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, what if the risen Shakespeare tells me that he didn't actually write one of the lines that most gives me that storyteller feeling? Once again, I must respectfully tell him that I don't care. It's still Shakespearean.

There is a point where one's personality comes into play. There are some people -- people who deeply respect authority or writers or Shakespeare -- who might be so moved by the risen man's explanations, that a change-of-feeling is triggered within them. I didn't say that feelings are immutable, just that they are very hard to budge and that there's no sure-fire way of budging them. But anything might change one's feelings: something a teacher says, getting older, experiencing more, a dream... So I can imagine someone saying, "I used to love that line, but then the author told me he didn't write it, and now I don't like it any more." Fair enough if that person is being honest about his feelings, but what touches that particular person (huge regard for authors as opposed to their works?) needn't necessarily touch all readers.

By the way, I'm not a total relativist. I do believe that there are distinct stylistic and thematic elements that -- for most people -- trigger the "Shakespearean" feeling, and I think it's a worthy endeavor to try to figure out what those elements are. But I fear we'll get further from the truth -- not closer -- as-long-as we worry about intent, and as-long-as we don't frame the issue of intent clearly.

As you might guess, you've stepped on "one of my favorite corns" (as Chekhov puts it). I've spent decades discussing and arguing intent (I found it confused most discussions throughout my academic career), and the result has rarely been pretty. For some reason (I have a guess why: see below) the subject -- or my take on it -- really upsets people. I'm not so arrogant as to suppose I'm infallible, but a number of people who started out by disagreeing with me, wound up (after long debate) agreeing with me but mad at me. A few have (thankfully) been articulate enough to explain why. They have said, "I think you're right, but I don't like the fact that you're right. I don't want the world to be like that. I'm going to cling to the idea that intent matters, even if I'm clinging to a fiction." (Naturally, if it matters to them, it does matter -- to them.)

Here's my armchair-psychoanalytical view about this response: in day-to-day life we must constantly deduce intent. My wife talks to me (fights with me, whatever) and I'm not just concerned with her on-the-surface meanings. I'm not even mostly concerned with her on-the-surface meanings. I'm concerned with her intent. But if you take my view to its logical conclusion, it means that I can never know her intent (the thing that's most important to me!)

There was a time when I would have protested that this isn't true (even I didn't want it to be true!), and that I was taking purely about aesthetic judgment, not interpersonal communication with loved ones. But of course it is true. One never knows what's in the mind of another. Perhaps that's the worst aspect of being human: the fact that my mind can never directly touch yours. I think this fact is so terrifying that we do anything we can to flee from it. So naturally my "message" isn't welcome.

Assuming that other minds do exist and that they work in a similar way to mine, my theories about my wife's intent are probably right. But there comes a point in all relationships, if they are to endure, that one must accept (generally good) intent on faith. My wife says she loves me; she acts like she loves me; I must assume that she does. (It's ironic that this same impulse, which is the glue that binds people together, often tears them apart. So many bitter fights are fought over what I assume you meant and what you can't convince me that you didn't mean! The need to divine intent -- to feel an intimate, psychic connection with other minds -- is extremely powerful.)

So we're (genetically?) programmed to make certain assumptions when we encounter something that seems like another mind. And that storyteller voice seems like another mind. Just as I love my wife, many of us fall in love with Shakespeare -- with the Shakespeare voice. It seems like a mind, so we naturally endow it with intent. So for me to say "intent doesn't matter" is like telling a man that he can't believe anything his wife says.

True. Still. When I read Shakespeare, I feel what I feel.

The crazy thing is that my theatre company is based around close reading. We rehearse for two months (I wish it could be five), spending most of the time around the table. We rarely cut. We perform on a bare stage with no scenery or lighting cues, hoping to make the text shine. Due to this aesthetic, my productions are most loved by those people who want to see Shakespeare "the way it was intended!" It's very hard for me to explain to people how I could care so deeply about the text on a word-for-word level, without caring about Shakespeare's intent. So I rarely try. I don't care about Shakespeare the man (maybe I would if I knew him). But I'm in love with Shakespeare the character. And he only exists as a voice in the plays and poems. So the best way to know him -- the only way -- is through close reading.

It was a great pleasure reading your book. I look forward to the next one.

Regards,

Marcus Geduld, Artistic Director
Folding Chair Classical Theatre, Inc.
New York, NY

The end. Stop.

Several years ago, when I was directing "The Winter's Tale," I noticed one of the actors was speaking strangely. His first speech in the play began as follows:

Nine changes of the wat'ry-star hath been
The shepherd's note since we have left our throne
Without a burthen: time as long again
Would be filled up, my brother, with our Thanks...

The character is Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, and he's speaking to his friend Leontes, the King of Sicilia. Polixenes has been staying in Sicilia for nine months (nice changes of the wat'ry-star -- the moon), and now he needs to get back to his own kingdom. Translated into rough, modern-day English, the passage means, "According to the shepherd's calculations (shepherds, being outdoorsmen, watch the sky), it's been nine months since I've left my peaceful kingdom. And it would take me another nine months to thank you, Leontes, for your hospitality."

In early rehearsals, the actor playing Polixenes (I'll call him Dave) was punctuating the speech like this:

Nine changes of the wat'ry-star hath been. [Period.]
The shepherd's note since we have left our throne. [Period.]
Without a burthen: time as long again. [Period.]
Would be filled up, my brother, with our Thanks. [Period.]

Nine changes of the wat're-star hath been? Hath been what? The shepherd's note since we have left our throne? The shepherds note what? (Anyway, it's shepherd's not shepherds, so that's like saying "the fireman's hose", which is an acceptable phrase, but not a complete sentence.

Other actors started pulling me aside. "He's pausing at the end of each line," they told me, worrying that I hadn't noticed. I didn't say anything to him for a few days. I remembered, back when I first started reading poetry, that I used to do the same thing. Then my fifth-grade teacher explained that the end of a poetic line isn't the same as the end of a sentence, and that I should keep reading until I got to a period. I though maybe Dave didn't know this basic rule, and I wasn't sure how to tell him about it without embarrassing him. I also thought it was possible that he was just getting used to the verse, and that after a few rehearsals, the problem might solve itself.

It didn't. After a few more days, I pulled him aside and said, "Dave, do you know you're stopping at then end of every line?"

He said, "Oh yes. I'm doing it on purpose."

I was stunned. Why would anyone do that on purpose?

He explained: "The punctuation in the script isn't Shakespeare's. It was added by later editors. We don't know what sort of punctuation Shakespeare intended, but we do know where his lines end. So that's the best punctuation guide we have."

I tried to reason with him that speaking this way didn't make sense, but he made it clear that he was going to do it his way or he'd quit. I should have let him quit. I should have fired him. Our styles were incompatible. But this was one of my first plays in New York, and I felt lucky to have the actors that I had. Other than this (huge) problem, he was a good actor. I sort of went into denial about things and just hoped the problem would go away. Naturally it didn't, and Dave became hated by the rest of the cast. I learned a valuable lesson about not letting problems fester.

"End-stopping" has now become an in joke in my company. Each time we do a new play, the actors who have been with the company for a while tell the new actors the story of Dave and his quirky punctuation. And the new actors always groan and many of them say, "I worked with someone who did that. It's horrible!" I've learned that end-stopping is an actual "school of thought", made popular by Sir Peter Hall, one of the great Shakespearian directors. I used to admire Hall, but when I heard he had started this silly ritual, I wrote him off as a dangerous loon.

Recently though, I read Ron Rosenbaum's book, "The Shakespeare Wars," a terrific exploration of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship. It's a thought-provoking, delightful and -- sometimes -- aggravating book, and I will post about it later. But what interests me now is a chapter about Peter Hall. Rosenbaum interviews Hall and asks him about end stopping. I never thought this would happen, but having read this chapter, I have changed my mind about the issue. I've gone from viewing it as an insane theory to realizing it's an incredibly useful tool -- one that I'll definitely incorporate into rehearsals next time I direct a Shakespeare play.

I should clarify here that I still think Dave was misguided. He wasn't using Hall's version of end stopping. He was using his own perverted version. Where did he learn it? Somebody out there -- some bad teacher (or some group of bad teachers) -- is teaching a corrupted version of Hall's idea, and this bad version is getting around. (Hence all the stories from actors about horrible end stoppers that they've worked with.)

As Rosenbaum explains, Hall learned end-stopping from his mentor, William Poel. Poel, who died in 1934, believed that Shakespeare worked best on a bare stage (as it was originally performed). This interested me, because my company performs on a bare stage. In general, Poel advocated the sort of production that I love -- minimalist in design and based around close, careful study of the text. And, of course, the verse endings are a major part of the text. You can see them clearly on the page, but they're generally lost in performance. To Hall, this is like playing a song on the piano without keeping to its tempo. Grudgingly, I had to admit that there's something to this. Shakespeare's writing -- most of it, anyway -- is verse, not prose. Is Hall wrong to want to preserve this vital feature on stage?

But Hall doesn't believe that the end of the line necessarily marks the end of a sentence. As he explains to Rosenbaum, it's not so much a pause as "a tiny sense break (not a stop)."

All well and good, but how should I translate that into a rehearsal technique? I can't just say to the actors, "Make sure you take a tiny sense break at the end of each line." Actors craft their performances around psychology. They think of their characters as people pursuing some goal -- to take over the kingdom, to have sex with the lady, to steal the money. How would pausing at the end of a line help them achieve these goals? One actress suggested to me that then end of the line is where she should take a breath. Maybe, but that's an awfully technical approach, and one that isn't remotely tied to psychology. I can't tie everything to psychology (sometimes I just have to tell actors to speak louder), but I wouldn't want to force a non-psychological rule on something as basic -- and as psychologically-meaningful-- as punctuation.

But then, reading further in the chapter, I encountered Barry Edelstein. Edelstein is the artistic director of Classic Stage Company, and he's discovered a way to make Hall's theory playable. (Hall surely has too, but Rosembaum doesn't explain Hall's rehearsal techniques). Rosembaum says that, to Edelstein, the pause at the end of the line is "the moment that the actor, as the character, takes to think up the next line." This is brilliant, because it has nothing to do with punctuation. In real life, we often have to pause and think mid-sentence: for instance "Back in the seventies, when I was living in ... Indiana..." (This technique is best when used subtly. If pushed over-the-top, you get William Shatner.)

A huge problem in rehearsal is to get actors to sound like they're saying something for the first time. Their characters are supposed to be thinking on-the-fly, but of course the actors, having (hopefully) memorized their lines, know everything they're going to say. If they're not careful, their performance will sound more like a recital than a conversation. What I love about Edelstein's idea is that it gives actors a rule to follow -- a place to insert the coming-up-with-a-new-thought or the finding-the-right-word (an activity heavily rooted in psychology). It's not a haphazard, arbitrary rule; it's connected to the verse!

Once you learn this technique, it's fun to try it out with random bits of Shakespeare. For instance, here's a snipped from "King Lear" (Lear is banishing Kent):

Hear me, on they allegiance hear me!
Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow,
Which we durst never yet and with strayed pride
To come between our sentence and our power,
Which nor our nature nor our place can bear,
Our potency made good, take thy reward:
Four days we do allot thee for provision
To shield thee from diseases of the world,
And on the fifth to turn thy hated back
Upon our kingdom. If on the tenth day following
Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions,
The moment is thy death...

Using Edelstein's technique, we -- as Lear -- mean to say, "Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow, and with strayed pride to come between our sentence and our power," but, after the word vow, a parenthetical thought occurs to us: we've never broken our vow before! So the speech becomes...

Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow, (thought pops into our head)
Which we durst never yet (back on track) and with strayed pride
To come between our sentence and our power,

Maybe because we're struck a little off balance by the parenthetical thought, we have a little trouble regaining our footing when we try to return to our main point:

Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow, (thought pops into our head)
Which we durst never yet (back on track) and with strayed pride (what?)
(Oh yeah!) To come between our sentence and our power,

For years, I've called this type of thought-process a "What? Oh yeah!" moment. It's very powerful on stage, when an actor plays it well, because -- as an audience member -- you momentarily fear the character is losing control, but then when he snaps back ("Oh yeah!") you're impressed with his newfound confidence: the type of confidence we all feel when we search for the perfect word and it pops into our head.

We then intend to say, "Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow ... and ... to come between our sentence and our power, our potency made good, take thy reward!" But, again, halfway through the thought, a "sub-thought" intrudes: "Which nor our nature nor our place can bear" (this is an insult that I can't pass over as either a man or a monarch).

Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow, (thought pops into our head)
Which we durst never yet (back on track) and with strayed pride (what?)
(Oh yeah!) To come between our sentence and our power, (and this makes me so MAD!)
Which nor our nature nor our place can bear, (Oops. Getting back on track...)
Our potency made good, take thy reward:

Moving forward, we then mean to say, "Four days we do allot thee for provision, and on the fifth to turn thy hated back upon our kingdom," but a sub-thought, a mini refinement of our main point, occurs to us after the word "provision."

Four days we do allot thee for provision (You're wondering why I'm granting you four days?)
To shield thee from diseases of the world, (Got it? Okay. Going on...)
And on the fifth to turn thy hated back
Upon our kingdom.

Again, I think the min-thought destabilized us, and we came back a bit shaky but then regained our footing:

And on the fifth to turn thy hated back (um... turn thy back on what?)
(Oh, yeah!) Upon our kingdom.

Finally, we intend to tell Kent what will happen to us if he disobeys: "If on the tenth day following thy ... thy... thy... thy what? What's a good insult?"

If on the tenth day following (What should I call your body?)
(Oh yeah!) Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions,
The moment is thy death...

This approach, while fun, can quickly dissolve into parody. So I would never tell an actor to pause for each one of these new thoughts. Often we have new thoughts without (noticeably) pausing. So forget the pause, and instead return to Hall's "tiny sense break." It's up to an actor how the sense break manifests itself. It could just be in his head. But if an actor does think of his speech this way, the speech will necessarily become a living mental process -- which is the most exciting thing about watching Shakespeare done well: seeing characters wrestle with their own thoughts, right here, right now, on stage, in front of you. (Hamlet trying to decide whether to be or not to be.) And if the audience follows the thought process, and if the thought-process follows the verse lines, the audience will also be hearing the music of the verse.

I am not dogmatic about this approach. There are times when it should be avoided -- when the thought process will be more dynamic if the actor plows right through the line-break. But it's a great tool. It's worth going through the play, line-by-line, and trying it out on each line ending, seeing what happens.

Full stop.

Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege

How are plays and films different? What does each of the two mediums do best? True, when you watch a play you're watching live actors, and I've heard people say that this is what makes theatre special. But how do live actors make theatre special? For some, just knowing that the person they're watching is flesh-and-blood (not a photograph) has deep, spiritual meaning, but not for me. I need something more tangible. Not that I need an justification for going to the theatre. I love going, and I find it to be a unique experience. I love going to the cinema, too. It's also unique. I'm not trying to justify either experience or claim superiority for one over the other. Rather, I'm trying to understand why I like both so much and how they are different. When I direct a play, I want to make sure I'm really using the assets of the theatre. If it could just as well be a film, why not make it a film?

There are special ways you can relate to both films and plays if you see a particular film -- or a particular play -- multiple times: films are static. The hundredth time you see "Citizen Kane", it will not have changed. It will contain exactly the same frames as the first time you saw it. This is film's great strength. It will not have changed but you will have. So a movie (like a novel) becomes a sort of benchmark against which you can measure yourself. When I was younger, I identified more with the young Charles Foster Kane. Now I identify more with the older one. The movie is the same, yet it's utterly different to me because I am different.

Plays change each time you see them. This is their great strength. You can go see the same production of "King Lear" ten times, and it will be different each time. This is appropriate, because you can't see the same production a hundred times as you can with films. Runs end. Actors move on. You can't want until you're older and different and then re-watch the same production. So it's lucky that you can -- during a short period of time in your life -- watch the same production and watch it change. I don't understand directors who try to fix their plays in stone, who try to ensure that the actors perform exactly the same way each night. If this is what they want, why don't they direct films instead of plays?

Whether I'm seeing a play or a film, I'm most strongly affected by what isn't on the screen or on the stage. Films and plays make suggestions, and then my brain fills in the blanks. I'm confused by people who claim that watching films and plays is a passive experience. It's not. It's highly active. When they're good, films and plays will hand me A and B but compel me to deduce C. And my C won't be exactly the same as your C, because C is a combination of data from the story and data from my life. So it's vital that plays and films leave things out.

Films should leave out psychology; plays should leave out scenery. Cameras can go anywhere and show me anything, so that's what they should do. The only place they can't go is inside someone's head. So they shouldn't try. They should plop me down in an environment -- and really make me sense that environment -- but they should leave some blanks as to how the main characters feel about this environment. I love the way Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" thrusts me into Vietnam and makes sniper bullets whiz past my head. I'm less thrilled with the voice-overs, which try to get inside the main character's head. This seems so un-cinematic and weak, an effect better left for a novel or a play.

But I love Hamlet's "To be or not to be." I love eavesdropping on his thought processes. I'm not completely sure why I buy this more on stage than in a film. After all, I can't really ever hear someone's thought processes. If this happens in a story, it's always an artifice. And maybe that's the key. By it's nature, theatre is always more artificial than film. Film can take me on location or fool me with special effects; theatre can't. And it shouldn't try. It will never succeed as well as film, so it should admit that hyper-realism isn't its strength.

When I'm sitting in the theatre, I'm primed for stage conventions. These conventions could be almost anything (a simple chair is a throne, a beam from a spotlight is a ray from the sun), but the strongest convention is that of an actor speaking his character's thoughts. It's strong because as a human, I long to connect with other humans this way. I know that I never really can, but in the theatre -- because I'm primed for a different sort of reality -- I can temporarily believe in brain-to-brain communication.

Omit the scenery: "Henry V" contains the most overt example of a play leaving blanks for me to fill in. At the very beginning of the play, the narrator says,

Suppose within the girdle of these walls.
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings...

And if he says this with enough conviction -- enough command of the language -- I do imagine the monarchies and horses.

On the other hand, in a recent film adaptation of "Henry V", I was nonplussed when the narrator said, "Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege..." when I didn't have to work my thoughts at all to see the siege. There were clearly armies and cannons and explosions, right there on the screen.

Shakespeare as homework

In "The Shakespeare Wars," Ron Rosenbaum laments the huge number of mediocre Shakespeare productions, and then, building to a crescendo, he writes:

As someone who who has come to realize ... after a lifetime of hoping to find something ... electrifying ... on stage ... very little approaches it. I don't think people realize it's rarely their fault if they don't "get" Shakespeare. Shakespeare done right is supposed to get you.

As much as I love the quote, to me it's more of a general note about theatre than a specific note about Shakespeare. Good theatre should "get" you. Good Shakespeare should too, but that assumes something about "you" -- that "you" understand the language. When you think about it, it's really simple. It's my responsibility, as a director, to craft plays that grip people. If people aren't gripped, that's my fault. But I'm talking about people who speak English. If my plays don't grip (non-English speaking) French people, that's not my fault. And I would never call a German play "bad," just because I don't understand it.

All average-Joes know that Shakespeare plays are in a foreign language, but theatre people tend to deny it. Maybe this is because they've spent so much time studying Shakespeare that it doesn't seem foreign to them. But when they casually say, "Anyone can understand Shakespeare," they come across as disingenuous. Anyone CAN understand it, but not without some work.

I've thought about writing a Shakepeare "appreciation" book, for people who want to get into his plays but don't know how. Only I don't think anyone will publish my book, because my message would be too unpopular: in order to understand the plays, you need to do a considerable amount of homework (most actors don't notice this "homework," because they do it while working on characters in rehearsal). Except for a few people who are into this sort of thing, the homework won't be fun. But it has a great payoff: getting in touch with some of the most beautiful creations of the human race.

Most Shakespeare books and teachers claim that in order to "get" Shakespeare, you should just rent some really good film adaptations and/or go see some really good stage productions. "Shakespeare was meant to be seen and heard -- not read." This is bullshit. If you don't get charged up when you read Shakespeare, you don't really "get" Shakespeare. And I mean "get" on a simplistic level: get = understand. I don't mean you're lacking in soul or intelligence. I just mean that you haven't yet fully grasped Shakespeare's language, which you can only do through study, so there's no way you can really get what he's saying. And if you don't get what he's saying (and how he's saying it), you can't grasp the beauty of the plays. (I'm operating under the assumption -- maybe false -- that most people who really do get the language will be wowed when the read the plays. There have been a few people, like Tolstoy, who hate Shakespeare despite understanding his language, but such people are rare.)

Usually, when people who don't understand Shakespeare see a great production and love it, they're not really loving Shakespeare. They're not really loving what's unique about Shakespeare. They're loving the production in spite of Shakespeare. They're loving the theatrics of that specific production. Maybe this will prompt them to learn more about Shakespeare on their own; maybe not.

One problem is that people want to get Shakespeare for at least two different reasons: (1) because they really want to connect with his writing, (2) because they want to look smart (or feel like they are cultured). Ron Rosenbaum calls this gaining "cultural currency." I don't think there's anything wrong with cultural currency, but it's worth disentangling it from the first reason. One can appear smart (and maybe feel cultured) by going to see a lot of Shakespeare plays, even without really understanding them. And if that's what one wants, fine. But let's not call an apple and orange. (Except that for culturally ambitious people, they must call an apple and orange. Who are they going to impress if they say, "I went to see MacBeth, but I didn't understand it."?

I'm always amazed by the hyper-educated, upper-middle class people who come see my shows and, afterwards, say something like, "Thank you for making Shakespeare fun." It's flattering but sad. Shakespeare is a chore for them, and they're grateful for a "spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down." I want to pull them aside and say, "You're a grownup now, and you're not in school. You don't have to see Shakespeare plays if you don't want to. There's no test on Friday." But of course, for them, there is a test. It's a cultural test. To pass the test, they need to fit in with a whole group of "cultured" people.

In my darkest moments, I imagine huge bands of people, all of them wearily forcing themselves to attend event after event that they loath. If just one of them would admit that the emperor has no clothes, they could all relax.

And then -- maybe -- a few of them, those who want to, could do some homework and meet Shakespeare on his own turf: Elizabethan English, which is a language one has to learn, just like French and Italian are languages one has to learn. You can't magically know Italian, just by watching a few Fellini films.

In order to learn Elizabethan -- or to want to learn it -- you have to take on trust that there's gold at the other end of the rainbow. You're not going to appreciate the gold until you DO learn it. So you just have to take the gold on faith.

We who have already reached the pot should emphasize the beauty. Sometimes, we make it sound like it's one's cultural duty to reach the pot, and that the only payoff will be to have fulfilled that duty -- and maybe to seem a little smarter. Which makes it seem like yet another burden, like getting a diploma in order to get a job. The diploma itself is worthless, except maybe that it makes one feel smarter. It's a hazing ritual. And I fear that's how many people see Shakespeare. He's the hot coals you have to walk over in order to be let into the culture club. We need to emphasize that there's great personal benefit, beyond seeming smart, of entering the club.

I remember they first time I really got Shakespeare. I had just finished the pre-production work on Winter's Tale, the first Shakespeare play I ever directed. I had gone through the whole play, word by word, and looked up each word that I didn't understand. I had about ten editions of the play, and I had read all of the editorial notes in all of them. Shakespeare had clicked, I was in love, and I knew my life would never be the same. But I also knew that Shakespeare never would have clicked for me if I hadn't put in that effort, and I probably wouldn't have done so if I didn't have a first-rehearsal deadline looming. It just didn't seem reasonable to expect other people to put in this same effort (which wasn't always fun). But without the effort, they will never really fall in love with Shakespeare the way I have -- the way other scholars and experienced actors have. And the falling-in-love is so worth it. But how can one communicate that?

Perhaps the best way is to find a difficult passage of great beauty, and to walk someone through it, explaining each word until they understand it, pointing out levels of meaning, poetic and rhetorical devices, complex metaphors and humor. It should be a short passage, and a self-contained one, so that the neophyte can -- within a reasonably short period of time -- feel the beauty without an agonizing amount of work. Maybe that's chapter one of my book.

The Human Network

This site invites people to define "The Human Network" ("a social structure composed of individuals, business partners, friends or other organizations") Here's my attempt:

We can't ever know for sure whether anyone else is conscious, but as social animals, we've evolved to read conscious into other humans (as-well-as animals, puppets and other human-like entities). And we're vitally concerned with how other consciousnesses view us. I like and dislike people, so I assume Kate likes and dislikes people. If she likes me, she'll share food with me (or sex or something else). Since we're often around big groups of people, we tend to be concerned about how the group sees us.

Human Networks are the ultimate class-ranking systems. Almost all human interactions can be boiled down to attempts to gain more acceptance (and sometimes more distancing) from a human network -- or to bring someone else into a network (or kick him out). I want to be a cheerleader; I wish that guy would go away; I want to work in that office; I want to be left alone...

Most of us have two opposing drives: connection and disconnection. It's obvious why we want to connect: other people can meet our needs (for companionship, sex, paychecks, etc.). Why do we want to disconnect? Sometimes that's obvious too: Charlie is going to hit me, so I want to get away from him. But sometimes we want to disconnect from "nice" people. I think this is because social processing is expensive, complicated and ultimately exhausting. After hours of reading tiny nuances and trying to figure out what they mean, we need time to recharge.

Some people rarely need time to recharge. They are social athletes -- extroverts. Others have a harder time reading cues, and the social mechanisms in their brains get overloaded very quickly. They are introverts. Most people aren't pure introverts or extroverts, so they experience tension between wanting to connect and wanting to disconnect -- or they flip-flop between the two.

One can manage this tension -- sometimes -- by constraining one's network: I will only stay out until 10pm; I will only hang out with a small group; I will only hang out with people I know. Bounded networking.

Technology confuses traditional boundaries. On the Internet -- and in other new mechanisms for networking -- I may be unsure how to control the tension between my desire to connect and my desire to disconnect. How can I join such-and-such a message board and only talk to the people I want to talk to? But since this tension is pretty stable -- all people feel it and are used to feeling it and know they will always feel it -- most of us find ways to placate it, even in new social situations. New networks are confusing (and sometimes scary) at first, but we have such strong drives to carve out a comfortable (and simulating) social space for ourselves, that we throw all of our resources into making them work. And in the end, it usually does -- although we are rarely able to completely avoid tension. We can control networks, but we can't control other people. We can set up rules, but we can't always make people follow them.

much ado about cutting

I just closed "Much Ado About Nothing." I directed it and played several parts. Now that the smoke has cleared, I realize that I learned something really great from this production: as usual, I didn't make any cuts before rehearsals started. During the rehearsal process I made minor cuts to help deal with logistical problems ( e.g. making sure an actor who is playing multiple roles doesn't "meet himself" on stage), but these were just a few lines here and there -- never a whole scene or even a major chunk of a scene. This is just business as usual at Folding Chair Classical Theatre. I'm actually not opposed to cutting. I love Shakespeare, but I'm not religious about him. I just want to tell stories, and sometimes cutting helps do that. (I'm not trying to tell Shakespeare's story; I'm trying to tell my story -- using Shakespeare's words. I can't really tell anyone's story except mine, because I only have access to my own head.)

But I generally discover the story during the rehearsal process. In other words, I read a play, and I get a vague sense that I can "tell my story" with it. But I'm not sure, when I start, how the play's story interacts with mine. I just feel that, somehow, it does. It's during rehearsals that I learn get to know the play deeply. So it doesn't make sense to cut before they start.

This generally results in minimal (or no) cuts. Scenes that seem pointless at first become important once I explore them. And, of course, Shakespeare was such a damn good writer that he rarely includes moments that are gratuitous. If a moment seems pointless, I probably haven't studied it enough yet. In any case, I made few cuts -- not for any grand reason, but just because that's my working method. In the end, the play was 2 hours and 45 minutes long.

We got the usual gratifying comments: "It flew by!", "I can't believe that was uncut!", "I never understand Shakespeare, but I understood everything!" (I love that one, because I don't let actors use gestures or any other 'hints' to help the audience.) But the most interesting comment was, "I've seen this play before, but somehow I never knew it was so serious. I mean, it's comic, too, but there are really serious, weighty parts." Many people said this. The general feeling was that my production was more "profound" than the typical "Much Ado."

Since I didn't try to create a profound production, I started wondering what I had done -- by accident -- to achieve this effect. Having thought about it, I'm pretty sure it happened by not cutting. In the second half of the play, there are some LONG serious (anguished) speeches by Leonato and the Friar (scroll halfway down the page). I played the Friar, and I used to warm up, before performances, by going through those speeches at double the speed I actually played them during the show. Even at double speed, they still seemed very long. And the actor who played Leonato begged me (unsuccessfully) to cut some of his three-page-long speeches.

In the end, I think we delivered these speeches well -- so that they were exciting and not boring. But I do think one's initial reaction, when reading them, is that they can be pruned way back without a problem. And so that's exactly what happens in most productions (since most directors cut before rehearsals start). So the play becomes 80% comic and 20% serious -- instead of what it is on paper (and in our version), about a 50 - 50 split between comedy and drama. The sheer length of those speeches -- if they aren't cut -- adds gravitas to the story. I really think it's as simple as that.

People remember the play as being a light romp about Beatrice and Benedick. Lisa, who played Beatrice, pointed out that she had one of the smallest roles in the play. It's clearly a pivotal role -- and a memorable one -- but she actually doesn't have much stage time. In fact, the whole Beatrice/Benedick story is a sub-plot. It's a big sub-plot (and it threatens to upstage the main plot), but it's still a subplot.

Again, I'm not anti-cutting. I pro-storytelling. And when you tell a story, you should really TELL it. Which means that you delve into every nook and cranny of it. Sometimes you have to cut, because the play contains gratuitous elements. By "gratuitous elements", I mean events or speeches that don't move the story forward. These elements DON'T help tell the story, so they need to go. On the other hand, if you cut an element that DOES move the story forward, then you're short-changing the story.

Sometimes external forces compel you to cut: producers refuse to let your play extend over two hours; you've only rented the theatre for certain span of hours each night; etc. Each director needs to find his own path through such swamps. But it's worth remembering that there's no law requiring you to tell certain stories. Given a choice between a cut "King Lear" and no "King Lear" at all, the latter is always a possibility. There will be other opportunities to produce the play in the future. And even if there isn't (for you), would you rather honor the story by not telling it in a bastardized form -- or wound it by stripping it of much of its richness?

against abstractions

Writing tip: beware of words that seem to be concrete but are, in fact, abstract. Examples: yellow and bird. There really isn't such a thing as a bird in the real world. "Bird" is a platonic category -- an abstraction. In the real world, there are hawks and sparrows and canaries. Even these are abstractions in a way, but they get closer to something we can actually see, smell and touch than "bird."

A confused writer might think he's being specific by referring to a "yellow bird," but yellow is another abstraction. You can see yellow, true, but what exactly IS it? What is a color? Can you grasp one

"Red car" doesn't tell me much -- it doesn't engage my senses. Same with sweet drink (though sweet is somewhat less abstract), loud noise, smooth table and a stinky smell. Those "mirror neurons" don't fire when I read "stinky smell." I get the idea, but nothing happens in my nose. "a gross-tasting sausage" doesn't disgust anyone, but how would you like some of George Orwell's sausages? The taste like "bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth."

You can get away with abstract modifiers when they're used in surprising ways, such as with a blue apple. I am forced to play an interesting mental game with my concept of apple when I read that. I actually have to paint it blue in my mind. As Robert Wilson says, "A Baroque candelabra on a piano is one thing; a Baroque candelabra on a rock is something else!"

Teachers tell beginning writers to avoid adjectives, not because they are intrinsically bad. It's just that there are so many weak and vague ones. But there are great ones, too: Think about greasy hair, dung-tinted walls and rasping voices. Notice in these instances, the modifiers are tied to specific sense-words or real-world objects and the words they are modifying are more generic. If the subject itself is specific, e.g. saxophone, it probably doesn't need a modifier.

a typical day in my life

I wake up at precisely the right moment. I used to wake up all groggy, but ever since buying a sleeptracker watch, I've woken alert and refreshed. (The watch ensures you never wake from a deep sleep.) I trot downstairs to start my routine: an hour on the exercise bike before work. I used to hate riding, but now I love it; I rent DVDs from Netflix to watch while I cycle -- usually engrossing TV-series, and some morning I can't wait to ride, because I'm so anxious to find out what happens next. Currently, I'm watching "Elizabeth R" with Glenda Jackson.

After the bike, I start the coffee maker and jump into the shower. I'm one of those idiots who sings in the shower: usually old standards. This morning it's Me and My Shadow. I tapdance in the shower and make little splashes. I also like to shave after letting my beard grow for a few days. I experiment with wild facial-hair designs -- excursions into grooming that I'd never let escape the bathroom: Mephistophelian goatees, Wild West sideburns, archaic muttonchops. Then, like shaking an etchasketch, I clean my face. No one but me the wiser to my antics.

I remember it's Friday, casual day at the office. Yes! I can wear jeans and my Converse high tops, a great ensemble for the Spring weather.

Dressed and back in the kitchen, I make the perfect cup of coffee. Nowadays, I only use the coffee maker to heat water. I then pour the water into my Aeropress. It's an amazing device. It looks like a giant injection syringe, without the needle. You put coffee grounds in the base, pour in the hot water, and then push down the plunger. This magical, smooth coffee squirts out the bottom. I like the small amount of effort this requires -- not enough to be an annoying task, but just the right amount to trigger a feeling of accomplishment, which makes the coffee taste all the better for being earned.

I sit in front of the computer screen and sip my coffee. Poor Lisa, being a girl, still has half an hour of prep before she'll be ready to go. But since I don't have to curl my hair or apply makeup, I'm set. I can relax and visit some of my favorite sites. I also keep half an eye on the TV, watching the Today Show, absorbing just the right amount of the news.

Once Lisa is ready, we head for the Subway. We're both dog lovers, so this journey of a few blocks is safari for us. We ooh, ahh and aww at all the puppies out for walks. Like kids, we giggle when we see one pooing.

Usually, there are funny characters on the train and we whisper about them: the Hasidic Jew with a girlie magazine peeking out from behind his prayer book; Or the smartly-dressed business woman with toilet paper stuck to her shoe.

I have to leave Lisa in lower Manhattan. She prepares for my exit by pulling the crossword from her handbag. She can sometimes complete them in ten minutes. It's been really cool watching her improve. When she started doing them, about five years ago, a single puzzle might take her a few days. Now she can finish while I eat a sandwich.

She has her activity; I have mine. While I walk the few blocks from the Subway to work, I listen to my iPod. Sometimes I listen to music -- Bach, The Beatles, Sinatra -- but nowadays it's mostly books on "tape." I'm currently listening to a fascinating history of the English Language. Did you know that Noah Webster is partly responsible for making American English sound different from British English? He wrote primers that taught kids to spell by sounding out each syl-a-ble. These books were incredibly popular, and they prompted a generation of American kids to reject the clipped vowels of their contemporaries across the pond. We say sec-re-tar-y, while they say secret'ry. I'm so into the book that I slow my pace so that I can listen a bit longer. There's still ten minutes before I have be at the office.

Today at work, I'm teaching a programming class. I love to teach programming. Most of my students are designers, and they're afraid of code. But I've taught this class for long enough -- and worked out enough techniques -- that I know I'll win them over in the end. It's exciting to watch their eyes light up as they master concepts that formerly intimidated them. I really feel like I'm changing their lives. It's a high!

Lunch time is Big Salad time. I go to this deli that makes custom salads with yummy, fresh ingredients. I start with a base of (healthy) dark greens and request grilled chicken, cucumber, peas, corn, red onions, carrots and kidney beans. I'm proud that I don't ask for dressing, and that I've learned not to miss it. But I do ask for a topping of parmesan cheese. Occasionally, if I'm feeling naughty, I get a rice-crispy treat for dessert.

Once work is done, I walk downtown a few blocks to rehearsal. My theatre company is working on "Much Ado About Nothing," and tonight we're staging some scenes in Act III. I love flipping my brain from programming to theatre. Somehow, the two very different disciplines feed each other. The precision of code tightens my directing skills. The improvisation of rehearsal pushes me to experiment more as a programmer and as a teacher.

After rehearsal, I have to ride the train home by myself. Which means I get to read! Since my iPod is being scholarly at the moment, I'm veering the other way with print: a P.D. James mystery. I get so into it, I almost miss my stop.

On the way home, I stop at The Islands, my favorite restaurant, to pick up dinner: jerk chicken, rice-and-peas, and curried vegetables for Lisa. We'll eat in front of the TV, tonight, watching "Deadwood" on the TiVo.

After the show, we're both sleepy, so we head upstairs to bed. But not before I end the day the way I started it: coffee -- decaff this time, thank you very much Aeropress! In bed, I strap on my sleeptracker and snuggle with Lisa. She falls asleep first. I plug in my headphones and listen to twenty minutes more of my audio book. Then I feel my starting to doze. So turn off the iPod and roll over.

My last thought: tomorrow is Saturday!

programming life

1) Good programmers have the ability to step in and step back. They can spend a couple of hours focusing on minutiae and then pull back and look at the whole project and its goals -- and then step back in. It's like being a good host at a party, focusing on one person and making sure he's happy, and then stepping back and taking in the whole room, making sure there's enough beer and cheetos left for everybody. Then back to the one person.

Programming has helped me adjust my focus in other areas of life. In an argument, I am better able to gain some distance and cool off. But I can also zoom way in and point out a specific flaw in my opponent's reasoning. When I direct plays, I can see that if the current scene doesn't speed up, the entire evening will run too long. But I can also finesse the placement of a chair so that an actor can ease into after he crosses the stage. When I draw, I can see how the line I'm finishing affects the entire composition.

2) A refusal to cut corners. On a mundane level, this means naming a variable totalNumberOfSharksInTheTank instead of S. But programming is full of these sorts of decisions on large and small scales. Decisions that involve choosing between something that works and is easy to type and something that works and is more difficult to type -- but that will be easier to understand later.

Pretty much everything that makes your program easier to understand and debug is a pain to set up in the short-term. Long, descriptive variable names, comments, etc. It's so tempting to be penny wise and pound foolish. But the good programmers I know EMBRACE this extra work. They get pleasure out of going the long way around to make things clear. They love the beauty of transparent code.

I struggle to apply this tip to my non-programming life. I'm gradually improving. I try to go the extra mile, do all the dishes, clean the tub thoroughly -- not just good enough so that the grime doesn't show. When I'm directing a Shakespeare play, I look up ALL the words I don't know, and even the words I sort of know. If I only understand a word from its context, I don't really know it. So I look it up. When I teach or give someone directions, I explain everything clearly and in detail. Sometimes I'm tedious. Maybe I go overboard. But I'd rather bore people than confuse them.

3) Good programmers, like good writers, make multiple drafts. They go back over their code many times, optimizing and clarifying. Some people don't like making multiple drafts. If you're going to be a good programmer, you can't be the type of person who likes to go over something once and then be done with it.

Here, I'm a natural. Though it's undiagnosed, I may have some sort of OCD. I tend to go-over everything several times. When I go to bed, I set my alarm clock, check it to make sure I set it accurately, and then -- after I've put my head down -- sit up and check it again. I'm always stunned by the errors people make via carelessness. Friends think I'm careful. I'm not, but I check my work. When I do, I find tons of foolish errors. I EXPECT the errors. I think some people assume they're better first-drafters than they actually are.

4) Good programmers work to allow themselves to selectively forget information. The goal is to make parts of your program become "black boxes." You try to perfect functions, classes and the like so that you don't need to remember how they work any more. They are self-contained tools that you can just use. Programming needn't involve holding a zillion things in your head at once if you work this way.

The flip side of this is my item 2, a refusal to cut corners. Once you have forgotten the guts of function, there will come that inevitable day when you'll need to revisit it. On that day, you'll be ecstatic about the breadcrumbs you left yourself -- the comments, identifier names, and organization -- when you originally built the function.

This is the opposite of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is a curse. I try to avoid it in all aspects of life ("try" being the operative word). When you multi-task, you have to keep several balls in the air at the same time, and chances are your split focus won't let any of them fly as high as they could if you threw them up one at a time. People mistakenly think that they get more work done when they multi-task. It's a lie. The trick is to finish task A -- really finish it, so that it's wrapped up and put away -- before going on to task B. You will save time by not having to return to task A again.

5) Good programmers learn from other good programmers. People have spend DECADES theorizing and experimenting, and they've learned a lot. There are all sorts of programming structures and practices that have been well worked out: design patterns, data structures, etc. These aren't things you're likely to come up with on you're own. You have to read, study and practice.

I'm saddened by the number of people who don't know how to use reference materials. This is a vital life skill. I rarely know what to do, but I know how to find out what to do. As with item 4 (above), that allows me to free up large parts of my brain. I don't have to remember how to bake sourdough bread. I have a recipe book that I can refer to.

The greatest thinkers and craftsmen know how to rely on others. Shakespeare stole plots; Stephen Sondheim uses a rhyming dictionary.

6) Good programmers (like good people in any field) work to improve themselves. I keep a personal "Syntax Error List." I tend to make the same mistakes over and over. For instance, I tend to write single equals in a conditional statement instead of double equals (accidentally making it an assignment instead of a test of equality). When my program doesn't work, instead of staring at it blankly, I go down my list and check for my common errors.

I've started using the same trick to improve my spelling. I'm an atrocious speller, and though I get by using spellcheckers, I also rely on them, so my spelling doesn't improve. It's embarrassing when I have to fill out a form and can't use MS Word. One day, I realized that spellcheckers could actually help me improve my spelling -- if I thought of them as data-collectors. I started writing down a list of words I continually misspell (I wouldn't know about these words if the spellcheckers didn't catch them) and I've begun memorizing their correct spellings.

7) Good programmers learn to debug. Debugging shouldn't be an afterthought that you do in a haphazard way. It's a specific and necessary skill that must be learned and applied. (Again, don't re-invent the wheel. Learn from people who have gone before!) You need to learn to think the way a good electrician thinks: the light doesn't come on. Is it the bulb, the socket, the switch, the wiring...? You need to test each component part to see where exactly the problem lies. Once again, it's about stepping in and stepping back.

Problem solving is a distinct mode. I must remember to click into it. I don't keep my problem-solving skills "online" all the time, because often they're not needed. When a problem arises, it's easy to forget about them and not use them. If face a problem without my problem-solving skills, I can only panic or throw up my hands. I need to step back (see item 1, above) and switch toolbelts.

Nowadays, if problem solving requires information, the web is key -- but you have to use it aggressively. Google is great, but do you know how to use ALL of it's search engines? Google Images? Google Maps? Google Groups? Google Video? Did you know that you can use Google as a calculator and a measurement converter (try entering "22 miles in furlongs")? What do you do when Google fails? Don't give up on the web yet! Use it to connect you with a person. Find the site of an expert and email him. Most people are surprisingly willing and happy to help. As a final straw, place an ad on Craigslist. Offer fifty bucks to anyone who can solve your problem.

8) Good programmers run tests. Test everything on the computer, not in your head. Unless you've coded the exact same thing 1000 times, don't assume something will work or won't work. Try it and see.

I drive actors crazy by trying everything out in rehearsal. They come to me and say, "Do you think my character is happy or sad in this scene?" I answer, "Let's try in once with you happy, and then go back and do it again with you sad." I refuse to make a decision in my head when it's possible to do it outside of my head. The world in my head is just a map of reality, and it's imperfect. If I assume anything, I might miss something. So I assume as little as possible. Over and over, this method has helped me strike gold and avoid potholes. I'm addicted to it.

a typical day in my life

I leave my apartment and take the elevator down to the lobby. The person in the elevator with me is making a smacking sound. Please, buddy. I don't want to start the day hearing or seeing your gum. When did people morph into cows? Now I'm on the street, walking to the subway. HONK! HONK! HONK! I nearly jump out of my skin. Is the fact that you're waiting for your friend an EMERGENCY, because that's what a car horn is for: E-mer-gen-cies. If you want your friend to know you're there, don't be a lazy fuck. Get out of your car and buzz him.

As I'm waiting for the train, I'm treated to the sight of at least three guys -- never women -- spitting onto the rails. I think I'm going to get into the spittoon business. I'll make millions. No I won't. If I put down a hundred spittoons, these geniuses will just spit on the floor next to them.

As I try to get on a train, the person ahead of me pauses in the door. Okay, these doors stay open for a FINITE amount of time. And no one is going to jump you. You don't need to check out the environment before venturing in. GET IN. There are people BEHIND you. Finally, the joker gets in, finds a space and stands there. He's found the space HE wants, so he's happy. He COULD move further in, making room for the rest of us, but that would take extra effort. So everyone entering after him has to squeeze past him. This is hard, because he's positioned himself in the middle of the aisle. I say, "Excuse me please," trying to get by. He doesn't acknowledge me. I clear my throat and try again: "EXCUSE ME, PLEASE." Very grudgingly, he moves about an eighth of an inch. Listen Mac, it's not about making some sort of gesture. It's about MOVING aside so that I can actually get by!

I finally squeeze by, having to get much more intimate with his body than I'd like (is brushing-your-teeth and using deodorant a lost art?), because he's determined to move the bare minimum. What is this? Some sort of macho thing? If you move too much, you're less of a man than I am? Fine, you're the big man. You have a bigger dick than I do. Happy? Now get OUT OF THE WAY!

The train is really full, mostly due to all the guys who sit with their legs spread so wide it's like they're trying to do the splits. Thanks for the crotch-view! That's exactly what I wanted to see. Wish I had some hot coffee to spill. Since there's no place to sit (there would be if the lady in front of me would move her bag onto her lap -- I'd ask her, but I don't feel like hearing that big tired sigh), I stand and try to grab a pole so that I don't fall. But some guy is leaning against it. So I guess the pole is your personal staff, Merlin? I try to reach really high and grab the pole above his head. The train lurches before I can do so, and I stumble.

Which causes me to step on a woman's foot. "I'm so sorry," I say. "Are you okay?" She just glares at me. Okay, I WAS sorry. Now I wish I had stepped on BOTH your feet -- and your head.

I finally manage to grab the pole. As the train is pulling into the next station, a guy gets up and starts getting antsy that I'm in his way and he can't get to the door as fast as he'd like. "I'm getting off at the next stop," he says. I say, "Sorry. I don't want to fall. As soon as we stop, I'll let go so and move so you can get by." "Whatever," he says, and give me a look like, "So the wittle baby is afwaid he might fall if he wets go two seconds before the big bad twain comes to a compwete stop?" Yes, Mergatroid, that's EXACTLY what the wittle baby is afraid of, so hold your fucking horses.

The good news is that once the guy leaves, I get his seat. I assume my normal beta-dog pose, trying to make myself as small as possible so as not to disturb my seat-mates. This includes getting out a book and reading it quietly. The woman next to me is also reading, but her elbows are splayed out like chicken wings. Every time she turns a page, they poke into my ribs. I wonder how big a scissors I'd need to cut through bone. The woman on my other side is doing her version of not-bothering-anybody, which for some reason involves humming quietly to herself. But I can STILL HEAR YOU. Quiet noise is still noise. No free pass for quiet humming. Here are the things you CAN do: think, read, play a video game WITH THE SOUND OFF. Not humming.

I have to admit, though, she's not as bad as the guy two seats down who has stuck his iPod headphones in my ears. Okay, they're actually in HIS hears, but they might as well be in my ears. Turn it up, space cadet. They can't hear it in Sydney. Then there's the heavy-metal dude across from me who insists on drumming on his backpack. When I'm dictator of the world, there will be NO public percussion. And it won't be three-strikes-and-you're-out. It will be one strike and you're flung into a prison camp.

As if it's not loud enough in here, a kid comes on and starts screaming an announcement, trying to sell us candy. Then an evangelist starts telling us we're all going to hell. Is there anything ruder than playing to a captive audience? I think there's a special place in hell for this evangelist, where he'll be strapped to a chair and forced to listen to the candy kid shouting in his ear for all eternity. And he'll never get to actually eat any candy.

I finally get off the fun train, and as I'm exiting the station, a fast-moving guy bumps into me -- hard. And then just keeps going. Oh, great. A hit-and-run walker. Hey, bozo, it doesn't matter if you're late for work. It doesn't matter that we're all city people and we're all in a hurry. You need a do-over in which you stop, apologize, and make sure I'm okay.

I have to use an escalator to leave the station. All I want -- with all my body and soul -- is to be out of there. My plan is to walk up the escalator, but I can't, because 10% of the people don't know -- or choose not to follow -- the simple rule of standing on the right. But you guys are special, right? Rules weren't meant for advanced humans like you.

As I finally get out into the air, a guy pushes a flyer right into my face. TAKE TWO STEPS BACK AND GET THAT PAPER OUT OF MY FACE! I wouldn't go to your pizza joint if you paid me. Though I might have considered it if you'd chosen to use a less invasive form of advertising. Then, on my way to work, I have to step into the street (and get honked at) to maneuver around the gaggle of young women who have decided to make a busy sidewalk their meeting place. Where can I buy a giant bowling ball?

Someone taps me on the shoulder and says, "How do you get to 33rd Street?" I'm sorry. Could you try that again? This time, do the version where you acknowledge that you're intruding on my time by saying, 'Excuse me, could you give me some directions?' Because I'm a pussy, I say "It's that way."

I stop in a deli to buy my coffee. There's a big line in front of me. Soon, there's a big line behind me, too. Every so often, someone bypasses the line, crosses right to the front, grabs some candy or a newspaper and thrusts a couple of bucks at the cashier. Good job, Muchacho. It's nice to know normal rules don't apply to you. Then some lady spends ten minutes digging through her bag to find her purse, so that she can give the cashier change. You couldn't have gotten your purse out while you were waiting in line, Einstein? The big-headed , portly executive behind me is booming into his cellphone, "TELL JACKSON TO DROP THE VERIZON ACCOUNT AND FOCUS ON CITICORP. THEN CALL BILL AND ASK HIM TO SEE ME AT 11." I wonder how far I could throw a cell phone?

Finally, I get to work. I'm in a SPLENDID mood. I can't wait until the work day is over and I can start the commute all over again.

dark at the end of the tunnel

How is a book like a TV show but different from a film or a play? Give up? When you read a book or watch a TV show, you know when you're nearing the end. You also know when you've reached the middle and when you're two-thirds of the way done. When you go to the theatre, unless you first check the run-time and then keep monitoring your watch, the end could come at any time. As could the middle. In fact, the middle will probably sneak by without you even noticing it. Middles don't register unless you know the distance to the end.

In a theatre or cinema, you sit and let the story take over, and you don't focus as much on "the goal," because you don't know when the goal is nigh. When you watch TV, the clock on the cable box or DVD player continually reminds you of how much of your half-hour, hour or two-hour show is left. When you read a book, you can feel how many pages separate you from The End. That stack in your right hand, which was once so thick and daunting, grows flimsier by the minute, until it's just a few postcards wide. Sure, you often get a sense that a film or play is winding up for a big (or small) finish, but you're not continually aware -- as you are with books and TV -- how how many steps you have left in the journey. And any sense you do have, in the theatre or cinema, is based on intrinsic elements of the story (swelling music or the heroine gasping her dying breath), whereas with a book or TV show, you're tipped off by an emotionally neutral feature of "the interface," the pages or the clock.

This difference is profound. It affects (or should affect) both audience and writer. Consciously or not, good authors are aware of whether or not they're writing for a medium with predictable . And they shape their work accordingly. It's easiest to see this with the most bounded medium: painting. A painting exists within a frame. Both artist and audience are aware that the "story" comes to an end on all four sides. There's no hiding these ends, so the expert craftsman makes use of them. Some paintings, like Magritte's famous apple-headed guy, come to a full-stop at the edges. Magritte centers the important details, drawing your eye inward and killing any mystery about what lies outside (though there's mystery aplenty INSIDE).




De Chirico does the opposite.


But both paintings are supremely aware of their borders and make full use of those boarders to achieve their goals.

Cinematic (and theatrical) craftsmen beware! Your process usually starts with a manuscript. Deceptively, the script has a page-count. You can thumb through it as you work. Your co-workers will blithely refer to the kiss on page 57 or the car chase on page 123. But theatre goers won't flip through pages. They whine like kids in the back of the car, "Are we there yet?" To strengthen your work, either throw in some signposts or purposefully manipulate the audience by keeping them guessing -- or by lulling them into a trance state, in which they no longer care about (or are aware of) the time's ebb and flow.

Kubrick played with the seeming boundlessness of film. "2001" is either trance-inducing or interminable, depending on your taste and attention span. In "The Shining," Kubrick strived for the opposite effect. He punctuated the movie with title cards which count down increasingly smaller and smaller units of time: Monday, Wednesday, 2am, 4am...

Here in the infancy of the 21st Century, we're in the thralls of a great convergence. No medium is an island. The tectonic plates of art are shifting and colliding. Movies are released concurrently with DVDs. TV-shows are downloaded from the web. Albums are broken up into songs, which are sold for 99 cents on iTunes. Books are read on screens or heard on headphones.

For several years now, I've been a devotee of audiobooks. I download two each month from audible.com. I generally read a printed book during the day, at my lunch hour during work, on my subway commute, and on lazy Sunday afternoons. At night, when I'm lying in bed, lights off so as not to disturb my wife (but in the throws of my chronic insomnia), I listen to books on my iPod. Sometimes I go back and forth between the audio and printed version of the same book, reading it during the day and listening to it at night.

I enjoy "reading" either way. I like being able to linger over a passage of text, which I can only do when I'm holding a printed book in my hands. But the truth is, I don't do it all that often. Generally, my reading (at least of fiction) is linear. I start at the beginning and plod through until I get to the end. I like the voice-characterizations in the recordings (when a book is read by a good actor), but the truth is that I can do these pretty well in my own head. In the end, the differences between reading and listening -- for me -- are minor. In either case, I absorb the information, I laugh, I cry, I wonder, I dream -- and then I move on to the next book.

The only REAL difference is that when I'm reading a book, I know exactly when it's going to end. When I'm listening, I don't. Yes, there's a readout on my iPod that tells me how many minutes I have left, but since I listen in the dark, I don't see the readout. On those rare occasions when I do see it, it is meaningful, but not as meaningful -- as quickly perceivable -- as a wad of pages in my hand.

When I listen, I "read" in a very different way. My main concern is, "where is the story going next?" I experience in-the-moment and worry only about what's happening now and what will happen in the very next instant. When I read, I have an additional concern: how is the story going to resolve itself in the X number of pages remaining? With the goalpost always in sight, the entire journey is an arrow pointing towards it. When I read, I can often feel a structure: a five-act structure or a three-act structure (I feel it figuratively and literally). When I listen, I may sense the passing of episodes, but I have no idea how many of them there will be in the whole series.

It surprises me that this difference -- the most profound difference -- is rarely mentioned in the endless discussions about media convergence. As a lover of stories, it's the only real difference I care about. Though my whole life is about stories, I'm not one of those people who are romantic about books. Yes, when my library becomes paperless, I'll miss the smell of paper and the snobbish pride at my shelves, filled with heavy tomes. On the other hand, I'll be able to collect many more books when they're all digitized. Hard drives are so much more spacious than my Brooklyn apartment. And I quit sentimentalizing print pretty quickly when I'm stuck on the subway, unable to get a seat. It's nearly impossible to hold "The Riverside Shakespeare" and a pole at the same time. It's so much easier to read "Hamlet" on my palm pilot. I only need one hand.

Screen readers give me a page-count: 122 out of 279. An attempt to simulate the printed experience. Close but no cigar. Maybe it will be more meaningful once I get used to it. After all, a clock is just as artificial, and yet I've lived with them for so long that they nearly have the authority of pages in a book. Which is why TV shows feel more like bounded books. Counters just aren't the same. When the counter says 210 out of 211, I DO feel a quickening in my pulse. But when it says 87 out of 249, it's just numbers. Whereas with a clock or a heft of pages, I'm gauging my progress during each step of the journey.

infidelity

I exchanged emails with a fellow who questioned my ethics. When I mentioned I was against infidelity, he accused me of being swayed by Christian doctrine. To an atheist like me, "them's fightin' words." As we discussed it further, he explained that though an affair might cause my wife pain, NOT having an affair might cause me pain. So by choosing not to have an affair, I'm putting her needs before mine. He thinks this is a perverted version of "love thy neighbor as thyself." For many people, he claims, this has morphed into, "love they neighbor MORE THAN thyself."

I replied as follows:

I agree that it's very important to take care of yourself. I'm not religious, and I don't believe that morals/ethics exist in the cosmic sense. But I do believe that we must develop some sort of rules to live by. At rock bottom, the specific rules we choose are arbitrary. Without being able to refer to a god, I really can't prove that my rules are superior to your rules.

My rules are pragmatic, based on this goal: maximizing the total amount of happiness in the world. I can't defend this goal. If you say that under your system, happiness is not important (or it's less important than other things), then I must grant you the right to disagree. Or I must use force to compel you to follow my rules. (If I was religious, I could say that my rules are correct, because they are God's rules. But, being an atheist, I don't have that option.)

So under my rules, my happiness doesn't count per se. Nor does my wife's. Both of our happinesses count only in-so-far as they add to the total amount of happiness in the world.
Now there may be some situations in which I enter a zero-sum game: if I engage in behavior X, i wind up happy and my wife winds up unhappy; if I DON'T engage in behavior X, I wind up UNhappy and my wife winds up happy. In either case, the total amount of happiness remains the same. So I need some method of choosing an action when all options lead to the same amount of happiness/unhappiness.

Whatever method I choose is arbitrary. I could flip a coin. Or I could follow some rule, like the "Christian" one of my neighbor before myself. I don't necessarily follow this rule, but I don't see anything wrong with it. Under my utilitarian system, I must have SOME way to make choices when all outcomes lead to the same amount of happiness/unhappiness. So why not the Christian method? Or why not choose, as you do, to put yourself first? (The anti-Christian method?)

In theory, I can't fault that method. It's just as good/bad as the "Christian" method or flipping a coin. In practice, my concern is that -- unless practiced diligently and objectively -- I might start to fudge, acting selfishly when the situation is NOT a stalemate, but justifying it in my brain AS a stalemate. Since I've set up a system that allows selfishness in stalemate conditions, it's very tempting to SEE stalemate conditions when it serves my purposes.

But regardless of what tie-breaker you use, it's best to look really closely at the situation and ask yourself, is it REALLY a tie? Is it REALLY the case that any choice will lead to the same amount of happiness/unhappiness? Such cases are rare.

Is there anything I could do that would be a compromise? Allowing both me and my wife some level of happiness. (I should amend my "happiness" rule here to say that two people being somewhat happy is better than one person being completely happy while the other is miserable. Again, I can't defend this rule, but it is a rule for me. Were it not, I would have to allow a serial killer to go on a spree if it would make him very very very happy. It might make him SO happy that his happiness would trump the unhappiness of his victims and their families. I sidestep this by saying that it's better for all the victims to be a little happy than for one serial killer to be extremely happy.)

My first thought is -- BINGO! -- have the affair and don't tell my wife! I'm happy, because I get sex (or whatever I want out of the affair). She's happy (or at least not more unhappy then before) because she doesn't know about my affair. Everybody wins. I'm SURE this is the exact reasoning that many people use in these situations. I'm sure, because I hear people use it: "What's the harm if no one finds out...?"

I will admit that there is no harm -- under my utilitarian system -- in a "perfect world." In this perfect world, we can commit "perfect crimes" and be 100% sure (or even reasonably sure) that no one will ever find out.

But we don't live in this world. Sure, it's possible to have an affair that always remains a secret, but that's not the norm. Usually, the truth will out.

I've been with my wife for 12 years. We're both smart and probably better at subterfuge than most people (we're actors, so you could say that we lie for a living!). And we've both tried to keep secrets from each other. It almost always fails. Even if it's something really small, like a surprise gift, the secret will probably be blown.

And I KNOW -- every time I have a secret -- that my wife will probably figure it out. I've learned from experience that if I try to keep a secret from my wife, there's a 90% chance that my plan will fail. Since I know this, it MUST be factored into my moral calculus. And I have to think long term. Having a secret affair isn't about keeping it secret for the next couple of weeks or months. It's about ALWAYS keeping it secret. So before cheat, I must be reasonably sure that my infidelity will remain a secret until my wife dies. If -- ten years from now -- she finds out that I cheated on her ten years earlier, she'll be very upset.

We can say she's irrational or influenced by Christian ideology, but that doesn't matter (under my pragmatic system). What matters is that, given her psychology, my actions are LIKELY to cause her pain. And I know that her pain will last much longer -- and it will be much more intense -- than the happiness I'll get from the affair. I also know that she'll get really angry at me and cause ME pain. So my affair will ultimately cause a ton of unhappiness for both her AND me. And that's not supportable under my rules.

If you really think you can easily keep secrets from your long-term spouse, then you're smarter (or more cunning) than most people -- or you've never been in a really long-term relationship (with someone with a bit of intelligence and/or gut instinct). There are a million ways I might get caught. My wife KNOWS me. She knows my every expression and micro-expression. She knows when I'm upset and trying to mask it. She knows when I'm lying. Plus, I'll probably trip up and call her by my lover's name or something. Alas, I don't have complete control over myself or what I say in my sleep.

Let me turn the tables and ask myself, "Is it okay for my wife to have an affair if I never find out about it." My guess is that many religious people -- or people influenced by religion -- would say, "Yes, affairs are just WRONG." I disagree. It's FINE for my wife to have an affair, as-long-as I don't know about it and NEVER find out about it. It's NOT fine if I do find out about it. Now, I can't expect my wife to see into the future, but I can (and do) expect her to make reasonable assumptions about the likely outcomes of her actions. And she knows that it's LIKELY that I'll find out if she has an affair. And she knows that when I do find out, I'll be in pain. Therefore, via my ethical system, she's wrong to have an affair.

Yes, humans are animals. We have sexual needs. All this means is that, under my system, we are likely to transgress. But that likelihood is unrelated to whether or not a transgression is a transgression. Yes, I will be tempted, and I may give into temptation. In which case, I will have done something wrong. And it's likely that my wife will find out. So this becomes the new State of the World -- one in which my wife IS going to discover my affair, get deeply unhappy/angry and the result will be tons of unhappiness for her and me (and maybe for my lover). So I now need to deal with that State.

What's the best way to deal with it? There are now two possibilities:

1) I keep quiet, in which case my wife ultimately discovers that (a) I had an affair and (b) I tried to keep the fact from her.

2) I confess, in which case she discovers that I had an affair.

2 is better (less painful) than 1. Of course, if I confess I make it impossible for her to ever not-know, which would be the best outcome. But I've already reasoned that to be an extremely unlikely outcome, so I'm best off confessing.

I'll fess up and admit that even if I knew I could keep it an eternal secret, I wouldn't do it. It hurts me to do things that I know would hurt my wife, even knowing she'll never find out. This is irrational. I suspect that this sort of irrational empathy is part of my (and most people's) genetic makeup. But I stand by my rational reasons, too. She WILL find out.

Thank you, Stanley!

When Stanley Kubrick died, I mourned. This isn't like me. I don't generally form attachments to people I don't know. Yet without ever meeting him, I lived with Kubrick all my life. He -- his films and the rare interviews in which he discussed his artistic process -- shaped me as a person and as an artist.

I was born in 1965. One of my earliest memories is seeing "2001" when it first came out in 1968. Actually, I think I saw it in '69 or 70, in an early re-release. But I was very young, five or six. It didn't puzzle me the way it puzzled many adults. Not because I understood it -- I didn't. But I was at that age when not-understanding was natural. The universe was full of mystery and I hadn't yet swallowed the lie that mysteries are always explained. I was used to embracing awe. But I'd never seen awe on the scale of "2001." Nor have I since. I've heard it in Beethoven symphonies; I've felt it when I've felt love; but "2001" is -- to me -- a uniquely oceanic visual experience.

Younger people have a hard time grasping the impact it had in the 60s and 70s. No one had ever made a "space movie" like that. Its competition was "Star Trek" and "Forbidden Planet" -- both fun, but you never for a moment really believed they were real. They were cartoons. But while watching "2001", you WERE in outer space. (Many Kubric films provide this you-are-there experience. "Full Metal Jack" dropped me right in the middle of a war zone. The first time I saw it, after the movie, I walked out of the theatre and into a busy parking lot. It was night, and cars were zigzagging around me. There were bars nearby, and drunken people were on the street, yelling. There was broken glass. Half my mind was still in Kubrick's war. I felt feral. I felt exposed. I felt I needed to find shelter. Sniper fire could, at any moment, fly from one of the car windows or from inside one of the bar doors.)

"2001" has since been technically surpassed -- though it's shameful how often sci-fi films made 30 years later look fake compared to it -- but only "2001" gets the stillness of space, the loneliness, the poetry.

The movie followed me all my life. My mother, who was once a film historian, wrote a short book about it. And then, years later, I got a job at Sothebys, the auction house. My office was right down the hall from the Collectibles Department. I loved Collectibles, and used to drop in there during coffee breaks to see what treasures they'd received: a Ring Starr drumstick, a Marilyn Monroe dress, a Superman #1 comic book...

One day I noticed something familiar. Could it be? Yes, it was an original spacesuit from "2001." I was stunned! I'd always heard Kubrick had destroyed all the props from the film. But somehow this one suit had escaped. One of the collectible guys told me that it wound up in the possession of some crazy guy in The Village. He used to walk around the streets of "New York" wearing it.

In a box, on the the floor next to the suit, I found the helmet. I picked it up. I'd somehow expected something flimsy and plastic. But it was heavy and very REAL. And extremely detailed. I'd always wondered about the purpose of those little "bugeyes" on the helmets in the film. Close up, I could see they were logos of the fictitious space agency. I snapped a couple of pictures of the suit(1 and 2). Alas, the helmet pic didn't come out.

(I was so mesmerized by the suit, I didn't pay attention to the dress behind it. Later, I learned this is an original Scarlett outfit from "Gone With The Wind" -- a film I also love and one that is oceanic in its own way.)

I wound up getting a theatre degree and becoming a director. But I learned more from Kubrick than I did in college, even though he directed films and I direct stage plays. Kubrick spent years in pre-production for a Napoleon film, which he never made. Studios feared it would be too expensive, because Kubrick would -- of course -- insist on filming huge battle scenes with hundreds of extras (in the days before CGI). Kubrick solved this problem by calling armies all over the world and asking how much it would cost to rent a regiment. Eventually, he got a really good deal (I think it was from Bulgaria.) Then there was the question of colothing. Putting hundreds of extras in period costumes? Too expensive! So Kubrick found a printer who would make costumes out of paper. He figured he'd have real costumes made for the foreground actors and use the paper ones for the extras in the distance. This devotion to problem solving -- to finding a WAY -- taught me a lot about the role of the director.

More important, I learned from Kubrick that a director could -- maybe should -- use all his resources to express a deeply personal vision.

I'm fascinated by the bi-polar reactions to his films. In my experience, people are more divided by Kubrick than any other filmmaker. Some people, like me, were scared witless by "The Shining." Others find it silly. Some are awed into a trance by "2001." Others find it boring (as they also find "Barry Lyndon," which is my favorite Kubrick film.) Some people think "Eyes Wide Shut" is sexy, profound or troubling; Others find it stupid or stilted. Some people love "A Clockwork Orange." Others find it deeply offensive.

All these people are right. They are right in the sense that it's both right to like a steak or hate it, depending on one's taste. What's NOT right is to try to cook a steak in a way that will please steak-haters. Sure, you can smother it in sauces to the point where its original taste is unrecognizable, but what's the point. THIS is what I learned form Kubrick.

By relentlessly following a personal vision, he made movies that some people will never relate to. Presumably, these people are fundamentally different from him and would probably be turned off by him if they met him at a dinner party. But because his films are so pure -- so undaunted by "sauces" -- when they click with a like mind, they REALLY click.

Few artists work this way. Most try to please everyone and wind up pleasing no one as fully as they could. They put a little sauce on the steak -- not enough to totally offend the steak purists, but not enough to really thrill them, either. And the steak haters enjoy the meal somewhat -- but they always detect a faint taste of steak.

To me, this is the chief difference between a Kubrick and a Spielberg. Spielberg reaches out to the audience and says, "Please love me! I promise that I'll throw in something for everyone!" And he does: the cute robot for the kiddies, the mild sexual innuendo for the parents, the rebellious teenager for the rebellious teenager. Spielberg can't possibly be all these things himself, but instead of relentlessly following his own inner truth, be panders. It's a shame, because technically, I think he has the brilliance of a Kubrick or a Hitchcock. Very occasionally, he WILL make something personal ("Schindler's List" / "Jaws") and it's like a totally different filmmaker has taken over his body.

By a strange coincidence, I started a theatre company in "2001." We produce only classics: Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, etc. When we produce Shakespeare, we do it on a bare stage without using sets or lighting changes (lights up the whole time). No costumes, either -- just the actors in their street clothes. We use very few props. It's just the actors in an empty room and Shakespeare's text, which we usually do uncut. This means our plays often run over three hours.

When we first started this work, I knew some people -- maybe most people -- wouldn't like it: no sauce on the steak. But I like it, and I'd learned from Kubrick that if I was going to be the director, I had to share MY vision -- not something I thought or hoped the audience would like. And so I did. I was scared, but I was relentless.

And yes, some people don't like it. Occasionally someone walks out during intermission. But to my great surprise and joy, most people love it. One common reaction is, "You know, I don't usually like Shakespeare, and when I heard how long your production was, I thought 'Oh boy...,' But I LOVED it. I understood everything, and it just flew by. I can't believe that was three hours long!"

Thank you Stanley. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.