You should probably read this book.

Becoming Shakespeare by Jack Lynch chronicles the journey of one man’s legacy from commercially popular writer to demigod.  Lynch isn’t interested in a nouveau Will of the World, he doesn’t attempt to rationalize historical records and artifacts (or the lack thereof) to illuminate what kind of man was Shakespeare (or if he was himself at all!) – he quotes the critic Paul Fussell, “What we actually know about Shakespeare as a person can go on a 3×5 card without crowding.  But the writings confidently telling his life story and delineating his personality, morals, temper, and character would fill moving vans.”  Instead, Lynch is more concerned with the series of events following April 25, 1616.  And it’s an interesting story indeed.  He asserts, “[This] is a book about an afterlife, but there’s nothing mystical about it.”  It is simply the tale of “how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.”

As an educated actor, familiar faces from theater’s history were peppered throughout.  I found the section on re-writing Shakespeare quite intriguing.  For years Shakespeare’s work was heavily edited, if not re-written entirely, to fit the standards and mores of a given era.  This practice, coupled with his popularity still rising exponentially, has caused some of the re-writes to be absorbed into our contemporary cultural fabric.  For example, in Olivier’s 1956 Richard III, Olivier declares, “Off with his head!  So much for Buckingham,” which was an addition by Colley Cibber (points if you can tell me what Charles Brown has to do with Colley Cibber) in 1700, and famously performed by David Garrick in 1741.  However, Lynch maintains that these rewrites, while seemingly blasphemous, may have been catalysts in making Shakespeare into what he is today.  ”Lear and Macbeth,” he says, “after all, were not very successful until they were rewritten.”

Lynch traces the road to deification from reviving, to studying, to improving, to co-opting, to domesticating, to forging, to worshipping.  Like a worn cloth, his work was dug up, washed, bleached, re-stiched, re-fashioned, ironed, and has been used for just about everything.

The course of history is perpetually amazing; I recently finished work on the Ben Jonson play Epicene for (re:)Directions Theatre Company as a part of their Anybody But Shakespeare Festival, and I perpetually thought back to reading Lynch’s book – “Why Shakespeare?  Why not Jonson or Marlowe?  Why was Shakespeare the one who has withstood the test of time; Jonson and Marlowe were thought superior in their day.”  Lynch harkens to the words of Jonathan Bate, “Because ‘genius’ was a category invented in order to account for what was peculiar about Shakespeare.”  Lynch explains, “The rules for literary excellence has changed, and Shakespeare was the one who changed them.”

Lynch sets up a thorny path and history, as chronicled by Lynch, doesn’t disappoint:

“It’s a book about sex comedies with no sex, about tragedies where everyone lives happily ever after, about a Shakespeare festival where not a line of Shakespeare was spoken. [...] It’s about a classic of children’s literature written by a murderess, a war fought in scholarly footnotes, and foreign affairs being conducted on the London stage.  [...] It’s about a provincial bumpkin who became the greatest portraitist of the human condition.  It’s only fitting that it should be a book about paradoxes, because it’s about one of the greatest paradoxes in all of world literature: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.”

Buy it here!  Read it and tell me your thoughts!  And thank you Mr. Kelly for the wonderful gift.  You are too generous for words.

Bridget Peterson is a student at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and a founding member of FUNCTIONAL, an interdisciplinary advocacy group committed to creating universal healthcare in the US. Bridget is pursuing a career in primary care with the goal of keeping patients healthy through preventative, responsible care. Even if it means living in a van down by the river.

As artists, we often fall into the category of “uninsured.”  If we’re lucky enough to be working, union actors we have healthcare coverage; likewise, we can gain coverage if we’re slaving our souls away at a corporate restaurant.  In fact, a major factor of working at “day jobs” is the opportunity for insurance.  Even so, the need for an effective healthcare system spans gender, generations, and jobs.  In the thick of the healthcare battles/reform/debate/what-have-you.  In this posting, The Only Thing I Have To Declare presents you with some hard healthcare facts and some food for thought in the discussion for alternatives to the current system.

Healthy Profits vs. Healthy Americans:

The obstacles to and benefits of covering everyone

By Bridget Peterson

What’s the problem?

We all know by now, and can hopefully agree, that the US healthcare system is a in a downward spiral of unsustainable failure. And most of us can definitely agree that we’re beyond sick of hearing about it and trying to sift through the extremist propaganda to find out what’s actually happening. This article is intended to take some of the hostility and confusion out of the debate. You might think that, as a medical student, I have a serious agenda, but the only thing I have to declare is my honest commitment to patient care.

There are numerous ways to frame the healthcare crisis: politically, financially, medically, internationally…irrationally (town hall meeting-style). I’ll spare you most of that and just mention a few of my favorite highlights:

• The US has reached record-breaking levels of healthcare spending (one sixth of the GDP) while simultaneously managing to provide care to a new low proportion of the population.1
• Sixty-two percent of bankruptcies in the US in 2007 were due to medical expenses. Seventy-eight percent of those filing for bankruptcy had private health insurance.2
• 22,000 people are dying every year in the US due to lack of health insurance according to the Institute of Medicine. (Skeptical about the accuracy of this estimate? http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411588_uninsured_dying.pdf) Other estimates put the number of deaths at 100,000 annually.

For a neat summary of more appalling facts, visit http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml.

The problem is that we have spent decades pouring billions of dollars into a profit-driven private health insurance industry that has done incredibly well for itself, but has failed to deliver and administer healthcare in a way that effectively benefits our population. The US is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide healthcare to all its citizens. For this and other reasons (so many other reasons…), we are currently ranking 37th in the world in healthcare, right between the great world powers of Slovenia and Costa Rica (World Health Organization). Isn’t it time that Americans, paying twice per capita than what countries with universal coverage are paying, see some results?

What’s the hold up?

The biggest issue in healthcare right now is simple: both the current system and the reform efforts are a hot disaster. Obama, as we know, is pushing the public option, a government-run insurance plan. This plan, like Medicare, has no third party, mad expensive private insurers, and is basically a good idea (I think). So let’s get after that public option, right? The problems with the public option are two: first, people are horribly misinformed and are going apeshit about lies people have made up. You may have heard that people are saying that Obama wants to encourage seniors to engage in euthanasia, etc. etc., but all these crazy rumors have, in fact, no basis. A decent website to see some of the common myths about the public option, paired conveniently with the truth in video format, is the government website www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck.  The site is actually kind of funny, because it’s basically the White House being like, EVERYONE GET A GRIP! And stop making up lies!

The other problem with the public option is that it is unlikely to solve the problems of the healthcare system because it will be too expensive to sustain when implemented in conjunction with private insurance. Bear with me on this explanation. Single payer, a government-administered health system, controls costs effectively and can cover everyone because it eliminates billions of dollars red tape that is designed to prevent people from using healthcare resources. It does this by running a much more efficient system than private insurers. The government runs Medicare and Medicaid with a 2-3% overhead, meaning about 97 cents of every dollar can go to providing care. Private insurance companies spend almost 31 cents of every dollar just running their company; that is, paying their executives millions of dollars a year, advertising their false promises to the American public, and figuring out ways to avoid reimbursing their “beneficiaries” and deny the sickest people coverage. If there was one system, there would be no advertising or preposterous waste. Do we want to keep paying people to tell us what not to do? Why do we continue to put up with this? Unfortunately, private insurance and big pharma are two of the most powerful lobbyist groups, and they have a political stranglehold on our representatives.

How will this thing really work?

Single payer works for a couple reasons. First, it gives the government the ability to consolidate massively overly-complicated payment systems. Medical offices spend over $31 billion a year in staff time on insurance paperwork alone.3 Second, single payer allows the use of collective bargaining power to get the best prices on services, and more significantly on DRUGS. Big pharma is a whole ‘nother mess, but basically, drug companies are charging the US far more money for drugs than any other country, but we’re too fragmented to do anything about it.

Two other important ways single payer controls costs is by covering everyone and taking care of people. Weird idea, right? Having 47 million uninsured, and far more underinsured, people in our country creates enormous expense for people who are insured, whether they have private or government insurance. When an uninsured patient goes to the ER, the hospital needs to cover their costs somehow, and those costs are covered by insured patients in the form of pro-rated fees that account for non-payment by millions of patients. It is truly in the best interest of insured Americans, not to mention uninsured Americans, for everyone to have coverage. Second, when those uninsured patients do come in to the ER, it’s more likely to be for a heart attack or diabetic crisis than for the low-cost and proven-effective blood pressure medications or glucose checks that keep patients healthy and prevent massively expensive and dangerous complications. Unfortunately, these preventative measures only keep patients who have the option of receiving regular medical care at an affordable price healthy. People who have no coverage avoid the doctor until it is an emergency because they have to; they pay for it with their quality of life and projected outcomes, and everyone else pays for it with their inflated insurance premiums.

In short, we can control costs by providing quality care for everyone, or continue

to pour billions into private insurance, but we cannot do both. The system is so unsustainable that private insurance premiums are set to outstrip the average household income in the next 15 years. As I heard the founder of Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan say, we will not have our hospital beds empty while our people die in the streets. But let’s not wait that long. Healthcare reform is absolutely critical for an economically and physically healthy future in this country, and the time for it is now.

I feel I would be doing a disservice to my cause without clearing up a few of the usual objections, so here we go:

1. Isn’t this socialized medicine? That’s un-American!

No. Single payer is publicly-funded, privately-delivered care. Doctors and hospitals will still be independent entities, and they will still compete for to provide the best care, because they still need to have patients. The government will never tell you what doctor to go to or make any medical decisions for you.

2. I don’t want to pay 60% income tax like Denmark.

Actually, Denmark is the happiest country in the world. I know, I was there, it’s awesome. Anyway, single payer will not require a 60% income tax. There will be a slight tax increase (<2%), but the amount that your taxes would increase will be significantly less than the amount of money you pay annually for a private insurance plan. Bonus on that: you can’t be denied coverage and people will stop losing their homes trying to pay for life-saving care. Win!

3. Don’t all doctors hate this?

NO. A 2008 Annals of Internal Medicine study found 59% of physicians are in support of single payer. Some of us actually went into medicine to help people, not to do paperwork. Plus, having private insurance decide what your patients can and cannot get really puts a damper on how much you can help them. Many people think doctors hate single payer because the American Medical Association, the largest group of physicians in the US, officially opposed single payer. Briefly: the AMA is a conservative organization officially represented almost exclusively by specialists earning top salaries. There is some anxiety among this demographic that single payer may reduce their salaries. There is not a lot of evidence to suggest that this would even happen.

4. Won’t single payer force us to ration healthcare like the Canadians?

Those damn Canadians. Basically, yes. But get this: right now a private industry in which we have no representation rations care (yes, really!) based on what is the most profitable for them, and who can pay for it. A single payer system rations care based on what is in the best interest of health. I strongly encourage the readers of this blog to check out this article by the philosopher Peter Singer. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&em

5. What are the best resources to find out more?

A great resource for single payer facts, and reform in general, is http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_resources.php

Good sources of truly independent information are The Commonwealth Foundation, http://www.commonwealthfund.org/ (the whole site is good, and puts US healthcare in a global context) and also Fact Check from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/seven-falsehoods-about-health-care/

Ready to get active? Check out http://www.singlepayeraction.org/

And just in case you need this made super easy, check this out!

References:

1. . Siska, A, et al, Health Spending Projections Through 2018: Recession Effects Add Uncertainty to The Outlook Health Affairs, March/April 2009; 28(2): w346-w357.

2. Himmelstein, D, E., et al, “Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study, American Journal of Medicine, May 2009.

3. http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/204206670.html

Edgy.

I witnessed a crime last night. The culprit? The National Theatre in London. The crime? A heinous act of fraud and open thievery. Using taxpayers’ money, they produced and marketed, with colorful, flashy billboards around town, something promising to be entertaining. In reality?  …I walked out at the interval. Now, I want to assure anyone reading this – I have never, ever in my life walked out of a show. I did a mental showreel in my head of all shows I can remember seeing, and I can confidently say I have never walked out – not even at my half-cousin’s christmas pageant when he played a goat. And to be honest, it wasn’t the absolute worst theatre experience of my life, I have seen worse come out the other end of a well meaning theatre ensemble project aimed at ‘education.’ But the true horror, what makes this the final straw that sends me out without so much as a mid-show ice cream tub, is the audacity of a publicly funded, emblematic institution producing something so amateur and pathetic. Not only does this constitute a misappropriation of public funds in my mind, but it damages the state of theatre. Simply put, when the standard by which something is measured is diminished, so does the entire field, even if by perception, diminish. For instance, to illustrate my point, last night there was an entire class of American students in attendance. It was clear (because you can tell) that this would be, for many of them, their first taste of professional theatre. And with that show being their sole exposure, I am fairly certain that this will also be their last venture to theatreland. And it’s not their fault. The National Theatre of a country is rightly perceived, by most, as the representative of the potential and merit of that nation’s theatrical artists. In simplest terms, it is their vested responsibility to produce theatre that, at its most simple, tells a story well. I am not even asking that it aim for greater artistic horizons or new heights of spoken word – just that it simply not suck.

Rachel is an expatriate (who lives in London), a writer, an actor, and a director... and she works for a fancy film company. Yes, yes. That means she's a "Renaissance Woman."

In trying to justify the National’s decision to take on this show, I happened upon not only the likely story behind the production, but a case perfect example of a growing symptom in Theatres with Means both in this country and back home in the States. Hanif Kureishi is a well-known, well-respected author of previous darlings ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ and ‘Mother,’ as well as countless novels. He predominately writes stories set either in the Indian subcontinent, or in the immigrant story of Pakistanis in Britain. He recently published and won many prizes for his novel Black Album. I am an artistic director at the National Theatre. I see a man of clout, carrying his own press interest, writing an ‘award-winning’ book about ‘edgy’ immigrant youths in ‘uncertain and even edgier’ times in ‘edgy’ London, and I could commission a script from the writer himself, get a bunch of young, ‘edgy’ Indian or Pakistani actors and BADA BING, front cover of the Culture section in the Times and maybe even a transfer for Brooklyn Academy of Music. Edgy. But, you see, this is when a business mind mars art. This was the brainchild of someone seeing the ingredients for what SHOULD be great, without first considering what about this story makes it suitable for the stage. I contend that an artistic mind would have known better, and would have pulled the plug if he or she had doubts before knowingly taking money from prospective audience members. But like most theatres, the National has too many businessman making the decisions – the Roundabout must have  a running flow chart of how much certain stars, when cast, could potentially make the company. And as a result, the art suffers. The standard by which we measure is lowered, and the National stops representing the possibility of the theatrical community, and starts representing the working business plan dreamed up by the Chairmen of the Board. Yes, the show was bad, but the worst part is that no one up in the turret of this theatrical insitution seemed to care, or have the sense of artistic integrity to not want it to represent them and thus pull it for further development. No, as I remember, they pushed to add more seats to each show to sell more tickets before press night. Meeting sales projections over cultural obligations, priceless.

Addendum: That being said, I just went to see the National’s version of All’s Well That Ends Well. It was truly a work of innovation and reinvention. Who knew such a difficult play could be so light? And work well as a storybook fairytale come to life? I might just keep my membership at the Nash after all…

A Greek Chorus. Oh, who are we kidding? It's actually just some wasted BFA Acting students.

I am a Theatrical Neo-Conservative.  I said it.  I don’t want to maintain the status quo of the arts, I want to put it in reverse.  A few thousand years in reverse.  Trust me, this is for the sake of mankind.  In short, theatrical art’s lifeline is inherently dependent on our ability to Speak Greek.

A quick lesson: The Greeks were the Founding Fathers of theatrical events as we know them.  The Greek mentality, and given, this is such a sophomoric interpretation but just bear with me so we’re all on the same page here, BUT: the Greek mentality rested on some basic principles.  One of which is referred to as “The Golden Mean.”  As you can probably extrapolate, “The Golden Mean” refers to perfect harmony.  Imagine an equilateral triangle, the top corner labeled “Deus” (or The Gods), the lower left “Polis” (The Government), and the lower right “Oikos” (The Family).

When the Golden Mean is activated, the triangle is, as I said, equilateral.  If one of the angles is out of sync, the triangle is skewed.  If the deus, polis, or oikos is not in balance, the entire triangle is thrown out of whack.  Let’s look at arguably the “perfect” play, Oedipus: the family is out of sync (murdered father, mother-wife), therefore the polis is in shambles and the gods are angry.  We have miasma – chaos!  We seek to right the “wronged” angle and restore The Golden Mean.  The Greeks were problem solvers.  They saw a societal ill and presented a method to change it in order to reach harmony.  Regardless, they brought up important questions and theoretical (as well as practical) debates – if the Gods controlled Oedipus’ fate was he really hubristic?  Could he escape his destiny?  If we are unhappy with the current situation, who do we have to blame?  The Gods?  The cornerstone of the family?  The Government as a whole?  Where does the problem begin, and where can we end it?  Just for starters…

The Greeks made sure drama was a tool for dialogue, and dialogue allows us to progress as a people.  Right now, as I am preparing to get in gear for some upcoming projects for In Vino Veritas (five points if you can tell me why we’ve named ourselves that), my production collaborative, a lot of things have been put into focus…

Where do I begin with the ills of theater today?  It’s not held in high societal regard – Middle America doesn’t view artists as “important” as doctors, lawyers, politicians.  And yet, when a culture becomes obsolete, the only thing they leave behind is their art.  The de-emphasis of drama, as well as the glorification of trash television and reality t.v., removes the artist from his or her well-regarded status.  We’ve lost the bigger picture in the era of “Me, me, me!”

Here’s a thought, and artists, I hold us at a fault: it’s never about “Me.”  There’s no “I” in art.  A former teacher of mine would have the class repeat after her: “I am me.”  A venomous mantra.  The glorification of the me is a dangerous, dangerous thing.  It is our job to serve the story, not serve ourselves.  Go on “The Real World” if you want to work out your bullshit, this is the theater.  If we can’t get past ourselves, how are we going effect change?  And if we don’t effect change, we become irrelevant.  And irrelevant art doesn’t survive.

Our artistic polis is out of whack!  We’ve got to set it straight or this artistic miasma will run us into the ground.  We need to understand that it’s not about “my” work, it’s about “the work;” not about “my” vision, but about “the” vision.

Yes, yes, I concede that one must know oneself, but that’s overrated.  We discover who we are through what we do.  And I certainly don’t want to discover that I’m a selfish, whiny, insolent actor who can’t put her own baggage to the side to say, “Hey, I have a job here.”  It’s not gonna kill you to have an identity crisis.

Now let’s expand: theater has become inaccessible to the modern man.  My dad doesn’t understand Shakespeare.  Shakespeare, like the Greeks, wrote for the people, to the people.  And yet, today his work is regarded as high scholarly and difficult to understand?  What is wrong with this picture?  

Us little, greedy artists have lofted the language and locked up the pedestrian notes that Shakespeare provides us.  We’re holding hostage potential work to create progression in society!  My God, my friends, let it go!  

Theater has taken such a 180 that the Average American can’t see him or herself in the art.  No one wants to see something if they can’t relate to it!  I had another teacher who said, “If a play is a good play, it can be done in a parking lot.”  God, how I love this lofty adage!  Spoken like a true, embittered soldier.  Fact is, this too is false.  Aristotle included “spectacle” for a reason.   People want to get taken in by the magic!  It’s human nature to want to see something special, something you won’t see every day – and we need to use this as a tool to further the story we are telling.  I’m not a proponent of the Disney-fication of Broadway, but hell, they’re doing something right!  What adult in their right mind would put down money to see The Little Mermaid, otherwise?

Us “hardcore” artists are getting it wrong.  It’s not about they story “we” want to tell, it’s about the story that must be told.  Forget that freaky, performance art shit.  It’s not working and people don’t want to see it.  So get over the fact that your Lower East Side movement piece in front of slideshows of iguanas and black boxes is a massive, massive failure.  Ask yourself: What am I trying to do?  Serve yourself?  Make yourself feel real good?  Well, there’s your problem.

Things suck right now, guys.  Really, they do.  So create something fabulous and start the conversation going.  Our polis is fucked.  The oikos is being denied uniform equality!  And do we even have a deus?  Discuss!  

The Greeks didn’t have everything right.  I’m not a fan of slavery and women couldn’t even attend the theater.  But they had some really great ideas that we claim to base ourselves around but don’t really embrace.  Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.

Performance is about the audience.  Never about you.  Take that in on a deep breath and when you let it out, imagine a perfect triangle.

Rachel is an expatriate who lives in London, works for a fancy film company, and often resorts to "wanking off" her boyfriend in the back row during terrible productions.

Virginia Woolf stipulated that the single prerequisite for creating art is  ”a room of one’s own.” However, who pays for this room? Who subsidizes the artist’s living so as to allow him or her the opportunity to create, explore and inject society with things beautiful and thought-provoking? Inadvertantly, a recent New York Times article sparked a heated, often vitriolic debate on the subsidizing of artists and wanna-be’s in the city. The article discusses the effect the economic crisis is having on hipster subdivisions of New York, such as Williamsburg, namely the crush on real estate and local businesses as the financial lifeline provided by the hipster generation’s parents back home in Upper Middle Class, USA has abruptly dried up. Without those monthly bank transfers from Mom and Dad, rents are becoming harder and harder to pay, and the buying up of prime real estate is all but stalled. Local vegan cafes and designer consignment shops are having trouble making sales quotas without the normal onslaught of the trust fund crowd (who’s going to by up all of those intentionally distressed plaid shirts?) Upon reading the article, I began to peruse the comments page, and was shocked to find entry after entry defaming these ‘trustafarians’ and their parents. And what’s more, it wasn’t just open judgement, there was a specific cadre of people most offended – the young artistic community. I have followed this online skirmish for about a week, and have seen that there is a typically unheard contingent that is putting words to their frustrations: those that have talent, training, and ambition but who, due to financial constraints and lack of outside funding, must sideline their artistic and creative pursuits in favor of survival. Yes, they tend to find ways to commit to the second full time job of following their dreams, but it is by no means with the same dedication and energy that they should and want to commit. And, any early career and training opportunities that do exist are frequently unpaid, basically leaving this amazing pathway open only to those who can afford to offer up their days for free. One commenter offered up this example:

“As a ‘fact-checker’ at San Francisco Magazine I worked 9-5 shifts without seeing a single dollar. With the option of working part-time and interning 3 days a week, I split my time between restaurant work and the magazine business. My younger more priveleged counterpart spent the full 5 days a week honing her networking skills while mom and dad foot the bill for her Pacific Heights apartment. Can you guess which one of us is now Managing Editor?” – Amanda Huelse

The Real Deal.

Some of those coming down on the side of those lucky few who arrive in New York fully funded claimed that art, through the ages, has rested on patronage, and they are completely right in saying so. Michaelangelo had the pope, Fitzgerald had Zelda’s family money, Sofia Coppola has the residuals from The Godfather fueling her engines – no one is denying this. In fact, the crux of my argument is not in lambasting the idea of subsidizing art and the makers of art, it’s that America’s artistic community, and indeed its government, has turned its back on rearing a new generation of voices and minds. There are no resources in place ready to pluck those that could bring us the next Grapes of Wrath, or The Piano Lesson, or Rhapsody in Blue from the hostess stands of Manhattan, or the trenches of clerical temp work, and bring them into the fold, and simply give them a chance to inform or reflect our worlds in ways that society can appreciate. This has been the fundamental life cycle for the arts for centuries, and to the confusion and shock of most Americans, is still very much in practice today in Europe, Asia, and many other parts of the world. Somehow we have lost the plot and, if we are not careful, we will be left behind. Soon, the only voices that will be heard are those that have been lucky enough to not have to struggle to get showcased, and really, does that make for good drama? Or a good novel? Undoubtedly, I like my artists tortured, and not just existentially.

“Could we get real?  Every year is the Year of the Man, with a couple of women who manage to crawl their way into the lineup.  There’s some feeling in rehearsal halls and writers’ retreats and drunken dinner parties, that maybe the American theater participates rather too enthusiastically in the supposed gender bias that the American media tosses about willy-nilly while discussing candidates for higher office.  Mostly it is women playwrights who feel that way; male playwrights think the system is really, really fair and that women playwrights who raise these quetions are whiners or dirty feminists.”

I will be writing about this topic.  A lot.  Because it is something I have to deal with every single day of my life.  And have had to deal with.  Every day of my life.  So this is not my opus magnum or my final say, just skimming the top of a deeper, disturbing reality that the majority of active working artists must face.

These women are some of the most incredible voices of the future. My graduating class was 80% women.

Here’s the fact: a large contingency of the art world is women.  I’d hazard to say we outnumber men.  I don’t mean to make this an us-against-them, because women themselves are at fault for our plight.  I don’t see any valid reason, at this point, why women have such limited opportunities in the industry.

I think there’s something to be said for the concept of “Everyman.”  As many of you may know, Everyman was a medieval play depicting the “average joe’s” ordeal with all things medieval.  Well, primarily heaven and hell and redemption.  That sort of thing.  The concept of “Everyman” has transcended time and become a grandiose entity that supposedly encompasses everything we have come to conceptualize about “John Doe.”  Or these days, “Joe the Plumber” (how’s he doing, by the way?).  Unfortunately, “Everyman” doesn’t umbrella the human race.  ”Everyman” is, in fact, quite limited.  First of all, he’s a man.  He’s also caucasian, blue-or-white collar, and raised with a solid moral backing.  This is the template for not only what writers write about (not all, I’m generalizing.  Keep your pants on), but who we aim to market productions towards.

We need to divorce ourselves from the “Everyman” concept and widen our breadth.  We, as creators, must understand that no character is universal, it is the continual reinterpretation of a story and molding it our era’s needs that keeps work fresh, meaningful, and impacting.

There’s nothing we can do to change the past.  The classics have been written.  We have the right to reinterpret, of course, but there’s something mind-numbing about seeing another Prospera.  Don’t make it about a woman playing the part.  That’s not the real gem – it’s the story in light of gender-bending.

My male friends have it easier.  They do.  And most of them can’t hold a candle to my ladies on stage.  But yet, they’re often the ones getting work rather than us.  I get work.  I do.  I can honestly say that for the past year, I have worked steadily acting.  I have had a great many more auditions and call backs and meetings.  But I don’t get the hand-outs that I see my male counterparts getting (“We’re putting up a production and need a guy.  Can you do it?”).  I have to work at least ten times harder to get the same pay-off.  I see a lot of women putting up productions that feature a shit-ton of men and ask myself, “Why?”  Why not help a sister out?

One particularly horrendous semester at my university, barely any production that featured women (and remember, our class was basically all girls) were being put up.  At the price tag of our tuition (a fucking lot), there is no excuse for this.  Rachel, another friend, and I aren’t the type to take this lying down.  It was a flat-out insult.  However, as intelligent, hard-working, progressive women, rather than bitch and moan, we scheduled a meeting with the assistant director of the program along with a department head (a woman).  We compiled a list, at least two-pages long, single spaced, of quality dramas, well written and lauded for their value, that featured predominantly female casts.  We attempted to appeal to the department head as women, to illustrate that we were in the same boat, that we looked to her as an inspiration as someone who climbed to a certain level of status in the art world, maintaining a leadership position at a top university and the founding member of a local theater company.  We also voiced our concern that the school, which mainly accepted women, never featured female students in their advertisements.  That was a side note.  We wanted to be recognized for what we were – a predominantly female class.  We are talented, the hardest workers you will ever meet, intelligent, and down right beautiful (I’m not gonna lie.  Our class was fucking hot).  Why waste these gifts that had been bestowed upon this institution?

The meeting was a disaster.  The department head responded negatively to the list we presented as well as our politically correct argument.  I think this happened for a number of reasons.  Inherently, women are not traditionally supportive of each other.  I think there was a feeling of threat; by another’s intellect, talent, ethic, etc.  I think women project their own bitterness regarding the struggles they’ve had to face onto the younger generation, and in an attempt to preserve and sanctify their own success, they sabotage the opportunities of those “under” them.  Or around them.  The cycle of oppression runs deep – and women are still oppressed.  In this instance, this individual’s own personal oppression within the art world, and the world at large, is transposed, due to her “power” over us, onto the students.  By oppressing us, she can then become the oppressor and gain some sort of further status while validating her position in life.  

A scene from an Alan Ball play, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, which some of my classmates and I finally got produced at a university level. With no budget, of course.

Educational institutions, universities foremost must set the standard for a new era: if you train the next generation of artists and realizers and tell them “This is what the standard is – women fully represented on stage and screen,” then perhaps we will see change.  But if they are going to waste tuition and misappropriate funds to work out their own artistic visions, which reflect an era of inequality and embrace The Man’s World – if they produce plays that have a cast of, say, four men and one woman, while the poor, the tired, the huddled masses of women who have worked their asses off to be there sit in the corner, relegated to workshop productions and chorus members – we are going to stay stuck right where we are.

I have a friend, Kevin, whom I’ve known since I was 13.  And I’ll say this – Kevin, a director (a great one, too), is drawn to stories which feature under-represented characters and minorities.  I hope to God that as we, the future of the art world, take the industry by storm, Kevin is not unique.  That he is one of many who will see we need a drastic makeover.

It is our job to break this cycle.  Female producers need to step up to the plate and pull work done by women out of “second stages, workshops, readings, or [...] their presence increases at institutions as resources decrease” (Susan Jonas, producing director of the Classical Theater of Harlem).  To this day, it’s a rare woman who has transcended gender.  No matter what our profession, we are still denoted as female.  ”Everyman” is ever present.  Until the term “actress” becomes obsolete, a term I admit I readily use to describe myself, we haven’t crossed the gender line.

This picture is absolutely ridiculous.

I tried to watch “True Blood.”  Really, I did.  Alan Ball is a Class A Genius and we could all intellectually, emotionally, aesthetically, and artistically masturbate to “Six Feet Under.”  He’s also a fabulous playwright.  When my friend Laura told me he had a new show out called “True Blood,” I thought it was gonna be HBO’s “Sopranos” replacement, some sort of mob type show.  Maybe it was the “blood” thing.  I don’t know.  When I SurftheChannel-ed “True Blood” you can imagine my surprise when vampires started running around drinking blood out of beer bottles.

I am not a science-fiction fan but I’ll admit I like my spooky media.  Interview With the Vampire was tons of fun and my dad let me watch in when I was 7, so that makes it just that much cooler.  Hocus Pocus is fucking awesome and I won’t lie when I say Jess and I spent this past October organizing our lives around the “Halloweentown” series showings on Disney.  Practical Magic made me want to move to New England and grow herbs and have powers.  Bottom line, supernatural = great in my book.

Fucking Fierce.

I remember the first time I saw “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.”  It was the summer, I was in late elementary school, I was at my aunt and uncle’s house.  I was flipping through the channels on their TV in the basement and this show came on.  And I couldn’t turn it off.  It was funny.  It was kinda scary.  There were fights, there were kisses, there were bitchy comments from the Popular Girl Peanut Gallery.  And I totally identified with the main character, rather, many of the characters.  They were down to earth, sassy, and smart.  And they had problems.  Not only did they have to find dates to the dance and study for their math tests, they also had to save the world from unnatural forces of evil.  And the dialogue is totally killer.

When I realized “Buffy…” was a truly great show, I was in college, probably my freshman or sophomore year.  I didn’t necessarily “rediscover” it, it just hit me how brilliant of a series it was.  Joss Whedon is one of those people, like I dunno, George Lucas (and I hate Star Wars, gag me with a spoon), who can create a real “world of the play”, in a sense.  Whedon tracked out his plot years in advance.

Stop rolling your eyes.  You liked Toy Story, right?  Whedon wrote that shit.  Talk about a penchant for dialogue.  The moment of my real appreciation that I previously mentioned happened during a re-run of “Band Candy.”  Principal Snyder, the rodent-like, evil principal of Sunnydale High, was trying to force Buffy and Co. (the Scooby Gang, as we Buffy folk refer to them) to help sell band candy and raise money for the school.  Buffy snarkily retorts, “I sure we like the idea of going all Willy Loman, but we’re not in the band.”  I mean, that is just smart.

The plot line is excellent.  I mean, yeah, when it went to the CW it got a bit crazy and Michelle Trachtenberg certainly didn’t help things but dude, they were the first series to do a musical episode.  Everyone and their mother followed suit!  There are really very few plot holes and each episode carries the viewer further along while remaining unique.  They did one episode with no dialogue.  That’s over forty minutes of television with no fucking dialogue.  They were nominated for an Emmy for it, and rightly so.

Whedon borrows from a variety of sources for plot inspiration – Shakespeare, the Bible, Greek mythology, Asian cultures.  It’s quite impressive.

But the hook, line, and sinker of it’s sheer brilliance can’t be glued to one attribute.  It’s the overall conjunction the show.  The stakes (pun intended) are always life and death, the writing is quirky, relatable, and clever, and the relationships are real.  They are indetifiable.  They are familiar.

“True Blood” is terrible, as far as this genre goes.  It’s soft-core porn, basically.  And I’m not saying soft-core porn is bad, whatever, it’s fine, but it is what it is.  Don’t try to pass it off as a viable, well-written, well-acted, well-directed primetime drama.  That’s like me telling you Backdoor Babes IX is quality cinema.  It’s just a lie.  Anna Paquin is abominable, and there’s really no debate over that.  I mean, don’t even try to argue with me.  She’s horrible.  Alan Ball dropped his ball on this one.  I’m still holding out hope for next season, but I’m not gonna watch it until my friend Jack tells me if it gets any better.  Or any worse.  I’ll watch it if it gets worse.  Because then it would be up there with, I dunno, Gigli or something just so bad you have to see.  No, that’s not true.  Nothing is worse than “It’s turkey-time.  You know, ‘gobble-gobble.’”  Ugh.  I just threw up.

Which brings us to the pointlessness of Twilight, which is an even sadder “Buffy” cop-out.  High school girl with a vampire boyfriend.  But he’s not evil.  Sounds familiar, right?  Twilight is a pathetic excuse for material for fourteen year olds across the nation to envision while diddling themselves in their pink bedsheets.  I admit: I refuse to see this.  I refuse to read this.  I am not subjecting myself to some farce that some religious, stay-at-home mom from fucking Texas wrote because she’s unhappy in her marriage and read one too many harlequin romance novels.  Really, the only interpretation of Twilight I am willing to endure is my friend Jack’s version:

“I just couldn’t put down the book because it was so bad.  Ok, but Gina?  Here’s the movie.  According to Twilight, there’s no down side to being a vampire.  They don’t kill people, they can go to school, they’re all obnoxiously good looking, have super powers, and they can go out into the sun.  Wait, that’s not true.  If they go outside, they have to wear body glitter.  And the girl is really annoying.  So… yeah.  That’s Twilight.”

Vomit.

Okay, that is ridiculous.  Paying no attention to centuries-old, hand-forged through fear and ill-education vampire lore that spans cultures and time.  It’s just ridiculous.  The whole point of supernatural material is fear of the unknown and what happens to “us” when we are faced with that.  With no danger, no mortal peril, where are the stakes?  Where are the conflicts we have to fight our way through to come out on the other side?  If you want a show where evil isn’t always evil and the lines are blurred, check out “Dexter.”  That’s a good show.  Not “True Blood.”  Give me a break.  And don’t even get me started on the Sookie Stackhouse book series.  Seriously.  Illiteracy in America, meet your new best friend.

If a show, movie, series of any kind is going to reuse a similar plot line and theatrical elements to that of a series that went off the air less than 10 years ago, you really need to bring it.  Don’t half-ass it.  Don’t keep yourself preoccupied with the sexual angle of the drama, that’s never going to last.  You need substance, people.

“Buffy” did it first.  And “Buffy” did it better.  There’s just no contest.

I’ve been in acting classes since I was four.  I spent four years training at a conservatory.  Welcome to my world.  I have to go cry now.

There's actually a Holy Land theme park. Complete with a "Jesus." That seems almost blasphemous, right?

This isn’t going to be a comparison.  Michael Moore is definitely a “moore” (haha, aren’t I clever?) inciting political filmmaker and undoubtedly realizes what he sets out to do, which is to make documentaries that meet Aristotle’s definition of a perfect tragedy with a dash of snarky humor.  The title was just to get your attention.  We’re gonna talk about religion (oooh, controversial!  Discuss). I watched Religulous the other day and had a very positive reaction to it.  Though he did let the Jews off light (we’ll get there).

The overall message that I took away from the documentary is that religion is used as a crutch, a veil, a destructive raison d’etre, and a diversion from the actual impending doom – we’re more likely to blow ourselves up via nuclear attacks than witness the End Times via the Second Coming.  And we need to get our priorities straight.

The fact of the matter is, immediately after the surge of any major religion, its universal congregants are convinced they are living in these so-called “End Times,” whether is was 1460 BC, 2 AD, 1635, 1842, or 1977.  Random times, all complete with people running around convinced that Armageddon was coming.  The issue is that now, we currently have the technology to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maher takes umbridge with so-called secular governments being lead by religious zealots.  He says,

“The plain fact is religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people – by irrationalists – by those who would steer the ship of state, not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.”  

Dramatic, but true.  He interviews Senator Mike Pryor who attempts to give politically correct and Christian-pleasing answers, only to look like a fool in the end.  I give him props for participating but as an intelligent, rational, registered voter and American citizen, I do become increasingly concerned.

Maher interviews those who I’d consider extremists, with the exception of a few Muslim leaders.  He interviews a Belgian stateswoman – and I do wish he didn’t talk over her to make his point, because what she was saying was pretty great – and she tried to explain that any fundamental interpretation of the Koran is flawed because those who wrote it were directly reflecting upon the historical time period in which they lived and considering we live in 2009, many of teachings have become obsolete.  She wanted to take away the “big picture,” if you will, and apply it to her life.  I think this is what we need to aim to do – take the “big picture” away from religious teachings because at their core, religions recycle and rewrite each other leaving some basic human truths which have stood the test of time and culture and that we in turn deify as holy teachings.

Maher was a relatively respectful interviewer, speaking to some men at a truck-stop chapel.  After a debate, he said “Thank you guys.  Pray for me!”  He doesn’t buy the rhetoric but respected his subjects as people.

As I mentioned before, he really only interviewed extremists and those who live “outside” the accepted religious box (Mormons, Scientologists, Cannabis People).  The two interviews which impressed me the most were two Catholic priests, one the astronomer for the Vatican, the other just a higher-up at the Vatican.  Both seemed to view the Bible as a record of a culture’s way of life and political aspirations combined with a re-telling of teachings of Jesus.  They truly viewed the Old Testament as anachronistic and were encouraging of a dawn of a new era accepting of intellect and progress.  They both really had it hard for Vatican II, too.

I would have liked to see Maher go deeper with Judaism; he made some bris jokes and interviewed some radical Orthodox Jews (one who is a Holocaust denier, the other spends his life making inventions for people to use on the Sabbath so they can actually get shit done).  I would have like to see him interview some women from Hasidic homes, for instance, because like both Christianity and Islam, Judaism can be completely misogynistic as well.

Also, I would have like to see him interview some pedestrian Methodists, Reform Jews, Kitchen Catholics, or Progressive Muslims.  People who don’t consider themselves particularly religious, but occasionally observant with a penchant for believing in some sort of afterlife.  But then again, these people probably can’t bring about the entertainment factor that a Latin American man claiming to be Jesus incarnate can.

Maher teeters between atheism and agnosticism, commenting,

“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do… The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.”

And I don’t disagree.  I hate Kevin Smith movies but love the moment in Dogma where Chris Rock’s character explains that the whole problem with religion today is that people took a good idea and turned it into belief, and belief is dangerous.  Good ideas help us progress, but belief is what people die over.  That notion was certainly residual in Religulous.

Most people don’t know jack shit about their own religions, let alone other religions.  I remember being in 8th grade and some girl asked me where I went to church.  Given, she was always pretty retarded, but when I said a went to such and such Lutheran church, she goes, “Oh, so you don’t believe in Jesus?”  WHAT?!?! Then, at 13, I had to explain to this fat-calfed moron who somehow made it onto the cheerleading squad (she was fat.  Seriously) that no, Lutheranism is a form of Christianity.  I mean, there’s just no excuse for that.

We all need to look at these books as primary sources depicting ancient cultures.  Faith is fine, faith is great, and if the tenants of a specific religion help someone key into a greater human truth, fabulous.  But as Maher so elegantly discerns, faith is not a tool for decision making.  He states,

“Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction… Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing Lord, I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’ Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.”

Maher wants us to back up and see what’s happening around us, he leaves us with:

“If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was, that we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got passed the neurological disorder of wishing for it. “

I highly recommend the documentary.  It has just the right amount of inciting information, intelligence, and humor that we all need right now.

Rachel is an expatriate who lives in London, works for a fancy film company, and often resorts to "wanking off" her boyfriend in the back row during terrible productions.

I read Perez Hilton just about every day. At work, at any moment I have free, I read the front pages of every major newspaper online, as well as Variety. My day to day life is saturated by media. And I am not alone – whole swatches of the public are swayed and united by the side they take on whatever issue, personality or scandalous event is splashed through the news that week, or even that day. Facebook groups will pop up to unite each warring side. And the power and influence that lies beneath the groundswell of public opinion isinexorable, and unyielding. Zinnie Harris’ version of Henrik Ibsen’s oft-studied A Doll’s House takes this idea of the  ‘Public Eye’ as the overarching determinant of social behavior and moral standards and uses it as the catalyzing menace for the action of the play.

This version sets the play at turn of the 20th century London, specifically in the image senstitive world of politics. Some critics have balked at this re-imagining of a classic story, but I think this is a brilliant way to make accessible the stakes of the decisions these people have made and are making, and it makes this story at last prescient. Seriously, I know it’s hard for all you ancient theatre critics to deal with change and progress, but dear old Ibsen won’t be offended, I promise. To be quite fair, sitting in a poorly lit classroom discussing how Torvald the banker would be seen as dirty because his wife took out money on bad faith, I really didn’t understand the fallout, or why I should at all be empathetic. I thought Nora was a fucking child, Torvald a bore, and the whole thing puffed full of hot air. My professor called it an example of the well-made play, and went on to say that it is the well made play that every major work of drama since its time has worked to destroy. So, I think alterations to the original form isn’t necessarily sacrilegious, especially if it is only done to bring the story closer to the audience.

The production wasn’t completely flawless, but I discovered new things about the play’s characters, which is absolutely SHOCKING this day and age, and what’s more, I saw our times reflected… enough to make a theatre-goer’s heart stop. Harris, by making the characters a part of the political world, the money fraud isn’t bad because of the deceit, it’s bad because of the potential public perception of these acts as reported by mass media. The determinant of what is morally good and bad rests on such a fine line, that human complexity and fault is pretty much factored out. Anyone disputing this claim is insane – seriously, as he or she crazy person would be in direct dispute of what we read every single day on every single news headline. “Government Rewards Thieves at AIG,” “Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary, Uses Public Money for Porn,” “British Tax Dollars Fund the Clearing of MP’s Moat”‘ “Presedential Candidate Impregnates Chick While Wife Dying from Cancer” – ok, so maybe that one is worthy of public scrutiny. I will give you that, people.

The only ones who come out of it unscathed, are Kelman and Christine. And my god – Zinnie Harris injected something completely new here, and I LOVE IT. There is a scene that must be viewed. Must. Chris Eccleston, playing Kelman, is making sweet love every night with the audience with his portrayal of this broken man. He arrives onstage in continuing, growing states of disintegration. I was sitting on the aisle in the stalls (and at the Donmar, if you are in the stalls, you are literally in spitting distance, so it was the perfect vantage point… although the maid kept batting her arm into me…) and literally, every time he blew onto and off of stage, I could feel an energy shift in the room, he brought onstage images of this destroyed man raging at his home, desperately keeping his mind together in order to find an answer. Christine, who up to the end has been this batted down, cold character, suddenly lets it all fall away when faced with him in a dark room, alone, seemingly to talk him down from publicly smearing Nora and her family, but, as we find out, to actually reclaim the love of her life. This was hot. Eccleston, faced in his darkest moment with someone saying, basically, ‘I don’t care. The public is an entity that does not exist in our kitchen when we cook a meal together, or lay in bed on a Sunday morning,’ literally collapses into a sobbing heap at the prospect of having her love. When he asks her ‘Can I kiss you again?’ it’s with a disbelief that she is even real… I dare anyone who was there last night to tell me they weren’t AT LEAST choked up at that moment. Me? I fell in love again, right along with them. With this nonjudgmental love butting up against the final ‘Exit’ scene, one can feel Nora’s complete abandonment and horror at her husband’s reaction to both the realization of her actions and the realization that the story will not be pursued.

Dance that tarantella.

So, what did I come away with? Chris Eccleston is both an amazing actor, and incredibly sexy. Toby Stephens’ regression to an infant throughout the final scene was brilliant. And Gillian Anderson made such  clear character choices, that I almost forgot to write about her… I didn’t have to think about her I guess. What blew me away about her, is that she didn’t get drawn in by the melodramatic moments, and always held onto the character she had created. It takes will and focus to do that. Acting students, take note. When I met her afterwards, I should have said something like that. Instead I jumbled my words while wiping away sweat from my brow… I think I said something about us both being Midwesterners, too. Oh dear.