Occupy Fringe: Recognizing the Roche Limit » Fringe Magazine

Occupy Fringe: Recognizing the Roche Limit » Fringe Magazine

An interview to Belgian newspaper Le Soir during the promotion of "W.E." in Venice brings us what it seems the first - and super smart - Madonna comment about Gaga in ages. Here's how it goes: Le Soir: "Dans W.E., vous filmez la romance de Wallis Simpson à travers le regard contemporain d’une jeune femme admirative, Wally. On pourrait y voir le regard de vos fans sur vous. Voire celui de Lady Gaga? " Le Soir: "In W.E. you filmes the Wallis Simpson love story through the contemporary eyes of a young woman who admired her, Wally. Could we see in that the way your fans look at you? Or the way Lady Gaga does?" Madonna: "De mes fans ? Disons que ce qui m’intéresse avec le regard de Wally, c’est d’arriver à percer la vérité sur Wallis Simpson. Et s’apercevoir que rien n’est jamais tout blanc ou tout noir. Vrai ou faux. La vie est de couleur grise. Et on ne peut enfermer personne dans une case. Quant à Lady Gaga, je n’ai pas de commentaire à faire sur ses obsessions ayant trait à moi, parce que je ne sais pas si ça repose sur quelque chose de profond ou de superficiel." Madonna: "Of my fans ? Let's say that what interests me in Wally's approach is to arrive to percieve the truth about Wallis Simpson. An realize that nothing is completely black or white. Truth or false. Life comes in gray color. And you can't put a human being in a box. Speaking of Lady Gaga, I have no comments about her obsessions related to me, because I don't know if they are based on something profound or superficial."

"I'm out of ways of telling art."

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh has denied reports that he is retiring from film-making.

"It's less dramatic that it sounds - it's just a sabbatical," the 48-year-old director told reporters at the Venice Film Festival.

In an interview on US radio in March, Soderbergh appeared to suggest that his next two films would be his last.

"When you see those athletes hang on one or two seasons too long, it's kind of sad," he told Studio 360.

However, speaking in Venice, where his latest film Contagion is featured in competition for the Golden Lion, he dismissed rumours that he was giving up film-making to paint, saying he was merely taking a break.

"I feel I need to recalibrate, so I can discover something new," he told The Observer, echoing words he used in a BBC Radio 4 interview in 2009.

"I'm out of ways of telling art."

Cannes breakthrough

Soderbergh became the youngest winner, at the age of 26, of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, starring Andie MacDowell.

Ten years ago, he was nominated for the best director Oscar for both Traffic and Erin Brockovich.

But, speaking in March, he said: "When you reach the point where you're like, 'if I have to get into a van to do another scout I'm just going to shoot myself', it's time to let somebody else who's still excited about getting in the van, get the van."

In Venice on Saturday, Soderbergh gave no indication of how long the sabbatical may be, although reports suggest it could be as long as five years.

The director was joined by actors Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow for the world premiere of his new film Contagion in Venice.

Other highlights from Soderbergh's career include the Ocean's series and his Che Guevara biopic
A thriller, about a global pandemic - widely linked to Sars - and peopled with star names, was given a positive reception at the annual film festival.

The cast also includes Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle.

"It's very helpful to have movie stars playing as many of these roles as you can, because you're throwing so many characters and so much information at the audience it's very helpful for them to get a sort of reference point," he told reporters in Venice.

"There's a reason that movie stars have existed since the beginning of cinema.

"It's good for audiences - they like to have people they can identify with."

Prior to his sabbatical, Soderbergh has at least three films to complete, including a Liberace biopic, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and a film version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney.

Haywire, an action thriller starring Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender, is due to be released in the US in January.

telling the unvarnished truth

'Most of the photographs in your paper, unless they are hard news, are lies,” says Martin Parr. “Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.”


Parr, 59 years old and perhaps Britain’s best known photographic chronicler of modern life, is sitting in the kitchen of his beautiful Georgian house in Clifton, Bristol. He has served me tea from a fine china pot and “posh biscuits” bought from the deli up the hill. Susie, his wife of 30 years, is stirring something on the hob. Everything looks rather lovely.


Everything, that is, except the appalled expression on Parr’s face when I suggest that sometimes, regardless of their truthfulness, pictures of things looking their best might be exactly what people want to see. “Of course,” he says, “but what people want…” He hits that last word with the force of a punch, then lapses into silence, as if the very thought of taking a photograph that perpetuates a fantasy disgusts him beyond words.


“If you go to the supermarket and buy a package of food and look at the photo on the front, the food never looks like that inside, does it? That is a fundamental lie we are sold every day. Part of the role of photography is to exaggerate, and that is an aspect that I have to puncture. I do that by showing the world as I really find it.”


A new exhibition, Martin Parr: Bristol and West, opening in the city next week, reminds us quite what a ridiculous, contradictory, dysfunctional and occasionally wonderful place Parr finds the world to be. Focusing on the part of the world that he has called home for the past 25 years, its 60 images, both old and new, suggest that whatever else has changed about photography over the intervening decades – the advent of digital cameras, the death of film – Parr’s gaze remains as acute and unsentimental as ever.



Has anybody ever looked their best in a Martin Parr photograph? Certainly not the mustachioed yacht salesman shot at Bristol regatta in 1989, his face, as he courts a couple of would-be buyers, frozen in a rictus of obsequiousness. Nor the group of girls Parr stumbled upon at Badminton horse trials, as much a product of good breeding and aggressive grooming as the fillies they have gathered to watch.

That picture finds its echo in another shot in the show, taken 20 years later, of a different quartet of girls of a similar age – smoking, teetering on a lamplit pavement on a night out in 2009, off-guard, half-cut, mouths open, eyes closed. Parr’s images frequently raise a smile by exposing the gap between the public faces we wear and the private motives and insecurities that, if you know when and where to point a camera, can be seen seeping out from beneath. But if there is a joke here, nobody has let his subjects in on it.

When he is taking a photograph, Parr says, his prime responsibility isn’t towards the people in shot, but to his viewer and to his own sense of the truth of the scene. “When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don’t take a good picture,’ what they mean is they haven’t come to terms with how they look,” he says. “They take a fine picture, it’s just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.”

I had always wondered how Parr got himself into such intimate proximity with the subjects of his photographs, who so often appear blissfully unaware of the critical lens loitering only inches from their faces. I suppose I’d imagined him to be a flatterer, or else a man of such discretion that people simply forget he is there and let down their guard.

In person, it quickly becomes clear that his chief weapon is not charm but directness. He shoots as he talks, with unflinching certainty and not a hint of self doubt. When I ask if he ever seeks a person’s permission before photographing them, that pained expression reappears. “You would never get anything done if you did that,” he says. “And besides, you still have the legal and moral right in this country to photograph anyone in a public place and do what you like with it.” So there.

Parr, who has been a member of the renowned Magnum picture agency since 1994, estimates he takes “tens upon thousands” of photographs a year. Unusually in this digital age, he prints out “maybe 15,000 of them” and, he adds, “If there are 10 good ones, it would be a good year.” Themes recur – “tourism, consumerism, the Americanisation of the world” – but his scope is dizzyingly broad: “I am interested in people and what they do,” he says, “the foibles of the world.”

As he approaches 60, Parr’s passion for his medium grips him as firmly as it did when his grandfather, an amateur photographer, first gave him a camera as a boy. “I can’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t want to take photos,” he says. “Photography for me is not work, it’s a calling.”

And while I abhor the idea of disturbing you when things are getting so very exciting in your life, I just want to remind you that no matter what may ever happen, the dreamer is always greater than the dream.
You're the greatest -
The Universe

New Cirque Show

NEW YORK (AP) — Director Francois Girard sits in an orchestra seat in the massive Radio City Music Hall and looks up at the massive challenge facing him.

The stage he has to fill these days is more than 100 feet wide and 66 feet deep. The proscenium arch soars more than 60 feet into the air. It is among the largest indoor theaters in the world.

"You can see how a human body could get lost in this space," Girard says.

That's an obvious issue for the writer and director of "Zarkana," the latest Cirque du Soleil show that opens later this month. So mammoth is the stage that it threatens to swallow up a $50 million production of 11 acts and 75 performers.

Girard insists he's more challenged than frightened by a space he acknowledges is "a monster." In fact, he says he and his team have been inspired by the arena's ghosts and Radio City has become a central character in the show.

"I feel at home right now," he says.

Girard has taken a break to sit among the 6,000 seats he hopes to fill each night when the show opens June 29. From the corner of his eye, he keeps tabs on a juggler practicing on one side of the stage, a group of trapeze acrobats on the other and new projections of clouds scudding along the back wall.

"A show like this is a place where so many disciplines are meeting," he says. "It comes from everywhere and has so many layers to it, which keeps me interested. There's not a boring day at the office for me."

One of the more quiet yet profoundly beautiful acts is performed by Erika Chen, who using only her fingers and nails swirls dark blue sand into striking images projected onto a screen at the top of Act 2. Self-taught, the 27-year-old Singapore native used to work at Deutsche Bank in asset management until she discovered sand painting on YouTube and fell in love. Cirque made her its first sand painter.

"It still feels surreal. I can't believe it's happening," she says after rehearsing to ensure her six-minute act is smooth and dynamic. "I'm just thankful. It feels like a dream."

Four years in the making, the rock-opera circus "Zarkana" is slated for a four-month ride in New York, followed by stints in Madrid, Spain, and Moscow. The hope is that it will return to Radio City next summer — and maybe every summer.

This isn't the first time Cirque du Soleil has tried to tame the Big Apple. Last year, its variety show "Banana Shpeel" — featuring a visually brilliant but disappointingly spotty program of acrobatics, juggling, dance and mostly tiresome slapstick — flopped at the Beacon Theatre.

This time around, the creative team is careful to be humble and respectful of the city. Girard calls New York "a mecca of theater" along with London, and knows there's plenty here to attract summer tourists other than whimsical circus acts.

"It's a highly saturated world, where if you want to be heard you'd better be clear and loud. That makes it both very exciting and challenging," says Girard, who directed the films "Silk" and "The Red Violin."

The other thing making Cirque executives soft-spoken is another rock opera with crazy stunts — the $75 million "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." Girard has gotten no vicarious thrill by watching that musical's troubled birth. "When a show runs into difficulties and technical problems, it is sad. But I wish them well," he says. "It's so hard to make a show. We should be supportive of their efforts."

This is Girard's second Cirque — he also put together "Zed," the Tokyo resident show — and he began with an attempt to assemble as many cool circus acts as possible. Then he wrote a story trying to incorporate all the elements, settling on creating a magician named Zark, who has lost his love and his powers. At the opening of the show, he wanders an abandoned theater and later the show makes nods to its famous home, including to the Ziegfeld Follies.

"Zarkana" — or the land of Zark — will have plenty of clowns, acrobats and a Wheel of Death. One high wire act features a father and his three sons, while another has a father, mother and daughter performing on ladders. There are seven musicians, hundreds of costumes and one trapeze act has a spider theme that would make Julie Taymor shudder.

Canadian singer Garou plays Zark and the music for the spectacle was created especially for the show by Nick Littlemore, an Australian musician and producer who has worked with Elton John.

Work on the show began in Montreal — headquarters of Cirque — but moved temporarily to Orlando, Fla., because creators needed a stage big enough to practice the show from top to bottom. That was found at Amway Arena, the former home of the Orlando Magic that is slated to be torn down, and Cirque took it over for a few months.

Back at Radio City, Stephane Roy sits in the balcony and surveys his hard work. As the set and props designer, Roy's job has been to make the Art Deco monster place look smaller. Of course, since it is a protected city landmark, he could not alter the stage or the building.

"This is a cathedral," he says.

Roy, doing his fifth Cirque show, used a series of three differently sized arches — decorated with snakes, branches and flowers — to make the stage more intimate. The back wall is also studded with LEDs for videos and the stage itself is hand painted.

"This is, for me, the biggest project that I've ever done," he says.

The latest move into New York is part of an expansion of the Cirque du Soleil empire. By October, the hyperactive circus company will have 22 live shows around the globe, including the new $57 million "Michael Jackson, The Immortal World Tour."

Chen, the sand painter, is asked if she'll go back to the lucrative — if duller — world of international finance if "Zarkana" doesn't excite enough New Yorkers or tourists.

"No," she says firmly. "This is my dream. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."

from Cary Tennis

My challenge to a therapist is this: "Tell me something I don't know. Surprise me." When I am led to see things that startle me, of which I had no inkling, that is priceless self-knowledge. And that can happen.

One thing you probably don't know about yourself is just how deeply you have been wounded. You cannot know this yet; in fact you have wisely prevented yourself from knowing this yet. It is as though, in a dream, we look down and see that we have been disemboweled; it is a moment of absolute terror; but we see that we have been disemboweled and yet we are fine! How can this be? How can we be so grievously wounded and yet smile peacefully and continue with our knitting or our guitar playing or whatever we are doing in our strange dream? We can do that because armed with the exquisite knowledge of the dream world we know that nothing can truly harm us, that we are spirit matter, that our consciousness is not affected by the disemboweling, and that it is only our severe waking attachment that causes us so much paralyzing fear.

Believing the wound is too deep to be seen, you have clouded your own sight from it. But you don't need to. There is someone who can guide you to the cliff edge from which that wound can be viewed at a safe distance, and you can see that it is just a wound to your spirit self, not your actual belly, and you can relax.

Another thing you probably don't know is just what archetype of yourself has come to the fore and is now running the show; this business of archetypes, or sub-personalities, is strange and tricky, and a person can sound like a crank for talking about them, but I'm just a writer using his imagination. A good therapist whose language and understanding are rich with myth and intuition can help you find the vantage point and language with which to view and express what you have gone through. When you can see, feel and express what has happened, then you can get better and feel better. It's pretty straightforward. Maybe you will speak of these things in the language of archetypes or maybe in some other way.

To me, it would make sense for a kind of warrior archetype to come to the fore in such a terrible time. The warrior in you would see your mother as an enemy to be vanquished, but since she is dead she cannot be vanquished, so she stands as an eternal adversary, and you are eternally stuck. So there must be some other archetype who can come to the fore to help. The other archetype might be your female, mothering self, who could let go of your mother, or it may be the dark, grieving, avenging self, who could split her sides in wailing but lead to peace, finally. If it is the warrior who is guiding the show, no wonder you are stuck. The warrior can do nothing about the past.

That is my hope for you. I think we often need to work emotionally through symbols and archetypes. These archetypes may be real or they may just be metaphors for stages of development. But it is useful to talk about these things as warriors, princesses, mothers and so forth.

So how will you get through this? With help. It is the kind of help that can guide you on a journey. It isn't so much about making individual choices about Dad No. 1, Dad No. 2 and so forth. It is more about learning what actually happened to you when you were broken as a teenager by your mother's death, and how you still have to heal from that, and how when you learned about your mother's love for this other man it further complicated and deepened this old wound. That's what it's about. And, as I say, that is my hope for you: that you can find the right person to guide you through this charged and explosive terrain.

You may need to back off on the drinking and drugs to get through this. If you are habitually blunting your feelings, you will not develop the fine feel for your inner life that you are going to need. So if you cannot afford therapy, you might consider joining a group of grief survivors. You also might consider joining a 12-step group. All this powerful emotion may make you feel like you're going mad. But you're not going mad. You're just a human feeling things.

You suffered a terrible blow as a child. In many ways, you are still a child. You were prevented from moving on. You are stuck. But you are not lost. You are right here with us. All you have to do is grow, and get help growing.

See everyone you meet, Andrew, as a brand new invitation to fall in love with me. Sneaky, huh? Kiss, kiss - The Universe

Charles bukowski

unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder,
don't do it.

unless the sun inside you is burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way.

and there never was.

(Ni-ni-ni) "Nicki, she's just mad 'cause you took the spot"
Word, that bitch mad 'cause I took the spot?
Well, bitch, if you ain't shittin', then get off the pot
Got some niggas out in Brooklyn that'll off your top
I-I-I-I hear them mumblin', I hear the cacklin'
I got 'em scared, shook, panickin'
Overseas, church, Vatican
You at a stand, still, mannequin
You wanna sleep on me? Overnight?
I'm the motherfuckin' boss, overwrite
And when I pull up, vroom, motorbike
Now all my niggas gettin' buck, overbite
I see them dusty-ass Filas, Levi's
Raggedy-ass, hoes in your knee-highs
I call the play, now do you see why?
These bitches callin' me Manning, Eli
(Manning, Eli!) Ma, ma-ma-ma-ma, Manning, Eli
These bitches callin' me (Manning, Eli)

fuck YES!

Madonna ready to record new album
Madonna's manager Guy Oseary has confirmed plans for the singer to re-enter the recording studio next month to start work on her new album.
The 52-year-old performer is said to know the people she wants to work with on the project, which will serve as the follow-up to 2008's Hard Candy.

Taking to Twitter to answer fans' questions surrounding the recording, Oseary revealed: 'Madonna goes into the recording studio next month to begin work on new album....'

'There are no back catalogue plans currently....I met with Warner Music about that very subject....but nothing has come of it....'

'There is nothing to report in regards to tour....you guys know how this works....first comes the album and next comes the....'

Oseary also indicated that Madonna knows who she wants to work with, stating: 'She has a good idea on which producers she will be working with....

From Digital Spy

“It is not given us to live lives of undisrupted calm, boredom, and mediocrity. It is given us to be edge-dwellers.”

If you hold out long enough, Andrew, always keeping busy while you wait, your ship has to come in, love has to find you, and bugles will blare as if blown by a million angels.

You do you like bugles?

Promise,
The Universe

Site hints at Asian roots for human genus

the deeper we go, the more layers we pull back, the farther we dig, the more the story changes... our scope widens & multiple truths arrive. the earth was flat. the earth was round. we are the earth.

-------

New finds in Caucasus suggest non-African origin for ancient Homo speciesBy Bruce Bower Web edition : Monday, June 6th, 2011 Text Size Early members of the genus Homo, possibly direct ancestors of people today, may have evolved in Asia and then gone to Africa, not vice versa as many scientists have assumed.

Most paleoanthropologists have favored an African origin for the potential human ancestor Homo erectus. But new evidence shows the species occupied a West Asian site called Dmanisi from 1.85 million to 1.77 million years ago, at the same time or slightly before the earliest evidence of this humanlike species in Africa, say geologist Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas in Denton and his colleagues.

The new Dmanisi discoveries point to an Asian homeland for H. erectus, the scientists propose online June 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Dmanisi was occupied repeatedly for roughly 80,000 years and supported a population that was well established and probably quite mobile,” Ferring says.

Evidence remains meager for the geographic origins of the Homo genus, says anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Several scenarios of Homo evolution are possible, and it’s possible that humankind’s genus got its start in Asia with H. erectus.

Researchers have abandoned the long-standing view that a small-brained hominid from East Africa known as Homo habilis, which first appeared about 2.4 million years ago, evolved into H. erectus. Recent fossil finds showing that the two species coexisted in East Africa for several hundred thousand years have undermined that assumption. Ferring’s team suspects that an as-yet-unidentified African hominid reached Asia before 1.85 million years ago and evolved into H. erectus.

With the new Dmanisi dates, “it certainly looks as though the African origin of H. erectus must be reconsidered,” remarks Harvard University anthropologist Philip Rightmire.

Wood regards H. habilis fossils as apelike enough to be reclassified as part of the Australopithecus lineage, which includes a more than 3-million-year-old species represented by a partial skeleton known as Lucy. Other researchers, though, champion 2-million-year-old Australopithecus fossils from South Africa as direct precursors of Homo (SN: 5/7/11, p. 16).

The new Dmanisi discoveries come from just beneath soil that previously yielded 1.77-million-year-old H. erectus fossils, including skulls with surprisingly small brain cases suggestive of an early form of the species (SN: 9/22/07, p. 179). Excavations produced 73 stone tools for cutting and chopping, as well as 34 bone fragments from unidentified creatures. The artifacts came from a series of H. erectus camps at Dmanisi between 1.85 and 1.78 million years ago, the scientists say.

Measurements of reversals in Earth’s magnetic field and of the rate of decay of the element argon in a series of volcanic ash layers provided age estimates for the new finds.

boom :)

The Goodman Theatre in Chicago has announced that Washington actor Edward Gero will play painter Mark Rothko there in the Tony-winning play “Red” by John Logan. Directed by Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls, the show will run Sept. 17-Oct. 23 in Chicago, then come to Arena Stage from Jan. 20 to March 4, 2012.

“I’m very, very excited,” says Gero, who is playing Salieri in “Amadeus” at Round House Theatre in Bethesda through Sunday. Gero appeared at the Goodman in 2006 as Gloucester, opposite Stacy Keach, in Falls’s “King Lear.” That production was remounted at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in summer 2009.


“Red,” which is set in the 1950s, shows the driven painter working with a young assistant whom he lectures, harangues and debates. Playing Rothko means “another huge role” for which Salieri in “Amadeus” provides “a perfect preamble,” Gero says. “It’s student/teacher . . . apprentice/master . . . father/son. It’s about art, it’s about life, it’s about whether one’s work is significant, which is very similar, I think, to what ‘Amadeus’ is about.”

For Gero, a 13-time Helen Hayes Award nominee and four-time winner, “Red” will be another facet of a multiyear run of meaty roles — from the demon barber in “Sweeney Todd” at Signature Theatre, the hapless junk store owner Donny in “American Buffalo,” the drunk Ivan in “The Seafarer,” the troubled widower John in “Shining City,” all at Studio Theatre, to Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” at Ford’s Theatre.

“What happens when you get to be a certain age, roles come your way and it’s sort of a payoff in a way for being around long enough, I suppose,” the actor says

waldosia

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

waldosia
n. [Brit. wallesia] a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain’s way of checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.

movers&shakers

"Love me or hate me, both are in my favor… If you love me, I’ll always be in your heart… If you hate me, I’ll always be in your mind."
William Shakespeare

the book of recurrent dreams, 1791

The dream of angels dreaming of men. It was during an afternoon nap that I dreamt of a ladder. Angels were sleepwalking up and down the rungs, their eyes closed, their breath heavy and dull, their wings hanging limp at the sides. I bumped into an old angel as I passed, waking and startling him. He looked like my grandfather did before he passed away last year, when he would pray each night to die in his sleep. Oh, the angel said to me, I was just dreaming of you.

"Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said. “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too."

Sleep with someone you aren’t sure you should, take a job without knowing where it leads, tell her she looks great when she talks about cooking, tell him he looks sad when he drives his car, don’t put things away, take road trips without directions, forget to lock the doors and let’s not say no. Cleanliness is the hobgoblin of memorable lives, so let’s all make a mess of things.

Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones (1973, dir. Jack Starrett)

“She handles a car like a gun. She handles a gun like a man. And she handles a man like Cleopatra…”

riveting.

Ruined by Lynn Nottage

it's great that they have real conversations about this in London newspapers

See sequences of artciles below... 3, total.


The School for Scandal - review

Barbican, London

oo Michael Billington

o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 22 May 2011 16.50 BST

I fear that the great tradition of English artificial comedy, written mainly by Irishmen and running from the Restoration to Oscar Wilde, is in danger. Either we neglect it or we revive it badly – and the latest victim is Sheridan's 1777 comic masterpiece, given an uncharacteristically duff production by Deborah Warner that strains to point out the parallels between then and now.

Warner prefaces the evening with a punkish, Alexander McQueen-style fashion parade, uses Brechtian captions and mixes 18th-century costume with Gucci shopping bags. But, although there are obvious connections between Sheridan's world of hypocritical scandal-mongering and our own, the fusion of periods misfires. For a start, Sheridan was not writing a savage satire but a free-spirited comedy in which virtue, in the shape of the amiably profligate Charles Surface, triumphs over vice in the form of his sanctimonious sibling, Joseph. But the real failing of Warner's approach is that the striving for contemporary relevance wildly distorts character and denatures Sheridan's comedy.

Leo Bill is, for instance, encouraged to play Charles Surface as a manic druggie presiding over a commune: the result is to make Charles's benevolently forgiving uncle, played by John Shrapnel in robust 18th-century style, seem positively delusional in his obliviousness to his nephew's lifestyle. Even the famous screen scene, in which the aged Sir Peter Teazle discovers his wife hiding in Joseph Surface's library, is not immune to Warner's heavy-handedness. Sheridan's Lady Teazle may be a tease, but, in place of the coy flirtatiousness with which she resists Joseph's advances, Warner has her ready to engage in consensual sex with him. This turns Lady Teazle into an even more flagrant hypocrite than Joseph since she later tells her husband she was not prepared to "sacrifice your honour to his baseness".

A few performances transcend the stylistic mish-mash of Warner's production. Alan Howard brings to Sir Peter vocal precision, a peppery temperament and a delicate pathos, and Matilda Ziegler catches exactly the silky corruption of Lady Sneerwell. The evening, in fact, begins with a nice touch in which Ziegler is stripped of her workaday modern clothes and gradually arrayed in the hooped artifice of 18th-century costume.

If only Warner had been content to leave the juxtaposition of periods there rather than banging us over the head with the play's contemporary relevance, the production might have worked. As it was I found myself nostalgically crying, like William Hazlitt when confronted in mid-life by a similarly vulgar revival: "Why can we not always be young and seeing The School for Scandal?"

The School for Scandal: storm in an 18th-century teacup

A modern version of The School for Scandal has outraged some critics. Deborah Warner, who directed it, can't believe their short-sightedness

-
·
· Deborah Warner

· guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 June 2011 22.00 BST

·
I've just opened my production of The School for Scandal at the Barbican, and it seems the critics are up in arms. Five-star reviews or one star. "Highly theatrical, provocative and intelligent, the show is unmissable," reads one, while another says, "Watching this School for Scandal is like witnessing a group of louts spray-painting an elegant old building with graffiti. It's time Deborah Warner was served with the theatrical equivalent of an Asbo."

How can Sheridan's comic morality play so polarise opinion? Traditionally, it's hardly been a play to frighten babies and old ladies, but now it seems it has. I'm no stranger to strong critical response, though. In 1994, I found a picture of my Glyndebourne Don Giovanni on the front of the Times, with the line: "Boos and catcalls greet Glyndebourne opening." Indeed, there was some controversy on opening night, but I certainly hadn't expected it to be world news by the next morning.

The year before, I read the reviews of Beckett's Footfalls, only to find myself again on the front in a column headed: "Director banned for life from directing Beckett." I've since directed Happy Days with the full approval of the Beckett estate and am represented by the very agent who placed the ban – thus making life seem, in this regard, sweet and long. Still, neither myself nor the School for Scandal company were prepared for this current furore. A storm in an 18th-century teacup?

We revive old plays because we think they may have something to say to us now. The job of directors and actors is to pitch these plays against our moment and see what happens. Strangely, it is the very "now" of our production that seems to have caused some of the upset. One very negative review says: "If the Earl of Rochester and Bertolt Brecht got together in Shoreditch one night and decided to host a rave (inviting Handel to man the decks), the result might look a lot like Deborah Warner's new production of The School for Scandal." Hang on, though, that's exciting isn't it? That's exactly what I wanted this production to be. The School for Scandal is a play obsessed by wit, fashion, celebrity and reputation, and whose central theme is hypocrisy. Does that ring any contemporary bells? I think so.

In this paper, Michael Billington was upset that hard-living Charles Surface, a rake and libertine, could not ultimately be thought of as virtuous by an uncle who had witnessed his appetite for drink and probably drugs. Is there a generation gap here? Might there be a generational reluctance to map our own Pete Doherty on to the classics?

I want to say this to the critics: I know the version of this play you recognise and miss. That version was great for its time but – and this is important – it might not be right for now. The job of director and actor is to test these plays against now; if they lose charm in some critics' eyes, then maybe the world has changed. Theatre, like all art, can make us uncomfortable. It should make us uncomfortable – it is there to shake us up.

I respect the role of the critic in the arts, and want to hear their voices, but I am concerned by one thing. Criticise as you will, but be careful not to put off the new audience. Any emerging theatre audience needs to be led to the places where they might drink, have fun and discover that the theatre holds something for them. Don't head them off at the pass. Let the new get started. This work may be for them, not for you.

I am happy to say that there are young people in the Barbican stalls really enjoying the show. It is a loud show and that aspect, perhaps, plays to a younger taste; but there are older people loving it, too. Scripts change meaning as time passes, and as producers and audiences we must put ourselves in danger to catch that new meaning. I'm surprised by what The School for Scandal became in 2011 – but I'm more surprised by the critics' refusal to yield ground.

The School for Scandal's Deborah Warner: no mother of reinvention

Director Deborah Warner's meshing of Sheridan's 18th-century comedy of manners with modern culture proves some classics are best left as they are



Michael Billington

It's good to find Deborah Warner responding to the critics in such a cool, rational manner: a welcome contrast to the vituperative rancour one sometimes gets from anguished directors. All the same, I think her argument rests on some highly questionable assumptions.

She says of the classics that "the job of the director is to pitch these plays at our moment and see what happens". But, surely, a lot depends on the nature of the play and how you pitch it. The night before The School for Scandal opened many of us had seen, and admired, Rupert Goold's Las Vegas-based The Merchant of Venice. But Shakespeare's play has a mythical quality that makes it easily transposable to another time and place. Sheridan, in contrast, was writing a social comedy rooted in 18th-century manners and delighting in verbal precision. To place it, as Warner does, in a world that's part 18th century and part punk fashion and hard rock is simply to sow confusion.

Behind Warner's argument also lies a veiled contemporary arrogance. She says of the standard period approach to Sheridan, "that version was great for its time but might not be right for now". But how do we know? It's nearly 30 years since London saw, at the Haymarket and the National, what might be termed a traditional School for Scandal. It also strikes me as faintly patronising to assume that a young audience will only grasp the modern resonances of a play that deals with gossip and scandal if you deck it out with Alexander McQueen-style fashion parades and Gucci shopping bags. If Warner were to tackle The Importance of Being Earnest, would she feel Jack and Algy had to watch internet porn or snort coke to bring the play home to a modern audience?

There are few absolute rules in theatre. Updating sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. And I'm all for giving directors a free hand. But my objection to Warner's The School for Scandal was that it drained much of the humour from the play and was neither one thing nor another: neither a radical rewrite nor a realisation of Sheridan's world. My hunch is that Warner has spent too long seeking to reinvent the classics. If she wants to speak directly to the young, why doesn't she, just for once, stage a play by a living writer?

living legend

The Ringleader
Since childhood, award-winning playwright Robert O'Hara has marshaled the means to tell wondrous tales
by Will O’Bryan
Published on June 2, 2011, 3:56am | 0 Comments, 2 Tweets

Robert O'Hara, the 41-year-old playwright whose latest work, Bootycandy, is having its world premiere run at Washington's Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is very familiar with ''3-ways.''

''It's something that reminds you of where you were raised,'' he admits. ''It's also sort of an item that you only get now and then. As a kid I couldn't really get it as many times as I wanted it.''


O'Hara
(Photo by Todd Franson)O'Hara is of course talking about the famous Skyline Chili ''3-ways'' of spaghetti, cheddar and chili, a steady staple in his hometown of Cincinnati.

He could've just as easily been talking about sex. He's very familiar with that topic as well. Sex, after all, is Bootycandy's heartbeat. He's explored slavery, time-travel and romance in Insurrection: Holding History, winner of the 1996 Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Play. He found a curious and acclaimed bridge between Nazi Germany and the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind in Antebellum, a Woolly Mammoth world premiere in 2009. He's seen a family repay a gruesome debt in the slasher flick, The Inheritance, which he wrote and directed. The Obie-winning director has plenty of topics to fill out his résumé, but this is likely his first artistic expression so dedicated to sex.

'''Bootycandy' is a word my parents used for the penis,'' explains the Brooklyn-based O'Hara. '''Oh, did you wash your bootycandy?' It's the oddest thing on earth that my parents would tell the little gay boy 'bootycandy,' … just being told that.''

Obviously, the word never left O'Hara's consciousness. Today it's taken on greater meaning for him, as well as his audiences. As he directs his play, Bootycandy becomes the vehicle for exploring sex.

''Whether we know it or not, we're one of the most outrageously sexual cultures,'' O'Hara observes, sitting in the lobby of Woolly Mammoth one recent Friday morning. ''Whether we acknowledge it or not, it happens all the time. We like to pretend we're not interested, but the first thing you do with new technology is figure out, 'How can I get more sex from it?' I'm dealing with that. How do we talk about sexuality?''

And talking about sex in O'Hara's world can be both outrageous and innocent, a conversation that revels in equal-opportunity offenses.

''Bootycandy is that sort of experience of seeing something really, really hilarious and vulgar at the same time. It is risqué and blue, but I think really, really funny,'' he says. ''I think people will find something in it to love and something in it to go, 'Oh, my God. Did you really have to go that far with it?' But there's also a story inside there.''

Just as there are plenty of stories inside O'Hara. From the fictional to the factual, O'Hara is a man who knows how to hold an audience. It's no wonder his grandmother dubbed him ''The Ringleader'' when he was just a little boy. Or that the professional accolades keep on coming.

METRO WEEKLY: Growing up in Cincinnati, what kind of family did you have? Nuclear? Single parent? Only child?

ROBERT O'HARA: My grandmother had 12 kids, and my mother was the oldest daughter. I had 11 uncles and aunts. I think they went there in the late '50s, and they're all still there, most of them. Before that, they were in Alabama and Georgia. When I was born, they were already heavily in Cincinnati. And they're all certifiable nuts.

MW: Friendly nuts?

O'HARA: Mixed nuts. Some of them are friendly. Some of them are quite out there, actually.

MW: No belligerent nuts, I hope.

O'HARA: Absolutely. Mixed nuts includes belligerent nuts, crazy nuts, meek nuts, nutty nuts – all that.

My mother had me when she was younger, so I was an only child with a single parent until I was 6. Then I had a little brother and we were two kids with a single parent. My mother got married when I was 12, and she's been with that person since. I've always had a sort of nuclear family that had its own sort of craziness, but there was a normality to it.

Going over to my grandmother's house was a circus, which I loved. My grandmother always called me the ''ringleader.'' I would go over there and just act out. It was a lot of fun. ''Ringleader'' fits in that I was sort of bookworm-ish. I would make up plays and I would make up songs and sort of corral the cousins to do things in the backyard.

My grandmother was basically my babysitter. All the cousins went over to Granny's. You could actually go about two doors up to my first school, so I would stay with my grandmother for the week and my mother would pick me up on the weekends; or she would drop me off in the morning and pick me up after school. My experience at my grandmother's house is very connected to me.

MW: Now we'll all want to picture her as some wise and wonderful matriarch. What was the reality?

O'HARA: She was not this evil lady, she was also not this, ''Come all around me and let's have an Oprah moment.'' It was not that. My grandmother could cuss up a storm. My grandfather could cuss up a storm. They cussed each other out every day and I would record them, because it was really, really funny.

MW: Seriously? You had a tape recorder?

O'HARA: Absolutely. I would go to the dinner table and put the recorder underneath the table and I would tape the family conversation. I had to be 5 or 6. I continued doing it till I was, like, 12, whenever I could get away with it.

MW: Do you remember why you started doing it?

O'HARA: Because my grandmother didn't talk like a normal person.

I was going to school with all white kids and I was coming home to this woman who grew up in the South – and my grandfather and this crazy amount of uncles and aunts and cousins – and the language was just completely different. And it was a lot of fun. At 4 years old, I was going to school and cursing people out with these words I did not know. [My grandmother] would make up words. It was just the most incredibly colorful language, and I guess I just gravitated toward it. I think that's why my plays have a lot of language issues. I like to make up words and put words together that don't normally go together.

MW: Did that ever get you into trouble at school?

O'HARA: Yeah. [Laughs.] I think it was a reaction to the fact that I was small and skinny and bookish, so I couldn't really physically fight. But I could fight with my words.

I guess I was loud and talkative. My family was loud and talkative, so I didn't really think of it as a problem. My teachers did – because I would always give them word for word. There was no way they were just going to tell me something and I was just going to do it. I had a lot of questions, and I had colorful language.

MW: Granted, it's a quiet Friday morning, but you seem fairly soft-spoken now.

O'HARA: Oh, I am. I sort of get that out of my system in my writing. I have no need for that in my real life [now]. I can be colorful, and I'm sure most people who have worked with me would say that I'm rather colorful. But I'm not this crazy guy. I think it's been channeled into my work. People who meet me, and they have seen my work, they completely think it's a different person.

MW: I interviewed Chay Yew in 2009 when he was here directing the world premiere of Antebellum, and he gave me this wonderful quote about the play: ''When else is there an opportunity to see hoop skirts, Nazis, gay people and mammies onstage at the same time?'' Is that sort of the O'Hara signature style?

O'HARA: Yes. [Laughs.] I never write a play until there are at least 88 ideas bumping up against each other. Why have just one crazy person in the play? Make 'em all messes and crazy, and then see what happens.

MW: I'm guessing the stories you're trying to tell aren't just about being wacky and crazy, though.

O'HARA: No. Rarely are they. They're actually sometimes very dark. And I love history. Someone will look at me and see me and put me in a category, and my first instinct is to burst out of that category.

Every play to me is an experiment. When people ask me how I write, I go, ''Everyone is welcome and no one is safe.'' That is something that I try to carry into my work. I try to find the beauty and the horror of events. It could be a horrific experience, but it's going to be beautiful. What is that pull of watching something that you know is going to be a little bit uncomfortable, or a little bit horrific, or a little bit scary?
MW: Speaking of horror reminds me: You would've been living in New York during 9/11, right?

O'HARA: I was living in New York, but I wasn't actually in New York. I was on a cruise ship with my family in the Bahamas.

MW: Frantically trying to get cell service?

O'HARA: Exactly. And my family saying, ''We're going back to the slot machines. What are we gonna do? Build the building back up? You can't be here all sad. This is vacation.'' This was two days into the vacation. ''But I'm from New York!''

They were like, ''We understand, but what, you gonna be upset all day?''

There was a memorial service for five minutes, and then people walking right out to the slot machines, right into drinking some more. I guess it's because it felt fake on television, watching it on a ship.


MW: That's the play I want to see.

O'HARA: Most of the people on the ship were foreigners, and they were sad about it, but that didn't stop people from partying, doing the conga line, all this stuff.

Most of my family was there. They were very happy that I was not in New York. Everyone was very sad, but the attitude was, ''There is nothing you can do.'' But there was just something wrong with this slot-machine playing and this drinking going on when I know that there are now people missing loved ones in the city that I have to go back to. And just being on a cruise ship with my family, it's like being locked in Times Square with a bunch of tourists and your family. It's nuts.

MW: Continuing with the horrific, but moving to fiction, I want to know about your horror movie, The Inheritance. Is the ''slasher movie'' genre one you grew up liking? All the Halloween movies? All the Friday the 13th movies?

O'HARA: Oh, I absolutely loved horror movies, because I was such a scaredy-cat. I was afraid of the dark. I would make up creatures and people in my room. It was ridiculous. But I love scary movies. The Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street – all those things.

The Inheritance was this thing, like, I had been waiting for something just out of the blue, to turn on the TV and [see], ''Oh, that's a member of my family who just chopped somebody's head off.'' I'd been waiting for that to happen. I never really know what my family members are doing. I only hear about them after something outrageous has happened. And I'm like, ''Really? She burned the car and mistakenly lit herself on fire and had to go to the hospital?''

MW: True story?

O'HARA: True story. It's just ridiculous. A fistfight at the funeral, over the body. There are all these sorts of different stories [I'm told], because I don't go home on a regular basis. They would call saying, ''Guess what happened.'' So The Inheritance was about, ''What would happen if your family was involved in a cult?''

MW: None of your family should take this movie personally, should they?

O'HARA: [Laughs.] No.

MW: Do they ask, ''Is that supposed to be my head on the stick?''

O'HARA: And, ''Why are you using my biography?'' Some of their names are in the piece. It's a catch-22. Either their name's in it and they're like, ''Why would you put my name in it? Where's my royalties?''; or their names aren't in it and, ''Why isn't my name in it? When am I going to be in the movie?''

MW: How often do you make it back to see your family?

O'HARA: I'm in touch with them a lot. We just had the family reunion last year. That was a treat. But I don't like Cincinnati. When I go back, I realize how segregated it is and how conservative it is. I get this feeling of wanting to get out every time I go there. I feel like I'm a stranger in a foreign land, actually. But it was a great place to grow up, I guess. I had a sort of different perspective than if I grew up in some major metropolitan city where I could do anything I wanted, be anything I wanted to be. I really had this need from a very early age to get out of Cincinnati as soon as possible.

MW: Where did you go?

O'HARA: I went to Boston, to Tufts University, to be a pre-law major. And then I was like, ''That's not gonna happen.'' Eventually I ended up in English. And I was like, ''That's not gonna happen.'' I ended up taking all these theater classes. I never thought I would be making a living doing theater. I like to do plays, I like to write, but I never thought I'd be a playwright. That never, ever crossed my mind.

MW: Why not?

O'HARA: It was my mother going, ''Are you out of your mind?'' Every time I would go home, there was this black woman going, ''Are you out of your fucking mind? Are you crazy?'' [Laughs.]

But I had always been doing that. I had written all my life. Directed and performed all my life. It was always a hobby, until I got to my junior year and realized that I actually could go into this as a business.

MW: What changed your mind to be a playwright?

O'HARA: It wasn't playwriting -- it was directing. I've always been a playwright. I could be a lawyer and continue writing plays. But to have a career, I always thought that I would have to be a director.

It was also around the time I was coming out to myself. I was sort of still in this, ''Oh, I'm gonna get married and have a wife and a kid and be a lawyer.'' Once all those things started to break down, [I thought], ''Well, that's never gonna happen, so now let's just get real with it. I want to be a director and a writer and an artist.'' It was part of my whole identity changing that allowed me to go.

I think what sparked it is that you had to choose a major in your junior year. It was my sort of relationship to, ''What am I going to do after I get out of here? Where am I going to live and what am I going to do?'' And mind you, my entire college experience was, ''We don't have enough money. I don't know if you're going to be there next semester. You have to get another work-study job. You have to get another loan.'' Everything was money, money, money, money. I went to a very expensive school. But I didn't give a fuck. There was no way in hell I wasn't going to be there. It was all very much this madness.

My parents said to me, ''We can't help you with graduate school.'' I said, ''Fine.'' I had written a play and it was very well received. The chairman of the department, Sherwood ''Doc'' Collins, said to me, ''Robert, you are a really, really talented writer.'' He was this old white man, sort of a legend. I was always terrified of him. He was this huge, hulking, Santa Claus of a man [who told me], ''You are amazingly talented.'' I felt like he, his presence, challenged me to do more and to be more as an artist. That's sort of when I really closed in around the fact that I could do this.

Doc followed my career for a number of years. I'd get these long letters from him after I got out of school, about work that I didn't even know he had heard about. This was before people would write in the press, ''This sucked! And his name is Robert O'Hara.'' He would write these long passages about something he'd read of mine. He was so amazing that he could be very critical, but very giving at the same time. When you have an old, white man say to you – about something that you think no one in their right mind would get – that he really, really loved it, it allowed me to go, ''Oh, wait a second. I'm valid? Even my sort of crazy Cincinnati homo self and my work can actually have a relationship to someone who's completely the opposite of me?'' It showed me the universality of writing, actually. It was just a really, really lovely relationship.

MW: The universality of your writing, specifically?

O'HARA: Yes. I always thought that my grandmother spoke in a weird way, an exciting way. But I realized everyone has those two sections. Everyone is different with their family, different in public, and we're sort of carrying those two personas. We all have secrets, and we all have sort of those inner beings that come out whenever we're in different situations. You can embrace them all. I think that's what Doc showed me. I was obviously this gay, black kid – that he embraced completely. He embraced me as an artist, not just as a professor.

MW: So you continued to graduate school?

O'HARA: Right out of undergraduate. There was no, like, five years of ''let me go find myself,'' and then graduate school. In graduate school, it's all theater, all day, in New York at Columbia [University]. It was overwhelming.At the end of my first semester, at my evaluation, the chair looked at me and said, ''Your teachers think you're a little bit too focused on African-American and gay issues.'' We're sitting in Harlem. I'm the only black student in the department. I'm the only out gay student in the directing program. And you're going to tell me that I'm too focused on African-American issues and gay issues? I had to laugh. ''Did you tell my colleague she was too focused on feminist studies and German expressionism?''

What it came down to was my professors would do things like, ''This week we're going to do gay theater, and it's going to be As Is and Torch Song Trilogy. Next week we're going to do fathers and sons, and it's going to be Edward Albee and James Baldwin.'' And I'm like, ''Edward Albee and James Baldwin were faggots. I don't know why they're not in this week.'' People are like, ''They're homosexuals?'' They're challenging me about Edward Albee and James Baldwin being homosexuals.

They wanted to categorize everything, and I would always go, ''Wait a minute. You can't put Tony Kushner just in that place and not in this place. You can't put August Wilson and James Baldwin just in the 'black place' and leave them out of this place.'' It was the absence of people allowing the otherness in the room.

What it is – because I'm teaching now – you have to evaluate every student. Obviously, I did not know. Everyone was older than me. I think what [the chair] was saying was, ''We want you to broaden yourself. We want you to read more Shakespeare and more Chekhov, Ibsen, stuff like that.'' Of course, I was doing that. But because they had to evaluate me, they had to find out what I needed to work on. But I only heard, ''You're too focused on blah blah blah.'' And that led to my first play, which is about a Columbia student who goes back in time to slavery and falls in love.

MW: Regarding the black and gay focus, it seems that gay playwrights are really making their marks right now. Is this the decade of the black, gay playwright?

O'HARA: Every decade is the decade of the black, gay playwright! [Laughs.] That's what you should say. Robert O'Hara says yes.

I don't really know. I know a couple of black playwrights that are men that are not gay. But Tarell [Alvin] McCraney, Marcus Gardley, Tracey Scott Wilson…. I think it is the decade of the black, gay playwright. If that means I get more work, then, yeah, say that. [Laughs.]

But I definitely know that there are more white, straight men getting productions done about white, straight men than there are black people or women productions being done. That's a fact. All you have to do is look at the brochures of theaters. In this city you can look at the brochures. And there are certainly more white people directing plays. I find it so odd that there's this new fad of ''white women and black plays'' or ''white people directing black plays,'' and there's no fad of ''black people directing white plays.'' It's like they're perfectly fine to have a white woman direct some black play. But me? I would never get a call to direct a Sarah Ruhl play. I would never get a call to direct an Adam Rapp play. And I just find that odd. White women should be able to direct any play they want to fuckin' direct. But why am I looked at as ''the black playwright''?

MW: What is the fit, exactly, with you and Woolly Mammoth?

O'HARA: They had the audacity to say, ''We're going to put your play on, and we know you're not done with it. And we don't know what's going to come out of it. And we know you're Robert O'Hara.'' That takes balls. [Artistic director Howard Shalwitz] allows me to be all of me. To not just be the black, gay playwright, but to be the intellectual. To be the complete zany guy. The sort of sad and lonely person at times. He allows me to bring all of myself into the room. I feel like I can do anything I want in there because they have said, ''We trust you and believe in you as an artist.'' There's no fear in that. It's one of the places I can go and be all of me.

Bootycandy runs through June 26 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St. NW. Tickets, $30 to $65, are available by calling 202-393-3939 or online at woollymammoth.net. The website also includes a schedule of special programming during the run tied to Capital Pride.

Yasmina Reza

Celebrated Playwright Who Resists CelebrityBy ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS — Yasmina Reza is one of the world’s most successful playwrights, but she wears her fame with discomfort. She can talk at length about her red leather Prada coat. She can relate stories with biting humor about her year on the road shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 campaign for the French presidency. But ask her about herself, and the anxiety of the writerly persona takes over.

A blend of fragility and steel, Ms. Reza wavers between extremes: a determination to be judged by her work alone and a desire that it be understood and appreciated. The publication of her new play, “Comment Vous Racontez la Partie” (“How You Talk the Game”), has propelled her, once again, to face a reporter.

“After I write, I have nothing to say,” she said in an interview in the bar of the Lutetia Hotel on the Left Bank. “The commentary afterwards is superfluous. I write. And that’s enough.”

But then she has something to say. Speaking in French, she pours out criticism of journalists who cut too close to the bone. “Too often what are described as interviews are inquisitions,” she said. “It’s not about the work. It’s more like, ‘Who are you?,’ which really, really annoys me. If I didn’t have to do them, I wouldn’t. But if you don’t talk yourself, there will be 20 people talking about you ahead of you.”

This is a good moment for Ms. Reza. In October the film “Carnage,” adapted and directed by her friend Roman Polanski and based on her 2009 Tony Award-winning play, “God of Carnage,” will be released. Starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, the movie had to be shot in France (the locations disguised to look like Brooklyn) because it is one of the few countries to which Mr. Polanski can travel without risking extradition to the United States. (Mr. Polanski, who has a home in Switzerland, remains wanted in connection with a 34-year-old case involving sex with a 13-year-old girl.)

In addition to her silences, Ms. Reza can tantalize her readers with partial information. She dedicated “Dawn Dusk or Night,” her best-selling book about Mr. Sarkozy on the campaign trail, to a man believed to be her lover at the time, a politician she identified only as “G.” There was speculation in the press then that “G” might be Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund chief, who resigned after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid this month in New York. The speculation was a kind of game of elimination based on phrases in the book suggesting that “G” was a Socialist who dreamed of becoming the president of France. Ms. Reza did not reveal “G” ’s name. She has no comment now.

She does not have a Web site, blog or Twitter account. She resists television interviews. “It’s degrading,” she said. “They never give you time to talk. I hesitate. I reflect. I contradict myself. Whenever I’ve done it, I was very, very bad. A catastrophe.”

When she speaks, it’s a process of showing and hiding so that her interlocutor can never quite get to know her. She responds in single-word sentences. “Formidable.” “Fantastique.” “Superb.” “Incroyable.” These are among her favorites.

“The interview is a game,” she said. “I try to structure interviews in such a way that I say nothing. It’s better for me to be mysterious.”

Often enough, though, her theatrical characters lose control and say too much. Take the two couples in “God of Carnage,” her satire about the middle class and marriage, who transform into primitive creatures during a span of 90 minutes. Or another pair of couples, in “Life x 3,” who compete ferociously under the guise of a sociable evening. Or the three men in her earlier Tony-winning play, “Art,” the comedy in which the friends fall to arguing so viciously over the purchase of a white-on-white painting by one of their number that they question how they became pals in the first place. A common theme in these plays is the tension between the sadness of the solitary human condition and blundering attempts to find solace in others, a tack often doomed to failure.

Ms. Reza, 52, who was born in France and has two children, is the daughter of a father of Jewish Iranian descent and a Jewish Hungarian mother. She has been quoted as saying that she considers her own humor to be Jewish and her plays tragedies, “funny tragedy,” perhaps, but not pure comedies. Yet she doesn’t complain excessively about the difference between her view and the perception of her as a comic writer.

In her own case, apparently, so deep is the conflict between silence and loquacity that she has made the struggle of a writer to control her persona the theme of her new play. The title, “How You Talk the Game,” is from a quotation in “The Big Room,” a collection of celebrity profiles by Michael Herr and Guy Peellaert and is a variation on the well-known line by the sportswriter Grantland Rice, it’s “not that you won or lost — but how you played the game.”

“How You Talk the Game” is a tightly wound psychological work that centers on verbal play and the strains that arise within a conversation among four people. What matters is not so much the reality of the action, but how the action is described by the characters. The protagonist, a novelist named Nathalie, is giving a public interview about her new book in a fictional French town called Vilan-en-Volène.

The interviewer, a female journalist, asks probing questions that unnerve the novelist. When Nathalie is asked why she accepted the invitation, her facade cracks: “I tell myself, what will you do in Vilan-en-Volène, you cannot go to Vilan-en-Volène, you have no reason to go to this unknown town and discuss a book that you undermine every time you speak, that you diminish every time you speak, that you watch disintegrate the moment someone mentions it to you or you mention it. And yet I cannot not go.”

Like Nathalie, Ms. Reza both hides and reveals herself under layers of beautiful clothes. Ultra-thin and tiny-boned, she exudes vulnerability as she lets her cashmere sweater slip off her shoulders, disclosing a soft, fitted knit dress. She always wears high heels. And she insisted on them while following Mr. Sarkozy.

“We were on farms and running to airports,” she said. “His people told me to wear jeans and gym shoes. I said no. Even when they mocked me, I said no. Firmly.” It was “sartorial obstinacy,” she said.

Nathalie becomes a character who is eerily close to herself.

“I can’t say that I am Nathalie,” she said in the interview, “but I would be dishonest if I said, ‘No, it’s not me at all.’ There certainly are aspects of her character that are truly similar. It’s the first time I have deliberately constructed a character with myself in mind.”

“Art,” Ms. Reza’s breakthrough in the United States in 1998, has been performed in more than 30 languages. It’s not enough. She talks about a fantasy: to have one of her plays performed at the Comédie-Française in Paris.

She has a “scoop,” she said. She is “in conversations” with Muriel Mayette, the administrator of France’s national theater, about a possible production of her new play. She acknowledges that it must undergo a rigorous judging process by committee. But she is excited.

“I’m in the greatest national theaters in the world, but not yet in France’s great national theaters like the Comédie-Française,” she said. “The Comédie-Française. It is a myth.”

Case Study

Case studyActor Tom Hiddleston reveals how he conveys emotion


Share Tom Hiddleston
The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009 Article historyWhen I'm given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person.

When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones.

I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that's how I played the part.

For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn't but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious.

By comparison, in Chekhov's Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as "a prig and a bigot ... uprightness in boots ... tiresome ... completely sincere". His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: "Forgive me, I'm going to tell you plainly."

I practised speaking gravely and sincerely without emotion and I actually noticed how that carried over into my personal life: when I played the open-hearted Cassio, I felt really free; when I played the pent-up Lvov, I felt a real need to release myself from the shackles of that character.

It's exhilarating to act out the emotions of a character - it's a bit like being a child again. You flex the same muscles that you did when you pretended to be a cowboy or a policeman: acting is a grown-up version of that with more subtlety and detail. You're responding with real emotions to imaginary situations. When I'm in a production I never have a day when I haven't laughed, cried or screamed. There are times when I wake up stiff from emotional exhaustion.

Film is a much more intimate and thoughtful medium than theatre because of the proximity of the camera. The camera can read your thoughts. On stage, if you have a moment of vulnerability you can hide it from the other actors; on film, the camera will see you feel that emotion and try to suppress it. Similarly, if you're pretending to feel something that isn't there, it won't be believable.

Tom Hiddleston

Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don't be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you've had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time... maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn't worth hearing, and I think everyone's voice is worth hearing. So if you've got something to say, say it from the rooftops.

-

His parents divorced when he was 12, a shattering family event that sent us all off in different directions. It was very difficult and I always say that it was the thing that made me who I am' – he speaks gingerly, careful not to implicate anyone else with his words – because it made me take responsibility for my life and I saw my parents for the first time as human beings, not as perfect love machines. They were both very badly hurt. I mean, it's hard enough when you're ending a short-term relationship, isn't it? I can't imagine what it's like to end a 17-year marriage. But I'm so proud of them and I couldn't do without them and as a result [of the divorce] I have grown-up, intimate relationships with both of them.'

He took a first in Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge and arrived at RADA with a spectacular grasp of etymology (I don't think I've ever not been able to understand what a word means') but with a lot to learn about tumbling, backflips and sword fighting.

And anyway, acting is about instinct, it's not a matter of the head. It's about finding the truth in your heart, not about what school you went to.'

By the time he left RADA, he still couldn't sing like Freddie Mercury, to his regret, but he was otherwise limber, deft with a cutlass and ready for anything.

He clearly enjoys the shapeshifting aspect of his profession – to excess, perhaps. While he was in the early rounds of auditioning for the Marvel comic adaptation, along with every other blond English-speaking actor in the world' it was suggested to him that, as he was being considered for the part of Thor, he might bulk up a bit.

Accordingly, he followed a strict exercise regime and ate nothing but chicken, as bodybuilders do. Chicken salad for every meal. And sometimes the odd egg.'

After six weeks of this, he received a phone call from the producers telling him they wanted him in the film, only playing the part of Loki, Thor's lean and hungry-looking brother. I guess it was a relief to go back to my natural body shape,' he says, admirably unfazed by the whole experience.

He's delighted to be playing Loki, anyway, the god of mischief (which is the one you want to be, isn't it?'). Anthony Hopkins is playing his father, Odin.

In a perfect Hopkins accent, Tom recounts a recent message, relayed via Branagh: Tell Tom I don't like fava beans, and I'm not a complete psycho…'. To cap it all off, Tom loved the Marvel Superpower Top Trumps card game as a child. If you went back and told the eight-year-old Tom this is what you will be doing, I'd have been…' Words fail him.

Hiddleston is a softy in love, and prone to grand romantic gestures such as spontaneous road trips. I like saying, “Pack your bags, we're off.” 'Yes, there is someone' in his life, he says coyly, but for the moment he lives alone in Kentish Town, although his bags are currently packed for a five-month stint in Hollywood.

Filming the Marvel blockbuster will be a new experience.

On stage he has proved himself, winning an Olivier award for Best Newcomer and an Ian Charleson award nomination for his work with theatre production company Cheek By Jowl. He loves the evanescence of live theatre, quoting Stoppard's quip on its magic: If you weren't there, you missed it.'

Hiddleston played the scrupulous young doctor, Lvov, in a Stoppard translation of Chekhov's Ivanov starring Branagh (again). Since Chekhov was a doctor, did he see his part as an authorial self-portrait? No, in rehearsals Tom [Stoppard] said he thought Lvov was probably based on someone Chekhov knew, another medical student. Because Lvov is so judgemental and Chekhov is the opposite, totally compassionate, totally aware that Ivanov is suffering what would now be understood as depression.'

Despite the manifold sufferings on stage, the cast had a jolly time. There were lots of laughs. It's often said that backstage on a comedy the mood can be quite depressed, but when you're doing a tragedy everyone has great fun.'

Wallander, a cop show that's so gloomy it makes Inspector Morse look like a Carry On film, follows the same rule of thumb.

On screen, we try to show what it costs the police, emotionally, to deal with murder victims. But behind the scenes, we're filming in Sweden on Midsummer's Eve, which is like their New Year's Eve, and everyone in the crew is in high spirits. They're so kind and have what I now understand as a Scandinavian sense of humour, very dry and with far fewer taboos than we have.'

But Ystad, where the programmes are set – and where the bodies pile up under the sickly yellow sun – is, he says, a funny old town; I wouldn't want to spend too much time there.'

With Hiddleston's career speedily gathering pace, this seems unlikely. He's an ethereal spirit; beautiful rather than sexy; a powerful presence on stage but unobtrusive in person.

Gentle, cerebral and entertaining, he's off to throw a girdle round the earth. The first stop is India, where his elder sister is getting married. I'm going to wear three sets of pyjamas, do a little dance and go mad!' he laughs – and then it's on to Hollywood, and beyond.

25 years of Oprah...

...a world of richness and wisdom.

I'm happy I was able to experience some of it, and I'm honored to witness genius in my lifetime.

Nobody but you is responsible for your life. It doesn't matter what your Momma did or what your Daddy did - you are responsible for your life. And what is life? Energy. You are responsible for the energy your create for yourself, and the energy you bring to others.

Be responsible. Take responsibility for the energy you bring into the space.

All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment.

Newton's 3rd law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

You are responsible for your life. No one completes you.

--

There's a difference between THINKING you deserve and KNOWING you deserve something.

There is a common thread of unworthiness in us all. Sometimes we block our own blessings. You are worthy because you were born. Because you are here.

Everyone wants validation. We all have that desire. Everyone wants to be heard.

I see you.
I hear you.
What you say matters to me.

Allow grace in. Be sitt. Know it. Know it. Wait & listen. Wait & listen for the guidance that is bigger than you. It comes first in whispers. I only make mistakes when I don't listen.

What are the whispers in your life? Your will will whisper to you... what is it saying?

--

Be a safe harbour for someone else.

Find your platform. Find your stage.
Don't confuse fame and success.
Find your passion and give it to the world.

Gratitude.

a great storyteller

"
April 26, 2011

I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time. On the screen were some flashback shots of Daniel, Emma and Rupert from ten years ago. They were 12. I have also recently returned from New York, and while I was there, I saw Daniel singing and dancing (brilliantly) on Broadway. A lifetime seems to have passed in minutes.

Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire, massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.

It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.

"
- Alan Rickman

joys of everyday living

Will Secretary of State Hillary Clinton take on a role as a global advocate for women’s rights? Clinton didn’t exactly dodge and weave when asked about that possibility in an interview with Laurence Ferrari of France’s TF1 TV network.

In an exchange about Clinton’s post-Obama administration plans, Ferrari asked, “You will be maybe a world ambassador for women’s right?”

Clinton responded: “Well, I am committed to human rights and women’s rights. And I spoke about both of those at two of the meetings yesterday and today, for the OECD and UNESCO, because I want our world to keep moving toward those ideals of both the American and the French Revolutions. And I want everyone to share in a more prosperous, peaceful world where security and opportunity go hand in hand. And so for me, I will continue to advocate as I always have, even before I was in any official position. So I’m sure whatever the future holds, it will hold work like that, and I look forward to it.”

One thing is certain: Clinton is looking forward to some time off. Earlier in the interview with Ferrari, she said: “I mean, here I am in Paris it’s a beautiful day, yesterday was even more beautiful, and I have no time to do anything other than my official work. And I would like to get a few more years where I can just wander aimlessly through the beauties of a city like Paris and meet with my friends and just have a life filled with the joys of everyday living. So I’m looking forward to it, but I have no plans.”

"Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious."

"Your journey has molded you for the greater good, and it was
exactly what it needed to be. Don't think that you've lost time. It
took each and every situation you encountered to bring you to the now.
And now is right on time." -Asha Tyson

:)

Almodovar, Banderas reunite in 'The Skin'
By JENNY BARCHFIELD, Associated Press Jenny Barchfield, Associated Press
1 hr 15 mins ago

.CANNES, France – After decades of playing Hollywood Latin lovers, Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas returns to his roots — and the director who helped launch his career — with a slow-burning role in Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In."

Banderas was an early muse of the acclaimed filmmaker, but it's been 22 years since the two luminaries of Spanish cinema worked together.

"It's part of my life.... I could almost compare it to a return to my country, to my roots, with all its misery, with all its greatness, all its contradictions and everything that goes along with that" Banderas said at a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie screened Thursday. "That's what returning to Almodovar is, a homecoming."

And what a homecoming it is.

In "The Skin I Live In," Banderas plays a psychotic plastic surgeon who devises a Machiavellian plot to exact revenge on the man he believes raped his daughter. Cold and calculating, Banderas' character Robert wears an impassive mask of icy sternness throughout the film.

The restrained performance — one of his strongest since his Almodovar days — contrasts with the exuberance and oozing charm of his Hollywood characters.

"The spectators discover that this is a tormented character as the story goes along, but without any grand gestures, no great things in front of the camera," Banderas said.

Banderas' restrained performance also contrasts with his early work with Almodovar, where he played a boy-toy in 1988's "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and a toreador in training in the 1986 "Matador," among other flamboyant roles.

With a cast that also includes another of the filmmaker's old school favorites, Marisa Paredes, "The Skin I Live In" is classic Almodovar at his best.

The themes that have obsessed Almodovar since his first experiments in cinema in late-1970s Madrid — obsession, gender-bending, family secrets — are all here, worked masterfully into a roller-coaster plot.

A loose adaptation of the novel by French author Thierry Jonquet, the movie is a bloodless thriller that keeps audiences' knuckles white without drenching them in gore.


Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Rise of the strays: Who hasn't had a partner who is now with the other sex? | Life & Style

Rise of the strays: Who hasn't had a partner who is now with the other sex? Life & Style

fluid, fluid.

And I Should Know

And I Should Know

amazing artcle.

rinse & spit

mohawkins essentials.

GOD: I own you like I own the caves.

THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison.

GOD: I made you. I could tame you.

THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now.

GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you.

THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.

How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers

Imagine this life, imagine her story..

By MUNIR AHMED, Associated Press Munir Ahmed, Associated Press
1 hr 24 mins ago

ISLAMABAD – One of three wives living with Osama bin Laden has told Pakistani interrogators she had been staying in the al-Qaida chief's hideout for six years without leaving its upper floors, a Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.

The woman, identified as Yemeni-born Amal Ahmed Abdullfattah, and the other two wives of bin Laden are being interrogated in Pakistan after they were taken into custody following the American raid on bin Laden's compound in the town of Abbottabad.

Pakistani authorities are also holding eight or nine children who were found there after the U.S. commandos left.

The corpses of at least three slain men were also left behind, while bin Laden's body was taken and buried at sea.

The wives' accounts will help show how bin Laden spent his time and how he managed to avoid capture, living in a large house close to military academy in a garrison town, a two-and-a-half hours' drive from the capital Islamabad.

Given shifting and incomplete accounts from U.S. officials about what happened during the raid, the women's testimonies may also be significant in unveiling details about the operation.

A Pakistani official said CIA officers had not been given access to the women in custody. Military and intelligence relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained even before Monday's helicopter-borne raid, and have become more so in its aftermath. There is also anger among Pakistanis over the raid, which many see as a violation of their country's sovereignty.

On Friday, American drone-fired missiles killed 10 people in North Waziristan, an al-Qaida and Taliban hotspot close to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said. The strike risks more tensions between the two countries. Such attacks were routine last year, but their frequency has dropped this year amid opposition by the Pakistan security establishment.

The Pakistani intelligence official did not say on Friday whether the Yemeni wife has said that bin Laden was also living there since 2006. "We are still getting information from them," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give his name to the media.

A security official said the wife was shot in the leg during the operation, and did not witness her husband being killed. He also said one of bin Laden's eldest daughters had said she witnessed the Americans killing her father.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's intelligence agency has concluded that bin Laden was "cash strapped" in his final days and that al-Qaida had split into two factions, with the larger one controlled by the group's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, according to a briefing given by a senior officer in the agency.

The officer spoke to a small group of Pakistani reporters late Thursday. A top military officer also present at the briefing told The Associated Press what was said, as did two of the journalists. All asked that their names not be used because of the sensitivity of the meeting.

The officer didn't provide details or elaborate how his agency made the conclusions about bin Laden's financial situation or the split with his deputy, al-Zawahri. The al-Qaida chief had apparently lived without any guards at the Abbottabad compound or loyalists nearby to take up arms in his defense.

The image of Pakistan's intelligence agency has been battered at home and abroad in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden. Portraying him as isolated and weak may be aimed at trying to create an impression that a failure to spot him was not so important.

Documents taken from the house by American commandos showed that bin Laden was planning to hit America, however, including a plan for derailing an American train on the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The confiscated materials reveal the rail attack was planned as of February 2010.

Late Thursday, two Pakistani officials cited bin Laden's wives and children as saying he and his associates had not offered any "significant resistance" when the American commandos entered the compound, in part because the assailants had thrown "stun bombs" that disorientated them.

One official said Pakistani authorities found an AK-47 and a pistol in the house belonging to those in the house, with evidence that one bullet had been fired from the rifle.

"That was the level of resistance" they put up, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

His account is roughly consistent with the most recent one given by U.S. officials, who now say one of the five people, killed in the raid was armed and fired any shots, a striking departure from the intense and prolonged firefight described earlier by the White House and others in the administration.

U.S. officials say four men were killed alongside bin Laden, including one of his sons.

The raid has exacerbated tensions between America and Pakistan. The army here is angry that it was not told about the unilateral raid on a target within its territory, while there are suspicions in Washington that bin Laden may have been protected by Pakistani security forces while on the run.