81. I NEED YOUR ADVICE
and i get to tell you about some new jobs!
so i’m not actively in rehearsal at the moment, which means every few nights i accidentally trip into a multi-hour hyperfocus sprint. this week, that turned into me redoing all the graphics for this newsletter and contemplating the way i structure it all.
as a result, i’m going to hit you with two polls. the first one is pretty self-explanatory.
now, for the next one: i sometimes struggle with sticking to my own categories here, especially because i like illustrating the rabbit holes my mind goes down. sometimes i’ve been putting articles (which i, you know, read) under “seeing” when i only encountered them as a byproduct of something i saw, since it feels weird to put them out of chronological order (and the “reading” section comes first). does this bother anyone? any preferences re: sticking strictly to the categories vs. being bendy when needed vs. a whole other format or just grouping by thought cluster?
okay, thank you for indulging me. back to our regularly scheduled programming! reminder that i love it when you email or text (if we’re close like that) your thoughts on anything below! dahoo dores, everyone!
p.s. if you’re looking for lists of my favorite things that i saw & read & heard & made in 2024, those will come next week to close out the year.
p.p.s. this post is too long for email! click the title in your inbox or click HERE to read it on my little substack website so you don’t miss anything.
the possession by annie ernaux, which is so short i first thought i had accidentally borrowed a sample instead of the whole e-book. some favorite bits below.
dipped back into women who run with the wolves, which is a little woo-woo for me, but too many people have told me to read it to ignore it completely. i am finding it relevant to cunnicularii, one of the shows i’m working on with sophie, which helps. plus, i love marking up hard copy books.
spent my saturday night reading this list for fun. i wish i were kidding, but this is who i am.
this interview with emma cline, which i sought out after finishing the guest.
anne helen petersen in conversation about “all things american girl doll” with the authors of dolls of our lives. (i should tell you up front that i’m a samantha. sorry.) this piece had me thinking about how if (optimistically!) pleasant rowland (the founder of american girl) wanted to stop girls from being pressured to grow up too soon and ruth handler’s goal (if you believe the barbie movie) was to show girls that they could grow up to be anything they wanted… what is the right age for a girl or woman to be? i guess what i’m getting at is: in modern society, girls are expected to be women and women are expected to be girls. at 27, i have no idea it in supposed to feel young or old, and i keep thinking whichever one i feel like at a given moment is probably wrong. i don’t know what it means for a girl or woman to feel like she’s the right age. i don’t know if i even know any girls or women who feel like they ARE the right age.
right on schedule, the cut offered up an article on “the year of the girl” — hot girl walks, girl dinner, the barbie movie. my friends know i love recapping a cut article, but this one irked me a little.
not to be a shill for mattel — or maybe worse, be guilty of explaining a joke — but i actually thought the laugh in that moment came from the fact that barbie has a detailed, if perhaps overly literal, knowledge of what fascism entails when we don’t expect her to! the joke is that barbie is both smarter and worse at reading social cues than we thought! and also that controlling the railways isn’t the first thing we think of when we think of fascism these days! not that politics don’t belong in barbie! again, plenty has been written about barbie’s failures of feminism (i direct you to my side eye at ruth handler above)… but this feels like the author is missing the point.
this paragraph, though, was really at the heart of my gripes. if only girlhood actually preceded choices about career building and homemaking and sexuality and caretaking! the patriarchal machine doesn’t whir to life the minute you get your period! and the idea that “in girlhood, we’re not yet even ourselves” feels fully bonkers to me. we grow, of course. but one of the things that i think adult women miss most about girlhood is how unabashedly free we felt, at least sometimes, to be ourselves. to play. to dream. anyway, maybe if that feeling didn’t feel so tied to girlhood, we’d all be happier to “act our ages,” whatever that means.
this very cool exploration from pudding.cool of why spotify lists over 6,000 genres of music, most of which you won’t recognize. (i offer you: stutter house, texas death metal, chill phonk, jesus movement, cloud rap, classical drill, bubblegum bass, italian screamo, irish hardcore, crank wave, and epic collage. please tag yourselves.)
another visual article from pudding.cool that digs into the messed-up statistics of how few hit songs have all-woman songwriting teams (or even women songwriters on the team at all). truly wild to see ali tamposi, a family member of mine and all-around amazing human, as one of the few women popping up on this list!
some lines of poetry about december.
a little ship of theseus humor for us all.
beating my same old drum again: we are so lucky that sara holdren writes not just reviews, but true dramatic criticism. her latest piece is a great example — tying together a number of disparate pieces (uptown and downtown, dance and drama) with her astute analysis.
but all is not well when it comes to the state of theater criticism. this article from jason zinoman outlines why.
on the flip side, this article from jason zinoman explains why the end of peter marks’s tenure as theater critic for the washington post is terrible news for theater
this perfect list from autostraddle: “30 slightly unhinged post-breakup activities that aren’t actually that bad.”
this piece on how a charlie brown christmas, that most overtly biblical of televised holiday specials, is actually, in some fundamental way, pretty jewish.
really hoping to go see appropriate, written by brandon jacobs-jenkins and directed by lila neugebauer, on broadway. was particularly interested by jesse green’s rave for the new york times in which he works through his own changing thoughts on the play since he first saw it (and hated it). read all the way through to the final lines.
this transcript of whitney white, jocelyn bioh, and zenzi williams discussing how jaja’s african hair braiding came to life. i love when directors share really specific pieces of their prep.
into the idea of a “more/less” list from celia keenan-bolger.
i had the chance to sit in on one of sophie’s classes at columbia when she presented part of her latest draft for her play the after wife. this particular class is taught by david henry hwang, and the guest was annie baker, so i obviously took pages and pages of notes. hearing annie talk sent me down a rabbit hole of her old interviews and profiles. this one, of her and sam gold, is really interesting, though the profiler’s insistence on a semi-romantic lens clearly squicks both annie and sam out. (it squicks me out, too!) it’s also particularly interesting for me to look back at annie’s collaborations with directors given that she now largely prefers to direct her own work.
watched the eras tour on streaming on a bad day, at some cake, lit a persimmon candle from trader joe’s, and felt a little better.
and speaking of media mentioned in that “year of the girl” article, i still can’t escape barbie. i am a little obsessed with this clip of margot robbie talking about how her tried-and-true method of “animal work” failed her in this film.
actively wept watching the final season of the crown — specifically, episodes 3 and 4, covering princess diana’s death. charles said, “i’m afraid you’re going to have to be very brave,” and i burst into tears. unfortunately, the show continues to push a comically pro-charles agenda, beginning with the casting of dominic west. it is ridiculous! i simply do not believe that the monarch we all know to have been cruel and forbidding was secretly a sensitive hunk!
speaking of bad television, i finished this season of the gilded age! it was terrible and delightful and awful and perfect! (this tweet about the show also really makes me feel like jackson mchenry and i would be friends.) kathryn vanarendonk also wrote an excellent and fun piece about why the gilded age is both objectively bad and also one of the most enjoyable shows on tv (or on max, or whatever). the main reasons can obviously only be elucidated via a close textual comparative reading with sontag’s “notes on ‘camp’,” so that’s what vanarendonk is offering. (there are spoilers for the end of season 2 in here! be warned!)
this little parody of “sisters” from white christmas by david lindsay-abaire, bonnie milligan, and alli mauzey over at kimberly akimbo.
this little tiktok of a kindergarten music teacher made me smile.
one of my favorite songs from sofía campoamor this year.
just utterly floored / wrecked / astonished by the latest jensen mcrae. she writes the things i wish i could. my god. so simple. so beautiful. so painful.
maggie rogers heard i said that and was like, “hold my beer.”
(bonus: maggie singing my favorite paul simon lyric maybe ever.)
should be safe now to tell you the two jobs i got recently! everything happened so quickly! 2024 is going to be wild!
the first gig is associate directing mindplay at arena stage, written by vinny deponto and josh koenigsberg and directed by andrew neisler. it’s a one-man show about mentalism and memory, and i’m probably not going to be able to tell you too much detail about it. (as the saying goes, an associate director never reveals her secrets.) somehow, one of my niches has become last-minute pinch-hitting director for solo shows written and performed by the same guy. excited to get to work at arena, make new friends, and learn some magic.
the second gig is assistant directing a workshop of a new play at roundabout, directed by whitney white. (not sure if the title and playwright are public knowledge yet, so staying quiet to be safe.) i finally got to read the play last week and am obsessed. plus, i’ve been manifesting getting to assist whitney for maybe six years, so this is kind of a pinch me moment.
and as i think i’ve mentioned, i’m returning to another rose to help install cast 3.0 in tasmania and australia. truly wild.
all three (!) of these gigs are happening over the course of january and february, which means my life is about to be jam-packed. (the projects actually overlap, so i feel extra grateful to all three creative teams for still wanting me there and making the dates work.)
also, if you’ve read all the way to the end, you get to hear about my other hyperfocus sprint this week, when i was suddenly consumed with an urge to mind map every single job i’ve ever had in the theater industry. i’m not done yet, but it was honestly very cool to see the steps that that have led me to where i am today laid out like that. i used miro to do it, and the thing is quite literally too big to share, but i can show you a couple snippets below.
my very rough system involves solid lines to signify direct connections (in which knowing that person or working on that show led directly to meeting another person or doing another show) and dotted lines to signify indirect connections (when someone from one part of my life popped up somewhere else, either by chance or because i was able to hire them for a project of my own).
an example path to trace, for fun: in college, my thesis advisor dan egan hired me as the assistant to the shen curriculum for musical theater, which is how i met director lonny price at a master class, which is how i ended up being the directing observer on scotland, pa at roundabout, which is how i met the wonderful jeb brown, which is how i managed to rope him into starring in before the flood, which is how i got to make my professional directing debut in the city. i often talk about how we’re all always planting seeds, and it’s really cool to be able to trace how some of those seeds sprouted.
Loved how this ends!!!