“Hi Steve,
I wanted to inform you all on how my auditions went this weekend.

Saturday:

NYU
I had NYU in the morning.
The dance audition was a lot of fun.  We learned a dance combo that was a combination of ballet technique, jazz technique, hip hop and a little bit of African.  The dance teacher was really nice and he would say that this day is “about celebrating you.  Breathe.  And have fun.”
My voice audition went well too.  The adjudicator and the accompanist were really nice.  After I sang both of my pieces they tested my range and I sang scales.  They took me down to an A and then took me up to an A flat.  Then they asked me if I could sight sing and I said “yes.”  So they handed me a piece of sheet music that had 4 or 5 staffs on it.  They asked me to sing the bottom staff and I sang it.  I though it went well.
Then I had my acting audition.  I went into the room and I did both of my pieces.  Then after I was done, the adjudicator said that he wanted to see my first piece again (my dramatic piece).  He said that he didn’t get the feeling that I was reacting to my father.  So he sat me down and then he wanted to hear me simply talk, be sincere and honest.  Then he stopped me again and said that when I say to my father that “I killed a man” he said that he didn’t know how I was feeling and that it seemed like I didn’t feel anything.  So he listed out around 4 hypothetical questions to think about and then he had me do the piece again.
Then he asked me 4 questions:
What was a risk I have taken?  I started talking about a risk that I have taken dealing with theatre.  But then he said that he wanted to know a risk not dealing with theatre.  And unfortunately I couldn’t think of one.  I spent a really long time thinking and nothing came to mind.  I’ve had a lot of challenges that I have had to overcome but risk not relating to theatre, I didn’t know?  So I told him that I was sorry and that I didn’t know.
Then he asked me what was a global or national event that has changed me?  And I answered that.
Then he asked where do I see myself in 10 years?  And I answered that.
Are you interested in any of the other studios?  I said yes.
And then I was done.

The Hartt School, University of Hartford
Hartt was a lot of fun.  I learned a simple, fun, rock and roll dance combination.
Then I sang both of my pieces and did one of my monologues.  It went really well.  They asked me if I had any questions so I was in there for a really long time asking them questions about the program and such.
It felt like they really cared about me as an individual.  I liked that.

Texas State
Texas State went really well.  It was just me and Ms. Hopkins in a hotel room (which was kind of funny – there was a couch, a table, a bed and everything).  Her sister was in there as well (she was video taping).
I felt like I did my pieces really well.  Mrs. Hopkins took a lot of time looking at my resume and seeing who I’ve worked with and how much dance training I’ve had.
She was so nice and very supportive.  She told me that I was going to do great at all of my other auditions.

Sunday:

I had my Roosevelt University Audition and Emerson College Auditions.

Roosevelt University: Chicago College of the Performing Arts
Roosevelt went AMAZING.  It was just me and Mr. Sean Kelly (the director of the department).  I did all of my pieces and after I was done he said that he loved my work and that it was a pleasure to watch me.  He also said that he has no doubt that I will have a successful career on Broadway.  Then he basically told me that I got into the school.  He told me that when I get my letter which will most likely say yes you are accepted that he will get me connected with Freshmen to talk about the program.  He also said that he would love to work with me for the next 4 years.  He knows that I will have a lot of other offers, but he hopes that I will consider Roosevelt.  He said that he was going to fight for me.

Emerson College:
Emerson went well.
We spent 40 minutes in the dance room with Steven (the director of Musical Theatre at Emerson).  He told us all about the program and how it’s focus was to make us better actors.  Everything was concentrated on acting.
We then learned a very simple dance to Hairspray and then we spent most of the time, talking about the dance/song and breaking it down into an objective, intentions, and tactics.
After we finished the dance portion we sang.
I sang both of my pieces.  He had me sing She Loves Me a second time because he felt like there was more voice inside of me that I wasn’t giving him.  So I sang it again, trying to give him more voice/volume (which I think I succeeded at).
Then I did one of my monologues (my dramatic monologue from Quiet in the Land).  I felt ok about my monologue.  I didn’t get to the place where I wanted to, but I can’t expect perfection every time.

Monday

Boston Conservatory
I had my dance audition at 10am.  It was a 90 minute dance audition.  It was so much fun.  It was with Michelle Chasae who is incredible.  We did a ballet across the floor and then we learned a really long Musical Theatre number to Tear Down the House from the musical Memphis. I felt really good about the dance audition.
Then at 5:30pm I was the last person to have their voice/acting audition.  I sang both of my pieces and did both of my monologues (my dramatic monologue and my Taming of the Shrew monologue).  After I did my pieces, I sat down with Neil the director of the program and we talked.  He asked me questions about my resume, “How do you like OCHSA?” and “How long have you worked with Anne Runolfsson?”  Then he asked me if I had any questions and then I asked him about 3 – 4 questions about the program.  Then I was done.
Overall I felt like it was a great weekend.  I did my best and that’s all I can expect of myself.

Thank you all for your help in helping me prepare and improve in my audition pieces and thank you for your support and guidance.  I greatly appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Collin Sanderson”

“I recently read J.K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement speech from 2008: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. And what hit home was the idea that failure is what forms us; it’s what shapes how we move forward in our lives. That said, it can either paralyze us or inspire us. It’s our choice. I’m starting to understand that we’ve got to turn our failures and our pain into the fuel for imagining and creating our deepest work and our truest selves. The failures that we’re bold enough to embrace will lead us to our inspiration.

J.K. (Jo, who took the initials to fool boys into thinking she was a he, as per her publisher) revealed that without the pain of her mother’s death, a failed marriage, poverty, and clinical depression, Harry Potter would not have been what it is. It very likely wouldn’t have been at all. What are we doing with our hurts and our follies? What catharsis are we afraid of? Do we dare to open the crucible and let ourselves be flooded with the depth of our histories? How can we accept the gift of our failures and clear the way for our most profound creations?

I’ve been struggling with my connection to failure. For my new website (to be finally launched this month) I’ve been exploring a part of my own history, archiving reviews and articles from the my long theatre (and film) career in New York. In going back and reading the clippings (with both nostalgia and apprehension) I found that I was too often attaching myself to the criticism (the petty, the biting, the misguided). And I’d replay events in my mind – What could I have done differently? Why didn’t I? What was wrong with me? I didn’t savor the great reviews, or even the good ones, or the in-depth articles on my achievements. I was doing what I tell every actor never to do (in their careers or in the scenes they play) – I was sitting inside the problem, the failure, and marinating in it. Well it’s time to climb out of that warm bath of regret. Bust open the crucible… and turn the failures, the mistakes, and the pain into fecundity (I love that word: fertility, productiveness). Into wisdom. Into deeper, more complex, exciting work. It really is the gift of our blunders and our anguish. It’s what, if we let it, grows us, braces us, and determines our artistry and our humanity.

This is some of what J.K. said:

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”

The entire speech can be found in the Harvard Magazine: http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination”

For more information on Risa Bramon Garcia, visit http://risabg.com/

I’m one of those controlling types. My morning yoga practice is more often than not a reflection of that persona:  willful and effort filled.  But this morning, a new and sublime experience surprised me mid-asana…. I was in the middle of an extended Warrior II pose, when all of sudden, for reasons I have yet to understand or recreate, I noticed that my by breath had expanded in my lungs in a way I had never experienced, and I had this distinct sensation of the prana sinking deeply into my arms, legs, back.  (Prana is a concept in yoga of a cosmic energy that enters your body with breath and is considered the link between the material and spiritual self.) For the next few minutes, my practice moved easily, organically, full of intention and awareness.  I seemed to float effortlessly on the breath with both the inhalation and the exhalation embodying the movement with a  subtlety and strength I have never before experienced.  It only lasted for about minute, and then I was back to my old ways. But for that moment, I was in a kind of heaven, the same bliss I feel in my most connected times in performance onstage.   There must be a connection.

Relaxed breath is key in powerful acting.  It’s no coincidence that the word for taking a breath has the same roots as the word for access to the artist’s soul… INSPIRATION. Breath creates a dynamic bridge between the left side of our brain – the part involved with speech, linear time and logic – and the right side, the side attuned to impulse, spirit and inspiration.  This is the realm of imagination… the realm of the visceral, uncensored response to the present moment.  Because breath can be a conscious, left-brain function, and an unconscious, right brain instinct, breath moves between both hemispheres – and serves as connective tissue,  key to the nuanced communication between the artist’s intellect and her soul.

What if we could allow the breath to take the lead onstage as I experienced on the mat?  With breath in the lead, could we suspend our usual attempts to control, to think three lines ahead, to worry about what our hands are doing?  What sort of effortlessness, what sort of attunement to the present moment could we enjoy if we could allow the breath to lead us from moment to moment onstage instead of trying to control the experience?

I think that answering these answers will make a big difference in our work, and I am going to continue to look for new ways to make breathing and the quality of breath a leading issue in my work onstage and in the studio with my students.  STAY TUNED!

Ben Cameron is a self-professed “Cultural Omnivore.” He was the visionary firebrand at TCG ( Theatre Communications Group) for ten years. He now heads the funding program at the Doris Duke Foundation. His recent TED talk is one of the most inspirational I have seen with respect to the continuing importance of the performing arts, virtual juggernaut notwithstanding. Give it a look/listen. Pass it on. This one deserves to go viral. (Or in the words of recent Whiting Award poet Julie Sheehan, “Wowzie!”)

Click here to see it: Ben Cameron\’s TED Talk: The True Power of the Performing Arts

Inspired by a real-life crime that Shaffer read about in a small town newspaper, Equus tells the story of a British psychiatrist wrestling with questions of passion and purpose while treating a disturbed teenaged boy who has violently attacked six horses.  And although this production stars Alec Baldwin as the psychiatrist, British newcomer Sam Underwood as his patient, and is directed by Theatre-Hall-of-Famer Tony Walton, the real star in the rehearsal room today is Mr. Shaffer himself, and the multi-award-winning opus he continues to polish.

Granted, there is nothing unusual about a playwright being in the rehearsal room. Authors of new plays frequently make changes during the period leading up to production. But once a play has been produced on Broadway, received multiple Tony Awards, been published, and then adapted into an Oscar-nominated film directed by Sidney Lumet, you might think the script was finished, “frozen,” as it were, as the definitive roadmap for any productions (and there have been many) to follow.  Not so here.

I am playing the role of the boy’s father in this production, and two days before rehearsals began, I received a whole new page of dialogue.  The new scene clarifies some of my character’s underlying motivation, and is of enormous help to me.  Other actors in our company have received equally significant adjustments to their scenes.  But what Shaffer is doing by picking up the pen at this stage in his, and the play’s, life, is not just a remarkable act of dedication to theatre, it is a profound act of courage.

Like the vibrant, restless horses that are so central to the play’s plot and theme, Equus the play is a magnificent  beast with a life all its own.  By re-entering the world of his play, Shaffer has summoned the courage to stand nose to nose with his creature and say: “I can do better.”

The young boy at the heart of the play has constructed a theology around horses – he literally worships them, and his actions call into question the psychiatrist’s own experience of faith and feelings about the passionate life.  “That boy has created out of his drab existence a passion more ardent than any I have known.”, says the Doctor. in one of the play’s more memorable moments.  “I feel a kind of envy.”  Why has this great playwright chosen to tempt the gods of theatre at this stage in his – and the play’s – life?  In fact, one can only imagine that the potential discoveries that might result from bringing thirty-five additional years’ perspective to the table would, for Shaffer, bring rewards worth the risk.

Win or lose, Shaffer’s willingness to continue exploring Equus is an inspiring lesson for us all… not just in the art of playwriting, but in the art of living. Would that we all had the courage to keep listening, within and without, to the narrative of our lives, remain open to its lessons, and be ready to continue re-writes.

Equus by Peter Shaffer
Directed by Tony Walton and Starring Alec Baldwin and Sam Underwood
June 8 through July 3, 2010
John Drew Theatre at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY
For tickets and information call the box office at: 631-324-4050
Or go online to www.guildhall.org.

Read more about EQUUS on 27 East Arts & Living

And what a celebration it was!  From 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 10 last Saturday over 50 student performers and 300 or so undergrad, faculty and community audience gathered to celebrate the arrival of Spring and raise money for Hands for Haiti, a relief effort founded by local high school junior Dayna Troisi.  And it wasn’t just Southampton Undergrads onstage.  East End middle school fiction writers and high school poets of the MFA Program in Writing and Literature ‘s Young American Writers Project joined hands with undergrad musicians, dancers and vocalists, MFA playwrights and actors,  - an incredible sampling from throughout our community – all of them raising there collective voices in celebration of love and redemption, sex and joy, humor, sadness and despair…everything that art and youth has to say about life in hard times.

There were far to many inspiring moments from talented performers to single out, but the commitment and vision of the festival producer, Bill Burford, Stony Brook Southampton Dean of Students, as well as the hard work of his production team – a mix of students and professionals – deserves a shout out and salute.

What was intended to become an annual event had become a swan song.  But that is not the how this story ends.  The story is and will always be remembered as nothing less than triumph of art over adversity.  As Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass “I celebrate myself and sing myself… I sound my barbaric ‘yawp’ over the roofs of the world!”  Last Saturday, our young sounded their ‘yawp’ over the Shinnecock Hills, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for us all.

About 6 months ago, I received an e-mail from my good friend Reed Birney.   Reed is an accomplished, talented New York actor who works all the time, but you would never consider him a star. He is, however, universally adored by the New York Theatre Community… and in a widely distributed e-mail, he urged a vast network of friends and colleagues, to “act quickly!”  He was appearing in the American Premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Soho Rep and tickets were already flying out the door. Besides, the e-mail continued, “not only do you get to see me make my nude stage debut, but I’m sure that all of you want to see me brutally raped at gunpoint.”

Neither one, truthfully… but to celebrate my 54-year old friend’s courage to bare his bits on the boards AND to witness the rare opportunity to see a fully mounted production from the limited cannon of Sarah Kane, infant terrible of the London Theatre in the last glimmers of the 20^th Century, that was worth bucking my inertia and, as the e-mail advised, taking immediate action.

Blasted was Kane’s first play, begun when she was still a schoolgirl in Birmingham, UK. It premiered in 1995 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The action of the play is set in a room of a luxurious hotel room in the north of England, where all seems normal – though there are vague references to a gathering menace in the streets below. Ian, played by Birney in this Soho Rep production that I am now hungry to see, seeks to reignite a dubious affair from the past with an emotionally disturbed innocent named Cate.  Ian bristles with gin-stoked rage when his expectations are not met, and a vicious cycle of abuse and brutality are leveled from both sides.  After the appearance of a starving machine-gun-toting soldier from some Baltic conflict, the narrative descends from a naturalistic though disturbing domestic scene into an increasingly nightmarish world of horrific vignettes, depicting anal rape, cannibalism and other shocking brutalities that largely enraged the British press at its premier.  The Daily Mail, in a review typical among the London dailies, referred to the play as a “disgusting feast of filth.” Blasted was, however, praised by many of Kane’s supporters as an important work, making important parallels between domestic violence and war, and between emotional and physical violence.

Had she not suffered from debilitating depression, Kane may have seen those critics eat their words.  She took her own life at 29 just two years after Blasted was first produced.

Now, it’s a cold Wednesday dusk, an hour before curtain, and I’m walking through what I remember from my salad days as a hell-hole south-of-Canal-Street neighborhood, now newly chic.  My  destination:  The venerable Soho Rep, where Blasted is playing, and, incidentally, where I  made my own New York acting debut, semi-clothed, in 1977.  I am walking along filled with magical thoughts, en route to the same theatre where my own professional career began, the same theatre where Sarah Kane was to have the American debut of her play, AND where my BBF Reed Birney was making his big-city-debut-de-naked butt.  I am loving life at this very moment, when out of this existential reverie appears an angel.  It’s Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman.

“Marsha!” I say.

“Stephen!” She replies. “What are you doing in my neighborhood?”

“I’m seeing this play at  Soho Rep.” says I.

A long pause, with concern beginning to color her face.  “Ohhh…” she keens, “I hear it’s a pretty rough go”

“So I’ve heard,” says I.

“Here’s what you do…” she says.  “Have a drink, a stiff one.”  (I’m thinking, no problem there!)  “And,” she continues, “purchase a bar of your favorite chocolate, and consume it quietly during the performance.  Good Luck!”  With that, she was gone.

I followed her instructions to the T.

The production did not disappoint.  It was exquisite, and to say the actors were good or even great doesn’t even begin to describe it. Their performances were convincing, accomplished, exciting, but more than that… they were brave.  Even under the artifice of theatre, to surrender yourself each evening to the lowest of the lower depths of human experience can take a toll on an actor’s psyche. It’s a balancing act of professional approach and artistic commitment. To be so convincing and yet come through the experience six nights, 8 times a week uncrushed by the weight of such darkness is a victory as glorious as any award.

As for me, the medication of one stiff drink quickly wore off as I was drawn into this dark world. But as I continued to follow the action down to below-hell depths, I found myself becoming more and more emotionally detached.  I could no sooner accompany the character to where they were headed than follow them to Mars.  Why would I want to?  I have my own demons to wrestle with, thank you very much.  But then, as I became more and more free from my emotions, my judgments began to soften – and my ideas about the action onstage became irrelevant.  Maybe it was the chocolate, but a curious change began to take place:  The more brutal, the more graphic and repellant the action became, the lighter I felt.  With each atrocity depicted with such care and craft by this extraordinary cast, director and production, I began to believe that I was being given a gift, an opportunity to exercise the darkest facets within my own psyche, the parts appearing only in my worst nightmares, and to allow this shadow to emerge safely.   After two hours of witnessing artful representation of mankind at its most depraved, I left the theatre not so afraid of the dark.

And, thanks to Marsha Norman, I had chocolate to share with my battle-scarred companions to the right and left… a communion.

Afterwards, over drinks with Reed at some Church Street dive, I asked what the experience of playing this role was like. He said that he’d never had such a liberating experience, onstage or off.  As strange as it sounds, I knew exactly what he meant.