Just learned that one of my all-time favorite teachers died on May 29th, so here then are a few tales about what good teaching looks like.
Bill Sharp taught at Emerson College for only about fifteen years, after teaching at Stanford and then starting the theatre program at the University of California – Riverside. But those fifteen years happened to cover the entire period when I studied there, the more happy me. What Sharp excelled at was teaching acting styles, most particularly the classics. Now, acting is a particularly difficult thing to teach--it’s too easy to fall into the trap of saying to your students “You’ve got it or you don’t.” But he focused intensively on a few key things: understanding the text, trusting your instincts, and challenging your limitations.
He was wonderful with Shakespeare. In fact, the man was Falstaff. Squarely built, a bit of a belly, a good Falstaffian beard, a booming voice when he wanted it and a beguiling sweetness when he wanted it, plus a tendency to perhaps drink too much from time to time. If I were directing Merry Wives or the Henry IV plays, I’d have cast him in a cold second without bothering to audition anyone else. So he wasn’t one of those “If you can’t do, teach” sorts of teachers—he could do, indeed, and very well. Those of us in his class were always conniving to find ways to make him demonstrate a few lines of whatever we were working on, just for the fun of watching him handle the text.
And when we were working on a piece with some complex language, like Shakespeare, his first rule was always this: never say the line till you really understand it. He would sit with us and go line by line through a soliloquy and make sure we really thoroughly comprehended exactly what each line meant, why it was there, what it hoped to accomplish. By the time he was done, our speeches weren’t that awful generalized Shakespearean wash of sound but were concrete, and specific, and rich with meaning.
As for challenging an actor’s limitations—this is the guy who cast me as Othello in a long-form collection of scenes our class presented my Senior year. Bear in mind: I am just about the least likely Othello you could hope to imagine. Iago has always been more my speed, in fact I love that part and hugely regret that I never got to play it. (Though Sharp did spend ages working with me on an Iago speech that became part of my standard auditioning repertoire--the one that ends “’Tis here, but yet confus’d: Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.”) But he wanted to push me, he wanted to see what would happen if I played a character way outside my normal range. It was essentially an in-class project with only a small audience from the other classes, so the point was not to create great art, it was to push the actors and see who could rise to the occasion. In the end I didn’t really do that great a job--but I appreciate hugely what he was trying to accomplish.
And here, finally, is a story about trusting your instincts. After I graduated, Sharp was nice enough to take on a bunch of us in his off-hours. His own personal time, something he didn’t have to do at all, but for about ten of us he decided what the hell, he’d continue working with us for a while. In that group were a couple of actors who weren’t really very good. Anyone else (me included) would say that these two just didn’t have it, whatever “it” may be, and that there wasn’t much point in spending too much time with them. Which may be exactly why Sharp included them in the group....
These two were doing the nunnery scene from Hamlet one night, and it wasn’t going terribly well. Stiff, and awkward, and dull. But at one point, Sharp noticed something, and he stopped the scene. He said to the guy playing Hamlet, “You had an impulse just then, didn’t you? You wanted to walk out of the room.” The guy nodded. “Then do it,” Sharp said. “Walk out of the room. It’s her job to keep you here, but if you have that impulse, you’ve got to honor it. Let’s try it again.” They started from the top, reached that point, there was a moment’s hesitation and then the guy really truly did walk out of the room. The girl playing Ophelia chased after him, and a moment later they returned, with Ophelia basically dragging Hamlet back onstage.
And after that, after that was one of the best versions of that scene I have ever witnessed. And for those two not-particularly-gifted actors, it was almost certainly the pinnacle of their acting lives, there in a dim room in the old Student Union at Emerson for an audience of about ten. Because Bill Sharp wanted to see every student accomplish as much as they possibly could.
I left Boston and have no idea whether he continued with the extracurricular classwork, but I know he retired in 1994, and despite the drinking he lived till the ripe old age of 84 down in Swampscott. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but I shall, this one particular time, most definitely raise a glass.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Mr. Jackson
About Michael Jackson, I only have this to say:
When I’m driving down the highway and there’s an accident, I generally make a decision to not look at it. For one thing, of course, there’s the practical side: all that slowing down and looking makes traffic impossible, even when the accident doesn’t actually block any lanes, and I don’t want to contribute to the problem. But on a human level, it just seems to me that whoever is involved in the accident is probably having at minimum a very bad day, and at worst one of the most awful days of their lives--and surely they deserve whatever privacy they can get. What they simply don’t need is all those looky-loos staring at them for their own damn entertainment value. “Thank God that’s not me!” think the looky-loos. And “Is somebody dead? Ooh, is that a corpse? Oooooohhhh.” I don’t want to contribute to that problem, either.
And certain celebrities--we all know who they are--slot perfectly for me into a category I think of as Perpetual Wrecks by the Side of the Road. Thus, Jennifer Aniston’s love life deserves just as much privacy as someone whose car got smashed. Which brings us back round to Michael Jackson, who was the King of Pop but who was also, unfortunately, the King of the Car Wrecks. I ignored the stories about his marriages, about his kids, about his various personal travails, about his court trial, all of it. It would mean nothing to him, of course--there will always be plenty of people in the world who delight in staring at the wreck--but it felt good for my soul to just leave that poor man alone.
And now he’s dead, and the world has gone a little bit crazy over it. I did not watch the memorial and frankly I can’t see why the City of Los Angeles should pay for it, but whatever keeps the peace, I guess. I’m certainly sorry he died, and I can’t help but feel a monumental sadness about that sweet kid who got so twisted by his awful life. (I also can’t help thinking that the weirder he got, the more we stared, which can only have contributed to making his weirdness get that much weirder.) All in all, then, I think it’s a better thing to just keep on driving through my own life, and not slow down to stare at the awfulness of his.
When I’m driving down the highway and there’s an accident, I generally make a decision to not look at it. For one thing, of course, there’s the practical side: all that slowing down and looking makes traffic impossible, even when the accident doesn’t actually block any lanes, and I don’t want to contribute to the problem. But on a human level, it just seems to me that whoever is involved in the accident is probably having at minimum a very bad day, and at worst one of the most awful days of their lives--and surely they deserve whatever privacy they can get. What they simply don’t need is all those looky-loos staring at them for their own damn entertainment value. “Thank God that’s not me!” think the looky-loos. And “Is somebody dead? Ooh, is that a corpse? Oooooohhhh.” I don’t want to contribute to that problem, either.
And certain celebrities--we all know who they are--slot perfectly for me into a category I think of as Perpetual Wrecks by the Side of the Road. Thus, Jennifer Aniston’s love life deserves just as much privacy as someone whose car got smashed. Which brings us back round to Michael Jackson, who was the King of Pop but who was also, unfortunately, the King of the Car Wrecks. I ignored the stories about his marriages, about his kids, about his various personal travails, about his court trial, all of it. It would mean nothing to him, of course--there will always be plenty of people in the world who delight in staring at the wreck--but it felt good for my soul to just leave that poor man alone.
And now he’s dead, and the world has gone a little bit crazy over it. I did not watch the memorial and frankly I can’t see why the City of Los Angeles should pay for it, but whatever keeps the peace, I guess. I’m certainly sorry he died, and I can’t help but feel a monumental sadness about that sweet kid who got so twisted by his awful life. (I also can’t help thinking that the weirder he got, the more we stared, which can only have contributed to making his weirdness get that much weirder.) All in all, then, I think it’s a better thing to just keep on driving through my own life, and not slow down to stare at the awfulness of his.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
The Failure of the Demos
Good article in Time this week about the current state of California’s budget woes. And I completely agree with Mr. O’Leary on one point in particular: the state of the State of California demonstrates the failure of direct democracy.
“Democracy” itself is a Greek word, from demos or demoi, originally a phrase for an Athenian municipality but a word that came to mean “the people” generally, combined with kratos, which means power. And since they basically invented the idea, the Greeks got the naming rights. Originally, democracy in Athens was pure and direct: when a vote was to be taken, every single citizen was compelled to go to the Pnyx. (And I do mean compelled: servants would roam the city with a rope dipped in red paint, and any citizen caught wandering the streets instead of going to the Pnyx was slapped with the rope, leaving a red stripe for all to see. They called it “ruddling.”)
But of course this direct democracy was only possible for two reasons: only about a third of the residents of Athens were considered citizens, and only adult males were allowed to vote, so it was possible to cram everybody onto a hillside for the requisite speeches and poll-taking. But even then there was something called the Council of 500, a group of leading citizens who actually made most of the day-to-day decisions. So even at its birth, there was already the necessary beginning of what we now call representational democracy.
Representational democracy is what we have here in most of the U.S. We elect people who go to the state capital or to Washington and who cast votes on our behalf. We cast one vote for a representative who then casts all the others. But in California, we have found a way around representational democracy and back to something very like the original direct form, through the referendum system.
It’s been a disastrous failure. Just about every issue gets submitted to the voice of the people through a ballot initiative, often through expensive special elections where they don’t wait for a national contest to be held but instead call for everyone to come out and vote again and again. This creates voter fatigue, where turnout gets lower and lower with each special election that gets added to the calendar (particularly when no one is getting ruddled...), so that only the people fiercely committed to a particular issue actually bother to turn out and vote. Which has the effect of actually perverting democracy, because only the ideologues end up having any voice. You can end up with some mighty strange laws that way.
But to make matters worse, when one side doesn’t get what it wants, it simply creates another referendum and submits that for a new vote a year or so further on. Exactly this is happening right now with the infamous Prop 8: having lost the first round, the opponents of Prop 8 are collecting signatures to submit the same issue to the voters again, as soon as possible, so that they can try different tactics and hopefully get a different outcome. But what’s to stop the people in favor of Prop 8, if they should lose the next round, from coming back themselves a year after that? Potentially there’s no end to it, not so long as the vote-count is close. So even though I happen to be on the side of the opponents of Prop 8 and would love to see that appalling decision done away with, I just don’t see where this endless referendum cycle does anyone any good.
But of course the classic example of failed direct democracy involves Prop 13, which limited property taxes (and thereby the amount of revenues the state can generate), and declared that the state legislature cannot pass any budget without a two-thirds majority. Combined, this double-eyed whammy means that the state has a nearly impossible time raising money when it needs it, unless it goes directly to the people and asks for the passage of a bond initiative. And as we saw in the last special election, the people are perfectly willing to vote for spending for new mandated services, but they are considerably less willing to vote for anything that even remotely sounds like higher taxes.
We the people want everything for nothing. It’s understandable, but it’s also horrific from a governance standpoint. And it is most definitely related to the Era of Excess we just lived through, where people spent money they didn’t have to buy things they didn’t need and then found themselves deeply in debt, and clueless as to how they got there. (Obviously that’s not the whole story--there were plenty of corporations perfectly happy to exploit our something-for-nothing weakness. But for now, I’m focusing on our own culpability, on why direct democracy has failed so badly.) The entire global economy rode a massive bubble of imaginary wealth and has now come crashing to the ground. Because you cannot have everything for nothing. TANSTAAFL, as Heinlein was fond of saying. (See? Sometimes I do agree with Milton Friedman.)
The result of all this in California was inevitable: at some point bills would come due that the state couldn’t pay, which is where we are right now, leading to what will surely be massive cuts to all sorts of state programs. And the inevitable result of that? Every group facing funding cuts is taking to the airwaves begging We the People to demand that funding not, in fact, be cut.
It’s only a matter of time before someone writes a new referendum, whereupon We the people, upset at the loss of such things as our lovely state parks, will vote to re-fund everything that the governor has cut--while still refusing to pay for a bit of it. And we’ll blame it all on the governor, refusing to acknowledge that in reality, it’s our own fault for creating this unworkable system in the first place.
Once we’ve done that--once we’ve had one more round of demanding the restoration of our pretty little baubles without paying for it--the state will be doomed.
“Democracy” itself is a Greek word, from demos or demoi, originally a phrase for an Athenian municipality but a word that came to mean “the people” generally, combined with kratos, which means power. And since they basically invented the idea, the Greeks got the naming rights. Originally, democracy in Athens was pure and direct: when a vote was to be taken, every single citizen was compelled to go to the Pnyx. (And I do mean compelled: servants would roam the city with a rope dipped in red paint, and any citizen caught wandering the streets instead of going to the Pnyx was slapped with the rope, leaving a red stripe for all to see. They called it “ruddling.”)
But of course this direct democracy was only possible for two reasons: only about a third of the residents of Athens were considered citizens, and only adult males were allowed to vote, so it was possible to cram everybody onto a hillside for the requisite speeches and poll-taking. But even then there was something called the Council of 500, a group of leading citizens who actually made most of the day-to-day decisions. So even at its birth, there was already the necessary beginning of what we now call representational democracy.
Representational democracy is what we have here in most of the U.S. We elect people who go to the state capital or to Washington and who cast votes on our behalf. We cast one vote for a representative who then casts all the others. But in California, we have found a way around representational democracy and back to something very like the original direct form, through the referendum system.
It’s been a disastrous failure. Just about every issue gets submitted to the voice of the people through a ballot initiative, often through expensive special elections where they don’t wait for a national contest to be held but instead call for everyone to come out and vote again and again. This creates voter fatigue, where turnout gets lower and lower with each special election that gets added to the calendar (particularly when no one is getting ruddled...), so that only the people fiercely committed to a particular issue actually bother to turn out and vote. Which has the effect of actually perverting democracy, because only the ideologues end up having any voice. You can end up with some mighty strange laws that way.
But to make matters worse, when one side doesn’t get what it wants, it simply creates another referendum and submits that for a new vote a year or so further on. Exactly this is happening right now with the infamous Prop 8: having lost the first round, the opponents of Prop 8 are collecting signatures to submit the same issue to the voters again, as soon as possible, so that they can try different tactics and hopefully get a different outcome. But what’s to stop the people in favor of Prop 8, if they should lose the next round, from coming back themselves a year after that? Potentially there’s no end to it, not so long as the vote-count is close. So even though I happen to be on the side of the opponents of Prop 8 and would love to see that appalling decision done away with, I just don’t see where this endless referendum cycle does anyone any good.
But of course the classic example of failed direct democracy involves Prop 13, which limited property taxes (and thereby the amount of revenues the state can generate), and declared that the state legislature cannot pass any budget without a two-thirds majority. Combined, this double-eyed whammy means that the state has a nearly impossible time raising money when it needs it, unless it goes directly to the people and asks for the passage of a bond initiative. And as we saw in the last special election, the people are perfectly willing to vote for spending for new mandated services, but they are considerably less willing to vote for anything that even remotely sounds like higher taxes.
We the people want everything for nothing. It’s understandable, but it’s also horrific from a governance standpoint. And it is most definitely related to the Era of Excess we just lived through, where people spent money they didn’t have to buy things they didn’t need and then found themselves deeply in debt, and clueless as to how they got there. (Obviously that’s not the whole story--there were plenty of corporations perfectly happy to exploit our something-for-nothing weakness. But for now, I’m focusing on our own culpability, on why direct democracy has failed so badly.) The entire global economy rode a massive bubble of imaginary wealth and has now come crashing to the ground. Because you cannot have everything for nothing. TANSTAAFL, as Heinlein was fond of saying. (See? Sometimes I do agree with Milton Friedman.)
The result of all this in California was inevitable: at some point bills would come due that the state couldn’t pay, which is where we are right now, leading to what will surely be massive cuts to all sorts of state programs. And the inevitable result of that? Every group facing funding cuts is taking to the airwaves begging We the People to demand that funding not, in fact, be cut.
It’s only a matter of time before someone writes a new referendum, whereupon We the people, upset at the loss of such things as our lovely state parks, will vote to re-fund everything that the governor has cut--while still refusing to pay for a bit of it. And we’ll blame it all on the governor, refusing to acknowledge that in reality, it’s our own fault for creating this unworkable system in the first place.
Once we’ve done that--once we’ve had one more round of demanding the restoration of our pretty little baubles without paying for it--the state will be doomed.
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