Theater Director Quotes

Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters.

Most of the truly remarkable experiences I've had in theatre have filled me with uncertainty and disorientation

Has it ever happened, you’ve seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they’ve done, what they’ve given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you’re happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket...the actors I see on the screen, they’ll get twenty cents of this very dollar I’m paying now; they’ll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they’re delicious because we see ourselves in glory’s mirror.

That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.

When a theater goes dark for the night, a stagehand leaves a lighted lamp on stage. No one knows why any more, but some old timers say it is to keep the ghosts away. Others say it lights the stage for the ghosts to play. Whichever theory one adheres to, most people agree: a great theater is haunted.

So that’s how we go on acting dramas in our theater of the mind even when we don’t believe anymore in the audience or the director or the play.

In the production of a good play with a good cast and a knowing director a kind of banding-together occurs; there is formed a fraternity whose members share a mutual sense of destiny. In these five blocks, where the rapping of the tap-dancer's feet and the bawling of the phonographs in the record-shop mix with the roar of the Broadway traffic; where the lonely, the perverted, and the lost wander like souls in Dante's hell and the life of the spirit seems impossible, there are still little circles of actors in the dead silence of empty theaters, with a director in their center, and a new creation of life taking place

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered. Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague." He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors. His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion. At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then, one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to the cafe with him.

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart...even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining...His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding--sometimes maddeningly so--for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley

Every creative act involves a leap into the void. The leap has to occur at the right moment and yet the time for the leap is never prescribed. In the midst of a leap, there are no guarantees. To leap can often cause acute embarrassment. Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act—a key collaborator.

School is like theater. Teachers are like directors, students are like actors, and classes are like theatrical presentations.

Hans Christian Andersen: We co-write them. I just don't do any of the writing. I change the bits I don't like and then erase all the rest from history. I'm more like a German theatre director. Or, y'know, a German generally.

The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts. This is the only place for our Dream. No form nor interpretation is for ever. A form has to become fixed for a short time, then it has to go. As the world changes, there will and must be new and totally unpredictable Dreams.

He told me that, in fact, he had always imagined me as a producer-director, beholden to nobody and immune to the constant rejection that all actors must endure. If you must go into the theater, he advised, be the person in charge and acquire the skills to do it right.

And Eisenstein was doing it,too!As a young boy Sasha had seen his Battleship Potemkin in the Khudoshestvennyi Theater on the Arbat Sqaure.The cashiers,ticket-takers,cloak room attendants, all were dressed in sailors' uniforms;it looked just grand,it set the mood.The world had acknowledged BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN as the best film and Eisenstein as the greatest director.Now the 'greatest' was loyally serving the tyrant and executioner.Here was an example for his argument with Gleb about genius and villainy. Gleb also read the paper and gave Sasha a meaningful glance. 'Well then one more sycophant.

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

Copying culture. Another, rather different approach to unsatisfactory culture is to imitate it, replacing the offensive bits with more palatable ones. A subculture within American society might decide that the best solution to the desultory state of the film industry is to start their own movie industry, complete with producers, directors, writers, actors and even theaters, and create a kind of parallel film industry that will fix the apparent problems in mainstream cinema. The new movies created and distributed by this system would certainly be cultural goods, of a sort. But if they were never shown in mainstream movie theaters—if, indeed, they were created and consumed entirely by members of a particular subculture—they would have no influence on the culture of mainstream movies at all.

I applied for a job as the night box office manager of a small theater company in Boystown. The job paid about five dollars an hour for a four-hour shift, so I was surprised to find that it required a lengthy interview with the artistic director of the theater. I had a degree in drama, I explained. We talked (meaning she talked) about playwrights we (she) liked. It was between me and another girl for the job, and she needed to know what I had to offer the Tiny Pretentious Theater Company because “We

Once, a few years earlier, Jules had gone to see a play at Ash’s theater, and afterward, during the “talkback,” when the audience asked questions of the playwright and of Ash, who’d directed the production, a woman stood up and said, “This one is for Ms. Wolf. My daughter wants to be a director too. She’s applying to graduate school in directing, but I know very well that there are no jobs, and that she’s probably only going to have her dreams dashed. Shouldn’t I encourage her to do something else, to find some other field she can get into before too much time goes by?” And Ash had said to that mother, “Well, if she’s thinking about going into directing, she has to really, really want it. That’s the first thing. Because if she doesn’t, then there’s no point in putting herself through all of this, because it’s incredibly hard and dispiriting. But if she does really, really want it, and if she seems to have a talent for it, then I think you should tell her, ‘That’s wonderful.’ Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.

sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are

No one gets closer to words, and to the impulses behind them, than actors and directors working intensely on a play. The main difference between a translator and a director, when it comes to performed texts, is that a translator has only words at his disposal, while a director can employ the entire theatrical palette of lights, movement, sound, costumes, speech/ diction, and bodies moving through space in order to transform words on a page into a production on a stage. As I worked on Euripides’s Bacchae, I soon came to realize that I was a director and a translator—an intermediary between ancient plays and audiences—and that directing and translating were one and the same.

I thought I might get a cinematic love story, and I've gotten some of that. But sitting here in my parents' house, with Ava a couple feet away from me, eating chow fun and watching Melrose Place, I realize that all of the sets and the props and the performances, the scripts that take years to write; the perfect camera angles and painstaking lighting, the directors that call take after take until it turns out right, the projections on the huge theater screens - so much larger and louder than life - it's all done in hopes of portraying what I'm feeling right now. As much as I had wanted a love story out of a movie, I know now that movies can only hope to capture this kind of love.

Pan, The House of Bernarda Alba, Transform Caithness: Hunter, Be Near Me, Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, The Bacchae (also Lincoln Center), Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, Home: Glasgow, and Black Watch, which toured internationally and for which he won Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards. He was Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre from 1996 to 2001, Paines Plough from 2001 to 2005, the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005 to 2012, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in the 2010–2011 academic year. JACK THORNE writes for theater, film, television, and radio. His theater credits include Hope and Let the Right One In, both directed by John Tiffany, Junkyard, a Headlong, Rose Theatre Kingston, Bristol Old Vic & Theatr Clwyd co-production, The Solid Life of Sugar Water for the Graeae Theatre Company and the National Theatre,

The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible.

EXERCISE 10: DEVELOPING A GRAND VISION You may want to do this exercise alone, out in a natural setting somewhere. 1. See Your Interests, Values, and Abilities. The next step is to discover how your interests and your deep values connect into and form your mission. It can be accomplished by seeing a grand, whole, meaningful image of what purpose you could dedicate your life to. This will be formed from your interests, values, and present goals. Begin to play with the images that you see, which represent some kind of direction that you want to take. As you get a sense of what your mission can be, see various snapshots of yourself doing what you love to do, snapshots of your abilities. 2. Focus on Heroes and Heroines. Take a look at what your favorite heroes or heroines do. See yourself doing things that give you the same feeling you get when you think of them. See snapshots of the person you want to become. Any images you don’t like can fade away. 3. Direct a Movie of Yourself. See yourself the way you want to be—doing the things you love to do. Whatever you choose to put on the screen, you’re the Spielberg, you’re the director. See the images that you feel passionate about. You can play with the images in front of you. Pretend that you’re in the middle of an inner, three-dimensional movie theater. It’s a place where you can see and hear and feel with great fidelity. Notice how much you can see, letting the wisdom from within guide the visual display that you see in front of you. Visualize it, feel it, enjoy it. The images are often up close and in full, rich color. See yourself living out a scenario that gives you tingles in your spine. You can zoom in on that glorious, fun-filled, exciting future that you see. It allows you to do what you love to do and accomplish what you believe in. 4. Recall Your Deep Values. List your deep values as you watch your mission scenario. Notice how your values and your images can fit together with a remarkable consistency. 5. Ask for Help from Your Inner Wisdom. Ask for your inner wisdom, the higher powers, or God to guide your grand vision. This vision is going to be more of a discovery than a creation. Let it come to you. Ask and it will come. Take the time to see and hear those aspects of life that unify into a whole that you feel a powerful passion for. See some more images. See some time going by. See various bright, radiant, up-close, colorful images of what it is that you could create in your life. They can begin going in a certain direction, coalescing and representing many of your current goals, some of the things that you want. See them develop into a kind of grand visionary collection of images that represents your purpose and your mission. 6. Do What It Takes. Take whatever time you need—five minutes, an hour, a whole afternoon. This is your life, your future that you are creating. When you finish, write it down. Your images are so attractive, you have some glimpses of what your mission is. Now you can develop it more fully. Ask the visionary in you to give you the gift of this grand vision. Now that you can see your grand vision of what you want to contribute to, you can make that vision into a cause to work for—a specific direction to channel your efforts to.

People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness, and he'd walk out or fall asleep.

Benefits of Improv To the Editor: Re “Inmate Improv,” by Anna Clark (Op-Ed, Dec. 31): It was not surprising to me that an improvisational theater workshop would help a prison inmate adjust to life after his release. Pretend play has been shown to improve the executive-function skills in preschool and school-age children. These skills include the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exercise self-control and discipline. As poor executive-function skills are associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime, it would behoove all adults involved in child-rearing to encourage role-playing or “improv.” STEVEN ROSENBERG Fairfield, Conn., Dec. 31, 2014 The writer is director of the Elementary Reading Program at the University of Bridgeport School of Education.

I’ve never liked the term ‘actor’.” Barron spoke slowly, joining hands with the cast members to his left and right. The rest of them formed a circle, also holding hands, and he continued. “Seriously now, is anyone here ‘acting’? Is anyone here pretending? “Me, I’m a theater director. One hundred percent, all the time. I’m not pretending, or acting, or trying to fool anyone. This is what I do, and I give it my all—just like you. I look around me, and I don’t see a single phony. I see people who give their hearts, their minds, and their very lives to being serious performers on the stage. In the last weeks I’ve watched every one of you give up the easy life to come here and bust a gut to make this show a reality. “That’s why I call you performers. Not actors—performers. Because when it’s time to prepare, you work out every nuance of a role. When it’s time to step in front of the crowd, you reach out and pull them in with both hands. When it’s time to say your lines, you deliver them with skill and meaning. That’s performance. And there’s nothing phony about that. There’s nothing pretend about that. There’s no acting that will take the place of that. “And so that’s my wish for you tonight: Have a great performance. You’ve done the work, you’re ready, and now it’s time to show off. Have fun out there, gang. Perform.

Accounts vary as to how much DeMille had to do with The Lux Radio Theater beyond his job of announcing the plays. He was billed as producer and sometimes referred to as director, though he certainly never directed and was probably limited to consulting on prospective plays. In one magazine account, he was shown in the booth, allegedly giving orders from on high.

The Los Angeles public health director said, “If ordinary precautions are observed there is no cause for alarm.” Forty-eight hours later he closed all places of public gatherings, including schools, churches, and theaters.

Ned Sherrin Ned Sherrin is a satirist, novelist, anthologist, film producer, and celebrated theater director who has been at the heart of British broadcasting and the arts for more than fifty years. I had met Diana, Princess of Wales--perhaps “I had been presented to” is more accurate--in lineups after charity shows that I had been compering and at which she was the royal guest of honor. There were the usual polite exchanges. On royal visits backstage, Princess Alexandra was the most relaxed, on occasion wickedly suggesting that she caught a glimpse of romantic chemistry between two performers and setting off giggles. Princess Margaret was the most artistically acute, the Queen the most conscientious; although she did once sweep past me to get to Bill Haley, of whom she was a fan. Prince Edward could, at one time, be persuaded to do an irreverent impression of his older brother, Prince Charles. Princess Diana seemed to enjoy herself, but she was still new to the job and did not linger down the line. Around this time, a friend of mine opened a restaurant in London. From one conversation, I gathered that although it was packed in the evenings, business was slow at lunchtime. Soon afterward, I got a very “cloak-and-dagger” phone call from him. He spoke in hushed tones, muttering something like “Lunch next Wednesday, small party, royal person, hush-hush.” From this, I inferred that he wanted me and, I had no doubt, other friends to bring a small party to dress the restaurant, to which he was bringing the “royal person” in a bid to up its fashionable appeal during the day. When Wednesday dawned, the luncheon clashed with a couple of meetings, and although feeling disloyal, I did not see how I was going to be able to round up three or four people--even for a free lunch. Guiltily, I rang his office and apologized profusely to his secretary for not being able to make it. The next morning, he telephoned, puzzled and aggrieved. “There were only going to be the four of us,” he said. “Princess Diana had been looking forward to meeting you properly. She was very disappointed that you couldn’t make it.” I felt suitably stupid--but, as luck had it, a few weeks later I found myself sitting next to her at a charity dinner at the Garrick Club. I explained the whole disastrous misunderstanding, and we had a very jolly time laughing at the coincidence that she was dining at this exclusive club before her husband, who had just been elected a member with some publicity. Prince Charles was in the hospital at the time recuperating from a polo injury. Although hindsight tells us that the marriage was already in difficulties, that was not generally known, so in answer to my inquiries, she replied sympathetically that he was recovering well. We talked a lot about the theater and her faux pas some years before when she had been to Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and confessed to the star, Penelope Keith, that it was the first Coward play that she had seen. “The first,” said Penelope, shocked. “Well,” Diana said to me, “I was only eighteen!” Our meeting was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and as we were both working a lot for AIDS charities, we had many notes to compare and friends to mourn. The evening ended with a dance--but being no Travolta myself, I doubt that my partnering was the high point for her.

[I]s there not something basically hostile to the actor's art in the consanguinity principle? After all, what is acting but an exercise in dissimulation? The challenge to actors is to create characters on the stage; and these characters may be very different from what the actors are in real life. That indeed is the actor's triumph. The racialist restriction nullifies the talent of directors. The idea that only Swedes can direct Strindberg, only Russians Chekhov, only Irish Sheridan or Shaw, only Englishmen Shakespeare is self-evidently ridiculous--and, if carried out, would hopelessly impoverish the art of the theater. The consanguinity principle is an exclusionary rule that penalizes the very minorities it claims to benefit.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

I applied for a job as the night box office manager of a small theater company in Boystown. The job paid about five dollars an hour for a four-hour shift, so I was surprised to find that it required a lengthy interview with the artistic director of the theater. I had a degree in drama, I explained. We talked (meaning she talked) about playwrights we (she) liked. It was between me and another girl for the job, and she needed to know what I had to offer the Tiny Pretentious Theater Company because “We like to think of ourselves as the most exciting theater company in Chicago.” I tried a joke. “I like to think of myself as the most beautiful woman in the world. But where will that get either of us, really?” The other girl got the job.

Notable from the foreword: The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull were written as "comedies", but have been traditionally performed as "tragedies" by later theater directors.

...an astonishing blend of cultural history, multi-arts criticism, and memoir, moving with dazzling fluency across the hybrid worlds of visual and performance art, dance and music-theater, and experimental just-about-everything... Coe celebrates the mad pioneers of America’s most surreal cultural era in a gorgeous, insightful prose that matches their marvels.”        - Todd London, This Is Not My Memoir (with Andre Gregory, FSG) “...Compiled from published and unpublished writings, this volume reflects Coe’s extraordinary ability to craft smart journalistic profiles of epochal theater and dance artists with the Olympian sweep of an academic researcher and more than a streak of gonzo memoirist.”       - Don Shewey, Critic and Writer “...a truly personal opus and one that captivates as well as inspires... brimming with imagery and rich pathos that never seem over-indulgent or forced... Coe's book is certain to delight anyone who picks it up."        - Robert Buccellato, the US Review of Books "...a bit of Norman Mailer with a splash of Joan Didion, but all in all, the book has an eclectic style all its own. It’s postmodernism with a smirk and a twinkle. If you were there, you’ll be glad to go back again. If you weren’t there, you’re going to feel as if you were."        - Des McAnuff, Playwright, Songwriter, Director

Whether or not alcoholism, the obvious “iceberg” the writer could not escape, drowned some more private and secret suffering related to sexual desire or even gender identity, Robertson clearly wanted fate to absolve him for some compulsion that he feared was a choice, and perhaps also give him the ability to free himself from that compulsion—an impossible, contradictory, ambivalent wish. His precognitive habit seems to have answered both needs. Eisenbud makes a very key observation in this regard, one that goes well beyond Robertson in its implications: “With such an ambivalent attitude toward fate,” he writes, “all one would need, it might seem, would be heads and tails on the same throw. But any good precognitive event provides just this, since … the metaphysical significance of such an occurrence is sufficiently in question to satisfy both schools.”24 There was surely no better “precognitive event” than reading a New York Times headline about a sea disaster you had written a novel about 14 years earlier. The psychoanalytic rule of thumb is that nothing is ever an accident.25 The disasters and misfortunes that repeat themselves over and over in the lives of neurotics like Robertson look for all the world as though some higher power or cosmic theater director is testing them or just being cruel, but these situations are actually elicited by the neurotic in deviously subtle ways. For Freudians, the thematic consistency of the neurotic’s failures is always assumed to represent unresolved past situations confusedly haunting the neurotic’s present reality, governed by the repetition-compulsion beyond the pleasure principle. Instead of seeing things as they are, the neurotic sees replays of situations from early life and reacts accordingly, with predictably disappointing outcomes—the idiomatic “carrying baggage.” The alternative possibility that a case like Robertson’s suggests is that some of our baggage comes from our future. Robertson seems all his life to have been confusedly presponding to a future upheaval, even a kind of near miss or close call (since, having written about it beforehand, the Titanic disaster was in some sense “his” disaster), but treating it again and again as a present reality, a disaster that had already occurred or was in the process of occurring. By the time the real thing happened, he himself was already sunk, “washed up,” and could not even successfully capitalize on what might have been the perfect advertisement for his precognitive gift. What if something like this is true of many neurotics? What portion of ordinary human floundering and failure might really be attributable to misrecognized precognition, a kind of maladaptive prematurity of feeling and thought? We now turn to another deeply neurotic writer whose life even more clearly illustrates the painful temporal out-of-synch-ness of the strongly precognitive soul.

Let’s revisit my conversation with Theater Director, Teacher, and Actor Terry Martin and the Meisner Technique. According to Terry, he encourages his students to seek a pivotal place when they are truly present in the moment and access their emotional impulses. He does this by describing emotions as E-motion. Energy in motion. Because they are constantly changing, emotions are powerful but momentary. By accessing these emotions, his actors find a way to tell a story in their unique way. He cautions that emotions only create a block if they are restrained. For example, my attempts to silence my emotions prevented me from accessing my mind and held me in a painful state. He teaches his students to understand the emotional journey by accepting their emotions.

Esos innovadores del teatro, Jerzy Grotowski, el director polaco de teatro experimental y autor de Hacia un teatro pobre, Peter Brook, el director inglés, y el Living Theater, el grupo de teatro experimental fundado por Julian Beck

Here's the reality, guys: you save up for years to go 'Out West' and you spend everything you have in six months living in a roach infested hole in K-town, paying for "casting workshops" so you can meet managers and casting directors who don't give two shits about you. You cut your hair a little bit or grow a moustache and you have to get new headshots because people in Hollywood fundamentally lack imagination and can't even begin to fathom 'who you are as an actor' unless your headshot looks exactly like you do on the day of. And headshots cost $300 to shoot (on the cheap end) and $100 for make-up artists and $100 to retouch and $100 to print. Plus, you need a car to get around because mass transit in Los Angeles is a goddam joke. You need to get into class so you can learn how to unlearn all the shit you learned in college theater. Meanwhile, you're in love with the city because it's new and warm all the time and there are beautiful women everywhere. But you start getting this creeping sensation like everyone is a facade of a human being and beneath every beautiful face is spiritual rot, careerism, graft, nepotism, bull shit, lies, fakery, a need to be seen and an overwhelming whorism. But don't worry, guys, because you can always get a job working as a bartender where you can sneak booze from the well and forget for a few minutes what it's like to be on the bottom of the totem pole. That's a lot of fun, especially when you discover that cocaine means you can drink forever and not get too wasted until later. You'll get a DUI eventually, but fuck it, right? Around this time you start to get bitter. Really bitter, which you'll mistake as an 'evolution of your art.' You start looking for edgy rolls. You get a dumb haircut and try to make yourself look ugly. Maybe you hit the gym or start doing improv. Something to give you an edge. You start seeing young kids coming into town all bright eyed and bushy tailed and you say 'good luck' when you mean 'eat shit and die.' You wake up one day after endless commercial auditions that you really need to make rent but can't seem to book because you 'come off as an asshole' or don't smile enough...

Auden’s bass voice resonates with Oxonian certainty even though the rumble of the Autobahn a half-mile away means anything can yet happen. For now, however, he is secure in the two-story, shingled, two-tone green farmhouse which, along with three acres of land he bought for $10,000 “soon after the Russians had left, when everything was cheap and very run down and hardly anybody here had cash. I had dollars, so I was able to beat out a theater director who was after the same property.” It is a quiet life that Auden lives here once he puts the anarchy of the city and the publishing world behind him.

In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.

If you’ve read enough scripts, if you’ve practiced and mastered your craft – you’ll be at a point where you only need one person’s feedback on your draft – yourself. Any additional feedback should only be sought from people who are going to be a part of your project, or people you know have the film’s best interest in mind – the actors, the director, the producer, etc. Be careful who you choose to share your script with and how you dissect other people’s feedback.

It's commonplace to describe theater—the activity underpinning the very existence of this book—as a collaborative artform in which the author's words are shaped, embodied and adapted by actors, directors, producers, designers, musicians and above all, audiences.

It was as if, when I sang, Dad forgot for a moment that the world was a frightening place, that it would corrupt me, that I should be kept safe, sheltered, at home. He wanted my voice to be heard. The theater in town was putting on a play, Annie, and my teacher said that if the director heard me sing, he would give me the lead. Mother warned me not to get my hopes up. She said we couldn’t afford to drive the twelve miles to town four nights a week for rehearsals, and that even if we could, Dad would never allow me to spend time in town, alone, with who knows what kind of people. I practiced the songs anyway because I liked them. One evening, I was in my room singing, “The sun’ll come out tomorrow,” when Dad came in for supper. He chewed his meatloaf quietly, and listened. “I’ll find the money,” he told Mother when they went to bed that night. “You get her to that audition.

Dad didn’t stop me from auditioning for the next play, or the one after that, even though he worried about me spending so much time away from home. “There’s no telling what kind of cavorting takes place in that theater,” he said. “It’s probably a den of adulterers and fornicators.” When the director of the next play got divorced, it confirmed Dad’s suspicions.

Sprocket fiend is the name I have for the subterranean dimension to my film addiction. The subtle, beneath-the-sound-track sound of the clattering projector in those old rep theaters, especially the New Beverly. The defiant, twenty-four-frames-per-second mechanical heartbeat that says, at least for the duration of whatever movie you're watching, the world's time doesn't apply to you. You're safe in whatever chronal flow the director chooses to take you through. Real time, or a span of months or years, or backward and forward through a life. You are given the space of a film to steal time. And the projector is your only clock. And the need for that subtle, clicking sprocket time makes you - made me - a sprocket fiend.

He does not tell her how. He never does. It is the essential aspect of his genius as an educator. The world is full of people who cannot wait to tell you what they know. What animates Volpe is creating moments for his kids to figure it out for themselves. His ego, though not small, allows for great patience. Very few high school directors could be more versed in theater, more knowing about what the finished product should look like. But he lets his kids find their own way there. His

Aaron’s Story Aaron was a strong, silent type who had always lived by a code that involved not pushing for recognition. Growing up, he loved theater and acting, but he never spoke up to request a role or ask a director for a bigger part. He thought he would seem spoiled and demanding if he promoted himself, and that lobbying for himself was a sign of weakness. However, as an adult, Aaron began to see that his code of not speaking up for himself often resulted in other people being put ahead of him. In addition, others often took advantage of his talents without reciprocating. He saw that his healing fantasy, in which he hoped authority figures would spontaneously recognize his potential, wasn’t coming to fruition. So he decided to develop a new value of going after what he wanted. He started actively seeking opportunities and laying claim to them. Considering a job change, he said, “In the past, I would have been reluctant to do this for myself, but now I’m not.” He finally saw himself as worthy of standing up for and investing in.

So instead of hitting light switches, I switched lanes and that's when I joined the chorus. My mom taught me an important lesson that day: Don't let racist magnet school theater directors crush your dreams. Go sing instead.