WHY ARE BLACK ENGLISH ACTORS CAST AS ICONIC AFRO-AMERICANS IF TOM STOPPARD IS JEWISH?

"Leopoldstadt deserves a Broadway transfer, but New York audiences will hardly need Gretl to deliver her straight-to-auditorium explanation of what a bris is.  -- For all its Viennese setting, Leopoldstadt is thus a profoundly English play," wrote Kate Maltby in The New York Review of Books in her review, Tom Stoppard's Theatre of Memory.      

                           Link to the review in NYR Daily:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/02/14/tom-stoppards-theatre-of-memory/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR Tyranny

These two Jewish 21st-century English-speaking politicians have a very similar ancestral history,  superficially, they have similar characteristics, but I think that the deep-rooted dissimilar cultures that raised them made them recognizably, insurmountably, steeped in those very specific different cultural experiences.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a federal hate crime, was passed and signed into law in 2020 -- so recently that the word antilynching is considered a misspelled word on the internet.  The expressive  historical connection to this one tip of the iceberg fact is so brutal, bloody, anxiety-ridden with fear, rage, that if it doesn't appear in our cultural expression, if it is suppressed in any way when it is lived every day to the moment you're reading these words, I think that that in itself is a crime.

Americans and the English speak the same language and understand each other's culture, but understanding isn't synonymous with being steeped in it, having it carved, literally and figuratively, into one's DNA.  There are English cultural behaviors that are foreign to Americans and would be confusingly out of place in our Congress or if performed in a "profoundly English" play on Broadway.  The talented performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Oyelowo, Daniel Kaluuya and Cynthia Erivo were, for me, also confusingly foreign and out of place.  Missing or erased from their performances, not  because they haven't experienced racism, but because they only understand American racism intellectually -- that specific rage born of a specific relentless exclusion from safety to a specific everyday expectation of harm -- finds expression on the faces of all African-Americans, from toddlers to the elderly, and we Americans, all of us, are familiar with that expression, that behavior, and when it's absent from a Black face, we recognize that as well.  Nevertheless, on a personal note, even though I recognized what I thought was misguided if not worse, cynical, casting of the English actors mentioned above, about a year ago, during an audition rehearsal, an African-American actor pointed out to me that my criticisms, my clamping the lid on his manner, on his expression of the text and his physical behavior was whitewashing (my word) his concept of the character.  I'm indebted to him.  Consider how often my error makes its way into performances.

The following two scenes from the film of August Wilson's play, Fences, directed by Denzel Washington are examples of how profoundly American that drama is, and how expressively American its characters are.

 The talent exhibited here is not a rarity of the talent, both active and dormant of African-American writers, directors, actors.  I wrote, perhaps obliquely, on 6/16/17 and 3/17/19, Diversity, Talent, Technique, Opportunity and Samuel L. Jackson about this topic.  I'll be more direct now:  It is pure ignorance of acting technique for any director, producer or actor to describe the traditional training of actors in England as classical, and by comparison or inference to describe actor training in the U.S. as anything other than classical; notwithstanding the divergent distortions of Stanislavski sometimes taught here.   Further, whether in England or the U.S., institutions like RADA or Juilliard, universities or studios, charge exorbitant tuition fees that exclude the majority of both our populations.  Is elitist too harsh a word?  Naaa, I don't think so.  A lot of talent has crossed my threshold only to quit in despair because they couldn't afford to continue even with the discount of my already lower than average fees.  Add to that the bottleneck of scarce opportunity to audition, let alone perform.

Once more, as I've already offered, if space will be provided, I'll teach anywhere at Uta's rate as described by Charles Nelson Reilly in my 12/10/13 post, The Life of Reilly.  I welcome discussion and I plan to visit this topic in future posts.

"WHADDYA MEAN 'FILMS'"? "BAUMBACH?"

A student expressed interest in why I said "films," plural, regarding Noah Baumbach's work in the post titled Character or Caricature?  Laura Dern - Marriage Story.  Admittedly, I haven't seen all of his films, but I have seen quite a few, since I like his screenplays and his visual syntax very much.  Okay, recall that in my other post titled Scarlett Johansson - Innate Talent Without Technique - Pitfalls - Marriage Story, I noted the discrepancy between correct instinctive performance and absence of technique where the actor mistakenly performs narratively rather than dramatically.  I noticed the error of narrative performance in The Meyerwitz Stories as well.  These two scenes are performed narratively; Marriage Story from the blog post as reference (above), and from The Meyerwitz Stories (below):

The reason I said there are excellent performances alongside drastic errors in Mr. Baumbach's films: In Marriage Story, Alan Alda's performance was exemplary, as was Ray Liotta's performance.  Adam Driver performed beautifully in his scenes with those two actors and also in his scenes with Azhy Robertson.  However, the pitfalls I described that occur when an actor relies on instinct rather than using the tools of technique, occurred particularly in his scenes with Ms. Johansson.  When she worked correctly, so did he, but, for example, in the climactic argument scene, because it was performed correctly in certain moments then moved in and out of narrative exposition, I think she derailed him, and ironically, his character's note to her in the beginning of the film that she was pushing for emotion is what actually happened to both of them in that well-written argument scene.

Here's a sample of the excellent performances of Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller in The Meyerwitz Stories.  This scene is near the end of the film. I included a snippet of the prior fight scene in order to note the characters' previous circumstances.  Please see the film and note the excellent creation of character through the arc of the drama, attention to the rising action, correct focus on the needs of the character -- journey of discovery -- by both of these excellent actors:

 

AUDIENCE COLLABORATION.....

...SEEMS TO NOT ONLY BE CONFINED TO OUR SPECIES...

BARBARA COOK: SAFETY OF THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE...

I quoted Barbara Cook on an earlier post. Here it is again -- reminding my students to take the risk and explore the safety of the most dangerous places.

"If you can get to the point where you are ready to use every joy, every death, every lover who has left you...If you are willing to explore that within the song, you cannot be wrong."  And especially when her disjointed sentence told a student, "The very place where safety lies for us is the same that seems most dangerous, and the sharing - the courage to let people really, really get into what life is into -- and sets it free."

MITT ROMNEY - EMOTION DERIVED FROM COGNITION AND...

...as well, the circumstances under which those thoughts/images are being evoked.  Mr. Romney read from a written text, one that must have gone through careful preparation, rewrite and editing to be sure he had accurately expressed his ideas.  I'm guessing he read it aloud several times; to himself and others.   We don't have that information, but surely he didn't intend to find himself overcome with emotion, unable to continue, when he said, "I am profoundly religious.  My faith is at the heart of who I am."  I think that a heightened awareness of whom one needs to reach with one's thoughts is what produces an emotion that under other circumstances might not appear.  Therefore, we're back to the action, the need -- what do I need to do to my partner?

For Mr. Romney, in this particular circumstance, it was his colleagues -- his fellow citizens - the world.

 

BEING SIMON CALLOW: "Acting is thinking the thoughts of another person."

Hey, everybody!  I've been talking about this interview to so many of you, that I decided to look for it, and here it is:

BARBRA STREISAND, SARAH VAUGHAN - PERFORMER / AUDIENCE CONNECTIONS

Whomever it was Streisand had in mind is not someone we'd know of with certainty, but what's obvious is that she had someone in mind. Note that when the camera moved to the audience and focused on one of its members, that that woman connected to her own life experience, not Streisand's life experience.  Did that woman say to herself, when she bought her ticket, "Oh, my, I'm going to Streisand's concert soon; I must go over all my romantic experiences in order to be able to find my substitutions and connect with my emotions!"?  Regardless of the story, what makes a member of the audience spontaneously laugh, cry, get angry, remember an event, etc.?  Isn't it a connection to the ideas/images they hear?  That's why I suggest diving head first into the character's actions because how and if they will resonate for you will be discovered by trusting that it's somewhere there in your body.  Both Hagen and Adler suggested, in writing, to seek a substitution only if all else failed.

Here's Sarah Vaughan with the same song and a different life experience.  She moves me with every song I've heard her sing because she seems to combine her words with the musical notes in a particular way that vibrates, illuminates, the idea/images she needs to convey.

And another one -- ah, the angst we'd need to go through dredging up memories days, hours, before taking a comfortable seat, seeing who's in the audience, pleased we dressed appropriately for the occasion, and then again, preparing our painful memories in order to participate in the audience's experience listening to: