QUESTIONS FROM ACTORS

We've said it before - but it's so important it bears repeating - a question from an actor is not a question. A question from an actor is an innocent bid to draw the director's attention to something unresolved. When the actor asks a question, a wise director doesn't answer the question. The answer to the question is not in the director, the answer to the question is in the actor. Answer the question by asking another question. Allow the actor to resolve the difficulty. He already has the best answer in mind before he asks the question. Here is an example:

ACTOR: Shall I wear this hat?
DIRECTOR: What would be best?
ACTOR: Well, it's too small. It gets in the way. I don't know where to put it, and if I do put it down, I have no way of getting it off the stage when I leave.
DIRECTOR: Let's leave the hat out.

Another example:

ACTOR: How should I do it, on the right or the left?
DIRECTOR: Which way is best?
ACTOR: If I do it on the right, I can arrive on time. If I do it on the left, I'll be late.
DIRECTOR: Well, then do it on the right.

The answer to the question is in the question. The actor's answer will be organic, and by using his solution, the director will avoid imposing anything. Another example:

ACTOR: Are we going to skip this scene today?
DIRECTOR: Is there something about that scene that we should give our attention to?
ACTOR: Well, I did alot of work on that scene last night and I have some new ideas I'd like to show you.
DIRECTOR: In that case, let's be sure to work that scene in.

The question "Are we going to skip this scene?" may be answered "Yes, it's not scheduled!" or "Yes, we're moving on to the last act." But, "Are we going to skip this scene?" is an invitation to draw attention to something. The director does not know what it is; he has to find out. A question from the actor is merely an invitation. The actor is drawing attention to something unresolved.

A painter builds with color and line; a musician with tone and rhythm. A sculptor builds with shape. But the actor builds his profession on patterns of belief. An actor is working with the same tool that causes all events. That is belief. Belief is the power that causes things to happen, and actors are exercising their belief power all the time. If one says to an actor "Will you please believe this?" he will do so readily. It is difficult for him to resist the tendency to become whatever is suggested. The actor rises to the occasion automatically. He quickly enters into almost any situation and believes in almost any suggestion just as a child does. That belief power has tremendous force. We say that in the theatre we "make believe," just as children make believe. What belief do we "make"? The actor makes himself believe. Then he makes the audience believe. The actor believes in himself, in his character, and in his work. The audience believes in the characters, in the story, and in the players.

There is a great deal of belief going on around a theatre during a performance. Belief power is pervasive in a theatre, and belief power is tremendously compelling. This is one of the reasons that audiences will sit in the darkness giving their undivided attention to individuals who believe themselves to be other than who they are. The belief on the stage is so compelling that the audience starts to believe these individuals are who they say they are. When an audience believes and the actors believe, we have a tremendous concentration of energy. It is spellbinding. The more the audience believes what the actor is doing, the more the actor believes what he is doing, the more the audience will believe. It's a self-hypnosis of belief. It's a rapture of belief. It's an orgy of belief.

When the play is over, we return to our customary identities. The broker has been believing himself to be in real trouble; believing himself to be wrapped in love; believing himself to be in danger; believing himself to be in triumph, and on and on. When the final curtain falls, he returns to the belief that he is a husband, a golfer, Republican, a father. He has come to the theatre to "exercise" his systems of belief. The more exercise or stimulation his belief systems get, the more exhilaration and pleasure he receives. When he leaves the theatre, he may say, "That was a wonderful show! That was a great play! That was really absorbing!" The reason his spirit is so renewed and enthusiastic is that his belief systems have been awakened and exhilarated. During the course of the performance he contributed so much of his belief that new aspects of his identity have been awakened.

“The way an incandescent bulb plays on the face on a Broadway makeup mirror,” he said, “you can never duplicate that.”

And in another case cited by the inspector general, Ms. Goodling blocked the hiring of an experienced prosecutor for a senior counter-terrorism position because his wife was active in Democratic politics. The candidate was regarded as “head and shoulders above the other candidates” in the view of officials in the executive office of United States attorneys, but they were forced to take a candidate with much less experience because he was deemed acceptable to Ms. Goodling.

I find uncritical respect for most works by great thinkers of long ago unpleasant, because they almost all accepted as natural and ordinary the belief that females and minority races and the poor were on earth to be uncomplaining, hardworking, respectful, and loyal servants of white males, who did the important thinking and exercised leadership.

Matthew Arnold and Virginia Woolf caught on the violent aspects of Brontë's work when the former complained that her mind "contained nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage"

His first play, “Killer Joe,” about a drug addict who plans the murder of his mother for insurance money, drew a mix of raves and cries of foul.

"I was offended by its misogyny and brutalization of women," said Martha Lavey, who is now the artistic director of Steppenwolf. "But I also stumbled out at intermission with Amy Morton and said, ‘Wow, this is wild, but, man, this guy has a voice.' "

"I was offended by its racism and brutalization of African-Americans," said Martha Lavey, who is now the artistic director of Steppenwolf. "But I also stumbled out at intermission with Amy Morton and said, ‘Wow, this is wild, but, man, this guy has a voice.' "

TRACY LETTS was angry.

When I think of Wendy Wasserstein, I hear her giggling.

...I remember her making a suggestion only when you said in front of everyone that you hadn't quite thought through the scene and out it might actually play on stage...

The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called "housing bubble," are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.

"Perhaps the new bubble could have something to do with watching movies on cell phones," said investment banker Greg Carlisle of the New York firm Carlisle, Shaloe & Graves. "Or, say, medicine, or shipping. Or clouds. The manner of bubble isn't important - just as long as it creates a hugely overvalued market based on nothing more than whimsical fantasy and saddled with the potential for a long-term accrual of debts that will never be paid back, thereby unleashing a ripple effect that will take nearly a decade to correct."

"The U.S. economy cannot survive on sound investments alone," Carlisle added.

Congress is currently considering an emergency economic-stimulus measure, tentatively called the Bubble Act, which would order the Federal Reserve to begin encouraging massive private investment in some fantastical financial scheme in order to get the nation's false economy back on track.

Current bubbles being considered include the handheld electronics bubble, the undersea-mining-rights bubble, and the decorative office-plant bubble. Additional options include speculative trading in fairy dust — which lobbyists point out has the advantage of being an entirely imaginary commodity to begin with — and a bubble based around a hypothetical, to-be-determined product called "widgets."

You’re referring to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, another of your muses who died young. Do you ever feel lonely?

Sometimes the pain still — the loss of my brother, the loss of Robert, the loss of my husband, even the loss of my children being children — we can access a lot of things that cause pain. This might seem really funny, but when I feel like that, make myself smile.

Where are the male Muses?" asks Monica Szabo at the end of the slide show of her paintings that begins Mary Gordon's new novel, "Spending: A Utopian Divertimento."

"Right here," answers the man in the audience whom Monica chooses to call simply B in her account of the unusual love affair they are about to begin.

B is a feminist's fantasy come to life. A highly successful trader of commodities futures, he has bought four of Monica's paintings and fallen in love with her from afar. He believes her to be "a very, very good painter" who one day "might be great" if only she had the advantages of the great male artists of history.

"What do you think you need that would give you the optimum conditions for work?" he asks her.

"Space and time," she answers.

So they undertake the experiment that B proposes: that he become her patron and muse in every possible sense of those words.

That (the movie) "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is set in the 17th century is no coincidence; the muse reflects an outdated idea of womanhood, when women were valued more for being than for doing. Prose comes up with one example of a "male muse"—Denys Finch Hatton inspired his lover, Isak Dinesan, to write Out of Africa, by listening raptly to her stories when he visited her in Kenya. Switching gender roles may allow the muse-artist relationship to flourish as women become more prominent in the arts and sciences. Or a more symbiotic version might develop, a la Yoko Ono and John Lennon.

Tomorrow morning, Tuesday 10th July, from 11.30am - 12.00 noon, you can catch My Male Muse on Radio 4. In this potentially controversial programme, "poet Clare Pollard dispels the popular female image of a muse. She argues that men can also be a source of beauty and inspiration, and contradicts poet Robert Graves, who famously claimed that the male muse doesn't exist."

How does one go about the business of finding a male muse? The great male writers of the world have always managed to reel in babes – no matter how crusty they got around the edges – willing to take care of their every need while they concentrated on their art. These women sacrificed everything of themselves so that their men could make some contribution to the world of art.

NY Studio Gallery is proud to announce its inaugural exhibition featuring paintings of male nudes by Kristen Copham. Copham’s colorful, large-scale oils are a figurative exploration into the personalities of her subjects. Her work challenges traditional ideas about both the nude figure in art and the artist-model relationship, the subjects themselves male visual artists working in either Minnesota or New York City.

we would like to think that the role of muse is genderless and that either sex may apply. But it is still harder for a male to be married to a famous and productive female than the other way around. Not that it isn't hard on a woman to be ignored at cocktails and trained to subjugate her needs to the work habits of a forceful, successful man. It is. But we look on the marriage of famous man and non-famous wife as normal. We don't necessarily expect it to last but we don't find anything odd in it.

We are haunted not simply by the outdated attitudes of those of us who learned about gender roles in another time, but by the problem - and not just for writers - of who dominates and who submits. Was George Lewes (husband of George Eliot) an odd man or just the best husband in the world?

OFF LINE. Instaputz deftly sketches the progress of the Atlantic Monthly from Julia Ward Howe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Megan McArdle reporting on her iPhone campout ("I imagine this is what it feels like to be a refugee"). Worse is yet to come, though, when the Apple Store people ask McArdle for her papers:

While I was buying the iPhone, they pulled me aside for a credit review. Since I have good credit, this was shocking--and humiliating. For a middle class American, telling your two friends in the store that the AT&T folks are having second thoughts about giving you credit feels a little like confessing that you're a criminal.

McArdle shows some sympathy toward some people with bad credit -- she's known journalists and folks just out of grad school, apparently, who have had such problems -- but she ends with this:

Of course there are irresponsible profligates who borrow money they've no intention of repaying...

The worst part is that the profligates are immune to the shame (or seem to be). It's the decent people, the ones who were overtaken by events, who cringe when the store clerks motion them aside.

This puts me in mind of characters from Nelson Algren, Charles Bukowski, and The Life of Oharu; also, of real people who passed in despair from caring anymore whether they were playing by rules that, experience seemed to show, never gave them a chance to succeed on even the simplest terms, and who stood in line not for iPhones but for food and shelter.

It may seem in bad taste to mention such people in a blogosphere largely devoted to middle-class problems. Still, it's worth considering that they exist, and in greater numbers than a romp through these precincts would suggest. If your frame of reference consists entirely of the relatively fortunate, then you may naturally consider all credit problems to be the result of wickedness or, at best, poor choices to which you owe no sympathy. From a libertarian perspective, certainly, there's no reason to feel any differently. Which is one good reason why, even in a country that loves liberty, libertarianism hasn't caught on, and won't until citizens outside the citadels of privilege wholly lose their acquaintance with misfortune. And though most of our public discourse since the Age of Reagan suggests otherwise, that is not even close to happening.

Discussion Between Actors
In the rehearsal, I never permit an actor to tell another actor how to do something. Never. If I find an actor making a suggestion to another actor, I immediately say, "When you have an idea, please tell me. If you'd like another actor to do something that would be helpful to you, ask me. I will be glad to pass it on." I always pass it on, but I pass it on as my own suggestion. I don't say, "So and so would like you to stand..." I pass it on as my own idea. If the suggestion is not a helpful one, I ask whoever made it to "hold on to that idea for a few days and I will see what I can do about it." By postponing, the bad idea frequently falls out of orbit naturally.

Ball was often provocative. His interpretation of Albee's Tiny Alice brought threat of a lawsuit from the playwright, who tried to withhold the performance rights only to discover that they had never been granted in the first place. Some observers thought that Ball's operatic production (with an added aside condemning the Vietnam war) may have solved some problems inherent in the text.

"Could I Talk to You About My Part?"

This question represents a signal to the director, and he must be sensitive to the message. Many actors ask the question during the rehearsal process. At the moment an actor says, "Could I talk to you about my part?" the director must become super-sensitive. He must stop doing whatever he is doing and give the actor his full attention. That sentence carries the actor's message of ultimate urgency. He must hear good news from the director at that moment, and he must have the director's full attention. If possible talk to him right away, at least to find out what the key to his discomfort is. The actor must get an answer that tells him that he is going to have an opportunity for an intimate and complete discussion with the director alone. It's better not to postpone it. The director sets a time and place where there will be no distractions. There should be no other actor within hearing and sometimes even no stage managers. The question is really not a request to talk about the part. The question is usually an indication that the actor needs to be told that he's on the right track. He cannot go a step further without the assurance that what he's doing is okay. Sometimes it is possible to say simply, "You're doing a beautiful job and I'm thrilled with the way it's going. Keep working the way you're going. It's coming nicely." The actor may be quite satisfied with this. But perhaps there is someone or something that is really troubling the actor. He must have the opportunity to receive your exclusive attention.

His difficulty may come in all sorts of disguises. It may be that one of the other actors is giving him some trouble. Perhaps he feels awkward about a certain scene or a certain kiss, or about his appearance, or about a certain emotional response. The minute you hear that question, it is very important that you give it your full and immediate attention. Don't let it slip by, because the actor could be very upset at that moment; if you don't catch him, pull him up, and resolve his difficulty then and there, he may slide into dejection or resentment. It's much more difficult to pull him out of that. If he grows morose and inefficient, it's because he didn't receive an answer when he asked, "Can I talk to you about my part."

Here’s how it will play out, if all goes well: early next year, President Obama will send his health care plan to Congress. The plan will face vociferous opposition from the insurance industry — but the Medicare vote suggests that this time, unlike in 1993, Democrats will hold together.

Unless Democrats win even bigger than expected, however, they won’t have the 60 Senate votes needed to override a filibuster. What the Medicare fight shows is that the Democrats could nonetheless prevail by taking their case to the public, daring their opponents to stand in the way of health care security — so that in the end they get some Republicans to switch sides, and get the legislation through.

A lot can still go wrong with this vision. But the odds of achieving universal health care, soon, look a lot higher than they did just a couple of weeks ago.

Below is a screenshot of Fox & Friends featuring the photo it used of Steinberg, with the original photo on its left. Comparing the two photos, it appears that the following changes have been made: Steinberg's teeth have been yellowed, his nose and chin widened, and his ears made to protrude further.

...In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with. (Mr. Steinberg told me that as a working reporter who covers Fox News, he was not in a position to comment. A spokeswoman said the executive in charge of “Fox and Friends” is on vacation and not available for comment but added that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.)

When I started calling around about Fox News, Mr. Lewis, the public relations head, made himself available on very short notice on the Fourth of July. He patiently explained that while yes, the game had changed, it was hardly in the way I was describing. There are no dark ops, he said, and no blacklist — “a myth” — only good relationships and bad ones.

Mr. Lewis said that members of his staff were not in the business of altering photos, that they had no control over stories that appeared on “Fox and Friends” or other shows, and he pointed out that it makes their job harder when they go after reporters. He called my suggestion that there was something anti-Semitic about the depiction of Mr. Steinberg “vile and untrue.” Mr. Lewis denied that his staff had threatened one of my colleagues or planted private information about him on blogs.

That comes as a surprise to reporters I talked to who say they have received e-mail messages from Fox News public relations staff that contained doctored photos, anonymous quotes and nasty items about competitors. And two former Fox employees said that they had participated in precisely those kinds of activities but had signed confidentiality agreements and could not say so on the record.

...That's why NutriSystem is great for guys. It lets you eat your favorite foods, but in an incredibly smart and effective way. No counting, no measuring, no weighing in. What guy has the patience for that?

A bitter love

How beautiful she looks, opening the pearly casement,
And how quiet she leans, and how troubled her brow is!
You may see the tears now, bright on her cheek,
But not the man she so bitterly loves.

-- Li Bai