SCHADENFREUDE. I have from to time posted on critics who support dismissive judgments with affectations. This morning the Financial Times (March 11) had a review of the new Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island. The critic makes the point that the movie is not for the intelligent: “Thought can be fatal, here…..” He compares it to a painting which he considers a “kitsch classic.” and says the movie would be more enjoyable “if you could take out your brain and experience it only with eyes and ears.” I was amused to see that he begins his treatment of the film by saying: “Fancy people call it schadenfreude: joy in shadows.” Of course, the dictionary definition of schadenfreude is: “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others.” The etymology is: “Etymology: German, from Schaden damage + Freude joy.” (The German word for the shadow is der Schatten.)
Archive for the ‘Theater’ Category
SCHADENFREUDE.
Thursday, March 11th, 2010THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT THE AUTISTIC SPECTRUM.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT THE AUTISTIC SPECTRUM. Here are some things I learned from the articles I linked to yesterday: 1. Temple Grandin says that “The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic…because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave.” 2. Temple Grandin compares this learning to acting: “It’s like being in a play; I’m always in a play.” Interestingly, Tyler Cowen cites a psychologist who says that “acting is a profession well-represented on the autistic spectrum.” 3. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures. Bari Weiss calls this “the defining characteristic of her mind.” 4. It is very important to recognize that there is a spectrum of autistic characteristics. 5. Tyler Cowen has a long list of cognitive skills—I counted ten of them in one paragraph—that people in the autistic spectrum are better in. 6. Cowen views “higher (and lower) education as teaching people to be more autistic in many of their basic cognitive skills.”
“SAMUEL BECKETT LOOKS AT THE STARS”—NEW YORK CITY PRODUCTION.
Saturday, January 30th, 2010“SAMUEL BECKETT LOOKS AT THE STARS”—NEW YORK CITY PRODUCTION. My play “Samuel Beckett Looks at the Stars” will be performed in New York City next Saturday and Sunday (February 6 and 7). It will be part of a program of short plays which will begin at 9:00 p.m. on Saturday the 6th and at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday the 7th at
Where Eagles Dare Studios, 347 W. 36th Street
New York, NY 10018 (Between 8th and 9th Avenues).
Tickets and reservations are available at the SmartTix reservations service. Here is a link.
WARNING: The running time of the play is about three minutes. You can find an earlier version of the play through the search feature for the blog. I’ll also post the final version after the performances.
IF METHOD ACTING IS DEAD, WHAT KILLED IT?
Monday, December 21st, 2009IF METHOD ACTING IS DEAD, WHAT KILLED IT? David Thomson attributes the change in acting to changes in the way people look at the world.Thomson identifies method acting with sincerity and emotional truth. Actors revealed the true feelings of their characters, and they did it by searching their own selves, even at great emotional cost (Thomson says that “Vivien Leigh nearly went crazy playing Blanche Du Bois.”) Thomson thinks that we are now uneasy with sincerity. The “new cool pretending” reflects a lack of trust in other people. I’m not sure about all this. I do think that there has been some change. There is more irony and distancing both in every day life and in television and movies. For a long time, I tended to value method acting as the pinnacle of acting. I am more aware now—thanks in part to Thomson’s praise of Cary Grant—that there are other kinds of acting. Yet I think the Oscars have the same value system they have always had. Comic acting still does not win Oscars. Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the great performances of the last few years, and yet it is inconceivable that it would ever be nominated for an award. There is more variety of approach today, but I think method acting and gritty realism are still on top.
IS METHOD ACTING DEAD?
Sunday, December 20th, 2009IS METHOD ACTING DEAD? I posted here that: “People think of great acting now as method acting—and Brando was as responsible as anybody for that change in thinking”; and I quoted here David Thompson’s entry on Cary Grant in A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM: “the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema.” David Thomson had a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (December 5-6) with the provocative title “The Death of Method Acting.” Thomson thinks that method acting reached its peak in The Godfather movies. He acknowledges that Sean Penn is still a method actor, but then praises Meryl Streep for her skill; Frank Langella, for his “lovely, hopeless intelligence”; George Clooney, for his “playing poker with the audience”; Johnny Depp, for his teasing approach; and John Malkovich (for being John Malkovich). He praises these actors as being like Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Bob Hope—”actors who never had any intention of letting us catch them personally.” For Thomson, “Acting is storytelling.” I think the word “storytelling” is important. The enormous achievements of method acting can lead us into forgetting that there are lots of ways of telling a story. Think of how narrow literature would be if every story had only the narrow world view of method acting.
SENTIMENT AND THE MIRROR OF REALISM.
Thursday, December 17th, 2009SENTIMENT AND THE MIRROR OF REALISM. Another reason the Mulberry Street plays are successful is that they are frankly sentimental. The current show is set during World War II, with two of the young men in the families away in the army. Every day, the people at home is filled with thoughts of the absent soldiers. And it’s Christmas. An honest presentation of the events in the play requires sentiment. I was born in 1942, so the events ought to be a little before my time, but I found memories of my aunts and uncles coming to mind from somewhere—and I think it was from the honest and sentimental accuracy of the show. I think that many works of fiction that seek to be realistic make a point of rejecting sentiment. The assumption is that bleakness is realistic. But if the purpose of the realistic novel is to hold a mirror up to nature, then sentiment can’t be excluded. Daily life for most people is filled with sentimental feelings.
MULBERRY STREET—THE TRILOGY.
Thursday, December 17th, 2009MULBERRY STREET—THE TRILOGY. Mary Jane and I were able to get tickets for the Curtain Call production in Stamford of A Merry Mulberry Street Musical. The show is the third in a series of “Mulberry Street” plays about immigrant Italian-American families. The original play was written by Albert Pia and first produced in 1939. Lou Ursone wrote and performs in the new musical. His father and a great uncle were in the original production. One of the Mulberry Street plays is performed almost every year now, and they sell out fast. It’s a small theater, about 80 seats, and a small stage area. Why are the plays so popular? One reason is that people know they will have a good time.
THE SHAKESPEARE PLAY THE SCHOLARS IGNORE.
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009THE SHAKESPEARE PLAY THE SCHOLARS IGNORE. My post here on Shakespeare’s view of marriage touched on a strange omission by Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt wrote that Shakespeare only has two examples of “a married couple in a relationship of sustained intimacy”—the Macbeths and Gertrude and Claudius in HAMLET. I noted that Greenblatt ignored the merry wives and husbands in THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. Now I see in the Times Literary Supplement (December 11) a review by Eric Griffiths of Trinity College, Cambridge, who writes that “Shakespeare wrote no play set amid the Reformed world he lived in; the nearest the careful Bard came to his audience’s England was 1534, a lifetime away.” Again, THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is forgotten. In MERRY WIVES, a time-traveling Falstaff, a figure from the early 1400’s, shows up in an Elizabethan Windsor. The time period must be later than 1534 because the play refers to “our radiant Queen”, and Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558.
I think Marjorie Garber puts her finger on why MERRY WIVES is passed over by scholars. She notes that the play anticipates in its spirit twentieth century screwball comedy and that the characters are middle-class figures and says: “….at first glance, MERRY WIVES may seem idiosyncratic, playful, and less than profound—not , in short, really “Shakespearean.” Not “Shakespearean”, and so a play about merry husbands and wives and the world Shakespeare lived in can be passed over when scholars write about Shakespeare.
CHEKHOV AND LOADED GUNS.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009CHEKHOV AND LOADED GUNS. I have been a member of Facebook for a while but haven’t known how to use it. I recently managed to post the following: “We saw the new Ayckbourn play in New York. Good, but unusual because he set up sight gags and then chose not to pull the trigger.” Annalisa’s learned comment: “As long as he didn’t literally have a gun on stage I guess Chekhov could forgive him.”
BUILDING CHARACTER—NEW YORK CITY IN THE 70′S.
Thursday, September 10th, 2009BUILDING CHARACTER—NEW YORK CITY IN THE 70′S. Edward Herrmann is one of my favorite actors. He has a review today in the Wall Street journal of a new novel by Valerie Martin (THE CONFESSSIONS OF EDWARD DAY) which is set in New York City in the 1970’s. Herrmann notes that he himself moved to New York City in 1970 and says: “She hasn’t quite managed to bring New York of the 1970s convincingly to life: The novel would have been greatly sharpened if it had more fully evoked the ominous daily grind of living in the city back then, when the air of degeneracy and the stink of fear hung over the city.” Kids, your mother and I were living in New York all through the 70’s, and those were some of the challenges that built our characters.
