They say you can't judge a book by its cover but, alas, many people do. So I've decided to start working on mine. You don't want to leave these things until the last minute.
Of course I'll need a really cool graphic for the front, but I don't feel like starting on that right now. Also a good blurb describing the contents. And I'll have to make up a bunch of stuff about the author, so I'll need to get started on that as well (I think a career behind the camera would be a good starting place. Okay, there's the fact that I'm married to Carol Reed! That's for starters. And then I can figure out how to graft Uncle Rex onto the family tree. Hey, this isn't as hard as I expected.)
But where I want to start is with those all-important quotes. I've got a real good one for starters, from the New York Times Book Review! And it's by one of the Kennedys, so that should count for something.
This is fun! And I'll keep adding more as I find them. Make the publisher's job a lot easier...;
*
"The first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."
- William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review
*
A reader of this blog has submitted another suggestion;
"Ron is so kind and funny! I laughed until I wet my pants! No book has given me a warmer feeling..."
- T. Anderson, Kultur Svenska Kanadiana, Summer 07
Thank you, T. While your contribution is appreciated, I'm not entirely sure it is what we are looking for. I don't think you are famous enough.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Thoughts on criticism from Past The Popcorn
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and [Shaw], enter our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art, but very startling and arresting dogmas. And they care even more, and desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas than about their startling and arresting art. —G. K. Chesterton
It is dangerous for an individual to assume that any attempted work of art actually is what it appears to himself. I have known a child to assume that his grandfather, kneeling for prayers, was a horse to be mounted and ridden. —Booth Tarkington
People ask me all the time, “What does that song mean?” Well, if I could say it in other words than are in the song, I would have written another song, wouldn’t I? —Elvis Costello
The best audience is one that will be fair enough to suspend judgment until it has first found out what [the artist] is trying to do; then is competent enough to discover how well he does it; and finally is so all-wise as to know whether or not it’s worth doing. —Booth Tarkington
The aim of the critic, as Chesterton once remarked, is to show what the artist did, whether the artist meant to do it or not. —Robert J. Reilly
Egoistic instinct is subtle and glamorous. It can even mistake itself for authoritative judgment upon works of art; but if we avoid being carried away by its eloquence we needn’t share in its error. That is, by making ourselves a little hard-headed we can escape the confusion of mind that damns an ostrich for not being a giraffe. —Booth Tarkington
I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. —G. K. Chesterton
These quotes are shamelessly lifted from the Past The Popcorn film review website
It is dangerous for an individual to assume that any attempted work of art actually is what it appears to himself. I have known a child to assume that his grandfather, kneeling for prayers, was a horse to be mounted and ridden. —Booth Tarkington
People ask me all the time, “What does that song mean?” Well, if I could say it in other words than are in the song, I would have written another song, wouldn’t I? —Elvis Costello
The best audience is one that will be fair enough to suspend judgment until it has first found out what [the artist] is trying to do; then is competent enough to discover how well he does it; and finally is so all-wise as to know whether or not it’s worth doing. —Booth Tarkington
The aim of the critic, as Chesterton once remarked, is to show what the artist did, whether the artist meant to do it or not. —Robert J. Reilly
Egoistic instinct is subtle and glamorous. It can even mistake itself for authoritative judgment upon works of art; but if we avoid being carried away by its eloquence we needn’t share in its error. That is, by making ourselves a little hard-headed we can escape the confusion of mind that damns an ostrich for not being a giraffe. —Booth Tarkington
I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. —G. K. Chesterton
These quotes are shamelessly lifted from the Past The Popcorn film review website
Friday, July 13, 2007
Jack Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces" and "About Schmidt"
FIVE EASY PIECES
I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes. Tomatoes instead. A cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
What do you mean? You don't have any tomatoes?
Only what's on the menu. You can have number two, a plain omelet. It comes with fries and rolls.
I know, but it's not what I want.
Make up your mind.
I have made up my mind. I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes on the plate. A cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.
I'm sorry, we don't have any side orders of toast. I'll give you an English muffin or a coffee roll.
No side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don't you?
Would you like to talk to the manager?
You've got bread and a toaster of some kind?
I don't make the rules.
I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like a plain omelet and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce, and a cup of coffee.
A number two. A chicken sal san.
Hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee.
Anything else?
Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for a chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.
You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
I want you to hold it between your knees.
You see that sign, sir? You'll all have to leave, I'm not taking any more of your smartness and your sarcasm!
You see this sign? He reaches his arm out and "clears" the table for her, sending dishes, menus, cutlery crashing to the floor.
ABOUT SCHMIDT
I awoke from my night in the wilderness completely transformed. I'm like a new man. For the first time in years, I feel clear. I know what I want, I know what I've got to do, and nothing's going to stop me ever again.
Can I take your order?
Um, I'd like a plain omlette, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
Oh. Fine. I'll just have the potatoes.
I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes. Tomatoes instead. A cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
What do you mean? You don't have any tomatoes?
Only what's on the menu. You can have number two, a plain omelet. It comes with fries and rolls.
I know, but it's not what I want.
Make up your mind.
I have made up my mind. I'd like a plain omelet. No potatoes on the plate. A cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.
I'm sorry, we don't have any side orders of toast. I'll give you an English muffin or a coffee roll.
No side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don't you?
Would you like to talk to the manager?
You've got bread and a toaster of some kind?
I don't make the rules.
I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like a plain omelet and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast. No mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce, and a cup of coffee.
A number two. A chicken sal san.
Hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee.
Anything else?
Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for a chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.
You want me to hold the chicken, huh?
I want you to hold it between your knees.
You see that sign, sir? You'll all have to leave, I'm not taking any more of your smartness and your sarcasm!
You see this sign? He reaches his arm out and "clears" the table for her, sending dishes, menus, cutlery crashing to the floor.
ABOUT SCHMIDT
I awoke from my night in the wilderness completely transformed. I'm like a new man. For the first time in years, I feel clear. I know what I want, I know what I've got to do, and nothing's going to stop me ever again.
Can I take your order?
Um, I'd like a plain omlette, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, cup of coffee and wheat toast.
No substitutions.
Oh. Fine. I'll just have the potatoes.
W.H. Auden, "The Unknown Citizen"
(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Anton Chekhov bits
From one of Chekhov's letters;
"I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live! The main thing is that people should understand this and when they do, they will surely create for themselves another and a better life."
Tolstoy to Chekhov;
"I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse."
"I only wished to tell people honestly: Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live! The main thing is that people should understand this and when they do, they will surely create for themselves another and a better life."
Tolstoy to Chekhov;
"I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord"
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Upon This Rock"
Another link for you to check out. John Jeremiah Sullivan had a Christian conversion in his teens, but moved on. A GQ assignment to cover Christian rock festivals prompts a re-examination. Funny, insightful, frank, exceptionally well written.
First appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly, February 2005. The piece was selected for inclusion in The Best American Magazine Writing 2006.
First appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly, February 2005. The piece was selected for inclusion in The Best American Magazine Writing 2006.
Christian Wiman, "Gazing Into The Abyss"
"The sudden appearance of love and the galvanizing prospect of death lead a young poet back to poetry and a hope toward God.”
I've requested permission to post Christian Wiman's essay "Gazing into the Abyss." For now, I encourage you to go to The American Scholar and have a read.
Wiman is the editor of the acclaimed literary journal "Poetry."
I've requested permission to post Christian Wiman's essay "Gazing into the Abyss." For now, I encourage you to go to The American Scholar and have a read.
Wiman is the editor of the acclaimed literary journal "Poetry."
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
David Ball, "What Comes Next"
Some well-meaning teachers do their pupils grave disservice by making them read a play when the students are about to see it in a theater. Do such teachers think plays on stage are better if you already know them? How contrary to a playwright's intentions! Or do such teachers believe students can't comprehend words spoien out loud, and might be confused with all that color and movement? Alas, poor student!
Don't deprive students (or anyone else) of theater's greatest pleasure: the delicious, often suspenseful thirst to know what comes next. Imagine seeing "The Merchant of Venice" not knowing in advance if Shylock will win or lose. And imagine a teacher (or textbook) undoing that pleasure. In our not knowing lies the play's adventure.
David Ball, "Backwards & Forwards" (page 33)
Don't deprive students (or anyone else) of theater's greatest pleasure: the delicious, often suspenseful thirst to know what comes next. Imagine seeing "The Merchant of Venice" not knowing in advance if Shylock will win or lose. And imagine a teacher (or textbook) undoing that pleasure. In our not knowing lies the play's adventure.
David Ball, "Backwards & Forwards" (page 33)
Friday, June 08, 2007
Joseph Mankiewicz, "The Theatuh"
The theatuh, the theatuh - what book of rules says the theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris, or Vienna? Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the theater is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band - all theater. Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience - there's theater. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and the Lone Ranger. Sarah Bernhardt and Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex the Wild Horse, Eleanora Duse - they're all theater. You don't understand them, you don't like them all - why should you? The theater's for everybody - you included, but not exclusively - so don't approve or disapprove. It may not be your theater, but it's theater for somebody, somewhere...It's just that there's so much bourgeois in this ivory greenroom they call the theater. Sometimes it gets up around my chin.
from ALL ABOUT EVE
from ALL ABOUT EVE
Friday, June 01, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Annie Dillard, "Notes For Young Writers"
After I left Chapel Hill, I thought of many things I wish I'd said to you. Here are some of them.
Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.
A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigamarole. "Why," he said, surprised at the question, "in honor of physics!"
(Incidentally, he had been an illiterate little Arab boy without any schooling whatever, who had hitchhiked somewhere once when he was thirteen or fourteen. The driver who picked him up chatted with him for five hours, and recognized that the boy had a genius for mathematical thinking. Consequently the driver educated the boy, through his doctorate abroad, at his own expense. This sort of thing happens in Arabic countries, where the people actually practice their religion.)
If you have a choice, live at least a year in very different parts of the country.
Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. You'll go into a depression. You have to be doing something good for the world, something undeniably useful; you need exercise, too, and people.
Read for pleasure. If you like Tolstoy, read Tolstoy; if you like Dostoevsky, read Dostoevsky. Push it a little, but don't read something totally alien to your nature and then say, "I'll never be able to write like that." Of course you won't. Read books you'd like to write. If you want to write literature, read literature. Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness.
You'll have time to read after college.
Don't worry about what you do the first year after college. It's not what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.
People in the arts, I read once, take about eight years just to figure out which art they're in! Notify your parents.
MFA and MA writing programs are great fun, and many are cheap or free.
Learn grammar. Get a grammar book and read it two or three times a year (Strunk and White is a classic.)
Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.
Check the spelling; proofread. Get someone else to proofread, too.
Don't use passive verb constructions. You can rewrite any sentence.
Don't misspell dialect. Let the syntax and words suggest the pronunciation.
Don't use any word for "walk" or "say" except "walk" or "say." I know your sixth grade teacher told you otherwise. She told me otherwise, too, and is still telling her sixth graders otherwise.
Always locate the reader in time and space again and again. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time.
Don't describe feelings.
The way to a reader's emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.
If something in your narrative or poem is important, give it proportional space. I mean, actual inches. The reader has to spend time with a subject to care about it. Don't shy away from your big scenes; stretch them out.
Writing in scenes doesn't mean in television scenes. No dull dialogue: "Honey, I'm home! Where's the beer?" "In the refrigerator!" (I think most fiction contains far too much dialogue.)
Capturing the typical isn't a virtue. Only making something new and interesting is. If you find life dull and people hateful, keep thinking until you can see it another way. Why would any reader pick up a book to read a detailed description of all that is most annoying in his daily life?
Don't use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.
Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don't buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.
Buy books from independent booksellers, not chain stores. For complicated reasons, chain stores are helping stamp out literary publishing.
(Similarly, register and vote. If you don't vote, don't complain.)
Write for readers. Ask yourself how every sentence and every line will strike the reader. That way you can see if you're misleading, or boring, the reader. Of course it's hard to read your work when you've just written it; it all seems clear and powerful. Put it away and rewrite it later. Don't keep reading it over, or you'll have to wait longer to see it afresh.
Don't write about yourself. Think of books you like. Isn't it their subjects you like best? Boring people talk about themselves.
The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go.
Usually you will have to rewrite the beginning the first quarter or third of whatever it is. Don't waste much time polishing this; you'll just have to take a deep breath and throw it away anyway, once you finish the work and have a clearer sense of what it is about. Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don't need it now. This is why some writers say it takes "courage" to write. It does. Over and over you must choose the book over your own wishes and feelings.
Ignore your feelings about your work. These are an occupational hazard. If you are writing a book, keep working at it, deeper and deeper, when you feel it is awful; keep revising and improving it when you feel it is wonderful. When you are young and starting out, often it is better, however, to write something else than to labor over something that was a bad idea in the first place. Write something else; then write something else; then write something else. No matter how experienced you are, there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between your immediate feelings about your work's quality and its actual quality. All you can do is ignore your feelings altogether. It's hard to do, but you can learn to do it.
When you are writing full time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings. If you skip a day it will take three painful days to get to believing in the work again. Have a place where you can leave the work out and open, so you don't have to get it all out and spread before you can start again.
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. You have many years. You can develop a taste for good literature gradually. Keep a list of books you want to read. You soon learn that "classics" are books that are endlessly interesting almost all of them. You can keep rereading them all your life about every ten years and various ones light up for you at different stages of your life.
Don't find an interesting true story a life, say, or a historical incident, and decide to turn it into a novel instead of a biograpy or a historical account. The novel based on fact is a muddy hybrid; readers can't tell what's true. Publishers won't touch these. Write it as nonfiction if you want to write it.
If you want to write novels (and if you buy hardcover novels regularly), go ahead and write novels. Publishing has changed, however, and novels are very difficult to publish. If you want to improve the odds that people will read what you write, write nonfiction narrative.
For fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, the more research you do, the more materials you will have to play with. You are writing for readers a very educated bunch in this country. It's hard and interesting to tell them something they don't know. The more you read, the better you will know what they know.
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work's possibilities. In every work, there's an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.
Publication is not a gauge of excellence. This is harder to learn than anything about publishing, and very important. Formerly, if a manuscript was "good," it "merited" publication. This has not been true for at least twenty years, but the news hasn't filtered out to change the belief. People say, "Why, Faulkner couldn't get published today!" as if exaggerating. In fact, Faulkner certainly couldn't, and publishers don't deny it. The market for hardback fiction is rich married or widowed women over fifty (until you all start buying hardback books). The junior editors who choose new work are New York women in their twenties, who are interested in what is chic in New York that week, and who have become experts in what the older women will buy in hardcover. Eight books of nonfiction appear for every book of fiction. The chance of any manuscript coming into a publishing house and getting published is 1 in 3,000. (Agents send in most of these manuscripts. Most agents won't touch fiction.)
When a magazine rejects your story or poem, it doesn't mean it wasn't "good" enough. It means that magazine thought its particular readers didn't need that exact story or poem. Editors think of readers: what's in it for the reader? There is a cult of celebrity, too, in this country, and many magazines publish only famous people, and reject better work by unknown people.
You need to know these things somewhere in the back of your mind, and you need to forget them and write whatever you're going to write.
from IMAGE: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS & RELIGION, #16, Summer 1997
Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.
A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigamarole. "Why," he said, surprised at the question, "in honor of physics!"
(Incidentally, he had been an illiterate little Arab boy without any schooling whatever, who had hitchhiked somewhere once when he was thirteen or fourteen. The driver who picked him up chatted with him for five hours, and recognized that the boy had a genius for mathematical thinking. Consequently the driver educated the boy, through his doctorate abroad, at his own expense. This sort of thing happens in Arabic countries, where the people actually practice their religion.)
*
If you have a choice, live at least a year in very different parts of the country.
Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. You'll go into a depression. You have to be doing something good for the world, something undeniably useful; you need exercise, too, and people.
Read for pleasure. If you like Tolstoy, read Tolstoy; if you like Dostoevsky, read Dostoevsky. Push it a little, but don't read something totally alien to your nature and then say, "I'll never be able to write like that." Of course you won't. Read books you'd like to write. If you want to write literature, read literature. Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness.
You'll have time to read after college.
Don't worry about what you do the first year after college. It's not what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.
People in the arts, I read once, take about eight years just to figure out which art they're in! Notify your parents.
MFA and MA writing programs are great fun, and many are cheap or free.
Learn grammar. Get a grammar book and read it two or three times a year (Strunk and White is a classic.)
Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.
Check the spelling; proofread. Get someone else to proofread, too.
Don't use passive verb constructions. You can rewrite any sentence.
Don't misspell dialect. Let the syntax and words suggest the pronunciation.
Don't use any word for "walk" or "say" except "walk" or "say." I know your sixth grade teacher told you otherwise. She told me otherwise, too, and is still telling her sixth graders otherwise.
Always locate the reader in time and space again and again. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time.
Don't describe feelings.
The way to a reader's emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.
If something in your narrative or poem is important, give it proportional space. I mean, actual inches. The reader has to spend time with a subject to care about it. Don't shy away from your big scenes; stretch them out.
Writing in scenes doesn't mean in television scenes. No dull dialogue: "Honey, I'm home! Where's the beer?" "In the refrigerator!" (I think most fiction contains far too much dialogue.)
Capturing the typical isn't a virtue. Only making something new and interesting is. If you find life dull and people hateful, keep thinking until you can see it another way. Why would any reader pick up a book to read a detailed description of all that is most annoying in his daily life?
Don't use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.
Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don't buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.
Buy books from independent booksellers, not chain stores. For complicated reasons, chain stores are helping stamp out literary publishing.
(Similarly, register and vote. If you don't vote, don't complain.)
Write for readers. Ask yourself how every sentence and every line will strike the reader. That way you can see if you're misleading, or boring, the reader. Of course it's hard to read your work when you've just written it; it all seems clear and powerful. Put it away and rewrite it later. Don't keep reading it over, or you'll have to wait longer to see it afresh.
Don't write about yourself. Think of books you like. Isn't it their subjects you like best? Boring people talk about themselves.
The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go.
Usually you will have to rewrite the beginning the first quarter or third of whatever it is. Don't waste much time polishing this; you'll just have to take a deep breath and throw it away anyway, once you finish the work and have a clearer sense of what it is about. Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don't need it now. This is why some writers say it takes "courage" to write. It does. Over and over you must choose the book over your own wishes and feelings.
Ignore your feelings about your work. These are an occupational hazard. If you are writing a book, keep working at it, deeper and deeper, when you feel it is awful; keep revising and improving it when you feel it is wonderful. When you are young and starting out, often it is better, however, to write something else than to labor over something that was a bad idea in the first place. Write something else; then write something else; then write something else. No matter how experienced you are, there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between your immediate feelings about your work's quality and its actual quality. All you can do is ignore your feelings altogether. It's hard to do, but you can learn to do it.
When you are writing full time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings. If you skip a day it will take three painful days to get to believing in the work again. Have a place where you can leave the work out and open, so you don't have to get it all out and spread before you can start again.
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. You have many years. You can develop a taste for good literature gradually. Keep a list of books you want to read. You soon learn that "classics" are books that are endlessly interesting almost all of them. You can keep rereading them all your life about every ten years and various ones light up for you at different stages of your life.
Don't find an interesting true story a life, say, or a historical incident, and decide to turn it into a novel instead of a biograpy or a historical account. The novel based on fact is a muddy hybrid; readers can't tell what's true. Publishers won't touch these. Write it as nonfiction if you want to write it.
If you want to write novels (and if you buy hardcover novels regularly), go ahead and write novels. Publishing has changed, however, and novels are very difficult to publish. If you want to improve the odds that people will read what you write, write nonfiction narrative.
For fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, the more research you do, the more materials you will have to play with. You are writing for readers a very educated bunch in this country. It's hard and interesting to tell them something they don't know. The more you read, the better you will know what they know.
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work's possibilities. In every work, there's an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.
Publication is not a gauge of excellence. This is harder to learn than anything about publishing, and very important. Formerly, if a manuscript was "good," it "merited" publication. This has not been true for at least twenty years, but the news hasn't filtered out to change the belief. People say, "Why, Faulkner couldn't get published today!" as if exaggerating. In fact, Faulkner certainly couldn't, and publishers don't deny it. The market for hardback fiction is rich married or widowed women over fifty (until you all start buying hardback books). The junior editors who choose new work are New York women in their twenties, who are interested in what is chic in New York that week, and who have become experts in what the older women will buy in hardcover. Eight books of nonfiction appear for every book of fiction. The chance of any manuscript coming into a publishing house and getting published is 1 in 3,000. (Agents send in most of these manuscripts. Most agents won't touch fiction.)
When a magazine rejects your story or poem, it doesn't mean it wasn't "good" enough. It means that magazine thought its particular readers didn't need that exact story or poem. Editors think of readers: what's in it for the reader? There is a cult of celebrity, too, in this country, and many magazines publish only famous people, and reject better work by unknown people.
You need to know these things somewhere in the back of your mind, and you need to forget them and write whatever you're going to write.
from IMAGE: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS & RELIGION, #16, Summer 1997
Monday, May 14, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Billy Collins, "The Movies"
I would like to watch a movie tonight
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,
a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,
or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me
so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.
I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.
I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach
to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.
I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger
who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.
Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,
helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache
and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station
and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook
and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.
from "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins
Garrison Keillor reads this - wonderfully - at The Writers Almanac for Thursday, April 12, where there's also a link to buy the Collins book. You can subscribe to Garry The K's podcast through iTunes. Thanks, Spencer, for the tip.
More about the movies at Soul Food Movies
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,
a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,
or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me
so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.
I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.
I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach
to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.
I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger
who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.
Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,
helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache
and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station
and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook
and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.
from "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins
Garrison Keillor reads this - wonderfully - at The Writers Almanac for Thursday, April 12, where there's also a link to buy the Collins book. You can subscribe to Garry The K's podcast through iTunes. Thanks, Spencer, for the tip.
More about the movies at Soul Food Movies
Friday, March 30, 2007
J.R.R. Tolkien, "Tales That Really Matter"
"I don't like anything here at all," said Frodo, "step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid."
"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales ever end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner."
from The Lord Of The Rings, Book IV, Chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales ever end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner."
from The Lord Of The Rings, Book IV, Chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", by J.R.R. Tolkien
Wendell Berry, "The Story In Which We Are Taking Part"
The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part. If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment or history or economics or technology, then, however pleasant or painful the part we play, it cannot matter much. Its significance is that of mere self-concern. "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing," as Macbeth says when he has "supp'd full with horrors" and is "aweary of the sun."
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance.
from "Christianity And The Survival Of Creation" by Wendell Berry
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance.
from "Christianity And The Survival Of Creation" by Wendell Berry
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Ron Reed, "Redeeming The Time: Live Theatre"
Is the theatre really dead? Everyone asked that question in the early Fifties, and it probably wasn't new even then. Simon and Garfunkel reiterated it in 1966 and now, a few years into this media-saturated new millennium, it's as timely and embarrassing a question as ever.
We were a dominant cultural force a mere hundred years ago, the place to go for communal stories, public dreams. Until our flashy celluloid kid sister showed up to hog the spotlight, joined onstage by her even brasher little broadcast brother. Their economies of scale and marketing muscle mean live theatre now occupies a dimly lit corner of the public stage, shabbily costumed and almost unnoticed, somewhere near the stage-left exit.
Post-modern culture is notoriously – and increasingly – word-resistant and image-oriented, not to mention fractured, hurried and advertised-to. Fast, cheap and out of control. (Maybe it's not theatre that's dying, maybe it's our culture that's killing itself). Consumers – which is what we're being reduced to – aren't likely even to hear about what's going on at the local skit factory: we can't afford the billboards, and electronic media looks after its own. Even when word does leak out, this language-rooted art form lacks the jump cuts, digital effects and – let's face it – graphic violence and sex that sells its flashier sibs.
So. Is the theatre really dead? If by dead you mean we're not the most visible cultural juggernaut in the neighbourhood then, yes, we're as near-dead now as thirty-five or fifty years ago – not completely, but pretty much. Us and the poets, the string quartets and the speakers of Esperanto. But if you mean dead as in dead - not breathing, no pulse, stage lights off, nobody home – I must report that the rumours are, as always, greatly exaggerated. Theatre is live. Very much so.
And that's the point, really. Liveness. Because people still, and always will, need that one essential, irreducible distinctive of our miraculous, marginal, indispensable art form. Maybe now more than ever.
A lot of us are getting more than a little sick of the whole franchised, hyped, impersonal show. Forget Reality TV, we want Real. It became obvious in the Eighties that TV church wasn't church at all – however postmodern we might get, we'll always be human, we'll always need human contact, flesh and blood and bread and wine. And what's true of church is true of theatre – screens won't do. It's not just our sermons and small groups that need to live and breathe, it's our stories. We crave this – to breathe common air, feel the actor's closeness, smell the grease paint, roar with the crowd. We're wary and weary of words, but what if those words take flesh and live among us?
Stuart Scadron-Wattles rightly observes that the best, truest and most vital theatre – Necessary, not Obligatory, Theatre – does powerfully what we've always needed story to do. Without preaching message, it nonetheless proposes an order to the chaos of fragmented lives – and God knows they're as chaotic and fragmented as ever, just now. It engages audience and artist in a tangible kind of community, as co-creators held together by the distinctly participative and permissive imagination that can make theatre an experience of transcendence. Far from being culturally peripheral or irrelevant, Necessary Theatre is essential to its community, and to the lives of its audience: "it reports from the front of cultural change," and because it is produced locally (rather than shipped in bulk from massive narrative warehouses thousands of miles away), it speaks distinctively and potently to the specific concerns of its community.
Theatre & Company, which Stuart founded, is as committed to serving its region (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario) as it is to a particular spiritual or artistic mandate. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the company's spiritual/artistic mandate is worked out within the particularities of a specific geographical calling. This dynamic distinguishes all the professional theatres expressing a Judeo-Christian mandate, from Lamb's Players in San Diego and Seattle's Taproot Theatre, for example, to the remarkable proliferation of such companies north of the border – Toronto's Brookstone Theatre, Rosebud Theatre in Alberta, Pacific Theatre and the Chemainus Theatre Festival on the west coast. Live theatre may not be as visible in the trans-continental mass market as film, television or published media, but it survives by tuning its ear to its proximate community, telling the specific stories those particular people are hungry to hear. What guarantees that this home-grown, humble art form remains Necessary and essential is its very smallness, its intimacy, its specificity. Generality, as Stanislavsky said, is the enemy of art.
It is fascinating to me that, by and large, these companies were founded by evangelical Christians, even though – and this must be stressed – their mandates were and are not evangelistic. (It may also be significant that many of these people would now be wary about labeling themselves "evangelical," though all are still Christians). There have always been Christians involved in the theatre, though thirty years ago they mostly operated undercover, and I'm going to guess they were mostly Lutherans and Catholics and Anglicans who lacked their evangelical cousins' guardedness toward the arts. But I find it remarkable that so much vital, culturally-engaged work that Christians are now doing springs from soil that until so recently grew mostly gospel singers and evangelists.
Forty years ago, the prevailing Evangelical stance toward theatre was the same as its stance toward culture in general – guarded skepticism, even outright antagonism. But Baptists made the mistake of buying TVs, to watch Billy Graham and Monday night football. Once those square-eyed Trojan horses infiltrated evangelical living rooms, the mighty fortress of cultural separationism was breached and it was only a matter of time until the kids were going to movies and trying out for the school play. When they left home for theatre school twenty-five years ago, they were hard-pressed to find believing peers, let alone role models or mentors, but their children are now signing up for actor training and playwriting workshops with no clue that their grandparents didn't even go to the movies. Indeed, the theatre program they attend may be at the very college where Grandpa learned his anti-culture theology. I don't know if Wheaton students were allowed to go to plays thirty years ago: now they're making them.
Other signs of life. After a decade or more when no new religious-mandate professional companies were birthed, recent years have seen new initiatives in New York City (the Salvation Army's Theatre 315), Orlando (The Vine Theatre) and Atlanta (Art Within), with a some Baylor theatre grads about to raise the curtain on a new venture in Dallas. Even the theologians are catching on: Jeremy Begbie, whose notion of "doing theology through the arts" is all the rage in certain circles, and Hans Urs von Balthazar, the It Boy of Catholic theology, share an appreciation for theatre their pastor-shaping predecessors lacked.
Good thing. Increasingly, the churches those seminarians end up pastoring have ministers of drama, acting workshops and even well-equipped theatres. Congregations are mounting full-scale productions of real plays, embracing the power of theatre-making to forge community and appeal to a generation of non-church-goers who don't want to be preached at, but are hungry for both story and authentic human contact.
The church is catching on to theatre just as theatre is catching on to church – or if not church, at least what churches have been reaching for all these years. I don't know if it's because everybody got all superstitious as the millennium approached, or if the collapse of the World Trade Towers put not only fear but the fear of God into people. Or maybe it's just because Christians have been emerging from their hidey-holes and getting involved in the culture, until we've reached the point where enough of them know enough of us that we all realize there's not really an Us and a Them anymore.
Whatever it is, there's no denying that the arts community's suspicious antipathy toward Christians and Christianity is being replaced by – dare I imagine it? – an almost respectful interest in what we've been on about all along.
Live theatre is an up-close and local thing, which makes it harder to generalize about Theatre In North America than about, say, film or fiction, which have a geographically dispersed audience and impact. So let me reflect on what I've seen over the past twenty years here in Vancouver, on the Emersonian principle that what's true of me is true of the universe.
When Pacific Theatre was founded in 1984, the Christians portrayed on stage – or screen, for that matter – were hypocrites, manipulators and sex abusers. Most new plays didn't deal with spiritual things, except in the vaguest and flakiest terms. Now I see spiritual enquiry in every second play I attend, and as often as not Christian characters are portrayed with the same humanity as anybody else – neither more nor less fallen, neither more nor less holy.
For the first decade of our history, Pacific Theatre was excluded from pretty much every aspect of the cultural mainstream: no government arts funding, no reviews, no admission to the Theatre Alliance. But the second ten years of our story has seen a dramatic reversal. Critics cover all our shows and even applaud the company's religious mandate, government agencies fund and encourage our work, and the professional theatre community welcomes us at the table, gives us our fair share of award nominations and committee assignments, comes to see our work.
Have we "won the right to be heard"? I suppose, partly. Sheer survival counts for something, and eventually people had to realize we weren't the proselytizing monsters they feared we were. But more, I believe, something has shifted in the zeitgeist. People are not only willing to tolerate us, they want to hear what we have to say, find out our spiritual survival strategies. Modernism, and its mystery-denying faith in science and pure rationality, has all but expired. Post-modernism's scorn for narrative and meaning don't wash any more. People – some people, anyway – want Mystery and humanity.
It astounds me that the Pacific Theatre plays which end up being produced at companies with no religious mandate are our most religious ones. Who would ever have believed that Tent Meeting, a play about gospel quartets and revival meetings and climaxing with an altar call, and Espresso, where the pursuing lover is Christ himself, would be performed at regional theatres across Canada?
Twenty years ago, non-propagandist scripts exploring spiritual experience with any sort of Christian resonance just weren't out there – we had to write our own. Which was fine: it made us nurture playwrights who create highly specific works for our context which – Emerson, again – end up having far wider impact than anything confined to our stage. But that's no longer our only recourse: my next season includes two new works from Canadian theatres with no faith mandate; Halo, in which the face of Christ appears on the wall of a Cape Breton donut shop, and The Domino Heart, about the spiritual consequences of an organ transplant. We're no longer the only game in town. Thank God.
Still, as spiritually open as theatre may now be, our days as Belle of the cultural Ball are long since passed. But they can't stop us from dancing. There will always be people born with story in their bones, and a compulsion to incarnate them in front of other people. Because the movies only need a handful of us – a flick with maybe fifty speaking parts will be seen by how many million people? – we find other ways to live out our calling. That's what the stage is for.
Something is stirring in live theatre on our continent. It may be that ours is the most peripheral of the narrative arts, with the least visibility and the lowest attendance. But if the invisible God is indeed moving in the arts, it wouldn't surprise me to find him in the midst of the least and the lowest.
Originally appeared in IMAGE Journal #42, Spring 2004, as part of their 15th anniversary symposium on the future of the arts, "Redeeming The Time."
We were a dominant cultural force a mere hundred years ago, the place to go for communal stories, public dreams. Until our flashy celluloid kid sister showed up to hog the spotlight, joined onstage by her even brasher little broadcast brother. Their economies of scale and marketing muscle mean live theatre now occupies a dimly lit corner of the public stage, shabbily costumed and almost unnoticed, somewhere near the stage-left exit.
Post-modern culture is notoriously – and increasingly – word-resistant and image-oriented, not to mention fractured, hurried and advertised-to. Fast, cheap and out of control. (Maybe it's not theatre that's dying, maybe it's our culture that's killing itself). Consumers – which is what we're being reduced to – aren't likely even to hear about what's going on at the local skit factory: we can't afford the billboards, and electronic media looks after its own. Even when word does leak out, this language-rooted art form lacks the jump cuts, digital effects and – let's face it – graphic violence and sex that sells its flashier sibs.
So. Is the theatre really dead? If by dead you mean we're not the most visible cultural juggernaut in the neighbourhood then, yes, we're as near-dead now as thirty-five or fifty years ago – not completely, but pretty much. Us and the poets, the string quartets and the speakers of Esperanto. But if you mean dead as in dead - not breathing, no pulse, stage lights off, nobody home – I must report that the rumours are, as always, greatly exaggerated. Theatre is live. Very much so.
And that's the point, really. Liveness. Because people still, and always will, need that one essential, irreducible distinctive of our miraculous, marginal, indispensable art form. Maybe now more than ever.
A lot of us are getting more than a little sick of the whole franchised, hyped, impersonal show. Forget Reality TV, we want Real. It became obvious in the Eighties that TV church wasn't church at all – however postmodern we might get, we'll always be human, we'll always need human contact, flesh and blood and bread and wine. And what's true of church is true of theatre – screens won't do. It's not just our sermons and small groups that need to live and breathe, it's our stories. We crave this – to breathe common air, feel the actor's closeness, smell the grease paint, roar with the crowd. We're wary and weary of words, but what if those words take flesh and live among us?
Stuart Scadron-Wattles rightly observes that the best, truest and most vital theatre – Necessary, not Obligatory, Theatre – does powerfully what we've always needed story to do. Without preaching message, it nonetheless proposes an order to the chaos of fragmented lives – and God knows they're as chaotic and fragmented as ever, just now. It engages audience and artist in a tangible kind of community, as co-creators held together by the distinctly participative and permissive imagination that can make theatre an experience of transcendence. Far from being culturally peripheral or irrelevant, Necessary Theatre is essential to its community, and to the lives of its audience: "it reports from the front of cultural change," and because it is produced locally (rather than shipped in bulk from massive narrative warehouses thousands of miles away), it speaks distinctively and potently to the specific concerns of its community.
Theatre & Company, which Stuart founded, is as committed to serving its region (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario) as it is to a particular spiritual or artistic mandate. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the company's spiritual/artistic mandate is worked out within the particularities of a specific geographical calling. This dynamic distinguishes all the professional theatres expressing a Judeo-Christian mandate, from Lamb's Players in San Diego and Seattle's Taproot Theatre, for example, to the remarkable proliferation of such companies north of the border – Toronto's Brookstone Theatre, Rosebud Theatre in Alberta, Pacific Theatre and the Chemainus Theatre Festival on the west coast. Live theatre may not be as visible in the trans-continental mass market as film, television or published media, but it survives by tuning its ear to its proximate community, telling the specific stories those particular people are hungry to hear. What guarantees that this home-grown, humble art form remains Necessary and essential is its very smallness, its intimacy, its specificity. Generality, as Stanislavsky said, is the enemy of art.
It is fascinating to me that, by and large, these companies were founded by evangelical Christians, even though – and this must be stressed – their mandates were and are not evangelistic. (It may also be significant that many of these people would now be wary about labeling themselves "evangelical," though all are still Christians). There have always been Christians involved in the theatre, though thirty years ago they mostly operated undercover, and I'm going to guess they were mostly Lutherans and Catholics and Anglicans who lacked their evangelical cousins' guardedness toward the arts. But I find it remarkable that so much vital, culturally-engaged work that Christians are now doing springs from soil that until so recently grew mostly gospel singers and evangelists.
Forty years ago, the prevailing Evangelical stance toward theatre was the same as its stance toward culture in general – guarded skepticism, even outright antagonism. But Baptists made the mistake of buying TVs, to watch Billy Graham and Monday night football. Once those square-eyed Trojan horses infiltrated evangelical living rooms, the mighty fortress of cultural separationism was breached and it was only a matter of time until the kids were going to movies and trying out for the school play. When they left home for theatre school twenty-five years ago, they were hard-pressed to find believing peers, let alone role models or mentors, but their children are now signing up for actor training and playwriting workshops with no clue that their grandparents didn't even go to the movies. Indeed, the theatre program they attend may be at the very college where Grandpa learned his anti-culture theology. I don't know if Wheaton students were allowed to go to plays thirty years ago: now they're making them.
Other signs of life. After a decade or more when no new religious-mandate professional companies were birthed, recent years have seen new initiatives in New York City (the Salvation Army's Theatre 315), Orlando (The Vine Theatre) and Atlanta (Art Within), with a some Baylor theatre grads about to raise the curtain on a new venture in Dallas. Even the theologians are catching on: Jeremy Begbie, whose notion of "doing theology through the arts" is all the rage in certain circles, and Hans Urs von Balthazar, the It Boy of Catholic theology, share an appreciation for theatre their pastor-shaping predecessors lacked.
Good thing. Increasingly, the churches those seminarians end up pastoring have ministers of drama, acting workshops and even well-equipped theatres. Congregations are mounting full-scale productions of real plays, embracing the power of theatre-making to forge community and appeal to a generation of non-church-goers who don't want to be preached at, but are hungry for both story and authentic human contact.
The church is catching on to theatre just as theatre is catching on to church – or if not church, at least what churches have been reaching for all these years. I don't know if it's because everybody got all superstitious as the millennium approached, or if the collapse of the World Trade Towers put not only fear but the fear of God into people. Or maybe it's just because Christians have been emerging from their hidey-holes and getting involved in the culture, until we've reached the point where enough of them know enough of us that we all realize there's not really an Us and a Them anymore.
Whatever it is, there's no denying that the arts community's suspicious antipathy toward Christians and Christianity is being replaced by – dare I imagine it? – an almost respectful interest in what we've been on about all along.
Live theatre is an up-close and local thing, which makes it harder to generalize about Theatre In North America than about, say, film or fiction, which have a geographically dispersed audience and impact. So let me reflect on what I've seen over the past twenty years here in Vancouver, on the Emersonian principle that what's true of me is true of the universe.
When Pacific Theatre was founded in 1984, the Christians portrayed on stage – or screen, for that matter – were hypocrites, manipulators and sex abusers. Most new plays didn't deal with spiritual things, except in the vaguest and flakiest terms. Now I see spiritual enquiry in every second play I attend, and as often as not Christian characters are portrayed with the same humanity as anybody else – neither more nor less fallen, neither more nor less holy.
For the first decade of our history, Pacific Theatre was excluded from pretty much every aspect of the cultural mainstream: no government arts funding, no reviews, no admission to the Theatre Alliance. But the second ten years of our story has seen a dramatic reversal. Critics cover all our shows and even applaud the company's religious mandate, government agencies fund and encourage our work, and the professional theatre community welcomes us at the table, gives us our fair share of award nominations and committee assignments, comes to see our work.
Have we "won the right to be heard"? I suppose, partly. Sheer survival counts for something, and eventually people had to realize we weren't the proselytizing monsters they feared we were. But more, I believe, something has shifted in the zeitgeist. People are not only willing to tolerate us, they want to hear what we have to say, find out our spiritual survival strategies. Modernism, and its mystery-denying faith in science and pure rationality, has all but expired. Post-modernism's scorn for narrative and meaning don't wash any more. People – some people, anyway – want Mystery and humanity.
It astounds me that the Pacific Theatre plays which end up being produced at companies with no religious mandate are our most religious ones. Who would ever have believed that Tent Meeting, a play about gospel quartets and revival meetings and climaxing with an altar call, and Espresso, where the pursuing lover is Christ himself, would be performed at regional theatres across Canada?
Twenty years ago, non-propagandist scripts exploring spiritual experience with any sort of Christian resonance just weren't out there – we had to write our own. Which was fine: it made us nurture playwrights who create highly specific works for our context which – Emerson, again – end up having far wider impact than anything confined to our stage. But that's no longer our only recourse: my next season includes two new works from Canadian theatres with no faith mandate; Halo, in which the face of Christ appears on the wall of a Cape Breton donut shop, and The Domino Heart, about the spiritual consequences of an organ transplant. We're no longer the only game in town. Thank God.
Still, as spiritually open as theatre may now be, our days as Belle of the cultural Ball are long since passed. But they can't stop us from dancing. There will always be people born with story in their bones, and a compulsion to incarnate them in front of other people. Because the movies only need a handful of us – a flick with maybe fifty speaking parts will be seen by how many million people? – we find other ways to live out our calling. That's what the stage is for.
Something is stirring in live theatre on our continent. It may be that ours is the most peripheral of the narrative arts, with the least visibility and the lowest attendance. But if the invisible God is indeed moving in the arts, it wouldn't surprise me to find him in the midst of the least and the lowest.
Originally appeared in IMAGE Journal #42, Spring 2004, as part of their 15th anniversary symposium on the future of the arts, "Redeeming The Time."
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Steven Soderbergh's Oscar Acceptance Speech
I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think the world would be unlivable without art.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
For Lent, I'm giving up...
It's not
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
So just...
Give up
Aimee Mann, "Wise Up"
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
So just...
Give up
Aimee Mann, "Wise Up"
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
E15, "The Actor's Calling"
To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
James Dean
Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play…
Alan Rickman
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
Regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
The camera doesn’t remind me of a gun, but it does remind me of a weapon. I believe the revolution will be fought with a camera, with films, and at a certain point guns will be unfeasible. Minds will be won in the theatre instead of on the battlefield.
Dennis Hopper
An actor, like every human being, has a very thin part of him which he uses all the time and which he considers to be himself. There is a vast area which is himself that he doesn’t know. By experimenting and taking risks a new process starts – what one actor once called a ‘number of drawers’ in himself that he has never opened.
Peter Brook
We don’t want bores in the theatre. Give us something that is different.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.
Uta Hagen
Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve it them where they live.
Shelley Winters
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
Sarah Bernhardt
Quotes from the prospectus of the East 15 Acting School, Essex, England
James Dean
Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play…
Alan Rickman
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
Regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
The camera doesn’t remind me of a gun, but it does remind me of a weapon. I believe the revolution will be fought with a camera, with films, and at a certain point guns will be unfeasible. Minds will be won in the theatre instead of on the battlefield.
Dennis Hopper
An actor, like every human being, has a very thin part of him which he uses all the time and which he considers to be himself. There is a vast area which is himself that he doesn’t know. By experimenting and taking risks a new process starts – what one actor once called a ‘number of drawers’ in himself that he has never opened.
Peter Brook
We don’t want bores in the theatre. Give us something that is different.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.
Uta Hagen
Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve it them where they live.
Shelley Winters
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
Sarah Bernhardt
Quotes from the prospectus of the East 15 Acting School, Essex, England
Friday, February 16, 2007
Aaron Zeitlin poem
Praise me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me.
Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise,
says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy,
says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.
Aaron Zeitlin
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me.
Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise,
says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy,
says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.
Aaron Zeitlin
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Eighteenth-Century Playbill
An 18th-Century Playbill
This evening, and during the summer season, will be performed several new exercises of
Rope Dancing, Tumbling, Vaulting, Equilibrium, Ladder Dancing and Balancing,
by Madame Kerman,
Sampson Rogetzi,
Monsieur German
and Mesieur Dominique,
With a new Grand Dance, called Apollo and Daphne,
by Mr. Phillips,
Mrs. Lebrune,
and others.
Singing by Mrs Phillips and Mrs Jackson.
Likewise the Extraordinary Performance of Herr von Eckenberg,
who imitates the lark, thrush, blackbird, goldfish,
canary-bird, flageolet and German flute.
A Sailor’s Dance by Mr Phillips.
And Mesieur Dominique flies through a Hogshead and Forces Both Ends Out.
To which will be added The Harlot’s Progress:
Harlequin by Mr. Phillips,
Miss Kitty by Mrs Phillips.
Also an Exact Representation of the late Glorious Victory
gained over the French at the Battle of Dettingen,
with the taking of the White Household Standard by the Scots Greys,
Blowing Up the bridge, and Destroying and Drowning most part of the French Army.
Every evening
at five o’clock.
This evening, and during the summer season, will be performed several new exercises of
Rope Dancing, Tumbling, Vaulting, Equilibrium, Ladder Dancing and Balancing,
by Madame Kerman,
Sampson Rogetzi,
Monsieur German
and Mesieur Dominique,
With a new Grand Dance, called Apollo and Daphne,
by Mr. Phillips,
Mrs. Lebrune,
and others.
Singing by Mrs Phillips and Mrs Jackson.
Likewise the Extraordinary Performance of Herr von Eckenberg,
who imitates the lark, thrush, blackbird, goldfish,
canary-bird, flageolet and German flute.
A Sailor’s Dance by Mr Phillips.
And Mesieur Dominique flies through a Hogshead and Forces Both Ends Out.
To which will be added The Harlot’s Progress:
Harlequin by Mr. Phillips,
Miss Kitty by Mrs Phillips.
Also an Exact Representation of the late Glorious Victory
gained over the French at the Battle of Dettingen,
with the taking of the White Household Standard by the Scots Greys,
Blowing Up the bridge, and Destroying and Drowning most part of the French Army.
Every evening
at five o’clock.
Welles, Guthrie, Mamet - On Theatre
I believe the Theatre, like Ballet and Grand Opera, is already an anachronism. The Theatre, as we know it, is now in its last stages; the end cannot be far off.
Orson Welles
I think the Theatre will survive. It is bound to, as long as mankind demands to be amused, terrified, interested, shocked, corrupted and delighted.
Tyrone Guthrie
We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic – we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times.
David Mamet
Orson Welles
I think the Theatre will survive. It is bound to, as long as mankind demands to be amused, terrified, interested, shocked, corrupted and delighted.
Tyrone Guthrie
We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic – we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times.
David Mamet
David Mamet, "Theater & Dreams"
The theater is an expression of our dream life, our unconscious aspirations – a response to that which is best, most troubled, most visionary in our society.
In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious rational mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally – e.g. how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect – our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete. We feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.
Ecclesiastes 9:12. "For man also know it's not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil man, and as the birds that are caught in a snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it follows a suddenly upon them."
The solution is the dream.
The theatrical artist serves the same function in society that dreams do in our subconscious life-the subconscious life of the individual. We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic-we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times – that soul both observed by and expressed in the artist.
We all dream each night, but sometimes we are reluctant to remember a dream; just so we, as a collective artistic unity, create poetic theatrical dreams, but it sometimes we are reluctant to remember (stage, acccept, support) them.
The mass media pander to the low and the lowest of the low in the human experience. They, finally, debase us through the sheer weight of their mindlessness. Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams – like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.
Who is going to speak up? Who's going to speak for the human spirit? The artist. The actor. Dedicated to the idea that the theater is the place we go to hear the truth.
Theatre – true theatre – is an art whose benefits will cheer us, and will warm us, it will care for us, and to elevate our soul out of the story times. The place we can go to hear the truth.
From three essays in "Writing In Restaurants" by David Mamet;
"A National Dream-Life"
"A Tradition of the Theater as Art"
"Decay: Some Thoughts For Actors"
In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious rational mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally – e.g. how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect – our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete. We feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.
Ecclesiastes 9:12. "For man also know it's not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil man, and as the birds that are caught in a snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it follows a suddenly upon them."
The solution is the dream.
The theatrical artist serves the same function in society that dreams do in our subconscious life-the subconscious life of the individual. We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic-we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times – that soul both observed by and expressed in the artist.
We all dream each night, but sometimes we are reluctant to remember a dream; just so we, as a collective artistic unity, create poetic theatrical dreams, but it sometimes we are reluctant to remember (stage, acccept, support) them.
The mass media pander to the low and the lowest of the low in the human experience. They, finally, debase us through the sheer weight of their mindlessness. Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams – like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.
Who is going to speak up? Who's going to speak for the human spirit? The artist. The actor. Dedicated to the idea that the theater is the place we go to hear the truth.
Theatre – true theatre – is an art whose benefits will cheer us, and will warm us, it will care for us, and to elevate our soul out of the story times. The place we can go to hear the truth.
From three essays in "Writing In Restaurants" by David Mamet;
"A National Dream-Life"
"A Tradition of the Theater as Art"
"Decay: Some Thoughts For Actors"
Ron Reed, scenes from "A Bright Particular Star"
Henry Irving & His Wife
It was at the opening of “The Bells,” you will remember that, Henry Irving's first great triumph. Some three or four years after had married and retired from the stage. Mr. Irving arranged for his wife, Florence, to sit in a box with their friends, the Hain-Friswells I believe it must have been. After the ovation – there were several curtain calls, absolutely everyone knew it to be a smashing success, and Mr. Irving in particular – his wife waited outside in a carriage as he made his way back to her through a thicket of well-wishers. As they drove home, Irving was ecstatic – he was the toast of the London theater. “Florence, we shall soon have our own coach and a pair!” To which his wife replied, "are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" He did not reply, except to order the driver to stop as they passed Hyde Park corner. Mr. Irving got out of the carriage and walked away, never to return home or speak to his wife again.
It was at the opening of “The Bells,” you will remember that, Henry Irving's first great triumph. Some three or four years after had married and retired from the stage. Mr. Irving arranged for his wife, Florence, to sit in a box with their friends, the Hain-Friswells I believe it must have been. After the ovation – there were several curtain calls, absolutely everyone knew it to be a smashing success, and Mr. Irving in particular – his wife waited outside in a carriage as he made his way back to her through a thicket of well-wishers. As they drove home, Irving was ecstatic – he was the toast of the London theater. “Florence, we shall soon have our own coach and a pair!” To which his wife replied, "are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" He did not reply, except to order the driver to stop as they passed Hyde Park corner. Mr. Irving got out of the carriage and walked away, never to return home or speak to his wife again.
*
Mark Twain on Junius Brutus Booth
(deleted scene)
Junius Brutus Booth. They say he left a tremendous theatrical legacy in this country prior to his triumphant return to the American stage. Fact is he fled to the States, at least that's how the story plays on my side of the pond. Traded his wife for Covent Garden flower girl, booked a pair of schooner tickets home to the United States of, and never looked back. Junius Brutus Booth and his offspring, the Booth boys, Edwin and John Wilkes, true blue native sons; braggarts, madmen, drunkards, and assassins – drunkards most of all. They do our nation proud.
Before his hasty departure from these sceptred shores, Junius toured England playing any theater that would have him, provided there was a pub within staggering distance of the stage door. Mr. Booth believed in the balanced life – excess in all things, including vanity and contempt for his audience. If he must interrupt his drinking to suffer the twin indignities of donning tights and a British accent, they were damn well going to listen, and he took it upon himself to do what ever he deemed necessary to encourage their rapt attention.
Do you know Manchester? Nothing but factories and, what was worse, factory workers – at least, that is how Booth saw it. Button factories. Booth was engaged to play the role of Hamlet as a visiting guest star for a Manchester company. At one particular performance it seems that Junius found the attentions of his working-class audience insufficient, to the point where, come the dueling scene, Mr. Booth saw fit to enliven the festivities for the enjoyment of his buccaneering spectators. He undertook to beat poor Laertes to a bloody pulp with his bare fists. The stunned audience fell silent. When at last the local actor laid bleeding and unconscious at his feet, Junius Brutus Booth turned to the crowd and said, "So what do you think of that, you bunch of damn button makers?" Oh, the life of the theater.
Do you ever have occasion to improvise in such a manner, Miss Ward?
*
Lilia Dreams
Charlie. I am in awe of the work you are doing amongst the poor.
Lilia. I’m no Octavia Hill! I visit with people who look like they want to talk, that's all. Most often I have to be at home. It's no hardship to sing a song or recite a poem.
Charlie. Not for you!
Lilia. No. That's just how I’m made.
Charlie. I like how you’re made.
(Silence)
Lilia. But this isn’t all, you know, all I'm meant to do. I feel it when I play in Shakespeare. I feel it when I can do something for one of the tenants, something that actually makes a difference. I have work to do, work the world has need of. Only – I am not doing it!
Charlie. Perhaps you are.
Lilia. I'm not! Otherwise, why this yearning? I'm made for something bigger, Charlie, something... Something I don't know.
Charlie. You need a larger stage, that's all.
Lilia. When my father speaks, people are enthralled. They say it is like listening to Jesus.
Charlie. You can sense it in his books.
Lilia. In Philadelphia, 3000 people crammed into a 2800 seat theater to hear him speak, about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" if you can believe it. And they said it was better than any sermon they had ever heard! That God spoke through him.
Charlie. I believe that.
Lilia. What if I have that in me? And I do nothing but babysit my brothers and read poems to the poor people.
Charlie. Those sacrifices may be of more account than you know.
Lilia. And they may be of less! I think it lives in me, just as it does in my father. Sometimes it presses so hard inside me, I fear it will seep out through my skin if I don't find a way to let it out! That I will bleed from the eyes! (Beat) I'm sorry.
Charlie. No!
Lilia. I've never spoken of these things.
Charlie. No.
Lilia. Something takes hold when I'm on a stage, inside a character. And it could transform people, somehow. Why am I telling you all this? I don't even know you, and I pour my silly ideas in your ear! I feel embarrassed.
(Charlie looks in her eyes, then leans over and kisses her tentatively on the cheek.)
Lilia. Oh my. Charlie. Now I feel embarrassed.
*
George MacDonald on Theatre
(from an actual letter)
Mark Twain on Junius Brutus Booth
(deleted scene)
Junius Brutus Booth. They say he left a tremendous theatrical legacy in this country prior to his triumphant return to the American stage. Fact is he fled to the States, at least that's how the story plays on my side of the pond. Traded his wife for Covent Garden flower girl, booked a pair of schooner tickets home to the United States of, and never looked back. Junius Brutus Booth and his offspring, the Booth boys, Edwin and John Wilkes, true blue native sons; braggarts, madmen, drunkards, and assassins – drunkards most of all. They do our nation proud.
Before his hasty departure from these sceptred shores, Junius toured England playing any theater that would have him, provided there was a pub within staggering distance of the stage door. Mr. Booth believed in the balanced life – excess in all things, including vanity and contempt for his audience. If he must interrupt his drinking to suffer the twin indignities of donning tights and a British accent, they were damn well going to listen, and he took it upon himself to do what ever he deemed necessary to encourage their rapt attention.
Do you know Manchester? Nothing but factories and, what was worse, factory workers – at least, that is how Booth saw it. Button factories. Booth was engaged to play the role of Hamlet as a visiting guest star for a Manchester company. At one particular performance it seems that Junius found the attentions of his working-class audience insufficient, to the point where, come the dueling scene, Mr. Booth saw fit to enliven the festivities for the enjoyment of his buccaneering spectators. He undertook to beat poor Laertes to a bloody pulp with his bare fists. The stunned audience fell silent. When at last the local actor laid bleeding and unconscious at his feet, Junius Brutus Booth turned to the crowd and said, "So what do you think of that, you bunch of damn button makers?" Oh, the life of the theater.
Do you ever have occasion to improvise in such a manner, Miss Ward?
*
Lilia Dreams
Charlie. I am in awe of the work you are doing amongst the poor.
Lilia. I’m no Octavia Hill! I visit with people who look like they want to talk, that's all. Most often I have to be at home. It's no hardship to sing a song or recite a poem.
Charlie. Not for you!
Lilia. No. That's just how I’m made.
Charlie. I like how you’re made.
(Silence)
Lilia. But this isn’t all, you know, all I'm meant to do. I feel it when I play in Shakespeare. I feel it when I can do something for one of the tenants, something that actually makes a difference. I have work to do, work the world has need of. Only – I am not doing it!
Charlie. Perhaps you are.
Lilia. I'm not! Otherwise, why this yearning? I'm made for something bigger, Charlie, something... Something I don't know.
Charlie. You need a larger stage, that's all.
Lilia. When my father speaks, people are enthralled. They say it is like listening to Jesus.
Charlie. You can sense it in his books.
Lilia. In Philadelphia, 3000 people crammed into a 2800 seat theater to hear him speak, about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" if you can believe it. And they said it was better than any sermon they had ever heard! That God spoke through him.
Charlie. I believe that.
Lilia. What if I have that in me? And I do nothing but babysit my brothers and read poems to the poor people.
Charlie. Those sacrifices may be of more account than you know.
Lilia. And they may be of less! I think it lives in me, just as it does in my father. Sometimes it presses so hard inside me, I fear it will seep out through my skin if I don't find a way to let it out! That I will bleed from the eyes! (Beat) I'm sorry.
Charlie. No!
Lilia. I've never spoken of these things.
Charlie. No.
Lilia. Something takes hold when I'm on a stage, inside a character. And it could transform people, somehow. Why am I telling you all this? I don't even know you, and I pour my silly ideas in your ear! I feel embarrassed.
(Charlie looks in her eyes, then leans over and kisses her tentatively on the cheek.)
Lilia. Oh my. Charlie. Now I feel embarrassed.
*
George MacDonald on Theatre
(from an actual letter)
It has come to my recent attention that a number of your circle have expressed disapproval of the theatrical work carried out by my family. Let me say this. What society so called may say or do, I simply will not heed one straw! We are only taking up an art that has been unjustly undervalued and left too much to unfit representation, and I shall not hesitate to take my share with my children. The time is short, and there is none for humbug, whether social or ecclesiastical. There is time only for truth and justice and graciousness and lovingkindness, and we hope to learn and teach some of all these things. What God has put in us, we will let come out, and not be ashamed!
Yours, Dr. George MacDonald
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Christopher Durang, "Peter Pan"
When I was eight years old, someone brought me to this... theatre. Full of lots of other children. We were supposed to be watching a production of Peter Pan. And I remember that something seemed terribly wrong with the whole production. Odd things kept happening.
For instance, when the children would fly, the ropes they were on would just keep breaking ... and the actors would come thumping to the ground and they had to be carried off by stagehands. And there seemed to be an unlimited supply of understudies, to take their places, and then they'd just fall to the ground. And then the crocodile that chases Captain Hook, seemed to be a real crocodile, it wasn't an actor. And at one point it fell off the stage and crushed a couple of kids in the front row. And then some of the understudies came and took their places in the audience. And from scene to scene, Wendy just seemed to get fatter and fatter until finally by the end of act one she was completely immobile and they had to move her off stage with a cart.
You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, "Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won't die."
So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, "That wasn't enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead." And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.
I don't think that any of us were ever the same after that experience. It certainly turned me against theatre. And even more damagingly, I think it's warped my total sense of life. I mean nothing seems worth trying if Tinkerbell is just going to die.
from 'Denity Crisis
by Christopher Durang
For instance, when the children would fly, the ropes they were on would just keep breaking ... and the actors would come thumping to the ground and they had to be carried off by stagehands. And there seemed to be an unlimited supply of understudies, to take their places, and then they'd just fall to the ground. And then the crocodile that chases Captain Hook, seemed to be a real crocodile, it wasn't an actor. And at one point it fell off the stage and crushed a couple of kids in the front row. And then some of the understudies came and took their places in the audience. And from scene to scene, Wendy just seemed to get fatter and fatter until finally by the end of act one she was completely immobile and they had to move her off stage with a cart.
You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, "Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won't die."
So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, "That wasn't enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead." And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.
I don't think that any of us were ever the same after that experience. It certainly turned me against theatre. And even more damagingly, I think it's warped my total sense of life. I mean nothing seems worth trying if Tinkerbell is just going to die.
from 'Denity Crisis
by Christopher Durang
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