Miracles

Never cease.

I’m back!

I said I would be if I had anything to say.

Two miracles to report this Monday. One is from a while ago. And one just happened.

The “while ago” miracle was in August. I became a produced playwright. This is a dividing line. There are the writers who write plays. And there are the writers who get them produced. Once you cross the threshold, you can never go back. (Not that you would want to.)

Anyway, I wrote an adaptation of The Looking Glass by Edith Wharton. It was produced by The Wharton Salon on the grounds of The Mount, Ms. Wharton’s Berkshire mansion.

Just getting a production is a miracle. But mine didn’t end there.

Because it could have been bad. It’s a one-woman show, and we lost our one woman about a week before we opened. (Health reasons. She’s fine now!)

Producer, director, everybody scrambling for a replacement.

And, the collateral miracle…they found Jane Nichols. The amazing Jane Nichols. Who came in late in the day, and saved it.

Jane gave a marvelous performance. Eternal gratitude? The term was invented for what we owe Jane.

It’s not easy coming into a one-person show at the last minute, learning pages of dialogue with no fellow actors to help you out if you stumble.

But she did it…and beautifully!

Audiences loved her. They loved the play.

Thanks to Edith Wharton, Jane Nichols, director Daniela Varon, and producer Catherine Taylor-Williams of The Wharton Salon, I am not only a produced playwright, but a beautifully produced one.

So, that’s the first miracle. Long overdue for a mention in this blog.

The second one is that I am back on track wrestling the To Do List from Hell into submission. I’m getting stuff done! I’ll tell you tomorrow about the software that’s helping me do it!

Right now, I have to get back to that To Do List.

Anna Deveare Smith

National treasure.

Anna Deveare Smith is a playwright, professor and one of the most extraordinary actresses you will ever see.

She is a pioneer of documentary theatre and became widely known for her one-person shows in which she used material from countless interviews to construct a script and embody the people interviewed. Her best known pieces using this technique are Fires in the Mirror about the Crown Heights Riot of 1991 and Twilight: Los Angeles about the 1992 L.A. riots. If you get a chance to see them, do!

She is now known to a wider public due to her recurring roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing and as the hospital administrator on Nurse Jackie.

Her ability to fully embody, physically and vocally, the people she has interviewed has been rightfully described as chameleon-like. It’s truly amazing.

I’m really excited about an interview she recently gave to The Boston Globe in which she talks about writing a fictional play for the first time. I can’t wait to see what that turns out to be.

Go take a look at the complete interview, of course, but here’s a little bit that caught my attention and explains a lot about Ms. Smith’s work:

The thing that speaks to me the most is the idea that a child understands, an early, primal idea, which is: That’s not fair. When somebody tells me something in the course of the interview that’s not fair, I become very interested because I know what’s going to happen linguistically is that as they tell me about a moment or something that shattered their sense of who they were, they will then have to go to their most rich resources to make the world right again, in front of me. And that’s when I start working.

It sure is good work.

Take a look at this TED Talk and see for yourself.

Trippingly upon the tongue

Speak the speech, I pray you.*

Hamlet’s advice to the players is always good to follow.

It can be a little tricky, however, when you encounter unfamiliar words.

This is clear to me from my work with Round Robin Shakespeare. Take an American who may have limited experience with Shakespearean English and throw some of those dukes’ names at her, and you could have a problem.

Phonetic spelling is not exactly how it goes.

Gloucester. Worcester. Leicester.

Now, of course, at our monthly meetings, we are not sticklers. We don’t really care if you trip over your tongue rather than speak the speech trippingly upon it.

But maybe some of you will have an audition at some point. Your agent (should you be so lucky) will email you the sides, and there’ll be some mouthful of unfamiliar names or scientific jargon.

What are you going to do?

Well, if all else fails, just say whatever it is confidently—as if you know what you are saying and how to pronounce it. If you get the part, somebody will make sure you get the correct pronunciation.

However, it is probably better to make some attempt to get it right. You can always look it up in a dictionary. But then, you have the additional problem of trying to decipher the diacritical marks put there to help you with pronunciation. I’m not sure they still teach those in school, anymore. (I mean, what can you expect from a curriculum that has decided that cursive is not going to be taught? A generation of people who can’t sign contracts, for one thing.)

Anyway, I found a site to help you out—and not a diacritical mark in sight!

Howjsay.com

Just enter those unfamiliar names (or other words) into the search box on howjsay, click submit, and listen to a lovely British voice pronouncing the word.

It turns out that Gloucester is Glawster, Worcester is Wooster, and Leciester is Lester—and the Shakespeare will go trippingly on.

* Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Sc 2

Alexis Smith

The power of longevity.

I have great partiality for the Smiths who are performers—as well as those who achieve longevity in show business. So, today, we recognize Alexis Smith.

Madam Smith—so-called, by me, at least, because she toured for a year as the Madam in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—Madam Smith began as a Warner Bros. contract player in the forties. She appeared alongside many of the biggest male stars of the day.

In the fifties, it seems she began to make the transition to stage doing a number of touring productions throughout the sixties—including one of my favorites, a big hit at the time, although little known now—Mary, Mary by Jean Kerr.

In the seventies, she made it to Broadway and won a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies.

She continued to work in film and television, with a recurring role on Dallas in the eighties and an Emmy nomination for a guest spot on Cheers in the nineties.

She passed away from brain cancer in 1993, still married to her husband of 49 years.

Personal and professional endurance. I admire it.

Here’s a clip, not the best quality video, of one of her numbers from Follies.

Manic Pictures Present

The Inimitable Danny Kaye.

In honor of it being SAG Awards time, and me having to watch ten movies before yesterday, I bring you this bit of silliness from Danny Kaye.

(By the end of my ten movies, they may be carrying me out by the elbows just like Danny.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoEUxTTobZ0

And, as a special bonus, one of his most famous bits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CetQrxFp4XI

Just remember: Eschew all vessels, pestles, palaces and chalices, and you’ll be fine!

There ain’t nothin’ like a dame

Dame Maggie, that is.

It’s not a very original headline, I know, but irresistible. In the same vein, I held off as long as I could, but we have to feature Dame Maggie Smith in a Smith Sunday. You knew it was coming, didn’t you? I suspect Dame Maggie is, currently, our most famous Smith. And, with the premiere of Season 3 of Downton Abbey last Sunday. . .how could we not mention her?

With an illustrious career on stage and screen dating back to 1952, she is one of the United Kingdom’s greatest exports. I am happy to say I’ve been a fan since I saw The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on TV. (Saturday Afternoon at the Movies was better then before Ted Turner bought all the great films.) Maggie Smith’s name in the credits will get me to a movie theater or into a Broadway house as quick as anyone’s. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life as I did at Lettice & Lovage, and it’s one of the few Broadway plays I’ve seen twice. If you want a lesson in timing, you could do far worse than study Dame Maggie.

Pure magic, long before she became Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry—although I, frankly, think she always was. I can’t imagine anyone would disagree that was a piece of the purest perfect casting.

Today, there are a lot of clips for your viewing pleasure. Start with a five minute scene from the stage production of Lettice & Lovage. Then, move on to Smith’s current audience favorite with the Dowager Countess’s top 10 moments form Season 1 of Downton Abbey. Finally, there is a much longer, half-hour retrospective of just a few career highlights. You’ll see her perform with Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, Michael Caine, Cher and Whoopi Goldberg, among others, and if you hang on to the end, there’s a delightful musical turn in which she teaches Carol Burnett to speak Cockney!

The end of Act I, Lettice and Lovage

Top 10 Downton Moments, Season 1

Dame Maggie Smith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF87K3cHTcI

History lives

It’s walked out of the books and onto the screen.

My grandfather collected books about Lincoln. Abraham, not Nebraska. I’ve read a few of them. Not all, by any means. So, I know a bit about our 16th president.

Most citizens of the United States do.

He’s one of the few that everybody remembers and everybody reveres.

Sometimes, we forget he was a masterful politician.

Go see Stephen Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln.

It’s going to sweep the awards. It deserves to do so.

What a gorgeous film on practically every level.

The acting—across the board—superb! Daniel Day-Lewis is the Lincoln I would have requisitioned if I could have imagined the perfect actor—and my imagination would have fallen short of this performance. The supporting cast: David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, Sally Field, Hal Holbrook and countless others disappear into the time and the story and the persons. After the first flash of recognition, all their star qualities, the tricks and trademarks, vanish as if they had never been. We are watching William Seward, Thaddeus Stephens, W. N. Bilbo, Mary Todd Lincoln, Preston Blair.

The script is fascinating. Based largely on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals, Tony Kushner has transcended the usual bio pic to give an in-depth study of the machinations surrounding the passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The wheeling and dealing, the lofty ideals and the base political machinations are all laid out before us.

The cinematography is beautiful. The film is shot in a palette almost indescribable. Suffice it to say that the historical details of setting and costume are crisp and clean, and yet, the whole thing has a patina of age, a not-quite-sepia tone of old photographs.

The direction—okay, I have a few quibbles—but the overall achievement is of such high quality that I’m not going to pick nits.

The score—one of the few movie soundtracks I feel I ought to buy.

I am going to buy the DVD. The minute I can.

This movie is a FIND. With a capital F.I.N.D. Run—with a capital R—to see it.

What becomes a legend most?

Sharing their stories!

Everybody loves behind-the-scenes info. Don’t they? I know I do. I love to hear how writers and actors and producers got started, what they remember most about their work experiences, what advice they have for others aspiring to similar achievements. It’s fascinating.

Of course, it’s best if it’s someone whose work you know, but an opportunity to hear from someone you’ve never happened to encounter is a gift, too. It can open your eyes to treasures you might not otherwise find.

Agnes de Mille came to speak at my college once. I’d heard of her. I knew she was, famously, the choreographer for the original Oklahoma. What I didn’t know and was delighted to discover was that she was a terrifically entertaining speaker and a wonderful writer. I went and found her books, learned a great deal and enjoyed them thoroughly.

Harold Clurman, John Houseman, Vincent Price—all became doors into new information once I had the opportunity to hear them talk.

So imagine my glee when I stumbled upon a website created by the Television Academy Foundation which hosts over 700 oral history interviews conducted in-depth with the legends of television.

EmmyTvLegends.org

There are over 3000 hours of interviews with actors, writers, directors, newscasters, tv executives, technical gurus and more. And they are not drive-by, promote-the-project-of-the-moment interviews. They are hours-long, thoughtful discussions. What I always thought talk shows should be and almost never are. (Dick Cavett’s show being a notable exception.)

It’s all fascinating. Sometimes funny, sometimes inspiring, sometimes eye-opening. The interviewers are good. They ask excellent questions, and they stay out of the way. Interesting facts come to light, and personalities are revealed.

You can spend a lot of time there. So, be warned. But spending your time in the company of some of our most creative people? Is there any better way?

A Thespian Thursday

Twisting your tongue into tangles

A little something for the actors in the group or teachers or anyone who has to do any public speaking.

Any time you have to get up in front of people and talk, it is a good idea to wake up your tongue. A little “Peter Piper,” a little “woodchuck chucking wood” in advance and your performance will be better.

(I saw Rachel Maddow the other day. I love Rachel Maddow–but on this particular day, she’d skipped the warm-up, I think.)

Avoid the stumbles and fumbles. Try a few tongue twisters. Say each one 3 times fast, and you’ll be ready for anything.

Alice asks for axes

Bad black bran bread

Betty Bocker bought some butter, but she said “This butter’s bitter!
If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter!”
So she bought some better butter and she put it in her batter
And it made her bitter batter better.

The big black bug bit the big black bear and the big black bear bled blood

Bluebeard’s blue bluebird

Bland Bea Blinks Back

Cinnamon Aluminium Linoleum

Cheap sheep soup

Friendly fleas and huffy fruitflies

A fat-free fruit float

Greek grapes

Gig-whip

The hare’s ear heard ere the hair heeded

Ike ships ice chips in ice chips ships

June sheep sleep soundly

Keenity cleaning copper kettles

Lemon lime liniment

Much mashed mushrooms

Norse myths

Nine nice night nymphs

Awful old ollie oils oily autos

Under the mother otter uttered the other otter

A pack of pesky pixies

Poor pure Pierre

The queen coined quick clipped quips

Red leather yellow leather

Rigid rugged rubber baby buggy bumpers

Round and round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran their rural races

Strange strategic statistics

The sea ceaseth seething

Six sick shorn sheep

The sixth Sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick

Such a shapeless sash

The swan swam over the swell, swim swan swim
The swan swam back again, well swum swan

A ghost’s sheets would soon shrink in such suds

Thrash the thickset thug

Three free through trains

Tea for the thin twin tinsmith

What a to do to die today, at a minute or two to two.
A distinctly difficult thing to say, but harder still to do.
For they’ll beat a tattoo at twenty to two
With a rat-a-tattoo at two
And the dragon will come when he hears the drum
At a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.

You know New York, you need New York, you know you need unique New York

Valuable valley villas

Real wristwatch straps

War weary warriors

Ex disk jockey

Local yokel jokes

Zithers slither slowly south

Trip over your tongue a lot? I bet, if you did, you laughed–and that’s another benefit. Laughter wakes up your diaphragm. Your voice will have more support.

There you go. All warmed up now? Knock ’em dead.

Most of these came from my work with the American Globe Theatre and Pulse Ensemble Theatre–but I’ve checked, and they all seem to be widely available elsewhere on the ‘net, so feel free to use and share.

The play’s the thing*

And good actors don’t hurt

Today’s Monday Miracle actually happened yesterday when I went to see the last performance of The 5 & Dime’s production of Next Fall by Geoffrey Nauffts.

Now, I’d seen Next Fall previously, in New York, in its Off-Broadway incarnation, produced by Naked Angels. That production moved to Broadway–with the help of some perceptive commercial producers who recognized a good thing when they saw it. Clearly, they were not the only ones, because it was nominated for two Tonys: Best Play and Best Direction of a Play.

I’m on a mission to see what kind of theatre is being produced in and around my new home in the Jacksonville, FL area. Google led me to The 5 & Dime, among other theatres, and they were the first one with a show currently running.

I’ll be honest and say that my expectations were not high. (They weren’t especially low, either. I suppose they were non-committal.)

The 5 & Dime is a nomadic company. They don’t have a space of their own, and they mount their productions in various spaces in and around Jacksonville. At best, that says to me that they are a young company. At worst, it conjures up memories of the seediest of black box theatre off-off-off-off-broadway. (I’ve worked in some of those off-off-off. . .offs. The quality of the work can be very high. Or not. The spaces, though, are almost uniformly in a state of what we might describe as “run-down.”)

Their name. . .well, I loved Woolworth’s and the other five-and-dime stores. . .but you have to admit calling a theatre company The 5 & Dime doesn’t give it the same aura as calling it, say, the Nederlander or the Schubert or the National. A rose by any other name. . .,** however.

In addition, it didn’t appear from their marketing material that the cast is made up of Equity actors. Again, this does not mean it can’t be good. There are some very fine non-union actors.

So, I went–hoping for good theatre but prepared for the possibility of something somewhat less. I knew it wasn’t going to be bad. After all, the script is terrific. But was it going to measure up to the version I saw in New York?

How wonderful to find a little gem of a show in a great space with high production values and a very strong cast! Deserving of special mention: Antoinette D’Amico was really terrific as the mother, and Kevin Roberts and Joe Walz turned in excellent performances as Adam and Luke.

And I can’t remember her name, but the president of their Board gave what is possibly the best curtain speech before a show that I’ve ever heard.

It was a lovely afternoon at the theatre — funny and moving and thought-provoking — and I am definitely going back to see their next show, Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

In fact, I’m looking forward to it!

* Shakespeare again! It’s always a good day when I get to quote Shakespeare. This one’s from Hamlet, Act 2, Sc. 2.

** And again. Another Act 2, sc. 2. This time it’s Romeo & Juliet.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Category Archives: Acting