My Name is Barbra: An Approach to Art

“I want to please the audience, and I’ve found the best way to please an audience is to please myself.”

In her nine-hundred-plus-page memoir, My Name is Barbra, published late in 2024, acting and singing phenomenon Barbra Streisand reflects on her career and incidentally articulates an approach to art. “I like improvisation,” she says at one point, “but not when it’s completely undisciplined.” Asserting on the one hand that the first take is often the best take because it is the most emotionally authentic, she also remarks that the editing process never seems to be over, even decades after the project wraps, to the extent that she might want to offer an alternative ending in an anniversary DVD. One wonders if the theory and the application are linked: the product can always be improved because it’s full of first takes.

Resistant on stage to a director’s encouragement to “lock it in”, blocking a gesture that he thought should be repeated in subsequent performances, Streisand asserts that it is important for her performance to be different every time, dictated by the way she is feeling. I cannot help but analyze this as a journalist. If my performance is based on something as capricious as the way I feel, my product may not satisfy the audience I am serving, tainted as it would be by nervousness, fatigue, irritation, and at times heartburn. It should be no different for someone in a different branch of the arts, especially when representing a character who may not inspire a great deal of sympathy. Asked what aspect of herself she channeled when playing the villain Jeanine in the film Divergent, actress Kate Winslet replied: “Nothing! I don’t feel for her at all.”

Of course, there is the way Angelina Jolie approaches her acting: “You put yourself in that situation and react naturally.” This is possible without necessarily feeling what the character would be feeling, especially after multiple takes. With Barbra, one gets the sense that improvisation is appropriate to the extent that she feels like improvising; in fact, she refers many times to what she calls her “creative control”, which she expects to have even as an actress relating to the director. This vague concept seems eerily undemocratic, for what would happen if everyone on the set demanded this privilege? The way people, especially men, react to her desire for control, she frequently attributes to chauvinism and, in the case of a woman, jealousy.

Is she pleasing the audience, or is she pleasing herself? Nobody can deny that Streisand has created excellent art, and the accolades printed copiously in her memoir, recognizing her excellence, testify to pure gold like The Way We Were and The Prince of Tides. But is it sustainable? Can we go the extra mile when we are merely doing what we feel like doing? In the third decade of the twenty-first century, we see a lot of recycled concepts, sequels to the sequels. What steered us to this dead end? Perhaps we were so entranced by Barbra that we didn’t see the dead end coming. Is it authenticity or is it short-sightedness? Is it a Berean commitment to truth, or is it a myopic concentration on one aspect of a multi-faceted situation? Is it vulnerability or is it a labile tendency to spew the first thing that comes into her head? One could question whether what the world desperately needed to see in the eighties was a woman dressing up as a man to study the Torah. Impulsive choices like that may have eliminated other worthy possibilities. But then again, one wonders about the studio executives whose choices made Streisand possible.

Being dictated by feelings is not a valid approach to relationships, and it is certainly not a valid approach to any kind of art form. As a journalist, I frequently make choices that have nothing to do with pleasing myself. I enter a room to cover a high-stakes meeting, butterflies in my throat, when I would much rather be in my bedroom watching one of my favorite Marvel films. When crafting an article, the word that resurfaces so often is “no, no, no,” as I reject the delicious but inappropriately caustic appraisals of what I witnessed at said meeting. Following my feelings could arguably lead me out of a job.

I do not want to be one more inadequate male reacting to Streisand’s inadequacy out of his own insecurity. But I think there is something basic about art that can be said here. Feelings come and go. It is nice when they are pleasant. But when they are so often not, whether in a relationship (which is an art form) or in a job, it is important to just keep going, to put one foot in front of the other. Excellence is based on nothing so whimsical as the way I happen to be feeling. A geography of pain is not an excuse for not doing the next right thing. Streisand professes to be interested in the concept of restraint. It would behoove her to give it more thought.