Italics are mine

The Meisner Technique taught by William Esper

 I've been reading up on theater, especially actors' and directors' craft, because of my current writing project (well, one of them at least... the fiction one), and part of this exploration led to me to the books "The Actor's Art and Craft" and "The Actor's Guide to Creating a Character" both by William Esper and Damon DiMarco. DiMarco creates a fictitious acting class at the Esper studio, where Bill Esper teaches the Meisner technique - or should we say the Esper technique? - to first-year (in the first book) and second-year (in the second one) acting students. I stumbled upon those books after reading other books, including the book by Sanford Meisner himself, and I've got to say, as someone who isn't planning to make a career in acting, I found the Esper/DiMarco books head and shoulders above the rest.

Esper and DiMarco possess a rare quality to not only explain exercises in clear terms but also convey what those exercises are important and why they will help actors improve themselves. It also helps that they've deliberately created a fictitious class to be better able to present common issues actors encounter. A lot of concepts I'd read in the Meisner book didn't make much sense until I read them again in the Esper/DiMarco book.

I particularly loved Esper's Commencement mini-speech at the very end of the second volume. The story of the talented actress (actor? I don't think Esper and DiMarco ever use the word actress) who got worried about her student loans after she graduated, took a job managing a discount store and never got the career she deserved rang true, although it's not clear whether the actress really existed, given the format of the book based on a fictitious class. Of course, most people interested in those books will be actors far more experienced than me in the craft of acting, so they might find the Meisner book extremely useful. But I've had to read enough books on theater craft over the past few months to strongly recommend that anyone eager to learn more about acting buy the Esper/DiMarco books first. And then of course, take real acting lessons, since no book will replace real-life experience, especially when it comes to acting.

The funny thing is, I probably won't incorporate anything I've read in those acting books in my novel, but it feels good to know what I'm talking about when I present actors in rehearsal. That and the fact that I'm taking an acting class at the Harvard Extension School (for fun and research too), so the books came handy for that purpose as well. So yes, maybe I bought the books to learn how to act a little bit. I'm preparing a monologue from The Maids as my "midterm". More about The Maids in my next post!

Tennessee Williams and Margo Jones

 John Lahr's remarkable biography of Tennessee Williams has received much press coverage over the past few weeks, and I won't attempt to compete with reviews in The New York Times or the New Yorker (also, I'm not close to finished reading the book). But, before I got Lahr's book, I had started the biography of Margo Jones - a now largely forgotten theater figure who launched the regional theater movement in Dallas in the 1940s before meeting an untimely death in a freak accident, and also distinguished herself as an early ally and staunch supporter of Tennessee Williams - and I'm much closer to finishing that book than Lahr's. Two observations come to mind: (1) Lahr is truly a gifted writer targeting a broad audience, and you can tell the difference in his writing with that of the book on Margo Jones (much more academic, although better written than other academic books, and unsurprisingly published by a university press), (2) it is worth noting how asymmetric relationships can be. Tennessee Williams holds such an important place in the Jones biography, but in the Williams biography, Jones is only mentioned here and there. Lahr quotes from Williams's letters to Jones, so it is clear they had a strong friendship, yet in the biography of the playwright it is obvious Jones played only a very small role, no matter how highly Williams thought of her advice. Simply, so many people surrounded him and impacted his life and career. Jones was only one among many. Still, it is interesting to read the same events told from different viewpoints by different writers for different purposes. Uber-famous Williams left us his plays, but now-forgotten Jones proved that theater should and could exist outside New York City's Broadway and left us the regional theater movement. She may only be a footnote to the life of someone who played center-stage in her own life, but her legacy is enormous.

"Uncle Vanya on 42nd St"

"Uncle Vanya on 42nd St" (1994) is a curious movie - and a phenomenally good one, once you understand what it's about. I wanted to watch it because of the current fiction project I'm working on (I thought it'd be about actors rehearsing a play) and it turned out not to be particularly helpful in that respect - but mesmerizing nonetheless, after I realized that it was really a performance of "Uncle Vanya" from beginning to end. The actors - all superb - wear their everyday clothes, the set (the stage of an abandoned Broadway theater) is minimal, and once the rehearsal begins the actors never stop being in character, so that we forget about the director, the theater itself, everything except the characters of the play. For some reason, the result is jaw-dropping. The actors only have Chekhov's lines and their body gestures to work with, but the play feels very modern, perhaps because as a result the movie puts front and center the true and timeless themes of the play: people who grow old without fulfilling their dreams, loneliness, boredom, the hope that someone else will make them whole, and the sad resignation to continue on living even when that hope has been dashed. 

Here is the trailer:

You can buy and watch the movie online using Amazon's Instant Video service. Read more about the movie on the Criterion website or on Roger Ebert's website. If you love theater, the movie is sure to make you think about your craft, and what the best actors do to create characters out of thin air, with a glance, a movement of the head, in a bare-bones set and without any costume. A masterpiece in its own right.

Random story: I looked up some of the actors' names afterward and realized Phoebe Brand (who plays the nanny) had been a well-known actress active in the Group Theater in the 1930s. Her name came up in The Fervent Years by Harold Clurman (Clurman wrote On Directing, which I already have and brought with me to Chicago a few weeks ago, where it proved to be an endless start to conversations with fascinating people). So I decided to buy that one too, and when I got it and cracked it open, I realized that Harold Clurman was married for twenty years to Stella Adler, whose book on America's Master Playwrights I love so much. Small world!

Head of the Charles story

 It's 8am. The 50th Head of the Charles regatta is about to begin elsewhere on the river. The Charles river is eerily empty. Then I notice something - someone, in a rowboat very close to the Cambridge side of the banks. (See picture.) He is hunched over the oars and rows very slowly. The race starts with the age-70+ veterans and from the man's silhouette, the way he sits on the boat (very hunched) and the way he rows (very slowly),  it does seem like a safe bet that he belongs to that age group. Maybe he's a veteran too. No way it's a coincidence. And you've got to give him credit for his undomitable spirit: he didn't row on the segment of the river where the regatta will take place but, with what looked like some difficulty and even more determination, he rowed on the Charles River the morning of the Head of the Charles regatta, which is almost like rowing the actual thing.

Theater, Creativity and Public Discourse

I had an idea the other day. Perhaps others have had it, but I've never seen it done before. So, here it is: there is a lot of talk nowadays on how to encourage great creativity and innovation in the American workforce, especially in the STEM fields (which I teach). The enormous rise in popularity of everything design-related, such as Stanford's d.school, and of dual degrees combining design and management or management and engineering or any combination of distinct skills in the hope of generating new insights, is proof of the general public's profound hunger for new ways to approach problems. The thing is, you don't become innovative on demand. Even a graduate program has an arduous task ahead if it claims to make anyone innovative overnight (which, to the industry's credit, I don't think any respectable program even comes close to suggesting) - the best it can do in the time allotted - one or two years in most Master's programs - is to select students who seem good candidates and help them further their pre-existing innovative mindset.

But what about the others? All these people who would like to become innovative in their job in science and engineering and don't know where to begin? As much as I personally like to draw and paint, I doubt the usual creativity tools ("channel your inner artist" etc) will have much of an impact there. On the other hand, I believe there is a unique opportunity for theater to leave its mark and help countless people develop their creativity - and it doesn't even involve getting those folks on stage. Because, let's face it, if we're talking about quants, programmers or technical analysts, would their strengths be best showcased facing an audience in the theater? But that's not the point. The point is, (and this is where you want to finish swallowing your drink or chewing your food before you make it to the next line) there are a number of plays staged again and again in the American theater world, and those plays are never staged twice exactly the same way. If you entrust Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller to two different directors, they will look at the play in two different ways and they will give you two very different productions. Some plays are more open to interpretation than others, and those are probably more interesting for the exercise I have in mind, but even in plays like Death of a Salesman where Willy Loman is always going to end up on the wrong side of the American Dream, the rule will hold: two different directors, two different ways to look at the play, two different productions. 

So instead of having casts playing plays in repertory, as is becoming more and more fashionable (same cast in two different plays the same weekend), my idea is to have two different casts and directors put up the same play, alternate both versions so that audiences can see both, and have some sort of forum involving audiences and casts to discuss what spoke most to people in each version. If you select top directors each time, there won't be one version clearly better than the other; simply, certain people will focus on different elements of each. And in these days where civil discourse is increasingly challenged by all-or-nothing thinking along partisan lines, the common ground of a play that has stood the test of time (you may or may not like A Streetcar Named Desire, for instance, but hopefully you agree that it is one of the top 100 American plays of the century, and as such that it says something worthwhile on the tiny piece of the world shown to us by Tennessee Williams and perhaps even on our lives in general) serves as a springboard for thoughtful conversations on the directors' vision. 

The focus on "art from nothing" in fostering innovation and creativity among non-artistic people is a very tall order. But starting from an existing text and showing different interpretations would open the door to more approachable endeavors. It could be implemented, for instance, in theater festivals held in the performing arts centers of colleges and universities deserted for the summer, with one local theater company and one invited from further away. By showing two different productions of the same play (or more than two, even, but then the exercise becomes of interest to only the most devoted theater-goers), especially in a school or university setting, people can get a better grasp of the value inherent to different visions.

There has been much talk regarding whether programs such as MetinHD, NTLive or GlobeOnScreen would turn audiences away from local productions. But by exposing audiences to multiple ways of viewing a theatrical work, we can only strengthen their ability to imagine options where they had thought there were none.

Quote from "American Craft"

 I enjoyed every single article of the October/November 2014 issue of American Craft (don't you love it when you see innovative art & craft that makes you feel connected to a community, instead of the obscure contemporary "art" you see in museums these days, eerily reminiscent of toddlers throwing temper tantrums in a desperate quest for attention? the art of this decade will be craft-based, mark my words on that one) but my favorite article in this issue was Busy Hands, Busy Brains with the enticing subtitle: Research shows that the most accomplished scientists are likely to be craftspeople. If you know me in the real world and not just the Internet, you know I am an engineer and researcher by training and a fiction writer and painter by passion. I loved hearing about the work of scientist and MacArthur "genius" grant recipient Robert Root-Bernstein who (along with his wife, artist Michele Root-Bernstein) has spent considerable time investigating what makes great scientists truly great. His most remarkable finding is that they all had a common trait: "They all had many hobbies and interests, and practiced some form of art or craft."

More quotes:

• "The Nobel Prize winners [in science] were all artists and poets and musicians, and all very explicitly said there were direct connections between the processes they used as an artist or a musician or a poet and how they did their science."
• "The top people... knew they had to take time off to recharge their brains, and their avocations were part of that... the people who were average all said exactly the opposite: "I know I'm not a good scientist, because I don't spend 14 hours a day in the lab, like the really food people." Well, the really good people don't do that. One said, "How do I tell my colleagues that I go home and play my piano for hours at night? They don't know that's what I do. They think I go home and work on my data or something."

The article has many more valuable insights in the same vein, and is sure to please people like me who make strong uses of both halves of their brain, combining analytical science with artistic creativity. 

Anne Bogart's "Conversations with Anne"

I just finished reading Anne Bogart's Conversations with Anne. The book has a format extremely similar to The Director's Voice vol.2 which I bought in DC a few months back and absolutely loved (you can read my review here). It has the exact same typesetting, same font, same way to print the interviewer's questions in bold before the interviewee's answer, same setup with a short introduction of the director before each interview. Yet, while I gave an enthusiastic five stars to The Director's Voice vol.2, and while this book is also very good, I only give it four stars out of five (worse things happen in life than being deemed "very good" instead of "truly exceptional"...) Here is why.

Anne Bogart is a very famous stage director, and rightfully so. If you're into theater, you may have heard about her Viewpoints method, although she is quick to point out in the book that the true inventor of the method was Mary Overlie, and she (Bogart) was more of a scavenger - her word. About a decade ago (around 2004-2006), she held a series of interviews about theater with fellow stage directors she admires as a reaction to the politics of then-President George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq and the political climate of the time. Her introductions before each interview are perfunctory at best and the main points are typically repeated in her first few statements in the interview itself, making the introduction a bit redundant. She is also clearly on the side of the people she interviews (not a bad thing, but if the two people on stage agree with each other all the time, I tend to feel there is one person too many up there) and she shares an extensive past trying to make art in theater with them, shared experience that the reader doesn't have.

The interviewer of The Director's Voice vol.2, Jason Loewith, is rather unknown on the national stage, but he does such an amazing job introducing his interviewees (retracing their career paths, setting the interviews in the context of what those directors were facing at the time and sometimes adding a few words about what happened after the interview, such as a job change) that I found myself excited to discover their work first hand and looking up online when they might direct a play nearby. Anne Bogart's Conversations are more like an advanced, theater-folks-only version of such interviews, where she either assumes that her readers have far more knowledge of interviewees' work than I have, or doesn't realize that such knowledge matters in making her print audience excited about reading the book. Otherwise you have to go through a lot of pages where people you know very little about talk about themselves. (Side note: Loewith's book has small headshots of the interviewees. Bogart's doesn't.)

An important difference between Bogart's book and The Director's Voice vol.2 was that Bogart's interviews happened in front of a live audience, presumably of theater-lovers with a certain sophistication about the artform, while Loewith's are one-on-one interviews where he can more take the time to ask simple questions on behalf of the reader. Bogart's premise - to hold these interviews following the invasion of Iraq - also makes the book seem slightly dated, since the interviewees do spend some time commenting on the terrible climate they faced and the way they felt about what was going on, but in 2014 the benefit of hindsight makes us not quite relate to what they are saying anymore (we can feel bad about the current political climate for other reasons, just not the ones discussed in the book). 

All in all, this is a very good book that, for me, doesn't quite rise to the amazingness of Loewith's book of interviews, but remains nonetheless very valuable for theater-lovers out there.

"The Killing of Karen Silkwood"

Next month will mark the 40th anniversary of health and safety activist Karen Silkwood's highly suspicious death in a car accident as she was going to meet journalists and give them confidential documents about safety issues at a Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Oklahoma, and I would like to urge anyone reading my post to buy (and read) "The Killing of Karen Silkwood" by Richard Rashke. Silkwood was made famous by a movie with Meryl Streep, who portrays her, but the movie has had mixed reviews and is not currently available on Amazon except from resellers. The book, though, is spellbinding - Rashke is an exceptionally talented writer and you just can't put his book down until you reach the end. His account obliterates the official, convenient theory that Silkwood was driving while under the influence of drugs and alcohol and fell asleep at the wheel. (Warning: the book will make you feel very despondent about law enforcement agencies, although the lead investigator in the Silkwood case benefited from the insights from one anonymous FBI source, who - in that sense - single-handedly saved the honor of the agency.) It also makes a convincing case that she was pushed off the road, that she couldn't get back on it because the other car was blocking her way, and that since she kept her eyes on the car blocking her while she was driving on the shoulder, she didn't see the cement culvert that her car ultimately crashed into. 

But the bulk of the book isn't really about Silkwood: it's about the investigation of her death, which (as told by Richard Rashke) basically screams "cover-up" from beginning to end with repeated stonewalling, mysterious deaths of people about to be interrogated, a psychic who described in stunning detail the drivers of the cars behind Silkwood on the evening of her murder (one has the impression that the locals would have known exactly who Rashke was talking about, at least for the first driver) and the theory of a plutonium ring that secretly provided plutonium to countries friendly to the United States - although only a theory, this would explain why people in high places really didn't want Silkwood to publicize the fact there was missing plutonium at the Kerr-McGee plant.

This last part bothered me the most about the book, precisely because the author makes the case so convincingly: in the end, Silkwood doesn't seem to have been killed because of her principles but because she was inconvenient to some great plan, far bigger than herself, that she played a tiny role in. I found that sad. She was also apparently poisoned before her death (exposed to large amounts of radiation without her knowledge, which would likely have caused cancer had she lived) and relentlessly smeared after her death. The book won't make you feel proud of the judicial system either - the large monetary award to the Silkwood family became a meager $5,000 on appeal and the case was settled out of court after the Supreme Court found in Silkwood's favor. Yet, it is an important work. Looking at the world with rose-colored glasses has never helped anyone, and Rashke's book, while careful to separate theories from the documented facts uncovered by investigators on the case, provides a sobering account of what happens when the system decides to crush one of its own.

Chile, Hong Kong

(Photography credit: Stephen Lewontin) When I heard the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong had been attacked by Beijing supporters, I was reminded of a photograph I recently discovered in the SoWa studio of Boston-based photographer Stephen Lewontin during a First Friday event. Lewontin covered the dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s as a photographer for the Gamma agency, and has many fascinating photographs he took of his time there on display in his studio. You can see a very small version of one of my favorite photographs of his to the left - to see a bigger picture, click on the link associated with his name above in the photography credit, which will lead you to his website. And to see the full-size picture, nothing beats dropping by his studio during First Friday and admiring a print of it for yourself. 

What fascinates me about this picture is that it depicts a pro-Pinochet demonstrator during the last few years of the dictatorship, expressing her anger at the photographer or the rest of the world for, apparently, condoning unrest aimed at bringing an end to the Pinochet regime. (Lewontin has more anecdotes about the picture and I hope he does write a book about all his memories of that complicated time.) From our standpoint of citizens in democracies, it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to live in a dictatorship - but some people have always been able to cosy up to the powers in place and others have always preferred stability over everything else. Some people find their interest in odious regimes (think too of collaborators during the French Occupation.) It's sadly too easy, and vastly mistaken, to believe that every anonymous Jane living under a dictator secretly hopes for the regime to ends. I was trying to touch upon a similar idea when I wrote my novella "Isolde 1939", which is based on the true story of a French soprano who sang for the Nazis. But Lewontin's photograph brings home this message far more powerfully than thirty thousand words.

Andris Nelsons at Boston Symphony

I've just returned from a concert at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by BSO's new (and 15th) music director Andris Nelsons - Beethoven's 8th, Bartok's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin and, after the intermission, Tchaikovsky's 6th (Pathetique). I loved it. I'm not a music critic, so I can't be very sophisticated in my comments, but there is no doubt Nelsons enthralled many concert-goers. Beethoven's 8th in particular was received with great applauses and bravos. Nelsons singled out certain members of the orchestra for extra praise and it was endearing to see the first player who was singled out (a woman in the first row of cellos) look all surprised by the attention, although she clearly deserved it. I had never heard Bartok's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin before and it was fascinating to recognize in the music the actions, mentioned in the program, that would have normally been shown on stage through a pantomine (Bartok composed the work for the stage). Finally, I found

Tchaikovsky's 6th life-affirming and vibrant in spite of the much darker last movement, which depicts death. In fact, after hearing the Boston Symphony play the piece, this may become one of my favorite symphonies of the moment. The one little quibble I had was that I think Nelsons held the silence after the last note a bit too long and I wondered if that didn't play a role in how subdued the applause was afterward - people applauded for a long time, but in a very parsimonious way, although the playing and conducting had all been spectacular. Or maybe Bostonians don't like Tchaikovsky? Maybe it's too emotional for them? (On the platform waiting for the T afterward I heard elderly concert-goers praise the first half as one of the best concert halves they had ever attended, but they weren't as thrilled by Tchaikovsky, although I couldn't figure out why.) The symphony is indeed very long and every time I hear it I think it's done after the 3rd movement - the darker 4th movement never resonates with me as much as the dynamic 3rd does, and the symphony would be of very respectable length (around 38 minutes) without it, although of course its meaning would be completely changed. But perhaps the audiences, mostly elderly people, were just tired after a long period of attentive listening. I really thought the BSO did a great job with it.

I was reading Chekhov's Three Sisters during the intermission and had almost reached the end of the play, I've seen it already so I know how it ends and maybe it's something about Russian creative types from another century but the three sisters' disappointment with life and their ultimate determination to go on living without answers as to why their dreams didn't come to pass seemed like the perfect accompaniment to Tchaikovsky's music. That might also explain why the symphony resonated with me to the extent it did. 

Nelsons came across as energetic, engaged and inspirational - using the full space available to him on the podium and often leaning toward the players. Maybe it is only due to his relatively young age and, one assumes, his desire to shine in his brand-new role as music director, but he seemed far more attuned to his orchestra than many conductors I've seen elsewhere, and I've seen a lot. Obviously the BSO must have rehearsed a lot for his first season as music director, while guest conductors often only have a few hours with the orchestra before the audience arrives, but even when I've seen Alan Gilbert conduct his own New York Philharmonic, the (very successful) concerts didn't have the same quality of buoyancy and verve. Anyway, I thought the concert marked an excellent beginning to Nelsons's tenure at the BSO.

Catch a repeat of the program on Thursday 10/2 at 8pm and on Friday at 1:30pm. Watch Nelsons lead his first BSO rehearsal on the Boston Globe YouTube channel: