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Today’s Quote
May 2, 2017Today’s Quotes
June 20, 2016“(. . . working on a play.) You do the first job as neatly as you can: She comes in. Then you do the next job: He sees her. And so on. It’s an extraordinarily useful lesson.”
“Elaine May has a wonderful motto: ‘The only safe thing is to take a chance.’ “I think she means that if you stay safe, and don’t take a chance — don’t do something that’s different from the last thing, something that makes you nervous and holds dangers — if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all — and therefore not safe at all. The longer you play it safe, the less interesting is what you do.”
Mike Nichols, the Director’s Art, by Barbara Gelb
NYT Magazine, May 27, 1984
Today’s Quote
August 5, 2015By David Mamet
“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want. . . . Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. . . . People only speak to get something. . . . They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective.”
From the Hilton Als commentary, “True Lies”
The New Yorker, June 29, 2015
Today’s Quote
June 12, 2015Three-Minute Memoir
February 28, 2015Bad Actors I
This is an edited re-post. Click images to enlarge.
Cecil, Virginia, 1964, was the second play I wrote and the first one produced by the Baltimore Playwrights’ Festival, in August, 1985. The story was based on the murder of my maternal first-cousin, Phyllis Jean. While there are positive things to say about the production, it failed my own expectations. I had hoped that writing it would somehow deepen my insight into the murderer, help me understand what drove Phyllis Jean’s husband to kill her. I was convinced that a fictionalized version of the deed would free me from thinking about it—or him—ever again. But some critics said that the play was too much a portrait of life in a small town, rather than of the murderer and his motivations. The reviews, good and bad, only compounded the emotional confusion I still felt.
In a case of tragic serendipity (cosmic joke?) the actor cast to play Joe Pete, the wife-killer, would murder his real-life wife a few years later. And in an even stranger alignment of dark stars, the woman he killed was a co-worker/friend of mine, her office no more than a hundred yards from my own. His wife was no tomboy like Phyllis Jean, and she didn’t have my cousin’s red hair and freckles, but she was vivacious and witty and fun to be around. And she had a lovely smile. In those ways, and in her fate, she came to remind me very much of Phyllis.
Cecil is an ensemble play with nine speaking roles. The character of Kitty, Joe Pete’s wife, is based on Phyllis Jean; Asher, the editor of the local paper, represents me. The story is told from Asher’s point of view and the first scene in his office is designed to define the relationship of those two friends since childhood, and to foreshadow the tragedy to come. In the complete scene we also learn that Asher had been hired by Kitty’s guardian to keep an eye on her on the school bus, in the same way that my grandmother paid me to spy on Phyllis Jean. But that’s pretty much where the resemblance to real life ends. The Baltimore Sun critic wrote that “Watching (the play) is like looking at a cut-away version of a small town.”
Here are a few lines from Act One, Scene One, beginning with a stage direction.
We hear a typewriter. Lights up in the office of the Cecil Herald. ASHER, who has a small town businessman look about him, is using his index fingers to tap out a story. After a few beats KITTY struts in. She is a small woman, pretty, light makeup, flowing red hair, the toned body of a dancer.
KITTY (after a long beat watching ASHER work, teasing): It’s O.K., Asher, don’t pay me no mind. Just pretend I ain’t here at all. (ASHER finishes the line he’s typing and looks up. KITTY, still teasing, snatches the typewriter paper and reads the headline): “Country Man Is Charged With Murder” (she glances at him, then continues.) “Four children have lost their mother and may lose their father for some time as the result of a long gun slaying at 7:30 last night in the Blue Run area of Cecil.”
ASHER (mock-stern): Kitty, give it.
KITTY: Lordy, what is this?
ASHER: Guy shot his wife over in—
KITTY (curious): What for you reckon?
ASHER (ignoring the question): Kitty, please, I’ve got this deadline—and a headache.
Many who saw the play agreed that my female characters were well-written, “for a man.” Any skill I may have for writing from the female POV is likely because as a young boy I spent a lot of time listening to women in all kinds of settings. My favorite half-sister ran a beauty parlor, and when she had to baby-sit me on a workday I’d tag along. I loved to watch and hear the women sitting under the hairdryers, flipping through Look and Life and Collier’s, gabbing about this and that, appearing at once cute and serious and silly in hair curlers—talking, talking, talking.
Aside from the reviews (brickbats included), the fun of hearing actors say my words, and experiencing how a play is staged, the BPF production was my reward for months of hard work. But the nagging fact remained that the murder, as written and staged, happened out of the audience’s sight and was, as one critic said, “. . . the off-stage fulfillment of (an) ominous promise (and) so perfunctory we are cheated of pathos. Perhaps the playwright wanted us to see the play’s climactic event as just another news item in the Cecil Herald. Still, murder is not a subtle crime. It calls for more than suggestion.” That critic had me pegged.
While the play was an OK first effort, I came to agree that Phyllis Jean’s death needed to be—deserved to be—dealt with directly. And, because of my inability (unwillingness?) to face it at the time, I had hidden it off-stage. As serendipity would have it, though, I’d get a chance to try again.
More about that soon, when I post Bad Actors II . . .
Copyright © 2015, Jim Sizemore
Château de Lacoste
February 18, 2015By Kathleen Barber
Provence, France, July 2014
As I climb from the village to the Château de Lacoste, the castle home of the Marquis de Sade, I realize that I am little more than a papered-over fourteen year old. I am still searching for my life, even though by now, I have lived most of it. I stop on the precariously steep path to wait for my friend, Lorraine. She has known me since I was fourteen and I marvel at her generosity in forgetting who I was back then: a swirling vortex of disappointment and desire laced with a foolish belief that there was something out there that would put me in order—if only I could find it.
A slice of gold catches my eye. I peer down a long, dark alley formed by two ochre buildings standing like angry lovers, an arms-length apart. Beyond the alley lies a quilt pattern of gold and green farmland. Lorraine passes me, good-naturedly complaining about my fascination with going up hills.
Hills excite me and Lorraine never says ‘no’, which is fortunate as we are spending a week in the Luberon, the hill country of Provence. Cobblestones make the path uneven: we aren’t ashamed to hold on to the handrails. In America, we probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk up here. In America, we are so bent on suing our neighbors for every bump that life gives us that we allow little risk . . . little adventure. I imagine the servants of the Marquis trudging this path, bringing grapes from the farm, a blue bowl recently fired, or perhaps a query about a daughter last seen following the Marquis through a side door of the local church. Hanging on a coral-colored wall of a butcher’s shop is a poster announcing Festival de Lacoste, an annual celebration of music and theater created by Pierre Cardin who is also the current owner of the Château. The poster lists Puccinni, Tchaikovsky, Natalie Dessay, and I want to hear everything.
We navigate the last of the cobblestone pathway and all at once are entering the upper courtyard of the eleventh century castle. At this level the building is mostly a limestone ruin. I wonder if there are ghosts. My breathing is heavy with anticipation; my heart is bursting with the discovery of a new world. I turn to see a road and a carpark nearby, but rather than feel foolish for having made the climb from the village, I feel sorry for the tourists who have driven. I smile at Lorraine and she grins back, then makes her way to the magnificent sculpture of a muscular man, his form unnaturally posed. The statue is both beautiful and disturbing, and its placement against the canvas of the sky, magnificent.
A sculpture of a disembodied, imprisoned head of the Marquis de Sade draws me to it. Though his victims have been long at rest, his torment is still not over. I shudder. Instead of thinking about gardens and wine, I find myself trying to reconcile the impulse of life that is sometimes loving and sometimes cruel. What has brought me here?
I go to the edge of the hill and look down and down and do not fall and do not step back. My eyes sweep over the Luberon valley, and I long to explore every town, stand in fields of grapes, climb every hill. A forgotten self writhes beneath the layers of family, career, husband, friends . . . of definitions unsought and dreams abandoned. Time is running out.
“Ready?” Lorriane asks. “There’s plenty more to see today.” I have known Lorraine since she was fourteen, too. When I look at her, I see her sisters, brother, parents—see my own family. Days of unfulfilled longing and moments of exaltation have brought us here. Layers of my life peel away and they float down the hill on a Provence breeze. There is more to see, and Lorraine and I are both still looking. We go back the way we came, and nothing looks the same.
Click images to enlarge. Copyright © 2015, Kathleen Barber
Kathleen Barber, on the right, stands with her friend Lorraine in a field of Provence lavender. Ms. Barber has had over fifteen plays produced in Baltimore community theaters, most recently In the Shadow of Lushan, produced by Fells Point Corner Theater as part of The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Kathleen is a partner in a manufacturing business, The Fairlawn Tool & Die Company, founded by her father, which has served as the basis for several of her plays. She has had short stories published in Teen Magazine, New England Senior Citizen, and The Maryland Poetry Review.
Sam Shepard on Play Writing VI
January 5, 2015Adapted from: The Pathfinder
By John Lahr, The New Yorker, February 8, 2010
The male influences around me (growing up) were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent. I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid.
I just dropped out of nowhere. It was absolute luck that I happened to be there (NYC, 1963) when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting. I think they hired everybody. It was wide open. You were like a kid in a fun park—trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened . . . . For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties. Terrible suffering . . . . Things coming apart at the seams.
I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced. There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer . . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come . . . . Break it all down in pairs. Make the pairs work together, with each other. Then make ’em work against each other, independent.
I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable . . . instead of embodying a “whole character,” the actor should consider his performance “a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme,” . . . . to make a kind of music or painting in space without having to feel the need to completely answer intellectually for the character’s behavior.
Character is something that can’t be helped. It’s like destiny . . . . It can be covered up, it can be messed with, it can be screwed around with, but it can’t be ultimately changed. It’s like the structure of our bones, and the blood that runs through our veins.
(I was) dead set against revisions because I couldn’t stand rewriting . . . . (The plays) were chants, they were incantations, they were spells. You get on them and you go. Plays have to go beyond just working out problems. (They have to move) from colloquial territory to poetic country.
I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing, and endings are a disaster.
Mystery Lady
November 23, 2014(Click image to enlarge.)
This photograph enchants me, and I know practically nothing about it. To begin with, who is the young lady? Back in the mid-1970’s, a friend gave me the picture because her mother was about to throw it out. At first it was the Art Deco frame that drew me. My friend told me that her mother “hated” the frame, and that the woman in the picture was her (the mother’s) great-aunt, and that she was a professional “acrobatic dancer.” That was it, that’s all my friend got from her mother. Now I was really hooked. The fact that there was a mystery attached to such a beautiful frame and such an interesting-looking—lovely-in-her-own-way—costumed woman, only made the package that much more intriguing.
So I did a bit of research. I checked out Google Images under “acrobatic dancer” for the 1920’s and 30’s, and came up with some notes that I may develop later for an essay. For instance, the images I found ranged from vaudeville and circus acts to strippers to deformed people who toured theatrically at the time and were exploited as “freaks.” Show biz people of every stripe, in other words, many of whom were social outcasts then. Which of course could also explain my friend’s mothers’ dismissive attitude.
But I don’t care. I think this athletic-appearing young lady’s story deserves more development. If you have clues to her identity, her career, or just helpful research ideas, please get in touch . . .
Copyright © 2014, Jim Sizemore.