This is a bit of a follow up to the post I wrote in January. And since yesterday was national Women’s Equality Day (though I’m not convinced we’ve quite achieved that yet…at least if we are talking about equal treatment…) it felt like as good a time as any to give an update of sorts. Continue reading
Feminism
How Linklater & Breathing Saved my Marriage
Playing Hesperides in the production mentioned in this post… see where she comes, appareled like the spring…
I was introduced to Linklater voice work in the spring of my first year of graduate school. Everyone involved in the MFA production of Pericles needed to take an intensive workshop on it during what would have been our spring break otherwise (I believe our program director suggested that spring break was for “amateurs and undergrads”). This was important because Tina Packer and Dave Demke were directing and assistant directing and both came from Shakespeare & Company where Kristin Linklater’s work is used as a common vocabulary for such techniques as dropping in. I was a little sad that giving up spring break meant giving up some of the plans I’d made with my then boyfriend, now husband (we’d been dating 6 or 7 months at that point and one of our planned outings included wine tasting, which I was very sad to miss) but I was also excited and I had no idea how worth it that experience would be. Continue reading
Anatomy of a Hug and Breathing through the Crazy
A quick update on a few blog posts from earlier this year. Those of you who read my post about being a female theatre artist- I am pleased to invite you 
to come see The Bridge Initiative’s capstone project of their symposium: Anatomy of a Hug. It runs June 19-21 and we will have the playwright in town from NYC the first two days of the run and a talkback with her the evening of the 20th. It has been a privilege and a new adventure for me to work on this production. As you may have guessed from the “bardolatry” B in this year’s resolutions… I mostly deal with Shakespeare or other classical authors, or even once in a while an “American Classic” which is what I would consider How I Learned to Drive. I have learned a lot tackling a new piece and I feel lucky to do it with such a hard working cast and creative team. Continue reading
Feminism, Mommy Guilt, and my problem with #sorrynotsorry
So, we’re still in the season of Lent. It’s a season of reflection as I wrote about before, but it’s also about repentance- about calling to mind sins and patterns of selfishness, saying sorry, and amending what wrongs we can. I’ve been taking some time out to journal and reflect and pray during this season, and one of the many things I’ve realized is that I say sorry for a lot of things I shouldn’t need to and I don’t say sorry for a lot of things I ought to. That’s because I AM sorry for a lot of things I shouldn’t be, for ridiculous guilt I carry around while I am often complacent or remiss in noticing the things I should be sorry for..
Don Draper has plenty of things to be sorry for, and they don’t include having to use the restroom…
This is by no means a revolutionary idea. There have been several articles and a whole ad campaign on the specific phenomenon of women apologizing like crazy and how we are ingrained the idea that we should take the blame for things. I am definitely caught in this pattern.
Here is a list of things I have caught myself apologizing for just since Lent started: Continue reading
What to REALLY Expect When You’re Expecting
***Originally posted 1/23/15***
So this article from Scary Mommy popped up on a friend’s Facebook wall today and it made me really want to write this post about my own experience with pregnancy. I thought I knew “what to expect” when it came to pregnancy. Not just the societal ideals and pop culture memes, but on a more thought out level because not only had I read the entire What to Expect When You’re Expecting book before I was even thinking about having children, I read it in service of working on my graduate thesis
In case you can’t see, that’s a paper fetus from when I played pregnan Helena… Photo by Woods Pierce from All’s Well That Ends Well directed by Linden Kueck
which dealt with staging pregnancy and pregnant characters in Shakespeare and how that highlights some gender issues we have as a society. I knew a lot of facts, but really:
On Being a Female Theatre Artist
***Originally Published on 1/16/15***
If there are two pieces of advice I can’t stand to hear people give those pursuing theatre, it is “take every role” or the closely related “audition for everything”. This “guidance” is something I have heard several times throughout my journey as a theatre artist, and the more I hear it the more it makes my frustration level go from 0 to 60 in seconds. Now let me explain… I think there are silly, immature, and career damaging reasons not to take a role. I’d be happy to talk about them, but that’s not for this post. And since this post gets a little heated, let’s take a step back and start with a Ryan Gosling meme: Continue reading
Alphabet Resolutions 