's Week 3 in this Year of Plays and I'm already realizing how easy it would be to just see well-promoted, well-reviewed Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. There are so many plays that get "buzz," well-deserved or not, and I am very susceptible to this kind of marketing. Ooooh, shiny!! So while visiting home in the Bay Area, I decided to mix it up and see some small-budget theater at Dragon Productions in Palo Alto. The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stephenson was the evening's fare, a very nice family dramedy that won the Olivier award for best comedy in 2000.

First a word about Dragon Productions. I remember my mom sending me a clipping from the Chronicle a couple years ago about a new theater company opening its doors in Palo Alto. I'm glad I got the chance to check the operation out. Apparently, the woman behind it all is an actor who has been directing and producing plays since 1991, has run Dragon for 8 seasons, and has successfully kept their permanent home (a converted storefront space downtown) operational for the past 4 years. Color me impressed. (Wow, did I just write that? Embarrassing. It sounds like something someone would say on "Golden Girls" or "Designing Women." On second thought, maybe that makes me ironically cool.)

But really, keeping a small theater company with its own space running for four seasons in this economy? That is no small feat! A cursory look at the show's program (above, it doubled as my ticket) gives a clue of how she does it -- grants, donors, corporate sponsors, advertising, space rental, wish list solicitation, the list goes on. This woman knows how to hustle. What's more, the motto at Dragon is, "If you want to do something amazing, do it yourself. Don't wait for someone else to give you the opportunity." And indeed, there she is playing the central character in the night's festivities. Girlfriend wants to act in meaty roles? She starts an Equity-approved theater company and does it herself. Yes, yes, color me impressed. And color me inspired too.

Lessons and observations from The Memory of Water:

A good actor does things one at a time. She listens, she registers the information, she reacts. Those three things can happen very quickly in succession, but they do happen one at a time. It's not always as easy as it sounds. In the HBO promo I'm in this summer, I recently noticed that I'm actually skipping a step. I listen and then react -- skipping over the part where I let the info land. The moment still works, but it's a little sloppy. Oh well, I guess that's what can happen when you're acting with tennis balls instead of Jemaine and Bret themselves. No, I will never get over the disappointment of that.

I so appreciate great comic delivery and dry, sardonic wit, both of which were nicely on display in this play.

I can start a theater company, get it funded, give it a permanent home, and produce great plays with good roles for women. I know this because I saw someone else do it. The point of apple trees is not to create apples, it's to create more apples trees. That is not a non-sequitur.

Coming Attractions:

One more thing I've learned at Week 3 of a Year of Plays? It's really hard to actually see a play a week, especially when you're traveling every weekend of the month. So I am not seeing a play this week, which means no post next week. However, I will make up for at the end of the month when I am doubled up with tickets to Our Town and Othello on back to back nights. Not too shabby, I tell ya. There are also several tasty Off-off shows running now that various friends and acquaintances are involved in, so I should be able to keep the nice mix of fare. Haven't figured out which ones I'll get to see, depends mostly on schedule, but you will find out soon enough!

Ruined

2009-09-04T21:08:00.015-04:00

Performance Date: 9.2.09
Manhattan Theatre Club, NY City Center

All summer long I’d been hearing that Ruined was not to be missed. So much so that when I finally sat down for the Wednesday matinee this week, I worried it might not stand up to built-up expectation. I need not have worried. Ruined did not disappoint.

As I left the theater, I tried to wrap my head around how they were able to pull it off. The play is set in a brothel in the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, a country brutalized by years of civil war, and where a woman is said to be “ruined” when she is raped with bayonets, leaving her sexual organs mutilated and her ability to control her bowels compromised. Not exactly light fare. To put it glibly. And yet the play still manages to realize the full spectrum of the human condition. It is unflinching in its portrayal of the cruelty and tragedy these characters endure, and yet in the next breath, gives endless room for love, humor, and joy. And it is equally unfailing at every subtle point in between.

How did they do it? My best guess is that the folks behind this play must have been a very committed, supportive, and collaborative bunch. I don't know how to achieve that kind of richness otherwise. As an actor, I find it difficult to stay out of my own way. It’s a challenge to not let myself off the hook, to stay open and courageous, to explore without knowing where I’m going, to reach for some place new rather than run to the familiar. And while that’s my own particular baggage, if all actors, directors, designers, and dramatists have analogous six-piece luggage sets of their own – and the smart bet is that they do – then how can any of us get anywhere worth going without the help of our peers? How can we create something sublime, without a fellow artist to lift us out of our usual patterns? Yup, a true ensemble is the way to go in my book.

I’m thinking now of August: Osage County, which may have been the best example of ensemble theater I have ever seen (in a commercial setting at least). I don’t think it’s any coincidence that both August and Ruined feature artists who worked closely together for long periods of time before their respective plays reached the public eye.

So what did I learn in addition to this reaffirmation of ensemble? My bullets of the day:

There is nothing better than the moment you walk into a space and see a set for the first time. A nighttime forest of tropical tree trunks, bathed in a warm and threatening red light -- a great first impression which made me eager in my seat.
You can slay an audience with a single line: “You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.”
A gesture is made powerful when it is married with clear intention and supported by high stakes. The persistent strength of his hand clasping hers, arms straight above their heads. The clean and firm beckoning of his other hand as he pulls her into a dancer’s embrace. The length of time this takes telling the story of a strong and injured woman allowing a man inside.
I love me some African dance. And drumming, yes please! And a jubilant curtain call, yes! That's the tops.

I wish all of you could see Ruined, those of you who haven't. I'm sure there will be plenty of regional productions in the coming years and the strength of the script alone (from current superstar Lynn Nottage) will definitely make it worth your while. With any luck, it will be built with the same supportive collaboration I suspect this production enjoyed. Then again, who knows? Maybe it was a hot, raging mess and it came together anyway. Who am I to say? I'm just a blogger.

Until next time. Thanks for reading.

Harold Pinter Pair

2009-08-28T16:46:00.112-04:00

Performance Date: 8.26.09

The Soho Playhouse (FringeNYC)

Last Wednesday I went to see Harold Pinter Pair, two short works by Pinter (The Lover and Ashes to Ashes) directed by fellow A.C.T. alum Patrick McNulty and presented as part of FringeNYC 2009.

It's my first play of the Year -- and my first post on the blog -- so I'm a little unsure how to proceed. See, this is not a review blog. I have no interest in playing the critic -- not after The Edinburgh Disaster of 2008 (see the "Instant Karma" and "Unsportsmanlike" posts from my Anna in Edinburgh blog -- yikes). I simply don't have the stomach to say critical things about other people's art in public. I don't know how these New York Times people do it. I just read an old review for The Vertical Hour while prepping for a scene study class and it was just brutal. If I were Julianne Moore or David Hare I'd be pissed. So yeah, not gonna go there.

So where to? Well what if I just restrict myself to saying nice things? Because I have a lot of nice things to say about Harold Pinter Pair. That seems fair. I can't imagine any artists being upset reading nice things about their production. Alright, Blog Rule #1: Nice things are allowed.

But what if I don't have anything nice to say? We'll have to wait until I see a play I don't like to figure that out, because Harold Pinter Pair I really enjoyed. But rather than worry this to death, why don't I just take a hint from my nifty sidebar over there and write some things I learned? Here goes:

I learned that I really enjoy extremely short, poofy, red strapless dresses worn by lovely ladies. Especially when the hem of the dress rests gently atop a red cloth-covered table under which a lusty gentleman has just descended.
I learned how I love to watch an actor play. And by play I mean when an actor has that little gleam in his eye of a character being totally alive and present. When he is wholly engaged with his imagination, and yet somehow his imagination includes everyone else in the room. An actor who is playing is utterly compelling, no matter if she is tearing up the scenery or sitting dully in a chair.
I learned once again how effective it is when an actor visualizes the story she is telling as if it's happening right in front of her. How when she struggles to bring the vision into focus, to see a particular detail, it activates her and affects her fellow actor. (Note to self: remember this next time you reject using an audition piece because it's a 'story monologue'.)

Now I feel I should say something about directing, particularly since if it weren't for this director being an A.C.T. alum, I might never have seen these lovely plays. But the truth is, I still have trouble making out what parts of a production are directing and what parts are writing, or acting, or something else. So I'll just say this -- I spent the majority of that hour and 45 minutes totally involved with what I was seeing, feeling as though I was in good hands, that I would never be bored, and curious to find out what would happen next.

A good start to a hopefully great year!