One of the more upsetting things about New York...

Excerpt from an interview with Raul Esparza, one of my other latest favorite Broadway actors. Saw him last February in The Homecoming, which was extremely weird (and speaking of which, Harold Pinter died the other day...), but he was brilliant in Speed-the-Plow, and a real scene stealer, which says a lot--he was up against two popular TV stars, Jeremy Piven and Elisabeth Moss.

You've been so prolific in the past six years in New York. Have you come across any stumbling blocks in getting the parts you want to play?
I've been really, really blessed. And I've been able to do projects that I've been excited about. The biggest thing that I worry about is the lack of new writing and the ability to create new work. I haven't had a lot of opportunities to do that. We seem to be in a time where there are so many rules, or where shows are trying to make music that is really great—I mean who doesn't love Abba?—serve a story. But then you're not really dealing with acting; it's sort of a wink and a nod, and everybody's having a great time going, "Isn't this funny that we're trying to make these songs dramatic?" That trend in New York does worry me: "Let's go with properties that we already know." It's not giving writers a chance to have a voice and make mistakes.

Yeah, for musical theater fans, it's a little scary.
I think it is. I'm sure the pendulum will swing back. It's just so expensive, I can understand why producers are afraid to take chances. If you think about it coldly, I think that Sondheim would have a tough time starting his career now. You know? Who's going to take a chance on a musical about lunatics like Anyone Can Whistle? People would be like, "Are you crazy? No. We're going to adapt Mr. and Mrs. Smith.'"

Love him. This is from back around 2006, 2007 when he was in Company, which was supposed to be great, though I've heard firsthand that it was pretty dull. The following question after this was if he'd seen Spring Awakening yet. Haha. He did and said he liked it. Really though, it's so rare now that something new and original dramatic pieces come out, and it's scary. It's scary that no one's taking chances, though understandable, and it's a huge threat to Broadway, and even off-Broadway. Especially for people my age looking for futures in it. Thanks to Andy Warhol and Marc Jacobs, I can accept that popularity is not necessarily a bad thing, and it isn't always terrible that art and commerce are so permanently linked, but it is still stifling. There are voices to be heard that are getting lost in the shuffle, I think, because no one thinks anyone wants to hear them.

Though, the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York is always supporting and producing new plays. It's the pet project of John Ortiz and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who was featured in a great article by the New York Times recently.

While movies typically require an elaborate and expensive mechanism, plays can be relatively simple to produce. Every year, LAB has a two-week “summer intensive” workshop during which 35 to 40 plays are rehearsed and read. Company members — there are about 100 — offer their critiques and the artistic directors then select the 10 or 15 plays they would like to see go to the next step. “Most of us liked ‘Philip Roth in Khartoum,’ ” Hoffman said. “Some of the women had problems with it, but I asked my mother to come to a reading, and she thought the female characters rang true.” Hoffman lit another cigarette. “People only want to invest in a play that they think will do well. They are not interested in risky theater. But even more traditional theater is pure risk, which is what I love about it. You roll the dice for the thrill of rolling the dice.”

LAB is the company that produced a number of Stephen Adly Guirgis's plays, including one of my favorite plays ever, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. I wish I'd gotten the opportunity to see it performed. It's this amazing dissection of the actions of Judas against Jesus, and it shows his trial in limbo. The NYT article mentions him--Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play, “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” directed by Hoffman in 2000, cemented LAB’s reputation as a theater company committed to significant new voices. “I used to think I was Catholic until I met Stephen,” Hoffman joked. “But I am not Catholic the way he is. He is tortured and haunted by that religion, and you see it in his work.” I've read Jesus Hopped the A Train and two of Guirgis's other plays, Our Lady of 121st Street and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings. They were all good, but not as good as Judas Iscariot. I'd wanted to see his latest, The Little Flower of East Orange, when it was playing last spring, but I didn't get a chance to.

These men are fierce. There's no other way to describe them. They write, act, direct with incredible intensity. Bennett Miller, who directed PSH in Capote, first met him at a theater camp in Saratoga over twenty years ago, and said that everyone liked him because he was serious about acting.

Haha, it's funny...this Times article...I think I mentioned that theater is my first love and you never get over your first love:

...It is easy to forget that Hoffman is a major movie star with an Oscar on his mantel. He appears not to have a trace of ego. “That’s why I wrote the character of the saintly nurse Phil Parma in ‘Magnolia’ for Phil,” said Paul Thomas Anderson. “Phil is that good — he’s committed to art and not in a phony, grandstanding way. He really wants to live a life in the arts that means something.” There are few other Academy Award-winning actors who have devoted themselves to the full-time running of a theater company. “It sounds noble, but it’s really not,” Hoffman said. “I do this because it gives me a home, a place where I can come and work. The movies are great, but they require a different kind of concentration, and then they’re over. Theater was my first love, and it’s been the biggest influence on my life. The theater is why I got into acting and why I’m still in acting...I’m happy here,” he said, sounding surprised at his glee. “You never forget your first love.”

I used to be on the fence about how I felt about PSH--I still haven't seen Capote, but I think I slightly resented him for beating Heath Ledger for the Oscar in 2006--but ever since Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, I've been warming up to him. Now I'm definitely a fan...

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