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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

Anyway, in what has suddenly become a brilliant, scintillating, continuing series of opening lines of hipster versions of Chekhov, I offer a first line to The Three Sisters, as heard in Silver Lake.

OLGA. It’s exactly a year ago that Father died, isn’t it? More cowbell.

Wha?!?! You say there’s no hipster version of The Seagull? Dammit, there ought to be a hipster edition of Chekhov’s classic play! Hmmm. How would it start?

HOPPER. Mamie, why do you always wear black ironic tees?
MAMIE. I am in mourning for my lifestyle.

Feel free to add to this scintillating re-work. Please add brilliant Chekhovian dialog as it might be heard in Williamsburg or Silver Lake. Watch out, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!