theory of acting

Yesterday I met with a friend of a friend at the Olive Tree Cafe, drinking endless cups of tea, walking to the bathroom through a comedy club, and we ate for hours while groups of people - designers, directors, public health advocates - came in and out. It was like a salon, or like the way I remember the Cat and Fiddle in LA. We discussed the marriage of two of them - the bride is going to carry her wedding dress on the 7 train to the actual ceremony.

By the end of it, we had all talked about the difficulty of separating art from life, including the usual digression on Heath and Method and Batman, and I had persuaded a director and an actor to read some scenes from my work-in-not-even-progress, the two-character realistic play that is so unlike me but I don’t seem to be able to stop writing.

I would really like to collaborate with someone (perhaps this actor, or others) on a general-interest theory of acting article. I’m very unqualified to write it. I just think it needs to be written.

And I have finally learned to end hanging out early enough to take my trains early enough to be home by midnight.

Today I have a meeting with another friend-of-a-friend that is my first real New York theater meeting, at a diner near Times Square. Should be interesting.

c train couplet

New York City like the back of my hand,
New York City like a broken man.

words to write a candle by

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks… the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”
- Michael Chabon

And on Obama’s candidacy: “To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope…”

My name is unable to stop Western culture. (Or toys.)

Dara vs. Barbie: “…in 2002, Iran introduced its own competing dolls — the twins Dara and Sara — who were designed to promote traditional values with their modest clothing and pro-family stories. But the dolls proved unable to stem the Barbie tide.”
Article forthwith.

the commencement of the end

At Tillie’s on DeKalb with Marisa, working. Yesterday I did my first interview with my aunt for the Antioch College strike play project. We talked about her freshman year and her first co-op work experiences. Antioch is in session year-round, with students taking quarters to go work, either locally or out of town. Her first two co-ops were as a nursing assistant at a home for the severely mentally retarded and a surgical assistant at Mass General Hospital. She made it seem as if students were constantly bringing new influences back into the campus, from all their trips away - and that her experiences of college were much more real-world than bubble. It sounds like an educational method that I would have loved.

Saturday was the Yellow Springs campus’s last forseeable commencement, since the school is closing its doors.

She asked me how I thought this was going to become a play, and I had to say I didn’t have a definite idea - I just have a feeling the material will reveal itself.

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

“I knew what was about to happen, but I did not stop to think, except to think that I knew what was about to happen.”

-Michael Chabon, THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH

Coming home today from interviewing a series of candidates for a job-share arrangement whereby we can partage in an administrative position and still pursue theater, I took the wrong train to the wrong stop and had to walk from Spring Street Station to the identically named Spring Street Station. On the way, I passed by people speaking French, several groups of them, and two young men at a table full of paperback books. It was about to rain. This did not deter them. I looked over the table with the deliberation of someone who knows she is going to have to buy a book. I walked slowly down the table, very slowly, but didn’t pick anything up until I picked up this one.

I picked up this one and opened it to the page where I read ” I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French.” I bought it immediately, read it on the C, read it on the G, read it on trains full of other young men from New York reading Michael Chabon, Kavalier and Clay in their hands with their arms wrapped around the striptease-surfboard poles, read it walking home and read it until it was over. It’s over but I’m still there. I am floating now, somewhere in Pittsburgh.

“No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”

Jim, I’m a doctor, not a…

I was reviewing the brief bios of a group of us going on this trip in May, and they all had higher degrees (MDs, mostly) except for me. It made me realize that it’s been 4 years since I graduated from school- plenty of time to get some kind of additional credential, if that was what one wanted. I don’t have one. I have a resume stuffed with productions and a passport, at least within the US, busy with travel.

Still, I’m starting to feel like I might be able to give 2 or 3 years of my life to a graduate program, and enjoy it - like some of the wanderlust is out of my system. But I have a feeling that’s another 2-3 years off, too. And if I were to do it, it would be in writing, not directing, for the simple reason that writing is the field in which I’d want to teach.

I can really imagine myself teaching poetry, or playwriting, or some kind of combination director-playwright collaboration course. I was even thinking it might be fun to teach principles of drama in a performance art class for visual artists.

This is probably five years off, because it seems so settled to me. Sitting down in a classroom. Opening a book. Writing in a notebook. Wouldn’t that mean I couldn’t be in a different state every month? That’s a problem!

I was reading therapy workshop proposals for my day job yesterday, and one of them was about the subject of home as an appropriate subject for therapy - that locations have the same emotional resonance with us that people do. Well, of course they do. But to see it like that, popping out of my Windows-addled work computer, shook me up a bit.

I suppose in one sense, this year has been about redefining my relationship to the concepts of home and location.

and I hope you can hear the italics on the word “hauntingly” - they are oh-so-intentional

I somehow seem to have italicized my entire blog. Perhaps this means the entire thing is
a) a footnote to my life
b) REALLY IMPORTANT
c) written in a different language than the dominant typographic discourse of the rest of the Internet
d) not supposed to be edited after 1 am.

My ineptitude in this area is highly ironic, given that my brother is now a web browser developer.

chamber music AIDS fundraising

I had dinner with my aunt and uncle tonight, and they told me about this NYC-based AIDS nonprofit they support, Classical Action, a Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids affiliate. Among other things, they run events where classical chamber music artists donate their time to perform in intimate, home settings. Tickets are over $200 but you get to hear an artist playing in a living room, and the money goes to “raise vitally needed funds for HIV/AIDS service, education, and prevention programs across the country.”

It’s a great idea and a great fundraising model - a high-priced ticket for an extraordinary experience.

it doesn’t get much better than this

One of the roommates from the 3 apartments adjoining the porch just brought me a cup of coffee.