A strange week, ending with a Manhattan snow shower on the day the city held a wake for an actress whose end qualifies as legitimate tragedy.
Such events upend us like unexpected storms; for me, it unlocked the genesis for the elegiac aspect of this blog. Back in the early nineties I was appearing as Shlink the lumber dealer in an off-Broadway production of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities. As a compliment to this character’s pragmatic eeriness, I commandeered a section of the callboard by pining up obits from the New York Times. I titled it The Dead Actor of the Week. It was an attempt to subvert my genial nature, to cloak myself in disquiet and it worked—the cast (we were a young bunch back then) was horrified, revulsed, a parallel reaction to what was going down onstage. But those posts also generated discussion and by the end of the run, those tacked up tributes had perhaps the opposite effect of putting us all more in tune with the accomplishments of the no-longer-living. And that we were part of a continuum: our struggles and triumphs as artists had been lived before us. We acquired a sympathy for death as we grasped the importance of remembrance—after all, our egos reasoned, that would be us one day. We’d want to be remembered too.
While Natasha Richardson lived, she blazed brightly. She was inspiring as a performer, and as a human being for her work with AMFAR and God’s Love We Deliver, charitable causes undertaken as honorifics to her father Tony Richardson who died of AIDS in 1991. RIP, and may we not forget.
Ms. Richardson in The White Countess (2005)
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