A Poor Player

Dunkirk, NY - I own a T-Shirt (which I have sinced passed on to my son) which read “Endangered Species: Working Actor,” with a picture of a commedia clown in the middle of the shirt. I am sure the blogging world will all catch up to this article in yesterday’s NY Times, but I post the link here just in case you might not catch up with it. It’s an interesting read. I’ll probably write something on it later this week. Today is the first day of the semester, and I don’t want to be late! -twl

(NB: Two of the actors featured have been through Buffalo, Chet Carlin and Ros Ruff)

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Dunkirk, NY - I attended a performance of Othello last Saturday night at Shakespeare in Delaware Park. It was a cool night with a lot of clouds in the sky, and the hill seemed relatively full. I sat off to the stage left side. I was trying to go to the show without meeting anyone from the cast or crew, but the TD Scott, ever vigilant, picked me up and said hello. I have no idea if he let others know I was in the audience. I just wanted to experience the show as a regular patron, and not someone “in the know,” if you will. When you happen to be in the business and you go to shows where you know the performers, the act of going to a show becomes more than simply attending a show. It’s that lingering feeling of obligation to say hello and congratulations that I have always had trouble with. Even when I am in a show, I do my best to avoid the after-show crowd. Often after All’s Well I just snuck out “the back way” via Hoyt Lake to avoid seeing people. When I direct a play at Fredonia I almost never make myself available to audience members coming in and out of the theatre. You never can really tell what the sincerity level is, and having been the insincere one on several occasions, I just find it better to avoid it altogether. [Read more →]

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Dunkirk, NY - It seems lately that I am surrounded by the shadows of death. I am at that stage of life where people you know begin to have operations, contract illnesses, and pass on. Right at the moment I know three people who are all coping with cancer of one sort or another. One has prostate cancer, one has colon cancer, and one has lung cancer. The oldest of them is in his early 60s. All of them are going through various chemotherapies and/or radiation treatments in an attempt to slow down or halt the advancement of their cancers. Statistically speaking, none of them will succeed. Nonetheless, the treatments will continue. In our culture, death is something which is to be put off at any cost whatsoever.

Because of this situation, I have found myself more aware of my own mortality, and perhaps subconsciously this is why I have been writing about theatrical entropy. Dealing with a concept like entropy means trying to come to grips with the notion that what once existed will no longer exist. In a metaphorical sense, theatre has been living with its own cultural cancer for some time now, and I feel that all the talk about what’s wrong with theatre, what we should do to save it, how we should change it, is merely the talk of those who want to treat theatre with some sort of cultural chemotherapy. They don’t want to see theatre die because they love it so, thus the effort to treat it in some fashion. Is it, I wonder, just simply time to let theatre die a good, honest, natural death? [Read more →]

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Dunkirk, NY - It appears that my own personal entropy has gotten the better of me these past few weeks. I don’t know whether anyone else ever goes through this kind of situation, but often after completing a show I get what I call “post-show syndrome.” It’s generally a combination of feeling somewhat ill, combined with a general feeling of malaise, lack of motivation, and a hint of depression. Often when I’m in a show I get so focused that I can’t concentrate on anything else, and I have no doubt that I am carrying a lot of inner tension which keeps me from getting sick and missing a performance. My body also runs at a high level as well, expending large amounts of energy and then working hard to re-energize itself. When it all stops following the final performance, I think my psycho-physical being shuts down, and it takes me some time to recover. [Read more →]

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