Limited Perspective

This popped up on Facebook because I posted it two years ago today. I think it's worth re-posting here as a little slice of what they call "actor life."  April 19, 2020 Amazingly alive, creative day today! It started off with an online, group audition for a new show by Dacha called Funfair. I really wasn't sure how it would work on Zoom but it did. The first energizing, magic part is when you break into small groups and create a scene from nothing. You get a few prompts and a few minutes and then they say "go!" Our little group was on fire. We created a whole world in six minutes and presented it to the other dozen or so actors and the creative team. I was so proud of our cohesion and our artistry. The other groups were just as good. Then we moved on to the one-on-one part. I got to create a character, again from basically nothing and have her go interact with one of the members of the creative team. I was this whole other person, Daisy Lansing, on a Disne...

This is the second house I lived in as seen on Google Maps. In 1975 there was a Pin Oak tree in the front yard. You can tell where it used to be. At that time, I could almost touch my thumb to my forefinger around the trunk. Over the years it got really big and beautiful. It had to be at least 30 feet tall or more.   I moved away in 1989. My parents sold the place maybe four or five years ago. The tree was still there. I could only ever see it on the internet. For some reason, I checked again yesterday and it was gone. The branches used to intrude on the house and the leaves practically paved the yard and were a chore to get rid of. That’s probably why they cut it down. It’s sad for some reason.

I’m often the first to clap. Most of the time, it is really easy to know when a play has ended. Sometimes, it’s a little less clear. Many of those times, it’s me who starts the applause as I sense the end. This happened just recently at Hotter than Egypt at ACT. It ends, as I recall, with one character peering out across the Nile into a hopeful future. I knew that was it.  Not so tonight. Again at ACT, I saw The Thin Place. It was obvious when it was nearing the end. Then there’s a blackout. Then one of the characters walks back on stage. It seemed like the end. It would be a good place to put the end, I thought. But in the context of the play, there maybe could have been a final monologue from that character, maybe even a whole scene. Then a second character comes out. Again, I wondered if there would be more story. Then the final two actors appear and it’s clear to everyone that this is the curtain call. Show’s over. We all clapped.  Thinking about it, this fit the theme of ...

Just tuned into this movie on regular, over-the-airwaves TV channel 44-2, called Somewhere in the Night and it happened to be right at the beginning of this restaurant scene. The YouTube video should start at the top of the scene: restaurant scene  At first I was fascinated by the shot tracking the waiter to the table. It's a (much) shorter version of the kind of scenes people rave about in Goodfellas, the new West Side Story and so forth where the camera takes you all the way down the high school hallway, or all the way from the street through the restaurant and to the table.  In this movie, when they get to the table, the four actors at the table eat dinner (or maybe lunch?) as the scene goes on. This also was fascinating. I loved watching them all eat the noodle dishes and then the crunchy fried chow mein noodles, all while the high-stakes dialogue churns along.  I once acted in a play, How the Other Half Loves that has a long dinner scene in which I ate meatloaf and s...

I was stopped at First and Broad the other day. I worked in a building on the southwest corner of that intersection more than twenty years ago. That building has been torn down and replaced. Waiting for the light to change, I thought, what if I could go back in time to my little office? I could almost see myself right there, just inside the new building, only in 1998. A couple of days or so later, I came across the meme posted here. “You can easily return to the past but no one is there anymore,” it says. It’s a joke, of course (or is it?) but that got me thinking again. If I could go back in time to exact spot of my old office at First and Broad, I’d be at the new building, not the old one, unless I could fit the whole intersection into my time machine with me. And all of you, assuming you would not fit in there either, would still be up here in 2022. There’d be no one to talk to in 1998. So to get to the old building, and see my old (younger) friends, I’d have go to back not just in ...

If you look up the idea of Chekhov’s Gun, you read about how a writer should avoid making false promises and should not write checks the story never cashes. But I think the bigger mistake would be more like having pennies from heaven. I thought of this today when I watched the first episode of Maid on Netflix. The show involves a character called Alex and her two-year-old daughter Maddy. Alex is in an abusive relationship. One night, Maddy’s father, in a drunk rage, throws a glass, which shatters against the wall. Later, Alex finds shards of glass in Maddy’s hair. It’s the last straw. She leaves in the middle of the night. Late in the episode Maddy is holding her Little Mermaid doll, which she calls Schmariel, out the car window, making her fly (which I just noticed as I am typing this is full of meaning!) when she accidentally drops it. Maddy cries and screams for the doll. Alex is rushing to make a ferry. If she doesn’t make it, she will probably lose her job. Despite the ris...

The things you get to say on stage can be fun for purely personal reasons, outside the context of the play.  I did a reading earlier this week of a ten-minute play called The Charitable Heart by Tony Barone . It is a reworking of The Gift of the Magi. I played a guy, Jim who must learn the lesson about love from the older guy who had seen it all before.  Jim has lost his job and is going broke. He laments he will not be able to take his wife, Louise on a vacation this year, like last year when they went to Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos. When I was growing up back east, we got WOR channel 9 on cable out of New Jersey. They played this commercial where they would sing “beautiful Mount Airy Lodge” in a memorable manner. As I recall, the three syllables of “beautiful” were sung on the same low note, then “mount” lilted upward ever so slightly but it still didn’t prepare you for the way they went up high and full-blast on “airy” and then trailed off back down to the “lodge.” It w...