Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd" [SPOILERS!]

Everyone I know loved Tim Burton's adaptation of "Sweeney Tood." I'm the exception. But, like all my friends, I found it visually stunning: meaning that each shot looked like a arresting painting or photograph. On top of that, I've always loved Sondheim's music and lyrics. And the story moves me. So, a great story, fantastic music, stunning visuals... what's not to love?

Redundancy. Rather than finding a way to make the visuals add a new element to the music, Burton uses them to illustrate the music. One example: in the song "By the Sea," Mrs. Lovett sings,

In our cozy retreat kept all neat and tidy,
We'll have chums over ev'ry Friday!

Burton decides to show us what's in Lovett's mind's eye. He cuts to a fantasy image of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett entertaining some friends. But that's unnecessary. The image is already in the lyrics. Burton doesn't need to illustrate it. (I'm surprised he doesn't place a calendar in the shot, showing that it is -- indeed -- Friday.)

Okay, maybe he doesn't need to illustrate the lyrics, but what's wrong with doing so? Ultimately, I can't defend my view, other than to say my aesthetics don't allow gratuity or redundancy. But I think most people would cringe at prose that said, "One upon a time there was a little girl named Margaret. She was little. Also, she was female. When she was born, her parents named her Margaret." Perhaps to those who aren't cursed with my redundancy-radar, such lapses are less noticeable when a visual duplicates a lyric.

If you give people enough treats, they tend to ignore (or not notice) that the treats could be better. So if you're sufficiently dazzled by picture, story and music (and acting, etc.), you may not be bothered by redundancy, even if you admit that, on some level, it's a fault. The movie is good enough to entertain you.

Yes, but it could be better.

Music is wonderful because each instrument adds something unique. They don't just ape each other. And all the unique sounds work together to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We especially feel this when music has lyrics. For instance, "Eleanor Rigby"'s sad music doesn't illustrate its sad lyrics. The lyrics are sad in one way; the music in another way. Both of these ways work together to create something deeply moving.

Now, I like The Beach Boys. But I think they're much stronger musically than lyrically. I don't think their lyrics are redundant; I just think they're weak. "Good Vibrations" is a stunning piece of melody, harmony and timing. But the boys could have done better than, "Im pickin' up good vibrations. / She's giving me excitations." To be honest, I'm so dazzled by the tune, I don't generally notice the lyrics. I simply enjoy the song. In this sense, I'm like my friends who are so dazzled by Burton's eye candy and Sondheim's music, they don't notice the flaws in "Sweeney Todd."

But that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. I'd be even more thrilled by "Good Vibrations" if its lyrics matched the brilliance of its music. So even if "Sweeney Todd"'s flaws don't disturb you, I hope you'll see that it is flawed -- and that those flaws could have been (and should have been) dealt with. And the movie would have been better without them. I don't think it's good. You may think it's good enough. But dammit, it should have been great!

I'd like to focus on Burton's handling of the song "A Little Priest." In the song, Todd and Lovett try to outdo each other with gruesome puns about pies made out of people:

TODD: What is that?

LOVETT: It's priest. Have a little priest.

TODD: Is it really good?

LOVETT: Sir, it's too good, at least!
Then again, they don't commit sins of the flesh,
So it's pretty fresh.

TODD: Awful lot of fat.

LOVETT: Only where it sat.

TODD: Haven't you got poet, or something like that?

LOVETT: No, y'see, the trouble with poet is
'Ow do you know it's deceased?
Try the priest!

TODD: (spoken) Heavenly!
Not as hearty as bishop, perhaps,
but then again, not as bland as curate, either!


Burton films this by placing the characters in a room surrounded by windows. Before each person-in-pie pun, one of the Todd or Lovett happens to look out a window and see the sort of person he or she is singing about. So, for instance, Mrs. Lovett looks out the window, sees a priest, gets the idea, and sings, "It's priest..."

Aside from being redundant, this destroys the fun. The fun -- besides the fun of gallows-humor -- is hearing two smart people, Todd and Lovett, on a spree of pure invention. It's like you're watching what you think is an actor doing brilliant improv, then all of the sudden you see he's reading cue cards. It was much more fun when you thought he was making it up. In Burton's version, Lovett isn't smart enough to think up "priest" on her own. She has to see one.

Given Burton's interpretation, I'm not sure what to make of lines like this:

LOVETT: (spoken) Now let's see, here... We've got tinker.
TODD: Something... pinker.
LOVETT: Tailor?
TODD: Paler.
LOVETT: Butler?
TODD: Subtler.
LOVETT: Potter?
TODD: Hotter.
LOVETT: Locksmith?

Isn't the whole point that they're brilliantly trying to stump each other? It's not brilliant if they can see a parade of London professionals walking by at opportune moments, giving them hints. A clever scrabble match gets reduced to one in which each player gets to consult a dictionary before taking his turn.

But the worst sin is that by turning the song outward -- by focusing on what Todd and Lovett are looking at -- Burton misses how deeply this song illuminates character. We don't care about priests and tailors. We care about Todd and Lovett. This song is about two people who have been talking past each other coming together and forming a cohesive unit.

Before "A Little Priest," Lovett moons over Todd, but Todd barely registers her. He's too caught up in anger and lust for revenge to care about her. Sondheim paints this picture beautifully in the song "My Friends." The "friends" in the song don't refer to Todd and Lovett. Rather, Todd is singing a love song to his razors. Never once does he refer to Lovett, though she's is in the room with him, simultaneously singing a love song to him, which he doesn't notice:

Todd (to his razors): You there, my friend,

Lovett (to todd): I'm your friend too, Mr. Todd.

Todd: Come, let me hold you.

Lovett: If you only knew, Mr. Todd.

Todd: Now, with a sigh,

Lovett: Ooh, Mr. Todd,

Todd: You grow warm in my hand...

Lovett: You're warm in my hand...

Todd: My friend,

Lovett: You've come home.

Todd: My clever friend...

Lovett: Always had a fondness for you, I did...

And so it goes. In fact, even "A Little Priest" begins with the characters talking at cross purposes and misunderstanding each other. Shortly before the song, Todd kills his first victim. He and Lovett are trying to figure out how to dispose of the body. Todd suggests waiting until dark and then burying it. But Mrs. Lovett has a better idea. She explains it to Todd obliquely, hoping he'll get it. But he doesn't.

MRS. LOVETT: Seems a downright shame...

TODD: Shame?

LOVETT: Seems an awful waste...
Such a nice, plump frame
Wot's 'is name has...
Had...
Has!
Nor it can't be traced...
Bus'ness needs a lift,
Debts to be erased...
Think of it as thrift,
As a gift,
If you get my drift!

No?


But then there's finally that golden moment when the lightbulb goes off in Todd's brain. Suddenly, he's in same time and place as Lovett.

LOVETT: Seems an awful waste...
I mean, with the price of meat
What it is,
When you get it,
If you get it...

TODD: HAH!

LOVETT: Good, you got it!

And for the first time, he sings to her as if he's noticed her, as if he appreciates her:

TODD:
Mrs. Lovett, what a charming notion
Eminently practical
And yet appropriate as always!
Mrs. Lovett, how I've lived
Without you all these years, I'll never know!

And this leads them into the partying and punning (the music, by the way, is a waltz). They hatch their great idea. Todd will murder people; Lovett will dispose of their bodies by making them into pies. The perfect crime, each member doing his or her part, each needing the other. It's appropriate that this song ends Act I (of the original stage version). The whole act has been about the two characters dancing around each other. Now they are dancing with each other. Act II will be about how their union falls apart. (And, at the end, right before Todd pushes Lovett into the oven, he reprises a bit of "A little Priest," this time sung mockingly. He re-interprets their former union as a sham.)

Even within "A Little Priest," Todd and Lovett have a complex relationship. True, they come together. But Todd's obsessions risk ripping them apart:

LOVETT: Try the friar,
Fried, it's drier!

TODD: No, the clergy is really
Too coarse and too mealy!

LOVETT: Then actor,
That's compacter!

TODD: Yes, and always arrives overdone!
I'll come again when you have JUDGE on the menu!

Todd's last line kills the game. Musically and lyrically, it doesn't rhyme. It's "out of tune" with the rest of the song. [UPDATE: in a comment to this post, James Troutman pointed out that the line contains an internal rhyme ("you" and "menu"). He went on to say, "Musically it provides a modulation from E flat to D flat and the song stays in that key until the end. To me it conveys a sense of moving towards the conclusion, as opposed to moving in a totally new direction."] Luckily, Mrs. Lovett distracts him, getting him back on track. And by the end, they're a couple again:

TODD: Have charity towards the world, my pet!

LOVETT: Yes, yes, I know, my love!

TODD: We'll take the customers that we can get!

LOVETT: High-born and low, my love!

TODD: We'll not discriminate great from small!
No, we'll serve anyone,
Meaning anyone,

BOTH: And to anyone
At all!

Like many Sondheim fans, I own the original-cast recording. I've listened to this song dozens of times. The puns were fun at first, and they're still fun, but the don't surprise me any more. What brings me back to the song, again and again, is the delicate balance of Lovett and Todd's relationship. The feeling of euphoria when they come together; the heart-skipping-a-beat feeling when they almost come apart. (And the foreshadowing that they eventually will -- that Todd's obsessions will destroy any chance of harmony between them.)

Consciously or unconsciously, Burton works against this. He's so intent on illustrating, he misses the forest for the trees. It's as if, reading Sondheim's lyrics, he rubbed his hands together, grinning at all the wonderful images they called up, looking forward to displaying them on a big screen. Though Burton will laugh at me all the way to the bank, I'd go as far as to say that he doesn't just misunderstand Sondheim, he misunderstands cinema. He thinks of it as a means to show off cool images. He doesn't think of it as a unique vehicle for story-telling, one that offers the craftsman an orchestra of instruments, each of which should be playing its own tune (though adding to the whole) or not playing at all. There's no room for fat. Fat should be trimmed. "You must kill all your darlings."

How would I have filmed the scene? Well, I wouldn't have shown a single priest, tinker or chimney sweep. If the room must have windows, the curtains would be drawn. Todd and Lovett would have been in Lovett's pie shop. They would have been discussing the body while Lovett got on with her business. She would have been making pies. Todd would have been seated in a chair, perhaps. Maybe staring into space; maybe cleaning one of his blades.

Once Todd gets Lovett's idea, and they go into the punning section, they would use Lovett's pies as joke props. Pretending they are people pies. Eventually, when the punning got fast enough, they would have dispensed with the props altogether. Words would have been enough, their eyes meeting, maybe for the first time. One thing Burton and I agree on: at they height of their unity, they would waltz around the room.

But that's not cinematic! Burton's version is a movie version, not a stage version. You can't just have people in a room, talking (or singing).

Hogwash. Most movies have dialogue scenes. Think of the most "visual" filmmakers. Scorsese, Coppola, Kubrick. In "The Shining," the most dramatic scenes involve Shelley Duval and Jack Nicholson talking. Famously, HAL 9000 and Dave talk in "2001." There's plenty of talking in "Taxi Driver" and also plenty in "The Godfather." Not every scene needs to be about "great visuals." A wise artist knows when to pull the camera back and when to push it in. He knows when a scene is about vista; he knows when it's about character.

And if there is no way to make a story "cinematic" (which I don't think is true in this case), the wise artists remembers that not every story needs to be filmed in the first place. Just because it exists, it doesn't have to be a movie.

POSTSCRIPT:

My idea of a well-filmed musical number is "My Forgotten Man" from "Gold Diggers of 1933." It's the most brilliant (and yet understated) number ever filmed, and Burton should have studied it as gospel. All you would-be Burtons can see it here:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qR7EtTdLbU

The scene starts with a dumbshow, underscored by a musical prelude. It's the Depression. A sad Joan Blondell bumbs a cigarette off a guy in the street. He seems down-and-out, too. They lock eyes for a moment and then he moves on. None of this illustrates the upcoming lyrics in a literal way. There's no mention in the song of cigarettes or meetings in the street. But it compliments and deepens the song's story.

Next, we get a prolonged closeup of Blondell singing (or rather speaking) the song. Some directors might prefer something more "cinematic," yet what could be more so than a closeup? What other medium allows it? You can't create closeups on the stage. They're relatively weak on television. (I'm sorry you have to watch this one on YouTube.) This closeup forces you to confront Blondell's pain. Her eyes complement the lyrics more eloquently than any other image I can imagine.

Then, in its most brilliant section, the camera moves away from Blondell to a tenement window, in which you see another woman. She too starts singing the song:

Remember my Forgotten Man.
You put a rifle in his hand.
You sent him far away.
You shouted hip hooray.
But look at him today.

The lyrics tell the story of a forgotten man. Yet the camera lingers on a woman. It then moves from window to window. In each window, there's a woman by herself -- in one case, a woman with a baby. These are the "forgotten women" who aren't mentioned in the song, except by the words "my" and "me."

It would have been so easy to show rifles and people shouting hooray. But the director (the great Busby Berkely) went in another direction. Realizing that such shots would be redundant, he opened the song up in an unexpected way. He let the music do its job, the lyrics do theirs, and the images make their own, unique contributions.

how has art changed the world?

On an online forum, someone asked "How has art changed the world?"

My response:

I don’t think art has changed the world any more or less than anything else (trees, politic, war, germs, rocks…). And I don’t think it’s changed the world in noticeably different ways than anything else. Which isn’t to say I think art is inert.

My problem is with the word art. It’s a useful word, but it’s necessarily fuzzy, and I think it falls apart when you try to use it in big philosophical questions. There is no one thing called art. Art is a collective word used to label a huge cloud of activities. What can we say about all those activities? Maybe only that “art” involves objects or activities that aren’t completely (or obviously) utilitarian yet which seem important. I’m not satisfied with that definition, but it’s the best I can come up with right now.

In any case, since art is a fuzzy catagory, when you try to build grand statements on it, you’re building on a really unstable scaffolding. It’s much safer to talk about how individual works of art have impacted the world: how “The Rite of Spring” changed music; how Shakespeare changed the language, etc. But that’s not as interesting as “a grand unified theory” of Art.

Why do people make art? I think they do it because they have to. Not all people have to, but enough do. It’s an urge — an itch. Where does it come from? I have no idea. My guess is that it’s a byproduct of other, more utilitarian processes: the need to communicate, the power of emotions and sensations, etc. For whatever reason, peoples in all cultures throughout all times have produced art.

Each piece of art impacts different viewers (listeners, etc.) in unique ways. How does art change the world? Ha! We can’t even say clearly how a single Picasso painting changes the world, because it changes the world in a zillion different ways. It changes the world by the sum total — or by the individual amounts, if you’d rather think of it this way — of the ways that it changes each viewer (and the artist).

You can say, “Yes, but how does it impact Art History?” And it’s fine if you care more about that than how it changes my grandmother. But that’s your arbitrary interest. The fact is, it changes both in some way.

Does art change in people in unique ways — ways that non-art objects don’t change them? Maybe. Maybe some people. But not necessarily in uniquely powerful ways. I’ve been destroyed by art. But I’ve also been destroyed by sunsets, love, kittens and really good cheeseburgers. Art goes into the mix like everything else.

What fascinates me is the fact that you asked this question. People ask variations of it all the time. I have a theory about it: I think we have two conflicting urges. One is to engage in activities that are more or less about pure sensation. These activities seem to have very little utility, especially when you separate them from their traditional roots in religion (which itself may have little utility). But that doesn’t stop us from wanting (needing?) to make and view art.

At the same time, we have another powerful urge to discard anything that’s not clearly useful. We could call it the Protestant Work Ethic, but you can be a Jew or an Hindu and still feel its profound tug.

We have a profound need to work; we have a profound need to play. We have a profound need to not-waste-time. We have a profound need to waste time. I think this tug is immensely important to human history and to individual experience. I’m not sure how it’s important, but I know that I wrestle with it every day. And I see everyone I know wrestling with it, too. (You even see it WITHIN art, where you have the Hollywood excess on one hand and the “Kill all your darlings” minimalism on the other.)

Ultimately, I think it’s impossible to harmonize the two forces. The tug between them is the Human Condition. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. Maybe trying is part of the Human Condition, too! The desire to pound art into a pragmatic framework often leads to questions like this (though it may not have been your motivation). It also leads to actors feeling guilty about not contributing enough to society, which is why we all have to suffer through Ben Affleck (or whoever) making public service announcements. It’s why people don’t want their kids reading a book unless it has “a good lesson in it.”

Here’s a thought experiment: what if I could conclusively prove to you that art had no purpose beyond hedonistic pleasure? What if art is like pot or sex without procreation? Would you think less of it? Would you stop viewing it? Stop making it? Would you view or make art anyway but feel guilty while doing so? I’ve heard people say things like, “art isn’t art unless it has a moral aspect” or “art isn’t art unless it makes you think.” But when I see a child finger painting on an easel, I doubt he’s trying to overthrow the government or muse on Existentialism. He’s scratching an itch.

will I or won't I?

I've been thinking about my state of mind when I first wake up in the morning. Due to my workload, I set my alarm for 6am every morning. This wouldn't be such a big deal, but I'm unable to get to bed before midnight, and I generally don't fall asleep right away when I am in bed. I know this isn't enough sleep. I said "yes" to too many projects, and this is the price I'm now paying for it. Come March, things should ease up a little bit.

I used to try to work out between six and seven. Now, since my publisher is chewing me out for being late on some chapters, I use that time to write. I write from six until eight. Then I get ready for work. Or at least that's the idea. Some mornings, the alarm goes off, and I hit the snooze button and stay in bed.

I've come to feel that I have no control over whether or not I'm going to get up and work. In fact, the night before, when I'm setting my alarm, I get this feeling that whether I'm going to get up or not is totally random. I've reached a detached state, where I think, "Okay, I'm setting the alarm. I wonder how I'll react to it." (Is this how drug addicts feel? "I'm trying to quit. I wonder if I will? Oh, damn. I'm reaching for another hit!")

It's easy for me to understand the mental mechanism when I stay in bed: the alarm goes off, I'm exhausted, I say, "screw that!" and I roll over and go back to sleep. What fascinates me are the times when I get up and start working. I wish I could say that I master myself. "Yes, you're tired, but you have work to do!" In fact, I do say that, but it seems to have no effect on whether or not I'll actually get up and do the work. It will make me feel more guilty, as I'm lying in bed, drifting back into a slumber, but it won't necessarily guilt me out of bed.

No. On the days that I get up, I just ... get up. I'll be lying there, mulling over the possibilities: "I'm so sleepy... I could get up ... or I could sleep more ... or I could ..." And then suddenly, I just bound out of bed. Before I know it, I'm slipping my arms into the sleeves of my bathrobe and padding downstairs. It feels like something that just happens, that just comes over my body. It doesn't feel at all like a decision.

It doesn't always happen. And I haven't figured out anything that will make it more likely to happen (or less likely). It appears to be utterly random.

I'm not worried about myself. I know that if something really important was going on -- a fire in my apartment or a plane I need to catch -- I'd get up. I always do in those situations. But though the writing is important, it's not vital that I do it on any given day. It's just vital that, in general, I keep at it. Which makes the get-up/don't-get-up decision harder to make on any given day, for whatever is making it.

I'm never been much of a believer in free will. But I do believe in the feeling of free will. I think this feeling is based on an illusion, but it's a strong feeling none-the-less. I'm not used to not feeling it.

My guess is that when one needs to make a decision, two opposing modules in the brain duke it out. I'll call them the yes and no modules. They both vie for dominance, and somehow one of them wins. The body makes a move. Or not.

After the fact, the winning module hands over his data to the "I" part of the brain. So I -- the conscious part of me -- feels like it has made a choice. This makes sense from a Darwinian perspective (I think), because if the choice winds up being successful, and I feel like I've made it, I'll be able to "make the same choice" in the future, in similar situations. The "I" module will trump the no module, saying, "I'm not going to listen to you. This worked well last time, so we're doing it again!"

But I guess that, when I'm awakening, the part of my brain that gives ownership of the winning solution to "I" isn't activated yet.

Or that theory may all be bullshit. But it's very odd to feel like a spectator, waiting for something else in me to make a decision!

what if you knew God's purpose?

I just finished reading a fun, forgettable sci-fi/thriller called "Blasphemy." In it, a group of scientists seem to have contacted God. God explains to them His reason for creating the universe, which is, essentially, to help Him think. The universe is like a giant computer. All of the galaxies, stars, planets, people and animals are the "ones and zeros" in this computer, and we're all working together to solve some great problem.

This got me thinking about the so-called "meaning of life" that many people search for and wonder about. If they're searching for it, they must think (or at least suspect or hope) that it exists. It exists; they're just not sure what it is.

Imagine someone revealed it to you. Imagine someone was able to categorically inform you that the meaning of everything -- or the purpose of everything, which I think is a better way to put it -- is to do X, Y or Z. To All Work Together On Some Big Project. To Help Defeat An Evil Demon. To Transcend Matter And Become Pure Spirit. Whatever.

Let's say someone proved this purpose to you, and you had no doubt in the validity of the proof. You now know the purpose of living, the purpose of everything. Now what?

I can't grasp the concept of a purpose without some sort of intelligent designer behind it. As I see it, it makes sense to speak of a hammer or a teapot as having a purpose, because someone designed those tools with a goal in mind. On the other hand, a rock doesn't have a purpose, though an individual person can choose to give it one. Even in that case, purpose is endowed by a thinking mind.

(People speak of evolved traits as being purposeful: "ducks evolved webbed feet in order to propel themselves through the water." But I interpret such statements as metaphors. Traits evolved due to a cause-and-effect process: some ancestor species to the duck lived in the water. Individuals of that species that happened to have webbed feet were able to swim better, which increased those individuals' chances of survival. There was no purpose; there were just events that happened. And the outcome of those events is that ducks now have webbed feet. Saying "ducks evolved web feet in oder to..." is a shorthand, metaphorical way of describing a purposeless process.)

So since (in my thought experiment), we've proven that the universe has a purpose, it must be somebody's purpose. Keeping with tradition, I'll call that somebody God. In fact, one might define God as the "person" who created the universe and gave it a purpose.

Fine. So we "know" that God created a universe and gave it a purpose. And we now know what that purpose is. Let's say that we even know how to best live our lives to help further that purpose. (I can imagine a no-free-will version of this thought experiment, where we have no choice but to further the purpose. We're simply cogs in a machine, running according to spec. But to keep things interesting, I'm assuming that's not the case. We can choose to work for or against the purpose.)

My question is: now that you know the purpose and how to further it, do you care? I suspect that there are two sorts of people: those who, given this knowledge, would gratefully fall in line with the purpose and those who wouldn't. I wouldn't. And I didn't realize that until I read "Blasphemy."

Remember, I'm not saying I wouldn't further the purpose because I don't believe these is one. True, in real life I'm an atheist, but for this article, I'm assuming I'm a believer. Someone has proved to me that God does exist and that he has a purpose in mind for us and for the universe. My honest gut response is "Why should I care?"

Let me pause to clarify a couple of things: first of all, I wouldn't cut of my nose to spite my face. If it so happened that God's purpose aligned with my personal goals, I'd be fine with it. If God's purpose for me involved staying with my wife, directing plays, and other things I'm already doing (or want to do), I wouldn't perversely stop doing them, just to be contrary. Still, I'd be doing those things for the same reason I always did them -- because I like doing them. If they furthered God's purpose, that would be coincidence. (Remember: I'm assuming free will, not some physics in which we can't help doing God's work.)

Second, I'm not immune to rewards and punishments. I'd probably fall in line with God's plan if it wasn't too onerous and if He (or some of His followers) offered me enough cash. And I'd definitely fall in line if, by not doing so, I'd spend an eternal afterlife in the Lake of Fire. But let's assume there are no rewards or punishments. Or rather, there are no punishments. The reward -- if you think of this as a reward -- is being part of the process itself: being part of God's plan.

Given all this, choosing to follow God's plan strikes me as similar to choosing to follow the president's plan. Or choosing to follow the king's plan. There's a powerful person; he has a plan; he wants you to follow it, though he won't punish you if you don't. Do you? If so, why? If not, why not?

I know God is much more than a political leader, but my imagination is limited. He's an intelligence, and I can only map that onto a human-like intelligence. So the only way I can understand God is as "a guy." A really powerful guy ... a guy who created everything... but still a guy. As a guy, he has his wants and needs. As another guy, I have mine. Why should I care about His? Why don't I care about His?

In stories and discussions about Purpose or Meaning, it always seems like people are searching for it with the intent of living their lives by it, once they find out what it is. There's never a discussion of evaluating it first. People don't seem to worry about whether they'll like the purpose once they know about it. They don't seem to worry about whether or not it will conflict with their personal goals and lifestyles. Why not? I get the impression that there are a ton of people out there who are lost. They are so lost that they want a purpose. Any purpose. And I suppose any purpose is better than no purpose.

In my cynical moments, I imagine God descending to Earth and saying, "My children: in order to fulfill my purpose, I need you all to grab the first infant you see and bash his head in with a mallet!" And that since this is God's purpose, many people will do it.

On the other hand, am I being colossally perverse not to fall in line with God's plan? (Even if His plan turns out to be something that strikes me as repugnant, boring or evil?) If the entire universe is a machine that does X, is it crazy (and selfish) to work towards Y? I can't help feeling like, selfish or not, I didn't ask to be part of this machine. I can't help feeling the desire to escape from its chains.

Or am I being perverse in the same way as the guy who keeps himself awake for five nights in a row? Our bodies weren't built for that. They were built to spend part of each day asleep. It's perverse to punish your body that way. In the same sense, it it perverse -- unhealthy -- to rebel against the machine you're a part of, even if that machine's purpose is unknowable, boring or repugnant to you?

(The unknowable part is interesting: if God said to you, "I need you to do X, Y and Z in order to fulfill my purpose. Unfortunately, I can't explain to you what that purpose is. But rest assured, if you do X, Y and Z well, you'll be furthering it," would this be enough for you? Would you do what He wants without knowing why He wants it?)

I've noticed that many people have a strong sort of respect for creators that I don't share, and I think this difference between them and me is key, though I'm puzzled as to why I'm so eccentric. And I'm puzzled as to why so many other people don't share my eccentricity.

In the theatre, I constantly hear people talk about "what the playwright intended." If they somehow know what Shakespeare or Ibsen or Mamet intended, they think it's perverse -- or disrespectful -- to thwart that intention. I don't.

(You may find my view selfish, and maybe it is, but I extend it to my own work. If I write something and "put it out there," I don't expect people to use it or interpret it "as I intend it." As a director, I consider my job to be telling stories to an audience. Though I often use written scripts to do this, I don't think my job is "to present the playwright's intentions to the audience." My job is to tell a story. If the story is clearer or more evocative when I thwart the writer's intentions, then I should thwart it. In other words, I see my responsibility to the audience as greater than my responsibility to the writer. And I don't see my responsibility to the audience to be to "tell the playwright's story to them, as he intended." I see it as "to tell the them the most interesting story I can tell."

I wonder if respecting the author/creator's intentions, above everything else, is a cross-cultural, pan-historical syndrome. Have we always done it? Will we always do it? If it's a local effect, what started it?)

As I see it, if I create a tool and keep it in my own house for my own use, it's mine. You don't have a right to break into my house, take it, and use it for your own purposes. But if I create a tool and give it to the public, part of that gift is letting go of my purpose. If I make a tool for you, you're free to use it for your own purpose. You don't have to respect mine. If you feel compelled to respect mine, then I haven't really given you the tool. A gift is given freely, or it's not a gift.

So I can't respect God's purpose just because He is the creator. The creation was a historical event, but the creator no longer has special significance or rights. The Chinese invented gunpowder, but we don't have to consult with them and ask them what they want us to do with it. We can use it for our own purposes. If God wants me to follow His plan, he needs to show me how it will benefit me.

Yes, that's a self-centered attitude. I'm not self-centered towards my friends and loved ones. I'll do things for them, even if they hinder my purposes. So maybe if I had a personal relationship with God, I'd feel differently. But since, to me, God is "a guy," and the world is full of guys, I'm not sure why I should choose this particular guy for a friend.

"Thinking Shakespeare"

Acting is strange. When you do it wrong, you're boring and phony; when you do it right, you're exciting and real. Being "real" means convincing the audience that you're engaging in purposeful thought -- that you seem to be actively trying to figure things out, right there on stage, in real time. If the audience feels that -- since you're read the script and toiled through countless rehearsals -- you already know what's going to happen, you'll seem contrived. If you're Hamlet, you can't know whether to be or not to be; you have to figure it out as you speak. Also, you must seem to be carrying on real conversation: really listening and responding -- even though, having memorized the lines, you know what everyone is going to say.

You screw this up by overcomplicating. You worry about what to do with your hands rather than what your character is trying to achieve. Or you worry about trying to squeeze out tears, because you're sure the audience will think you're a good actor if you can cry on cue. You're enmeshed in your ego, rather than simply trying to achieve some simple action, like talking or listening.

You screw things up by failing to prepare. You don't learn your lines well enough, so they never seem natural. Sometimes this is due to laziness. Other times, it's ego again. You're scared that you'll fail on stage, and every time you pick up your script for a memorization session, you have to think about your impending failure. That's too painful, so you watch television instead. And in the end, you fail, because you didn't pick up your script.

You succeed because you Keep It Simple, Stupid. You memorize your lines, and you play your simple actions. Then you bow and go home. Really, that's all there is to it. You figure out What Your Character Wants and you try to get it, using the playwrights words (which you've thoroughly memorized). But just sticking to this simple plan is incredibly hard. Actors need constant help to do so. Some need to be prodded to memorize their lines; others need to be kicked in the ass and told to get over themselves, their fears, their inhibitions, etc. What does your character want? What should he do to get what he wants. Do that! ONLY do that.

Even those who are committed to the simple plan need continual reminders to stick to it. It's so easy to veer off course. Which is why it's always useful to read clear, to-the-point acting books. They're all the same. They all tell you to figure out what your character wants and then work to get it. But the good ones find a new way of telling you this. Even when you know these books messages before reading them, you read them and say, "Yes! Of course. That's what I should be doing!" And you're grateful to the author for setting you back on The One True Path.

The best acting book I've read in years is "Thinking Shakespeare", by Barry Edelstein. It delves into every nook and cranny of Shakespearean acting. And we Shakespeareans need even more prodding than usual, because added to our egos and our laziness, we have reverence to contend with. Shakespeare is such a lofty figure! How can we possibly measure up? By Keeping It Simple, Stupid. By figuring out what our characters want and working to achieve those goals on stage. That's Edelstein's message. It's been many other people's message, too. But Edelstein tells it well -- and he shapes it specifically to the needs of the Shakespearean actor. But "Thinking Shakespeare" should be read by all actors. For if you can act Shakespeare, you can surely act Neil Simon. The Simonean uses many of the same tools as the Shakespearean, and Edelstein will teach both how to wield those tools. (It's the "figuring out what your character wants" part that particularly hard with Shakespeare. But if you know how to look for them, you'll find clues in the words. Most of Edelstein's book explains how to interpret the words to find these clues.)

"Thinking Shakespeare" is a splendid book for directors, too. It will teach them -- or remind them -- how to analyze a Shakespeare script. It will also help them work with actors. And "Thinking Shakespeare" will thrill the literary scholar or Shakespeare fan. If you've spent all your time viewing Shakespeare through the lens of academia, this book will open you up to a whole new way of reading (not just Shakespeare, but all plays). You'll see plays as conflicts that arise when multiple agents -- the different characters -- all try to achieve their ends at once, inevitably clashing with each other to do so. And you'll see how each character uses facets of Shakespeare's language to achieve his particular ends. Since I started running Shakespeare through the mechanics of the theatre, I've enjoyed reading the plays more than ever. You will too.

Throughout the book, Edelstein repeated asks the correct question (the only question): why is this character using these words now? He answers that question in dozens of ways, including metrical analysis, focusing on verbs, chewing over line endings, etc. But none of this is done for the sake of scholarship; it's done to answer the question "why is this character using these words now?" (So that actors can choose an appropriate action when speaking the words.) For instance, Edelstein urges readers to consider Richard II's change from heightened to simple language in his "Let's talk of graves, of worms, or epitaphs" speech. Near the start, Richard's words are lofty and "poetic," such as when he says to, "Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes / Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth." But by the end of the speech, his words are simple monosyllables ("I live with bread, like you; feel want, / Taste grief, need friends..."). Why? Why the change from high to low? What does this tell us about what Richard wants? What does it tell us about why he's using these words now? Actors need to understand what such changes mean and know how to use them as tools to aid their craft.

Using simple, non-jargony prose, Edelstein delves into meter, line endings, formal vs. informal address, shared lines, names, rhyme, irony, wit, and more. He's exhaustive and definitive. I dare you to come up with ten topics (applicable to the Shakespearean actor) that Edelstein has forgotten to cover. He's written THE book that every actor and director should skim through (having once read thoroughly) before starting work on a play.

I do have a few quibbles: in his early section on actions, Edelstein suggests that a strong one is "to wonder" (as in "to wonder about a question or problem"). I disagree. An action helps an actor DO something -- as opposed to trying to play some emotional state. For instance, an actor should never try to "be sexy." Instead, he should try "to seduce." To seduce is a playable action. So is "to rebuke," "to compliment," "to mock," etc. These are all things you can try to DO while speaking the playwrights lines. The action that you're playing will necessarily color the way you speak the lines. If I'm saying "you're SO beautiful," I'm going to say it very differently if my action is "to mock" as opposed to "to flatter."

"To wonder," Edelstein's example of a good action, seems more like a state to me. Granted, it's not quite the same as "happy," "sexy" or "pissed off." It makes no sense to say "to happy," whereas "to wonder" is a perfectly fine infinitive. But to me, it's not playable. What exactly do you DO when you wonder? If I'm trying "to seduce," there are various tactics I can employ. I can gaze into your eyes; I can subtly lick my lips; I can speak softly; etc. But what tactics do I employ "to wonder"? Wondering isn't something I do on purpose; it's something that HAPPENS to me when I get curious or confused. (When a scientist is curious, he doesn't take action by wondering; he studies, researches, experiments... When he's lying alone at night, he may wonder, but that doesn't make wondering a playable action. When Hamlet asks "To be or not to be?" he doesn't wonder, he wrestles, searches, beats his head against a problem....) As a director, I'd never tell an actor "to wonder." I'd worry that, by doing so, I'd throw him into trying to play a state -- to BE something (quizzical?) rather than to DO something.

My second quibble is something of a soapbox issue for me: I'm continually turned off, when I see productions of Shakespeare plays, by actors who illustrate their speeches with hand gestures. For instance, when saying "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below," the actor playing Hamlet might flap his arms like a bird's wings while saying "fly up" and point to the ground while saying "below." I suspect actors do this -- and I see them do it ALL the time -- for a couple of reasons; (a) they think it's amusing; and (b) they think it will help the audience understand the difficult, Shakespearean language.

I object to it because it's (a) redundant and (b) condescending. I can understand "fly up" without gestures, thank you very much. And so can my audience. When I direct Shakespeare plays, I forbid all such gestures. I DO worry that the language might be hard for the audience, but I deal with that by making sure the actors know what they're saying, know why they're saying it, say it clearly, and say it while playing an action. Whenever I stick to this plan, the audience always seems to be able to follow the play -- with no need for pantomimed gestures.

But I mostly hate these gestures because they're phony. I don't believe that the characters would really make them if they were truly 100% focused on trying to achieve their actions. I believe they make them because they're 80% focused on their actions and 20% focussed on trying to amuse (or explain things to) the audience. Since I'm aware of this, I smell fakery. I'm not saying that people never gesture in real life. Of course they do. But they don't tend to gesture in such a self-conscious, theatrical way.

I mostly see these gestures when an actor says something lewd. For instance, when Mercutio says, "love is like a great natural, that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole," you can bet that the actor will thrust his hips back and forth to MAKE SURE THAT WE GET IT. Maybe we don't get it (though I think we do, if the actor speaks the line clearly while playing a strong action), but I'd rather miss the sense of a line or two than be constantly distracted by visual Cliff Notes.

I often fear that actors (and directors) are terrified that without these gestures (and without juggling, musical numbers, wacky costumes, etc.), audiences will be bored. Too much Shakespeare! The audience needs a spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down! But if you assume that Shakespeare is Caster Oil -- or if you assume your audience thinks it is -- you've lost the battle. Produce Shakespeare because you love Shakespeare, and assume your audience loves it too. Of course, some don't love it, and that's too bad. But you're not going to convert them into Bardoholics by making lewd gestures. You may -- you probably will -- entertain them. They'll go home thinking, "Boy, that actor was funny when he mimed jacking off!" But they won't go home loving "Romeo and Juliet."

I'll be off my soapbox in a minute. But I'm standing on it now, because Edelstein (correctly) points out that if a line seems dirty in Shakespeare, it probably is. In other words, Shakespeare intended it to be dirty, and his original audience would have understood it as dirty. Edelstein does NOT suggest making lewd gestures to illustrate with lewd lines, but he does immediately follow his discussion about dirty lines with a chapter on gesture and movement. So while he may not connect the dots, his readers might. They might feel that an expert on "Thinking Shakespeare" has given them permission to illustrate "the beast with two backs." Maybe he has. Maybe Edelstein likes such gestures. As a Shakespearean director and theatre-goer, I'm sure he's seen them often enough. But while he rails against other practices that make Shakespeare seem phony -- Shatner-like inflection and veddy veddy pretentious, British-sounding dialects -- he doesn't speak out against the sort of gestures that I wish had been left behind in the 18th Century, where they belong. Well, maybe Edelstein's not on this soapbox with me.

Finally, I fault the book for the very reason it will surely appeal to many others: though Edelstein claims to be writing for all sorts of people -- laymen and experienced thespians alike -- his target audience is one that quakes in its boots when faced with "King Lear" or "MacBeth." So his prose is very Shakespeare-for-Dummies-esque. "Don't worry. The Shakespeare Police won't arrest you." That sort of thing. I'm sure this hand-holding aids many people, and it probably helps book sales, but it's a bit grating if you're not scared of Shakespeare. It's a bit superfluous if you want "Just the facts, ma'am."

Still, these are minor concerns based on personal quirks. "Thinking Shakespeare" is a fantastic resource. The next time an actor friend has a birthday, I know exactly what I'm going to get him. The next time I direct a Shakespeare play, I'm buying copies for everyone in the cast.

my dad

What made me who I am? I'm a theatre director, a computer programmer, and a technical writer. My father, Harry Geduld, is none of those things. Yet, as I look back, I realize that he's responsible for nearly every career choice I've made and many of the (hopefully endearing) quirks of my personality.

My dad is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, West European Studies and Film Studies. He retired a few years ago as chair of his department. But while he was running his department, he surprised many colleagues by "ruling" with an olive branch instead of a whip. Those of you who come from academic backgrounds know how political they are: how axes are always grinding and grudges last for decades. Over the years, my dad had accumulated plenty of good reasons to be vindictive. As a younger professor, he was often ill-treated. I don't know all the ins and outs of the situation, but I think it boiled down to the fact that he taught Film Studies. Nowadays, that has more cache, but in the 60s and 70s, scholars sniffed at it.

Student's didn't. Student's ate it up. My dad's classes burst at the seams, while those other professors -- the ones teaching German Literature classes (or whatever) -- were lucky to get three students. So snobbery combined with professional jealousy. Added to this, my dad was a writing machine. He churned out books -- over twenty-five when I last counted. He wrote papers and essays and reviews. His department supposedly had a "publish or perish" rule, but I think my dad was one of the few who took it seriously. So he was a little like "the teacher's pet," following the rules while the other boys stood around on street corners, whistling at girls. Only there wasn't a teacher to pet him. He just believed in hard work and took joy in work well done.

I'm sure many facts in the previous paragraphs are wrong. I was a kid when it happened and it was all very confusing. But I was left with the impression that my dad was working incredibly hard, taking a stand against the world. It really seemed like him against everyone, but he didn't back down. He just kept working hard and fighting the good fight, and after years and years, he finally got the recognition he deserved. And, when he finally got some power and could have rained sorrow down on the heads of those who had belittled him, he instead treated everyone with kindness. That was a wonderful lesson for a child. Though I was brought up in a Jewish home, I learned from my dad to "love thine enemy" and "turn the other cheek."

Since he was a Film Historian, our house was always flickering with movies. Back before DVDs or VCRs, my dad would project movies onto our living-room wall. This is how I first saw "Vertigo," "City Lights," "Gone With The Wind," "2001," and "Sunset Boulevard." Later, my dad bought one of the first consumer video-tape recorders. It was a reel-to-reel machine! Each reel could hold an hour of footage. And I remember when a good movie came on TV, I would try to tape it. Halfway through, I would frantically thread a second tape through the machine, hoping to miss as little of the movie as possible. I got to the point where I could do this in about 30 seconds.

All these movies now float around in my head. I fell in love with stories -- the type people used to tell in old movies, when a good yarn was what was most important. From as early as I can remember, I was awash in stories. Which, I'm sure, is what made we want to work in the theatre. As a director, I'm not interested in making a point or advancing a theme. I just want to tell stories.

Actually, there was another influence on me as a story maker. When I talk to people about what made me decide to become a director, I always bring up the movies on the wall. But there was an earlier influence, and it also came from my dad: he read to me. From when I was too young to remember to when I was eight or nine, my dad read me stories. I'm sure, when I was really small, he must have read me picture books, but what I remember are the novels. He would read me a chapter every night, making all sorts of voices and playing all the characters (the start of my romance with acting?). This is how I first encountered "The Time Machine," "War of the Worlds," The Narnia Books and "The Hobbit." I became a life-long reader, and in addition to printed stories, I also listen to audiobooks. I think they make me nostalgic for those days when my dad read to me.

One time I had to go on a long road trip, and my dad actually recorded himself reading the whole of John Hersey's "Hiroshima" on four or five cassettes. It was harrowing. I'll always remember it, but I've never wanted to reread it. I want it in my head, spoken with my dad's voice.

In addition to Film Studies, my dad also taught English Literature. He is an extremely well-read, cultured man. So he may have been disappointed when his son became more interested in comic books and sci-fi than in Shakespeare and Melville. But if he was disappointed, he never showed it. He never forced Chaucer down my gullet or made me feel ashamed of my lowbrow tastes. Quite the contrary, he BOUGHT me comic books and recommended sci-fi books to me. Eventually, in my own time, I got tired of the "kiddie lit" and graduated to the classics that were stacked on shelves throughout the house. So my dad did the best kind of teaching with me. He let me be my own sort of person but gave me the tools to "better" myself -- when I was ready to do so.

Seemingly without trying, my dad taught me to be a good writer. He tapped away at his manual typewriter (using his two-fingered, hunt-and-peck method, he was faster than any touch-typist I've ever seen), churning out books at the rate of a dime-store novelist. But he wasn't a hack. He was devoted to clear, evocative prose. He introduced me to writers like Orwell and showed me how they structured their sentences around strong, simple verbs. More important, he taught me that all writing was worth doing well. I write much less creative stuff than him. He wrote studies of D.W. Griffith and Chaplin; I write computer manuals. But I labor over each sentence like a poet, and my readers seem to appreciate the effort.

One day, as a teenager, I came home upset about some fight I'd gotten into at school. My dad told me that if I really wanted to win arguments, I should study logic. And he presented me with a dog-eared copy of some logic book he'd had for years. It was a tiny, Strunk-and-White-sized book, but it started an avalanche in my brain that's still rumbling around in there today. I took to logic immediately. I loved how it clarified my thinking and writing, but I wanted to touch it in some purer form. I eventually found that form via computer programming. I think I became a programmer for two reasons: because I wanted to grapple with logic in some tangible form, and because I was transfixed by HAL 9000 when, as a boy, my dad showed "2001" on our living-room wall.

Before becoming a programmer, I spent ten years teaching computer courses. I was a great teacher. If there was a five-star rating system on evaluations, I pretty much always got five-out-of-five stars. I have a legion of former students who keep in touch with me and ask advice. I'm continually invited to speak at national conventions. I owe it all to my dad. Some professors are good writers or researchers but lousy teachers. Not my dad. He worked just as hard at teaching as he did at writing, and he always spoke to his students as equals. When I was a kid, our house was generally filled with grad students, who seemed like friends. Though, as a kid, my schoolteachers were mostly incompetent martinets, I learned from my dad that teaching wasn't about being in charge. It wasn't about discipline or proving how smart you are. It was about communicating complex ideas clear and helping people grow.

My dad filled our house with music. He's been collecting L.P.s since he was a teenager. By the time I came along, he'd acquired shelves and shelves of them. From my friends, I learned about The Beatles and Disco. From my dad, I learned about Shostokovich, Judy Garland, Old British Music Hall ongs, Miklos Rozsa and Stephen Sondheim. These all still play on my stereo today. But more than for the specific music, I thank my dad for making music as essential to me as food or water. I have over five hundred albums on my iPod. I wish I had room for more. When I get done writing this, I'm going to play Shostokovich's Eighth String Quartet. And then maybe the original cast album of "Company."

One thing I didn't appreciate about my dad until I was much older: he was a good husband. As a kid, I witnessed all of my friend's parents separating, divorcing and remarrying. Most of those friends are now divorced themselves. But my dad and mom have been together for almost fifty years. I can't yet claim such success. I've only been married to my wife for eleven years. But things are going well and marriage to me feels like something sacred and worthwhile. And I owe that to the example I witnessed as a child.

In many ways, I'm very different from my dad. I'm not sure what he believes, but I don't think he's a staunch atheist like me. He's a proud Jew, whereas my Jewishness has never been all that important to me. He also an extremely political man. I, on the other hand, rarely think about politics. I suspect sometimes my lack of interest in my roots -- and my head-in-the-sand attitude about politics -- upsets him. I don't blame him for this. I'm a little ashamed of these aspects of myself, too.

I know he's the way he is because, as a child, life treated him harshly. He was a small boy in London during The Blitz, and twice his homes were bombed to smithereens. He was evacuated into the country, separated from his mother and father and subjected to all sorts of anti-semitism. I can't even imagine. I can't because he worked hard to make my life different, better. And it was -- and is. And since he sheltered me from many of his hardships, I can't completely relate to what he wend through. In addition to all the intellectual and emotional gifts he gave me, he gave me the gift of security.

How can I thank him? There are no words.

boo hoo

An actress friend is concerned because she can't make herself cry. Here's my take on stage crying:

1) Very few people can turn on the waterworks at will. This is just a truth, and all actors need to admit it to themselves. In play X, if asked to shed tears, an actor may not be able to do it. He needs to admit that he may not be able to do it and come up with some other plan. (This actor is probably a really really good actor. Sometimes good actors can't shed tear; sometimes bad actors can shed tears. Shedding tears is an auxiliary ability, like stage combat. It doesn't define good acting.)

2) "Some other plan" is faking it. If shedding tears isn't an option and the play calls for crying, you need to fake-cry. There's NO shame to doing this. Acting ISN'T about feeling real feelings; it's about convincing the audience that you're feeling real feelings. All that method stuff -- the stuff that helps you feel real feelings on stage -- is useful, because the easiest way to convince someone that you're having real feelings it to actually have real feelings. But it's important to remember that "having real feelings" is not the goal-- it's one tool to help you reach the goal. And when that tool fails, you should toss it and choose another.

An actors might refuse to fake-cry because...

1) He thinks the goal of acting is to feel real feelings. But he's wrong. The goal is TO TELL A STORY -- to convince the audience that he is feeling real feelings.

2) He doesn't enjoy acting unless he is feeling real feelings. I sympathize, but he's being selfish. Acting isn't about the actor serving his own needs; it's about the actor serving the play. The play doesn't care whether or not the actor really feels anything. If the play cares about anything, it cares about getting its story gets told.

3) He's scared that if he fake-cries, he'll do it badly and it will be obvious that he's faking. Okay, so get better at it! Rent movies of with people crying in them and study their faces. Study their body movements, etc. This sounds silly, but I strongly believe that ALL acting schools should have a class called "Faking It." In that class, students should learn how to fake crying, laughter, orgasm, etc. All actors should feel secure that if they can't muster up the real thing, they can effectively fake it. They should never feel that they can neither really do it nor fake it. If they feel that, they'll panic. (And I bet an actor who is really secure with his fake-cry will actually be able to shed real tears more often than an insecure actor. One of many factors that keeps the insecure actor from crying is fear of failure. It's like trying to get an erection when you're worried about premature ejaculation.)

What about tears? Well, there are all sorts of tricks you can play -- and they're EFFECTIVE. One is to play the action of holding-back-tears. (When real tears roll down an actors cheeks, it's impressive in a pyrotechnic sort of way, but it doesn't actually serve most scenes. It's too much of a release: too cathartic. It kills all the tension. Holding back is usually better. For a rare counter-example, see Emma Thompson in "Sense and Sensibility." And think about how rare such scenes are.) Wiping away non-existent tears works really well too. Don't wipe them from your cheeks -- wipe them from you eyes. The audience can tell there are no actual tears on your cheeks (in a close space), but they can't tell that there are no actual tears in your eyes.

(When I was playing Uncle Vanya, I came up with a great trick (it helped that I was directing): I told the actress playing Sonya to come up to me and wipe away my (fake) tears. This is what magicians call "misdirection.")

Fake it. Sell it. And have fun selling it. When they praise you on your realism, inwardly smirk and think, "SUCKERS!" They're not really suckers; they're theatregoers. Theatregoers WANT to believe. They are paying to be conned. Con them, goddammit!

As for the movies: bah! Hardly anyone really cries in movies. It's either glycerin or tears that finally come after a zillion takes -- and you're only seeing take One Zillion. If you want to ruin a bunch of movies for yourself, watch scenes in which people cry and notice the inevitable cut right BEFORE the appearance of tears. BAD GUY: You must pay the rent. SWEET POLLY: But.. but.. *sniff*... [Cut back to BAD GUY] BAD GUY: Boo ha ha ha ha HAAAA! [Cut back to POLLY with tears running down her cheeks.]

It's editing and special effects.

Some screen actors who CAN cry on cue opt for glycerin instead -- because it looks better than real tears.

what is this thing called love?

In response to this post, Rowan (from Australia) wrote me this terrific letter:

I have to disagree with something you wrote. You said that in real life, the fact that people can't know intent (your mind will never truly touch another mind) is shocking and tragic. I agree that it's never possible to know another person's intent with certainty, but I don't see that as a flaw. So much of human interaction is made difficult by this fact, which leads to all the false assumptions, empty accusations and unspoken suspicions that cause pain in the world. But, like most other aspects of the world, this down side is more than made up for in the moments when the impossibility of knowing intent is surpassed, is irrelevant. I have been in situations where I have felt closer to another person than I even knew possible, and when I am experiencing a incredibly unique rush of emotion as the mundane, everyday workings of the world suddenly appear new and beautiful, in every way. It's called love, but that word gets used so much it dilutes this one particular aspect of it.

Of course, not every moment that you love someone is quite like that. There are disputes, there are irritations, there can be those assumptions and suspicions. In those rare moments though, there is something special to be found. I don't think you are knowing their intent any more than you can normally, because the same barriers are in place. But you don't need to know their intent. You don't need to have this false reinforcement of your belief because that belief, in itself, is perfect. There is something in the very fact that you cannot know if it is reciprocated that makes it better. Instead of a flawed human emotion where you need support and constantly doubt yourself, this is the one moment where you transcend that anxiety, because the sheer power of the moment takes you beyond concerns. I think a similar thing happens with very religious people, which is why any amount of argument about the lack of a God will, in the end, be futile. The moment of pure love doesn't listen to evidence or reason, or care about knowing intent. It is, in itself, perfect.

Perhaps in 20 years I'll look back and think that this is just me trying to 'flee from the truth' about intent, and that it is truly terrifying that we can't know another's intent. But until then, I'll happily see it as something that is an obstacle to human interaction, but that it can be overcome (not in the sense that you can know another's intent, but in the sense that it doesn't matter to you) in those rare and wonderful situations.

Here is my reply:

We're actually in agreement about love, but you expressed it better than I ever could. I agree that whatever shortcomings love may have, it's enough. Which really means, for all practical purposes, it doesn't have any shortcomings. Enough is enough.

My point wasn't that we can't feel connection, but rather that we're scared of not feeling connection. And that this fear causes people's knee-jerk reaction to my statements about intent. If I can't know an author's intent, then his mind isn't really touching my mind. And if his mind can't touch mine, can anyone's?

Let's not discuss whether or not we can truly connect with other minds. That opens up a gigantic philosophical can of worms. It's an interesting can, but I think there's a can on the other shelf which is much more relevant to everyday human existence: do we FEEL that we can connect with other human minds?

Well, there's no "we" when it comes to things like this. You and I might feel entirely different things, but I'd wager that the general answer -- the answer for most people -- is "yes and no" or "sometimes yes, sometimes no."

Whether it's illusory or not, we sometimes fell amazingly close to other minds. This is the feeling called "love," and it's the best feeling there is. At other times, we feel completely cut off from any mind except our own. This is called ... what?... loneliness? being alone? It's the worst feeling there is. We're not always pushed to these extremes. Often, we feel somewhat connected or somewhat alone. But we know that the extremes exist, and we fear one as much as we long for the other. Sometimes it's surprising which one we fear and which one we long for.

In a way, all stories are about these two feelings. Stories are about people striving to connect and succeeding -- or failing. Obviously, this is true about love stories, but it's true about other stories, too. Ghost stories, for instance (can we connect with the dead?). And sci-fi stories (can we connect with alien minds?). There are also stories about people trying to disconnect ("The Misanthrope"). There are stories about people who are tormented by other people's too-strong desire to connect ("Fatal Attraction").

Naturally my statements cause anger: I'm toying with the most important aspect of the human animal -- the fact that we're a social animal! I may be right (naturally, I think I am), but it doesn't matter. For me to casually say, "you can't know intent" is like someone casually saying, six million Jews died in the Holocaust. It's true, but it shouldn't be casually uttered. (And I try not to be casual about it.)

I know that in my most intimate relationship -- my relationship with my wife -- pretty much every moment is about trying to connect (and very occasionally about trying to disconnect, as in "I need some space, honey!") and terror of losing the connection. Sure, I'm terrified that my wife will die, but this terror reveals itself in more mundane ways, too. Because I'm so close with her (or feel like I am) it's horribly frustrating when we have a misunderstanding -- when I try to connect with her and fail.

The whole "battle between the sexes" is about this conflict. It's summed up in the trite saying "Can't Live With Them; can't Live without them."

So I think you're right that we can touch other minds (or that it feels so much like we can that we might as well say that we can). And I think I'm right that we can't (since it often feels this way, too). Which is the true feeling? Which one is more valid? I think those are silly questions. Or maybe they are religious questions. If there's a God, maybe we're created for a purpose and so there's some truth about the way we really are.

But I believed that we evolved through the accident of a Darwinian process. We evolved to be -- more than anything else -- social. So naturally we're going to care about other minds and fear losing connection with them. Evolution is a cold, unintelligent process. It's not trying to be fair (it's not trying to be anything). So I'd say we simply have these feelings -- for no real reason other than as a result of being what we are. And we'll always have them. There's no way to resolve them or to make one of them trump the other.

Are the Arts in peril?

A friend of mine is pessimistic about the state of the Arts. I understand. I will never make money as a director, even though I live in the America's theatre center, New York City. It's mostly filled with tourists going to see second-rate musicals. But I'm not pessimistic. But my lack of pessimism comes with a bite. I can only be optimistic about the Arts when I shine a harsh light on myself.

Artists have always complained about the state of the Arts, but (partly based on introspection), I suspect that these complaints are, in reality, one of four things (and usually all these things at once):

1) Anger that the government doesn't give more money to the Arts. This is a legitimate reason to be angry, but it's not the same problem as concern that the Arts will cease to exist or become "less artistic." If the government stops funding the Arts, some artists will quit making art, because they will need -- or want -- to jump into more lucrative fields. But the loss of some artists -- no matter how unfortunate -- is not the same as the loss of Art.

2) Anger and fear that I -- the artist -- will not be able to support myself by making art. Again, this is a natural concern, but my personal finances have much more to do with my life and comfort than they do with Art.

3) Anger, sadness and frustration that so many people I know don't care about art. This is horrible, but "people I know" aren't necessarily representative of all people. Maybe my "concern about the Arts" is really a concern about my social life.

4) Fear, anger and confusion about aging. Is it true that the Arts are declining? Or is it "just" that the the artists I grew up with -- the ones I'm most comfortable with -- are declining? Am I transferring my fears of aging to less-scary fears about "art" because aging (and dying) is too scary to think about? I grew up reading Raymond Carver's short stories. When Carver died, I pretty much quit reading short stories. But tempting as it is, I can't deduce from this that the craft of short fiction is dead. I'm sure it's alive and well. Rather it's me (or part of me) that is dead.

You could read my list, agree with it (not that you necessarily should) and still be depressed. "Okay, maybe I'm not depressed about the Arts, but I AM depressed about the government, my finances, my philistine friends and growing older." Fair enough, but the good news is that if you DO care about the Arts, you can be assured they will survive and thrive.

I am 100% convinced that making and caring about art is natural to the human animal. It's no more likely to decline than eating or sex is likely to decline. All cultures throughout history have made art. All cultures will continue to make art -- despite the fortunes of individual artists or the whims of particular administrations. Sure, there may be historical blips -- a few decades now and then when the art scene becomes less vibrant -- but then things will bounce back and the arts will be important again.

I often have a fantasy -- and I never admit this to my artistic friends -- that the government will pull ALL support for the Arts. Not only that: in my fantasy, there will be no paid artists. No one will buy art, and artists will never be paid for what they produce. I know this sounds terrible, especially coming from someone who toils in the Arts. Please remember: it's just a fantasy. But I think it would prove to everyone that the Arts are in no danger. Art would continue because it has to. And it would stop the ugly linkage between art and money that does way more harm than good.

Yes, it is VERY sad that people give up making art because they can't make a living while making it. But -- and this is really harsh to say -- I think such people are not truly devoted to the Arts. The best artists I've met make art because they HAVE to. It's that way with me. I often feel that I'm a lousy artist. It doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter that I hate going to rehearsal about half the time. It doesn't matter that my theatre loses money. I'm compelled to do it. It's like sex. Or eating. And if it ever stops feeling that way for me -- and sometimes I hope it will -- it WILL feel that way for someone else. So I might not continue, but the Arts will continue. I may or may not be an artist. But I am not Art.

And I don't know about you, but the plays I most want to see, the novels I most want to read, the paintings I most want to view ... are the ones made by people to HAVE to make them. The ones made by people who will burst if they don't vomit their demons out onto the canvas, the paper or the stage.

I DO think certain art FORMS are dying. Theatre is dying. That is very sad, but it's just Darwinism. Vaudeville is dead; Silent films are dead; Mime is dead; Medicine Shows are dead... but Art continues. Storytelling continues. As it always will, because people are storytellers. And I don't think the sad stare of Theatre has much to do with the government or a decline of culture. Forms just die. It's the same with languages. People get depressed because Yiddish is dying, and I totally understand that, but Etruscan is already dead; so is Ancient Egyptian, Aramaic, etc. But LANGUAGE goes on. It will always endure and it will always morph.

I am sad because so many of the artists I loved as a child are dying, dead or very old: Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller... And I SHOULD be sad. But if I'm feeling up to it, I can put things in proportion. Those losses are personal tragedies for me, but they are not losses to the Arts -- any more than losing Shakespeare or Tolstoy is a loss. People die. New artists -- great artists -- will always emerge. If you think they won't, they you have to explain how the human animal could possibly have changed all of the sudden. When I'm at my most cynical, I think all of this "the Arts are dying" is a way of making ourselves feel like our generation is special and not just the blip in history that it is: I was THERE when the Arts died!

I am in trouble, because I'm moving into middle age. And that's when people make The Great Decision: which is whether to ossify or move forward. Yes, Arthur Miller is dead and Harold Pinter is an old man. But there are NEW artists. And there are many great new artists. And (many of you may disagree, but I mean this with all my soul) this is a GREAT time for the Arts.

The Arts are very vibrant right now: ask a 20-year old who is passionate about the Arts. The trouble is with me. There's a truth about aging that people don't like to admit: it's scary and exhausting to embrace new things. This isn't true when you're younger, but it's true when you're older. Hence the urge to ossify. Most people feel a reluctance to start reading a new novel. Those first few pages are daunting. But if you push yourself past them, you quickly get hooked. If you go out in search of new artists -- if you read the "New York Times Book Review" -- it will seem daunting at first, but you will get hooked, and you'll discover that you could spend the rest of your life, every waking moment, reading great NEW books and watching great NEW movies and tv-shows and you'd die without getting through an eighth of them. So how can the Arts be dying? It's we who are dying. And the Arts don't care. They proudly march on.

I suspect that TV will dominate the next 100 years -- TV seen on an old-fashioned set and TV seen on the Internet. Our generation was told that TV was evil. Of course it's not. It's just a box that displays pictures and sounds, and it's as good or as bad as the particular show that's on it right now. And we're currently in a Golden Age of television. No one is saying this, but it's true. TV artists have finally figured out how to craft stories for their medium. (They didn't get it during our formative years -- the 70s and 80s were horrible for television, so naturally we tend to think it's a bad medium). HBO figured it out. They have crafted quite a few shows that are great art by any standards. And due to HBO, the traditional networks have learned that -- surprise, surprise -- people respond to good writing. So there are now great shows on mainstream TV. And sure, there's also a lot of crap. It's mostly crap. But that's always true in all mediums. Why -- out of a vibrant Elizabethan theatre -- do we now only produce Shakespeare, Marlowe and a few others? Because most Elizabethan theatre was shit. It's hard to make great art. It always will be. 80% of it will always be shit. We need to be thankful for the other 20%.

One day, maybe 100 years from now, TV will die, and people will lament. They will look on TV the way we look on live Theatre. But waiting in the wings will be something else -- some new form to take TV's place. And sometimes the new form is a rediscovered old form. Maybe there will be a live-theatre revival. Whatever. Art marches on.

And if our friends don't care about art, that's sad. But those are just our friends. There are art lovers all over the world. The "masses" will never care about art on the level that we do. But they didn't in Shakespeare's time, either. Most people are too busy surviving to care deeply about art. That's horrible. But that's always been the state of the world. But there will also always be pockets of people, all over the world, who do care. There are tons of people who still go to the theatre, read literary novels, visit museums and listen to classical music. One great thing about the Internet is that it lets such people -- who formally would have lived in isolation, thinking they are the only people who care about Mozart or whatever -- meet each other.

Here are some hopeful signs for the future:

TV: Deadwood, Studio 60, The Sopranos, Freaks and Geeks, Lost (not as good as the others, but descent genre work)

Filmmakers: Ang Lee, Wes Anderson, Sophia Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson

Novelists: Jonathan Ames, Curtis Sittenfeld, Mark Haddon, Michael Chabon

Theatre: Adam Guettel (grandson of Richard Rogers, mentored by Sondheim -- have you heard his achingly beautiful musical, "Floyd Collins"?) and Conor McPherson. I'm sure there are other gifted you writers for the theatre, but my head is in the sand -- I pretty much only read/watch classics.

my own intent

A reader wrote in response to this piece (in which I am skeptical that we can ever know an artist's intent). He wondered if, when I direct plays, I care whether or not the audience gets my intent. He also wondered whether actors might confuse an audience if they played their characters as confused. For instance, if an character is groping to try to figure out his next word, mightn't the audience think that the actor playing the character has forgotten his lines? Here's my response:

You asked whether it's important that, when I direct plays, audience understand my intent. I assume you're asking whether or not it's important to me -- not whether or not it's important to various audience members. I'm sure it is important to some of them, because many people care about intent. If I felt like confronting them, I'd say, "I'm sorry it's important to you, because you can never know my real intent. Not even if I tell it to you, because I might be lying (or, more likely, I might be mistaken)." Of course, I would never actually say this, because I want people to enjoy themselves. If someone cares about intent and thinks they know what mine is then more power to them!

One of the reasons why I mistrust the idea of mining intent from other people's work is that when I direct plays, I'm not always aware of my own intent. If someone pinned me down and demanded to know my intent, I might tell them something, and it would probably be an approximation of the truth, but I can't really read myself well enough to tell the whole truth. And -- who knows? -- I might just try to say something witty or smart, something that would make me look good, perhaps, but wouldn't help anyone understand what my actual intent was while I was directing. Also, all this talk about intent assumes that the artist has one fixed intent. But during a long rehearsal period, my intent might change from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday (to later in the day on Wednesday).

Maybe people cling to intent is a desire to simplify human psychology. People really want to believe that they can pack someone's motivations into a nutshell or boil them down to a simple sentence. I fall prey to that desire. It's one of the reasons I direct. You can do that -- to some extent -- with characters in plays, but I think characters (even really complex ones, like Hamlet) are sort of toy people: simplistic models of real human beings. That's not a criticism. I think it's a major reason why we find fictional characters appealing. (It's also why we like plots: even the most tangled ones are never as tangled as real-life plots.)

If an actor takes a character and boils his psychology down to some simple statement of intent, that will help the actor grasp the character and be able to make decisions on stage. But since the actor is a real human being, his creation will necessarily be more complex than his decision. Little random bits of the actor's behavior and psyche will creep into the character. Paradoxically, I think this is another reason we like enacted stories. We like seeing the actor's personality clash a little with the character. What pops out the other end is often very interesting and nuanced. (Though if either side wins, the result is boring.)

Years ago, I read about frustrated hackers who created a calligraphy program. They spent hours analyzing letter-forms and came up with an application that spat out perfectly-rendered letters. Trouble was, they were too perfect. They were so perfect, they looked fake (like much computer animation). To "fix" the program, they made it introduce tiny errors: they type made by even the best human calligraphers. This made the output more aesthetically pleasing, and more seemingly the work of a human. I've heard that the same problem plagues computer-generated music. Programmers have to add auditory glitches, the type that real musicians make (even super-talented ones), or the result sounds cold and mechanical. I'm not musically gifted, but I once heard a sax player say something really interesting. He said that unlike older instruments -- the French horn, say, or the trumpet -- the saxophone was never really perfected. So part of what you hear, when you listen to a musician playing the sax, is the sound of him wrestling with the instrument, trying (and failing to some extent) to get the sax to do what he wants it to do. And it's this struggle that arouses us when we hear a sax. True or not, this is an apt metaphor for what actors do: they struggle with their characters, in real time, in front of us, on stage. We may not be aware of this consciously -- and in fact, I think it's much better if we're not -- but it's what makes great acting seem complex, conflicted, nuanced and endowed with hidden depths.)

Anyway, back to your question. Is it important to me that the audience gets my intent? Well, to avoid your question for one moment longer, I'd say -- given my view that it's impossible to really know someone's intent -- if it is important to me, I'm out of luck. Important or not, it ain't gonna happen.

Now I'm a human being, and humans like to communicate, and when we do, we often are trying to communicate our intent. Directing is a form of communication, so -- yes -- if I think a scene is about revenge, and the audience watches it and afterwards several people tell me they loved the "revenge scene" ... sure: I'm pleased.

I'm also a little disappointed. It's been so many years since I embraced the notion that people can't know intent. And whereas I find this really shocking and tragic in real-life interaction (my mind can never truly touch your mind), I find it liberating in art. My real goal is to plop something very interesting in front of an audience and let them mine whatever they want -- or whatever their mind wants -- out of it. If they mine exactly what I intended ... well … that's a little boring. What's really exciting, and what often happens, is that people come up to me and tell me things about my own show that I didn't know. That's awesome!

And note that some of these audience interpretations are better and more profound than my thoughts were, while I was crafting the play. Hopefully, I am better at directing plays than the average play-goer, otherwise I should hand the reins over to someone else. But assuming I am a good director, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily an insightful critic (especially of my own work). It doesn't mean that what I have to say about my own work is better -- more interesting or more meaningful -- than what someone else says. Often, it's not. So that's another reason I don't care about artists' intents. Other people may -- and often do -- have much more interesting things to say about the work than the artist himself (though hopefully the artist is the best person at creating the art). I think people confuse brilliant artistry with brilliant insights about art, but these are two very different talents.

I also think that, just as people want to simplify psychology, they often want to simplify art. If we can't trust the author's statements about his intent -- or our own notions of what his intend might have been -- what can we trust? Where can we look for the ultimate, definitive guide that will tell us what a work of art means? I'd say, "no where." Art is interesting only when it can't be pinned down in this way. But perhaps this elusiveness makes art frightening (or frustrating) too.

The reason I put months into a production, and the reason I go over a scene over and over again, is NOT because I want to be sure some point flows across the footlights. It's because I'm trying to "polish the machine." I'm trying to craft something so perfect, nuanced, entertaining, provoking and sensual that the various people in the audience will all react in some way (maybe each in a different way). I don't care how they react. I just want them to react.

I take that back. I don't care how they react, as-long-as they're reacting TO THE STORY. I'm disappointed if they're reacting to ME. I don't want them to think, "Interesting choice. What a brilliant director!" (And, of course, I don't want them to think "Terrible choice. What a horrible director!) I don't want them to think about the director at all, because I want them to be totally immersed in the story. And the director is not part of the story. Stanley Kubrick isn't a character in "Full Metal Jacket" (though an "authorial voice" may be a character) and Alfred Hitchcock isn't a character in "Vertigo."

(Oops. Yes he is. Even though most people think they're great fun, I hate those Hitchcock cameos. I revere Hitchcock, because he was such an immersive storyteller. Everything he did seemed an attempt to get you to believe in his storyworlds and to forget that they were fake -- except for those damn cameos. They are glitches -- maybe fun glitches, but glitches all the same -- in otherwise perfect worlds. I suspect he left them in because they were so much fun for him (and for his audiences), but as Hemmingway (or Falkner or whoever) said, "You have to kill all your darlings." Darlings are those fun, clever things that are, nonetheless, gratuitous. They don't further the story. In fact, they detract from the story or highlight the fact that it is a story.

A more complex example is the red-coated girl in Spielberg's "Schindler's List." Though I'm not generally a Spielberg fan, I love "Schindler's List." I think it's a brilliant, almost perfect film. It's shot in black and white, but in one scene, there's a little girl wearing a red coat. She moves around all the black-and-white people, and she's impossible to miss, because she's the only one in color. In her scene, the Nazi's are massacring a Jewish ghetto. There's much violence and confusion, but the red coat lets you follow the little girl and see her fate. It's a clever (and even poetic) device, and I think I'm the only person on Earth who hated it.

I hated it, because up until that point, I was totally immersed in the movie. I was feeling the storyworld so intently that it might as well have been the real world. Then all of the sudden, the red coat appeared, and I thought, "How clever. Spielberg made a really interesting choice!" And at that point, I was thinking about Spielberg the director (and his choices), which means I was suddenly very aware that I was watching artifice. I could talk about how well-meaning and "artistic" the artifice was, but the truth is it was no longer affecting me as strongly as it did before I became aware of the artifice. I was now less immersed. A dream is more powerful when you don't realize it's a dream.)

That's the closest I'll get to a statement of intent: I love the story of whatever play I'm working on, and I want to share that love with the audience. I want them to love it too. I don't care how they love it or what they get out of it, but I DO want them to love it. I can't make them love it, but I can do whatever is in my power to make it compelling, and my slight grasp of human psychology tells me that people usually like compelling things.

You're right: there's a danger that the audience will mistake character stutters for actor stutters. I've actually seen that happen, and if it happens, it's a problem. But it's a very rare occurrence. If the audience thinks, "that actor just made a mistake," then it means they're thinking -- to some extent -- about the actor, and not the character. It means they realize that what they are watching isn't real. And it's probably a sign that there's a deeper problem. There's something profoundly wrong with the production -- something that's not allowing people to engage in it fully.

(It also might be a flaw in the audience member. Some people -- for whatever reason -- can't (or don't want to) really engage with a story. But as a director, I can't control that. So I ignore it. If my story doesn't engage someone, I find it useful to take responsibility for their lack of engagement, even if it's "not my fault." If I take responsibility for it and try harder next time, I will mature as an artist.)

I know what I've written sounds a little nuts. Surely, people always know that what they're watching isn't real. Well, that may be so (though, I think, at least for short periods, people do tend to forget that fiction is fiction: think about when you've been really scared by a horror film). But I'm not chiefly concerned by "knowing" on an intellectual level. Whether or not people know they are watching fiction, I want them to FEEL like they're watching real life. I want them to be emotionally engaged with the characters as-much-as they would be if the characters were real people. I try to stamp out anything that will keep them from this state. That -- as I see it -- is my job.

This is another reason why I rehearse for so long. Step one is to get the actor to really feel he is the character (I don't care whether or not he "knows" he's not the character). He has to get deeply inside his character's skin. He has to know his character intimately. This sometimes leads to confusion in rehearsal. We'll be talking about some tiny bit of psychological nuance, and the actor will say, "But how will the audience know that I'm feeling this?" (Actors are just as wrapped up with intent as anyone else.) I have to explain that the audience may not know, and it's fine if they don't know. The point isn't to get them to know. The point is to create a rich characterization. If you think about the really great performances you've seen, I'm sure you don't know what's going on in the character's head in each moment. But you know that SOMETHING is going on. You know that there's LIFE IN THERE. And that's what compels you. And you're free to read whatever you want into it.

Too many artists are egoists. They want to convey some idea to their audience and that's all they care about. But I don't think that's why people like art. I think people like art because art helps them learn about THEMSELVES. It helps them feel their OWN feelings -- not the artist's feelings -- and have their own ideas. It helps them sense! As an artist, what I most want to do is to help people engage with their own sensuality. Not with mine

Shakespeare the Character

[Letter to Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars.]

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum:

I'm the Artistic Director of Folding Chair Classical Theatre, a small company in NYC. I greatly enjoyed your book. It continually provoked me, sometimes to kiss the pages; other times to hurl the book across the room -- never because the book itself was bad; rather, because the various scholarly and artistic theories so affected me. At least one chapter in your book profoundly changed the way I will rehearse plays from now on (see this link). Your book also inspired this and this.

You chose the most important theme for your book (and stated it clearly, colloquially and concisely): what's all the fuss about? What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare? With the greatest respect, I'd like to suggest that you dodged one very important aspect of this question: the issue of intent.

I know that you mention "The Intentional Fallacy" a couple of times. Strikingly, in the preface you quote Edward Pechter's phrase "Shakespeare the Writer," which you define as "the voice, the mind we can find in the work." I like this, but feel more comfortable calling this voice "Shakespeare the character," though I'm not completely comfortable even with that. I do know that the plays and poems conjure a storyteller in my brain -- one that has certain views and an extraordinary facility with words. This storyteller -- this authorial voice -- is a sort of extra character. It's very easy to confuse him with Shakespeare the writer, and this can be a useful (in the sense of conversational "shorthand") and harmless confusion. But it a book like yours, which is all about "what is Shakespearean?", it's a dangerous confusion. Your book is more about questions than answers, and that's no fault. But, in your book, intent rarely coalesces into a question. Instead, it's a specter that haunts many of your pages.

You ask "Can we imagine Lear without 'Look her lips...' merely because we cannot be absolutely sure it is an addition by Shakespeare?" I find the word "absolutely" interesting. It's as if you're saying, "maybe if we're reasonably sure that Shakespeare wrote those words, that should be good enough." As if there are two camps: the camp that wants to delete text if there's any doubt as to authorship and the camp that is happy as long as the author is fairly likely to be Shakespeare.

You leave out another camp: the people who don't care whether or not Shakespeare wrote the words. The key question is this: what if Shakespeare came back to life and told us definitively that he didn't write "Look her lips..."? The first two camps would delete the lines. The third wouldn't. The third would say, "they're good lines, so who cares who wrote them?" And this third camp would be just as devoted to (just as in love with) the authorial voice as the other two camps. The question "what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare?" is deeply important to this third camp, even though it ignores the risen-from-the-dead author. This group doesn't care about the author. They care about the storyteller character. (Maybe "they don't care about the author" is too strong. Rather, they separate the historical person from the effect of his words.)

I fear you'll read this and cry, "But I do raise the intent issue all the time. I began my book by separating myself from the biographical school of criticism!" I agree that you raise the issue, which is why I suggested that it hovers like a specter. But many sentences in your book imply that you do care about biography -- at least to some extent. How much to you care and why?

"I'm undecided about whether a playwright would wield his most powerful dramatic gifts over the course of a three- to four-hour production mainly to leave the audience ... undecided." Isn't that you worrying about Shakespeare's intent? Fine if that's your bent. But you don't explain to me why I should care what he intended (as opposed to what I experience when I read or watch his plays).

There's a very interesting section in your chapter on Paul Werstine. At first, you ask, "... was Hand D 'Shakespearean'?" Your quotation marks around "Shakespearean" lead me to believe that you were making a distinction between the historical person and the authorial character. But then you go on to say, "... the truth is [not] relative here: Shakespeare either wrote or didn't write it. Some passages are 'Shakespearean,' some are not." This sounds like a clear statement to the effect that, if Shakespeare didn't pen the lines, they aren't Shakespearean. Whereas I would say say that a line can be Shakespearean even if Shakespeare didn't write it -- just as a novel can be "truthful," even if though it isn't true. (This works because stories are sensual, provoking the emotions, and the emotions don't care whether something is true -- true in the sense of "it happened in history" -- or not.)

In that same passage, after a seeming admission that if Shakespeare didn't write it, it ain't Shakespearean, you go on to say, "But the fragmentary historical record does not afford ... certainty ... Ultimately ... what we call Shakespearean will at times depend on the idea of 'the Shakespearean' we project upon it." To me, this implies that you're closer to the 'biographers' than first meets the eye. You and they both wish for historical proof. Only they are foolish enough to pretend that proof exists when in fact it doesn't. You are clear headed enough to see that, alas, the proof doesn't exist, and to admit that -- in the absence of such proof -- we are forced to rely on less satisfying techniques (like subjective response based on close reading). Naturally, it's fine (and good) for your to have your views, but I wish you'd explored them more fully. Why do you long for historical proof? Why (as far as I could tell) would the "what is Shakespearean?" question be answered for you once and for all, if only Shakespeare's diary would turn up? Why is my view -- that Shakespeare's diary would settle nothing (other than interesting biographical riddles) -- not represented in your book? It's not a crackpot view. It's reasoned and passionately felt.

Yes, like most anti-intentists, I am wary of intent-based discussions because we can never know the author's intent. In the case of Shakespeare (or Homer) we really can't know, because they're long dead and have left such a paltry trail behind themselves (other than their works, of course). But even with living authors who give interviews and state their intents, we can't know for sure that they're not lying. Or, if that sounds too oddly paranoid, we can't know for sure that they have the ability to talk objectively about their intentions. Few of us can! I'm no Shakespeare, but in my own humble way, I am a creator. I write, draw pictures and direct plays. Many times, people have pointed out aspects of my work that I hadn't seen myself. Many times, people have made comments about my intent that might be true -- even though I wasn't aware of having this intent. I grant that I might not always be the best judge of my own intent. And I don't think there's any reasonable evidences that the really great writers and artists are especially reliable self-psychoanalysts.

But all of that is secondary to my main reason for rejecting intent. Even if Shakespeare came back from the dead, explained his intent, and somehow proved that what he said really was his intent, it still wouldn't matter to me.

I feel I must pause here and state that I'm not a proponent of "the author function." I do believe that works are created by authors -- authors who make artistic choices. I do believe that these authors have intents. It's just that I don't think their intents matter (though I think the results of their intents -- their work -- matter deeply.)

My view is this: I read (or watch) a play. I have a feeling. That feeling is what it is. It "is what it is" because I have very little control over my feelings. If someone close to me dies, I'm going to feel sad, even if I try not to. In the same vein, I'm going to feel what I feel when I read King Lear. Those feelings are going to be hard to budge, no matter what anyone says. As I said above, I think fiction attacks the senses and feelings much more profoundly than it attacks the intellect. So naturally, given this view, I'm going to be chiefly concerned with the feelings I get from Lear.

So what if Shakespeare comes back from the dead and tells me that though some particular line makes me cry, he intended it to be funny. My tears may be horribly distressing to poor old Shakespeare -- I can't blame him for caring about his own intentions -- but they are just my honest response. He can spend hours convincing me of his intention, and I can agree with him, but that's not going to stop me from feeling sad. So why -- other than for biographical interest -- should I care about his intent? (I'm actually passionately interested in biography; I just feel it's a separate domain. Discussions get muddled when biographical details get entwined with aesthetics.) And since "Shakespearean" is that feeling I get of a storyteller,