Mother of Invention Acting School — Los Angeles — Blog

I am very pleased to announce the fourth member of the Uranium Madhouse Advisory Board, Karim Javeri:

Karim Javeri is based in London, UK and is Director and Project Manager at Public Value Consulting Limited. His work focuses on advisory and consultancy services to the nonprofit and social enterprise sector. In the past he has conducted research for the Bank of England through the London School of Economics and recently completed a dissertation on performance measurement in the public sector. He holds a Masters of Public Administration from the London School of Economics in Public and Economic Policy.

Before moving to the United Kingdom, Karim lived in Canada and held various service delivery and leadership positions in nonprofit organizations in Toronto. He has Bachelor of Social Work degree from McGill University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Karim joins David Chambers, Dr. Amir Eshel and Elisa Carlson on the Advisory Board for Uranium Madhouse, the theater company I am forming in Los Angeles

Welcome Karim!

Here is what I am looking at for the logo for Uranium Madhouse, the theater company I am founding. With much gratitude to Seth Ernsdorf of Ernsdorf Design

I am thrilled to announce that Elisa Carlson, who has worked as a voice and speech coach at the Guthrie and other major regional theaters and is a graduate of the stellar MFA acting program at the University of Delaware, has agreed to join David Chambers and Dr. Amir Eshel on the Advisory Board for Uranium Madhouse, the theater company I am forming in Los Angeles.

Here is more about Elisa:

Elisa Carlson was on the Artistic Staff of the Guthrie Theater for eight years where she coached voice, speech and text for 31 productions. Other coaching credits include multiple productions Off-Broadway and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Children’s Theater, Alliance Theatre and Georgia Shakespeare.


Elisa has a special interest in new plays, having coached world premieres of plays by Tony Kushner, Kia Corthron and Ellen McLaughlin, among many others, and the premiere of the Michael Korie/Ricky Ian Gordon opera The Grapes of Wrath. Her acting credits include the Guthrie, The Shakespeare Theater and the Alliance. She has performed internationally with companies in Finland, Germany, Greece and The National Theatre of Cyprus.


Film credits include acting in and coaching text for Campbell Scott’s film of Hamlet starring Blair Brown. She was dialect and foreign language coach for the feature film Sweet Land starring Alan Cumming, winner of the 2006 Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and created language for the multiple award-winning short Ana’s Playground.


Elisa has B.F.A. in acting from Florida State and an M.F.A in acting from the University of Delaware’s Professional Theatre Training Program. She recently moved home to Atlanta and is a Resident Director and Associate Professor at the Gainesville Theatre Alliance.

Welcome Elisa!

I am pleased to announce that Stanford professor Dr. Amir Eshel has accepted my invitation to join the Uranium Madhouse Advisory Board.

A little about Amir:

Amir Eshel is Charles Michael Chair in Jewish History and Culture, a Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, and Director of The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. He is currently working on a book about the poetic figuration of historical narratives, and he is also involved in an interdisciplinary project on urban space in Berlin. At Stanford, he has taught courses on German Jewish literature, literature of the Holocaust, modern German poetry and the contemporary German novel.

Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of German studies, he taught at the Universitat Hamburg (Germany). He is a member of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association of Jewish studies, the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In 2002 he received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from Stanford University’s dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received an MA and PhD in German literature, both from the Universitat Hamburg. He speaks Hebrew, German and English, and has a good knowledge of Yiddish and French.

Amir was a reader on my dissertation on Thomas Bernhard at Stanford, and a tremendous source of guidance and support during that project. I look forward to continuing to work with him on this new venture.

Jesse Eisenberg, who played the lead in The Social Network, is a smart actor. He’s also a good actor. He embodied the fierce intelligence and determination his role seemed to ask for admirably. Is he a great actor? He may be one day, but he’s not there yet.

Why do I say that? Consider the final scene (SPOILER ALERT). The Zuckerberg character is apparently preoccupied, deeply troubled even, about the question of whether or not he is, in fact, an asshole. He asserts to the concerned junior lawyer who hangs around to cluck over him that he is not an asshole, and her rejoinder (more on that below) is an apparent answer to that question. Trouble is, by this point, I had long since ceased to care about the condition of Mark Zuckerberg’s soul. The story had been absorbing, engrossing even, but I found myself totally apathetic to the question of whether deep down, Mark Zuckerberg was a good guy or not.

Perhaps the fault for this does not lie with Eisenberg alone, but I think if he as an actor had found a way to care about the people he was eventually to betray, his remorse upon betraying them would have been more real, and, as a result, more palpable. As it was, he seemed troubled, but anguished? Not remotely. Jesse Eisenberg will have to try to hit that mark another time.

If I had to guess, I would speculate that Eisenberg made a judgment, consciously or not, about Zuckerberg that he was “uncaring”, so it was hard for him to see that these relationships really meant something to him.

As for the movie itself? It was watchable enough. It did stay with me for a day or two. But I don’t think it really showed us anything new. We know about the dangers of ambition and of failing to keep it real when you succeed. And we know people do ass things in their early twenties. (oh how we know…)

And about that ending: Zuckerberg says something to the lawyer like “I’m not an asshole!” and she says something like: “I know you’re not. You’re just working really hard to be one.”

This reminded me more than a little of the last lines of Howard Korder’s 1988 play Boys’ Life:

Carla: You’re not the worst man in the world.
Jack: I’m not, huh?
Carla: No you’re not. I’m afraid you’re just not. (Pause) But you’d like to be…

Just sayin’.