Month: September 2010

And learn your lines

Stephen Tobolowsky explains his approach to auditions.

First, you have to understand it is the idea that you are walking into a room with people sitting on the other side of the table judging you that is making you nervous. Right? Not completely. Once I got there early and walked into an empty room with a table in it and I got nervous. That’s when it dawned on me that the table itself is a factor. I realized I needed to turn the tables so to speak.

The solution—and this advice works for any profession you have to go on interviews for—go sit on their side of the table. Not literally, but figuratively. Don’t stand opposite them to be judged, become a collaborator. The one thing you always have in common with the producers or your employers is the project. If you make the project the most important thing in the room—not you—you will sit on their side of the table and you won’t be so nervous.

In the Next Room or the vibrator play

Sarah Ruhl’s script plays it straight for most of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, reserving her trademark theatricality for the satisfying ending. Indeed, it’s a play that accomplishes some of its best moments in the shared silences between two characters, especially a touching subplot between Sabrina Daldry (the fine Kimberly Gilbert) and clinic nurse Annie (an understated and hence very effective Sarah Marshall); the silences are fitting, since this is a story that unfolds in a Victorian America where sexual experience is not discussed, hardly even recognized for what it is. (And apparently no one saw the need for personal lubricant.)

There’s a lovely passage toward the end of Act 1 in which Catherine Givings (welcome newcomer Katie deBuys) looks forward to the coming century in which “everything in our lives will be electrified: On. Off. On. Off.” with clearly mixed feelings.

Daniel Conway’s set puts two half-circle rows of bleacher seats onstage to frame Dr. Givings’ parlor and consulting room as if it were an operating theater. Unfortunately, upstage action creates sightline problems for patrons sitting in the upper row. But I loved the hand-cranked entrance bell fitted to the Givings’ front door.

  • In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Aaron Posner, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

No news is good news

Matthew Kaiser reports (in the most recent Friends newsletter) on Resource Manager Dave Lawlor’s July survey of the waters of Dogue Creek, which drains Huntley Meadows Park. Fortunately, no snakehead (Channa sp.) fish were detected, and even more positively, samplers found ten Largemouth Bass. It is believed that the presence of the bass will put pressure on snakeheads that would otherwise move upstream in the Creek. Other species counted in the survey (alas, no scientific names in the report):

  • Yellow Bullhead
  • American Eel
  • White Sucker
  • Satinfin Shiner
  • Creek Chubsucker
  • Tessellated Darter
  • Lamprey
  • Green Sunfish
  • Pumpkinseed
  • Bluegill
  • Creek Chub
  • Eastern Mudminnow

I find it unpleasant to find myself reporting observations of Lamprey as a good thing. Lampreys are the one taxon of the animal kingdom that I could do without, if it’s all the same to you: they’re nasty things.

West decoded: 3

Or not, as the case may be. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s maggotty mash note to California, has several instances of slang that may be obscure, undocumented, or simply his own coinages. I got nowhere with the following:

He sat near Harry’s bed and listened to his stories by the hour. Forty years in vaudeville and burlesque had provided him with an infinite number of them. As he put it, his life had consisted of a lightning series of “nip-ups,” “high-gruesomes,” “flying-W’s” and “hundred-and-eights” done to escape a barrage of “exploding stoves.” An “exploding stove” was any catastrophe, natural or human, from a flood in Medicine Hat, Wyoming, to an angry policeman in Moose Factory, Ontario. (ch. 6)

How is it that Medicine Hat was transported from Alberta to the Equality State? I wonder whether hundred-and-eight is a misprint for hundred-and-eighty—unlikely, since it would be plural in this context.

Most of the online hits that this next one turns up want to sell me an Acura.

Faye was coming back. Homer saw that Tod was going to speak to her about Earle and the Mexican and signaled desperately for him not to do it. She, however, caught him at it and was curious.

“What have you guys been chinning about?”

“You, darling,” Tod said. “Homer has a t.l. for you.” (ch. 20)

This last one has such a rhythm that I have to believe West made it up.

… all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super “Dr. Know-All Pierce-All” had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames (ch. 27)