It's a Vision thing

We had the first readthrough of Cherry Docs last night. I'm excited and a little scared. David Gammons brought his usual mystical brew of understated genius. I've never seen any other director who uses imagery and design to access the deepest truths at the center of the play. Most other directors, myself included, talk around the play: themes, characters, effects. David somehow manages, through the images he brings, the designs he makes or draws from others, and a few well chosen words, to go right to the soul of the play. He creates a world, with a few well-chosen strokes, that has deep textures, subtle nuances, and a rightness that makes you, as an actor, feel absolutely confident that you are stepping down the correct road.

It's inspiring. And, as I said a little scary.

This one is a beast.

Spring Standards

A friend of Kelli's posted this on her Facebook page. And I must say it is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long, long time...

Head games

So tonight, I went to the Boston Psychoanalytic Society - Bipsy, to her friends - to talk about Shakespeare and acting. It was strange, and interesting. I was approached by a very genial and generous therapist names Walker Shields, who had seen some ASP stuff and had won this prize for writing a paper called, "Imaginative Literature and Bion’s Intersubjective Theory of Thinking".

Now Bion, it turns out, is neither and ancient Greek nor an alien from "Ben 10", but british psychoanalyst from the early 20th century. My friend Walker has developed a group model whereby you use a piece of imaginative literature - a poem by Emily Dickinson and the "To be or not to be" speech in this case - as the springboard for an active exploration of the soul of a group. He was interested in the relationship between this practice and the theater, and asked me to join him in a discussion as part of his giving his paper and collecting his prize.

We've had a bunch of "My Dinner With Andre" kind of lunches at a thai place in Belmont, which I wish everyone who is interested in the personal and spiritual practices of making theater had been at - they were really cool. The main points, I guess, to summarize:

1. Theater and psychoanalysis are really similar.

2. The chance to enter into a kind of reverie in which imaginative literature causes impulsive and unexpected associations, thoughts, memories and reflections, is essential to both fields, and really cool.

3. Human beings are naturally drawn to make stories and create connections, and the feedback loop created by a storyteller and an audience is essential to get deep into the human psyche

4. To actually get deep into the human psyche, it is necessary to nudge people out of their comfort zones, and create an environment where they are dealing with their sensory input in an immediate and improvisatory way.

Now, none of that is all that strange, I guess. But it was pretty cool. Most of the time I hate talking about acting and making theater because it's mostly such self-congratulatory bullshit, but in this context, it was pretty cool. And I thought theater was pretty cool, too.

magic waves

So today I joined the ranks of the amazed. Kelli had told me about Magic Marcus the Avatar of Acupuncture, but until I experienced for myself, I couldn't really appreciate it.

I have had this impingement in my neck for almost 6 months - chiropractic, physical therapy - it hasn't really done anything. So I sit down with Marcus, he asks me a few questions, then he asks me to put my arm over my head. I do, but it hurts. So he puts these two little magnets on my wrist, and asks me to do it again. Low and behold, it's so much easier - like noticeably so. He moves them, it's even better. He moves them again - it gets worse! So #2 was better than #3. Huh?

He works on me for a while, and sends me home with more magnets - and, okay, it's only been about 8 hours. But my neck, shoulder and hand feel better than they have for almost three months! My chi, getting aligned. Who'd a thunk it? Obviously, it's not cured, I will have to wait and see. but wow. I guess it's science, medicine, fact. But it seems like magic to me...

In the few moments before I fall asleep these days - I'm sleeping rather blissfully well these days - partly because we're all waking up before 7 a.m. It's also because I have less to worry about these days - finances are still really tricky, but I do find a great weight has lifted since the end has truly come in my relationship with ASP. Of course, I shouldn't be sleeping so much. The impingement in my neck seems to like nothing so little as sleep. The longer I sleep, the more screwed the nerves in my arm are the next day - and the longer it takes for the tingling and numbness to return to its base state - just in my forefinger and thumb and not all up my arm. Still, sleep is fun these days. So rarely in my life have I be able to regularly enjoy the sensation of drifting easily and quickly off into the land of nod. I'm also dreaming more, and the dreams are often quite entertaining. I should start to write them down.

But I digress. I was going to say, before the above paragraph got hijacked by sleep, that in the short moments before I fall asleep, I have been reading a really neat book. It's called The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason. It's a bunch of short stories - some really short - all variants of sections of the Odyssey. What if Odysseus had come home to find Penelope remarried, that sort of thing.

There's a good review of it in Slate, here.

It's pretty contemplative, and the individual chapters are all elegantly brief, and very thought provoking. The one in which Odysseus is a shaman who creates Achilles as a golem is one of my favorites, and really does connect to some very thought-provoking resonances with the myth. That's its real attraction - by looking at these well-known adventures from a slightly different angle, it reveals some of the timeless images, themes and questions of that amazing journey.

Check it out.

Awkward Family Pet Photos: The Book

I was whiling away the time looking through the wonders of the Awkward Family Photos website - a marvelous time waster if ever there was one. This had to be my favorite, though. The delicious blasphemy of it must be savored.

It's a funny site. Check it out.

Awkward Family Pet Photos: The Book

Big Love

Kelli and I watched What's Eating Gilbert Grape last night. Kelli had to watch it for Class Day at Milton - I guess they were talking about it at some Class Thing. Anyhow, I'd never seen it before. It was pretty good. I've always liked Johnny Depp (someday I must tell you the story of how we met him and his wife in the Park in Rome), and Mary Steenbergen. And Leonardo Di Caprio does pull off a very convincing kid with mental deficiencies. When it came out, I remember I as at the age (29) where I was starting to feel that young people were trying to be cooler than me, and so I pooh-poohed their pretense of deep experience and wouldn't go near the movie. Now that I am old, old old I have more respect for the work of people younger than me - since so many people are younger, now.

Now I really was surprised and impressed by Darlene Cates as Mamma. Like so many people, I'm sure, we wondered what had happened to her, and how and whether she was making out, given her extraordinary girth.

Happily, she still seems to be with us. I was really struck by a quote of hers on IMBD:

"I wish everyone that's kind of hiding away at home still could understand or could have the same experience that I did. Once I did the Sally show, all of a sudden I realized that if I went out and people stared at me, I wouldn't know if they were staring at me because I was fat or because they recognized me from being on TV. That empowered me.

I had to make a choice, I could stay where I was and be miserable, or I could take a risk and do something exciting. I talked with the author, Peter Hedges. There were some things in the book that I didn't like. We talked about those extensively and I trusted him because the character was based on somebody that meant something to him in his life. So I knew that it wouldn't be anything horrible. As we went along I was so proud of the way that the character was portrayed and so proud of the way that the children came around to see that this woman had these good qualities, and how much she really did care about her family."

With America's horrible problem with obesity - which we see all over, especially when we travel out to Missouri to visit Kelli's relatives - it's important to remember the human being that is stuck in there...