Monthly Archives: October 2007

directing, employment

A Life In The Theatre

Got in the Denham app for LYDIA, and Toby and I are brainstorming about doing German together this summer in Middlebury.

Mary Orr Denham is perhaps best known for her first short story, entitled “The Wisdom of Eve,” upon which the Oscar-winning film “All About Eve” was based. She sold the story to Cosmopolitan for $800 and it was published in the May 1946 issue. Ms. Orr married the director Reginald Denham in 1947 and together they wrote four plays that opened on Broadway. Ms. Orr also had a successful acting career, appearing in many Broadway plays, including The Desperate Hours in 1955. A longtime resident of Manhattan, Ms. Orr passed away in September 2006 at the age of 95.

Looking at this now I wish I had made some reference in the app to Mary being a hybrid artist herself, but hopefully it’ll work out by context. Les doights crossed.

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directing

SSDC Associate Membership Application

October 1st, 2007.
The Monday “off” between tech and previews.

I, Dara Weinberg, hearby make application for membership in the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, Inc., and agree to abide by all rules and regulations as provided in the By-Laws of the Society as well as to all the addition working rules adopted by the membership, and support the SSDC credo:

“It is the broad purpose of this Society to elevate the standards of the art of stage direction and choreography; to develop communication among the director and choreographer craftspersons; to establish means for the dissemination and exchange of ideas of directorial and choreographic interest to the profession; to aid in the development and training of directors and choreographers; to increase in the professional and public esteem these arts and to develop all conditions that will encourage them.”

I’ve never been so in fervent agreement with the goals of anything I’ve joined in my life.

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directing, self-blogerential, style

MOH&H audience member writes

I found a very long post online from a friend of Ezra’s, Bob Toombs, who saw MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL and really hated it.

I decided to respond to him and hope he would take up some dialogue with me.

It’s exciting to have audience members who are this engaged. I just wish I’d gotten to have the conversation with him in person.

I don’t think I would have ever thought of writing back to a post like this before I worked with Bill, but I learned a lot from seeing how he responds to feedback and criticism. He really believes in dialogue with other people. And after two years working for him, I want to hold those values in the same way he does.

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Uncategorized

And We’re Back

So, Anne Bogart says, in A DIRECTOR PREPARES, that her best loved play in New York, or one of them, was the one she thought only theater people could like. It makes me wonder, more, about a play set in the time of tech. Real-time. Ten out of Twelve.

I feel like the theater folks around me are a really Chekhov group – the way I keep hearing people repeat “Some actors are moths, and some are cockroaches” reminds me of Simeon-Pischik, or something.

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books, quotes, style

I do not wish to appear smug

“Then we were kissing – just like, I suppose, a couple on the cinema screen. It was almost exactly as I had always imagined it would be, except there was something oddly inelegant about our embrace, and I tried more than once to adjust my posture; but my right foot was hard against a heavy box and I could not quite negotiate the necessary turn without risking my balance.”

– from When We Were Orphans. One of the reviews on there called Ishiguro “emotionally strangulated” – for heaven’s sake- his precision, and especially his modifiers upon descriptions (“oddly inelegant”) have much emotion as anyone could want. There’s nothing minimalist about his adjectives. His characters feel more than any ten others.

“My feeling is that she is thinking of herself as much as of me when she talks of a sense of mission, and the futility of attempting to evade it. Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. For those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”

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Golda, the audience, theater

You’ll Have It In The Morning

Tonight at Molly Magee’s, after two run-throughs in our final day of tech, (and my laptop fainting like a woman of fiction in the middle of the second one) we fell into another conversation about bad theater and the way it happens so often – through money, through paint-by-numbers directing or writing, through “prescription audiences,” through mediocrity.

We criticized theater with the attention to detail of intimate family. We know her flaws better than anyone else does. (And, I suppose, she knows ours.)

I suddenly overheard myself saying that every new audience is an new opportunity to do something better. I don’t always believe that, but I try to work as if I did.

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Golda, style

And the war

Bringing in a projection of an image of fences before you say the words “fenced in” makes the words feel foreshadowed.

Bringing it in after makes the words feel like they’re coming from a teacher in art class with slides.

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