***
Back in 1985, the brilliant Martin Short captured the weasel-like quality of certain political figures with his portrayal of Nathan Thurm, uncontrolled liar. As a bonus, in this comedy sketch Short also appears as the character Irving Cohen, a 90 year old vaudevillian who gets called before the House Un-american Activities Committee.
Thanks to YouTuber CrazyFunVideos
***
Stephen Fry leads Hugh Laurie in a masterpiece of pedagogical punditry.
Thanks to YouTuber irehouse
***
The first line of Hamlet, like many first lines of Shakespeare, announces the theme: “Who’s there?” For Denmark, like the countries we inhabit, is a place where no one is sure who is watching whom, who the enemy is, or on a more metaphysical plane, who makes up the person one calls oneself. Identities are questioned from the outside and the inside. Who and what is real? Can we know others? Can others know us? Can we know ourselves?
Denmark is a prison says Hamlet. It’s a country that seems to be perpetually at War. In such a world, where the enemy can sneak upon you at any moment, nothing is private. The State dominates through surveillance of actions and thoughts. The dangerous one is the one who keeps to him or herself. The notion of privacy has disappeared.
In No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald’s book concerning the revelation of ongoing, illegal, mass warrantless surveillance by the American government, he makes a point that is often overlooked: it is not possible for human beings to grow and develop normally in a society where there is no privacy. Privacy is a necessary condition for being able to try out different versions of ourselves, to both invent and to find out just who we are. To keep sane.
But Denmark is a prison.
In a government where the will of the people is feared, the alarm must sound for Hamlet—Claudius warily declares that “madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” Hamlet feigns madness as protection, to save his true self from scrutiny. Madness acts as a protective shell, the soul’s attempt to keep from being “too much in the sun.” There is no place for Hamlet to feel his feelings without the glare of the court on him. Even his most intimate conversations with Ophelia are watched. Like the sacred ceremony being recorded by an anthropologist, sacredness evaporates. There is no room for the sacred under such conditions, even though humans must have such a place or go mad. The early Shakespeare commentators asked whether Hamlet was really mad or only feigning it. He is both: he feigns madness and is driven mad by his panopticon society.
Hamlet eludes. He puts on an antic disposition. He play acts. What is a human being that s/he can act? For centuries, actors were reviled and cursed, classified with beggars, thieves and prostitutes. They were shapeshifters, untrustworthy, not what they seemed. Worse, an actor seems to have no center. Indeed, Borges once wrote that that was Shakespeare’s glory and curse—Shakespeare was everything and nothing. Everything because he was nothing.
Denmark is a prison. It’s a prison because there is nowhere to hide. A place becomes a prison when there is nowhere to be alone, no way to find out who you are. You are constantly being defined by others, being told who you are, who you must be, what you must do.
But the actor escapes definition. The actor is subversive of the whole notion of fixed identity; subversive of the notion of control. It’s, paradoxically, in the act of acting that Hamlet finds the truth and frees himself.
When we wonder whether art can be revolutionary, an act of resistance, it serves well to remember that every government in the world throughout history has sought to control its art. Surely that must be a salve to those who are not certain whether their efforts are useful. We don’t always know what kind of art will be effective or not, but the possibility that art can be a strong weapon always exists, even when it may be in ways we don’t always fully understand. The actor on the stage is always the promise that we contain multitudes and have the capacity to transform ourselves and society.
The play’s the thing.
***
***
The suspenseful Fireside Mystery Theater has become an unexpected podcast success, with over a million downloads of its contemporary radio performances of macabre and off-center scripts, reminiscent of the Golden Age of Radio. You can listen to an interview broadcast yesterday on the Arts Express radio program over WBAI FM that I did with the two creators of the company, Ali Silva and Gus Rodriguez, by clicking on the grey triangle above.
***
A quirky, funny, and ultimately cryptic short film about a would-be magician who can’t seem to find his way in life. Rob Zabrecky plays the stunted soul under the thumb of his mother. Zabrecky is a true film actor: his face, even in silence, reveals the anguish within.
Thanks to director and YouTuber Andrew Madsen Jasperson
***
It’s hard for a modern magician to adopt an extreme persona without seeming corny, but Rob Zabrecky’s funny warped psycho magician character humorously illustrates what it might have been like had Norman Bates taken up magic as a hobby.
Thanks to YouTuber Simon Drake’s House of Magic
***
A few days a week I work at a public high school for new immigrants here in New York City, and one of my students, Lamine, asked me to act with him in a scene from a play for the school’s Talent Show. So we worked up the following which you can see in the clip above.
It was a lot of fun to prepare and perform. The student audience last Thursday really appreciated the dynamics of the father-son story: the son has just moved out of his parents’ house to his older brother’s apartment, leaving only a letter behind to announce his decision. He thinks he’s on his way to a hot date–but when the doorbell rings, it’s his father.
***
Today is Shakespeare’s birthday. If you’ve never read it, this very short story about Shakespeare by Borges comes closest to describing the man who I imagine WS to be.
I had the pleasure two days ago of participating in the 7th Annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam. It was a drizzly, misty day that made all of Central Park look like a French Impressionist painting. The producers told us that if it rained hard, we would simply continue and gather up the audience to join us up on the outdoor bandshell stage in Central Park. It never happened, but it was a cozy thought to think about.
This was my fourth Sonnet Slam, so I knew what to expect. All 154 sonnets are read in about three hours. Producer Melinda Hall has a very democratic approach to the slam, and it’s fun to see the way professionals and non-professionals alike approach performing the sonnets. One reader brought her dog up with her, and another set her sonnet to music. Each year brings some surprise guests, and this year veteran actor Richard Thomas made an unannounced visit to read Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…” It’s also always fun for me to hear others perform the sonnets to which I had been assigned in previous years. I feel a kind of special bond with those particular readers even if we’ve never met, because I can appreciate the struggle that goes into wrestling with those shared sonnets.
I’ve written about analyzing a sonnet before, but based on what I’ve learned this time, I’d humbly like to make a few suggestions about performing sonnets. These suggestions may seem sonnet-specific, but I believe they have wider acting implications as well.
The first thing is this, and it’s not as minor as it may sound at first: You have to pay allegiance to the final couplet’s rhyme. In the rest of the sonnet, the interpretation can spread over line breaks and rhymes, but if you don’t hit the rhymes in the final couplet, there is a real sense of incompleteness for the listener. It’s like a piece of music without the final resolving chord; the rest of the sonnet can be performed beautifully, but if you don’t get the final rhyme stressed, you haven’t closed the deal. Rhyme, even at the expense of sense or archaic pronunciation. (“Love” doesn’t rhyme with “prove” anymore? It doesn’t matter. Make it rhyme in your performance.) Go for the rhyme.
The second thing to remember is that the vast majority of these sonnets are love poems. They are meant, in the end, to win the heart of someone special. So while actors are wont to build little mini-dramas of the sonnets—not a bad thing—it should be remembered too that objectives such as to woo, to praise, to kiss, to seduce, to reassure, to flatter, should take precedence over objectives such as to scold, to complain, to dismiss, to chastise. Not that there aren’t elements of the latter, but in the end, the sonnets are love poems and should end up that way. So humor and self-reflection about the more negative aspects of love are in order, even though the anger may seem flashier to perform.
Finally, make every noun, metaphor, verb as visual and specific as you can for yourself. It’s Acting 101, but it’s especially true in playing Shakespeare that one should not lapse into the generic meaning of the words. The first line from Sonnet 70 should suffice to illustrate:
“That thou be blamed, shall not be thy defect.”
“Thou”: Who am I talking about? What does that person look like? What is my relationship to that person? Where are we?
“Blamed”: Blamed for what? In what manner? By whom? To what end?
“Thy defect”: What form might that defect take? How has this affected my lover? How has it affected our relationship? What do I want to do about it?
And so on. The wonderful thing about the fourteen short lines of a sonnet is that they allow you to do this kind of close work without getting overwhelmed. The important thing that I learned for myself here is that it’s not enough to make intellectual choices, but to pick vivid images that will spur feelings and imagination. Make the metaphor real.
Well, one more nice thing about Shakespeare’s birthday is that it comes around every year, and if the producers so wish, so will the next Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam. So if you’re in the NYC area next year, consider signing up in April for one of the sonnets at www.shakespearesonnetslam.com . You will have a wonderful time.
***
While Buster Keaton was called The Great Stoneface, he actually was able to portray a wide range of nuanced emotion in his movies. Here is a love scene from The Cameraman (1928). Buster has just messed up his job interview for a movie newsreel company, but Marceline Day, one of the company’s employees, sees something special in him.
Thanks to YouTuber Andrea Lombardo
***
Robert Weber in The New Yorker
The Patty Duke Show overlapped The Beatles first coming to America and somehow she was part of that era for me. The television show which ran from 1963–1966 was perfectly tailored to Patty Duke’s acting talents, where she played two cousins, a demure Scottish girl, Kathy, and Patty, a swinging teen from Brooklyn Heights. A great supporting cast too, with William Schallert as the mildly acerbic father and Paul O’Keefe as her annoyingly nerdy younger brother.
Duke’s greatest role, however, was as Helen Keller in the stage and screen versions of William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. Later on in her career she got to act in the play again, this time playing Annie Sullivan to Melissa Gilbert’s Helen.
Watching the opening titles again made me laugh when I saw the mirror sequence. Of course, that mirror bit had been done a number of times before, including most famously the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (and I recently ran across the Chaplin short The Floorwalker where there is a kind of an ur-version of the routine) but what made me laugh was considering that the joke inherent in most mirror routines is that of two people acting as one; but in The Patty Duke Show it was one person in the mirror acting as two.
In a strange turn of irony, later in life, Patty Duke was diagnosed as bipolar, and she devoted much of her later years to mental health causes. But she was a really wonderful actor who died just this past March.
Thanks to YouTuber TeeVees Greatest
***
***
Here’s a series of four short membership promos that I wrote and produced for radio station WBAI. I performed them with Mary Murphy with whom I had previously done the Ambrose Bierce short stories. It was a lot of fun to do these, and I think you may enjoy them.
Click on the grey triangle above to hear them.
***
A heartbreaking song about undocumented immigrants, sung by the great La Santa Cecilia. Video directed by Alex Rivera. Stay through the closing credits…
Hielo is the Spanish word for ICE; ICE also stands for the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
More La Santa Cecilia at La Santa Cecilia
Blogger cairaguas has translated the Spanish into English. Visit the excellent blog page to find out more about the video and the political and historical context of ICE.
Eva pasando el trapo sobre la mesa, ahí está,
Cuidando que todo brille como una perla
Cuando llegue la patrona que no se vuelva a quejar.
No sea cosa que la acuse de ilegal.
Eva passing the rag over the table, there she is,
Taking care that everything shines like a pearl
(So) when the boss comes, she does not complain again.
Don’t let it be that she accuses her of being illegal.
José atiende los jardines; parecen de Disneyland.
Maneja una troca vieja sin la licencia.
No importa si fue taxista allá en su tierra natal;
Eso no cuenta para el Tío Sam.
Jose tends to the gardens; they look like they’re from Disneyland.
He drives an old truck without a license.
It does not matter if he was a taxi driver over in his home country;
That does not count for Uncle Sam.
Chorus:
————————————————————-
El hielo anda suelto por esas calles.
Nunca se sabe cuando nos va a tocar.
Lloran, los niños lloran a la salida,
Lloran al ver que no llegará mamá.
ICE is loose over those streets.
We never know when we will be hit. [*alt. We never know when it will be our turn.]
They cry, the children cry at the doorway,
They cry when they see that their mother will not come back.
Uno se queda aquí.
Otro se queda allá.
Eso pasa por salir a trabajar.
One is left here.
Another is left there.
That’s what happens when you go out to work.
————————————————————-
Martha llegó de niña y sueña con estudiar,
Pero se le hace difícil sin los papeles.
Se quedan con los laureles los que nacieron acá,
Pero ella nunca dejar de luchar.
Martha arrived as a girl and she dreams of studying,
But it is difficult for her without documents.
They keep all the prizes, the ones who were born over here,
But she never stops fighting. [*alt. But she never stops trying.]
[Chorus: “El hielo anda suelto por esas calles…”]
***
The incredibly funny and accurate Frank Caliendo doing his Donald Trump impression.
***
***
Yesterday, radio station WBAI’s Arts Express program played my interview with Karl Marx. Well, not Karl Marx exactly, but with actor Jerry Levy who plays Marx in a new one-man play that Levy wrote called The Third Coming.
Click on the grey triangle above to hear Levy talk about Marx, anarchism, Howard Zinn, and how he prepared to act the role of a lifetime.
(Click to enlarge)
***
So, the 2016 Shakespeare Sonnet Slam last Friday was really enjoyable! It was a beautiful dry day, no rain at all, despite the weather forecast; and unlike last year when the temperature was really cold, it was warm and sunny. There was great variety in the performances, as always: a lovely sonnet performed in French, a high school group who came to watch and perform, a woman who performed with her young baby in her arms, a singer from the cast of the hit Broadway musical Something Rotten, old men, young women, and people I recognized from past years. The highlight for me was the wonderful actor Dana Ivey, who recited “Shall I compare thee,” just beautifully: still and strong and resonant as an oak tree.
Every year, as I get more familiar with the sonnets, I “hear” more of them, and enjoy them that much more. I also feel a kind of silly identification and solidarity with the people who are performing sonnets which I was assigned to in previous years.
I met my actor friend Eve there—she’s a slam recidivist as well—and we both agreed that it goes by so fast when you’re finally up there, that you have no idea what you’ve done. We both had the sensation that we had skipped multiple lines of the sonnet while we were reciting, but I think (I hope!) that was only a feeling.
When I’m up there, actually performing, I don’t try to think too hard about my analysis or preparation; that was homework, and I just have to trust that I’ve done it well. The one thing I’m focusing on in the moment of performance, the one thing that I’m holding onto for dear life, because otherwise stage fright would sweep me away, is to play my action, which I chose in this case to be, “to double my bonds of love with you.” That’s my lifeline.
We finished all 154 sonnets very quickly—started at one, over by four—so I walked over to Strawberry Fields where, of course, there was a young guy playing John Lennon songs on his guitar. Lots of tourists, and he was very accommodating, playing all of their favorite requests. He sang in a key that I could sing in, so I spent a while croaking out John Lennon songs with him, though I have to say that by the fifth rendition of “Imagine,” it was getting old.
We were spared from the rain the whole afternoon, everything looked green and luscious in Central Park, and I finished the day with a $4.00 Double Caramel ice cream pop from the ice cream vendor.
A very nice way to spend a day.
***
My recent post about Times Square, set me thinking about the film Midnight Cowboy. When it first came out, all the talk was of Dustin Hoffman whose turn as Ratso Rizzo was, of course, a classic characterization. After Hoffman’s scrubbed suburban college grad in The Graduate, it was a treat to see him do something diametrically opposed in Midnight Cowboy. But I think because of Hoffman’s flashy performance as Ratso, Jon Voight’s achievement in the film was somewhat overlooked. Voight looked like they had picked someone off the street from Texas and that was that. But how many knew that Voight was born and raised in Westchester County, NY? His transformation was just as impressive as Hoffman’s, only nobody realized it.
Above, you can see the devastating last scene in the movie, fading out with John Barry’s haunting theme written for the film.
Thanks to YouTuber Ofer3331
***
The uncompromising performance artist Susana Ventura, better known as Penny Arcade has been stirring it up for the better part of four decades. She, along with figures like Charles Ludlam and Jeff Weiss were pioneers of the avant-garde scene on the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.
She’s still raising hell with her wit, energy, and courageous insights. Listen to her New Year’s Eve piece about Cupcakes and the Decline of New York City, and you’ll understand why she’s still very relevant today. The language at times is Not Suitable For Work.
***
Kevin Spacey is a marvelous film actor; what isn’t as well known is that he’s a first-class impressionist. Here he is with Inside the Actors Studio‘s James Lipton, and Spacey regales the audience with nine hilarious dead-on impressions:
Jimmy Stewart
Johnny Carson
Katherine Hepburn
Clint Eastwood
John Gielgud
Marlon Brando
Christopher Walken
Al Pacino
Jack Lemmon
My pick hit? Definitely Marlon! But they’re all great. Click on the video to play.
***
I’ll let the Smithsonian Folklife website describe this extraordinary five-minute performance:
“The mysterious art of bian lian or face-changing originated in Sichuan Opera, and has long been a closely guarded secret of Chinese performers. Hu Dongxiao of the Zhejiang Wu Opera Troupe performed the most complex style of face-changing at the 2014 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, switching between colored masks that represent different emotions in a dramatic story.”
Western magicians will smile at the breakaway fan used in the middle of the performance. As for the how of the instantaneous face-changing? No clue.
Click on the video to play; this one is best at full screen, which you can access by clicking on the lower right hand corner of the video.
***
A first artistic mentor can be like a first love. Everything seems new, extraordinary, larger than life. Your brain, body, soul, emotions are expanding so rapidly that you endow the other with superhuman powers, even if on looking back, you understand that what you had been exposed to were, perhaps, the usual lessons of life. Nonetheless, memories are formed and the lessons learned take on an importance that stay on, years later.
The following story came to my mind today, of a day many years ago that made a large impact on me. It didn’t even directly involve me, but it was something I witnessed. I had just performed a scene in my college acting class with my scene partner, a talented young woman named Dena. We had a wonderful teacher, Lloyd Richards, not only an excellent acting teacher, but one of the finest teachers I have ever had for any subject. Dena was a very good actor, probably the most accomplished in the class, but on this day, after class, she was very upset about something. She went up to Lloyd, and she was obviously a little shaken and embarrassed, and said to him, “I had this awful dream last night. I dreamt that I was having a big argument with you, and I was telling you that every thing that you’ve ever taught us about acting was completely and utterly wrong.”
And Lloyd, whose physical manifestation was similar to a plump Buddha, with great repose and a Cheshire Cat grin, replied, “Congratulations, Dena. You’ve just passed the class.”
Click on the video above for more of Lloyd Richards and Chekhov’s advice.
***
***
Every year the gracious David Kenney, who hosts the WBAI radio program Everything Old is New Again (WBAI 99.5 FM NYC and WBAI.org, Sunday nights, 9-11pm), produces a smashing cabaret fundraiser for the station. Last year, the amazing Liz Callaway sang her version of My Grown-Up Christmas List and knocked it out of the park. You can hear her every-word-counts performance by clicking on the grey triangle above.
And if you want to hear the performances of the wonderful line-up of guests that David has for this year’s fundraiser, including Julie Budd and Mark Nadler, tune into his show this week and next.
***
From The Gold Rush
***
Here’s the short pilot of an amusing, quirky comedy web series called Third Wheel, starring an actor with whom I’ve worked, Sarah duRivage-Jacobs. You can find episodes two and three on Vimeo.
***
Last week I posted a top 30 list of favorite under-the-radar posts. Those posts were all pieces that I had had some hand in creating. Today I’m listing my favorite under-the-radar posts of the past year that were other people’s creations including cartoons, comedy clips, and music.
Cartoons
***
Comedy Clips
The dressing room: Buster Keaton
The inimitable mr bean: Rowan Atkinson
The driving instructor: Bob Newhart
The one the only the great flydini: Steve Martin
Pop Haydn explains it all for you
Lets squish our fruits together: Improv Everywhere
The last angry moose: Rocky and Bullwinkle
The great stone face: Buster Keaton
She was only sixteen: Coogan and Brydon
Worst party ever, the moose: Woody Allen
Rainy day activity: Donald O’Connor
***
Music
A different drum: Linda Ronstadt
Take the star out of the window: John Prine
I’ve just seen a face: Ray Kennedy
The harder they come: Jimmy Cliff
A fine romance: Ella FItzgerald
One last adult christmas song: Liz Callaway
