Fairy tale of new York

My current favorite song...

Dewey's Library

My guinea pig, Dewey, has been tearing through a lot of books lately. Literally. Or maybe, literarily. His cage is the typical mesh kind, with a door in the center, and I always leave this door open. Guinea pigs, unlike hamsters and other rodents, aren't very curious about new places (much like me), and tend to stay in the cage. When one of us walks by, he'll come to the opening and lean out, looking for a scratch and a snack (though not in that order, I'm sure). Last week, I got the idea to stack some books outside the cage, under the door, so that it lies straight out, like a diving board. Dewey treats this like a porch, and from time to time he leaves the cage and hangs out there. I noticed he was trying to nibble through the wire at the top book, so I made sure it was one I didn't care about.

He is currently chewing his way through Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. He is halfway through chapter three right now, and reports that it is hard to put down.

Shakespeare: "Macbeth" (Judi Dench) - sleepwalking scene

Dame Judi, kicking ass and taking names in the scene of her lifetime...the moment beginning at 4:55 is bone chilling...

CATcerto. ENTIRE PERFORMANCE. Mindaugas Piecaitis, Nora The Piano Cat

This cat, let's be honest here, is terrible at the piano...no sense of tempo, touch or emotion--just a cold, technically weak pawing at the ivories...the good news, though, is that she's better then Joan Osborne...

Feeling Blue ...

Found this letter in my desk tonight:

My Dear Nephew, November 30, 2004

Have a very happy birthday!

I am sorry I haven’t got a nice birthday card for you but I’ve been thinking about you a lot. One of my friends (from our days at Anchor Hocking) visited me this afternoon, and I told her about our (you & I) trips to the country to see the cows. She thought that was nice and cute. Then I bragged about you and your acting and I showed the snapshot of your dad and his 6 children. Oh yes I bragged about your wife too. So do you suppose she got it that I think a lot of you & Dani? I forgot to tell her how I got our shift foreman to let me go to the hospital to see my first nephew. That was a great day for your Grandma Mann and I. We loved you then & that love just keeps on going.

Well, Mark I hope you will have a great day.

Love you

Aunt Bern

Bern (short for Bernice) has Alzheimers Disease, and lives in an assisted living facility now. She no longer remembers me--though my sister, who works there, said Bern was in her office and saw a picture of our family, and put her finger on my face and held it there for a while. I haven't been able to bring myself to visit her yet, though I think I will tomorrow.

Jeff Black "Easy on Me" live @ Evening Muse 11.17.07

Jeff Black is my latest musical crush...

BAN BAN CALIBAN

Been a while since I written for this blog, but I promise more attention will be paid.

There are three performances left of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which I am playing Caliban. The production has run for five long weekends now, and I think everyone is a little over it. During The Three Musketeers, I told my pals in the cast, on the final weekend, that I had “run out of handsome”, meaning I no longer had the oomph to do all the things it took to transform me from the middle-aged, sedentary creature I am to the active, dashing, mysterious Athos. It felt like I’d pitched the performance to run for four weeks, and that last week was a slog to the finish. Couldn’t wait for it to end, though I miss the entertaining folk who made up the company.

Now I am experiencing the same thing with The Tempest. I am running out of monster. Instead of looking forward to getting to the theatre and slogging on all that makeup—which was fun at first—and getting to say all those gorgeous lines, I find myself daily checking the weather reports and praying for rain (this is an outdoor production).

So, I am thinking, in an attempt to jumpstart my enthusiasm, I will jot a few things down about the process of becoming Caliban, the man-monster.

This is a part I’ve always wanted to play, and can now cross it off my list. I’d played Prospero 17 years before, on the same stage, and had failed at it. I was too young at the time, 33, and just didn’t get the character into my bones. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I swore I would never do the play again, unless I was Caliban. The company had produced a couple other versions of the play since then, but I wasn’t interested.

Cut to this spring. My plan was to audition for The Tempest only, and to, in the parlance of the local theatre “suicide it”, meaning I would accept only the role of Caliban. It’s called “suicide”, because you run the risk of pissing off the casting people, by taking the decision out of their hands—I nearly always do it though, because deep down I know that I am only energized by playing the roles I WANT to play. Not for me the buzz of acting just to act. I have never loved doing it enough to do a role I didn’t like.

So anyway, I also listed The Three Musketeers, and suicided it for the roles of Athos and Cardinal Richeleiu, but figured that was going to be impossible. As the rehearsals would run through April and May, my schedule at the school where I work would make it difficult to cast me, because I had many conflicts, and would miss all but about 15 days of rehearsal (last year, in the production of Macbeth, I could only give them 10 days for the role of Macduff). When John Kuhn called me, offering me both Athos and Caliban, I was surprised, but loved the idea of a challenge, playing 2 very physical roles back to back, outdoors in the teeth of the summer.

I am an outside/in actor, always have been, though as the years go by the two directions have gotten closer together. But usually, I need to know how I am going to look very early on. I didn’t want to play a native islander, as is the vogue over the last 20 years. I consider it a very hackneyed approach, to treat the story as if it’s a tale of European conquest of the hapless natives of the New World. I wanted to be a monster, green and scaly and fantastical. Pam Hill, the director, trusted me enough with the character to let me work it out with the costume designer how I would look. This is a positive move, in character with how I think theatre should be as regards costuming. I hate being a meat puppet, forced to wear whatever a costumer has decided I would wear. Especially in Shakespeare. I can pretty much guarantee the costumer hasn’t researched the role as much as me in any show I do, so why shouldn’t I have a say in what I feel my character requires in costuming? I also had misgivings about this costumer in the past—she costumed the 12^th Night I was in a few years back, and had no grasp of the character or the play, it seemed to me. I was Malvolio, and in the scene where he wears yellow stockings, she costumed me in a terrific 1920s era suit—but a yellow suit. So, the reveal of the yellow stockings produced a very understandable “so?” from all concerned. The reason for the yellow suit? She had one in stock, and thought it looked good. Nothing about character. She just wanted that suit walking around on stage. Anyway…

I began sending her tons of pics of creatures and animals and other Calibans, to see what we could cobble together. She liked one pic of a Caliban who wore a unitard, and asked if I was amenable, and I said I was. When it came, it was so hot, I told her I could not wear it for 5 weekends of shows in the summer heat. Anyway, by this time, I was sort of landing on an idea for a look—a sort of hybrid of the narrator/singers from Marat/Sade, and pics of island lepers I’d seen on the interwebs. I also liked the idea of a kind of look from The Fly, in which the character was half man, half fly. Caliban is the son of a witch and a demon—sort of like the Cheneys. So the costumer cut off the long sleeves and one of the legs, and painted the remaining one to look like reptile scales. She also put scales on the chest.

She gave me a bunch of ratty cheesecloth and rope, and a pair of ripped breeches and a torn shirt, and left me to do the rest. I have a set of long rubber finger nails that I applied ( “and I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts”, and I ripped some of the cheesecloth into strips and wrapped them around my hands. Later in the run, I began taping down the ring finger of my right hand, hiding it under the cheesecloth, as if Caliban had lost a finger to leprosy. I used the rest of the cheesecloth to make a turban and a jaw sling that stretched over my head, and under my chin, so I resembled the leper look I’d seen in pictures.

I was also beginning to come round to the view that Caliban was a native islander, albeit one seen through the eyes of an Elizabethan, and backstoried with a demonic, fantasical heritage. His reactions are those of a child brain, a sort of “boy raised by wolves” kind of approach. He had no words to express himself until taught by Prospero and Miranda, and he is certainly a ‘new soul” in his lack of wisdom and foresight. But he is a natural, and survived all those years without his mother by a native cunning and an ear always attuned to the natural earth. And he is enslaved by Prospero, after his failure to control his impulses when it came to the nubile Miranda. Even though this was beginning to inform my choices (GOD, I hate that word “inform” as it used in theatre—so non-specific, so pseudo-intellectual—I heard Jessica Simpson talk about something that informed her choices as Daisy Duke—AAUUGH!”)—I still believed he is more than just a native islander. The language is specific in the play as regards his heritage, and I was beginning to see a marriage of both approaches.

The last addition of makeup was to apply several different shades of green to the exposed part of my body, which takes about an hour all told, and then I streaked it, like veins, with all the colors that appear on the set—reds, blues, oranges, yellows, purples—so he might be a chameleon, if he needs to be, and blend in. For my face, I tried to make it crude and painted—slashes of black for a unibrow and nose bridge, slashes of red around the mouth (we don’t want to imagine what it was he was eating before his line ( “I must eat my dinner”).

Throughout the run, as often happens, the performance changed, grew more detailed within the scenes, and yet simpler. I always remember reading that Sir John Geilgud said a professional actor learns to simplify his performance in a long run, learning how to conserve energy while still producing the same effects. I felt Caliban was too strong and dark in the first scene and needed something to established that he was in fact one of the comic characters, so about 7 performances in I hit upon a bit of business where I try to summon up a curse on Prospero (“ All the charms of Sycorax/toads, beetles, bats light on you!”) and finish with a conjure man gesture toward him, and after a beat during which nothing happens, I repeat the gesture, then give up. This always got a laugh, and set me up for the rest of the show.

The difficulty I had was with the drunkenness. I resisted the director’s insistence that I be more inebriated, because I didn’t want it detracting from the verse. But I found a way to do it eventually, though I confess I always tried to drop a lot of the drunkenness during “The Isle is full of noises” speech, because it just to beautiful to gabble away. I found if I said it simpler, with wonder and a longing for life before the Europeans, it helped with the delivery of it. Made it unfussy, more direct, less singsongy. And I hope, moving, if one can be moved by such a beast.

Physically, the long nails informed (that word again) my movements—I kept them moving, twisting, as if they had a life of their own. I turned one leg inward to give him a sloping walk, a shuffle. Watching my guinea pig gave me the idea of twitching and popping up in surprise or fear. I tried to flinch each time someone tried to touch me. The final physical touch was to create a sense of a “mountainous” throughline—by that I mean in the early scenes I bow and scrape low when I am browbeaten by Prospero, and when I am terrified of the two drunken sots who find me. I fall backward and expose my belly to Stephano when he first comes over (later in the show, when I am nearly passed out with drink, Stephano tickles my belly and I shake a leg like a dog). As his plot to murder Prospero takes hold with his companions, I gave Caliban a taller aspect, nearly as upright as the other two scene partners. Then when his plot begins to unravel, he drops low again, finally all the way to the floor in the final scene, when he is towered over by his finely dressed master. So the shape of the physical performance, if graphed, would look like a single peak of a mountain.

So this was the technical underpinning of the performance. The next post will be a scene by scene description of Caliban’s time on stage. Oh boy, you are all thinking!

Below are some of the pics I used in coming up with my Caliban look...

Sarah Palin

Just read Todd Purdom's piece in Vanity Fair on Sarah Palin, and while no one despises that woman more than I (even while ashamedly admitting I find her pretty damn hot), I have to say I found the article to be about 50% hatchet job. Which makes it 100% invalid, for me.

There are several examples where he falls back on an old journalistic technique of using the word "many" which is vague and can be misleading. He'll say things like (not a direct quote) " ...which had many people in Alaska wondering why?" My first response is, really? Many? You took out a poll? What are the numbers, please." Even the word "some" --another journalistic chestnut-- is inaccurate and vague. Often it is the opinion of the writer himself, but newspaper style calls for him not to include himself in the story, so he falls back things like " In a move that has some people questioning his sanity..." Some? Who please? If it was relevant to mention, then the names of the sanity questioners are relevant too.

The use of "many" is too open to interpretation, and I don't trust political writers to appreciate the difference. 3 people in 100 is not many when talking about people who cheat on their taxes. 3 people in 100 who are child molesters living on my block is too fucking many!

He often criticizes Palin for her sometimes capricious personality, but show me the politician who isn't narcissistic, self-important, and petty when they can get away with it. Lyndon Johnson was notoriously so--hell, even Lincoln knew how to screw over a person for an advantage. All politicians think the world revolves around them. They used to say, walk into the Senate Chamber and say "Excuse me, Mr. President?" and 100 heads will turn.

There is a peculiar anti-intellectualism in America which is, frankly, getting old. "He's got a lot of book learnin', but he ain't got a lick of common sense." Of course the people who say this don't read, and consider themselves chock full of common sense. Sarah Palin is locked into this feeling...er, feelin'. She seems rather proud of what she doesn't know. The new conservative columnist for the NY Times, Ross Douthat, draws the distinction between Obama and Palin:

"Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard."

Sarah Palin has always been a party of one--the Palin Party. Her history of rising through Alaska state politics on the backs for former mentors and friends is a local legend up there. Many people say so. :)

Purdum suggests she is vaguely conservative,but an Alaskan conservative is a different animal. Up there, they say a liberal is someone who owns a .357 Magnum or smaller. Her core beliefs are whatever propels her forward.

Really? And what politician doesn't reserve the right to change his or her opinion when faced with the possibility of electoral defeat? Can you say the name of that great Democratic Senator, Arlen Specter, perchance?

Anyway, as I say, I have always considered Palin a joke. She is no more qualified to be President than I am. And I, at least, have read a book. And a magazine. And a paper. And can name them. But just because she can't doesn't mean Vanity Fair can just hatchet her at will. Or...does it?

backstage habits

I have always found the backstage habits of actors fascinating, though I gotta say, much less so these days than when I first started out. These days, the thing I see most of the time are actors walking around or sitting with their Blackberries in hand, intent on whatever it is they are watching or reading. Boring. The level of conversation backstage has dwindled, to my old fogey way of thinking--the amount too. Often these days, there will be a group of actors sitting around, but all are looking down at their phones--if you didn't see the devices in their hands, you'd think by their attitudes that they were at a prayer meeting--heads bowed, hands in laps, lips moving silently. I have even seen them text each other while sitting there--no joke! I suppose that could be useful if you are pissed at someone " Dude--you are sitting nxt 2 th biggest ASS in ths cast!"

Young actors are particularly involved with their phones in a deeply profound way. I watch them come off stage and run to their dressing areas and pick up their phones first thing, even before looking in a mirror (surely the oldest actor habit since the invention of the mirror). I wanna ask--because I am a sarcastic bastard about these things--" Are you a pediatrician? Is there an emergency C-section you may have to rush off to perform at any moment?" Because, honestly, I can't think of any other reason for rushing to your phone in the middle of a show.

I know this dates me, but I don't care. I have always seen the theatre as a bubble, as an escape from the world. Once I show up, around 6:30 for an 8pm curtain, the world can't touch me. If one of my parents dies, I don't wanna know about it till after curtain call. My time there is spent getting ready, getting my head in the performance, silently running lines to myself, or quietly with my scene partners, working on makeup and costume issues, and trying to keep the engine running hot. I don't want to be taken out of that place. I can chat a little with cast members, but always with an ear cocked toward the stage, listening to scenes I am not in, or listening to myself in my head as I go over my next entrance. And if I see another actor who looks like he or she are doing the same thing, I don't butt in to chat. I leave them to their preparations. I am not saying my method is right for everyone, but I can't imagine texting my friends between scenes, or watching videos. It would interrupt the flow of continuity I need to keep things going. And, I gotta say, those actors who I do see texting between scenes?--their performances could probably benefit from a little more attention to the internal intangibles and keeping the world waiting at the door.

My backstage process has evolved over the years. I used to be very chatty, prided myself on being able to be social in the wings, then turn it on the moment I walked into the lights. But you know what? Looking back, I wasn't as good then as I am now. These days, I tend to keep to myself backstage. As I said, I try to keep the engine's RPMs running at a consistent level. That's why a part like Caliban in The Tempest (which I am currently performing), who is only in 5 scenes, leaves me exhausted at the end of the evening. Because I am not just working during those five scenes--I have done them over and over again before going out on stage to do them. I pace around, mutter to myself, stretch, run in place, do any number of things to keep hot. My mantra, to anyone who asks, is " I never warm up because I never cool off."

Back in the day, I use to watch older actors knit, or do crosswords. These were time-honored activities designed to keep busy between scenes without being distracted from their performances. Personally, I approve more of knitting, which is a mindless physical activity that doesn't get into your head--crosswords always took me away from the immediate task at hand. And maybe that's what those particular actors need. To each his own. But in any case, the world could not and did not enter, unlike with cell phones. One old school actor I knew when I first started in theatre, used to sit at his dressing table and copy out his all his lines onto a notepad. Every night. We knew not to interrupt him--when he wasn't on stage, he was writing down his lines. It was a mind-numbing thing to contemplate, but it worked for him.

I don't comment on the use of phones backstage. What would be the point? People would respond with patronizing smiles, and think, " What an old stick-in-the-mud (or whatever the latest word would be :) )--doesn't he know the world has changed, and this is how we roll now?"

I get it. But just because everyone does it, doesn't mean it is correct. Or effective. It's like I tell my kids at the high school--" You have 22 hours in the day to talk to your friends and be unfocused and undisciplined and divide your energies--why not try to devote yourself to just one thing for these 2 hours?"

Great Quote from Bernard Levin

"If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if youo have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - shy, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that is the long and short of it, if you belive that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blod, if you li low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surly you have a tougue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinkin idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare."