Monthly Archives: October 2015

Choosing a monologue can be likened to winning a lover/boyfriend/girlfriend into your world. The last thing you want to do is to see the first monologue that walks your way and decide there on the spot – before even asking their name – that THIS is the monologue that you will wed and spend lots and lots of time with. You will be identified by this monologue. You will bet introducing it to your family and friends as “yours.” You won’t have the option of getting bored – not with this one! Read more →

I have been away to Seattle for most of the week at an Arts School Network meeting. Teachers from all over the country were attending to learn, swap stories, and advocate the hell out of the meeting hall. The break was nice on several levels. I got a chance to step away from my day to day and catch my breath – – perhaps thinking how Monday’s return would clear the air and start anew. This trip also made me very grateful for what I have. One of the best features of the conference is the ability to go to other high schools in the middle of a school day and just witness how their classes go down: the kind of expectations, camaraderie, and rigor they contour up. Sometimes I am a bit nervous going to these events – worried that I am going too find that I have been doing wrong all the time. Read more →

Just as last week was ending a took a pair of actors out into the hall to have a first red through of their scene from The Elephant Man. The actors came to the moment very unprepared as the script had just been handed to them a day or so before. For the first rehearsal, I asked them to do all they could to STOP as they were reading – – to take the moment in and to try to make sense of what was being sent and how it was being received by their acting partner. BUT what I get is actors who are reading along and PAUSING – not stopping. And a pause ain’t a stop! They think that when I say pause it is as good as saying stop. These are going to be the same citizens who will be pulled over by the police regarding a recent stop sign in their life only to know that even legally there is a wee difference between stop and pause. Read more →

In the late spring I always end of picking the show that I will be directing in April of the following year. Then I somewhat drag that script with me through all of the summer months – on vacation, to the pool, even to NYC to see some theatre. I put it in a very nice binder and carry it with me everywhere. BUT I often spend the time just hiking it around promising myself to give it an hour or two but that hour or two just never happens. It reminds me of the time in high school when as a trombone player I would drag that big ass instrument home every blessed night, toss it in the corner of my bedroom and stare at it with guilt only while the commercials were playing on my bedroom TV. And this behavior didn’t just go on for a week or two – – it happened for four full years. Dragging it home nightly was never going to make me a musician only a guy with one arm much longer then the other! Read more →

Curiosityoterian
noun
a student, typically having the highest level of curiosity in the senior class, who sits listening to the valedictorian speech graduation and wonders how the podium can stay attached to the stage when the earth itself is spinning at a rate 1,040 miles per hour and wonders if the issue of boxers vs. briefs has every been statistically explored with valedictorians.

Okay – “curiosityoterian” is not a real word. But I am so behind the idea that in addition to the smartest kid in the class being honored, I do wish they would be able to also honor the kid that has proven his/her thorough and rich curiosity. Read more →