Hard Work If You Can Get It

There are many actors who join in the refrain of "I love ensemble work." The reality, though, is that true ensemble work is frickin difficult and rare. Few actors ever have the opportunity to work collaboratively. It's a dangerous process that seems to perpetually toe the line between inspired success and egotistical disaster. It's unsettling. It can be rejuvenating and it can be demoralizing. Oftentimes it's both in the same five minutes.

I'm nervous, yes. I'm petrified. This whole ship might sink in flames. But if we don't do work that scares us we're not artists. If we continually live comfortably in our work we are no more than sedintary shmucks.

We're attempting something big. I think that's important. I think that's healthy. I think that's necessary.

"Instead of art aspiring towards lifelikeness what if life aspires towards art, towards a creative, controlled focus of freedom, outside of the tyranny of matter? What if the joke about life imitating art were a better joke than we think?"

-Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects