Tag: Theatre

  • A Visual Language

    Last night, my daughter told me how she has started learning about mime in her school theatre class. Just so happens that I have had some mime training, and done a respectable bit of mime work on stage in Texas and NYC. We had a fun bit playing “being trapped in a box” and “throwing a ball” to each other. Then she asked me is it was possible to do a whole show just in mime? I told her it was, which she found hard to believe.

    So, I started looking for an example to give her, and the first idea I had was to show her a silent movie; Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last” or Buster Keaton’s “The General” or “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” Not exactly mime, but physical enough to move a story along.

    Instead, what I showed her was Jacques Tati’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” which is just a sweet, sincere gem of a movie. Though made in 1953, this French film plays like a silent movie, with Tati playing the character of Mr. Hulot. Tati was a trained mime who transitioned to the French film business, and this movie was the best example to show my daughter how mime can be used to tell a story. Though it is French, there is very little dialogue in it, and what there is are just easy to read subtitles. For the best explanation of this movie, I suggest reading Roger Ebert’s review in his Great Movie series.

    And the kid got it. I mean, it did take her a minute to understand that no one was going to talk, and that though it was a comedy, this wasn’t a belly laugh, slapstick comedy. But she saw how jokes were set up, how you could read what someone was thinking about their facial expression, or how they put their hands on their hips and what that might mean when the front door is left open. And how you knew Hulot was a good guy because he was patient with a dog sleep in the road, and a gentleman towards the young woman staying in the hotel. She learned quickly, or maybe she already knew it, to pick up no what each person was doing, and how those actions help explained they type of character they were.

  • This is What Dad Does

    I got to do something last night with my daughter that I have been looking forward to for years. We went to a presentation of four works-in-progress puppet shows. The venue was Dixon Place down in the Lower East Side, and the showing was part of their Puppet Blok series. And, it was a school night, so this was a very special occasion. My daughter got to experience the world of puppets that I had been in, and meet some of the people I have been working with for over 15 years.

    The kid has known since forever that puppetry was the “thing” that I did in New York, but for most of the time when she thought of Dad and puppets, she was thinking “Muppets.” Slowly, as she’s grown, and I have shown her videos, and pictures of the type of work I was involved in. Some of it was traditional puppets, and some of it was mime, and other shows were more about movement and physical theatre. I never did marionettes because that is a hard skill to hone, and those guys are crazy.

    Last night, the kid got to have her first experience in seeing what it was that her father did. And I was especially happy that we chose last night because two good friends were showing their work, and both of them are very talented women who I have worked for. I wanted my daughter to see women being themselves, out front, creating art, and leading their projects.

    I was also a little nervous that the kid would get bored with the show. I learned a while ago that just because something is important to me, doesn’t mean it will be important to her. I’m not looking for her to want to become an artist or a performer. I just would like for her to have an appreciation of the arts, and the creative process. And works at this stage can be rough, very much “in progress,” and still a ways from a final form.

    But I needn’t have been concerned. She got it. She was into it. She was a great audience member as well. All four of the pieces engaged her, and lead her not to ask a bunch of questions, but to tell me how each piece made her feel. At the talk back after the show, she was a little shy to give her comments, but she whispered them to me, and I spoke up for her. Yeah, she got it.

    And it was a late night. We were riding the D train home, and she snuggled up next to be with her show program in her hand. I’m pretty sure she had a good time. I got what I wanted, which was to share a part of me with the kid.

  • School Performances

    My kid had a school performance this morning. It wasn’t a play; it was a review of songs. Each class came out on stage and did a song. I must say that the program was run very smartly and efficiently. It started on time, and ended early – of all things. I give all the credit to the theatre and music teacher; they did an outstanding job. I would say that a great many professional theatre artists could learn a great deal on running a show from these teachers.

    As I sat in the back of the house, I can’t deny the sense of beaming pride that shone off of me. The wife too, and, well, all the other parents there, too. Oh, parents are such a subjective, unreliable audience. Our opinions cannot be taken seriously. Yes, we would applaud our kids burping the National Anthem.

    I began to wonder, and I know the answer is yes, but even going all the way back to the 4th Century BC, were Athenian parents also swooning over their kids as they performed in Dionysian Festival of Theatre? When the chorus of children filed out on stage and began to recite lines backing up Oedipus, there must have been mothers and fathers beaming and bragging about how amazing their child was. Even when masks fell off kid’s faces, and the deus ex machina locked up stranding an actor in the air, those parents still spoke about how their kid was just as good as Thespis.

    Yeah, sure, the more things change, the more the stay the same – a truth that cannot be avoided in this situation. I always knew that when I became a father that eventually, I would be in a school auditorium watching my kid on a stage with other kids, half of them desperately not wanting to be up there, performing something – and probably not well.

    But not today. No, my kid was awesome on stage. She is a naturally talented performer.

  • Happiness

    I have been thinking a lot about what would make me happy. Is there one thing, that if it occurred, I would be happy from now till the end of my days? I mean, is that even possible?

    I have this feeling, a thought in the back of my head, that there isn’t one thing that brings about happiness. Happiness is attained, and also is a choice.

    And, an additional $500 a month would get me really damn close to being happy.

    I guess what I’m saying is that security also is a form of happiness.

    Maybe fulfillment? That can bring about happiness. So.. yeah, sure, I’ll go with that; fulfillment.

    You know, about five years ago, I had a phone interview for a prestigious job in San Francisco, which would have had me working for this really important theatre school. But to be honest, I don’t remember the name of the theatre school, so it wasn’t that prestigious. Anyway, I was on the phone with the head of the whole place, someone very important, and we are hitting it off, and I felt like the job is going to be offered to me. Then the head of the place asks me if I could do anything, what would I do – I didn’t miss a beat and said confidently, “I would be in a cabin in the woods, reading books, and writing.”

    There was a long pause, and I knew that in this pause was the silent sound of this job slipping away because what I should have said was something along the lines of, “Working at this school,” or “Doing theatre,” or anything relating to the job, and not the truth of what would really make me happy.

    Or…

    As I try to ret-con this part of my life, maybe I finally admitted out loud what I really want to do with my life to be happy.

    But I could still use that extra $500, though.

  • Short Story Review: “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal

    (The short story “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal appeared in the September 18th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

    “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal is an interesting exercise. I read it twice, enjoyed it both times, but I’m still wondering about the ending. Each time I read it, and I can’t put my finger on why, or where the example is in the story, but I kept thinking about French Absurdist one-act theatre. (I was a theatre major, I read a lot of their works.) Something about this story seemed to parallel that. This story isn’t blatantly absurdist. It does have a foot in reality, but there is something off, which works.

    The story is about ladies who lunch, but not the Sondheim “ladies.” The story of these ladies is broken up into sections; the first being “JANUARY: THE FORGETTING OLYMPICS,” which also happens to be an agenda item for the meeting of the ladies. What if forgetting was an Olympic sport? And the ladies give examples of their forgetting, comparing, and expanding this idea. At this point, the story could be about aging. But with the next section “MARCH: NEXT TO GODLINESS” and “JUNE: FUNK” we are given examples of the ladies friendship, and how they are dealing with their forgetting. And again, it all feels purposefully off center, ever so slightly. But when the final section comes along, “NOVEMBER: NO MORE TRAINS” which is broken up into three sections, with the last being the one I questioned the most – It’s a single paragraph with no dialogue, which is different and shorter than all other sections of the whole story. This paragraph thuds the story to a close, help with a rhetorical last question “For now?”

    From the way the story started with that absurdist feeling I had while reading, I never was expecting this to be a story that would wrap up cleanly, or even conclusively for that matter.  But that last paragraph is completely and radically different from the rest of the story – what was the point? Then I remembered the French Absurdists, who sometimes made the point of not having a point, and just ending things.

    Or it’s about death?

    I’m going with death.