Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Actors: they're fucked-up truth junkies operating in a permanent state of controlled psychosis, and we need them like we need oxygen. Not the Hollywood variety; those aren't actors, they're commodities with better teeth. I'm talking about the sweating motherfuckers doing Genet in abandoned mints, the ones standing in six inches of mud in the Emeryville mudflats where nobody's watching, nobody's paying, and nobody gives a shit except the four people who understand that this, this, is where the real shit goes down.
They're doing something we're all too chickenshit to attempt: living publicly inside someone else's skin, mining their own psychological wreckage to give you something resembling truth. It's exhibitionism meets archaeology meets performance art suicide. You want authenticity? Watch an actor three hours into rehearsal when the mask finally cracks and you can't tell where they end and the character begins.
The ones worth a damn aren't performing; they're conducting electricity through their bodies, channeling frequencies most of us block out because they're too painful, too naked, too real. Carmen from The Balcony isn't a role; it's a possession. Shakespeare at Fort Point isn't entertainment; it's ritualized exorcism in military architecture.
These beautiful bastards understand something fundamental: art isn't about being seen, it's about disappearing so completely into the work that something true escapes, even if only for a moment, even if only four people witness it. They're the last honest practitioners of a dying religion, and we should probably pay more attention before they all quit and get real jobs.
Speculation 2015
Backstage: Ryan Tacata as Carmen in The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint. Entering a brothel means rejecting the world. Here I am and here I stay. Your laws and orders and the passions are my reality. Jean Genet, The Balcony
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Collusion 2015
Look at these people. Really look at them. These are theater people, the real kind. The ones doing Genet in a defunct federal building in San Francisco. Site-specific theater, which means they’re not just memorizing lines; they’re wrestling with architecture, with history, with the bones of a building that’s got more stories than any script. […]
ReadSpeculation 2014
I know this thing is doomed. Katie knows it too, though we don’t say it out loud during our afternoon rehearsals in that sweatbox of a studio space in Los Feliz. Michael doesn’t know, which is somehow worse. Or maybe he does. The heat in LA is biblical, relentless. Beckett. Happy Days. A woman buried […]
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Absolute Solipsism / Engineering 2014
Solipsism Backstage at We Players‘ Macbeth at Fort Point “My darling,” she said at last, are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?” “I don’t mind at all” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.” Roald […]
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Speculation 2014
I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. Alfred Hitchcock Here’s the thing about getting notes: it’s the moment where every actor or crews carefully constructed self mythology gets shredded like wet newspaper. I’m standing there, I’ve just done what I thought was brilliant work, […]
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Individualism 2014
Look at these three women perched on the Fort Point rooftop in San Francisco, caught between acts of this site integrated Macbeth production, and what you’re seeing isn’t stagecraft. It’s the raw, unvarnished truth of what it means to be fully present in the middle of nowhere that matters. They’re witches, sure, but right now […]
ReadCollusion 2013
O, never Shall sun that morrow see! Your face, my thane, is as a book where men May read strange matters. To beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming Must be provided for: […]
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