The work is very much to the point.

It was a good day yesterday, professionally speaking.  Swung by the theatre early, around nine, to sit in for a bit on the Bachelor's Graveyard rehearsals.  I couldn't have been more pleased.  The five actors, Rob Arbogast, Chad Coe, J.R. Mangels, Ryan Keiffner and Jonathan Zenz were blocking some of the show with the director, Karesa McElheney.  Karesa had things firmly under control and the guys were in full heathen mode.  I sat in the audience and grinned.

I just love this red-headed, stepchild of a play.  Even at this very early stage I could feel a sense of anarchy on the stage.  I call this play my "dirty play."  It's loosely about five eighteen year olds enjoying their last hurrah before college in an out-of-the-way, abandoned graveyard in small-town USA.  There is lots of frank talk about sex and being young and dreams and hopes and despair.  There is a lot of laughter and, later in the play, some pretty good serious stuff.  I've worked with Chad and J.R. before in From the East to the West and I know how good they are.  Rob is a cracker-jack L.A. actor with a long resume.  He's playing the lead.  Jonathan and Ryan are young actors whose work I've admired from a distance.  Ryan recently set the house on fire with a wonderful performance in PROOF.  And it's hard to imagine a better role for Jon's really subtle work.

So I just really kind of sat there and smiled as they all attacked the stage helter-skelter yesterday.  I've been told they all really like the play and that's evidenced in the way they revel on the stage.  Originally, we had just planned a staged reading of the piece.  See how my "dirty play" would work in front of an audience.  In the play the characters are all swigging gallons of PBR throughout and talking about whatever bizarre thoughts enter their inebriated heads.  Apparently, the boys got together a week or so ago and actually DID swig gallons of PBR and talk about whatever bizarre thoughts entered their heads.  Out of that evening came a resolution to actually do the play full out rather than just a staged reading.

After rehearsal I told them they were about to be involved in the hippest, smartest theatre piece in L.A.   And I think that's true.  Plans are underway to run the show in tandem with Praying Small.  Bachelor's Graveyard would run on the dark nights, I guess.

The Artistic Director of NoHo Arts Center has stepped down for six months or so to deal with a few health issues.  In his place a triumvirate of artistic directors will run the joint.  They've given the green light to the piece.

After the rehearsal, feeling quite jaunty, I sauntered over to Starbucks and met my lifelong buddy, Joe Hulser, for some thick coffee.  Joe and I were at Missouri State together a million years ago.  He's a fine actor and director himself.  Joe's a funny guy.   One of his greatest joys is to get a group of good actors around him and carefully examine a classic piece of theatre line by line.  He's doing that now with the play Death of a Salesman.  He's got a deep, booming voice and a perpetual half-smile, half-scowl on his face all day long.  I was sitting in the sun outside the coffee shop, my back to him, when I heard in that unmistakable Hulser voice, "Willy Loman, Clif!  Willy Loman!  Gotta love him!  Miller took the brakes off for that one!"  This in place of "hi."

We then spent an hour or so talking about our favorite Willy Loman performances over the years; Lee J. Cobb, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, George C. Scott.  I can't imagine a more stimulating conversation on a perfect southern California morning.

Finally I wandered back to the theatre for a barn-burner marketing meeting.  The theatre has brought in a world-class marketing guy, C. Raul Espinoza, and he had a group of us together in the second stage to talk marketing strategy.  An illuminating afternoon.  The possibilities, it would seem, are endless.  In the past one of the things that hampered the theatre has always been a complicated ordeal of getting a project green-lighted.  That is to say, getting a good piece of work actually in front of an audience.  Lots of reasons for this, some financial, some political, some bureaucratic.  No one's fault really.  Certainly no malice intended.  Just complicated.

For a number of reasons, very few theatre companies on the west coast use a subscription base.  They depend on single ticket sales.  This is exactly opposite of theatre companies on the east coast, where I've spent the bulk of my professional career.  So out here it's really important to find out exactly what kind of an audience attends our productions.  And then, of course, find out what that audience wants to see.  And finally, what kind of theatre we want to present in order to educate and guide them towards in order to find a happy medium.

The theatre, NoHo Arts Center Ensemble, is dedicated to new work, luckily for me.  It is part of their mission statement.  And part of our meeting yesterday with Raul was identifying and highlighting that again.  I mean, Joe Hulser notwithstanding, how many Willie Loman's can a body see?

This theatre is blessed with a lot of really smart people.  People passionate about the work itself and not so interested in the accolades.  I like that  a lot.  It has always been my personal philosophy.  To quote Lanford Wilson in Tally's Folly, "The work.  The work is very much to the point."

Came back to the house after that to a couple of puppies greeting me as though I'd been on safari.

One of the reasons my days are now filled with humor and purpose is because I have this damned diabetes under control now.  I actually feel as though I've been given a new lease on life.  I have energy and drive.  It completely sucks not to have that.  I think you'll notice, gentle readers, a recent dedication to the maudlin in my blogging.  Blame it on the untreated diabetes.

Angie and I spent the evening doing what most people would consider boring but to us is a fine way of spending time; we cooked a great pasta meal, tormented the puppies and watched The West Wing.  We have them all TiVo'd from Bravo.  We take special delight in watching them all again.  I can't imagine that with any other show, but The West Wing is nothing short of brilliant and there are eight seasons of episodic work in which to indulge.

And then blessed sleep.  Haven't had a lot of that lately because of this annoying "silent killer" with which I've been dealing.  We got both dogs in bed with us, talked and played with them for awhile and then drifted off to sleep.  Mundane?  Yes.  Middle-aged?  Yes.  Perfect?

Yes.

Rehearsing a few of the gargantuan monologues from Praying Small today with my director, Victor Warren.  I want to get these under my belt before rehearsals begin in earnest with the rest of the cast.  It's all broken-fourth-wall work and all difficult stuff.  And today, glory be, I relish the challenge.

The sun is now rising on southern California.  The birds are singing the hallelujah chorus.  Angie and the puppies are still sleeping soundly.  The coffee is thick and hot.  And I am a happy and lucky man.

See you tomorrow.

On Being Young and Getting Old...

I have always been a boxing aficionado.  The heavyweights.  I have hundreds of heavyweight fights on DVD, transferred over from VCR tapes which have been transferred from sixteen millimeter film.  I have old, forgotten fights on DVD from Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Jack Johnson, Max Baer, Max Schmeling Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Ezzard Charles, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier, George Foreman and, of course, Muhammad Ali.  In fact, here's a great trivia question you can ask next time you're sitting in a pub having a beer.  Name the only two heavyweight champions to retire undefeated?  The obvious answer is that there was only one heavyweight champion to retire undefeated - Rocky Marciano.  It's a trick question and will, without fail, win you a beer in a bar.  The other is Cassius Clay.  He was forced to retire and he was undefeated.  When he came back he was Muhammad Ali.  Pretty good, huh?

One of my favorite people in the world and one of my best friends is a Catholic priest in Brooklyn.  He saved my life once many years ago but that's another blog for another time.  Back in the day, whenever a major fight was on TV or cable or PPV, we would meet up, find a seat at a bar a couple of hours before the fight began, start sipping beer and talk endlessly about fighting.  The history of fighting.  His knowledge and expertise in the area is nearly equal to my own and he's seen a lot more fights in person than I have.  There was a place on 33rd Street in NYC back in those days called Mulligans, a little place off Third Ave.  They always showed the big fights.  It was a boxing bar and one I loved.  So we'd get there early, as in the case of the Tyson/Holmes fight in 1988, order up some beer and shots and start debating.  I remember, in fact, on that particular occasion, he'd come straight from some Catholic thing and still had his collar on.  His name is Bob and he is a worthy conversationalist about the sweet science.  So we're sitting there getting a little tipsy before the fight talking about boxing...who was the best, who had the best hook, what would have happened if these two had met, etc.  And he kept going back to Joe Louis.  Bob is a lot older than I am and remembered Louis.  Finally, I remember saying, sort of exasperated, "would you please stop bringing up Joe Louis?  He got old and slow and and frankly, I don't see the big deal around him."  He stared off sort of wistfully for a second and said quietly, "ah, but you don't understand, Clif.  He was so BEAUTIFUL when he was young."  Today, when I talk to younger boxing enthusiasts I sometimes use that same phrase about Ali.  He was so beautiful when he was young.

Last night I was rehearsing for one of the one-acts I'm doing in SANITY, the night of short plays I'm doing with NoHo.  In the play with me is a much older actress who had an entire career in Italy when she was younger.  She actually worked with Fellini and some other icons in Europe.  Anyway, in the play, she plays an aging actress and the set should have old posters of her in past plays.  So she brought in some old photos of herself when SHE was young, perhaps to blow up and use in the play.  She was stunningly beautiful in the photos.  She was proud to show them to us.  But there was something else there, too, something not so much sad as resigned.  Something gentle and wistful.

I think I know how she feels.  We all do, really.

Poets and songwriters and novelists and playwrights have been trying to tell me my whole life to stop and appreciate my youth.  GB Shaw famously said it is wasted on the young.  Of course, none of us heed.  We're too busy being young.  For me, anyway, it was always nearly inconceivable to be old.  But it happened, it happens.

The trick is to do it gracefully.  I don't know that trick.  But I know ABOUT it..  It is a sub theme in my play, Praying Small and a major theme in my play Bachelor's Graveyard.  A time to set aside childish things, I believe is how the bible phrases it.  Move on, Sondheim says.  It was a very good year, Sinatra says.

Who is this bald guy shaving, I ask myself some mornings.  I'm not sure I know this guy.  This is a theme I dwell on a lot these days.  In my work and in my life.  How did we get here, is a question asked often in my play, From the East to the West.  We just did, is the answer.  How do we reconcile the pictures of our youth with the people we've become, sometimes struggling with addiction or cancer or diabetes or relationships or any number of unforseen, metaphorical potholes in our lives?  How do we try and tell that glossy, beautiful photograph taken thirty years ago about the unimaginable loss and fatigue that lie ahead?  How do we connect the dots from twenty five to seventy?  The proof is right before us, in our hands, in the very pictures we hold.  Most of us took it all for granted.

I don't know about you, gentle reader, but I want to do it all again.

"Time it was and what a time it was, it was a photograph.  Preserve our memory.  That's all that's left me."

Now I get it, Father Bob.  Took me a little while.  But now I get it.  Ah, he was so BEAUTIFUL when he was young.

See you tomorrow.

On Writing in a Bar...

So I'm doing these two one-acts for NoHo Arts.  I'm doing this before Praying Small opens.  They run with six other one-acts in an evening entitled "Sanity Squared."  At least I think that's what it's being called.  The name keeps changing so I'm not quite sure.  I suggested they call it "The Lion King" simply for marketing purposes but no one seemed to like that.

One is an amusing little script about dinner theatre and all the little self-important foibles that go along with it.  And the other is about what might have happened if one of George W. Bush's daughters had come out as a lesbian.  Both comedies.  I think.

I'm not a fan of one-acts even though I've written a few myself.  Mostly because they're quite the rage these days with a lot of theatre companies.  The "Ten Minute Play."  I've churned out a few over the past few years to pick up a little cash.  I don't take them very seriously.  I suppose an evening of one-acts has its charms although I don't really know what they might be.  An actor can't really stretch his legs in one.  A director does little more than block.  And a good writer is bound to be frustrated if the subject matter is worth exploring at all.

Nonetheless, I'm doing them.  Solely as an actor.

Having said that, I was involved in an evening once in NYC that featured two one-acts.  The first was entitled "The Relative Importance of Jeri" by a very fine writer named Jim Uhls.  Jim has since gone on to quite a lucrative career out here in LA - he wrote "Fight Club."  This was a long time ago and I don't remember a lot about the play except that it was a tad misogynistic.

It was directed by my buddy Jeff Wood and starred the late Robert Fiedler in probably his last hurrah as an actor.

The other one-act on the bill that night was one I wrote and acted in called "Golden Eggs."  It was essentially a forty-five minute, one-person show.  It was kind of a warm-up act for the other one.  In those days I was a bit enamored with a couple of writers that I no longer care for.  One was Sam Shepard.

Shepard is an enormously gifted playwright who apparently, early on at least, didn't believe in re-writing.  His Cafe Cino (I think that's what it was called) stuff in the sixties and early seventies was really surrealistic and fun.  But I suspect Sam wrote that stuff the same way I wrote "Golden Eggs."  That is to say, sitting in a bar writing long-hand.

In those days, and I don't even know if this place is still there, there used to be a great little dive bar right around the corner from The National Shakespeare Conservatory called The Spring Street Lounge.  Actually, I don't even know if that was the real name of it.  We called it that because it was a lounge on Spring Street.  I hung out there  a lot after rehearsals with Bob Fiedler.  You had to know the bar was there because there were no signs, no lights, nothing.  Just a big, red, metal door.  It was an "insiders" bar.  A lot of actors and writers hung out there. Saw Norman Mailer in there writing one day.  Saw Brett Easton Ellis writing in there one day.  Saw Martin Sheen in there learning lines one day.

So, as I recall, Jeff came to me (he'd already directed a few of my pieces by this time) and asked for a one-act to go up along side "Jeri."  So a few nights later I traveled down to the lounge and sat in the corner and just began writing on this big, yellow, legal pad.

Let  me tell you why The Spring Street Lounge was my favorite place to write.  It was a musty, dusty old bar.  Mismatched tables and chairs.  Sawdust on the floor.  A big, oak, wrap-around bar at the front.  Only two drinks available there - Budweiser and Jack Daniels.  And only two artists on the jukebox - Springsteen and Sinatra.  I was in writer's heaven.

So I sat down and ordered a couple rounds (I didn't like getting up to get more drinks back then so I always ordered two rounds at a time) and began writing.  Four hours later I had a one-act play.  Honestly, that's how I used to write.  I think the next day I showed it to Jeff and he read it and nodded and said, "Okay, that's fine."  That's how we did things back then.  No re-writes to speak of, just write it, get on your feet and rehearse it, add water and voila, a brand-new, one-act play.  What were we thinking?

And here's the kicker: they all turned out to be really good.  I was always a bit embarrassed to admit how I'd written it.  Someone would say to me after a performance, "Why, that was incredible!  How long did you work on that?"  And I'd lie and say, "I've been working on that piece for over a year now, trying to get it exactly like I wanted."  For some reason I somehow thought it dishonorable to admit I'd written the damn thing sitting in a bar over a few hours.

I no longer have the script (actually there never really was one) or the tape of that performance.  There is one floating around out there somewhere because I've seen it.  But I don't know who has it.  Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing it today.

So here I am learning lines for these two comedic one-acts for NoHo Arts.  They're not bad.  Funny, even.  But it's hard to work up any passion for them.  It's hard to invest.  I think once we go into tech and start getting ready for an audience, I'll get more excited about them.

Just a few meandering thoughts today.  Life is good and no doubt the sun will shine in Southern California.  Angie just got up and is feeding the puppies.  The TV is droning in the background.  I have a great outlook following my visit to the doctor yesterday.  I even got a little sleep last night.

Things could be worse.  Things could always be worse.  But they aren't.

See you tomorrow.

The Silent Killer and Sanibel Island...

I am sitting here waiting to see a doctor.  Hoping to get some new medication to control my diabetes symptoms.  I'm told they call it the "silent killer."  In my case it should be called the "silent annoyer."  The symptoms?  A whole litany of things I've never dealt with before: high blood pressure, weight loss (20 lbs in a month), excessive thirst (I've been chugging about three or four gallons of water a day), excessive urination (see "chugging"), crippling headaches (they incapacitate me at times), weird out of the blue dizziness, right leg numb, and a bunch of other stuff.  So what we tried to correct with diet and exercise will now have to be dealt with through medication.

Okay.  That's the last time you will EVER hear me talk about my health.

I hate it.  I hate when people whine about their health. My grandmother was a hypochondriac and for the last thirty years of her life she was dying.  About to drop over any second.  Every time, as a child, I visited her I listened to endless theories on how she just very well might die that day.  A cough was pneumonia. A sprain was a compound fracture.  A sore muscle was polio.  It was ridiculous.

I'll tell you what.  If they tell me I've got about forty five minutes to live, THEN I'll talk about it one more time.  But it'll have to be quick.

But since I'm on the subject.

In 1993 I traveled down to Sanibel Island off the gulf coast of Florida to do a whole season of plays; Lend Me a Tenor, The Rainmaker, Two by Two, Wait Until Dark, The Foreigner and Run For Your Wife.  There was a little SPT (Small Professional Theatre) down there called Pirate Playhouse.  Embarrassing name for an Equity theatre.  Nonetheless, I did a lot of work there, always in the bitterly cold months of December, January and February.  Anything to get out of NYC during those months.  And Sanibel Island is just beautiful.  I always described it as Gilligan's Island with electricity.  Adding up all the time I spent doing theatre there, I probably spent a year of my life on that island.  And it's a paradise, it really is.  Beaches beyond anything I'd ever seen.  Beautiful houses.  Literally an island paradise.  Angie and I hope to retire there someday.

The theatre itself, which is still there but now they do non-Equity musical reviews and the like, mostly using local actors, is a great 200 seater with state of the art facilities.  Back in those days it was run by Bob Cacioppo who is now the AD at Florida Rep in Fort Myers.  As near as I can tell he was fired for doing good theatre.  The board, apparently, didn't like the fact that actual plays were being done there, Williams, Shakespeare, Miller, Odets, Inge, Simon and the like.  They wanted snappy musicals with lots of glitter and jazz hands.  The kind of stuff that makes me want to throw canned hams at the stage.  Anyway, that's another blog.

So I'm doing Run For Your Wife during that season.  I'd been feeling a tad under the weather for a few days but I thought it was because of all the tippling I and the cast had been doing.  I tended to tipple a lot back then.  So I'm doing the play and getting weaker and weaker as the night wears on.  Finally, midway through the second act I knew I was gonna go down.  Something just told me I was going to.  In the middle of a scene in front of a packed house I simply walked off stage and passed out.  Later I found out the stage manager had then walked on stage and canceled the performance and asked if there was a doctor in the house.  Well, it's Sanibel.  I think EVERYONE in that house was a doctor.

I awoke in the emergency room.  Getting blood transfusions.  It was a duadenal ulcer.  About half the blood in my system was now in my stomach.  Duadenal ulcers are tricky because there are no nerve endings in the duadenal tract, apparently, so there is on pain involved.  You just drop.  And I dropped.

So they went in and cauterized the ulcer.  I was out of the play for a week or two.  Which kind of sucked because I really enjoyed doing that stupid little play.

The old cliche' "if you don't have your health, you don't have anything" is annoyingly true.  It never occurred to me I might someday have health issues such as diabetes or ulcers or heart problems.  Never.  Because I was blessed with an incredible constitution.  The things I've done to myself would kill a half dozen normal people.  And so I'm surprised, startled even, to have to deal with these things now.

Our bodies begin to betray us.  We turn into our parents and their parents and finally understand the meaning of the foreign words they used when we were young.  We have to spend time looking up medical terms, terms we've heard about and seen on bad TV movies but never really taken the time to really understand.  We have to pace ourselves.  And, like our parents and their parents, we have to sashay through life doing normal, everyday, working things, all the while knowing that lurking just beyond our passive countenance is a disease doing unwanted things to our body.  We want to tell people about it.  The guy at the checkout line, "Um, listen, could you please not be so curt with me right now?  I was just diagnosed with diabetes, that's the "silent killer" in case you didn't know, and I'm really in need of just a tiny bit of compassion right now."  In my case, an audience, "Um, listen, I just want to stop the show here for just a second if you don't mind.  Normally, I do that scene with a great deal of emotion.  Other audiences have wept uncontrollably at this moment.  But I can't raise my voice because it will bring on a blood pressure surge and a crippling headache.  So I'm changing my performance so that it's not the best I can do...just to accommodate my disease.  I hope you don't mind.  By the way, it's called The Silent Killer.  Now back to the show."

So what's to be done?  Nothing.  Acceptance.  Grace.  Trust.  Get older.  No use fighting that.  Become less.  It's a losing game.

On the plus side our new puppy, Francis, is making me really dig life in general.

See you tomorrow

On Old Friends...

One of the cool things about Facebook is the whole reconnect thing.  People we haven't seen for ages suddenly popping up with a picture looking vaguely like someone with which we used to spend hours and hours, days and days, huge patches of our formative years.  That's happened to me a lot on Facebook in general and whole lot in recent weeks.  And for someone like myself, who can slip easily into a wistful, nostalgic countenance, it has been bitter-sweet.

Mostly sweet.

Did a few shows with a very fine character actor named Gary Wingert at the now defunct New American Theatre.  He was one of the few bright spots in Servant of Two Masters, a play I blogged about recently as not being one of my favorites.  We later played the Duke and the King, respectively, in a production of Big River which also featured my dear friend, Kyle Puccia as Huck Finn.  That kind of amuses me now because at the time Kyle played a 16 year old boy and did it believably.  Today Kyle could pass for an ultimate fighter.  He works out a bit.

Anyway, Gary and I clicked almost immediately.  One of those wonderful first meetings that happens occasionally to the traveling professional actor like myself in those days.  I think within five or ten minutes Gary and I realized we had identical senses of humor.  That is to say  dark, absurd and irreverent.

A couple of years later we did the musical, Big River, together and spent hours honing our bits together.  In hindsight I think we did that more to make each other laugh than the audience.  We worked on split second takes and gestures ala' Laurel and Hardy.  WE thought it was funny.  At one point we took a five minute scene and turned it into a ten minute scene with just silly physical stuff, much to the chagrin of our PSM.  Both Gary and I loved that stuff.  The director, not so much.

But it spoiled me.  Later I did another production of Big River and worked with an actor in the role of The King that wasn't anywhere near what Gary was as a physical comedian.  Frustrated the hell out of me.  His idea of being funny was to yell a lot.  Which CAN be funny if you happen to be in a public library.

Also reconnected with a very close friend from my undergraduate days named Dwayne Butcher.  Dwayne was another I met and clicked with almost immediately.  I don't remember our first meeting but I do know we were nearly inseparable during that time.  Dwayne and I did a number of shows together back in those days; 1940's Radio Hour, Oh, Kay! and one of my plays, The Flagger.  Maybe some others, but I don't remember.  I always thought Dwayne was very funny on stage and even funnier off.  And as gentle readers of this blog will no doubt appreciate, funny goes a long way with me.

Neither one of us suffered fools gladly in those days and had a well-deserved reputation of being obnoxious to others in the theatre department.  But we didn't really care because we were part of a group of arrogant, young actors that were entirely self-sufficient:  Dwayne, myself, Joe Hulser, Dave Brady, Robert Fiedler, a couple of others.  At the time I lived in a really big apartment over on Belmont Street, near campus.  That was our den of iniquity.  You practically had to have an embossed card to be welcomed there.  A card that said "ass" on it.

In undergraduate school, Missouri State University, there was what was called The Vicky Awards every year; sort of our own Tony Awards for school.  There was a professor, Dawin Emanuel, who had, for whatever reason, taken me under his wing in those days.  Unlike other professors there, Dawin had actually been a working, Equity professional for many, many years before becoming a university teacher.  He made it very clear he only befriended the truly talented students.  Like myself, he had very little patience for bad work and phony people.  Very Salinger-esque, we were.  Anyway, I remember with great clarity the final Vicky Award Ceremony I attended in college.  Dawin was persuaded to go with us.  A grand ballroom was rented out.  Everyone was in a tuxedo or a gown.  A big to-do.  Our gang of bully-boy actors commandeered a big table in the corner and sat and jeered and cheered throughout the night and guzzeled cheap scotch.  I won best actor that year for a role in Fifth of July, the wonderful Lanford Wilson piece.  I think Dwayne won best actor for some one-act festival.  Joe won for best director, as I recall.  But the point is, we were insufferable over there at our corner table, cheering wildly for each other and remaining conspicuously silent when one of "ours" didn't win.  Very childish on our part.  In retrospect, it was one of our last hurrahs, our little gang of miscreants at the corner table.  Dawin sat and grinned and cheered right along with us, proud to be the figure-head of our snotty little group.  I loved that night and it is one of those few nights I wish I could live again.  I felt a part of something.

So Dwayne and I, after a couple of decades, reconnected through Facebook.  He's in a small town in Oklahoma now, not sure what he does, but it's nice knowing he's only a keyboard away.  I think he's happy although I'm not sure.

Joe Hulser, another member of that self-satisfied bunch of ne'er-do-wells, lives very close to me here in Los Angeles and we hang out now and then.  He came to see my last play, in fact, From the East to the West.  We go to lunch together once in a while at this terrible little diner near us called "Sittons."  It's just awful.  We love it.

And finally, my old high school choir teacher, David Rice, and I reconnected.  I always liked Mr. Rice.  He was an amazing vocal teacher and a fine singer, too.  He was occasionally very strict, but he always had a great sense of humor.  That goes a long ways in my book.  He's retired now and working as a pastor in a small town near the town in which I grew up.  I had a very troubled boyhood in Fulton, Missouri, and David Rice was the first teacher to speak with me privately and empathetically about it.  I shall always be grateful for that.

There are others, of course, that I've found again through Facebook.  Maybe I'll blog about them someday.  The one that stands out like a shining beacon, of course, is Angela.  But that's a different story altogether and one I don't care to expound on.  Suffice to say it changed every single thing about my life.  In a very, very good way.  A delightful paradigm shift.

Chicago, in some respects, was such a terrible time for me.  I spent a decade in that city I've come to loathe.  Los Angeles is exactly the opposite.  Nearly every minute is filled with joy and gratitude.  I never would have thought that.  I think a lot of it has to do with getting older.  Los Angeles is much slower than Chicago or New York.  And so am I.

Tomorrow I'm scheduled for a whole battery of tests regarding my recent discovery of diabetes.  I have no idea what will come of all that.  But whatever comes of it, it is exactly what is supposed to come of it.  There are no coincidences.  I have been very fortunate to have the constitution of a Missouri mule most of my life.  Considering the trials I've put my body through in years past, it's amazing I'm on my feet at all.  I trust all will be fine.  And if not, that will be fine, too.  I very rarely fear tomorrow these days.

See you then.

More on The Naked Face...

Eccentric choices.  A term that has brought me some friendly fire a few times.  Once, directing and acting in a play called Redwood Curtain by Lanford Wilson in New York, the producer was sitting in the back of the theatre listening to me give notes to the actors after a rehearsal.  He listened to me give a note about an eccentric moment, a moment of "lightning," as it were.  In a breach of rehearsal etiquette he said from the back row, "you can't ask her to be eccentric for eccentricities sake alone!"  I stopped the notes and turned to him and said, "yes, I can.  I can do exactly that.  And that's what I'm doing."  You see, he didn't get it.  He, like so many others, had bought into the "lowest common denominator" approach to acting.  That is to say, the approach thousands upon thousands are taught in the education system all across America and then again later with professional acting teachers that think they need a text book to legitimize their class.  My thoughts on this are fairly simple.  Whatever your choice is to interpret a line of dialogue, fight that instinct and try and find something not quite as expected.  Not always, because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  But be aware that about a gillion other actors will interpret the line the same way.  Hence, the lowest common denominator.

Look at the wonderful Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump.  Think back to his line, "I may not be a smart man, Jenny.  But I know what love is."  That is a moment of lightning.  That is an eccentric choice for the sake of eccentricity.  That is why people quote that line so often.  Because Hanks actively chose to say it unlike a million other actors.  It's a pretty impressive piece of interpretation, actually.  Hanks is one of those actors that I forget how good he is until I see him in something again.

I'm using film work in the blog to make points because film is easiest for everyone to reference.

Choices.  It always comes back to choices.  If there were two separate classes for Naked Face, choices would be the master class.  Choices are the sprinkles on the ice cream cone.  The added dash.  The final ingredient after learning how to say the words without embellishment.

Choices.  Returning to Moriarty.  There is a scene in Holocaust (If you haven't seen this brilliant mini-series that aired in the late seventies about the NAZI atrocities in Europe, do so, rent it immediately.  It is full of wonderful performances from Streep to James Woods to Rosemary Harris to Michael, himself, who cadged an Emmy for it), that is a startling example of what I'm writing about.  The war is winding down.  It has become clear the Germans are about to lose everything.  Michael, as a NAZI murderer, is in bed with his Lady Macbeth-like wife.  And suddenly from a man that has been clear-eyed about his desire to eliminate the Jews once and for all, he breaks into tears about his new doubts about Hitler himself.  "He loves dogs,"  Michael says and weeps uncontrollably for a few seconds.  The moment is so unexpected and startling it turns the scene instantly from predictable to heart stopping.

Look at the overwhelming evil in Lawrence Olivier when, as Richard III, he delivers the line, "I am not in the giving vein today."  Another moment of lightning.

Look at Brando in Last Tango in Paris as he recounts his childhood all the while turning a small lamp near him on and off again, over and over.  An eccentric choice certainly not in the script.  And ultimately mesmerizing.  Later in that film, as he is about to die, watch him place the gum he has been chewing under the balcony railing.  His last act as a living person.  A moment of lightning.  And as unpredictable as it gets.

I have an obscure reference here.  In 1955 Ernest Borgnine won an Oscar for his work in a film called Marty.  It is good work.  But earlier there had been a live broadcast of that same script on television.  It was saved in kinescope.  Rod Steiger does the same role.  It's great work.  The difference between a good actor and a great actor in the very same role.  Steiger is unpredictable and full of odd and interesting choices.  Borgnine finds, in nearly every instance, the lowest common denominator for communication.

Had our first read-thru of Praying Small last night at the theatre.  A really fine cast has been assembled for this most personal play of mine.  There's a good vibe and I am hopeful and optimistic.  It opens June 11.

See you tomorrow.

The Naked Face.

I teach acting here on the West Coast.  I've taught for the past ten years or so in Chicago and before that intermittently in New York.  My studio is called Naked Face Los Angeles and in the midwest it was called Naked Face Chicago.  I'm slowly, ever so slowly, about to finally get my website up again for it.  I had it up and running for years in Chicago but finally I got to the point that I was overwhelmed with students and let it lapse.  I had a three month waiting list.  I didn't need it and was, frankly, too busy to really care about renewing it.  But now I'm sort of starting all over and I'm gathering students again.  In Chicago, my studio was located in Lincoln Park.  I had a small, two room space inside an art gallery.  A small, brass plaque outside that simply said, "Naked Face."

I started with a few students that had done work with me at Actors Workshop, a small professional company on the north side that originally did my plays, Praying Small, Liars and Angels, Promotion to Glory, The Liar and Norman Mailer and The Language of Cherubs.  With that humble beginning, through word of mouth, my clientele grew.

With Actors Workshop, I would teach a large class every Tuesday night.  The class started small and, again, built through word of mouth and eventually was very large.  But I don't like teaching large classes.  I don't feel as though I can give the individual attention to students.

So I stopped doing that and only did one-on-one work.  Which is what I do now.

Naked Face Chicago, through no effort of my own, became quite mysterious and somewhat famous in the actor's underground network in that city.  A few years ago, The Chicago Reader, which is sort of Chicago's version of The Village Voice, did a long article on acting classes in the city.  They called Naked Face, "the most prestigious in the city, but nearly impossible to join."  That was, I suppose, true.

Naked Face Studios is modeled on Michael Moriarty's Acting Studio in New York.  Michael taught acting during the eighties there.  Eventually he started doing Law and Order in 1990 and no longer had the time for it.  I was one of the lucky ones that found his class in the mid to late eighties, however.

One of the things Michael would say to new students, he certainly said it to me, is, "I'm not here to teach you how to act. I will if you want me to, but that's not the goal.  The goal is to teach you how to get a job."  It was a "performance based" acting class.  That's what I call Naked Face, too.

Here's what one had to do in his class:  first, have around twenty audition monologues ready to go at the drop of a hat.  Monologues are the actors business card.  It's just not prudent to have one or two.  Twenty.  That was the goal.  And before you moved on to another, Michael had to approve of the one on which you were working.  At one point I had much more than that.  At any given time I could drop a Shakespeare Comedic, a Shakespeare soliloquy, a Shakespeare dramatic, a Southern Gothic, an 18th Century Farce, a modern dramatic, a specific monologue (Williams, Pinter, Miller, Orton, Shepard, Mamet, Inge, Wilson, etc.), even a gender specific monologue.  All ready to go.

Following that, if one had all of this ready to go, Michael then asked that one WRITE a one-person show and then perform it at Theatre 22, a small theatre in Chelsea that he would rent for the week to have the play seen.  Agents and managers and casting directors would be invited and if all went well, the actor would obtain representation, a mighty first step in building a career as a professional.  I went through this entire process and got my first agent that way.

In the meantime, if you wanted, and I wanted, Michael would teach you how to act.  He would teach The Naked Face.

In essence, the Naked Face approach to the craft is a process by which the actor learns to stop doing so much damned work.  It puts the the burden of emotion squarely on the shoulders of the audience.  The words of the writer do the work for the actor.  It teaches the actor to stop acting ON TOP OF THE WORDS.  It has been and continues to be the single most important lesson on the craft of acting I have ever learned.

If one wants to know what that means, one only has to watch Michael himself work.  See him in Holocaust or Pale Rider or early Law and Order episodes (1990 - 1995 - for which he earned FIVE straight Emmy nominations for Best Actor).  Or watch Anthony Hopkins do anything in his career.  Or John Malkovich.  Or Judi Dench.  Or Brian Dennehy.  Or John Gielgud.  Or Joan Allen.  Or Morgan Freeman.

These are just a few of the actors that practice naked face work.  They do not act on top of the words.  They let the writer do the work.  And the audience.  I remember hearing a student tell me he thought Anthony Hopkins was "brilliant" in a movie called The Edge.  I told him to go back and look at it again.  I said, yes, he was brilliant, but watch what he actually DOES to be brilliant.  He did.  The next day he said, "He doesn't do anything.  He just says the words."  That's it.  That's absolutely it.

Now of course there are always exceptions to any rule.  But generally speaking that's what the entire approach is about.  Saying the words the writer has given you and don't embellish.  As actors we always want to do more, to act, as it were.  To stand emotion ON TOP of the emotion that is already there.  It's not only unnecessary, it's distracting and dishonest.  Watch Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs deliver the line, "I'm having an old friend for dinner."  Try and think of the countless ways another actor, the inferior actor, might deliver that line.  The line is so chilling not because of what Sir Anthony does with it, but because of what he DOESN'T do with it.

Now all of this may seem not only simple but common sensical.  It is not.  It's incredibly difficult.  Now yes, it may be simple to do with one line.  Try spreading the philosophy over an entire performance.  It's incredibly difficult.  Why?  Because every instinct in our body tells us to start acting.  And more often than not, we eventually succumb to that instinct.

Teaching the actor to stop acting.  It's a beast of a job.  Now, none of this has anything to do with PROCESS.  Naked Face is the endgame of acting, not the genesis.  It does not nullify or inhibit, say, Method work.  As Michael often said in classes, he could care less how an actor got to where he was going.  Could care less about the internal process itself.  No one does, really.  The audience doesn't sit there and ask themselves, "I wonder how he made himself cry there?"  It's moot.  It simply doesn't matter and no one is interested.  The better question is, "I wonder how he made ME cry there."  It's not about emotion.  It's about the suppression of emotion.  It is far more interesting to watch an actor try NOT to cry than it is to watch him cry.

Now all of this is simply the tip of the iceberg.  Next there is what Michael often called "moments of lightning."  Startling and sometimes eccentric moments inside the text that keeps the actor unpredictable.  Ambiguity is the actor's friend.  For ambiguity leads to unpredictability which leads to great acting.  The actor must always stay ahead of the audience.  Once the audience can begin to predict what the actor is going to do or say next, the day is lost.  Everyone might as well go home.  What is meant by a moment of lightning?  Watch the actor, Gary Oldman, in a film called The Professional.  It's a startling performance.  Why?  Because Oldman absolutely FILLS it with unpredictable moments of eccentricity.  The audience has no idea what he may or may not do next.  For that matter watch Marlon Brando in nearly everything he's ever done.  He is the high priest of unpredictability.  He built a career on being unpredictable.  And he very well might be the finest actor of the twentieth century.

More on all of this tomorrow.  Or the next day.  It is what I teach.  And good actors, who have been indoctrinated by endless hours of academia and Uta Hagen's Respect For Acting tome,  who have been taught to always find the lowest common denominator, to reach for an emotion that already exists in the text, these actors, when applying the Naked Face to their work, become great  actors.  It is as simple as that.

See you tomorrow.

...these are a few of my favorite things...

Reconnected with an old friend and wonderful actress, Jennifer Piech, a couple of days ago.  Jenn was my first Guinevere out of three King Arthurs I did in Camelot.  And my favorite.  Taken as a whole, Camelot is a rather unremarkable musical.  The group numbers are not that exciting.  The music only serviceable.  But for the three leads, Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, it's a pretty cool show.  Some surprisingly well-written passages for a musical.  Arthur's end-of-act monologue is especially well done.  I didn't know it at the time but that was an amazing cast I had around me.  Jenn as Guinevere (she went on to do a ton of big-time theatre including a long run of Titanic on Broadway), Mitch Kantor as Pellinor (Mitch is now in public television, but he was a fine character actor in his day) and James Barbour as Lancelot.  Jim, of course, has done a ton of Broadway leads since that time and is still one of my very best friends.  He and his amazing wife, Dana, live very close to Angie and I out here in L.A. and he is currently doing the lead role in a new musical at The Geffen called Nightmare Alley.  They have a baby girl named Hudson (cool name, huh?).  He's also agreed to be my best man at our upcoming wedding-slash-bowling extravaganza.  Jim has his own bowling ball with "Hamlet" written on it.  Okay, we're not having our wedding in a bowling alley, but Jim DOES have a bowling ball with "Hamlet" written on it.

Anyway, by reconnecting with the beautiful and talented Jennifer Piech, I've gotten a tad nostalgic.  My students sometimes ask me, "What's your favorite role?"  I counted them up a while back.  As near as I can calculate, I've done 117 roles as a professional.  To be honest, I can remember with any clarity only about half of them.

The old, "What's your favorite role" question is impossible to answer, of course.  Most of the time it really is the one I happen to be doing.  But that's a bit of a cop-out.  On the other hand I can honestly say as a playwright, the piece I'm writing at the time is always my favorite.

And, not surprisingly, the role is sometimes caught up with the cast surrounding me.  For example, I once did a role at The Asolo, the lead in a very funny new play, but the cast was snippy.  Loved actually doing the role, but for some reason the actors didn't get along that well.  That tends to shadow the actual work, sometimes.

But King Arthur in Kentucky, of all places, with Jenn and Jim is right up there.  For one reason it was in a giant, outdoor theatre, I think about 700 seats, no electronic help as I recall.  Actually, I think they did mike us but it wasn't a very good system and I remember constantly getting in trouble with the PSM because I would simply reach under my costume and turn it off.  We did a bunch of plays in that huge space - Camelot, Drood, Funny Girl, 1940's Radio Hour, West Side Story, South Pacific, The Music Man, Hello, Dolly - and that was where I learned to project without hurting my voice.  Very important for an actor.  I learned to play that space.  Many actors, even seasoned ones, can't do it.  They don't know how.  But for Jim and Jenn and I, we learned.  It was a sink or swim kind of thing.  And, in a very friendly way, it was every man for himself.  Barbour and I were forever locked in a battle as to who could command the stage.  And Jim is no light weight.  I lost as many as I won.  It solidified my theory of "if you can take the stage from me, be my guest."  A little nebulous for non-actors, but for my actor buddies reading this, you know what I mean.  I remember a few years after that doing a play in Dallas and there was a moment when I had to do a dramatic moment but there were, by necessity, a couple of people moving scenery behind me.  The director stopped rehearsal and said he needed to re-think this.  He said he was worried I wouldn't "have focus."  I said if the audience is more interested in the chairs being moved behind me than in what I was doing, I DESERVED to lose focus.  We moved on.

So, yes, that first Camelot of mine stands out as one of my favorites.

Another is the third time I did Lost in Yonkers.  I was doing it in Chicago, the first production away from Broadway, and playing the Uncle Louie role.  This is the role Kevin Spacey had won a Tony for in NY.  I was surrounded by heavy hitters:  Paula Scrafano, a multiple Jeff winner in that city, and the incomparable Marji Banks, known at the time as the first lady of Chicago theatre.  Paula and Marji were both astonishing actors.  Marji has since passed away, but Paula is still a stalwart on the boards in Chicago.  Marji had worked a lot with Tennessee Williams years back.  Tennessee Williams!  I spent time in her home high above Lake Michigan and she had pictures on the wall of her and Tennessee hanging out.  Good Lord.  So that one remains one of my favorites if for no other reason than the sheer talent by which I was surrounded.  No room for error in that one.  It was the big leagues every night.  You either showed up to play or you got the hell off the stage.

Another is, God help me, Run For Your Wife down on Sanibel Island in Florida.  This little innocuous English farce is one of those plays you hope no one you know sees you in.  I did it twice.  Once there and later in Rochester, NY.  I played the exceptionally silly role of Stanley both times.  But say what you will about this stupid play, when we did our final dress in Florida the show ran an hour and fifty minutes.  On opening night it ran two hours and forty minutes.  And ALL of that added time was simply holding for laughs.  Audiences love this thing.  They eat it up.  I blush to confess I had so much fun doing it and more, playing INSIDE the play.  I experimented with manipulating the audience for eight weeks, eight shows a week, sold out.  I loved it.  Got to the point I could raise an eyebrow and get a laugh.  This is why actors sacrifice so much of a real life.  So they can be in the middle of something transcendent like this show was.  It's a high that drugs or alcohol can't even begin to compete with.

And finally a one-person show I did on an Equity national tour, Give "Em Hell, Harry, about the life of Harry Truman.  Two hours in the make-up chair before every show.  Something happened in that play that rarely, if ever, happens to an actor.  I would sometimes lose myself.  I would step out onstage and begin the piece and the next thing I knew it would be two hours later and I was taking a curtain call.  For the layman this may sound impossible.  It is not.  It is when everything clicks, all the training, all the rehearsal, all the endless preparation.  The lines are so secure one could recite them in the middle of the night in a dead sleep.  The audience latches onto the actor at the first moment and just holds on.  I would sometimes do that show and a half hour later be too exhausted to drink a glass of water.

So there you have it.  Some plays that stick out in my head as not only fun to do, but possibly my best work as an actor.  There are others, of course, that I remember fondly:  Long Day's Journey, The Rainmaker, The Boys Next Door, 1776, Moon for the Misbegotten, Julius Caesar.  All of those plays had some terrific moments that I always recall with a smile.

As for roles I still want to do?  Well, that list used to be a lot longer some years back.  Now, as I get older, there are really only a few that I think about now and then.  One is Willy Loman, of course.  That is the American Lear.  Any actor worth his salt should want to take a crack at that one.  MacBeth is another.  The cursed Scottish play.  It's my favorite role in Shakespeare's canon.  Not my favorite play by The Bard, but my favorite role.  I'm convinced there are lost scenes from that play.  But that's for another blog some other day.  A lot of roles I dreamt of playing have simply passed me by.  I can't play them anymore.  That's sort of sad.  I recently told my mentor and teacher of note, Michael Moriarty (in my mind, the finest actor I've ever seen), that it was unfortunate we never got to see his Hamlet.  Michael, whom I think is aging far more gracefully than I am, was unconcerned.  He admitted he would have liked to take a crack at it, but it didn't bother him or make him in the least regretful.  Pity.  I think he would've made the greatest American Hamlet since Barrymore.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda.  I've turned down so many over the years.  Often times I would have an offer to do something I really wanted but I couldn't do it because I was doing some other play that was paying a ton of money.  Choices like that have to be made sometimes for the actor.  Sometimes a roof over one's head and a warm meal trumps a moment of glory.

I'm learning lines right now for my own play, Praying Small.  It's a mammoth role.  Two straight hours on stage.  Get to swing every club in the bag.  Get to go from raging against the dying of the light to flat-out stand-up comedy.  Cry, laugh, blubber, whisper, resign, scream...it's one of those.  It's playing at NoHo Arts Center from June 11 to July 25 of this year.  Come see it.  I'll meet you in the lobby afterwards and tell you if it made it into my top five.

See you tomorrow.

The Banality of Evil.

It was my particular misfortune to run across The Salvation Army in the early part of this decade.  Today being Easter, I think this is a good time to finally blog about what I've been threatening to for a long time; the unabashed evil of The Salvation Army.

A phrase I once read to describe the NAZI's was "the banality of evil."  It also applies perfectly to this nefarious group.  How about this:  in the three years I worked for them, I never once, not ONCE saw or heard of them doing one single good thing for someone else.  The officers or "ministers" of this church are trained to do one thing and one thing only: make money for The Salvation Army.  Anything else is purely incidental.

L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame once said, "If you want to get rich, start a business.  If you want to get REALLY rich, start a religion."  He wasn't introducing anything new.  The Salvationists have been all over this since 1865 when one William Booth founded the church.

William Booth was born in Nottingham in 1829. At the age of 13 he was sent to work as an apprentice in a pawnbroker's shop to help support his mother and sisters. He did not enjoy his job but it made him only too aware of the poverty in which people lived and how they suffered humiliation and degradation because of it. During his teenage years he became a Christian and spent much of his spare time trying to persuade other people to become Christians too.
When his apprenticeship was completed he moved to London, again to work in the pawnbroking trade. He joined up with the local Methodist Church and later decided to become a minister.

After his marriage to Catherine Mumford in 1855 he spent several years as a Methodist minister, travelling all around the country, preaching and sharing God's word to all who would listen. Yet he felt that God wanted more from him, that he should be doing more to reach ordinary people. He returned to London with his family, having resigned his position as a Methodist minister.

One day in 1865 he found himself in the East End of London, preaching to crowds of people in the streets. Outside the Blind Beggar pub some missioners heard him speaking and were so impressed by his powerful preaching that they asked him to lead a series of meetings they were holding in a large tent.

The tent was situated on an old Quaker burial ground on Mile End waste in Whitechapel. The date for the first meeting was set for 2 July, 1865. To the poor and wretched of London's East End, Booth brought the good news of Jesus Christ and his love for all men. Booth soon realised he had found his destiny. He formed his own movement, which he called 'The Christian Mission'.

Slowly the mission began to grow but the work was hard and Booth would 'stumble home night after night haggard with fatigue, often his clothes were torn and bloody bandages swathed his head where a stone had struck', wrote his wife. Evening meetings were held in an old warehouse where urchins threw stones and fireworks through the window. Outposts were eventually established and in time attracted converts, yet the results remained discouraging-this was just another of the 500 charitable and religious groups trying to help in the East End. It was not until 1878 when The Christian Mission changed its name to The Salvation Army that things began to happen. The impetus changed. The idea of an Army fighting sin caught the imagination of the people and the Army began to grow rapidly. Booth's fiery sermons and sharp imagery drove the message home and more and more people found themselves willing to leave their past behind and start a new life as a soldier in The Salvation Army.

Inevitably, the military spirit of the movement meant that The Salvation Army soon spread abroad. By the time Booth was ‘promoted to Glory’ in 1912 the Army was at work in 58 countries.


At that time I have no doubt the Army was still pursuing Booth's dream.  To Help people.  It is impossible to say when they turned the corner.

The Salvation Army of 2010 is not anywhere near what he envisioned.  The Salvation Army of 2010 is a global, money-making organization of epic proportions.  And where does the money go?  To make a life of unbelievable comfort for its officers.

Officers of The Salvation Army are given a beautiful (look this up for yourself) house in which to live.  They own countless acres of property across the United States, they are given a stunning cash salary (no taxes, they're "ministers"), two NEW cars annually, complete health insurance for a lifetime, their children go to whatever college they want - paid in full by the church, free food, 12-week yearly vacations and amazing retirement packages (they are encouraged to retire in one of the Army's "retirement centers" located in Florida, Arizona and California - beautiful compounds restricted to all but retired officers).

I went back to school in the early part of this decade to obtain a C.A.D.C. (certificate of alcohol and drug counseling).  My idea was altruistic.  Naive, but altruistic.  I wanted to do something tangible.  Something to really help people, one on one.  Get my hands dirty.  All this theatre stuff was fine and dandy, but I wanted to actually DO something.  So I stopped acting, stopped writing, stopped leading a life I felt was selfish. I, too, had fought and lost a battle with substance abuse and now I wanted to spread my passion for sobriety, for living life on life's terms.  Again, how incredibly naive I was.  Upon completion of my C.A.D.C. I was hired to work at an A.R.C. (Adult Rehabilitation Center) for The Salvation Army, working with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.  I was delighted.  Finally, a chance to really do some good in the world.  Not just act in little skits or write long, high-minded plays.  A chance to really reach out to someone.

There are hundreds of ARC's around the country.  Most people don't know what they are.  The Army is perfectly happy with this.  They don't like this part of their church being in the public eye.  They are modern day sweat shops.  Even worse, in some cases, latter day concentration camps, minus the death and beatings.  I used to call, in private, the one where I worked in Chicago, "Dachau on Michigan."

Men go to these Centers for help.  Most are homeless, hopelessly addicted souls that have lost everything.  Understandably most large cities welcome these places operating under the "out of sight, out of mind" principle.  So most don't bother to find out what actually goes on inside these places.  The utter stripping of dignity, the forced worship, the slave labor, the less than ideal living conditions, the total disregard of human kindness.

Men are forced to work 12 or 14 hours a day in deplorable conditions in one of the Army's warehouses.  All day long, into the night, they are forced to "process" the endless incoming "donations."  Most are somewhat feeble from their lifestyle of addiction.  No matter.  If they cannot do the work, they are dismissed.  Back to the streets.

At some point in the twentieth century the Army was forced to comply with Federal guidelines, that is to say, they had to at least show a semblance of helping these men with a "program" of recovery.  They never took that guideline very seriously and they still don't today.  For a long time the "program" was six months long.  At the end of the six months, the men were summarily kicked back out into the streets.  No housing, no job, no training, no light at the end of the tunnel.  A full ninety five percent (look this up) drink or use drugs again and re-enter the "program."  Not surprising, they have no where else to go.  The Army not only encourages this, they COUNT on it.  Recently they've started a "program" in which they must complete a series of "booklets" to complete before "graduation."  One is not allowed to move to the next level (there are six) until the center administrator (an officer of The Salvation Army) gives his approval.  This allows the Army to keep them in the center for up to a year.  Working as slave labor.

If one looks at all this from a purely capitalistic point of view, it's brilliant.  Gather up the homeless, the addicted, the displaced, the indigent, the social outcasts, the PEOPLE THAT NO ONE CARE ABOUT, and turn them into indentured servants to do the grunt work for the organization without paying them.  No overhead whatsoever.  The items are free.  The labor is free.  My God, what a plan.  And no one looking over their shoulder to insure common decency for these men.  Absolutely brilliant.  The money has been pouring in for decades.

Next they realized they could hood-wink an entire country, hell, an entire planet, into thinking they were a "charity."  They are not.  Not in the sense of The Red Cross or some other actual charity.  They are first and foremost a CHURCH.  And because of this legal delineation they answer, virtually, to no one.  Their records are, for all intents and purposes, sealed to the public.  They operate in the dubious legal zone known as a "private charity."

I was working for them in this counseling capacity when Katrina hit New Orleans.  The unbridled greed I witnessed from this organization in the hurricane's aftermath rocked me to my very foundation.  The Army loves a good catastrophe.  Their coffers take a mighty soar upward during times of crisis.  They know this and are quick to capitalize on it.  Sad and thoughtful commercials were quickly made (we all see them on television, they are beautifully done), "beneficiaries" (this is what the Army calls the homeless people in their centers) were forced to get on the phones to an unsuspecting public, given heart-wrenching monologues to read to people they call randomly from the phone book, whole ROOMS of "beneficiaries" calling people endlessly, telling them of the Army's need for cash ("no donations at this time, please.  What we really need is money.  We have to get money to the people of New Orleans.  That's what they need most!").  Do not take my word for this, look it up yourselves.  The Salvation Army received millions and millions of dollars for Katrina.  NOT ONE CENT ever made it there.

The same happened with the tsunami of Indonesia and the same happened recently with the earthquake in Haiti.  And most significantly and chillingly with 9/11.  The Salvation Army, mind-boggling in their greed, was actually at ground zero SELLING coffee and baloney sandwiches to the rescue workers.  It was a huge money-making opportunity for them.  They love cataclysmic events of this sort.  The American people give them cash by the truck full.  And none of it, not a single penny, goes to help anyone.  Again, look this up, please don't take my word for it.  The stats are all out there, obtainable on-line if one is patient enough to search.

After a bit, I was promoted to Director of Rehabilitation at the center where I worked.  A singularly empty title.  For legal reasons they must call the back-breaking work at these centers "work therapy."  Once I obtained this title I was considered "senior staff" and allowed to  sit in on the closed door meetings.  Already appalled at the situation in these places, I didn't think it possible to be even more stunned.  I was.  In private the officers, the "ministers" of these places, routinely refer to the homeless men doing the work as "mules."  As part of the agreement to enter the facility, the men must sign waivers saying the Salvation Army is in no way responsible for their health.  If an accident occurs, or someone gets sick, something the "beneficiaries" deeply fear, they are kicked out.  Literally.  Their stuff is packed, just what they came in with, and they are placed on the street.  They are reminded of this upon dismissal.  The agreement they signed.  I still remember it word by word.  "If you are in any way unable to complete your work therapy assignment you will be asked to leave the center."  I once witnessed a 63 year old man with pneumonia left standing on the streets of Chicago in blizzard conditions.  No coat, no hat, just what he came into the center with, a t-shirt and shorts.  He was "unable to complete his work therapy assignment."

I once spent weeks working on a plan to provide possible housing for the men once they reached their six-month limit.  I submitted it to the "major" for his consideration.  Once in his office, away from earshot, he turned from smiling, glad-handing, empathetic preacher into a shark-eyed, callous, unfeeling business man.  He said, "You don't get it, do you?  We don't care whether these people live or die.  We don't care if they find housing.  In fact, we'd prefer they DON'T.  We WANT them to come back.  We WANT them to need us for food and shelter. They are mules.  That's what they do."  He then vetoed my housing plan and told me to get back to work.  The following sunday he gave an amazing and beautiful homily about the charity of Christ.

Now, remember, this is an organization that believes whole-heartedly in the infallibility of the bible.  The Salvation Army, as outlined in their mission statement, believes without hesitation in the literal word of the bible.  They believe (but only talk about amongst themselves), in literal agreement with Leviticus, that all gay people should die, that blacks are to be considered "beasts of burden", that unwed mothers should be stoned.  I swear I am not making this up.  Again, look it up.

Forgive me for dramatizing all of this.  I want you to understand, gentle reader, the horror and hypocrisy I witnessed first hand.  The horror of Christian arrogance run amok.

Out of sight, out of mind.  The press, even though I've tried, will not touch these centers.  In Des Plaines, Illinois, a city just outside of Chicago, The Salvation Army has set up its midwest headquarters.  There is an entire four-story building full of lawyers there.  They fear no one.  Certainly not one man trying to alert the press to the unimaginable indignities that take place in their ARC's.  And, as I learned, the press is not interested anyway.  After all, it's The Salvation Army, for god's sake.  They HELP people, don't they?  Why should we investigate the accusations of one former, disgruntled employee?  It's The Salvation Army.

The "beneficiaries" are given three hots and a cot.  That's it.  They are given a small bunch of used clothing if they need it.  A donated coat for the winter. On Sundays, the day of Salvationist rest, they are forced to sit for hours in the "chapel," head bowed, silent, and "pray" for the mission of The Salvation Army.  It does not matter what their religions beliefs were prior to entering the center - Muslim, Buddhist, it doesn't matter.  If a "beneficiary" does not worship Jesus, he is asked to leave.  Other spiritual beliefs are not tolerated.

I am no longer a Christian because of this organization.  I have seen first-hand what Christianity can become in the hands of those who use it for their own ends.  I have witnessed the appalling hypocrisy.  I have seen a thuggish band of uniformed, authoritative, "believers" whip the less fortunate into line, luring them into slave labor conditions for which they have no way out.  I have seen the banality of evil, the blanket of false kindness, the Machiavellian approach to the teachings of Jesus.  I have seen hundreds of men used and spit out.  I have seen them kicked back into the streets from which they tried to escape.  I have known many who died.

And I will spend the rest of my life trying to make everyone I know aware of the inhuman plight of The Salvation Army.  One person at a time, if need be.  I know full well it is a losing battle.  Most of the time I am simply not believed.  So be it.

I've held off writing this blog for a long time because of the subject matter.  Well, I don't really care anymore.  People need to know.  People need to know there are subtle versions of a Dachau operating very near them.  People need to understand the audacity of the unbridled mixture of right-wing Christian conservatism with the desire to make money.  The Salvation Army is a shining example of what is terrible and morally wrong with right-wing Christianity.  They hurt people.  They dehumanize people.  And they hide it.  They outright steal from a compassionate nation.  And they don't care.  Because they are The Salvation Army and Need Has No Season.

Don't take my word for any of this.  Do the research.  Satisfy your own conscience.  And the next time you want to donate to a good and noble charity, please remember what you've learned.

See you tomorrow.

Welcome to Bad Theat-ah...

The state of theatre in this country is just awful.  Honestly, I don't know why people go.  This is just a guess, but I'd say that of all the theatre I've seen in the past, say, thirty years, since I've had a discerning eye, that is, ninety percent of it has been just terrible.  Some of it almost unwatchable.  And geography has nothing to do with it.  I've seen some godawful stuff in NY, Chicago and LA.  So why go?

It has, in many cases, turned into a friends and family kinda thing.  Especially among the small theaters, the 99 seaters.  What I always feared has come true for the most part: Theatre has become the horse and buggy of entertainment.

I have worked all over the country, from coast to coast, from LORT A to 47 seats, and I have seen some staggeringly bad work.  Bad acting, bad directing, bad design, bad music, bad everything.  And the awesome thing about all this is that the people involved hardly ever realize how bad their stuff is.

Every time I see bad work it scares the hell out of me.  Because everyone in that theatre is watching the same bad work that I am and chances are they haven't seen nearly the amount I have.  So it's a good bet they're not going to come back and give it another shot.  Why should they?  They just payed 20 or 30 or 50 bucks to have two hours taken out of their lives that they'll never get back.

A few years ago I saw Streetcar Named Desire, one of my favorite plays, in The Raven Theatre in Chicago.  Full house.  About three hundred people or so.  Gorgeous new space.  And watched  a bunch of performances so bad I was twitching by the end.  How many of those people will never go the theatre again because of that production?

I really think we need to own up to what's happening.  Are people not going to the theatre because they'd rather spend their entertainment dollars on movies or netflix or blockbuster? No.  They're not spending their money because they've been burned too often.

I have been IN productions that are bad.  Many of them.  Was in a production of Servant of Two Masters years ago in Rockford, IL.  Horrible.  Everyone was horrible in it.  The direction was horrible.  I was horrible.  What was meant to be a fluffy, farce-like, very funny two hours of work was mind-numbingly unfunny and slow and filled with bad actors.  Of course, at the time, none of us could own this.  We desperately continued to think we were in a funny show,  if for no other reason, in the hopes we'd get hired back sometime to do another horrible show there.

Another was You Can't Take it With You in Roanoke, VA.  Just terrible.  Unfunny, slow, telegraphed work.  I was bad.  The play was bad.  Looking back on it, just embarrassing.

Another was The Music Man in Pennsylvania.  I was Harold Hill.  God in heaven, was I bad.  And the show was even worse.  The musical director couldn't even play the songs.

Has theatre always been this way?  I don't know.  Is it a lottery?  Audiences paying big bucks to see something and hoping that THIS time it will be worth watching?  That's not really good business sense.  One doesn't open a carpet store with 90 percent of the carpet stained and torn and dirty.  And yet that's what theaters all over America do every day.

Broadway learned this lesson.  There's hardly anything there now except for big, splashy, tech-heavy musicals.  They KNOW that will sell.  At the very least those shows are fun to watch.

And Shakespeare.  I can hardly bear to get started on this nonsense.  Of the one hundred or so performances of Shakespeare's work I've seen, only two stand out as worth watching - Ian McKellan's Richard III and Kevin Kline's second Hamlet.  That's two percent.

It's a sorry state.

What do we do?  First we can fess up to it.  My first acting teacher, the brutally honest Howard Orms, once said, "Ninety eight percent of the actors in this country are unemployed.  And ninety eight percent of THAT ninety eighty percent DESERVE to be."

Now.  Having said all that, now and then I've seen some extraordinary things on stage.  Orphans, a Lyle Kessler play that I saw in 1985 at NYC's Westside Arts Theatre, was a life-changing experience.  I was stunned.  I can't even begin to tell you how immediate and urgent and exciting that play was.  It was a Steppenwolf transplant.  In some ways, I've spent the last twenty-five years trying to match that experience.

Sunday in the Park with George with Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin.  My God, what a piece of beauty that was.

I have two plays about to be produced:  Praying Small and From the East to the West.  I am terrified they will both be just another boring play.  I was very excited last year when I found out Praying Small was to be staged Off-Broadway in NY.  A few weeks later I got the DVD.  I can't possibly imagine why anyone payed to see it.  Slow, turgid, unfunny, self-conscious, didactic, self-important.  I could barely watch.  There was one moment I counted thirty-two seconds between scene changes.  Just a bunch of people sitting in the dark.  And they payed to do it.  Unpardonable.

Another time I saw the same play done in Chicago.  It zipped right along, thank God.  But the problem was it was peopled with mediocre actors.  Actors acting for Uncle Fred and Aunt Becky.  The work was, well, simply dull.  And worse, there was a sense of "look, mom, I'm acting" feel to it.

None of this surprises me.  I mean, why pay twenty-five smackers to see a talky, exclusive, artsy-fartsy, preachy, badly-acted play when one can pay ten bucks to see Avatar?

Very cynical post today and I apologize for that.  But it's necessary to look at this purveying of plays business with a clear eye.  Otherwise I'm just adding to the bullshit.

I can say this: I will do everything within my power to keep the upcoming productions of Praying Small and From the East to the West exciting and urgent.  Surprising and exciting.  Emotional and genuinely funny.  It appalls me to think my work will add to the general malaise of the ticket-buying public toward small, professional, live theatre.

And on a completely different subject, I got engaged to be married yesterday and I'm really happy about that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrfk8weTWTM

See you tomorrow.