Christmas 2009

And a fine and wonderful Christmas to you all

Daisies

So I was sitting at the Starbucks on Bay just north of the Bloor subway waiting for my playwrights unit to show up and this is what I saw out the window.



I found myself wondering what it would take to get that many people so excited about theatre that they would don some glad rags and go running about the streets in a state of undress. I must confess that I could not think of a single thing.

And yet when my unit arrived we went on a fabulous excursion touring art galleries looking for art to inspire their pieces for the Mussorgsky Project. We saw a huge range of work, talked to artists and gallery owners and generally had a wonderful time exploring likes and dislikes.

We don't do that enough. None of us. Just take time to see and think and listen.

I propose that we should have an annual "Down Time" week where all artists just take off, kick back and spend a week delving into what we do.

If it could work for Alice then it could work for us.

Dancing with August

Isaac Butler writes this amazing article for the Tony Blog. It is about Bartlett Sher directing an August Wilson play and then goes on to include some fascinating links. I would urge you to have a read and to follow those links all the way to the end.

The issues of who {ie what race} gets to direct a play about another race is one that is pretty fraught with land mines. I remember when The Colored Museum was produced by the Tarragon and Martha Henry directed. Martha was great. Ok she knew nothing about black women and their hair issues but she was able to direct us with craft and insight. Nowadays I don't think you would see that happening. We have managed come as far down the road as to only be able to have a non-white direct a non-white play.

Wilson talks about the need for a black theatre and his opposition to colour blind casting. It all leads to some fine contemplation of issues that never seem to get behind us.

Suitably handsome

Dance Magazine has this article on Reviews entitled Knocked Sideways

It’s about receiving bad reviews and how they hit us. All of a sudden I was floating down memory lane. It’s funny how some bad reviews are just kind of fuzzy in my brain. And trust me I don’t really want anyone to dig up the reviews of my Othello from the Arts Club Theatre. I already have my excuses in place for that.

The one bad review I really remember was from a production of Absurd Person Singular that I was in at the Globe Theatre. Ah those halcyon days when my hair was still black. This was unlike the production that I had previously been in at the Globe where I played the spunky runaway slave to the sage Richard Greenblatt’s Thoreau. Of course in this production I did indeed create my theory of “Natural Savagery Acting”. But perhaps that excursion should be left to a late night revel with much scotch.

Ok avoidance over. In the review of my work of Geoffrey the Architect that has that wonderful 2 page monologue as his wife tries to commit suicide in front of his oblivious self the local paper said “ And Philip Akin was suitably handsome”. Suitably Handsome? Like taupe, dry concrete, spam or bad adolescent rhyming couplet poetry?
I was crushed.

But in a wonderful kind of way it became an insulation for whatever reviews followed. No matter what critics thought of my work, in my heart I could always know that to that one critic years ago I had been.....suitably handsome.