NYT's Story About Nuns Who Die Well

I'm moved by this NYT story about a group of Catholic Sisters who manage the end of life well, not allowing anyone to die lonely. When I reach that point in my life, I hope I'm surrounded by friends, in a similar way. I, myself, know too many people who have not been, mostly because they didn't allow it. You can read the story HERE.

Looking Back at Recent Training....

.... Movement pieces I did in grad school that I'm glad to have done:

• Four-minute Dance Solo, embodying several qualities that don't come naturally to me, to music from The Bourne Identity;

• Short scene from 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in a found space, a well-lit corner in a much used stairwell;

• The Messenger speech from Oedipus at Colonus, done as a stylistic 'shmear' of 18th-century and naturalism, with 23 specific moves thrown in, e.g., smiting the gods, real laughter, real tears, smiting the castle, a marshal arts move, etc.;

• Creon in a two person scene from Medea in another stylistic "shmear;"

• original choreography of a scene utilizing the theme of "light and shadow," in which two actors wear fencing masks with lights where their mouths should have been and fall in love across a table to a musical passage from Vagabound Opera;

• original choreography of a short scene to music by John Hiatt; and

• performing in choreography by a classmate in a scene depicting several Shel Silverstein poems for children.

There were others, but these were the ones that stayed in my body. I"m finding the 'Greek Shmear" particularly useful for Malvolio.

Actor-Monk Lives Here

My room at OSF

Boredom and the Exotic

Walking around Durant, I remember growing up in Vermont, the mugginess, smell of grass, boredom so pure and heavy and inescapable that one couldn't help but notice being here now. There was nothing else to do but do something. I took up long distance bicycling before I had a driver's license just so I could escape town. I'd ride for hours, from Waitsfield to Montpelier--which seemed (almost) exotic--and Waterbury, or the other way, down the Granville gulch and windy, dangerous Route 100 all the way to Rutland. It got me out of town and out of hitting distance (Dad hit). If I didn't bicycle ride, I read, or walked the six miles from home into the center of town, where I loitered in front of the Waitsfield General Store. I hitch hiked a lot. Swam in the Mad River. Did a lot of things on my own, despite having two brothers, a sister, and an odd number of foster siblings. I seemed to like facing down by myself the boredom that could settle on a long muggy summer weekend.

Walking past houses in Durant, a town which seems to have a burgeoning industry in fast food outlets but not much else, I wonder what people are doing indoors. They must be in there because there seems to be nowhere to go. They hunt and fish and go to Lake Texoma, I do know that, but this is flat country and the lake is muddy, and it's too hot to bicycle any distance far enough to seem exotic.

Peanut Heads

I and Brian Hamlin sightseeing in Durant

I Love Playing Malvolio

I'm so much enjoying Malvolio! I have never had such fun on stage. Acting has never felt so painless (which is different than easy). If training gives me nothing else, it will have freed me from the terror I've always felt, until now, going on stage or in front of a camera.

This makes me happy.

Malvolio

I'm finding that what I thought would be difficult is, if not easy, not as difficult (at this moment in rehearsal) as what I thought would be easy. The comic, early scenes--of preening, strutting, lambasting, cooing, and other such actions--are playing, but my later, more 'tragic' scenes--grasping at dignity, pleading for assistance, imputing betrayal--are still phony baloney. They 'play' insofar as the lines are good, but I'm attitudinizing more than hitting actions. This is one thing that rehearsal is for: ferreting out the phony baloney and finding out which sections of the script need more crafting.

R.I.P. Pina Bausch

She died of cancer this week at the age of 68. She smoked like a chimney her whole life. You may read the NYT obituary here.

On "Breaking Bad"

I just finished watching the second season of "Breaking Bad." My question is, did the creators of this show know how dark they would get, or did they let it happen? This show is a stunningly bleak picture of methamphetamine abuse from the point-of-view of a "good" man who produces it. This good man is responsible for much bad. And even as he (mostly) remains the character with whom the viewer most wants to spend time, one can't help but also root for his (mostly irritating) wife and hope the cops nail his ass. This show is insidiously disturbing.

I hope there's a third season. One theme I hope the creators continue to make more explicit is how this "good" man's pathological aversion to accepting "charity" makes him proud of selling meth; that is, how our very American obsession with success and 'hard work' make hard work more important than good work. Making this ever-more explicit is the job of Act III, the probable denouement of the series. If it were hammered home any earlier, it would have been hectoring.

"Breaking Bad" is a smart, smart piece of entertaining and serious dramatic art. This is the kind of work I'd like to do in both theater and film/t.v.

UPDATE: I also like that Bryan Cranston and Vince Gilligan appear to think of Walt as having a kind of multiple personality disorder. But, one that is not obvious, and doesn't involve a complete separation between Walt's two selves. For some years now, I've felt in myself--and seen in others--that we are all 'multiple personalities' in whom the division between selves lies on a spectrum of fused-completely separate. No one is a purely fused unity (probably, though Obama makes me wonder). Few are actually hearing voices from 'outside.' But, we're all negotiating among internal selves all the time. This may not be news to you (or you, or you), but the simple things turn me (us) on.

Orsino

I like Brian Hamlin's discovery about Orsino. In Orsino's opening speech, "fancy" is all-consuming, crazy-hungry love--eros unbound--which no single object of love can fulfill. As soon as a person (or, perhaps a man, more than a woman) achieves the object of his desire than that object is diminished and made tawdry by the having, and ever-hungry eros remains as ravenous as before. For the duration of the play, Orsino believes that only Olivia can sate this appetite. But, in the final scene, he finally takes Cesario/Viola as his "fancy's queen." S/he finally sates his appetite. Brian's discovery is that during the play Orsino has gained an education in what love really looks like in the companionship of Cesario. When he has learned that Cesario/Viola--who has his own mind and speaks it--offers more love through friendship than a woman can through distant desire, he marries her.

It probably says something tawdry about me that I missed this. Thanks, Brian.