Quote of the Day

One of the basic notions of theater is that it's special, and it's only happening for you, every night of the week. But if you look at it globally, and you talk to actors who are doing a show for more than three months, it's a job. Somebody who goes to work every day, and does the same thing every day, they're doing it at a pretty high frequency-- you repair thirty radios a day, or approve thirty transactions. Theater, in comparison, is on a very low-frequency loop-- once a night. And that supposed singularity is what effaces the traces of the work. But if you turn up the frequency to where the actor is performing all day long, and there may or may not be an audience, then you can actually start thinking about labor and how it goes up against hope, or the expectation of transcendence. -- "David Levine in Conversation with Christian Hawkey" (The Believer, February 2009), talking about his film Bauerntheater, in which an actor "acts" the role of a farmer, 24/7, for a month.