BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THEATER # 4

for Michael French


JONATHAN MILLER ON DIRECTING & DIAGNOSTIC MEDICINE

"Condemnation and ridicule of the Actors' Studio style of training is general. 'I don't care how somebody feels about a part -- that's between him and his conscience,' Jonathan (Miller) says ' What I want is an actor who can say a line eighteen different ways. I am not running a clinic.' Yet a few minutes later he is talking about the relation between his current job and the one he was trained for. 'Directing and diagnostic medicine are mirror images. In both cases you're concerned with small physical signs which connote deep inner states. But you work in opposite directions."

Alison Lurie. "What Happened in Hamlet" in Words and
Worlds : from Autobiography to Zippers (Encino, Ca.Delphinium Books, 2019
)

**
SPEECH FROM AN 18th CENTURY PLAY

VAPID: Now do write a play - and if any accident happens, remember,it is better to have written  a damn'd play than no play at all -- it snatches a man from obscurity.
Frederick Reynolds. The Dramaid (1793)
"...folk assume actors must be extroverts, but a lot aren't; many performers are big presences on stage, but quite shy off. There is, after all, a huge difference between pretending your somebody else and being yourself."

John Cleese. So,  Anyway... (New York: Random House, 2014)
**
HOW TALL SHOULD A PLAYWRIGHT BE?

2 October 2005 --- "Some drunken lads at the buffet bar as we are queuing to get off the train at King's Cross, one of whom was trying to explain to the others who I was.
    'Really? He's tall for a playwright."      
    Difficult to tell if this was wit or drink, but quite funny nevertheless.

Alan Bennett. Keeping on Keeping on (New York,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
**

ON ENTERING THE THEATER

"I spent last winter translating The Three Sisters and Cheryl Crawford is going to produce it with the Actor's Studio. I want to write a play myself but it's rather like joining some church-- I need to believe in the plot first."
     Randall Jarrell
in a letter to Robert Penn Warren  (July 1954)
Randall Jarrell's Letters, edited by Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985)
**
 OPENING NIGHTS IN BOSTON

" We went to Boston, and you know that opening night in Boston, that they don't let you in you are under 90."
Neil Simon in The Dramatist Guild Quarterly(Spring 1973)
**


ON THE SET FOR THE BUDGET WAS ROSES BY FRANK D. GILROY & A THEATER CRITIC WHO DID NOT KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE BRONX

"I don't know much about the Bronx, but I hope that the middle-income group there doesn't have to live in the sort of setting that Edgar Lansbury has designed."
                        John McCarten

The New Yorker (June 6, 1964)

**
EXCELLENT CRITICISM FOR GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

"Mr. Shaw's cook was speaking . Way back at the century's turn, she had gone to see Janet Achurch as Lady Cicely in her vegetarian master's Captain Brassbound's Conversion. In the manner of Moliere, Mr. Shaw had ventured into her kitchen for a real dramatic opinion. He was not disappointed. ' No,' his cook had said, 'she was not right:: no high lady would do that.' Mr. Shaw had no other choice. He  wrote Miss Achurch. 'This is excellent criticism. You played the whole part , as far as the comedy we went , with your dress tucked in between your knees.'"

John Mason Brown. "South of Boston" in Seeing Things
(New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1946).

**

JOHN HUSTON, as Abraham Lincoln in the play THE LONELY MAN by Howard Koch,presented at the Blackstone Theater in Chicago (1930's)

"As for Gram, as John called his grandmother, she sat
in the first row every night of his performance. His
exit after the first scene always brought  a round of
applause from the audience. One night for some reason
the applause didn't come. This was an omission Gram 
refused to brook. With the help of her cane, she struggled
to her feet, faced the audience with a stern expression.
and stopped the show while she clapped her hands until
others joined in. Of all the tributes, I think this is 
the one John enjoyed the most."

Howard Koch. As Time Goes By (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovitch, 1979)


**
 THEATER AS SOME POET SAID

"...it's rather like joining some church"
                  Randall Jarrell


Has any actor got a tan
Standing in a spotlight
Or under a ghost light
Waiting for a cue?

No longer entranced 
By travelling actors,
Packing and unpacking,
Half-eaten sandwiches
On the make up table,
One night stands
In countries not their own,
I too  have played Caliban,
Crying out in dusty halls
"The isle is full of noises"
Or in another play:
"I know where to wear
This dagger then. Cassius..."

The rising of a scene
Delivers me from bondage.
When two persons kneel
To create a river or an ocean
From a long skein of blue silk.
Then I am transported.
When the curtain goes down,
My heart is wide awake.

What is the sound
Of three hundred hearts 
clapping?


Louis Phillips