Philip Carlson
The Actors Center Journal Vol. 2, No.
Letter From The Editor
I am concerned about a very slow, I might even say cautious, level of response to the opinions expressed in this Journal. I don’t know if that’s because there are real technical difficulties (for which we apologize) involved in setting up the Forum. And if someone had wanted to post a comment and was unable to, perhaps it is understandable that the need to get through to us did not last past that initial (and thwarted) impulse. We are, all of us, used to being able to be heard. Waiting is so last century. However, readers can write me (philip@theactorscenter.org) or Michael (michael@theactorscenter.org). And some of you have. And eloquently. And we are printing some of those responses in this issue. Or what I take to be the timid response may simply be the result of our not asking the right questions. Or perhaps we are simply saying things with which most of you already agree. In which case, we should go on saying them. But one wants to make a difference. It’s human nature, I suppose. I have never considered myself to be much of a rabble rouser, but even I would like people to be as impatient as I am with the passionless performances that pass for art in most of the theatre we see today.
I have a dear friend who is a great actress who says to me periodically, “Oh, Philip, you hate everything.” Well, that’s a terrible reputation but I confess it is not ill-founded. But then people should be writing in to tell me not to be such a nattering nabob of negativity, if for no other reason. The truth is, more gets done in this world by people who are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore than by people like me who sit there and say, things used to be better. We’d like to find those people. We’d like to touch the hearts and minds of those people and I fear we are going to have to do better in the response department if we are to have any chance of making the world a better place for actors and their art and their ability to practice their art fully and for a living wage. That is what we are about. It may not sound like rabble rousing but it is. I have another friend who went to Africa last fall with a bunch of other artists and they taught poor kids how to act and make movies and express themselves. Is that rabble rousing? I think so. You should see those children’s faces as they watch my friend teaching them. World changing. One pair of children’s eyes at a time.
Before I moved to New York, I came in one weekend and saw Geraldine Page and Robert Morse in two different plays. I concluded the theatre was alive and well. Ten years later, when I lived in Los Angeles, I came into town and saw John Lithgow and Charles Durning in two different plays. Same conclusion. When I lived here in 1987, it was possible to see John Malkovich in Burn This and Bernadette Peters in Into the Woods. Same conclusion? I thought so then but I am not so sure now. I wonder if I had been making the correct conclusion all along. Isolated spots of genius do not make a theatre. In 1935 there were 162 plays produced on Broadway (including Porgy and Bess, The Petrified Forest, Rosmersholm, Waiting for Lefty, Ghosts and The Taming of the Shrew). Last season? Well, I don’t recall any Ibsen.
Years ago there was a multi-paneled cartoon in The New Yorker. The first panel showed a person (man or woman, I don’t remember and it hardly matters) reading a book in a hammock in the yard of a very nice looking house. In succeeding panels, the person puts down the book, goes into the house, gets a pencil and returns to the hammock. He or she then picks up the book, underlines a passage and writes in the margin, “So true!” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Or maybe our readers are thinking, so not true. It’s hard for us to know. Could you speak up?
So, to be clear, if you want to contact me, email philip@theactorscenter.org.
If you want to contact Michael, email michael@theactorscenter.org.
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