No comments about San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five.

No comments about The House of Blue Leaves and Chaucer in Rome.

1 comments about The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Stage Plays (Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky).

1. I bought this collection of Chayevsky plays in order to get my hands on THE LATENT HETEROSEXUAL, because I'm in the process of revising my will, and I remembered the playwright's mordant take on lawyers, accountants, trusts, taxes--and it's as good as I remembered it. (The play never made Broadway, even with Zero Mostel in the lead; Paddy had sworn off Broadway for good and opened it in Dallas. I read a version printed in ESQUIRE.) Now I'm working through the other plays in this volume. Though working is the wrong word. I'm being pulled into them by Chayesvky's brilliance and clarity of language. And also by his vision of the human beings who made up his world, his incredible empathy and sympathy for them, as well as his virulent scorn at their failures of moral courage. Turn to any page in the volume to hear the unique, powerful, brilliant, funny voice of Paddy Chayevsky, a writer we need now more than ever!

4 comments about At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions.

1. This is a fascinating book on the Grotowski method of acting work. It is very well written and a must read for anyone in the acting profession and of interest to others who are curious about the creative process.



2. For anyone interested in getting more information on Grotowski, this is of course a must-read, although occasionally the humility with which Richards infuses his prose borders on making it a must-slog-through. In a way, it's appealing that Richards tends to describe only his own work - only the things that he himself did, but I tend to find the descriptions fuzzy. I often felt the descriptions of exercises or actions were not concrete enough for me to imagine them; this is by no means a practical handbook.
   
   Having said that, it is an excellent read for probably every serious actor, who will recognize in Richards' frank account their own mistakes, frustration over lack of discipline, and impatient desires to be brilliant. Definitely inspiring, occasionally repetitive or unclear.



3. Whoever said anything about "The Method" should realize Grotowski has nothing to do with Lee Strasberg. Grotowski has picked up at the end of Stanislavski's work, which only stopped evolving because of his death, and Jerzy Grotowski has expanded on those ideas and brought new meaning to physical actions. Thomas Richards explanations of how Grotowski and the Labratory Theatre's work taught actors like himself to embrace physical actions in a powerful, intense way is truly inspiring. This book is a must read, particularly in conjunction with "Towards a Poor Theatre" by Grotowski for any person working in modern theatre.



4. Most people in theater have heard of Grotowski, but few have any first-hand experience of his work. This book is bound to become a standard work on acting as it explains in clear and consice detail how Grotowski applied his technique to the pratical work of acting.

   As a bonus, the book bridges the gap between traditional Stanislavski method and physically-based acting, by showing how Grotowski's work is in continuation of the Method, not in oppostion to it. Any serious student of theater will want to have this book on their shelf

2 comments about A Number.

1. Churchill is never one to shy from difficult subjects, and this play is no different. Here she explores the emotional (as well as legal) aspects of cloning and what identity really means. In each section, Father meets with three of his "sons", all clones, to try to hammer out their complicated relationship with him, his "original" son, and to each other. A good read. Would be OK for college or professional production, but high schools and community productions wouldn't be able to pull it off.



2. On a routine visit to hospital, Bernard receives some shocking news: he's been cloned. When he confronts his father, he finds out it's worse: he is just one in an unknown number of genetically identical sons. But is Bernard the original or a copy? Does it matter? And what's going to happen when two other versions come knocking at the door? "A Number" takes the ethical labyrinth of genetic engineering, and the timeless debate over nature versus nurture, and reconstitutes them as a bracing family drama. As Bernard and his "brothers" wrestle with a range of very human responses to the news - shock, anger, horror and delight - their anxious father ducks and weaves, grudgingly revealing their histories and the anguished choices he's made. The play's themes might be borrowed from science fiction and philosophy, but its scale is confrontingly domestic. There are no speeches, no grand pronouncements, no finely honed philosophical dialogues here. It consists almost entirely of the halting, taciturn exchanges that usually pass for conversation between men, especially fathers and sons. This makes the issues real for us. It grounds them in the eternal questions and doubts that hover over every child and every parent who wishes they could cancel their mistakes. "A Number" looks fearlessly at what is often left over when the excitement of new science fades: damaged people. In this case, they must confront not only what's been done to them, but the more terrifying issue of just what they actually are. By extension, it's something we're invited to ponder about ourselves. As one "son" reminds us: "We've got ninety-nine percent the same genes as any other person. We've got ninety percent the same genes as a chimpanzee. We've got thirty percent the same as a lettuce." So what makes me different? What is it that makes me, me? What accounts for that look in the eyes, the set of the shoulders, the scowl or the smile that allows a father to distinguish between his genetically identical sons? We can create life in a petri dish, but do we actually know what it is? It's a chilling question, and one that may well be unanswerable. But as Caryl Churchill shows in this spare, harrowing and above all humane play, those kind of questions are precisely the ones worth asking.

3 comments about The Libertine.

1. Fantastic read - this one reads really quick and is quite a page turner. Made me want to go and watch the recent film adaptation. I love each character for their wit and honesty; they are truly ones to remember. Well done, Mr. Jeffreys.



2. Jeffreys' portrait of Rochester seems designed to titillate Rochester scholars for the play is packed full of references to Rochester's poetry (both the popular lampoons & satires and the more arcane meditations on "nothing" etc...). Though Jeffreys admits that he takes some liberties with the material he deals with the most infamous incidents in the life of Rochester (hatred of poet laureate Dryden, disgust at excesses of Charles II, breaking of the Kings sundial, abandoning his friend Downs to die at the hands of a night watchman during one of the merry gangs many riotous jests, the impersonation of Italian mountebank Dr. Alexander Bendo, the alleged training of and affair with the actress Elizabeth Barry, portrait with monkey). Any Restoration or Rochester scholar will be impressed and delighted with the amount of historical and literary research and detail Jeffreys packs in to this play. But the play is not just a reiteration of already known facts and incidents that are already part and parcel of Rochester scholarship/lore; this play also attempts to offer an original take on the world's most famous libertine.
   
   Its interesting to note that Jeffreys' THE LIBERTINE was originally written to be performed as a companion piece with the most famous libertine play of the Restoration, Etherege's MAN OF MODE. Most scholars agree that the lead character of Etherege's play, Dorimant, was based on a kind of idealised version of his friend Rochester. Some critics would say that Etherege crafted a portrait of his notorious friend but a portrait that Restoration audiences could admire for Dorimant like Rochester is a cool patrician libertine but unlike Rochester Etherege's Dorimant never makes a move designed to upset or lampoon the social world that he inhabits but is always an affable charmer/companion with friends and ladies (his treatment of Mrs. Loveit excepted), and his winning ways make him the toast of the town and the most sought after lover and socialite in all of London. You could say that Jeffreys' portrait of Rochester in THE LIBERTINE is designed to counter Etherege's too flattering portrait with a more gritty and more realistic portrait of his own. This is especially interesting as Rochester himself was always interested in offering a more realistic or more natural version of life than any of his literary companions and competitors were offering. Etherege's portrait is complex though and it does show Dorimant/Rochester as a consummate social performer who is capable of always knowing just what to say to each social player (and this can be viewed as a criticism not a compliment). Jeffreys wants us to see the other side of Rochester, the side that is only implied in Etherege's portrait. Taking his cues from Rochester's own poetrry Jeffreys fashions a much more complex and paradoxical creature. Jeffreys' "Rochester" talks as if he did not really want to be liked or admired. He talks as if he preferred "reality" to "art" and yet his actions seem to contradict what he says as he always seems to want to escape "reality" and seek refuge in "art". For instance Jeffreys' "Rochester" is disgusted at the artificiality of Restoration social norms and forms and yet he seems only to be interested in life as it is enhanced by or refracted through the theatre and through poetry. Rochester, according to Jeffreys, is a self-professed cynic who claims that he has ceased to believe in life and who wants from the theatre a convincing illusion that can provide him with the emotions that life alone can no longer provide. And yet his Rochester also seems to genuinely fall in love with the actress that he is training to provide him with those artificially contrived emotions (arguably what he falls in love with is the genuine being who like himself feels the need to express herself through artificial forms). Jeffreys seems to be offering us a portrait of a man who either does not know himself as well as he thinks; or a man who knows himself very well and knows that he needs a very complex cocktail of life/art to satisfy his very sophisticated urges/desires/appetites for a very sophisticated kind of life/art.
   
   The one theme that seems to be consistent throughout the plays about Rochester and the various versions of the life is that Rochester sought release through excess. (Jeffrey's at one point has Rochester say "I only know that I am alive when I have gone too far"). As Graham Greene noted in his famous biography of Rochester, LORD ROCHESTER'S MONKEY, "excess" for Rochester (whether excessive love or hate) was a way of escaping the forms and norms of society. And yet, paradoxically, in the London of the 1670's "excess" as well as "cynicism" was in fashion (and for that matter so too the lampoon and the satire were fashionable as was the "malice" required to practice such literary modes) . Thus Rochester even in despising the age in which he lived still seems to be its most representative member.
   
   Many Rochester scholars like James William Johnson (whose A PROFANE WIT is perhaps the most comprehensive Rochester bio available) claim that what Rochester was trying to escape from was himself (many scholars offer some version of the claim that Rochester did not believe man had anything like a transcendent identity and that, like the monkey, he was really nothing but an actor capable only of offering a series of social performances to please one audience or another). Jeffreys, as many scholars before him have done, interprets Rochester's religious conversion as just one more social performance that is no more "real" than any of the ones that preceded it. This is what some of Rochester's own friends thought when they heard of the deathbed conversion. Some scholars claim that Rochester's poetry was always full of religious imagery and that the apparent unbelief of the satirist is just a negative route toward belief and affirmation. One of the most interesting scholars claims that Rochester's conversion was indeed an act but an act that quieted his will and allowed him to actually occupy the present moment or the "now" that he had previous to the conversion only theorized about. In any event the Rochester that continues to capture the public imagination is the iconoclastic doubter and the contrarian who seems to be both attracted to and repulsed by his own libertine ways and the world that he not only belongs to but exemplifies.
   
   Rochester's paradoxes and dichotomies are fascinating and will, I think, be of interest not only to scholars but to amateur literary men and women as well. Jeffreys' play does an excellent job at sorting through and arranging some of the paradoxes that scholars have struggled with for centuries and making them accessible to a popular audience. I would not say Jeffreys' version of the life is the definitive one but only because with a life like Rochester's there is no defintive account. The paradoxes and unresolvedness are what make the life and the work so interesting.
   
   Highly recommended.
   
   By the way the film version of THE LIBERTINE is only a loose adaptation of Jeffreys' play. The play is a kind of scholarly entertainment geared toward audiences with an advanced interest in & knowledge of Rochester and Restoration literature (though the play can be enjoyed on some level by those who are not yet Rochester/Restoration experts I would not suggest starting here if you are new to Rochester; I would start with a biography and then come back to this play). The film, on the other hand, is designed for those who might not yet be acquainted with either Rochester or the Restoration and thus it drops far fewer insider references resulting in a far less intricately nuanced portrait. The film is nonetheless an excellent and entertaining introduction and will lead the literary minded toward the biographies and other Rochester literature.
   
   I really recommend both play and film (and biographies). I also recommend a PBS miniseries called THE LAST KING which is an excellent way of learning about the Restoration. Rochester only makes a couple of brief appearances in the miniseries but THE LAST KING is an excellent way of familiarizing yourself with restoration era politics and society. One of Rochester's complaints in Jeffreys' LIBERTINE is that the aristocrats had no real function in Restoration England and that their lives were useless and that what they all suffered was the realization of their own irrelevance and absurdity. The miniseries offers another take on just how Charles II's politics (the crisis of authority) effected the social reality and artistic production of the time.



3. This is a pretty good book about John Wilmot (aka the Earl of Rochester), who is not well known, but surely will be soon - due to a movie starring Johnny Depp coming out. As a poet, Wilmot is entertaining and virile. He is obscene and satirical. "The Libertine" does a good job of expressing this, sharing his life, exploring his reasoning for his satire of King Charles, his heroism, the balance between reason and humor that seems to be the dichotomy of Wilmot. We'll see how well the movie does. But, it would be great if people starting actually reading his poetry.
   Another book I recently enjoyed that is like a modern-equivalent of Wilmot is "The Loony," a story about a guy also sort of exiled, who is also a libertine, also afflicted with a penchant for perversity, and also destined for a bad end. It was interesting to read one after the other, as they shared so many interesting attributes. I look forward to the movie, and hope it bring Wilmot more readers.

1 comments about Play It!: Great Games for Groups.

1. This book is a great resource for summer camp directors or other youth leaders. Each game is described in detail, and categorized by group size and space needed. A must-have for camping programs.

5 comments about Honors Disguise (Rocky Mountain Legacy #4).

1. This series gets better and better. As always, Kristen Heitzmann has a lovely way with words. Her characters are deep and lifelike. Things finally seemed ready to settle down and Cole's up and kidnapped by bounty hunters haulin' him in for a murder, of a harlot of all things. Of course, Abbie's gotta hitch up her skirts and tear off after him like heat on a summer day and of course, she finds and frees him. That's where the fun begins. Cole's still determined to walk towards danger for honor's sake.



2. Abbie is fearless, a loving wife, a devoted mother. She's a good daughter and friend. She has many qualities most ladies aspire to.
   
   I love the series, and I cannot wait to see what happens next. I love the narration by Kate Forbes. I can't wait for the 2nd series when Janette gets married, and Eliot finds his true love as well; and even how Marci's daughter turns out.
   
   Kristen keep writing,
   
   Julia



3. Cole has returned to Abbie's ranch as foreman, but Abbie is not about to let down her guard to love again, until -- could it be happening? Just as she begins to wonder, a stranger rides onto the ranch and beats Cole severely immediately before bounty hunters come and violently take Cole away for the murder of an El Paso woman, a lady of the night with whom Cole's brother, Sam was in love.
   
   Consuming a good portion of the whole book is the long journeys most of the main characters are making to El Paso and back, leaving the children, 7 and 4 behind in the care of Abbie's parents. The journey is long and hard, unlikely characters from past books appear and one surprise after another lands Abbie in El Paso, visiting Cole in jail. She has a hard time really knowing if he is innocent or guilty, but someone does know, and Abbie feels she owes it to Cole to find out the truth. After all, he has saved her life on several occasions. Her faithful young stable hand, Will, is by her side, helping in every way he can.
   
   A circuit rider preacher has accompanied Cole part of the way on this trip and Cole has decided he needs to know God. However, Abbie has a hard time believing he really has changed. The author throws in some difficult situations with Cole's past and his family's tragedies and some real surprises in this book which features mainly, the life, the hanging charges and the changes which take place in the lives of Abbie Farrell and Cole Jasper.
   
   I already have the next book ready to start. Thanks Kristen, for this wonderful, historical Christian fiction series!



4. I think this is the best book,but I realy wish monte did not die. I think she should write another book to the series, and have monte not realy be dead,and have it turn out that he realy was just badly injured and before they put him in the dirt a native american came and grabbed him and patched him up but lost his memory.So Abbie falls in love with cole and gets married, and so monte comes home after a few months they've been married, with his memory back,and abbie has to choose between them........you could finish the rest kristen if you decide to use my idea in another rocky mountian legacy. Keep up the good work,and GOD BLESS YOU! P.S Keep me informed please!



5. I think this is the best book,but I realy wish monte did not die. I think she should write another book to the series, and have monte not realy be dead,and have it turn out that he realy was just badly injured and before they put him in the dirt a native american came and grabbed him and patched him up but lost his memory.So Abbie falls in love with cole and gets married, and so monte comes home after a few months they've been married, with his memory back,and abbie has to choose between them........you could finish the rest kristen if you decide to use my idea in another rocky mountian legacy. Keep up the good work,and GOD BLESS YOU! P.S Keep me informed please!

1 comments about Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems (Folger Shakespeare Library).

1. Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
   To thee I send this written embassage,
   To witness duty, not to show my wit.
   (Sonnet 26.)
   
   How to do justice to the legacy of literary history's greatest mind - moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe's "universal genius" and his rebel contemporary Schiller; forget the 19th century masters; forget contemporary literature: with the possible (!) exception of three Greek gentlemen named Aischylos, Sophocles and Euripides, a certain Frenchman called Poquelin (a/k/a Moliere), and that infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde, there's more wit in a single line of Shakespeare's than in an entire page of most other, even great, authors' works. And I'm not saying this in ignorance of, or in order to slight any other writer: it's precisely my admiration of the world's literary giants, past and present, that makes me appreciate Shakespeare even more -- and that although I'm aware that he repeatedly borrowed from pre-existing material and that even the (sole) authorship of the works published under his name isn't established beyond doubt. For ultimately, the only thing that matters to me is the brilliance of those works themselves; and quite honestly, the mysteries continuing to enshroud his person, to me, only enhance his larger-than-life stature.
   
   The precise dating of Shakespeare's sonnets -- like other poets', a response to the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" -- is an even greater guessing game than that of his plays: although #138 and #144 (slightly modified) appeared in 1599's "Passionate Pilgrim," most were probably circulated privately, and written years before their first -- unauthorized, though still authoritative - 1609 publication; possibly beginning in 1592-1593.
   
   Format-wise, they adopt the Elizabethan fourteen-line-structure of three quatrains of iambic pentameters expressing a series of increasingly intense ideas, resolved in a closing couplet; with an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme form. (Sole exceptions: #99 -- first quatrain amplified by one line -- #126 -- six couplets & only twelve lines total -- #145 -- written in tetrameter -- and #146 -- omission of the second line's beginning; the subject of a lasting debate.) Their order is thematic rather than chronological, although beyond the fact that the first 126 are addressed to a young man -- maybe the Earl of Pembroke or Southampton, maybe Sir Robert Dudley, the natural son of Queen Elizabeth's "Sweet Robin," the Earl of Leicester -- (the first seventeen, possibly commissioned by the addressee's family, pressing his marriage and production of an heir), and ##127-152 (or 127-133 and 147-152) to an exotic woman of questionable virtues only known as "The Dark Lady," even in that respect much remains unclear; including the nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the two main addressees, regarding which the sonnets' often ambiguous metaphors invoke much speculation. #145 is probably addressed to Shakespeare's wife; the closing couplet plays on her maiden name ("['I hate' from] hate away she threw And saved my life, [saying 'not you']:" "Hathaway -- Anne saved my life"), several others contain puns on the name Will and its double meaning(s) (exactly fourteen in the naughty #135: "Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will;" and seven in the similarly mischievous #136), and the last two draw on the then-popular Cupid theme. Sometimes, placement seems linked to contents, e.g., in #8 (music: an octave has eight notes), #12 and #60 (time: twelve hours to both day and night; sixty minutes to an hour); and in the famous #55, which praises poetry's everlasting power and as whose never-expressly-named subject Shakespeare himself emerges in a comparison with Horace's Ode 3.30 -- in turn written in first person singular and thus, denoting its own author as the builder of its "monument more lasting than bronze" ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius") -- as well as through the number "5"'s optical similarity to the letter "S," making the sonnet's number a shorthand reference for "5hake5peare" or "5hakespeare's 5onnets," echoed by numerous words containing an "S" in the text.
   
   Of indescribable linguistic beauty, elegance and complexity, Shakespeare's sonnets owe their timeless appeal to their supreme compositional values, the universality of their themes, and their keen insights into the human heart and soul; as much as their transcendence of the era's poetic conventions which, following Petrarch, heavily idealized the addressee's qualities: a form new and exciting twohundred years earlier, but encrusted in cliche in the late 1500s. Indeed, Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" Sonnet #130 owes its particular fame to its clever puns on that very style, which went overboard with references to its golden-haired, starry- (beamy-, sparkling, sunny-) eyed, cherry- (strawberry-, vermilion-, coral-) lipped, rosy- (crimson-, purple-, dawn-) cheeked, ivory- (lily-, carnation-, crystal-, silver-, snowy-, swan-white) skinned, pearl-teethed, honey- (nectar-, music-) tongued, goddess-like objects. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" the Bard countered, proceeded to describe her breasts as "dun," her hair as "black wires," and her breath as "reek[ing]," and denied her any divine or angelic attributes. "And yet," he concluded: "by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."
   
   Arguably, Shakespeare's very choice of addressees (a young man -- also the subject of the famously romantic #18: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day;" the first of several sonnets promising his immortalization in poetry -- as well as the "Dark Lady," in turn introduced under the notion "black is beautiful" in #127) itself suggests a break with tradition; and compared to his contemporaries' poetry, even the equally-famous #116's on its face rather conventional praise of love's constancy ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments"), echoed in the poet's vow to vanquish time in #123, sounds fairly restrained. But ultimately, Shakespeare's sonnets -- like his entire work -- simply defy categorization. They are, as rival Ben Jonson acknowledged, written "for all time," just as the Bard himself immodestly claimed:
   
   'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
   Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
   Even in the eyes of all posterity
   That wear this world out to the ending doom.
   (Sonnet 55.)

No comments about High Noon (BFI Film Classics).