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Courtesy of our friends over at A2K Productions...

ow

Damn.

Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett has suffered a minor injury after being hit by a prop during a live performance of A Streetcar Named Desire in Sydney.

The Elizabeth star was accidentally hit in the head with a radio during a fight scene with her co-star Joel Edgerton.

Audience members said she left the stage with blood pouring down her head. The show was subsequently cancelled.

She's apparently fine.

Dude. I wasn't there -- so what do I know? -- but as performers we've all been there: working with scene partners who get into the moment just a bit too much for safety. (I still have a scar from the Fringe show where my scene partner took some clippers to my ear. Yikes.)

On behalf of all us Cates to the Joels of the stage: take it down a notch, okay? It's not real.

looking in the mirror

Something was on the tip of my brain when I read about the latest outrage (as if anyone paying attention -- on the anniversary of Katrina, with the gruesome milestone of 4,000 Americans lost in Babylon already surpassed -- as if we could be outraged anymore):

Security at the United States Embassy in Afghanistan has been seriously compromised by mismanagement and misbehavior among civilian guards and their supervisors, according to reports by a Congressional subcommittee and a nonprofit oversight organization.

The oversight group’s report said guards worked in a “ ‘Lord of the Flies’ environment,” where they and their supervisors groped and urinated on one another. They cite photographs that suggest guards have drawn Afghans into activities forbidden in a conservative Muslim country.

“Multiple guards say this deviant hazing has created a climate of fear and coercion,” the report said, “with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted or even fired.”

It was somewhere in my brain, rolling and rattling around, bit for the moment it was an idea too big to quite articulate.

We like our villains -- I know I do. I'd enjoyed making the problem all about Blackwater/Xe -- but that was moot, now that another private contractor has shown its employees to be craven schoolboys with guns.

Maybe, I thought, we could blame outsourcing of government work; but we know that regular soldiers commit atrocities, too.

That thing, that thought rolling around in my head rolled a bit closer to the tip of my tongue: maybe it wasn't that we'd found the wrong villain. Maybe the problem is that we were looking for a villain at all.

And there it was: maybe the point was that when you take the madness of war and occupation, add isolation, and remove any familiar signposts, maybe this is what happens to any of us.

But then, just as I had found the words, with the proper syntax and punctuation, I found that Tom Tomorrow had already found a way to say it better than I ever could.

"So, what's next?"

This is the question I've gotten more than I can count in the past two months. Most folks in COI's orbit have grown accustomed since last October to monthly -- if not weekly -- emails from us about The Next Show. It's been a couple months now since we were teasing any Next Show, and it's starting to get weird. And for our monthly subscribers, I'm sure it's a question that's starting to get a bit awkward (what exactly are they subscribing to, after all?).

Believe me, it's ten times weirder for us. I feel a niggling guilt when people ask what's next, and I don't have an answer. As an actor, it's not your fault when you don't have a project lined up ... but when you produce, it kind of is.

It's been a luxury to know what was next. But it wasn't planned: one show lead to the next, and then the next...and pretty soon we'd produced half a dozen projects in a row. Initially, we knew we wanted to do McReele in advance of the election -- we'd (unnecessarily, as it turned out) scrambled for the funds to secure the rights in December of 2007 .

I never planned to be doing project after project after project all through 2008 and up until July 2009. At the same time, it was such a high to look at a calendar and know what was next. Who was I to kill our momentum? (My checking account had other ideas.)

If you're a monthly donor, a well-wisher, an interloper -- rest assured, we are all working very hard to figure out what is coming next. Harder than we have any right to, since this is definitely not our day job. Keep asking, goading, cajoling -- one day soon, we'll have details.

pigeonholing the penis-less (part IV)

They're still coming! Answers to our standing question: do female performers have to choose between being pretty or funny? As always, these folks want to be anonymous:

before I answer your questions, let me respond to the initial statements that triggered the jezebel.com article-- The Times has a profile of Anne Heche where the co-creator of the new series Hung, Colette Burson, says "It is incredibly difficult to find beautiful, talented, funny women over 35."

When i look at character breakdowns, I'm more drawn to descriptions that have to do with the character's journey or relationships with other characters. If it just states that she's "funny" or "beautiful" I tend to skip it. "Funny" and "beautiful" are uber subjective and unless there are sides or unless i can get my hands on the script to see if there's something in her journey that speaks to me, I'm less likely to go to something where it feels like it's just about looks or less likely to attend something where I think the expectation walking into the room will be, "Okay, try to make me laugh." In the case of the latter scenario, I'd like to connect with you, but if you expect me to "make" you do something, I think you're probably rooting against me, whether or not that is your conscious intent. As for the "beautiful" description, that leads me to think that it's just about looks and truth be told, I am not comfortable consciously placing myself in a situation where I feel I'm just being judged on my looks--I'm an actor, not a model.

Back to "funny." If you want "funny," I hope your script is "funny." If you want "funny," please give us sides. I don't want to waste your time. I am a big fan of sides! Sides allow us the chance to see if we're on the same page as to the kind of "funny" you're probably looking for. There's I Love Lucy funny, there's Roseanne funny, there's Buster Keaton funny, there's Andy Kaufman funny, etc, etc.
End of tangent. Now to the specific questions:

*So, what I wanted to ask you about. Have you experienced this kind of either/or dichotomy -- expected to be pretty OR funny, but never both?

I can't remember encountering this in my auditioning experience.

*How pigeonholed are you in auditions these days? By your looks/age/ethnicity/possessionof a brain?

I once had an agent who I believe sent me out on any and all auditions for Black characters who could sing just because I am Black and I can carry a tune. Anyone who has heard me sing (and he has-- I sang two songs for him in his office) would say that I have more of a legit sound. But most of the roles he had me auditioning for were better suited for someone trained to sing gospel. I did my best at the auditions, but I felt like he was operating based on my looks alone.

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