This Can't Be Broccoli

There are benefits to insomnia. I always see these articles about how much sleep you need and how if you’re not getting enough sleep you’re basically going to die in a matter of minutes and nobody will mourn you, because you threw your life away staying up late to watch Archer on Netflix. Whenever I see stuff like that, I can’t help but think— Why don’t you scientists go cure cancer instead of lecturing me about sleep? Those ‘Get Fourteen Hours of Sleep a Night’ pieces just seem so judgmental.   I saw one article that said we need twelve hours of sleep a night. TWELVE HOURS OF SLEEP? That’s half the day! What’s the point of living if you’re spending half your life asleep? I get as much sleep as I need.   You know how I know that?   Because when I’m sleepy, I sleep.   But yes, if I’m wide awake, I refuse to lay in bed and wait for sleep to overtake me like somebody who doesn’t have a million things to do at any given moment. W...

Here’s the thing about critics that upsets me. You work on a play. You have a process. You do a show. Maybe you feel good about the show, maybe you don’t. A critic comes to see the show and after spending a night with it, tells you what it is. It’s good or it’s bad. He or she puts a label on it, and that’s what it is forever. I’ve been in shows that I knew were absolutely terrible that got rave reviews, and it didn’t change my mind about the show.   If anything, I felt like I dodged a bullet.   Like I fooled somebody.   But it didn’t for a second make me think that maybe somehow a person who spent two hours with something I spent six weeks with knew it better than I did. I think a critic is an important part of the artistic process.   I just wish it was an element of the process instead of being like the verdict in a court case.

It’s always amazing to me what we can get away with onstage. The things we do to take a story and make it presentable for an audience are sometimes so out of the realm of the possible that it seems like it should make alarms go off in the head of anybody with a penchant for realism. Turning out is the thing that drives me the craziest. I get that we have to turn out in order to blah blah blah the audience, but every time I see an actor consciously turn out, all I can think about are soap operas where a teary-eyed young girl confesses something to her boyfriend by stepping three feet away from and turning to look off into the distance as if she’s smelling smoke from a distant fire. Surely it has to look better to have people onstage actually talk to each other so that the audience feels like they’re eavesdropping rather than watching alien people from another planet who communicate by avoiding eye contact at all costs. I mean, one would think, right?

There’s been a bit of a debate lately about whether you should unfriend people who disagree with your views on things or try to engage them in conversation to try and open up their minds. Here’s my opinion on that: People don’t change their minds. And my opinion’s not changing about people not changing their minds—I can promise you that. Now, I’m not saying you should unfriend someone because you don’t like the same tv show, but if somebody posts something racist, sexist, and/or homophobic, just get rid of them. I realize this sounds cynical, but keep in mind, we’re talking about Facebook.   If people are going to have a life-changing epiphany, it’s not going to come in the form of a comment on an unending thread. If you get the chance to broaden someone’s horizons face-to-face, go for it.   But on the Internet?   Don’t bother. Life’s too short.

This is my favorite/least favorite time of year. It’s play-choosing time. I read as many plays as I can and try to pick nine that will make up a season of theater. One of the things I look for is work by women, but also for women (work that will utilize some of the many talented actresses I know). You wouldn’t believe how difficult this ends up being. The number of women who write great roles for women is terrifyingly small. I don’t know if women are scared to write plays with too many women characters in them because they feel like if they write plays that utilize men then male Artistic Directors will be more apt to choose their play, or if writing like and/or for men is just something that’s becoming an unfortunate side effect of women not being produced enough in American theater. Either way, it’s disheartening that men are the ones in charge of creating the majority of roles for women.   I end up faced with the same question every year: Do I p...

This year I wanted to start eating healthier. The following problems arose: -           According to the Internet, all the foods you think are good for you might be bad for you -           If they’re good for you today, they might be bad for you tomorrow -           Scientists go back and forth on food more than I do on Anne Hathaway -           Healthy food is way more expensive than crap (I guess this makes sense, but it explains why more people eat Doritos than kale chips) -           Red wine is really, really good for you and/or scientists might just be alcoholics. -           Everything you ate as a kid that you thought was disgusting but that you now find slightly less disgusting is now no lo...