I look forward to reading updates by Regina De Vera. She occasionally blogs about her "Julliard Journey." And this is from the latest reflection:

During my late teens and early twenties, I had bought into the notion that a "leading lady" or an "ingenue" was a soprano. I might have unconsciously forced myself into being a soprano because I wanted to be a "leading lady." Much of my Juilliard journey (which includes my casting and my work in scene study classes) have challenged all these ideas of "leading lady," "ingenue," "character actress" and so on. "All acting is character acting," one of my acting teachers said. I am very happy to have begun letting go of this hold to become of a particular mold and embrace my voice and my self and my soul as IS. I love that I am an alto. I love that I can sing deep notes. And I love that I can sing high notes, nevertheless. Having range is good.

Type is something actors obsess about. I have mixed feelings about it. And I won't go into all of that right now. But I love the "All acting is character acting."

Ali Smith's Autumn is the first of four seasons novels. I understand they are independent novels, but I'm sure they will talk to each other in fascinating ways. Critics have considered it the first major post-Brexit novel. While it does cover some of that territory, it's much more than that. The dread about the results of "The Vote" can be directly applied to America. It's immediate and expansive. No wonder it's shortlisted for the Booker. 

This is a book that has an extremely dense thread count. It's not linear. It read like a long prose poem. I don't know that I've read too many novels that are this "experimental." But Smith is being careful as much as she's being playful. Nothing feels capricious (except when it's inentional). The quotes I've copied below are fairly bleak, but I promise you, there is a pervasive "stop and smell the roses"/"rise above the muck" element that I adored. The autumn here is often hot and humid. Leaves are falling. Winter is coming, but there are wondrous bursts of color and life. Much like the autumn I'm experiencing right now.

The primary story involves the close friendship between Elisabeth, a young art professor and her old, dying neighbor Daniel. There are imagined conversations, dreams, flashbacks, and cringe-funny passport renewal scenes at the post office. We also get to see Elisabeth working on her dissertation on Britain's pop artist Pauline Boty.

I was able to finish this in a couple days. I've never read Smith, but I'm keen to try others.

The opening sentences:
"It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature. So an old man washes up on the shore. He looks like a punctured football with its stitching split, the leather kind that people kicked a hundred years ago."

(Elisabeth frequently reads to Daniel. One of the books is A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.)


And it continues with lines like these:

"Can you be hungry and dead? Course you can, all those hungry ghosts eating people's hearts and minds."


"Someone killed an MP, she tells Daniel's back as she struggles to keep up. A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn't be enough. But it's old news now. Once it would have been a year's worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff."


"Anonymous people start to add tweet-sized comments about Daniel beneath Daniel. They are commenting on his ability to change things. The comments get more and more unpleasant. They start to make a sound like a hornet mass and Elisabeth notices what looks like liquid excrement is spreading very close to her bare feet. She tries not to step in any of it."


"The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks."


"He had a voice off old films where things happen to well-dressed warplane pilots in black and white."

We opened Love's Labour's Lost last week.

Here's an interview with Matt Davies, the director for that play.

"Romantic comedies work best when the audience is playing catch-up, just one step behind the love trysts and the comic shenanigans, and panting in excitement to keep up.  Put on your running shoes, and tune your ears: you’re in for a frantic feast of wit, wisdom, and waggery."



And here's an interview with Jenny Bennett, who directed Much Ado about Nothing.

"Another thing that I love about this play is the notion that since we’re all invented out of nothing, we can reinvent ourselves out of nothing, too.  Several people in this play are confronted with a rebuke of who they are, or how they’ve been behaving – they overhear people talking about them or are directly told they’ve made a terrible error.  The real mettle of a person is revealed by what they choose to do with that information.  Grace is available to those who take action to repair what’s broken, to be available to Love, to be ‘good men, and true.’  Along these lines, I’m quite fond of our 5.3 Tomb scene.  Chris Johnston, Music Director, wrote the most beautiful song.  I won’t spoil it here, but I hope you love it as much as I do."


These are two smart folks with lovely things to say about these Shakespeare comedies.

Both plays are running in rep with Peter and the Starcatcher at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA.

This is more for me than anything else. But here are a variety of quotes that struck me in a John Lahr's profile of Janet McTeer in The New Yorker.

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She wants to be known for the parts she plays, not for who she is. As she told the Daily Telegraph in 1996, “When I take off my stage makeup and walk out of the door, my obligation to the audience is over.” To me, she said, “There’s a reason I live in the Maine woods, where nobody knows what I do for a living. I think you can be better if someone who’s coming to see you perform has no idea who you really are.”

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“I was incredibly self-conscious about the way I looked.” The year she was fourteen, she grew seven inches and had to bandage her legs to ease the growing pains. “I was half an inch taller than the boy I liked. I remember I was doing my piano practice, and I started sobbing. My father couldn’t cope with it. He gave me a tot of whiskey and ginger until my mother came home.” But the moment was a kind of emotional watershed. “After that,” McTeer said, “I stood up tall, and I never slouched. It was a sort of act of defiance, really. And, when I went to college, I realized that my height was an incredible tool. I could really use my body in a way that I felt was theatrical: you can stoop, you can be big, you can be galumphing, you can be nineteen-thirties and elegant. You’re much more malleable.”

​---------------

McTeer sees acting as a form of jazz—a performance in which each player makes new music from a familiar tune. “I want to see live theatre,” she told me. “I want to not quite know where it’s going—so, when you see performers, you feel like they’re inventing it as they go along, rather than doing something that’s polished.” Once, she sat in the audience at what she describes as a “controlled, grownup, well-presented play.” Afterward, a man in front of her turned to his companion and said, “Wasn’t that marvellous! Gin and tonic?” she recalled. “I thought, I never want to be in that play, to do something easy that doesn’t challenge you. The idea of being in something competent—well, watch television.”

​---------------

Coleman [McTeer's husband, on the night he first saw her] wrote in his journal, “She slips through air like a harbor seal in an icy green sea.”

​---------------

In “The Dressing Room,” a poem about this first encounter with the inner workings of McTeer’s craft, Coleman bears witness to her shape-shifting from ordinary citizen to extraordinary performer:
She throws her head
back and guzzles a Diet Coke, turns up the
volume on her stereo and curses, howls
sways her weight from one foot to the other
the room getting smaller and smaller
and the air suffocating

​---------------

“Janet feels a connection between fearlessness and great work,” Rourke said. “In the rehearsal room, in performance, she drives herself to the edge of what frightens her, and jumps off.” Working at that level of intensity requires reserves of energy, especially in a play like “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” which places enormous demands on the actors’ verbal dexterity and mental focus; sometimes McTeer pushes herself too far. “I hate being tired for shows,” she told me. “I’m not one of life’s great sleepers. I work quite hard at sleeping.” She believes, she added, that “you have to be fitter than the play you’re doing.”

McTeer follows a vigilant regimen. For a very physical show, like “The Taming of the Shrew,” she spends the afternoon before an evening performance at home. At three o’clock, she has a salad and perhaps does some reading. At four o’clock, using “my Paul McKenna hypnosis tape,” she said, she naps for half an hour, then for another half hour lifts weights and takes a hard spin on an exercise bike. After a shower, “I’d hum, get my voice started warming up, and I’d bike to work,” she said. While playing Petruchio, she never looked in the mirror, but for Merteuil, she said, she’d “maybe put on a face mask, check my nails, because I want her to have nice nails, nice moisturizer.” She explained, “You’re as vain as your character.” She also always listens to music before a show: baroque for Merteuil; for Petruchio, “anything loud.”
​
McTeer’s characters may change and her routine may vary, but one part of her ritual stays the same. Before every performance, especially when she’s tired, on matinée days, “just for a second,” she peeks out at the audience, “to see people’s eyes.” She tells herself, “That person wants to be moved, that person wants to be excited, that person is here to see a bit of magic. All right, I can do this.”



​

I toiled around with sharing my thoughts on the Globe production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. When I got going (there was a lot, and it was very exciting), I realized that what I had to say was a lot of sound and fury. It didn't mean nothing, but it was pretty...petty...? I don't know. Maybe I'll sort out those ideas some day. But for the moment, I'd rather spend my energies on making my own work and helping others with their work.

For the record, there were so many things I believed to be a great success, but there were some other things that stuck out and wouldn't stop stabbing me. And they were arguably pesky details.

Details matter. And my voice does matter. 
But I was exhausting and boring myself in the process of ranting. So that may never see the light of day.

So, in lieu of today's auditions for All My Sons (I'm the director), I'll post this quote from Joseph Haj.
He's the AD at the Guthrie Theater and I can't wait to see his work live.
​ 

How Daveed Diggs of ‘Hamilton’ Spends His Sundays

• I’m on the couch, with “SportsCenter” or music on, and when I have thoughts I write them down in Google Docs on my phone. I used to work in notebooks exclusively, but I lost so many of them. I don’t think that quickly. There’s no reason for somebody who’s good at writing rap to be good at freestyling. They’re different parts of your brain. You can develop both skills. I’m a much better writer.​

• I love detective shows. I’ve seen every episode of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot.” I never go to sleep before 3. Right before falling asleep I like to watch this old British court show, “Rumpole of the Bailey.” I find it comforting.

​

How to Be Rejected
Justin Taylor at HowlRound

• ​Your voice as an artist is not on your list of responsibilities. Like your singing voice, your voice as an artist is given. You cannot choose it. Conversely, it is our responsibility to discover it, embrace its unique sound, set it free and share it with those who go gaga for it. 
• Artists ascend horizontally, not vertically. We thrive when we are entrepreneurs, which literally translates from French as “takers from between.” Our careers grow by working with who is beside us, not who is above us. Put your time and energy into the people who say yes to your work already. Make a list. Get to 100. (You’d be amazed how fast you can get to 100 in one go). Put it on your fridge. Read it every day. Star the ones you want to work with, especially directors. Arrange theatre love affairs—match specific directors you adore to specific plays you think they’d line up to lick off the pavement. Call them. Make a plan for your dream project. Reach out to theatres together, theatres also dying for a play (and a director) like yours. Go to their shows. Ask for info coffees. Take your career into your own hands.

An Interview with Jessica Hecht and Alexandra Silber
The Interval

(currently playing mother and daughter in the 2016 Tony-nominated revival of Fiddler on the Roof)

• [Jessica] but I’ve done a lot of revivals of what people would consider American masterpieces or contemporary masterpieces. What’s interesting to me is not looking at it from a contemporary standpoint—I know there are many directors that do that—but I worked with a director named David Cromer, who has an incredible aesthetic for looking at revivals that really changed the way I thought about it. Because what happens is that people forget what the actual story is of the play. They do revivals and they think so much about this idea of contemporizing it that they don’t look at just the story. So people that would do a play that is in the public library of plays they know or stories they know are basically sometimes reviving a thought about the play.
• [Alexandra] I remember when we were doing the scene where I sort of say, “I don’t want to marry him,” and was playing it with a great deal of contemporary strength. And Bart said, “Try this. Try taking your time. Really, really taking your time”—I’ll never, ever forget this—“And recognizing that this is 1905. This has not only never been uttered before, ‘I don’t want,’ it’s never been thought before. And so when this comes out of her, the world needs to explode. It needs to open up. This is the inciting incident of all the changes. And I know that’s a lot of pressure, but that endemically makes Tzeitel strong no matter how it comes out. The fact that it does come out and comes from her, from this young, young girl. Allow that to sort of be what it is.” And I think that’s what you’re saying. Don’t play strength. Don’t play feminism. Play the truth, and the strength and feminism is innate.

Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice
Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American

• Creativity does draw on a deep knowledge base, and deliberate practice can certainly contribute to many aspects of creativity, but ultimately creativity involves much more than just deliberate practice. Creators are not necessarily the most efficient, but their messy minds and messy processes often allow them to see things others have never seen, and to create new paths that future generations will deliberately practice. I have immense respect for Ericsson's body of work on deliberate practice, and do believe that deliberate practice can help you get better in virtually any skill. However, I also believe that an accurate understanding of creativity is important for how we recognize, nurture, value, and ultimately, reward it, across all sectors of society.

A Writer's Room: Irvine Welsh
New York Times

The space itself is really four areas: a library-type room with a large desk I can cover with a manuscript; an alcove with my decks and music; a smaller office with a whiteboard and reference books; and a balcony where I can sit outside and write in the sun, counting my blessings that I don’t have a real job to do. As much as I like this place, I try not to get too attached to it, and I therefore do a lot of work in coffee shops and on public transit. It’s important for me to be able to write anywhere and not get too precious about trying to chase the fool’s gold of optimum conditions.