Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Moneyball


Along with Eight Men Out, this is the best baseball movie I’ve seen. I say this as a passionate baseball fan and a passionate movie fan. I was a little concerned when I stepped into the theater that these two worlds in which I have such an investment would collide and explode. But instead, I left with a greater understanding of what a movie can be and what the unseen realities of a major league baseball organization are all about.

For me, this is Brad Pitt’s best acting performance. That’s because this is the role of his that seems least like acting. There isn’t the distraction of a love interest to lead the script down predictable paths. Instead, it is the story of loss and defeated expectations and how a man responds by finding and defiantly pursuing a new way.

Even if I wasn’t convinced before (and I was) that Phillip Seymour Hoffman can do no wrong, what’s there to say? I can’t conceive of a more compelling portrayal of a major league manager than he, well, manages.

He’s in a sure hit group for me with William H. Macy and Ed Harris. In a sense they are the Moneyball of acting. They don’t have the classic look, but they carry the day.

Sure there are a few factual baseball mistakes that the critics will probably point out – like Jeremy Giambi has already been on the team a year before they are trying to bring him aboard in the movie, but so what. There’s inside knowledge here you could never find out any other way.

In a film remarkably about a statistical method, the question gets asked more than once: Is there romance in baseball? You decide.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Country Strong: Love and Fame (Starz on Demand)


Love and Fame can’t live in the same place. That’s what the unfolding action in this film would have you believe. Gwyneth Paltrow creates a convincing heroine; this is the second time I have seen her take on a singing part. The first was “Duets,” the karaoke movie where she plays alongside Huey Lewis – the young daughter of an absent father going to great lengths to try to insert herself into his life.

Tim McGraw, curiously enough doesn’t sing in this movie, which makes for interesting counterpoint. His role is much meatier than in The Blind Side, where he had very little dialogue, and seemed one-dimensional. Here he has visible on-screen epiphanies at least twice.

This is a much more mature Paltrow character than I remember seeing. Exhaustion, loss of innocence, the weight of life choices, the price an audience exacts, rising to the occasion and how many times it can be done… all of these are themes in a moving portrayal.

Love and Fame can’t live in the same place. Sounds like a line in a country song.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Why you should Follow Me to Nellie's




I admit it. You may have seen me entering a house of ill repute last night. This house is run by a very respectable lady. The girls are beautiful, a little troubled, but beautiful, and so is the setting which transports its guests across time and space. It’s a fine old house for an age-old profession. But there is something decidedly new afoot, which accounts for all the drama.

By the way, I went with my wife and two of our closest friends.

Follow Me to Nellie’s is the first full production of the new theatrical year at Premiere Stages in Kean University. For me, it furthered the theme introduced just last month by the staged reading of Egyptian Song. In both plays, song expresses the yearning of the spirit for something more.

Na Rose, the blues singer in Follow Me to Nellie’s, says it this way: “In my stomach. In my heart. Like it’s gonna burst with some kinda longin’…I just feel… full. Overflowin with want. Like I’m dreamin somethin that may never come…”

The year is 1955; the place is Natchez, Mississippi – the deep south – all of the historical factors we know so well are at play. A new arrival in the city, with plans for change, triggers events. His arrival occasions a view for us of a world in which the madam's understanding of the social fabric is as intricate as the patterns we see in the oriental rugs on her floor, as detailed as the carpentry work the set designer has so carefully achieved.

But everything's about to change, or is it?

Written by Dominique Morriseau and directed by John Wooten, the play stars a cast of eight.

Lynda Gravatt reins as the indomitable madam, Nellie.

Kelly McReary brings her impressive charm and her voice to the part of Na Rose.

Warner Miller returns after his Premiere Stages starring role in Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods with another commanding performance.

Harold Surratt, just off a run in Cormac McCarthy's Sunset Limited, shows wisdom and measure as Rollo.

Adam Couperthwaite gives us enough vulnerability to make his character dimensional and convincing.

The three ladies of the night -- Michelle Wilson, Ley Smith and Nyahale Allie -- present like the Three Graces of Greek Mythology, effectively displaying their differences, like a personality study.

Sometimes a script throws down a role where the complexity offers singular potential; Ms. Allie picks up this baton and runs with it.

There are 8 more performances of Follow Me to Nellie's through July 31: 8:00PM Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and 3:00PM Sundays.
Box office: 908-737-7469 www.kean.edu/premierestages

Friday, July 15, 2011

Horrible Bosses


Since I’m a boss myself, I went to Horrible Bosses expecting from it a how-to manual. But, no… it’s some kind of comedy. People in the audience were laughing -- not taking it seriously at all -- and some of them I happen to know are bosses themselves.

There is a bit of dead space before things get going, but once they do, they take off.

This is also one of those films that make you feel that everyone is in it. Donald Sutherland, Kevin Spacey, Collin Farrell, Jimmy Foxx, Jennifer Aniston plus some other surprises, not to mention the three leads – Charlie Day and the two Jasons – Sudeikas and Bateman.

My only fear is that my male employees, when comparing me to Jennifer Aniston and all she has to offer, will conclude that I am a horrible boss indeed!

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Midnight in Paris

I don't think I can be objective about Midnight in Paris. In my early twenties I made Paris my home for two years because like the Owen Wilson character in this film I felt sure that this is what aspiring writers did. Every street he wanders down is familiar to me as it fills the screen, and like him, it will come as no surprise to those of you who know me, I got repeatedly lost and repeatedly made discoveries I'll never forget.

I went to this movie with my wife and two daughters, and the action on the screen in some crazy way made me feel as if I was sharing a part of my life that took place before I knew them. This, of course, totally synchs with the temporal transports at the heart of the film.

It also made me file away for future thinking the observation that who accompanies you, like where you see it, can be a factor in the experience of "seeing a movie."

On the way home, I resolved to dust off my copy of Janet Flanner's "Paris Was Yesterday," a book of her dispatches written for The New Yorker in the 1920's. I also reflected on Mme. Tussaud's wax museum, which I felt had just seen animated by the movie, and where, by the way, the figure of Woody Allen is one of the most life-like.

With this film, Woody Allen finds his own animation in Owen Wilson. Allen films divide neatly into those in which he acts and those in which he doesn't. At moments in Midnight in Paris, Wilson delivers his own brand of the well-known frenetic combination of enthusiasm and exasperation that characterizes Allen as actor.

We glimpse a possible relationship between director and actor like the one between Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud, his favorite actor, except here it manifests in outbursts instead of in the subtle build of a French film, which makes perfect sense for an Allen impersonation.

Not as ground-breaking as Annie Hall, not as profound as Crimes and Misdemeanors, not as layered as Hannah and Her Sisters or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but nevertheless, Midnight in Paris takes its place as a new Woody Allen classic with a message about living in the past and living in the present which we all experience.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Egyptian Song at Kean University


With the Arab Spring in the air and everywhere on the news, the timing could not be better for Egyptian Song, the spare, eloquent play that opened this year’s season at Premiere Stages. Never mind that the setting is the 1920’s, the debate remains the same today.

James Christy’s script has two actors who play all the parts, including the central characters, a brother and sister – twins – in a small village in Egypt. The transitions are handled beautifully by Miriam Habib and Govind Kumar, all through secondary expressions – changes in intonation, accent, posture, a limp – you never wonder who’s speaking – mother, daughter, uncle, father, shop-worker, friend, friend’s mother. Because the story is told with so few elements, the entire production takes on a poetic cast.

And then there’s the song – or rather, the gift of song -- which the sister possesses.

There is virtually no singing in this production, but song is central to the action.

The sister’s gift is something exceptional, something stirring, with the power to move the spirit beyond the usual confines. It is the voice of yearning – appealing, magnetic, inspiring – with the power to lead to unexpected outcomes.

Premiere Stages follows this staged reading with the opening of its full-fledged production of Follow Me to Nellie’s July 14 – 31 at Kean University in Union, New Jersey.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Why every guy should see Bridesmaids


Because you can observe a lot by just watching as Yogi says. Because you might just fall in love (with Kristin Wiig) for two hours and five minutes. And because it’s just really a good movie.

How many times have you heard women talk or seen them interact with no man in sight? Ne-ver! Well, here’s your chance.

Even though the conversations and the actions in movies and plays are highly scripted – there’s always something true about them, and there seems to be a lot of truth here.

Men and women are raised in different camps even when they grow up in the same house. Women are so much better at keeping themselves mysterious, except in the company of other women. So, if you want to find out a little more about how much you don’t know, see this movie.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

After Anne Frank


Can something be about everything? Imagine the lens of a camera through which you see everything, including a lens and a camera. Now you’re ready for Carol Lempert’s latest one-woman show, “After Anne Frank.”

On the surface, this is a performance about an actress who, through serendipity, has played every female part in the theatrical staging of the Diary of Anne Frank, and this actress happens to be the one telling you the story.

But it is also about the uneasy interdependence of history and drama. Are there some realities so profound that mere words can never do them justice? Does telling the story exploit its source? But if we don’t tell the story out of some deep reverence for the unthinkable will it whither in silence, and be forgotten?

These philosophical and moral questions spring out of this virtuoso performance interlaced with humor, yes laugh-out-loud humor, and journalistic, political, and legal lessons about how many different lives a single story can take.

It’s a play about a play that asks you how much playing is too much. Does this sound clever? It’s certainly that, but it’s much more; the talent of the actress turns the “ideas” with which it plays into a palpable experience for the audience.

The playwright/actress puts a piece of crystal in your hands, then turns it over, and with each new turn, something else gets revealed. And then, with genuine concern, she reaches across vales of karma to the original protagonist holding pen and notebook.

The Fringe has elected to include “After Anne Frank” in its upcoming season. Be sure to check local listings.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Tree of Life


There can be no broader canvas than the one on which this film is painted. It reaches back to the beginning of life and seemingly goes beyond the end of time. Throughout is the intensely personal story of a 1950’s Texas family living with more than the usual problems, but not so unusual that we cannot relate. All of the action is seen through the eyes of a sensitive boy.

This is not a film for the casual movie-goer. There isn’t a single laugh, not even a smile. And while the beauty of the visuals is arresting, for viewers whose expectations have not been set, all of this beauty will only produce impatience and bewilderment.

The narrative voice at the beginning sets the underpinning which is a debate between “nature” and “grace.” Nature gives us beauty, sustenance, and life itself, but it cares nothing for us as individuals; it takes grace for that, embodied in this film by the actress Jessica Chastain, mother to three young boys.

To show how sweeping the time shifts are, consider this: Brad Pitt plays Sean Penn’s father. The story is told through visual echoes, sometimes very subtle. In nature, there is conflict; beauty is a by-product; just as real is the conflict between human beings. Dissatisfaction is a potent force. Creating beauty is an act of courage. I believe this is the director’s vision, but it may be too much to expect one-time viewers to share it.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Blue Valentine: The Giving Tree

That the husband in Blue Valentine has a tattoo of an image from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree reinforces all of my feelings about the character.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

"Blue Valentine": Time is the Villain

Blue Valentine is the most dangerous film of 2010, which is why you probably won't see it on Oscar night.

We can tolerate massive explosions, endless mutilations, shootings at point blank, and all manner of mayhem on the screen, but to watch the normal wear and tear of living drive two people so far apart is just too painful, and too real.

This film is about layers of history, and ultimately about the primacy of the first layer, the family or lack of a family in which we grow up.   That a man and woman have their own romantic history, their own beginning, just seems to matter so much less than the history that shaped or deformed them.

This formative layer is the director of the story.   We have vivid glimpses of the Michelle Williams' character's home life.  Her father is a negative force.  The inability to relate is passed down like a genetic trait.  At a potentially intimate moment, she craves reinforcement of the pain she feels inside, rather than any kind of new awakening.

Ryan Gosling is so effective in his role that for a time you are unsure that the younger and the older man he plays is the same person (it's tragic that not that many years have passed).  To escape the abandonment of his past, his character settles, and by so doing courts his own abandonment.

In the midst of it all, their young daughter embodies joy.  We hope that it carries her through.

It's rare that the male character in a crumbling relationship is the more sympathetic partner.  There is a question he asks about love at first sight.  "Sure," he suggests, "guys may go out with lots of girls, but once they're struck by one - isn't that love?"

Sure, he makes a lot of bad choices, and in a sense, he has not grown up.  He needs a personal trainer and a personal shopper, but these are all externals.  

Every movie, and all of literature, for that matter, seems like one cautionary tale after another.  If a marriage solves problems that are more immediate for one partner than the other that seems to mean trouble.   In the end, solving short-term problems will be forgotten, and the long-term ones will have their day.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Rubber Room: Patti Meltdown

Allison Goldberg’s delivers a tour de force.

As Patti, the last entrant, she is the only person in the room with a mission. It’s a nervous mission, though. She can’t keep her knees still as she takes her seat. Her conversation is clipped; she moves her head from side to side like a small animal wary of predators.

Her performance is single-minded and extreme. She takes center stage with a monologue meltdown that is hilarious and magnetic. We agree with the Daytona character; we can't help but be drawn to her.

She also makes a single-minded, unique choice by bringing an object into the room that changes the play: a tape recorder that keeps running throughout the action and the emotion that fills the room, unless another actor makes the unique choice to turn it off, which happened once in the Rubber Room experiment.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Rubber Room: Larissa Enters the Room

Larissa is the first character to enter the room.  One word to describe how the five different Larissa's react in the first few minutes of the play to the Rubber Room.

Kari Swenson Riely:  Dismay
Abby Lee:             Astonishment
Cecily Benjamin:      Disgust
Erin Hadley:           Bemusement
Cooper Shaw:         Curiosity

Kari Swenson Riely was the first Larissa on the first night.  She did a remarkable job of discovering the room with each of her entrances, giving quality to the silence.  One person alone in a room.  

Rubber Room: Capricious Laughter (continued)

To try to answer the question of how performances of the same play, each with a different set of actors, are different from one another, laughter is one lens through which we can look.

Here are some examples:

Each of the security guards, in his exasperation at why the teachers are not checking in with him at the front door before coming down to the rubber room, lists the reasons for why he might not be there when they arrive. He means to say that he is almost always there.

Only Jacob Callie Moore elects to deliver this list in such a way that it seems so long that it undoes his intention. The audience laughs.

This line of Daytona's gets a laugh every time: "It's a lousy day not to be drinking." Jill Melanie Wirth gets a more sustained laugh when she follows the line by pouring the contents of a miniature bottle of liquor into her coffee cup. This also shows that her interpretation of the character took a bravado risk earlier when, like the other Daytona's, she asks Alan if he wants to check her purse. She was hiding exactly what he was looking for; this fleshes out the character and gives us a glimpse of the kind of risk-taking that contributed to her predicament.

Cecily Benjamin became funnier in each new performance. She got laughs in unexpected places by how she said things. When Alan asks her to be good, she explains that she kind of likes being bad. Every Larissa's delivery of this line did not get a laugh; Cecily's later deliveries got much bigger laughs than her earlier ones.

Abby Lee colored her lines with a certain tone I guess I'd call it in which the preposterousness of the situation causing the words to be said is folded into how the line is delivered, so that each intonation is like an inside joke with the audience and with herself, if you can have an inside joke with yourself. I'd be very interested to know whether this is a technique developed for this character or something she always does in comedic roles.

Kari Swenson Riely's Larissa became more physical as the performances progressed. Her pointed finger and other gestures absent from earlier stagings, underlined her lines and made them funnier. The audience laughed.

John Calvin Kelly's most comedic moments had to do with how he bared his teeth. Trying to win over the Rubber Room occupants after he introduces the fourth entrant, he smiles nervously, he oversmiles, if I can coin a word, to try to make the others complicit in his desire to have them accept Patti as one of themselves. "Okay," he pumps his fist. Something's afoot, and even though the audience does not know what it is, this sudden turn in his character's behavior is funny. We laugh.

There is little room for comedy from the Sinclair character. He derides Larissa's attempts at amateur psychology. Scott Davidson's Sinclair responds without moving from his chair, eliciting laughter before he speaks a word, from the expression on his face. Richard Hoehler's Sinclair stands and approaches Larissa to give mock acknowledgement of her insight. They're different; both are funny.

These are only some examples.

Rubber Room #20 and 21: Capricious Laughter

The Friday night audience was in a laughing mood, but curiously enough many of the laughs in the two performances came at different times. 

This is a small illustration of how the shows are different.  Certain lines always get a laugh because the humor is in the words.  Other times, the humor is in the pause after the words; if the actor does not pause, then there is no room for the laughter to happen; the audience misses its cue.

Certain lines get a laugh because of the delivery.  Sometimes the actor doesn't seem to see the humor in the line, and so neither does the audience. 

Some of the humor comes out of the situation, and has nothing to do with words.  Some of the humor has to do with body language and facial expression; it precedes words. 

See the next post for examples.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Rubber Room: Get-ting Bet-ter All the Time

Over the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from the Jersey side there's a giant billboard of the Beatles looking extremely young.  It's there to remind us that Beatles songs are now available on iTunes. 

I can't get through the tunnel without at least one Beatles tune running through my head.

The play was great from the very start.  Individual performances have shined from the first day, but now, in the last two rounds, it keeps getting better, getting better all the time.

I think it's because the actors are taking more chances with each other.   Where there were only words before, I now see embraces, sometimes tears.

I think it's because the actors are more comfortable in their parts, having done them on this stage a handful of times.

I think it's because everyone is more comfortable with the stage itself.  They know where things are.

I think it's because they trust more the idea of interacting with other actors they may not have seen before. 

I don't know any of this for sure.

I'll need to wait to hear from them what it is about the parts that keeps improving the whole.



  

Rubber Room: Time is Elastic

February 18, 2011

65 degrees today.  Shed my coat.  I began the Rubber Room project in the dead of winter (nine days ago) and today feels like spring.

I've been coming to the show from one or another of my NYC clients, so I'm usually wearing a tie.  Coincidentally, today I'm wearing my Einstein tie, an accidental cosmic bow to the professor who taught us that time is not as it appears

When you are immersed, time takes on different qualities.  I'd like to know from the actors about showtime -- the span of time in which a show runs; weeks, days, months -- not just inside this experiment, but in traditional shows.  How do those days feel different from other days? 

When the season ends, athletes must feel the change.

For teachers in the Rubber Room, day in and day out, what does time feel like?

Two more days for me. I've been coming to the same four walls more often than the actors, the stage managers, more often than anyone except a teacher in the Rubber Room.  

Two More Mesmerizers

Two more movies I can't stop watching even if I only glimpse a single frame:

The Door in the Floor
The Big Lebowski

What are your mesmerizers?

See the complete blog: www.moviesightings.com

Rubber Room: Repetition

I've seen the Rubber Room 21 times now, more than any other production of any kind.

Whenever Goodfellas comes on TV, I always say I'll just watch fifteen minutes, only fifteen minutes, through the scene in the bar, until we hear the nicknames of the mob guys explained.  Before I know it two hours have passed and I'm listening to the instrumental from Leila grow larger and larger as the characters go off - a classic and irresistible denouement.

I've seen Rubber Room more times than Goodfellas and more times than any of my other "mesmerizers" -- which is what I call movies I can't stop watching:

All that Jazz
Once Upon a Time in America
The Godfather

What are yours?


                 

Friday, February 18, 2011

Rubber Room: Making the Experiment More Experimental

In the first round, no actor saw any other actor again.  This is how the experiment had been outlined for them  They entered the stage, one by one, at different times, so they first encountered each other when they first encountered each other.

Then, occasionally, in later rounds, sprinkled in were a few, very few, second encounters, just to make the experiment even more experimental.

First encounters produced the shock of un-recognition.

Second encounters produced the double-take.

Each added its own flavor of unpredictability.

"Biutiful": Acting as a Disappearing Act

Barcelona as we see it in Biutiful is not what the tour guide will show you.   Inarritu's city is as dark as it is light in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  This reminds us that the director directs where the camera goes, that there are no random shots, it's all point of view and choice of subject matter, no one speaks with God's voice. What a mistake it would be to think you know a place based on how it is depicted in only one movie.

Javier Bardem is in both films.  In both films (and so many others) he practices the highly refined, careful art of disappearing into the character.  

So much box office and so many movie careers depend on just the opposite.

Reviews are about whether to see a movie; sightings are about what there is to be seen in the movie, which moments on the screen illuminate life.  This film is about all of the important things, beginning with a father's love for his children and his desire to protect them at all costs.  

Uxbal descends into the underworld every day to make ends meet.  He constantly juggles the darkest challenges.  His means of livelihood is unsavory and complex; but when it causes suffering, he cares.   His estranged wife's behavior reduces him to a single father, wary and weary.  He is dying.

His life is organized by illness and the need for money.  In the latter, he's like the rest of us; in the former like any of us may become.  

The story inside the film is directed by an actor who makes several on-screen appearances at critical moments --  Money.  Cash.  No credit cards accepted in this world.  Colorful, European oversized bills, dirty, folded, in batches.

Money motivates all the action.  Money demands all the attention.  Money only stops mattering when life itself stops.

Through it all, Bardem gives such a sympathetic portrait of Uxbal that we cannot separate the actor from the character, or even from ourselves as we watch.   

Uxbal/Bardem understands that the first romance is the family, and that the story of this romance will be constructed by the children out of memories of the parents, even when nothing exists but scraps of information.  Despite insurmountable obstacles, Uxbal/Bardem never wavers from his mission:  to protect his children and to show them who he is.  

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Rubber Room #17 and 18: Two Dinner Parties

February 16, 2011 7PM and 9:30Pm

Imagine you throw a dinner party.  You invite five people.  They are five people you do not know (they're passers-by) and they don't know each other.  You put them in the same room, sit them at the same table so to speak, and take a seat out of sight where they can't see you and you watch them interact.

That's what happened tonight and every night for the run of this innovative theatre experiment developed and executed by Artistic New Directions.

Tonight, both parties were a success.  The guests got along and did not get along in unexpected ways.

Kristine Niven has to agree that this was her best Daytona so far.  Jill Melanie Wirth gave us another spirited Daytona.

Desmond Dutcher and Scott Davidson gave compelling performances once again, each with his own mix of anger, disappointment, and distress.  I'm pleased each time to talk to these two actors afterwards, just to remind myself that they are really nice guys, a tribute to their talent.

Abby Lee and Cooper Shaw couldn't be more different in their portrayals of Larissa (that's LARI-double S-A, in case you wan't to write it down).  That's an inside joke.  Come to the show to get it.  I've written plenty about Abby's comedic gifts (there have to be all kinds of roles in her future).  She plays it just enough over the top.  Cooper Shaw seems to have experimented the most with her character.  I've seen four of her Larissa's, each one stronger and more confident than the last; more inventive, too.

John Calvin Kelly once again excellent, compelling, engaging.  Great on the transitions.  As single-minded as a security guard.  Ben Sumrall, his counter-part, could do the entire role without moving.  The expressions on his face track every action, articulate every mood.

The two Patti's take different routes to the same place.  Irene Longshore brings back her bookish, shy, persistent, manic insistence.  Amanda Ladd is quietly explosive.

Rubber Room: Separate Dressing Rooms

The actors never see each other until they enter the rubber room.

They dress separately, in different rooms, a brief solitary confinement before each one steps on the stage.

On the elevator, I encounter one of the Patti's. There are no other passengers.

"Good job last night," I say. "Are you enjoying the play?"

She looks down, and then up at me, nervously.

"I've seen them all," I say. "I'm writing about them."

"Oh, I'm so relieved," she said. "I thought you might be one of the other actors. I didn't know if I should talk to you."

Rubber Room #13: Enter Janus

February 14, 9:30PM show

This performance was the most complete melding of comedy and seriousness yet, and it was extremely effective.  

The comedy was very funny and the seriousness very serious.

Abby Lee, the first actor to enter the room, sets the tone and sustains it, just as she has in both of her other performances.  I mentioned this quality in my observations of Rubber Room #5.  The Daytona character played by any of the actresses is always game for fun, always covering a certain sadness with a worldly sense of humor.  In this staging, Abby finds a willing comedic partner in Jill Melanie Wirth.

John Calvin Kelly is excellent as he has been all four times as Alan, the security guard, the unwilling jester.  Each time he handles masterfully the revealing transformation that the character undergoes as he introduces the fourth entrant into the room.  He's  thoroughly engaging.

Richard Hoehler delivers a dynamic intensity that grows as the play races to its conclusion.  It's hard to find any other words to describe a stellar performance.

Irene Longshore combines innocence, bookishness, pushiness and helplessness in an appealing, believable mix.  At a critical moment, she comes apart before our eyes just as the play comes together.
 

Out of Order: On the Way to Rubber Room #8 & 9


It starts to snow as I wait for the Saturday evening train. Talk about variations on a theme: from the end of December through now, we've had every kind of snow - heavy, wet flakes; powder; fluff; silent snow insulating all sound, terrible, freezing rain... 

There is something reminiscent of Chekhov while I wait for the train, with the new snow falling and yesterday's snow lying between the tracks as far as the eye can see.

The weekend train is festive.  People are on the way to the theatre.  They discuss the plays they are going to see: The Merchant of Venice, the dangerous Spider Man...

Across the aisle from me, in Chekhov fashion, a blonde from the Ukraine reads her book, legs crossed at the knee, right foot far forward, so the slipper-type shoe hangs downward from her toes, revealing her bare foot.  She is reading silently while the landscape rushes by the train window, just as she might in a Chekhov story.  

Behind her an Asian woman with a large brown leather bag alternately reads a bible and turns to her cell phone and taps out a message, back and forth, back and forth, one to the other, as if she is sending evangelical messages out to the world.

A man with a severe haircut is holding too many newspapers.  He spreads them out on the chair as if he's doing a comparative study of how the different papers have handled a certain story. 

These last two characters definitely belong more to Dostoevsky than to Chekhov.  

Meanwhile, the train rumbles along.  A woman is loudly discussing on her cell phone a furniture purchase she is about to make.  Children are laughing.  There is a general buzz throughout the train.  One family is holding balloons of different colors.












Out of Order: On the Way to Rubber Room #5 & 6

I'm surprised at how crowded the train is at noontime on Friday.  I have the last seat in the rear of the train, so looking forward I only see the backs of heads.  

Directly in front of me straight brown hair with a hint of red.  The temples of glasses visible when the head turns slightly.  The combination of such straight hair and such glasses makes me think librarian, but who knows, could be quite the opposite, making for a better story.

In front of her, that blend of gray and blonde which means a mature woman with an expensive hair-dresser minus the obsessive adherence to an appointment schedule.  I expect her to be creative, possibly scattered, good-hearted.

On the left side a bit further forward, a pair Rastafarian cuts, but wearing suit jackets, making me suspect the haircut is a statement of style rather than a way of life.  Neither head moves; they don't look at each other.

In front of them, a perfectly white head, also unmoving.  It is lower in the seat, so I expect it belongs to a shorter woman.  Easy to gravitate to the image of the kindly old woman and the kindly old man when age, but who knows how much havoc they wreaked to survive so long a life?

And in front of her, a gray head becoming a whiter shade of gray.   The head bobs with the movement of the train.  He is following some inner music (no head-phones visible), or he is meditating, entranced by the loco motion of it all.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Rubber Room: The Things They Carried

The actors bring different objects into the room.  

A box of crayons, pretzels to share, a miniature bottle of liquor, a pillow, purses and bags of different sizes, bottles of hand lotion, books to read, newspapers, a clipboard.  Some may be in the script; some are not I can tell because they are not always there. 

The longer the character has been coming to the Rubber Room, the more objects that character brings, which makes sense.

There is one object that one actor brings that changes the play. Too soon to say what.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Rubber Room 10: Unpredictability

February 13, 2011

Larissa: Kari Swenson Riely
Alan: Jacob Callie Moore
Sinclair: John Brady
Daytona: Elizabeth Bell
Patti: Blair Goldberg

If there's anything that bothers the actors about the experiment it is the unpredictability of working with actors they do not know.  By that, I learn by listening to them, they mean people with whom they have not rehearsed, whose tendencies and signals they do not know.  But that, of course, is the experiment.  I hear them discussing it on the elevator, and in front of the building after the performance.

More about that later, and what I have been calling "the reality dimension," and whether, as one of the actors put it, "reality is overrated." 

Sunday afternoon reality stopped the show.

We were three minutes from the end -- only two sentences remained to be spoken.  The show had had its own dose of unpredictability, as had all of the action in the second round.  They did different things, brought different objects with them into the room, said sentences in different ways, dropped a few lines, anticipated others.

With three minutes to go, someone began to moan.  It was an emotional moment in the play.  We knew there were teachers in the room.  At first, I thought the sound was an expression of solidarity across the profession.  The sound grew.  I turned to see one woman's head on the shoulder of another, but still did not feel there was any danger.

The actors were now aware of the sounds which they had professionally ignored until this moment, when the woman said, "I need to get out.  I need air."

We thought the worst.  We thought she might be having a heart attack.  The actors all stood up.  911 was called. The audience spilled onto the staging area; everyone co-mingled.  Once the situation was in hand, friends of the actors who had been wordlessly watching them perform, offered embraces and shook hands.  It reminded me of the world series game in San Francisco when the game was interrupted by an earthquake and the players could be seen in their uniforms holding their children in their arms.

EMS, to its credit, arrived in about ten minutes, and the theater's on the 12th Floor.  One of the workers said to the woman, "So you had to get into the act."  They had brought a wheel chair and a collapsible stretcher-bed.

The woman was telling the EMS workers that she felt okay now, that she didn't need any help.  Even if she truly felt that way now was the time to act, like when you get wind of a surprise party.  You have to act surprised.

She went off holding the hand of the EMS worker, meeting everyone's expectations.  

The play resumed.  They wound everything back five minutes and the two minutes leading up to the last three minutes were significantly different than they had just been played.  The actors stood in different parts of the room.  Their deliveries were slightly different.  The experiment was made even more experimental.

On the way to Rubber Room #10: Unpredictability

At first during this train ride on the way to Rubber Room performance #10 I was really enjoying not writing.  The train was decidedly warmer than the platform and I sank into the angle between the window and the chair to shut my eyes and just think about things.

It's Sunday afternoon. On the weekends, there's a transfer that takes place at Newark.  It's hard to find a seat on the second train.  I'm amazed by how crowded it is.  It's a double-decker and still I walk through several cars looking for an empty seat.  Two woman are in front of me as we make the trek from car to car.  The conductor checks our tickets and assures us that there are seats up ahead.

"I can't go to the  upper level," explains the older of the two women,  just in front of me.  "Bunny doesn't like it up there." 

"Bunny," I realize, is the name of her dog which is in some kind of carrying case that she has managed to fit beneath her coat, so that when she turns around to speak, they both look at me, a beast with two heads.  The woman's hair is extremely curly and completely white.  So is the dog's - a miniature poodle.  Who says people look like their pets?

She gives up the search, sliding into a seat reserved for the handicapped.

The younger woman I recognize from the platform, two trains ago, where she stood weighted down like an infantryman with three cases of different sizes, legs crossed at the ankles, arms akimbo, in perfect balance, with the poise of a dancer - a thing of beauty.

At Penn Station, I take the #1 train after finding the right metro card in my wallet.  But the train arrives in Times Square on the express track, not a good sign.  Less than ten minutes before the curtain rises.  The announcement confirms that there is no uptown service.  We are urged to take the express to 72nd Street and then the local back downtown.  No time for that.  I rush into the street where I flag down the only available cab, pointed in the wrong direction.   After several red lights, I jump from the cab at 54th Street, run to the building and walk to the elevator behind a slow moving patron of the arts whose girth and manner of walking forces me to adopt the same snail-like pace.  Sense of urgency is seldom shared.  

Once inside the elevator, I press 12, and, unfortunately, he presses 11.  As the car finally reaches the 11th floor, I step forward to be nearer the door once he departs.  

"Please don't touch any buttons until I exit," he says with indignation.

"No way I would," I say in my most innocent voice.

They've held the curtain for me, but as we'll all find out this will not be the only interruption of Rubber Room #10.

Time for an overview: Rubber Room #6-10

February 11, 2011

The Rubber Room is a play about the practice of confining "unfit" teachers to rooms where they sit in limbo waiting for their cases to come up.  While some know what they have been accused of, many do not.  So they sit and wait.

Artistic New Directions www.artisticnewdirections.org is a theatre development company that came up with the innovative idea of giving the play to five different theatre companies.  Each company rehearsed it with its own set of five actors.  

Twenty-five performances were scheduled, each with a different group of five actors, none of whom had rehearsed together.  In the first round of five performances, none of the actors had previously seen the set.

In the second round they have all seen the set at least once, but none of the five actors in each performance have rehearsed or done the play together.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Rubber Room #5: Taking the Fifth

February 11, 2011 7:00pm show

Larissa:    Abby Lee
Alan:       Jacob Callie Moore
Sinclair:    Desmond Dutcher
Daytona:   Jill Melanie Wirth
Patti:       Amanda Ladd

This impromptu group had tremendous fun right through the curtain call.  Amazing to see the transformation on the face of the most troubled character as he stepped out of character to the sound of applause.

This is my last introduction to actors I am seeing for the first time.  Beginning with the next performance, it will be new assortments of actors I've seen play their roles before.

So, from here out it should be interesting to note how the same actor in the same role plays it differently when surrounded by a different group of actors.

This time I heard the meaning of certain words as if for the first time.  There is a sentence, "I failed that boy," which I just did not understand in what I now believe is the intended way until it was delivered by this actress in this performance.

I also think I saw the actors catching the sense of enjoyment from each other, and wonder if such a tone can be set by just one actor, the first to appear.  This time the play, with all its serious moments, seemed most like a comedy.  The single word "Then..." spoken as it was, got a tremendous laugh.  I don't think that word at that moment exists in the other performances.

One object absent from the other performances, carried the day by how it embodied a sentiment only expressed in the other performances.  I want to see if it persists the next time this actor returns.

There was a certain controlled exaggeration of character that seemed completely in character and spelled success.

The performance played to a full house which thoroughly enjoyed the show.

  

Rubber Room #4: the Fourth Kind

February 10, 2011 9:30pm show

Larissa:    Erin Hadley
Alan:       Ben Sumrall
Sinclair:    John Brady
Daytona:   Denise Nolan
Patti:       Allison Goldberg

Improvisation.  Not with words, but actions.  It happened in Performance #2 as well -- highlighted by the snapping of a writing implement.  The snappee was suitably astonished.

This group was mobile, as in performance #3.  Now a veteran of three performances, I noticed how much improvisation there was here, and how it seemed to feed on itself.  One improvisation engenders another.  

So an expression of anger is underlined when an object is thrown.  Some do it with just words; others go further, just like real life.

I was impressed by certain physical movements.   How is it possible that one can make a greater impact on the group by moving away from the group to deliver a brief monologue?  I saw it happen.  

 

Friday, February 11, 2011

Rubber Room #3: Round Three

February 10, 2011 7:00pm show

Larissa:     Cecily Benjamin
Alan:        Jared Zirilli
Sinclair:    Richard Hoehler
Daytona:   Elizabeth Bell
Patti:       Mary Ruth Baggott

I'm not giving away anything by telling you that there a certain number of pieces of furniture in the room.  In the first two performances, the characters took identical positions, which made me conclude that where they positioned themselves must have been a stage direction.  But I had to throw away that idea with the third performance since the actors positioned themselves differently.  So identical results can also be random.

Attitude stepped forward with this performance, just as sound and mobility dominated the last.  It does not mean that it was absent in previous performances, but rather I noticed it because I was finished with taking note of such things as what happens (#1) and then what's different (#2).  Attitude is indirect; sarcasm is attitude.

Suddenly words seem to take on a deeper meaning.  So, I'm struck by the word "appealing." The actors are appealing.  The actors are appealing to one another.  I don't mean in the passive sense that they find each other appealing.  I mean it in the active sense that with every word and action they are appealing to each other, making their appeals, trying to make something happen.  That's what Rubber Room #3 showed me, and I have no idea if it's because I am seeing the action for the third time, but it gave me a deeper appreciation of how often when we speak on and off the stage we make appeals.
 

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Rubber Room #2: Reprise

February 9, 2011 9:30pm show

Larissa:     Cooper Shaw
Alan:        Tommy Day Carey
Sinclair:     Dan Patrick Brady
Daytona:    Sheila Stasack
Patti:        Blair Goldberg

Second show.  Same script.  Different actors.

Overall, the second group of actors was more mobile than the first.  There was more moving around the stage.  Voice levels seemed higher.  Also humorous lines -- both casts were just as funny as each other -- but the second group sometimes drew the laugh by a gesture that accompanied the words.

General observations:  the first performance you learn the action.  The second performance you know the action and hear some lines that you may not have heard the first time.  Different actors give different lines more emphasis so you hear them in a different way.

I need a phrase or word for the "reality dimension" of the performance.  For example, the character is entering the room for the first time and so is the actor.  The characters are meeting each other for the first time and so are the actors.  You can only do things for the first time once, but that doesn't mean that it's easy to get across to the audience the newness of the experience just because it's new.

The second performance reminds me that some of the reality dimension will be taken away beginning with the sixth performance.  In that performance the set which is a single room (named in the title) will no longer be new.

I want to see how that changes the performances, particularly the performance of the first actor to enter the room -- an empty room.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Train Back from Rubber Room Night 1

February 9, 2011

11:05 and I am in the subway on the way downtown to catch the train home from Penn Station.  This reminds me of when I worked in the newsroom at the NY Times years ago, except I did not get off until 3AM.  

Everything is more marginal late night.  Instead of the crush that met me at Penn Station on the way in, during rush hour, the population is slow moving.  Many are sleeping on chairs and stairways.  Some have no place else to go.

The train itself has late night energy. To my right is a well-dressed couple, both absorbed in their cell phones, until she dozes off against the window.  Surprisingly, the same conductor with the shock of red hair takes my ticket again, the same one she handed back to me on the way into the city.

There is a child murmuring behind me.  The woman is holding her head like she has a tremendous headache, but she's only tired, the end of a long day.  

A perfectly bald man with a gold earring, at first he seems lost in thought, or asleep, but then I see he, too, is looking into his cellphone and moving his fingers -- these devices, our electronic friends, always there, ready to respond.  Who am I to talk, as I tap away at this iPad.

Tomorrow morning, must describe Rubber Room Performance #2, after reflecting on the differences.

Tomorrow evening, back in for Night #2 and Performances #3 and #4.

Rubber Room #1: Introductions

February 9, 2011 7:00pm show

Larissa:     Kari Swenson Riely
Alan:   John Calvin Kelly
Sinclair:     Scott Davidson
Daytona: Kristine Niven
Patti: Irene Longshore  

The actors have never seen the room before, just like anyone entering a room for the first time.  The actors have never seen each other before, just like people encountering each other for the first time.  Remember, they did not rehearse together -- this is the "reality" dimension of the experiment.

Like any audience member, I have never seen the play before.  This is the least experimental part of the experiment, but it will be short-lived as I'm writing in the nearly empty theatre in the time between the first and second performances.

I want to find out what I find out by seeing something for the second time.  What persists, what changes?  Which choices made by the actors will carry from performance to performance?  They represent five different directors like strangers coming from five different families; the next five roles will represent five different directors.   

I'll never give away any plot details.  I was extremely impressed by how the one character who finds herself alone in the room gives life to the silence and palpably discovers the room.  The audience, in on the experiment, laughed at spots they might not otherwise have when the characters meet each other for the first time (because the actors are meeting each other for the first time).  Don't ask me what I mean by this, but that makes the meeting three dimensional; otherwise it's closer to a snapshot of a meeting, a rehearsed meeting.

I'm rushing this a little bit as the second audience assembles.  The actors in Rubber Room #1 were excellent; more about them all as I see the roles played by others.

I'm not alone, at least tonight.  I see some members of the audience returning for the second show.  "You see one performance," I hear someone say, "it's like seeing a play.  You see a second one and it's 'Whoaa.'"

As the audience left after the first show, the stage hands replaced a light, moved the furniture back in place, discussed their weekend plans.  I had to charge my cell phone and began to look for an outlet.

"Did you lose something?" one of them asked.

"I need an outlet."

"You know," she said, "I think they're behind the wall."

"You mean that's not a real wall?"

They looked so pleased, having so expertly constructed it for the play.

On the Way to the Rubber Room

February 9, 2011

On the way to the Rubber Room experiment....

A man reading a book, holding it too close to his face.  It has "beast" and "genius" in the title.

The conductor comes to collect the ticket.  Her hair is dyed an astonishing hue of red.  She hands me back a ticket.  I'm puzzled.  "You gave me two," she says.  

A young girl who sits across from me.  Instinctively, I move my foot from the seat next to her. "Don't bother," she says, "doesn't make the least bit of difference to me."  She pulls out a book by Nora Roberts and a banana which she promptly peels.  

Two guys sit down facing each other.  "You want to ride backwards?" the one guy says.  "I don't care," the other guy answers, and then less than a minute into his ride, he says, "Well, maybe I do," and he gets up to sit next to the other guy.

The young girl abruptly reaches for her cell phone, pulls it out of her pocket, looks at it, dismisses the message.  

A baby cries out in a happy way.  The girl stops her reading, puffs out her cheeks, makes gestures of approval passed down across eons of evolutionary time to the stranger baby whom I can hear but not see.

The train brings us into the station -- a combination of passengers that will never in the history of the world be together again.  

An hour the play begins, and I meet the first unique set of five characters.

The Rubber Room Challenge

One play.  Five roles.  Five theatre companies.  Five directors.  Each performance a new combination of actors, never two from the same company.  25 opening nights.  
 
I've taken the challenge presented to me by Artistic New Directions, an innovative theatre development company - www.artisticnewdirections.org - to attend all 25 performances and write about the experience in my blog -- www.moviesightings.com.  OK "movie sightings" is a misnomer (at least for this project), but so is funny bone.
 
First two performances happen tonight! 

I'm about to board the train to NYC.
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