grammar? i hardley know her

At an audition last week I ran into a cliche head on. I ran into the actor who says 'little'. It is their way of making themselves superior during their backhanded compliment.

AWSL: So what show are you doing right now?

Me: I am doing 'Show Title'.

AWSL: Oh, is 'Other Actor' in it? She is a good little actress.

Me: Actually she is normal size.

So maybe I did not say that last line. I was not wanting to stir the waters two seconds before having to read with this person. The conversation, which I tried to keep to a minimum, got worse.

AWSL: How are 'Show Title' rehearsals going?

Me: Good, thanks.

AWSL: How do you like playing that part?

Me: I love it.

AWSL: Is it coming easily?

Me: I am still figuring her out, but it is going well.

AWSL: Her? I hate it when actors refer to their characters in the third person. I never do it.

Me: Lets go over these sides again before we go back in.

I am not rehashing this to ruminate on her rudeness, but because I started wondering on the drive home, how else one thinks about a role they are playing. I remember reading on someone else's blog about actors discussing their characters in the third person (wish I could remember which blog), and I don't have a problem with folks who do not approach it that way; but the truth is that I do not know of a better way to articulate beat changes, intentions, history, and motivation when analyzing my character.

When I discuss any literature, I discuss the people in that story in the third person. Why would I change this when I am discussing a role in a play? I don't feel that it alienates me from my role to do so, it just gives me the ability to understand them better. I never judge a character I am playing, to do so would be the death of it. Is that what this actor feared? That in talking about it as a separate entity she would render it separate from her? Is there a venacular that I am ignorant of that gives actors a different vocabulary for delving into a role. I confess that while I have read about different acting methods, and trained in several of them, I have not encountered one yet that discourages references to your character in the third person.

I have, however, done many improv exercises playing roles where you switch to the first person. But at that point I am inhabiting the role. While in character it makes sense and feels right to use 'I'. But when I am discussing the role in the abstract, or dissecting it in a discussion, than it just seems odd.

I will continue to do what is comfortable to me, but I am curious as to the process of an actor who refuses to refer to their characters in the third person, or any director that does not want their actors to use that convention.

jill back from a tiny room

I have thought about her all the time since she was taken. Every time more bodies were found I held me breath thinking she would be among them. Her abduction stayed with me.

I cannot tell you the relief that I felt today at her release.

hmm hmm hmm - hmm hmm hmm

Ever have that day where you have a song stuck in your head and you want to hear it so badly and then you have to go to rehearsal and you keep humming it at every break until you get everyone else humming it and then you go to an audition and you are singing it in your head all the way until you walk in the room and you only stop humming it when doing the audition, but then it is back again before you even say your last 'thank you'; and then you're tired and driving home and the song just won't stop and then you turn on the radio, which you never listen to because you have an ipod, but the ipod is out of juice and lo and behold...

THE SONG STARTS RIGHT WHEN YOU TURN ON THE RADIO!

It exorcises the song from your brain. Hallelujah.

secrets of the universe do not come in manila envelopes

Fanaticism in any religious doctrine preys on the weakness in individuals. It preys on their insecurities, their loneliness and their inability to find direction.

This is why, although I come from a very open minded, and religiously mixed background, I find that I have a hard time reconciling sprituality with religion.

letting them know how it is

More chats with a small person.

Smaller: Why did VanGogh cut off his ear?

Me: Well I guess because he was sick in his head and when you are sick like that you may do strange things.

Smaller: What kind of strange things?

Me: Well the ear thing I suppose, or saying things that are weird, stuff like that.

Smaller: You mean like the weird stuff Mr. X says, is he sick in his head?

Me: No , he's just Republican.

Smaller: Ohhhh, I get it.

why they won't

Once again I am late in the game on talking about something. But here goes.

The fear of our government banning all abortions is a real one. I understand why many people believe that we are headed in that direction but let me tell you why I don't think we are.

When South Dakota banned all abortions unless the woman's life is in danger, it took an issue that politics and religion have been talking about in the abstract and brought it into reality. It brought it about during the time of impending election and during the time of new Supreme Court justices. The South Dakota legislature may have thought this was the perfect time to do it, but they could not have misjudged the climate more.

The Supreme Court's two new justices are appointees of our current president. Our current unpopular, warmongering, numbskull of a president. They are still however, judges. Yes, I am upset that it was Bush who got to nominate them instead of Clinton nominating someone I like more, but these judges will still be faced with the same legalities involved with trying to over turn Roe v. Wade. Precedent has been set. These judges are old enough to remember the times of coat hanger abortions, and they do not want to be the ones who force a 14 year old girl who was raped by her father to then give birth to a baby conceived from that violation.

Let's go on further to the Republican party as a whole. Republicans have used the abortion issue as a way to sway voters for many years. But now they are faced with entering an election cycle with an extremely unpopular president and the moderates that they picked up to win the last election will be making a mass exodus. If you want to see voter turn out, then lets tell the women of America that their right to choose is on the line. In actuality, it is always on the line, but they won't all vote until they are cornered.

Now take a worst case scenario. Roe v. Wade is overturned and South Dakota's law is made national. Fast forward to a victim of a brutal rape who becomes pregnant and then illegally gets an abortion and gets arrested. Imagine that woman's face plastered all over the newspapers. The media and the public will find this martyr; and anyone who voted to over turn Roe v. Wade will now be the devil. Or some young girl with an angel's face will die in an illegal botched procedure. It can happen. These thoughts will haunt any person who is running for office, and anyone who votes to ban abortions. The simple truth will force its way through. That you cannot commandeer a persons body for any purpose.

South Dakota has jump started an ugly machine that, while we all argued, had laid dormant for a long time. Like everything else under this current administration, South Dakota's law seeks to move us backwards as a nation and as a people. Instead of moving backwards in a woman's right to choose, education, human rights, poverty, economy, and peace; we need a leader to move us forward to a higher level of thinking and acceptance.

This all may be optimism on my part. I remember when I knew with certainty that there was no way this country would ever let Bush be president, and then I knew with certainty that this country would never elect Bush president. I was obviously wrong. Here's hoping I am right on this one.

marketing makes my ass twitch

Before the Oscars...













After the Oscars...



















Anyone else find this hysterical?

let the play happen and keep watching

It occurs to me that while everyone is busy debating the censorship of My Name is Rachel Corrie, that the show will make out better than it did before the issue arose.

Meanwhile things just keep getting worse and new diaries are being written everyday.

netflix and blockbuster don't get me

Does anyone out there know a place where I can rent indie movies and/or documentaries here in the DC area? I have several titles that I cannot find.

moment of procrastination

I am fairly cranky at the moment due to the absurd amount of work that has been coming my way lately. I need the work. I need the money that the work makes. It is a good thing to have these projects, but I feel like I am sinking into an abyss of photoshop, illustrator and sketch pads. There are little pieces of paper everywhere and the list of incomplete work is long.

I am, at this moment, so thankful I did not take that last show. This revitalizes the idea that everything happens for a reason.

Amidst the mess I actually surfaced with the thought today of Shakespeare's sister. The fictional sister, Judith, that Virginia Woolf conjures in A Room of One's Own. I was 18 when I first read her words and it was a light bulb moment for me. For a long time I could not read that particular passage without getting choked up. It still gets me sometimes.

Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter--indeed, more likely than not she was the apple of her father's eye. Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager- a fat, looselipped man- guffawed. He bellowed something about poodles dancing and women acting- no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. He hinted- you can imagine what. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows- at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so- who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?- killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.
-Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own

Judith would be free to roam now, but this says something about artists. Yes, I am thankful for the work, but it muddles my brain and, I too, would rather be at the 'hub of the universe'.

he had garlic breath for my first onstage kiss

Wow. This has me floored.

When I think of Mark Ravenhill, writing for young people does not immediately spring to mind. Shopping & Fucking comes to mind. This is not to say he could not do it. Tony Kushner has paired up with Maurice Sendak to do a show appropriate for young people, and it looks very promising. Writers can work in many different styles. Yada, yada, yada.

Here is my favorite quote from the article. Ravenhill says...

"I wanted to write a play that would humanise sex for young people. I rewrote Citizenship in the light of those discussions with London teenagers: they emboldened me to develop the physical contact between the young characters, to be honest about young people's fascination with and confusion about sex. Still, I decided not to ask for any full nudity. The play would be performed by young people in front of parents, teachers and friends and I thought it would raise too many difficult questions. What the play does demand is a great deal of full-on sexualised kissing. I've since discovered that kissing between two teenage boys on stage can lead to young audiences doing anything from whooping with delight right through to booing with disgust - but never staying silent."

He decided not to ask for full nudity? He thought that would bring on too many difficult questions? What, like, why are you telling underage students to engage in sexual moments in front of an audience? Does he mean questions like that? What is he thinking?

Yes, teens are goofy about sex. It is crazy to me that he is just figuring this out. He had to have gone through puberty.

I think that the banning of kissing from school plays is ludicrous, but the sexually heated kissing that Ravenhill used is disturbing. Theatre teachers have to walk a fine line with their students. They have to build trust with their casts in such a careful way because these kids are still walking, talking hormones. They can shatter at a moments notice, and then turn around and be unbelievably strong for other things. The point being that you can never know what you are going to get. Sexuality at that age is not something teens look at with any objectivity, and the lines of what is occurring onstage and off blur even more frequently than they do with adults.

Imagine, for a moment, a school here in the U.S. where a teacher commissions a play about sex, and talks to his students about sex, and asks his students to engage in "a great deal of full-on sexualised kissing", and then directs two boys to engage in this same kissing, and then has his students perform it for the community. Yes, said teacher would no longer be teaching.

So, fine, Europe is not as prudish as the U.S., but the same issue is at stake. Why would you take an emotionally immature and vulnerable MINOR and direct them to do sexually charged acts in front of their community? What answers would it bring that could not be brought in a well mediated discussion with parents or counselors, or the like? In my mind it would raise more questions for all involved then answers. Questions without answers is not always a good thing. Sometimes that just creates more confusion.

Ravenhill seemed to think that because these teens were excited by the discussion, they were then ready to perform it. This cannot come as a shocker to anyone that teens love a juicy discussion about sex. They also love getting attention from people. Let's combine that talk about sex with an open minded, famous playwright, who is writing down the things you say, and they must have thought they were the coolest people on the earth (I know I would have).

I agree with Ravenhill that artistic integrity should not be compromised, but he goes on to say...

"Drama is sexual - it's about bodies, about display, about fantasy - and puritan regimes have always resisted it. We can't ignore the fact that we live in a sexualised culture. And a school play can either perpetuate the sexualisation of young people, as many school musicals and cabarets do, or it can be used to tackle the complex physical and emotional world young people find themselves in."

I am foggy as to why he thinks we have to abandon tackling sexuality if it is not put on stage. We do live in a sexually charged culture, which is why it should be tackled, but is having kids act out these issues really the best way to go about it? Should sexual discovery be made so public? I still get nervous the first few times I have to do love and/or a sexual scene on stage, can you imagine what a 14 year old with no experience might feel? It reeks of exploitation to watch such a young person explore sexuality in front of a crowd.

So maybe what we should think about is being careful about what work we teach and how we teach it. Hold on folks, I am not advocating censorship, far from it. Not all drama is sexual and using teenagers to tackle sexual issues is a scary road. What I am advocating is accountability and responsibility. As artists we may feel that we should be neither, that being responsible or accountable is restricting to what we do. But teachers have to forego that freedom because they are accountable to those that they teach. As any long time teacher knows, what they teach their students can have lasting effects, both good and bad.

old men who make wishes come true, but not really

I dare you to try and explain to a small person

why Santa does not exist

but God does.

What a day...

mud slide carroll hamas guantanamo bird flu is not enough

Did you hear?

Did you?

Bush is satisfied.

Its a huge shock, I know.

Did you hear about it?

Because I wanted to make sure.

Just in case you didn't hear.

Wasn't sure if you did.


Can the media please keep their eye on the ball?

or triple threat boy

Can someone out there, some sort of theatrical superhero, a being with other worldly powers, stop the onslaught? The Lex Luthers of musical theatre have brought us Hairspray and the campy Rent and now The Wedding Singer. I do enjoy my moments of 80's retro, but didn't we cover that with Movin' Out?

But I say, there are new frontiers.

Lead us Uber-Jazz-Hands-Man to find something new.

perspective tangled on the inside

Every time I read anything about these protest over cartoons I get so twisted up inside. Angst and worry eat me up. I wrestle with the notion that we should leave the mideast alone.

The nations of Islam do not think in a westernized way so why do we force them to be confronted with things like political and religious satire?

But then I think of my father, who converted to Islam, after growing up in the U.S., and I see that even he, in his later years, began to don many of the ideals, emotions and reactions that his fellow Muslims in the east had.

What is in the root of this religion or culture that responds so mercurially to challenges of faith?

I am scared for the targets of these protests and for the ones swept up in the zeal of them. I am scared for the choices that must face my Muslim friends and family and I am scared for the way those choices may affect all of us.

having pulitzer doubts

I am very late in the game on this one, so forgive my tardiness.

I finally, finally, finally read Doubt. It was the subject of discussion a ways back on BLOG!, but I just never ponied up and read the damn thing so I had no input. When I actually commenced reading it I tried really hard to not be biased and actually wanted to like it. Why I wanted to like it , I am not sure. Maybe to validate that the Pulitzer is not handed out haphazardly, maybe to just differ in opinion from Arctic Actor, or maybe just for shits and giggles. So my gut reaction after finishing it was...

ABC after school special,

Hallmark Channel original,

Good Touch Bad Touch, a made for T.V. movie.

I am very upset. This is what beat out Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House?

when they squeak its even worse

Someone over on tboy made a comment about uncomfortable seating. They said it as a joke. But now it has me wondering about it.

I saw Howie the Rookie last weekend. It was really well done and I loved it, but I left the world of the show a couple times to readjust in my seat. I was also fairly uncomfortable by the end (not because of the show, because of the chair). Great theatre, yes. Great theatre space, not so much. I also know that every time I sit my hiney at H Street Playhouse I am so pleased by its comfy seats, and I also tend to like almost everything I see Theatre Alliance do.

Is there such a thing as seat seduction?

a new process called 'let it go'

I was thinking about something Hunka had posted a while ago on his blog. The post is great and I like pretty much everything he says. It in many ways made me think of Grotowski's poor theatre. Grotowski is fairly strict in his principles to attain honesty in performance. I find what he puts forth very interesting and many times helpful. But I railroad into the same issue I have with every acting method I have ever come across. It is just not for everyone. At some point every method for acting runs the same risk, that it ends up being more about process than product and at some point theatre has to have a product (it may still be developing, but it is still a product). Being in the moment and listening are hard for many to do, but clouding impulses with a messy process can be even more debilitating. I believe that many artists reach a moment of clarity at some point where the realize what works best for them. There is no one true process that is better than another. Every writer must have a moment when they realize how to best utter their thoughts, every painter discovers mediums that work best for them, and every actor (hopefully) seeks the key to realized moments on stage.

My moment of clarity came fairly early in my education. I worked for a while with a director who sought to build characters through many of Grotowski's exercises. Finding centers, impulse work and the like. Then I worked with another who shed all of it to go for an approach much more like - well Mamet. Little time was spent on character walks or subtext, instead we were expected to just do it in the moment. Staging, costumes, and tech were all much more important. I found both to have their hindrances, but in the end it was I who was the problem, not the directors. As an actor I loved getting to spend a lot of time exploring the physicality, vocality and emotional background of a role, but as a performer I also loved the feeling of being certain about what was needed on stage. Now most of the time you end up with directors who are able to strike somewhere in the middle. What was more important, though, was that I realized that in order to keep going in this field I could not cling to any one acting method, but had to work to build a relationship with each director so that the communication between us resulted in realization of the play. This idea also came with the epiphany that attaining honesty on stage should not be hard. I found that when I obsessed too much about any process it hindered my ability to know my character. Process should be the road leading you forward, the flags cuing you in the right direction. I have had parts that I have grappled with, struggled through and felt unable to get my head around. I found that whenever I removed myself from trying to squeeze into a certain process, and instead let the character and the text guide me, it became a case of discovery without the angst. This is not to say that I will never have a hard time again, it is simply a reminder to just relax.

As a good actor I should be able to hit my stride no matter what the acting method. We shall see.

it's funny because its true

Isn't this Rove's job already?

fibbing onstage is just believing

I am finally feeling better. Posting shall resume soon.

But for now. Here is an article I really like.