I will perform in NYC on June 26

Friends in New York! On Tuesday, June 26, I will be performing at Ars Nova. “Performing what?” you ask, in my imagination, “why, performing the act of inventing a religion with diagrams, theories and preposterous arcana,” I reply. “How is that possibly entertainment?” you hopefully don’t wonder. “If you’ve ever seen me introduce a play [...]

I will perform in LA on June 19

Friends in Los Angeles! On Tuesday, June 19, I will be performing at Atwater Crossing, with special musical guest and former office-mate Jeffrey D. I will attempt to lasso the cosmos for the 21st century agnostic using obscure scientific trivia, personal medical records, ontological diagrams, sociological arcana, whimsical apocrypha, the Oxford comma and jokes. Jeffrey will [...]

Happy Leap Year

In honor of leap year, and the smart young toga-clad IT guy in Caesar’s Rome who looked up long enough from playing Angry Aves on his iScroll to solve the whole Earth takes 365 days, 5 hours, 49 Minutes to go around the Sun dilemma…   Brendan Hughes on “Time.” – watch more funny videos

Turn Your Body Into a Lightning Rod, Part 1: Imagination, Eyes, and Tongue

Introduction Very occasionally throughout my career I have taken small roles to attempt to stay in touch with the task of acting, and found it utterly confounding and deeply, deeply difficult to relax into. As a man with scoliosis, I know body tension. If I even mention a certain stressful teacher I had in high [...]

The Conundrum of Directing

I’m the Pollyanna and it kills me. In 2004, I was in my third year of grad school, studying theatre directing. My thesis production was of an Irish play about two warring brothers and the priest who tries to reconcile them. In a certain way, it amounted to a very expensive diary entry. I watched [...]

The Human Slouch Towards Narrative

Spending the week at the American Film Market, and watching $800 million worth of narrative morsels whiz around the beaches of Santa Monica, can make you think many cynical things about what makes a movie popular. It reminded me of this old graph I created five or six years ago to try to encapsulate all [...]

Purpose

When you begin to seek a purpose in life, you face this question: do you protect the past from the inevitability of the future? Or do you protect the future from the inevitability of the past? Eventually, some realize the past is safe. It already happened. And we begin to protect the future from the [...]

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  • The Pizzicato Effect

    In classical music, Pizzicato is the plucking of a muted string on a violin. The effect (in my opinion) is the indication of the note for your heart to play.

    This can also be achieved in directing. We do not go to the theater to admire an actor have an emotion. We go to have the emotion for ourselves.

    The Pizzicato Effect is theatre and film in their highest forms. This is what I'm after.

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