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Apropos of nothing, here is a list of published plays that I have read recently (in addition to those in which I have performed):

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
November by David Mamet
Hurlyburly by David Rabe
The Water’s Edge by Theresa Rebeck
‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza
Travels with My Aunt by Giles Havergal / Graham Greene
On Golden Pond by Ernest Thompson
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov

The last of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet evokes a pleasant feeling in me. True, the entire volume is cherished because of the good feelings it brings to the modern reader, but this letter ends on an unexplained and inexplicable up note. It is the day after Christmas and Rilke is responding to something good the young poet had written. Further, Rilke is glad he hasn’t ended up in a profession that denies or attacks the existence of all art. Isolation in a lonely soldier’s outpost is better than a job in journalism, criticism and three quarters of what if called literature. I’m not at all sure I technically agree with this, but I can’t argue with the sentiment. The letter warmed me, that is all.

In this my final post on the topic, I link to an online version of them that I have found. Enjoy. It’s a resource to be read again and again.

Find more brief posts on Rilke here.

In the ninth of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, he addresses the endless doubting and disharmony of his recipient. It is a short letter because his “hand is tired” because he’s “had to write so many letters” to others, too. But a portion of it resonated with some actorly experiences I’ve had.

And about feelings: All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

The italicization is mine because I’ve been trying more and more to do good acting work with my entire body. Good acting is often seen as concentrated in the face, or the voice, or the heart. The greater truth is that, more often than not, a truer experience for both actor and audience is achieved when the actor is having a full-body physical experience. That came to mind as I read Rilke speak of one-sided feelings versus something that is in your blood.

Find more brief posts on Rilke here.

The eighth of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is long, dense, hard to follow as I read it. Rilke writes about the sadness his recipient has had. (And his own sadness, of course.) One part struck me as lovely, where Rilke writes of the value in not blocking out all the pain we might experience:

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.

If you’re hoping for some change in your life, I hope this helps. Find more brief posts on Rilke here.

Another quotation from Letters to a Young Poet, a compilation of letters by Rainer Maria Rilke. From the seventh letter:

Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult … that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

If you’re dealing with something difficult, I hope this helps.

Rilke was writing about solitude and love in this letter. Find more posts on Rilke here.

Letters to a Young Poet is a compilation of letters by Rainer Maria Rilke written, um, to a young poet. This Rilke is recommended reading, especially regarding creative endeavors.

From the first letter (italics are my addition):

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.

Very insightful.

I had my first rehearsal today to play the role of Dr. Jim Bayliss in a production of All My Sons, the great Arthur Miller play. More info will be forthcoming, naturally, but since today was my first rehearsal and since I speak first in the play, I thought I’d type up a snippet from the top of the play, including the last bit of prefatory stage directions into the first lines of dialog:

DOCTOR BAYLISS is nearing forty. A wry, self-controlled man, an easy talker, but with a wisp of sadness that clings even to his self-effacing humor.
AT CURTAIN, JIM is standing at L., staring at the broken tree. He taps his pipe on it, blows through the pipe, feels in his pockets for tobacco, then speaks.

JIM. Where’s your tobacco?
KELLER. I think I left it on the table.

I may wear a bow-tie. Stay tuned!

There’s a nickname people have tried to give me a few times over the years. Ashworthy. I’ve never been fond of Ashworthy. I’ve never hated it and insisted people stop using it, but I’ve never been fond of it. And not just because as a nickname, it’s longer than the name it nicks, which goes against one of the main points of nicknames. In fact, one of my favorite nicknames of all time is Kevin Kevin Ashworth, as I was called by several lovely coworkers at Ab Initio Software in Lexington, Mass.

Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve never been fond of Ashworthy is that it’s not a name, it’s not a real thing, it just doesn’t exist. Or so I thought. This week I am reading the play Moonlight and Magnolias by Ron Hutchinson, which fancifully imagines how the screenplay for Gone With the Wind might have been created. The writer Ben Hecht is laughably unfamiliar with the big, famous book and must write a screenplay in just 5 days. At one point he gets the name Ashley Wilkes wrong and says Ashworthy. And there you have it. In print. The existence of Ashworthy.

Not that I want to be called that. Kevin is still fine. Kev is okay. K-dawg, K-Ash, Kevin Kevin Ashworth, dude. So many other things to call me first. Okay?

Do I call it The Cherry Hipster Orchard, The Hipster Orchard, or The Hipster Cherry Orchard?

In any case, the line is one I read once upon a time in a reading — my first foray into acting alongside professionals, in fact.

GAYEV. Dear, highly respected bookcase. I salute your existence. Yeah, man. For more than one hundred years, you have been copacetic to your witty ideals of Bettie Page and Freakonomics.