On Opera, and "auteur" directing:

There is a FB group which is dedicated to having opera produced in its original form--no changes, no adaptations--supposedly to be true to the composer's and librettist's "true intentions"...

I agree that some operas suffer from changing milieu...AIDA only works amidst the Pharaohs...FAUST should remain in the gothic miasma...moving TOSCA requires a complete revision of historical references and events...but there are some operas which scream for removal from their prisons of powdered wigs and endless ballets...

Opera was a populist art form...it reached out and touched--deeply--a contemporary audience...an audience which, when first introduced to the piece, expected a gala, with ballets and beautiful costumes...and which passed those expectations on to subsequent generations, each, in turn, more distant from the genesis of the work...

If anything, some pieces need to be stripped naked to find their core, then dressed with a fashion which helps to define the story and the "crisis" of the characters...My COSI FAN TUTTE was moved to 1912, on the cusp of The Great War which would if not kill then maim Romanticism for the next century..it added a certain poignancy to the antics on stage...

I am more convinced than ever that Massenet's MANON must be denuded of all the wigs and hoops and "frufru" which has traditionally muddied the core of the story--an ambitious young woman desperate for fame meets an enabling Romantic equally desperate for approval...a recipe for wonderful romance and inevitable disaster... I set it in Paris, 1941-43, during the Occupation...the wealthy are collaborators...the kids are young and foolish...the outcome, in the rail yards of Gare de L'Est, is a personal tragedy set against a global one, with death camp prisoners being marched to the cattle cars... no "sets", just projections and furniture...

If I die, remember this concept..it could take years (I don't have) to find a producing company....

On Dads, Dogs and Death:

As my duenna dog Whimsy approaches the final portal, I feel strangely and fiercely connected to my father...

Phil was a giant among curmudgeons...he could fit more curse words into a sentence than M&Ms into a clown car...he had a history of fighting authority, and a list of debits resulting from it...

But he loved his PooDog.

PooDog was a god-knows-what/Rottwieler mix with the funniest underbite...despite his formidable drool, the sweetest soul...

When PooDog died, it killed my dad...the previous 3 heart attacks didn't do it, but the one he had 3 months after Poo left did the trick....he drowned in his grief...

Now, as I witness the slowed gait and painful mounting of the couch...the labored breathing...I understand...

I am obsessed with the momentary and miniscule details of Whimsy's comfort right now....no surgery because it would be too risky...new, softer beds...get rid of the massive 4x4 and get a minivan so she has easy access...

and yet the inevitable prevails...

Why I'm not fishing off a yacht near Corfu...

Last week's solitary confinement made me question a lot of things...

In a life as non-linear as this image it is not easy to spot the exact time your life went into a spiral, took a hard left turn, hit a wall....or found itself in a field of wildflowers in respite...

A simple question for someone as narcissistic as myself is "How the hell did I get HERE?  Why am I not fishing off a yacht near Corfu??"  The answer is far more complex.

Anyone who walks off the stage of the Schubert Theater, gets on the IRT to Whitehall St., enlists in the USAF---this is 1964, folks---without even telling his stage manager...anyone who turned down the offer to have medical school paid in full if he agreed to go into practice with his benefactors (in Pittsburgh, unfortunately) but turned it down because his mom burst into tears of grief over his lost theatrical career (thank you, Madame Rose)...anyone who has found ways and means to screw the pooch with a career marked by artistic success and utter financial failure...this is not the guy you go to for easy answers.

But I keep asking, hoping the voices of better angels will sing an answering chorale...

On Solitude and Introspection:

9/12/20

A little of both goes a long way...

Some of us, at least consciously, glide through life with little self-doubt and virtually no self-deprecation...then there are those of us who, without distractions to disengage us from the voyage, are in a perpetual state of "if only I had done"...

Among those diseased with inferiority complex, there are two common subsets--the Trumps..the braggadocious blowhards who think their own voice can drown out the demons...and the furiously-softspoken who have come to accept...even desire...the self-consumptive feasting on one's ego...

I have been without my wife for a week now...without her 24/7 presence in my home if not my heart...I have come to realize how much I rely on her to intercede with "Rick The Prick"--the doppleganger who keeps appearing to chastise me for past failures and past successes--and spare me from the tiring dialogue.

She returns tonight.  I really must straighten up the house and kick Rick to the curb...

 WITH APOLOGIES TO MISS MANNERS

I take--and give--a ton of flak...

My readers admonish me for "too much anger"and "too much profanity", both "off-putting" and "alienating" to members of my audience...

I admonish them for being too fragile, and myself for being a curmudgeon...

Here's the thing:  Lisa was my "governor"--you know, the devices they put on engines to keep them from revving to "red line"...she was my voice of reason...she was my quaalude...   Without her presence, I am now rudderless...a large and old rustbucket vessel circling in the harbor, making waves and threatening collision with the party boats...

I think my personality is that of a hardened cop in a lot of ways...you learn to approach every situation with at least a tinge of suspicion...you "hope for the best" but are "prepared for the worst"--especially in people.  I know I am textbook "personality disorder" in a lot of ways...I am ill-tempered, quick to confront, have no impulse control....

At my age, I can now say "tough shit"...  It's kind of liberating...

However, there is a caveat...I don't give a rat's ass if people "like" me, but I really do want to say my piece and have it received by--if not friendly then accepting--ears...  I want someone to take me head on with factual information which may blow my thesis out of the water...not some prepackaged pablum prepared by The American Heritage Foundation or Wayne La Pierre's Flying Monkey Squad...not some mole-fed mush supposedly coming from Liberal, trusted sources but which is in fact nothing more than well-camouflaged Karl Rove propaganda...  Facts.  Certifiable, creditable facts.

Or at least a damned interesting hypothesis well-stated....something to chew on..

Sorry if that sounds condescending or self-aggrandizing... first of all, I am a classic narcissist...secondly, "tough shit"...

Love and kisses to all.

"That's life...that's what people say..."

Well...this was the year that was...we sold our little oasis in Los Angeles and headed for the big pines of the Northwest...we found another, different oasis...one with 50 foot pine trees in the backyard...with tadpoles in the pond...with fuscia and perrywinkles and clematis abounding...we went from dead broke to flush to dead broke again...we, along with our intrepid steed--the redoubtable, massive black Expedition nicknames "T.T." in homage to Tina Turner, another big, black and ballsy broad--traversed 1200 miles of geography and light years of anxiety...we had landed, safe, on our home base...

Then Lisa died.

The horrific irony of that is something I will spend a long time trying to "get around"...

We had finally found our home.  It was owned free and clear, purchased with cash.  Lisa was about to reap the fruit of her horrible labor--her 50-year "galley slave" existence as lackey to her adoptive mother, fraught with physical and emotional abuse--...it was over.  The Wicked Witch--morphed at life's end into some Norman Rockwell sweet biddy--was dead.  All the legal maneuverings to keep white-trailer-trash "relatives" from raping the Witch's assets...all the expensive lawsuits...all the court appearances...all the confrontations culminating in a remarkable conservatorship which preserved not only money and property but also the Witch's personal dignity....all were going to finally reap reward. Lisa and the Witch's grandchildren were going to share in a substantial estate.

The first payment arrived in January...now 6 months ago...We giddily deposited money in separate accounts under Lisa's name....we bought her clothing and shoes, things she had done without for too long...we put up a fence around our new oasis...we sent her on her first vacation in 11 years, somewhere it wasn't raining....somewhere sunny and warm and lined with ocean...we sent her to Kauai...

She died there, in her sleep, on February 29, 2016.

And so I sit here, 4 months after my personal apocalypse, trying to make sense of the first sentence--"that's life"--

All I keep saying is..."What the fuck???"

From the "Hey Diddle-le-dee, an actor's life for me" file:

PROLOGUE

At 70, the "calls" get rarer and rarer...so when a world premiere of a really fascinating play comes along, and you really dig the character, and they call you in at the "head" of the day to read for it, you trip over yourself to "accept" the audition...

But you also start to lose attention to detail…

THE DAY BEGINS

I showed up, dutifully, at 10:15 AM for my 10:30 call...to an empty parking lot....to a locked theater...and it was now 10:30...I even got the theater business office manager to check her booking schedule...and nothing was there... 

 

I had been sucked into the vortex known as THE ACTOR'S NIGHTMARE...

The casting office called me at 10:40...on my bluetooth as I tried desperately to get back to my home computer-stored emails and check the address...the casting people wanted to know where I was...I replied "At the ________ Theatre, well I was but now I'm rushing back to my home to find out what was happening..."  

"The ________??  No, hon, we're at the ___________ in Hollywood...."

Picture, if you will, the map of your local area.  Now...place a point somewhere near the lower left edge of that map....now place another point somewhere towards the upper right sector....if you can, place all kinds of natural and man-made obstacles between points A and B....that was my location in context to their location....it would take any human being at least 45 minutes to traverse LA catty-corner during business hours...I could do it in 30, but not in a car with a very unhealthy transmission...

I gave my profuse apologies, told the assistant to make sure that his boss knew how much I appreciated this opportunity, how much I loved this script and this character and how I really would love to read for it, but I was now in Playa Del Rey, and Hollywood was an unrealistic goal in less than an hour...."We're breaking for lunch from 12:30 - 2" was the reply.  

OK.  I could get back in my now-seriously ill car, already overtaxed from the morning's first journey, and drive like a NY cabbie to this spot in Hollywood, and get there before the 12:30 lunch break.  I suggested this possibility, and was told to try it and I would get in the morning run...

I asked my trusty steed, my Saturn, if she had this one trip in her.  She said, "hell yes...or I'll die trying"...and we were off...

We got there without bloodshed or violation at 11:50, parked and checked in...the young blonde woman monitoring the call told she had made the same mistake during the previous day's business, and was very sympathetic to my Homeric journey..

.

Once inside (they even bumped 7 guys to get me in the door...imagine my apologies to the room on my departure) everyone was lovely, my abject apologies on entrance warmly received...the playwright and the director, first meetings for me, had the glimmer of true “mensch” in their eyes, and they were outgoing---rare and refreshing qualities, when genuine, in my industry--and the producer and casting director were pleasingly friendly, so... "Let's do it", I said.

THE SCENE BEGINS

I have the first line...and, since there's no designated "reader" with whom to interact, I prepare to launch with option "B":  you play it to an imaginary fellow actor somewhere on your plane...somewhere within "the 4th wall", as it were...something resembling the final product given the medium...

Foolish boy.

A slightly annoyed tone arises from outside that 4th wall..."read it to me"...the casting director is telling me to break 4th wall, and to play the scene with an audience member--namely himself?....ok....been there done that..."Let's go", I say again, this time in the guise of the first line of the scene, waiting for the reply which will prompt my next response, etc. etc. etc....and what comes back sounds like someone reading the minutes of some local Kiwanis Club meeting...no inflection, no emotion, not even the attempt at eye contact...and at an inaudible level and at breakneck speed...

Listen, please....I can play it any way I'm told to...I pride myself on being a "money player", a craftsman who can provide a quality product to my clientele...you want "representational" acting, especially important for most media comedy?  No problemo...you want a certain style, you want a certain sound...I'll give it my best shot...but IMHO this play deserves more, and these two men I just met deserve a chance to judge my work with all the steam in the engine and at pressure, and this beast was never going to take flight with that lack of commitment on the other end of the see-saw, so..

..

"What?  What?  For Chrissakes, I'm an old man!  Speak up, boy!"  hurled from my mouth, in the appropriate dialect of this complex character, in his eighties....and it got my scene partner's attention...

The rest of the scene went...ok....but not what I would have been chosen as my ideal scenario for this once-in-an-ever-so-quickly-shortening-lifetime chance at reaching for the ring...

THE EPILOGUE

Now I descend into that darkest of cellars in the actor's psyche:

How to do I rationalize my blowing this without losing the last, slim glimmer of hope that keeps me caring about being an actor? …without using the "ok, you didn't get it, the callbacks were today and you ain't called, so..." dialog, which if not monitored becomes a spiraling descent into the dark and desperate and oh-so-attractive-to-all-us-Brando-era-“mavericks” place…the portico of the hellhole of the "Oh God I need This Job" place, that chant of the serf, and which so demeans your personal sense of value as a person and as a product?....

And there are dozen levels of perfectly logical reasons for “not landing” this plum…”With this director’s ‘cred’ and this kind of writing, there may be three ‘A-listers’ already being wooed to play this role”, “you were too young to play him (What?  Have you seen my selfies???)”…even the “Simple. You suck!” response…you name it, it’s part of the dialog…and it’s being spoken right now…

(Author’s Note: Keynesian-inclined responses proposing that "a more accurate assessment of the offered commodity" might be in order are welcome.)

Ah, f*ck it.  I'll feed the dogs...

Thanks for listening...