September 2011
11 posts
Today's Lesson
Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end- the unnamable
So the lesson for today: never be afraid to ask for help. Also, asking for help sooner is better than later, but later is better than not at all.
Met wil Ilona Pierce, goddess of vocal coachiness out at Hofstra yesterday. Ilona had the distinct challenge of teaching me at a time when I was already transitioning...
Hello friends
Hello new readers!
*waves*
More to come.
Still trying to figure out how to get comments allowed on here. But feel free to drop me a note and say hi.
Fail Better 2.0 or... asking the universe for help
Blogging can be a lonely activity. With the plethora of technology and communication out in the world, it can be challenging to put your very small gesture out into the world.
So here I’ve been thinking all this time, why the hell do I never ever get comments on the blog??
Answer: I had to install a third party software to allow comments. And I think I still don’t have it right.
...
The Why of the Book
Why a book?
Well, because there isn’t one currently. 10 years ago when I first picked up these plays I thought what the hell do I do with them? Who are these characters? How does one go from 8 pages of monologue to nothing but a mouth on stage.
The vast majority of information that floats around the info-sphere about Beckett’s plays slants towards the dramaturgical side. What...
Fail Better
Jean says I’m no longer allowed to say I’m not an actor. And apparently I’m too young to have a midlife crisis. So i guess this thing is really happening in a couple of weeks.
I am having some real vocal issues. Dry, scratchy, irritated throat. Over usage? Maybe. Allergies? Probably, knowing me.
But also there’s the problem of not having a trained instrument anymore....
Green Tea
And then sometimes there are those rehearsals. Something just happened. I am not even sure that I can articulate what happened. But it did. I am having some vocal fatigue. And I was drinking some green tea. And there were some friends that I said hi to and then this thing happened.
We finally brought in the metronome. Jean mentioned this back several months ago when we were trying to...
Auditing
Ran Not I three times in rehearsal today and I feel, all in all, like I’m going to die. I went after rehearsal to the post office to mail something, and when I signed for it the woman behind the counter remarked that my signature had changed quite a lot. I had neither the strength to tell her that I was tired because I’d just come from a rehearsal where I was channeling Beckett’s women, nor did...
Then I had a vision, then I had religion
And I did it with my chakras. Sometimes, what is tried and true is the thing that works. After all the musical scoring, the line by line work with inflection and the struggle for meaning, after my head did all the work, I opened my chakras and let fly. For a more detailed account of this, one can check out the old blog from 10 years ago. And if anyone who doesn’t know how to find it...
Cheater
Each man to his own specialty. (My recollection of a Godot quote, probably not the actual quote.)
And now for something completely different.
I admit it. I’ve been cheating on Mr. Beckett. There, I said it. I’ve been cheating in a big way all week. And it won’t be the last time.
Yep. I’m stage managing again. And I’ve gotta admit, even to myself that it feels good to be doing so...
Hello out there
Are you listening to me? Is anyone looking at me? Is anyone bothering about me at all?
- Play
Hello friends. It seems there are some people reading the blog now. Yay. Welcome. I guess ya’ll deserve and update.
Things are moving along. First off:
We have a web site! It has launched. It tells you a little bit about us. It tells you where and when you can see the production. It lets...
August 2011
5 posts
digression
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
It’s been one difficult rehearsal after another. Beautiful, hard, tricky and difficult....
2 tags
It's 1:30 in the morning and I'm still blogging
Nevermind the fact that i have rehearsal in the morning. And not even happy Beckett rehearsal (joke. not really. Beckett makes me laugh but others think im crazy I know)… but CTH rehearsal. Wherein the actor gets to be a stage manager once again.
Totally different kind of schizophrenia here. The two major halves of personality, sensitive artist and terror who flaps in the night …see...
...to be clear
I hate elipses…
When you decide you can't do it
You find that you’re doing the thing after all. Much like this whole process.
A few days ago I was on the subway running Not I, with as much connection as I could muster. And for the 267,562nd time I crashed and burned at the end. So on. Keep on.
I restrained myself from chucking my meticulously color coded (more on this later) copy of the play across the subway car, looked up to the...
July 2011
4 posts
race pace
Listening to Bad Religion today. ?
Just got back from rehearsal in which I finally ran Not I up to speed. And the funny thing is- we clocked it in at more or less 13 minutes (goal speed 14.5), and yet it did not feel super fast, rushed, problematic, unintelligible, or anything of the kind.
I keep comparing the process and the ultimate performance to running a marathon. I have a little...
But do we believe everything we read on facebook? →
Memory is an Unreliable Narrator
Welcome back friends. Looking over my last entry I realize that I never addressed how I have been duped once again. At some point I will write about the history of textual inconsistencies in different editions of Beckett’s texts. Later.
This time, Jean was giving me notes after our rehearsal, some of which included lines that I was dropping or otherwise not saying correctly. One of the lines...
Not Exactly Live from Las Vegas OR We miss you...
Greetings friends and readers- we are not exactly live from a large white couch in Las Vegas. Yes, here we have reached the part of the year when this little Beckett blogger runs away from the gritty sauna of New York City and repairs to the relative comfort* of the oven known as Las Vegas, and my mommy’s couch.
For the last few years, I have made it a habit to sit on the couch in the...
June 2011
1 post
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me.
This year I will get back to the blog, learn the rest of my lines, and learn to play the ukelele.
May 2011
3 posts
look a Beckett actress talking....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/may/08/pauline-mclynn-happy-days-interview
Beckett video →
it's true. i love twitter. →
Beckett papers for academic obsession.
April 2011
5 posts
I blog I blog, look how I blog…
Blogging is a habit. Like smoking or line dancing. And though I condone neither of thee activities per se, these like other habits must be practiced periodically…
Also both of these activities are hard to do with a broken face. Hence lack of blogging.
But perhaps the best reason for lack of blogging is lack of content. And something really cool happened last night to give me some content.
So...
digress
Let me stop for a moment and digress. I digress. It seems that Fyvush Finkel Live! A whacky, old-timey cabaret that I worked on in the fall has been nominated for a Drama Desk award. Fyvush was produced by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and directed by Motl Didner. The show was not without its challenges, but Motl is a doll and Fyvush is hilarious. His sons are alternately also ...
Another Stain Upon the Silence Or Nearly a...
Why Beckett? Why Beckett in performance? Why Beckett in performance AGAIN? Good questions.
Once upon a time there was an undergrad student who wanted to make it as an actor. The young, wide-eyed actor moved through her undergraduate acting curriculum with hunger, learning genres and styles of all kinds, enjoying them all. Until one day, the hungry little actor discovered the plays of...
Odd ends
Or posts that I’ve been trying to write and have been too afraid, busy, scattered, something to actually put up. But blogs do need that thing we call content yes? Right. So..
From the book Images of Beckett: Such inertia and void as never before. I remember an entry in Kafka’s Diary. ‘Gardening. No hope for the future.’ At least he could garden. There must be words for...
juggling 3.0
Between working on Angela McCluskey’s fun little show Catch a Falling Star at the Living Theatre (Women Center Stage Festival) and listening to Don Giovanni as much as possible enough to know that I haven’t listened to it enough, I have not had time to read or think much about Beckett.
Major difference between college life and real life- in college I spent an entire year thinking...
March 2011
11 posts
Insert poignant Beckett quote about pain here
I really do have a list of things to blog about. All of which involve Beckett. I really really do. i really really really really really really do. (To the tune of the Whose Line Is It Anyway Hoedown).
But right now I have a big goddamn headache.
I can’t compete. Beckett got stabbed by a pimp while visiting the local pub and nearly died. Completely turned his life around- focused on...
1 tag
when suffering from a lack of one's own words-...
Ruby Cohn wrote: ”After ‘Godot,’ plots could be minimal; exposition, expendable; characters, contradictory; settings, unlocalized, and dialogue, unpredictable. Blatant farce could jostle tragedy.”
Noted. Lifted from Beckett’s NYTimes obit and to be filed later
The dangers of zen in Manhattan
Or- what happens when I don’t meditate for 3 days….
I am out of touch with my Beckett. I am not as grounded today as I was a week ago. And I am giggling a lot.
Friends and readers- I have copious notes for upcoming posts about Beckett, Billie Whitelaw, my process, and the occasional romp through a bookstore. They are coming. They will make you laugh. They will make you cry. They...
snow on my fire escape, and other signs of the...
And in other scary news…
http://twitter.com/#!/dreadfullyun
God help us all.
…promise to get back to Beckett. Not today, but surely tomorrow.
they must have planted tulips at Hofstra yesterday
Because it’s snowing today.
Some things never change…
1 tag
and another thing...
Add this man to the list of people I would like to talk to for the book..
Forgive me folks. Today I don’t have much to say that is my own. More about getting into the habit of writing again.
If I can ever figure out how to work these strange blog formats dear readers, we will be in good shape. These new-fangled rich text format blogs are tricksy. Why when I was your age, we wrote our own...
OR Books: Samuel Beckett is on Twitter →
orbooks:
There is a twitter account for Samuel Beckett, which feels both a tad underwhelming and oddly inevitable. Admittedly, the uroboric aphorisms that fill Beckett’s work fit tidily into the space Twitter allots. However, as Andre the Giant could testify, the actual Samuel Beckett would probably…
Fail Better
Sequel… sequel… a little later when Not I was quite forgotten she began to…
Do it all again. Again.
That’s right folks, Beckett is back in full swing…
For those of you, dear readers, who are new to this game, welcome! So glad that you could join us. For those of you intrepid readers who remember, almost 10 years ago, the last time we went ‘round this topic,...
