Animal Kingdom

So it's Friday afternoon, and just came in from killing a creature in cold blood. The cold blood of pity, but still...

I heard Spencer yelling at Spike outside a few minutes ago "Leave it! Spike! Give! Leave it". Spencer came in the house. "Spike has a bird in his mouth," He said. "Is it dead?" I asked. "Not sure, I think it's twitching."

I went out into the garden. Sure enough, there was our sweet, shaggy dog, sitting in the garden with a wing and a foot sticking out of mouth. I put on a glove, grabbed his collar and wrested the bird from his unwilling mouth. He's a very good boy - he wasn't excited about it, but he didn't make trouble.

The bird was a mess. I don't know if Spike had caused it, or if he had found it that way. But it was alive. Much of its feathers has been torn off its belly, which was red and bleeding. Its head was lolling back and forth, I think its neck was broken. It had its eyes tightly close when I pulled it out of Spike's mouth, as it were just waiting for it all to be over. But it opened them when I pulled it into the air. It looked at me. Usually, I find bird's eyes to be so strange, so alien, they hardly seem like they come from the same planet. This bird's eyes were so full of such familiar things: pain, weariness, confusion, hope. It was heartbreaking.

I could hardly bear it. There was clearly no way it was going to survive - it was a shattered wreck. Should I give it back to the dog? I thought, rather incoherently. Should I put it somewhere safe where it can eke out its last breaths? That seemed cruel, it must be in a lot of pain. So I put it down on the flagstones of our patio, and I picked up a big stone - a piece of white marble that decorates the flowerbed - three times the size of the poor creature. Its head was facing the ground so it couldn't see. I held the rock over the bird's head at a height of about two and half feet, and let it fall. It was over instantly.

Then I put the bird's body in the trash, so that Spike, or some other animal wouldn't get at it. It seemed, ironically, the most respectful thing I could do.

Don't Vote - yeah, that's American Values...

I stumbled across this this morning and I just couldn't believe it. It's aimed at Hispanic people in the Nevada election, and is the most blatant example of voter suppression I think I have ever seen. How can people who claim to believe in the United States and in democratic values possibly condone this? It is so fucking hypocritical. The ad ran in Spanish, which I've put first, and then the English translation, which didn't run on the air, but for those of us who don't speak Spanish is useful - there's also a story in the Huffington Post:

seeing red

I have never been a fan of abstract expressionism. I never really got it. Big canvases with paint on them - that's what it looked like to me.

I don't know if it's the part I'm playing - Danny in Cherry Docs - but for some reason, this article, in the New Yorker, really got me. You probably can't read it without a subscription:

“Abstract Expressionist New York,” at MOMA, review: newyorker.com

But there it is, anyway. I found the descriptions of the art suddenly deeply sensuous, gripping, and emotional. I mean, look at this picture:

Granted, it's kind of hard to see when it looks so small and, well, red - but there's a fever to it that suddenly I find deeply compelling. It probably is Danny who is doing this to me. He is the kind of guy who sees red, a lot, and the kind of guy who is constantly pulling intense spiritual significance out of the most insignificant details. His desperate need for some kind of spiritual grounding, for something to mean SOMETHING, is making me see import in the simplest of things. "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." Suddenly I get the frenzied passion behind these strange painters who were looking for something so deeply essential that the paint, the canvas, the deepest colors and simple lines, somehow took them to a =more essential, primitive space than any form or figure could do.

I kinda get it now...

Cry

So I had this dream last night. People telling you their dreams is usually lame, but this one I felt was strangely beautiful, and so I'm going to subject you to reading about it.

First off, we were wandering through an old city looking for the vegetable market. Don't know what that means. But we wound up at this old house which was inhabited by a small group of artists. One of them had a friend, a young woman, who had recently been killed by a stalker - she was a beautiful, clear, simple girl with straight blond hair, and she had been cut down. He was grieving, and we all joined him in his grief. We took ordinary towels that we had folded up, and we played them - we twisted and squeezed them - and the most beautiful, complicated music came out - intricate, sad, but sweet and so lovely.

The artist who was grieving was a muralist, and on the wall were two of his murals. They were side by side. One was called "Cry #1" and the other "Cry #2". They were simple. They were both images of a staircase - that's all - that rose up, and plummeted straight down. The first one was simple, four steps going up and then over; but the second was high, high, high - it reached around the corner and fell from a great height. Somehow, they encapsulated for me so perfectly the idea of what it means to cry. You must climb your grief, step by step, to the summit, and then you can fall, free - a descent that is at once a release and a loss.

I woke, at 4:30 a.m., feeling so lucky that I had had this dream. I mused on it, trying to remember the details, until I drifted off again about an hour later. Good night....

Skinheadcase

Danny is starting to get under my skin. That's the part I'm playing in Cherry Docs. This happens to me with most characters, for good or ill. When I played Hamlet, I famously couldn't decided anything, but moped around my life in a state of withdrawn indecision. When I played Coriolanus I became intrepid, uncompromising, and impulsive. When I played Dorian in Opus I became obsessed with good skin care.

I guess it's a good thing that he's getting in there. It's not the kind of play you can get away with skimming along on the surface. As he says in the script, "you've got to get to sinew." Trouble is, he's kind of a morose, thin-skinned little bastard. I've found myself surprisingly cranky these days. I thought it was the troubles with my neck, money troubles, and my anxiety about how difficult it has been to learn the lines to this play - the first and last of which lead me to worried thoughts about losing my capacity as an actor. If there was one place I always felt like I was in command of myself and what I did, it was in the rehearsal room. Not so right now. I'm struggling, irritable and fighting a vague sense of inadequacy.

Of course it didn't occur to me until I was lying in bed at 5:30 this morning, unable to sleep and gloomily examining the state of my life, that I realized it was the damn character who was working this insidious mojo on me. Not only is he cantankerous, edgy, laconic, he is also deeply vexed by profound existential questions about his own place in life. There I was, lying in my bed. I sleep on my side, facing the edge of my bed, and I often wake up in the early hours because I've somehow pushed off the covers, and I am lying there exposed and freezing. This morning, and I'm lying there and noticing how close I am to edge, like I'm on the edge of a cliff ready to plummet into some sort of abyss. Cheery. Then, it hits me. That's Danny thinking. I feel a little better, but, of course, I can't sleep because I suddenly start writing this post in my head and I know I won't be able to get back to sleep until I get it out. Obsessiveness, another Danny trait. So here I am, at 6 in morning, when I should be sleeping because I have another tough rehearsal day ahead of me doing another thing that the annoying bastard I'm playing does incessantly. Soliloquizing.

High diddly dee...

It's going to be a great show, though.

Kindness

We went to see In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) last night at Speakeasy. It was a good production with strong work by the women in the cast, especially Lindsey McWhorter and my friend Anne Gottlieb.

I was thinking about what it was that I found so appealing about Sarah Ruhl's writing, and it occurred to me that she refuses to recognize the existence of evil in people. Stupidity, stolidness, selfishness and myopia, yes, but not evil, and not hatred. Her empathy is so great that she really is able to see and express every single character's point of view and to make us appreciate their need to be understood and listened to.

This is quite interesting to me, at the moment, as I delve into the world of Cherry Docs - which is full of evil. Reading Frank Meeink's book Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, the amount of evil and hatred perpetrated by almost everybody is stunning, and very discouraging. It is indisputable that there is way too much senseless cruelty and brutality in the world, which people inflict on one another for no good reason. But Sarah Ruhl has the ability to see and explore areas of the human experience that are just as urgent, compelling and universal, but are concerned with need, love, and - and to me this is the actually the most salient - just plain confusion about what the heck is going on in our lives and what we should do about it.

I often like to say, and I'm hardly original here, that drama takes place at the fringes of life - you need a good crisis to make a good drama. But Ruhl manages to make compelling drama that exists more in the middle - where people are mostly okay, but still profoundly lost in the daily effort to live. It touches me just as deeply as the most extreme tale of human suffering and redemption. Almost more so, because it's more like my own life. Not that I've had much experience with the electronic stimulation of the quelque chose...