Books I'm Reading

Give and Take by Adam Grant is subtitled 'A revolutionary approach to success' - I became interested in the book after reading about Grant in the NY Times.  Grant is a professor at The Wharton School and has done extensive research on people's relationship, networking, negotiation and leadership styles, and found that in our interactions with others, people tend to operate as either givers, takers or matchers.  And while some givers burn out, many incredibly successful people in many fields are also givers. 

This book highlights the key differences between burning out and achieving success, and has introduced me to some of my new favorite concepts:

1) pronoia - it's the opposite of paranoia and can be defined as "the delusionial belief that other people are plotting your well-being or saying nice things about you behind your back" - sounds like a great attitude to bring into any casting situation to me.

2) expeditional behavior, a term from the National Outdoor Leadership School, which trains NASA astronauts, among others, and means putting the group's goals and missions first and showing the same amount of concern for others as you do for yourself.  This is the exact name for what I'm trying to cultivate in any group of students who are working on a show together - we put the play and the story we are trying to tell first. 

There's even more interesting and helpful thinking in this book - ideas about how to process the successes of peers or co-workers, and lots of ideas about networking and cultivating relationships - two big keys for any theater professional.

On a totally different track, for theatermakers and others who want an in depth look at the women of the War of the Roses, Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood shines a light on the lives of Marguerite of Anjou (the wife of Henry VI), Elizabeth of York (mother of the 'Princes in the Tower') and 5 other women from both Team York and Team Lancaster.  If you're heading into production on a Shakespeare history play, learning more about the details of the day to day lives of these women and how they leveraged their limited power in their relationships with powerful men is pretty fascinating reading.

I'm also very excited about a project that is coming up at the end of June.  I'm part of an event that will not only showcase approximately 30 women theater artists, the majority of them members of Actors' Equity, but will also raise money for a non-profit called SF Safehouse, who provide 18 months of housing as well as lots of other varied support and resources for homeless women leaving prostitution.  The public portion of the event is an evening of short original plays, and takes place on Monday June 24th.  Ticket info is here and you can also find event details on Facebook. 

Girls of Atomic City & Honor

Some good things I've been reading lately include Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City, a non-fiction book about Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the women who worked there during WWII on a super secret project.  In a nutshell, these folks were doing the grunt work of the Manhattan Project, enriching the uranium that would provide the explosions.  Because of the high levels of secrecy surrounding the project (most of the people working there didn't know what it was they were working on), the organizers recruited young women from neighboring areas, who they believed would be obedient and work hard.

The amazing book not only gives you the day to day lives of several of the women who worked there, it also looks at women's contributions to the development of nuclear technology as a whole.


I've also torn through the novel Honor by Elif Shafak.  The story is set in Kurdish communities in Turkey and London, follows multiple generations from the 1950's through the 1990's, with the bulk of the book set in London of the late 1970's with punks and racial tensions mixed into the milieu.  It looks at Muslim tradition and women's and men's roles, and unfolded with incredible beauty and surprise.

A confession

I am an actor who is not good at imagining.  At least when it comes to the objects and things that might surround a character who lives in a time/place from history that is different than my own.  I need some help - a place to jump off and get started.

So I love love love when I can visit historical homes and museums like the Tenement Museum in New York where you can walk through a tenement apartment building and see different apartments restored to reflect different time periods in the building's history.

And I had a great time when I went to Dublin's Georgian House Museum, which is a house from 1794, restored and filled with objects from that time.

And I was super excited to learn about this book, which came out of a joint project between the British Museum and the BBC.  It is what it says - an attempt to cover all of human history, using 100 objects from the collections of the British Museum.  Each object gets its own essay/presentation and was originally presented over a period of 25 weeks (one object/day M-F) as a radio series on the BBC.  And it's archived here.

So, if like me, you aren't the best imaginer, the objects in this book, and in museums and historic homes everywhere, are a terrific resource for our actor imaginations.

Monologue inventory

Last week I inventoried my monologues. I looked back through my audition tracking spreadsheet to remind myself what monologues I've been doing in auditions lately, and to help figure out what type of monologue I should be looking for to learn next.

Over the years, I've rotated monologues out of my repertoire for a number of reasons, including that I've done them too much, they've grown stale for me acting-wise, I've outgrown them, or that they weren't playing the right way w/auditors outside the context of the whole play.

And, when I rotate things out of the repertoire, it's time to rotate something else in.  But what?  That's where the inventory comes in.  I categorize and describe what I've got, and then look for the holes.

I categorize by time period, and I use three - classic (Greeks to Moliere or so, incl. Shakespeare), modern (approx Ibsen/Shaw/Chekhov through Odets/Williams/Miller), and Contemporary (written in the last 20-30 years).  Then, I categorize by tone - comic, serious, or serio-comic, keeping in mind that the tone varies  a bit with the time period - a comic classic piece might simply be one where a character talks about falling in love (like Viola in Twelfth Night) but a comic contemporary piece might be much more jokey (think Neil Simon).  After that, I look for where pieces fall in terms of physicality - does this character sit in a chair and talk the whole time or do they run around the stage and pretend to sword fight?  I also look at dialect work, and try to have one piece ready to go in a dialect I'm good at and would get to do onstage (usually a British or American Southern as opposed to Carribean/West Indies or Japanese).

After I look at these things, categorizing gets more creative and fun.  I look at things like character status, are they talking to one person or addressing a crowd, is their internal rhythm slow or fast, are they a city mouse or a country mouse, where does this character fall in terms of my age range?  Typically, I think a character seems young if they're experiencing something new or for the first time, and a character seems older if they are giving advice, or remembering a past event.  I may also look at the character's profession - sometimes the character is primarily a lawyer/doctor/businessperson etc. and other times their relationship parent/child/spouse is in the foreground in the piece.

My current inventory includes:
1. contemporary comic, fast rhythm, low physicality, violinist on a first date
2. contemporary serious, slow rhythm, low physicality, parent of a teen w/cerebral palsy
3. contemporary comic, variable rhythm, medium physicality, stressed out political aide talking to small group
4. contemporary seriocomic, medium rhythm, medium physicality, sister of the bride doing wedding toast for large group
5. contemporary seriocomic, medium rhythm, low physicality, waspy wife attempting apology to cheating husband
6. classic serious, slow rhythm, medium physicality, king's widow about to be taken as war prize
7. classic comic, variable rhythm, high physicality, queen falling in love under a spell
8. classic comic, variable rhythm, medium physicality, maid showing her master that he's marrying his daughter to the wrong man
9. classic comic, variable rhythm, high physicality, drunk getting two reluctant fighters to duel
10. classic serious, slow rhythm, low physicality, conquered queen begging for her son's life


So after the inventory, my biggest hole is in the modern category.  I need to do my looking there.  I don't have any dialect pieces right now, so looking at something like Shaw or Wilde would be a good place to start.  It'd also be great to look for pieces that emphasize physicality.  In terms of high or low status, age of character and those types of variables are really open - I've got a lot of different things covered, so I can probably find something that pairs well with other monologues that I've got already.  I might want to think about looking for someone who is talking to a group - overall, more of my monologues are characters talking to one or two people.

Okay - now I'm off to the library!

Or, if anyone reading has a suggestion for me - post 'em in the comments!

Actor Slash ?

Here's something I've been thinking about this week: how so many folks I know (myself included) are actor/something else. 

I'm an actor/theater educator.  I know actor/directors, actor/writers, actor/theater administrators, actor/musicians even actor/massage therapists and one actor/flight instructor.  Actor/ is different than being an actor with a day job (like an actor who makes their money by walking dogs, or working chain retail). 

Actor/ means that you do multiple things for work, enjoy doing multiple things for work, and if people ask you what you do you might be tempted to say "I'm an actor and also a (fill in the blank)"  However, sometimes, depending on the parts of the slash, it may not make sense to promote all the parts at the same time, or in the same way.  If you were a preschool teacher/dominatrix, it's pretty obvious that you wouldn't want to bring up both in the same breath, but what about a police officer/cake decorator, or a voiceover artist/B&B owner?

If you pursue multiple careers simultaneously, you may want to check out the book One Person Multiple Careers by Marci Alboher.  (I got it from the library several years ago).   It's full of practical advice about how one part of your slash can compliment the other, and includes things like how you might negotiate if you are a /parent.  I thought it was a helpful read, and hopefully you will too!

Resource: Monologue hunting and overdone monologues

Don't know about you, but my monologues are feeling stale, I'm not in rehearsal or production for anything, so now seems like a good time to do some looking for new monologues.

I'll be using the library to get started, of course.  But, I just found this cool website that lists overdone monologues for women, men, and Shakespeare.  It looks like a terrific resource.

Sidney Lumet, RIP

Making Movies is Sidney Lumet's book about just that.  It's fantastic.

In The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger is the title character, running a pawn shop in Harlem in the 1960's, haunted by flashbacks of his youth/childhood in Nazi Germany.  It's gritty, sad, well-acted and well-shot.


Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is from 2006, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are brothers, with a heist idea - a terrific plot, and more great acting.

Yes, there's Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, 12 Angry Men, Network, and even The Wiz.  An amazing body of work.  Worth checking out.

P.S.  I got all the titles on this list from the library.  For free.

Some good books

Here are some books that are on my shelf and about acting.

1. The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnelan - author is the artistic director of England's Cheek by Jowl, and this book is his ideas about what acting is, based on the idea of getting around what is 'blocking' an actor.

2. The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, A Director Prepares by Anne Bogart, And then, You Act by Anne Bogart - the first book has more of a workbook quality, and outlines the technique of Viewpoints.  The other two books are more collections of essays by Anne and her ideas about making theater.

3. Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus by Marina Calderone and Maggie Lloyd-Williams is a slim volume filled w/playable verbs, and synonyms for those verbs.  If you are the type of actor or director who likes to think about playable actions when analyzing text, then this book is indispensable, I'd think.

Resource of the Week: The Library

It's free.  Thanks to the internet, the catalog is available 24/7, with the option of requesting that books get held for me at my branch.  It's got scripts, acting books, biographies of actors, an amazing archive of film, soundtracks and scores of musicals, and did I mention that it's free?

And, if your library (like San Francisco Public) is connected to the Link+ system, that means you're able to borrow from even more libraries than just your own.  Link+ is a network of libraries that includes public libraries and college libraries all over the state of California, as well as UNLV (they've got a lot of scripts). 

When I'm looking for something in the online catalog, if they don't have it in the SF Public library system, I'll see a button that says 'search link+' which then searches this larger network, and usually finds a copy of what I want.  I make a request, and it gets sent to my branch of the library, usually in a week or so.  There are some limits to getting DVDs and CDs from these other sources, but I've been surprised at what scripts and reference books I'm able to get from it.

So, before you go ordering from Amazon or Sam French online, check the library - you might be able to save a few bucks!!