The Adventures of Tony

Coriolanus: False to Nature

2012-03-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

For some reason, Shakespeareville USA (that's Staunton, VA to those who don't live here) did not get Ralph Fienne's cinematic take on Coriolanus, but that's okay, as it provided a handy excuse to visit our nations capitol the other day to check it out. I didn't have high expectations for it, so it's hard to be too disappointed, and while the movie was more watchable than some unintentional burlesques of Shakespeare that have graced the silver screen, it still isn't very good.

Quite honestly, if I wanted to see a movie about the Serbian war, I would have checked out Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Milk and Honey (actually, I intend to), but in Fienne's "place calling itself Rome," the rhythms of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy are lost to the sound of automated weapons fire and the imposition of technological forces that strip the public moments of a play very much about the perils of the public sphere of all their intensity.

Something that Fienne's has actually done very well is capturing the spirit of the people. One of the reasons I love this play is that it presents a conflict of aristocracy and republicanism; in the earliest days of the Roman Republic, the people are as unsure of how to use their new found power as the noble families of the monarchy are to concede it. Coriolanus' defection following his banishment represents a triumph of the will of the over-man, but the greater triumph is in Volumnia's ability to bend her son's will to the needs of the state.

In order to pull this off, the people have to be an almost amorphous mass of bodies and a cacophony of voices, and they are. Sometimes. Unfortunately, as the film progresses, shots of individuals with camera phones recording Coriolanus' every word become a substitute for the cacophonous mass, and that pits the over-man Coriolanus against a single pleb. A wall of bodies might be able to tear even the great soldier apart limb from limb, but a man with a camera phone doesn't stand a chance.

And this is the other crucial failing of Fienne's film: the eponymous tragic hero only rarely has to face the mob, and when he does, he wields an automatic weapon. Anyone with the will to shoot can control a crowd with an automatic rifle, but in Shakespeare's play, written in a time when muzzle-loading rifles were dangerously unpredictable about a time when such weapons had yet to be conceived, Coriolanus (and his rivals Brutus and Sicinius) controls the crowd through sheer force of personality. And the mediation of television (the cleverly named Fidelis TV) takes away the immediacy of the public rhetoric of those moments.

I know, I know, politicians give speeches to the camera's these days, but in Shakespeare's time they didn't, and his plays employ language that accounts for the realities of public rhetoric. Ultimately, it's the way that film works that does the most damage to Shakespeare's text, though, as even moments that remain public in the film are turned into private affairs through the camera's eye and the microphone's sensitivity. Volumnia's rhetorical struggle with her son, a feast of language and classical forms, is located almost exclusively in the back of her throat, and directed almost exclusively to a son who, lacking the immediacy of a the public audience of Volscian soldiers, has no reason to feel shame.

Fienne's film is practically an exercise in the perils of Shakespeare on film. While there have been a few successful attempts over the years, Coriolanus is not one of them. See a stage production instead.

Dear Rush Limbaugh

2012-03-04T13:58:00.002-08:00

Right now you've got the whole world breathing down your neck over a choice of words that, by your own admission, were "not the best," but don't get me wrong, I'm not here to add to the pile on. Sandra Fluke is an intelligent, well spoken woman who is strong enough to take some mud slinging, but even if she wasn't, she's got all of America, and probably a good chunk of the English speaking world looking after her right now. This isn't about her, this is about you.

Everyone else seems to have missed this one moment where you gave yourself away. You remember, where you asked for the sex videos? You said something like “we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." Well, okay, so they noticed, but they maybe didn't hear that deep cry for help. Behind the mask of cynically squinting eyes and casual cigar smoking (on your web site), I can see you for what you really are. A man who wouldn't mind seeing Sandra Fluke naked.

I really can't blame you for that. As I said, she's strong, intelligent, and well spoken, and a quick look on Google images shows her to be pretty, too. As an intelligent, heterosexual man, I know where you're coming from on this. But the way you're doing it, mate, it's all wrong.

The thing about women you don't seem to realize is that, in the 21st century, they generally think of themselves as being intelligent and capable human beings who should have come control over their life and choices. I know, once upon a time feudal transfer of property rights to your own offspring created the social conditions where it was necessary to regard women as property for the sake of protecting your own chattels, but we have long abandoned that particular economic system, and science has come a long way. So basically any rational justification you could come up with for treating a woman so badly is a couple centuries out of date. At least.

I know, that one is going to be pretty hard to swallow. Take a moment.

What I think you don't understand is that you want to see Ms. Fluke naked so badly because you're attracted to those very qualities that you pretend to abhor. You know, he intelligent, well-spoken courage. The thing is, even if you could score some intimate moments with her based on caustic denigration of her person because you disagree with her principles, you wouldn't enjoy her.

Fortunately, she is strong, and as I said, will survive your mud slinging. Unfortunately, I think you've ruined your chances with her. Women tend not to respond favorably to being called a slut in any circumstances, let alone on a nationally syndicated program. No, you're just going to have to man up and deal with the fact that you're not going to get to see Ms. Fluke au naturale anytime soon.

But I have good news! There are thousands and thousands of intelligent, well-spoken, and courageous women in the world. And doesn't everyone love a reformed sinner? You have the opportunity of a lifetime, sir, to begin treating women with respect, and leveraging your media outlets to do the same. Right now, state legislatures all over the country are pushing through frightening laws that require doctors to rape their patients before performing an abortion, and otherwise limiting the ability of these highly intelligent, well-spoken, and courageous women to control their own destinies.

Where I think you and your conservative brethren have gone very wrong is in thinking that a stronger woman makes you a weaker man, but that's not the truth. Actually, it's quite the opposite: women like Ms. Fluke inspire us to be better men. Now that your eyes are open, you have the opportunity to do this for yourself; don't squander it.

Best,

Tony Tambasco

If You Seek Meaning

2012-03-02T13:47:00.002-08:00

I don't know where I first heard the saying "if you seek meaning, listen to the music, not the song," but it's the sort of thing that appeals to both my Zen sensibilities, and neatly encapsulates the way I feel about the role of sound design in a theatrical production. Common wisdom in most directing texts is that lighting functions as another actor on stage, and while that's true, the sound design can function as a whole other play.

One of my favorite things about my years at Weathervane was when we would bring in kids from the YMCA day care programs (we're talking about 8 or 9 years old) for a brief tour of the various shops in a theatre. To show off sound design, I would usually have one of the actor apprentices working in a shop cold read from whatever Shakespeare play I happened to have in my pack at the time, while underscoring it with different pieces of music from different genres, and then asking the kids to tell me what they expected to happen in the play. Thus I introduced them to sound design. Of course, it kind of works the same way in the middle, and especially at the end.

All this is to say that, as a sound designer and director, creating a musical is maybe the most awesome thing I've ever done. It's a literary way of telling a story through an elaborate sound design, and as The Ballad of Dido has started coalescing into a shape that will more closely resemble the final product, I have allowed myself to enjoy this play as a director and sound designer.

I was particularly impressed with one girl at the Weathervane/YMCA camp who noted that, underscoring the opening of Henry V with Vivaldi, the music and the verse blended together naturally. Actually, it was more like being humbled. Apart from being an excellent argument for early childhood music education, her observation has stuck with me because that's what a good musical should do: most of the time the text and the music should be married. I say most of the time, of course, because just like a surprise Em in a G-C-D chord progression, the occasional bit of variance is a way of telling the story, too.

Really, I don't have much more of a point to make than that I think I've finally found a way of merging my various skill sets into a single activity, and I'm happy to be discovering that such a project does exist.

Epic Poster Art

2012-02-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

The poster for The Byron Project, this years MFA Acting production (stage managed by yours truly) came out recently, and I couldn't help but note some of the cast talking about how the poster gives away the ending. That graphic in the top quarter of the poster is a representation of the execution of Charles, Duke of Byron, and the protagonist of this conflation. The phrase "spoiler alert" has become one of the memes of the Internet age, but in this case, there really was no spoiler. Just about everyone who saw the play knew what was going to happen to Byron. Hell, Byron knows what's going to happen to him by the end of the second act of the first play (The Byron Project conflates The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron and The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, both by Chapman) when an astrologer tells him he has recently done something that will result in his decapitation, and Byron says, effectively, eff that.

In order to understand how that sentiment would read on the early modern stage, I invite you to consider someone being told they have cancer and must undergo treatment immediately by a physician, and saying they would beat cancer by their own will power. We would generally regard this person as either stupid or crazy, no matter when their other merits may have been. So it goes with Byron.

So Byron's death comes as a surprise to no one. This play is not about that, it's about watching the process of Byron's downfall. He has many opportunities to save his own life, and rather than plead for mercy or forsake his own ambition (being a powerful duke and a war hero isn't enough for him), Byron continues to travel at warp speed down the path that everyone knows will end in his beheading.

Maybe it's got something to do with an MLitt thesis on Shakespeare and Epic Theatre one of my fellows is writing this semester, but I can't help but see the dialectical nature of the original plays. The performance of Our Town I directed last year at a high school was some how better because it was played by children, and the Byron plays, written for a boy's company, would likely have be similarly received. From the mouths of babes, we have the story of one man's ambition in the face of political intrigue. A tragedy because he has failed to heed the warnings of his friends, and relies on the empty promises of his enemies. Or show can't re-create that, but the poster is an effort to try.

This is actually one of the problems that we struggle with with presenting classical plays. Anything that was politically significant 400 years ago is likely irrelevant today, so those themes fall flat. Just about everything in The Byron Project is political, and while the latest batch of Republican primary candidates could learn a thing or two from Byron's downfall, presenting it in such a way that they know this applies equally to them can be tricky. Of course, Matt's staging will have the most to say about it, and for what this Assistant Director/Stage Manager's opinion is worth, it's a good staging. The poster can help.

Maybe.

Notes from the Breach | Middleton Our Contemporary

2012-02-23T23:30:00.000-08:00

Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters opens at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA on Friday, and judging by the preview performance I saw tonight, it's a refreshing addition to their current season. Middleton's plays have a freshness to them that makes them feel like distinctly modern pieces of writing. As Gary Taylor noted while discussing last year's A Trick to Catch the Old One, Middleton presents his audiences with a fallen world where flawed people deserve and find happiness.

The ASC embraces Middleton's scatological world in their production; they don't check their punches in making us aware that we're all cohabitants of a messy world. It's hard to look down on Dick Follywit's (Gregory Jon Phelps) stealing from his grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress (Daniel Kennedy), who freely admits he will fritter away his wealth keeping a Courtesan (Miriam Donald), but you also enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance. What sets Middleton above his contemporaries is that all of these characters find some measure of happiness through their failings. This is Middleton's ultimate gift to us: he lets us know that embracing all of those things about ourselves that we find distasteful are the key to our own happiness.

One of the confidence games Follywit plays on his grandfather is a play-within-a-play aptly called "The Slip," which might well encapsulate Middleton's theory of performance better than Hamlet's advice to the player's capture's Shakespeare's. The audience comes to the theatre to be conned, and we all have a good time being the victims of our own imaginations. Worrying about the time and money we lose in the theatre would only get in the way of our enjoyment of our time there, and in this way, at least, all the world is a stage in Middleton's work. Shakespeare may elevate the spirit, but Middleton tells us to sit back and relax, we're fine where we are.

It's telling that Middleton gives us devils without angels. Tempted to turn back to committing adultery with Mistress Harebrain (Brandi Rhome), Penitent Brothel (John Harrell) is visited by a succubus in the Mistress Harebrain's guise. Brothel may find the strength to turn away from sin through reading some holy book, but lacking a divine power to approve his virtue, the only rewards we can be certain he will find are terrestrial ones, but that's ultimately enough. We're all in this mad world together, after all.

Thomas Middleton shows us a London filled with sex, greed, and deceit in a way that reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you're in the mood for something refreshingly un-Shakespearean, stop by the ASC's production of A Mad World, My Masters, which plays through April 7 at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA.

This article was originally published at The Shakespeare Standard.

Through a Television, Darkly

2012-02-20T15:00:00.000-08:00

One of my guilty pleasures is a sound of Law and Order: SVU. There's nothing like a detective story to break up the monotony of elevated language, situations &c, but this episode has a particular train wreck feel to it:

I can't decide if this episodes writers really hate theatre because they worked in it, or because their parents warned them about wandering bands of live performers who steal children in the night. I have to give them props for not even being subtle about it, though: all live theatre is nothing but a sex show run by egomaniacs and attended by perverts, and exploiting the poor midwestern actresses who came to New York seeking fame.

I will grant that these kinds of personalities exist, of course, but just in case any politicians took away NEA funding for the arts because of this episode or something like it, I beg you to pretty please with sugar on top spend some time in ANY theatre first. Really, if every person/place/play in the world was this bad, I would have quit a long time ago.

Also, just because one television's writer of smutty stage director makes a sex show out of the Divine Comedy, lets not go trashing Dante as a purveyor of smut. Francesca da Rimini's story has been retold in many different forms through the ages. I'm honestly feeling sorest on that point; I don't know if the writers included that tidbit to show that theatre folk turn everything into porn or that theatre turns everything into porn or... what exactly?

I don't know, exactly, but this is what we're fighting against here, and it's one of the reasons that I chose to study the classics. Shakespeare is a case study in how to turn thousands of year old materials into culturally and politically relevant narratives for a contemporary audience, which is exactly what I'm doing with my MFA project. Maybe the point of the television writers is that we're not better than them because we work in theatre, and they're right: but I'm better than these clowns because I've done my homework.

But like I said, watching this episode is a lot like watching a train wreck: the sheer absurdity of the horror fascinates and entertains you. I'm kind of sorry that anyone outside of the business has seen this tripe, but those of you in the business shouldn't miss it.

Conspiratragedy

2012-02-16T17:26:00.000-08:00

Or is it Tragiconspiracy? For those of you who don't know, I'm stage managing the MFA Acting production this year, which is a conflation of two Chapman plays that no one has ever done or heard of before. The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. I told you you hadn't heard of them before. But these plays were apparently highly scandalous in their time, got the boys companies kicked out of the Blackfriars, which in turn enabled the King's Men to perform there, and that is why the American Shakespeare Center exists today.

Okay, so you have to skip a few steps, but according to the prof directing this thing, that's how it went down, and he's writing his dissertation on Chapman, so I guess he should know.

The reason this is all funny is because we had a prospective student visit rehearsal today, and he asked how it was coming together. My first thought was "like any other show," Davies et al have done a lot of cutting, re-writing, and otherwise conflating to fill in the gaps and make two never performed plays into one. Overall, the narrative arc basically make sense, and what the cast is struggling with is making a play about 16th century French court politics into something that will resonate with contemporary audiences.

Which, when you think about it, is all anyone does with Shakespeare and his other contemporaries. So what's the big deal?

The prospective student rather astutely pointed out that, sometimes there's a very good reason why plays are unperformed. While I agree that's completely true, I often find that completely good reason may have nothing to do with whether or not the play would do well on a stage today. Of course, you realize that the director of the first production of The Merry Devil of Edmonton in at least 300 years is the one telling you this. Probably the best reason most plays of the period are not performed is because they are completely lost, and the second best reason is that more companies simply don't know they exist.

Then again, Chapman's plays, strictly speaking, don't exist. Sections of them that depicted Queen Elizabeth were cut from the text of the play prior to publication, but Chapmen, the crafty bastard, cut them in such a way that you knew there was a cut there. Essentially anyone reading the play who had seen the performance would have been in on the joke, and anyone who had not seen the performance would have received a report of what happened in the performance from the mouths of a character on stage. Part of Davies' project involves the re-creation of those scenes.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the project, chiefly because it's hard to not get a little bored with Shakespeare in a Shakespeare program at the home of the American Shakespeare Center where 3/4 of the plays that you see are by Shakespeare. When you have a writer who recycles characters, and a resident company performing those writers plays using his original staging conditions, you basically wind up with a bunch of plays that look, sound, and smell the same. While I commend the ASC for branching out into Middleton and Marlowe (et al), I very much believe that a good graduate theatre program should be able to serve as a laboratory of sorts for the professionals theatres to which they are attached.

We can do things that a company that has to worry about making payroll can't, which in turn lets us help push the bounds of what can be done in that space. Don't get me wrong, Tina Packer's Pericles was phenomenal from start to finish, but how many productions of Pericles get done? Of course, one of the reasons that the show was so perfect was because Packer didn't feel the need to be so strictly bound by Shakespeare's original staging conditions; she pushed the envelope of visual and aural design in the Blackfriars in a way that you rarely get to see the resident company do.

Of course, as Rob Clare's Taming of the Shrew taught us all, different doesn't necessarily mean better, but if we don't take the chance on creating a deeply flawed production every now and again, we run the risk of stagnation, which just results in a slow death. You can always recover from such a deeply flawed experiment by doing something a little bit more conventional.

Which brings me back to The Byron Project. Davies' staging is, at its heart, very conventional for the Blackfriars Playhouse, but the text itself is not. Chapman's characters would never be mistaken for Shakespeare's, and if you're interested in a direct comparison, many of the same characters that appear in the Byron plays also appear in Love's Labours Lost, which the first years are performing for their production this term. No, that's not a coincidence. I like to think that our program is, with these two ways, helping the American Shakespeare Center further bridge the gap into non-Shakespearean plays from the early modern period.

Stay Here and Feed Your People

2012-02-12T16:04:00.000-08:00

I usually sneak in The Moth podcast while doing other things, because it's usually not more than 20 minutes or so, but late last year they published their first Chicago GrandSLAM over the course of two hour long podcasts. For those of you who haven't heard of The Moth, it's a venue where people tell true stories live without notes, and in this event Peter Sagel hosted several winners from previous events, but far and away had the best story of the evening.

He relates the story, which I won't try to print word for word, of a friend of his who was working as a dramaturg in New York in the early 80s who became obsessed with Mother Teresa, and when the celebrated nun visited New York to speak to the UN, Sagel's friend stalked her. She expressed the desire to follow Mother Teresa to Calcutta and join her in helping feed the poor. Mother Teresa politely declined the young woman, and asked her what it was that she did here that failed to bring her satisfaction, to which Sagel's friend said that she was a dramaturg and did nothing of importance; she only helped put on plays. Mother Teresa replied: "There are so many different kinds of famine in this world. In my country there is a famine of the body, in this country there is a famine of the spirit: stay here and feed your people."

I'm going to keep that story. I'm going to write those words down in a place where my eyes will frequently fall on them. I'm going to make it a daily prayer.

Gender Differences in Scholarly Presentation

2012-02-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

The Shakespeare and Performance program had it's thesis festival this weekend; for the uninitiated, that's where thesis candidates have to stand on stage and talk about their work for 25 minutes, "using" actors in some way. It's a great opportunity to see what some of your colleagues are up to and offer feedback; conversely, it's a great opportunity to see who dropped the ball and make fun of them.

But rather than provide a detailed list of who clearly didn't do enough reading before presenting, I wanted to share a phenomenon that I observed while taking pictures. Basically, I was trying to capture a photo of every student delivering their paper with enthusiasm and gusto for whatever publicity purposes the powers that be might want to use them for. In a nutshell, I was trying to capture them in a moment where they were looking at the audience.

I was able to capture most of the gentlemen in 4 or 5 shots within the first few minutes of their presentation. The ladies, however, were much harder. It wasn't that female presenters failed to make eye contact, but they rather did not make sustained eye contact as often as their male counterparts. Whereas a male presenter might make eye contact for 10 - 12 words at a time, female presenters seemed to make eye contact for 3 or 4 words at a time; as a consequence, it was nearly impossible for me to get the shot I was looking for: I either caught them in the act of looking up, or of looking down.

As a professor of communications, this fascinates me. As an adjunct professor, I have no idea what this means, or if it means anything. As a MFA directing student creating my own musical, I definitely don't have the ability to do any sort of research on this right now, so consider this a solicitation. Has anyone heard of this phenomenon observed before, or is my limited anecdote a mere blip on the radar of gender and communication studies?

Thoughts?

The Things You Learn in Theatre

2012-02-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

I've been saying most of these things for years, but this blog post has been trending lately, and it's a good enough summary of why majoring in theatre is maybe the smartest thing you can do that I wanted to link to it here. Seriously, I have a hard time figuring out a skill set that I haven't had to drawn on for one of my theatrical undertakings, and my undergraduate education was a great place to get a feeling for that. Those of us who have stuck with it have a broad and highly exportable skill set that touches many trades and professional fields.

Then again, this one is also very true. As with all things, it's going to depend on context. Whatever brings you into this game, most of us tend to figure out pretty early in that, if you don't consider hard work it's own reward, you should get out fast. In fact, there are very few people in this game who don't also do something else, and even at well established companies, it's not uncommon for everyone at the top to heave a great big sigh of relief when they manage to pay their staff and their bills for the month.

The one thing that Mr. Vander Well (Mr. Well? Tom?) doesn't include on his list is the lesson in courage you get from working in theatre. Even if you don't stick with it, you get comfortable talking to a room full of people almost by default, and time and again that shows up on surveys as the thing that people are most terrified of. As I try to tell my Intro to Public Speaking students, the sooner they can master this fear, the better they'll be personally and professionally, but the lesson goes so much further beyond that.

Once upon a time, I got the idea into my head that I wanted to move to Vermont, and almost right away I started booking gigs and landing full time work. I surely wasn't going to let a little thing like "not having a place to live" get in my way, and I saw absolutely no problems with just living out of my car until I landed a decent apartment three months later. Looking back on it, that was probably at least as dangerous as it was stupid, but this overwhelming sense of doing what needs to be done often means not letting fear of failure get in your way. I'm reminded of this exchange between the Macbeths:

Macb. If we should fail?
Lady M. We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.

Lady Macbeth clearly is the product of a career in the theatre. She knows that it's completely possible to fail, and has accepted that possibility, along with all of the consequences that come with it, but she believes from the bottom of her heart that she and her husband will succeed if they're smart enough and strong enough, and if they try.

In the Jungle of Cities

2012-01-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

Casey Caldwell directed a staged reading of Brecht's In the Jungle ofCities last night, and far be it from me to pass up a staged reading of one ofBrecht's lesser known works. First performed in 1923 (but revised forsubsequent performances in 1924 and 1927), *Jungle* is aWeimar era fantasia of Chicago ca. 1912. It could be a bleak place,but while the characters are all destined for ruin, as we are told ina prologue, they all enjoy their race to the bottom of the pit.

The market is an irresistable force in the world of most of Brecht'splays, from his earliest (Baal) throughout his latterworks. Capitalism is the liquor of the masses, and despite the povertymost of them dwell in, which here sees a brother prostituting hissister, though tormented by his mistress' infidelity, the potentialfor the characters to win big if they're scrappy and clever enoughkeeps them coming back to the bar. Like Romans at an orgy, thecharacters in Jungle drink until they vomit, and then keep drinkingmore.

Brecht characterizes this play as aboxing match, a favorite metaphor of his, and for Brecht, America wasthe ultimate ring. As bad as things were in Weimar, Brecht saw inAmerica a land free from the old strictures and moralities ofEurope. It was a place where anything was possible, and Chicago in Jungle prefigures the Mahagonny of the soon to follow eponymouscabaret and later to follow eponymous opera. Chicago is a Sodom and Gomorra where everyone knows their own sin, acknowledges their imminent destruction, and keeps right on sinning.

Thoughts of morality, or indeed of anything beyond material needs, area luxury in this world. Jane (Shannon Schultz) condemns George (Maxim Overton) for"philosophizing while the roof is coming down over our heads," andthat neatly summarizes the problems with this world. Brecht'scharacters are fully aware that there are better ways of living, butthey're too consumed with their own consumerism to listen. As Janesays late in the play, "I'm sure this is my last chance, but Idon't want it."

Even the"boxing match" at the center of this piece plays itself out as afunction of consumerism. Shlink (Bob Jones) tried to buy George's(Overton) opinion, who in turn refuses to sell, and so Shlink proceeds todestroy him to force his hand. Economics dictate the powerrelationships of individuals, but this power is ultimately empty. AsGeorge observes late in the second act, "it's awfully hard to destroysomeone, when you think about it."

Caldwell's cast brings Brecht's dark fantasy of America to life,despite the chairs and music stands that anchor this reading. AsShlink (Jones) and George (Overton) destroy themselves andeverything they love through their duel, you almost start to wonder ifBrecht might have liked the idea of seeing this play performed byactors tethered to one place, as physically confined as theircharacters are morally and econonmically. As a stage direction late inthe first act says: "the chairs are all taken, no one gets up."

"The soul is nothing," says George. "It isn't who comes out on topthat matters, it's who comes out alive." In the end, in the jungle ofcities, life is nasty, brutish, and short, and the battle forsupremacy is meaningless when everyone ultimately comes to the sameend.

Bertolt Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities was directed by CaseyCaldwell, and features Maxim Overton, Bob Jones, Johnny Adkins, DanStott, Riley Steiner, Shannon Schultz, Brett Sullivan Santry, and Josh Brown. Caldwell says that this is the first step toward producing a fully realized production. Based on this early work; I hope I'm around to see it.

The Political Rhetoric of Perpetual War

2012-01-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

It's a gift to be teaching a communications class in a heated primary season. What a feast of modern rhetorical prowess, or lack thereof, is on display, and I would be remiss in my job if I didn't talk about it. Yet I caught myself saying something horrible without even realizing it, about the Republican candidates taking each other to task while keeping President Obama in their cross-heirs. As soon as the words passed my lips I immediately thought of the attempted assassination on Representative Giffords, and Sarah Palin's tasteless graphic that showed cross-heirs on Democrat-controlled districts. Now I can't help but wonder at that line between tastelessness bordering on criminality (i.e. calling for "second amendment solutions" to political disagreement), and the tastelessness of political rhetoric in our society in general.

To some degree, it's natural for us to think of any ideological debate in military terms. As a society, we have been either mobilized for or at war for almost 75 years. There is no time in the memory of most living Americans when there was not an enemy who, if not at the gates, wasn't too far off, and needed to be kept in check by a strong military presence. So why shouldn't we think of everything as a war? As much as we might find the use of "jihad" distasteful in certain parts of the Muslim world, we use "war" in much the same way. We're either at war with something (drugs, cancer, obesity, terror) or we obviously don't care enough about it to do anything about it.

And yet I cringe at the thought of the way my mind casually links Republican rhetorical assaults on President Obama's policies with the image of Mitt Romney et al tracking his movements through a sniper's scope. How can we possibly have a productive dialogue if we're always subconsciously viewing those who disagree with us and our positions as trying to kill us? As Mr. Frank observes in Anne's Diary "we don't need the Nazi's to destroy us."

The secret to logical thinking and rational judgment has never been not-having feelings and prejudices, it's a simple matter of being aware of what they are and not letting them guide our thinking. Animals act on instinct alone, and we owe it to our ancestors to be better than that. I would like to think I can teach my students this, and that realizing my poor word choice in class can help serve as an object lesson to them. Still, I have no delusions about doing away with vulgar political rhetoric in America. We have a fine tradition of debasing ourselves for our ideologies. For instance, this charming political cartoon form the early 19th century:

Andrew Jackson is clearly not inviting John Quincy Adams to a nice gentlemanly debate here.

I would like to think that, by being aware of the culture of violence we've created for ourselves, we can find ways of overcoming our own history, and perhaps our own natures. Sadly debate, compromise, and shared ideas seem to be taken as a sign of weakness, especially on the conservative side of the aisle. In the culture of the sound-bite and the talking points memo, productive public rhetoric may be a thing of the past, and while it may be possible to conduct business behind closed doors, I shudder to think that the only remedy for our state of political gridlock is lowering the level of accountability that we hold our politicians to.

Sadly, like most Americans, I don't see a clear and simple solution to this complex problem. History teaches us that our republic will stand and will continue to find a way to function even though our politicians are subject to the whims of pathos, but I fear that the millions of working class Americans who have suffered for their mistakes: the tax payers who have bailed out the bankers, and the soldiers who have bailed out the militarily adventurous politicians, will continue to pay the price for the mistakes of our representatives. My only consolation is that, in a representative democracy, we tend to choose the representation that we actually deserve. If Richard III was just punishment sent by God for the sins of civil war, we, at least, are the creators of our own dilemma.

And so now, at the last, I find myself echoing the sentiments of that great sage of the modern age, Jon Stewart: lets all take it down a notch, for America. If I can admit to my horrible choice of words in front of my students, and be not ashamed to do so, surely our politicians can do the same thing if they choose.

The Very Logical Explanation for why a New Musical is my MFA Project in a Shakespeare Program

2012-01-25T23:15:00.000-08:00

Fact: I am a graduate student in a program that is so classically centered that "Shakespeare" features prominently in the name of the program, and thus on my degree. The meticulous study of the literary technology of verse ad rhetoric forms the core of our studies in such a way that the core curriculum for all students involves a class devoted to reading all of Shakespeare's plays, a separate class on understanding Shakespeare's verse and rhetoric, and a separate class on research methods and understanding the critical modes of understanding the plays in the first semester.

It is because of this that I am not surprised that, when I tell people that my MFA project revolves around the creation of a new musical, I am greeted with a mixture of surprise and indignation. If we can learn anything from the last season of Slings and Arrows, it's that the classically trained sort tends not to think very highly of the musical theatre trained, as if singing and dancing required any less discipline than a thorough understanding of prosody.

When someone from a classically trained background derides the work of the musical theatre performer, they're betraying their own ignorance: musical theatre performers engage in a different style of acting that has its own technique, it's own set of skills, and it's own customs and traditions. But I would argue that they are betraying a deeper ignorance because Shakespeare's plays and good book musicals share something in common: heightened language.

When Audrey sings "Suddenly Seymour" in Little Shop of Horrors, she does so because she is so overwhelmed by emotion that her prose is not enough. Because Little Shop is a very good musical, you can make this argument for every song in the play; every song represents a moment of overwhelming passion where the characters are in heightened situations, and are so overwhelmed by their heightened passions that song is the only method they have available to communicate.

Those of you who study Shakespeare already know where I'm going with this, but for the rest of you, I'll explain that Shakespeare does almost the same exact thing. Hamlet speaks in verse because he is a heightened character in a heightened situation, because he can't contain his passions, and because he can't keep the truth from escaping, but he doesn't always speak in verse. In fact, he offers one of his key speeches in prose:

293 I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent
294 your discovery, and your secrecy to the king and
295 queen moult no feather. I have of late—but wherefore
296 I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of
297 exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my
298 disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
299 me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy,
300 the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
301 this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why,
302 it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
303 congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!
304 How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,
305 in form and moving how express and admirable,
306 in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
307 a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
308 And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man
309 delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by
310 your smiling you seem to say so.

It's important information for other characters to hear, and equally important for the audience to understand that this language is in the language of the head. These are Hamlet's thoughts, not his feelings; he is saying something he devised in advance, or is being otherwise duplicitous (or at least crafty) in some way. Of course, he isn't trying to fool us, the audience, he's trying to fool other characters. He'll be back to speaking in verse (and telling us how he really feels) by the end of the scene:

549 Now I am alone.
550 O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
551 Is it not monstrous that this player here,
552 But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
553 Could force his soul so to his own conceit
554 That from her working all his visage wann'd,
555 Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
556 A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
557 With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
558 For Hecuba!
559 What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
560 That he should weep for her? What would he do,
561 Had he the motive and the cue for passion
562 That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
563 And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
564 Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
565 Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
566 The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
567 A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
568 Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
569 And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
570 Upon whose property and most dear life
571 A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
572 Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
573 Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
574 Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
575 As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
576 Ha! 'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
577 But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall
578 To make oppression bitter, or ere this
579 I should have fatted all the region kites
580 With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
581 Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
582 O, vengeance!
583 Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
584 That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
585 Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
586 Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
587 And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
588 A stallion! Fie upon't! foh!
589 About, my brain! Hum — I have heard
590 That guilty creatures sitting at a play
591 Have by the very cunning of the scene
592 Been struck so to the soul that presently
593 They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
594 For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
595 With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
596 Play something like the murder of my father
597 Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;
598 I'll tent him to the quick. If he but blench,
599 I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
600 May be the devil, and the devil hath power
601 To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
602 Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
603 As he is very potent with such spirits,
604 Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
605 More relative than this: the play's the thing
606 Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

His passions are too great, and the situation too heightened, for common language.

So I'm creating a musical for my MFA project. I am interested in telling a story that, as far as I can tell, no one else has told, and because of my classical training, I am very much interested in telling this story using the heightened language that musical theatre can offer. Modern audiences may not have as acute an ear for prosody as their early modern counterparts had, but the music will help them with that.

Because it's me we're talking about, I do have some grander philological ambitions with this piece, which I am tentatively calling "The Ballad of Dido." I have constructed the initial draft on the backs of the epic poetry of Vergil, the dramatic poetry of Marlowe, the narrative poetry of Ovid, and the rhythms of roots music. If you come to see it in April, you'll hear songs you know, and some you don't, and have the chance to explore a story that will be both familiar and strange.

It seems like the most logical possible culmination of my studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Fuck Joe Paterno

2012-01-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

I've seen a lot of posts on the Facebook wishing Joe Paterno a peaceful rest, but you know what? Fuck him. I hope he's found his way to a place where some devil thrice his size is raping him, all within the view of an angel who refuses to do anything about it. Bad men should die badly, and anyone who lacks the moral clarity to call the authorities when they have credible testimony that one of their subordinates is a child molester is a very bad man.

I know some of you are mourning him as a football coach, and you're right, Paterno's moral bankruptcy doesn't erase his career as a winning football coach, but what victories in something so trivial as sports can ever compare to such a grievous lack of honor? I think The Onion had it spot on in this article.

And again here.

And please stop characterizing him as a mighty warrior who gave up the will to live when he was betrayed by his institution. That disgusting coward Paterno betrayed those children, and he didn't die because he lost the will to live, he died because his body was ravaged by cancer. I, for one, think he got off easy.

So while some of you are hoping Paterno rests in peace, I will instead be hoping and praying that the victims of his apathy find some peace in their lives. And I'll be hoping that the next time a commander thinks of turning a blind eye to the criminal perversions of their subordinates, they'll think of Joe Paterno's disgraceful death, and think again.

Verse and Rhetoric: 21st Century American Style

2012-01-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

Right around the end of last year, I saw this article over at NPR that talks about the somewhat fractious state of poetry in America today. I fully admit that I tend to not think much of most modern poetry, and that was before I spent the last two and a half years consuming the verse of Shakespeare, and his even better contemporaries (i.e. Marlowe, Jonson, and Chapman).

Because it was one of those extremely cheap subscription offers, I subscribed to Poetry late last year, and having made it through two whole issues, I'm having the hardest time finding even a scrap of verse that sounds good to my classically trained ear. Of course, there's the rub: modern poetry is not early modern poetry; it's meant to be seen and not heard (mostly).

If Christopher Marlowe grew up in the age of Hannah Hoch, Francesca Woodman, and Jean-Luc Godard he might have devoted his time to exploring language as a purveyor of contrasting images rather than as a symphony mirroring the order of the cosmos. And maybe that's one of the reasons why modern audiences sometimes struggle with the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: we're used to digesting images in fragments, and our linguistic sensibilities have evolved in to accommodate the post-modern vocabulary of fragmentation.

If I admit that modern poets aren't necessarily better or worse than their early modern counterparts, I would also have to admit that modern political rhetoric, reduced to the 30-second-sound-bite, is also no better or worse than the great rhetoricians of years gone by.

Hmm... pause and consider.

Let's take a look at the Apology of Socrates for a minute:

I have a family, yes, and sons. O Athenians, three in number, one of whom is growing up, and the two others are still young; and yet I will not bring any of them hither in order to petition you for an acquittal. And why not? Not from any self-will or disregard of you. Whether I am or am not afraid of death is another question, of which I will not now speak. But my reason simply is that I state.

So there's Socrates telling us that he's not going to bring his family to the court to plead for his life, while simultaneously reminding the jury that he has a family. In my Intro to Public Speaking class, we would call this an appeal to pathos. In case you missed John Huntsman dropping out of the Repblican primary, why don't you take a look now:

You notice how he has his wife at his side (but a step behind!) serving as the set dressing that we're accustomed to political spouses (wives, mostly) playing? My students sure did. So I will put it to you, is there a difference between Socrates' and Hunstman's tactic? I'm less and less sure.

Which, in turn, might imply that there really isn't a great deal of difference between the information that we communicate in the modern theatre than the information the Ancient Greeks communicated with theirs, or the early-modern Londoners did with theirs. If only our media are different, then we've nothing to fear from theatrical forms from other times. We only have to get through the different ways of communicating.

But, really, they're not that different. One of the reasons I showed this clip in my class is because Huntsman indulges in some pretty heightened rhetoric. I dare say it's probably nothing beyond the television audience watching that announcement, at least not generally. That's one of the keys to understanding the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries: they were writing for a broad range of education levels in the audience. Not 100% of the people got 100% of 100% the actors said 100% of the time. As long as most everyone can understand most of what's happening, we're fine.

As Huntsman's speech demonstrates, our modern oratory still contains the same basic DNA as Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It takes a little bit more work on the part of the actors, of course, but that's where grad programs like mine come in. It will also take a keener sense of awareness of how to adapt a language written before the influence of post-modernism. In other words, directors have to be smarter; we have to know what parts of the script we can cut, and what parts we should cut in favor of employing lighting, costume, scenic, or musical effects.

Which brings me full circle to the role of modern poetry in all of this. A director who wants to bring the poetry of the Renaissance to a modern audience needs to be aware of the way in which modern verse, in all its fragmentary forms, works. We need to study it's various forms as a reflection of the modern language of imagery and fragmentation. Only then will we find innovative ways of bringing Shakespeare's words to life beyond his original staging conditions.

Of Romances and Revenges

2012-01-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

The other night, someone called me a die hard romantic, which gave me pause. I've got very used to thinking of myself as a pragmatist over the years, and I enjoy thinking of myself as someone who makes the rational choice after careful evaluation of all available facts. The thing is, I know this isn't true at least some of the time, but given my highly unpragmatic career choices, I wonder if it's even the case most of the time.

To witness my pragmatism, there is this fact: Bonnie A. Bohacek, the woman who killed my father, is still alive today after the legal system failed to punish her for killing him. I think it would be a small matter for me to kill this woman, on a purely logistical level, and yet I have not done so because of my over-riding sense of pragmatism: I like to believe that our system of justice functions properly most of the time, and that if the jury found reasonable doubt than I am bound to accept that there is at least some fragment of reasonable doubt that she was, in fact, responsible. Participating in American jurisprudence means believing that it's okay if the occasional criminal escapes punishment as long as we create every possible means of ensuring that innocent people are not punished wrongly.

And, really, killing Bohacek would be about revenge, and that's just silly.

I will never forget the lesson of September 11th, 2001; the literal lesson of the English class I attended that morning before any of us knew we were attacked. We were discussing Edgar Huntly and revenge as a romantic impulse. The concept of revenge requires us to believe that, by the act of inflicting pain on someone else, we can restore ourselves and our world to a time and place before we suffered the injury they inflicted on us. As more than a decade of endless war has shown us, that's just stupid. Revenge is to be forgiven in children, but adults should be held to a higher standard of reasoning.

This is different from punishment. Punishment is what you do to deter an individual from engaging in certain behaviors: putting them in prison for killing someone in a head on collision while under the influence of "a host of drugs," for example; maybe even killing them for this if we wish to deter this type of behavior strongly enough. Were I to kill Bohacek for this, though, it would not be taken as such a warning as I would (rightly) be arrested myself. Even if the rest of society is to view this hypothetical action as a warning, my incarceration removes the deterrent. Therefore, because killing Bohacek cannot possibly prevent any crime, and because killing her won't bring my father back, I refrain from killing her.

It's the pragmatic, civilized thing to do.

Q.E.D. I'm a pragmatist who understands why Hamlet spends 2 hours (or 3 or 4, depending on the cut and pace of the production) trying to not kill Claudius. We both like to think that we're better than the characters who came before us.

But there I go, tilting at windmills, a hopeless romantic in my belief that these great works of letters and art actually matter.

The corporate stooges in the Republican party routinely put the arts on the chopping block. The great masses of our society feels the theatrical experience is even less relevant to their own lives than ever before, and even within my own professional community, Shakespeare and sound design are usually regarded with something on a scale limited by passive annoyance and outright contempt. And yet I continue to do these things. I continue to devote as much time and energy to their practice, and my perfection of their practice, as any skilled tradesmen, and all for the hope that I might make a tenth of what a union electrician makes over the course of his lifetime, and might be able to help enrich a few lives.

But that kinda requires that I believe that there is such a thing as a way in which the world can fundamentally work better because of the work I do. How would I be able to process the death of my father at Bohacek's hands without Hamlet? or 2 Henry IV? I don't really want to know. And I would very much like to think that I am doing everyone a service by helping them have the same cultural experience just in case this terrible thing happens to them.

Or even a more mundane thing, really. Trouble with your boss? Trouble with your wife? Trouble with your kids? Your home? Your country? Your politics? Your wealth? Shakespeare has a play for that. I'm sure there are about a million things I'm leaving off the list, but someone's got a play for that, whatever that may be. It is maybe just a little bit romantic to believe that I can create the plays that will help you be a better person, and I don't plan on stopping any time soon, so I guess that makes me a die hard.

A die hard romantic who still believes my work matters even if you don't, even though I'm doing it for you.

I suppose that's where I have to draw the line between romanticism and pragmatism; where one's ideals and desires cease to contribute to making the world a better place, one must abandon those ideals and desires.

Bonnie Bohacek sees another day,
Whiles I work to produce another play.

Notes from the Breach: The Winter of Our Discontent

2012-01-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

The hot ticket for the American Shakespeare Center’s 2012 Actor’s Renaissance Season promises to be their production of Richard III, which concludes their four year long history series: “The Rise and Fall of Kings.” The cast literally had audiences on the edges of their seats and on their feet for their 2011 production of 3 Henry VI, and many (if not most) of them are back to bring the cycle to its conclusion. Partially because I’m teaching an introductory public speaking class at Mary Baldwin College, and partially because we’re in the midst of our Presidential election season here in the states, I can’t help but think of the theatrical success of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy as a document of political failures.

It’s hard to draw perfect parallels between modern and early modern politics, but throughout the past year, US citizens have watched their elected officials carry on in a pageant of dysfunction as the economy has all but collapsed around us. The one thing that our congresspersons seem to agree on is that they have zero interest in peaceful negotiations with opposition parties, and as soon as one party or the other starts, the other makes a grab for more concessions. Sound familiar?

Despite the ravings of more rapid individuals on the fringes of the spectrum, we haven’t quite descended to the point of Richard’s tyranny quite yet, but as our politicians continue to get paid handsome sums of money for failing to run the government in any appreciably sane or healthy way, I can’t help but wonder if Richard III was more cure than curse to the English people.

Try to imagine what England would have been like if Henry Tudor took over without Richard’s ambitious house cleaning: all of the very powerful nobles and political factions are still in place waiting for the first moment of civil unrest to take advantage of a weak monarchy. Macbeth, Reagan, Goneril, and their ilk succeed at killing a lot of innocent people, and while Richard takes out his fair share of children, he also succeed in completely weeding out all the corruption plaguing the English government. He’s even courteous enough to do away with himself by fighting to the death even when it becomes clear that, no matter how many Richmond’s he has killed, he cannot win the war.

Among Star Wars fans, there’s an old argument that the Empire is good for the galaxy. While I can hear some of you groaning out there, I should mention that the American Shakespeare Center casts of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI drew that parallel themselves at the very beginning of each show. I’m not quite willing to say that the United States could benefit from a blood thirsty tyrant who is willing to hang the disemboweled bodies of Congress from the battlements, but Richard’s own brand of political reform makes possible Henry Tudor’s relatively smooth transition to the monarchy, and the Tudor golden age that follows.

Of course, I know that history is slightly more complicated than that, but Shakespeare’s telling of it is on my mind. I can’t help but wonder about the plays people will be writing about this particular period of American history in a few centuries. I also can’t help but wonder how much worse things will get before they get better. If we’re to learn anything from this production of Richard III, the answer is “much.”

Richard III runs from January 19 through April 5 at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA.

This article was originally posted at The Shakespeare Standard.

Infinal Semester of Grad School

2012-01-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

On the one hand, I'm ready to proclaim that I am back and ready to go for my final semester of grad school. On the other, I can't escape the fact that four out of the eight shows I did with the Clarkson Theatre Company were my last show with them before moving on to other things. As I round out the last corner to my MFA, I can't help but see the parallel there. I directed four farewell shows with Clarkson because I was always sure I was about to move on to something else, and life invariably had other plans, or I decided I wanted to get in just one more.

Grad school may be the same way. Even though I'm finishing my MFA at Mary Baldwin, there are other degrees, PhDs and MSs, specifically, that I could get. There is a difference from being done and from being done for the moment.

So I won't trivialized finality by saying this is my final semester of grad school. Lets call it my infinal semester instead. I'm almost done for the moment. Put it that way, and graduating seems a lot less impressive in my mind's ear; almost like it's more of a starting gate than a finishing line.

But I knew that already.

Every accomplishment is really just a gateway to your next challenge. So is every defeat. Life is a lot less stressful when we remember that/

Meditations from an Early Winter Evening's Wedding

2012-01-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

"I think Almost, Maine can best be described as a midwinter night's dream," says John Cariani in the general note to the Dramatist's edition of his play. I've had this script sitting in my "to read" pile for a while now because I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I cringed a little with Cariani's implicit comparison to Midsummer. Despite everything Cariani says about his play in the little "On Structure" essay he's included in the back.

In all the gushing Cariani does over the meaning, beauty, and importance of his own words, he hits on Almost, Maine's chief short coming in his essay on structure: "In what I've written, the lights fade on the moment of change. And change is hard and confusing and uncertain." Unfortunately, those are also the really interesting parts of a play, and this is why Shakespeare leaves us with a few problems left in Midsummer.

Those problems, or potential problems, are the Demetrius is still under the spell, and Hermia and Helena don't speak in the final act, and we are left to guess as to why.

For the record, I don't really think these are necessarily problems. Demetrius is not enchanted by the love-in-idleness spell, he's restored by it. Or, at least, he could be. One of the things that Shakespeare gets at in this comedy of wooing is that love is an inherently capricious feeling given to flights of fancy. Fairy magic is just as good a reason to love someone as anything else. So whether we leave Demetrius enchanted or restored, love itself is still the problem.

As for Hermia and Helena's silence, well, you have to remember who they are and when they are. They're both well-born ladies who have just been married, and in the period, a woman being liberal with her speech was taken as a sign that she would be sexually liberal. For a married woman in early modern London, shutting up was the chaste thing to do. Or, at least, certain people held that point of view while others very clearly did not. So maybe Hermia and Helena's relationship is too strained from the night's "dream," and they can no longer speak in the presence of each other. Whatever the case, love has transformed them from eloquent and plucky heroines who were bold enough to contradict a duke into mutes.

The problem with Almost, Maine is that it really doesn't show you any of that. Two or three of the vignettes in the piece do actually explore love as a lossy business, fraught with fear and pain, but Cariani makes no bones about it, Almost, Maine is a play about anticipation. It is a play about wanting where the joy of possibilities never have to confront the tedium of reality. We get to see people falling in love, but we rarely get to see them after they've hit the ground.

And these insights are brought to you, in part, by the experience of my cousin's wedding early winter evening's wedding. So thanks and congratulations to the new Mr. and Mrs. Mannarino: remember that the altar is not a finish line, it's a starting gate. Good luck, and have a wonderful life together.

What I Was Doing Last Year

2012-01-02T23:29:00.000-08:00

There was this thing going around Facebook a couple days ago wherein people were detailing the things they were doing this time last year, and then talking about what they're doing this year. I guess the point is to show everyone how much you've changed, how much better you are, &c &c &c. I don't buy it. I figure that about 90% of the time, while the details may be different, who we are and what we want doesn't change that much from one year to the next. Then again, that may well be because I am, very generally, doing the exact same thing this time of the year: archiving a year's worth of material.

I learned this lesson about seven or eight years ago: if you don't keep track of your work while your doing it, it's really hard to share that work with others. This tends to be one of the few times of the year when things are slow enough to make sure that all of my photos, videos, and pieces of electronic paper work are filed away by year and company, and backed up in the right place. And then, of course, to build out my portfolio.

Still, every now and again, while compiling my archives, I realize that I have become better at what I do. I've either attained a finer sense of detail, or I've added a few new skills to my repertoire. Reflecting on 2011, I think I will remember it as the year I started getting really comfortable with music. Mostly because of things like this:

That's Act 2, Scene 5 from my production of As You Like It this summer at the Weathervane Playhouse. In addition to directing the play, I wrote most of the music (the harmonies anyway) for the songs. If you asked me before hand, I would have told you I don't think I can do that. Clearly I can.

This discovery has lead me down a rabbit-hole of "I bet I can play that" moments over the past few months. So I won't deny that I'm pretty much doing the exact same thing I was this time last year, and yes, I am pretty much exactly the same person, but now I can also play Bach, Satie, and Whitesnake.

Polonius Justified

2011-12-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

The American Shakespeare Center's recent production of Hamlet was excellent across the board, but several things stood out and shattered some of my notions about the play. Chief among these is the misconception that Polonius is a doddering old fool.

Psychoanalysis changed the way we think about Shakespeare's plays, and right around that time is when Shakespearean scholars started thinking about Hamlet as Shakespeare's greatest creation. That may be why, when Hamlet calls Polonius a fool, scholars and practitioners have been quick to take him seriously. Really, though, the events in the play don't play out that way.

Reason number one we tend to think Polonius is a fool is that he's long winded in saying farewell to Laertes when Laertes is about to set sail for France. But remember that travel from Denmark to France wasn't as easy, quick, cheap, or safe in 1599 as it is today. Also, there are pirates off the coast of Denmark (which Hamlet himself encounters later in the play). Also, Polonius is an old man at a time when men typically don't live to be very old. He may well be saying his final farewells to his only son. Maybe Laertes is in a hurry to go, but we should forgive Polonius for wanting to take the time to say everything he needs to say.

Shortly thereafter, we get to see Polonius the spy master, sending Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in France. What a prick, right? Except for the fact that part of Laertes' galavanting involves seeking out extremely potent poisons. We don't know why Laertes wants these poisons, but he is very clear in their use: he wants something he can put on the edge of his word (or dagger), scratch someone with, and have them die. We know this because Laertes tells us exactly how it works. Morally upright gentlemen don't seek out poisons like that.

And who could forget poor Ophelia. So repressed. Except, again, context is what really matters here; Polonius clearly has some rank and position in Claudius' kingdom, and he may therefore be able to arrange an advantageous marriage for his only daughter. Only that whole thing falls through if she gives up her chastity to the prince, who is clearly above her station. Above her station, that is, until King Claudius decides that maybe she isn't. So while post-Enlightenment/Feminist critics may find Polonius' treatment of Ophelia reprehensible, he is trying to do right by her in the best way he knows how.

Benjamin Curns played Polonius as a man who cares very much for the welfare of his children, as a man who is very smart and cunning, and who is used to being right. If Polonius has shortcomings as a person, he is not alone, but that is not reason enough to take Hamlet's pronunciations over the corpse of Polonius' slain body too seriously.

Having Made it Through Christmas

2011-12-25T20:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I made it through Christmas with my family; now I can get back to work like God intends. For you neigh sayers out there, I offer my obsessive-compulsive disorder as proof.

But before I do, there's something that I've been meditating on that I wish to share with you. For Thanksgiving, I sent a shout out to all of my teachers over the years for being so excellent at what you do and imparting your knowledge to me, but this carries with it certain implications of age/experience/&c, and I fear that my colleagues may have not felt included in that.

As I have started winding down my time in graduate school and started reflecting on what the next leg of my journey holds, I find myself unable to keep track of the amount that I've learned, produced, and accomplished through collaboration with the excellent fellow students and company members that I have been privileged to work with over the last few years. I couldn't have done a damned thing without them helping me do it at every step of the way.

Thanks, guys! And Merry Christmas (or happy whatever winter solstice festival you choose to celebrate).

Of Outrageous Fortune

2011-12-22T15:14:00.000-08:00

People have been telling me to check out Slings and Arrows for years, and I finally had the chance over the past couple days. At first, it hit a little bit close to home: presenting classical plays in a musical theatre world, living in the theatre, artistic directors getting killed, &c. The feeling passed, though.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that this is a piece of entertainment and not a documentary, but I've heard nothing but how exactly like life in the theatre Slings and Arrows is from people who work it. If that's the case, I feel sorry for all of my friends. Slings and Arrows makes it seem like a pure miracle whenever a show opens. In the world of the New Burbage Festival, skill and hard work take a back seat to luck.

I'm not so delusional that I think luck doesn't come into play in any production, of course. Luck probably has a lot more to do with everything than anyone would like to admit, but the folks on this show tempt fate. Most of the people they hire are incompetent, and their work ethics absolutely suck. I don't think I would want to work with any of these people.

Which is, again, sort of my point. I know that it's entertainment. Like I'm pretty sure I've said before, I tell the stories where things went wrong more often because they make better stories. Conflict is at the heart of my trade. The problem is that we shouldn't talk about Slings and Arrows as if it's an accurate representation of life in the theatre any more than we should talk about The Office as an accurate representation of life in corporate America. Yes, they both get some things right, but pretending that the show is anything but an exaggeration of some of the things we face is a discredit to all of us.

I'm also pretty sure I've said this before: I've worked with some of the best people in the business. Yes, I have worked with some foppish cartoon caricatures that you might expect to see on Slings and Arrows, but 9/10 of the people I've worked with work longer and harder hours than anyone who works in an office. My colleagues work hungry, tired, and far removed from their friends and families, and whether they know it or not, they treat this work as a calling both sacred and noble: a vocation worthy of princes.

Slings and Arrows is a good time, and it is certainly inspired by certain personalities in the business, but lets not confuse it for an exemplar of a good theatre. We owe ourselves better than that.

American Shakespeare Center Podcasts

2011-12-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

Hey! Did you know that I'm the one who puts together the American Shakespeare Center's Podcasts? I started a few weeks back and will likely continue for the next couple months at least. You should definitely either check out the link above or look them up on iTunes for an inside look in the world of Shakespeare and Performance here at the Blackfriars Playhouse, and coming soon, from our Touring Troupe as they go back on the road for the southern leg of their tour.

More Results from the Experiment in Breathing

2011-12-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

I've previously discussed an approach to performing Shakespeare's verse* involving rhetorical punctuation as a guideline for breathing (here and here, if you're interested), and I wanted to share some more results from this approach. That particular scene study in Coriolanus was part of my directing classes recital, so before I say anything else, I suppose I should just let the cast speak for themselves:

That's a lovely scene, isn't it? It's a wonder Coriolanus isn't done more often, although I suppose that it will be done much more frequently with that Ralph Fiennes movie version coming out.

My commentary about why I think we may be on to something with this particular approach to performing Shakespearean verse comes from some of the brush up rehearsals I had with Charlene, who played Volumnia in the scene. We had been away from it over the Thanksgiving holiday, so we got together to work to get Volumnia back into her system. I couldn't help but notice when she was breathing in a way not-indicated by the punctuation in these early rehearsals.

Charlene is an impeccable actress, and so those moments were few and far between, but they stuck out like sore thumbs. When I heard one I would look down at my book and see, for example, that the text had called for a comma, and she had breathed as if it were a colon. Of course I gave her those notes and she fixed them, but it was a little bit surprising that they felt like moments that had to be fixed.

As I'm pretty sure I've said before, Shakespearean actors tend to be trained to respect the verse as being sacrosanct, and everything else as subordinate, but I'm more convinced than ever that there's something to this. Hopefully, I'll have further chances to explore rhetorical breathing while I am here and in the company of such finely trained actors.

[*] Although I'm sure it would work well for prose, too.

Apparently, Someone Has to Grade These...

2011-12-12T21:17:00.000-08:00

I don't think I had an appreciation for how heavy and long a class full of end-of-term research papers would be, but it's provided me with a much deeper appreciation for why professors tend to make themselves scarce after you hand in your stuff. Grading my way through term papers is, however, only one of the reasons that I've been in absentia this past week. Another reason was that I had a couple of my own to write. Another was Bad Quarto's production of The Second Shepherds' Play, which I am pleased to say went swimmingly.

On to the next thing. Things. Actually, the plurality of the things I'll be undertaking is probably significant enough that I should write it thusly: things. Yes. That feels much more appropriate.

I had one of those moments I sometimes have on the Saturday we opened Second Shepherds Play this year. I registered that my company was opening a show, but I didn't feel like it was anything to go get worked up about. I realize, of course, that this is because I know I had a director and cast that had the situation well in hand, that everything was taken care of and all that, but as I reviewed my materials from my first production of Second Shepherds' Play back in 2000, I couldn't help but smile at the sense of magic that seemed to accompany opening a show.

Somewhere in the last decade or so, opening a show went from something magical to the sort of thing I do every now and again. Because I'm a fan of list, here are a few mundane things I do less often than open a show:

clean my living room
change my mandolin strings
update my resume
go on a date

Hmm... I think I better stop there before I consider the implications of what I'm about to write.

Anyway, I think a major part of that magic was my then legitimate fear that I might never open another show again. I was still in undergrad, after all, and had every intention of having a long and profitable career as a programmer, or at the very least as a network tech. But then as I did more and more shows, and got better at doing them, the magic went away as I started to realize that this is just what I do.

Actually, it's more like this is what I am. I am a guy who puts up shows, or at the very least has a hand in doing so. And I think I'm okay with that.

Which, I suppose, means that I should also be okay with doing mundane things that everyone else does all the time less often.

That reminds me, I have to clean my living room.

If You're Not Scared

2011-12-06T13:53:00.001-08:00

...then you haven't been paying attention. Actually, no, that's not fair: almost none of the major news outlets have been covering the greatest threat to our civil liberties since Joe MacCarthy. Funny, that threat arose in the Senate, too.

The National Defense Authorization Act is an annual bill that Congress passes in order to fund military spending. It's never a big deal because we can generally all agree that we like having the most powerful armed forces in the world to help keep us safe from all of the scary people out there that want to destroy the American way of life.

The problem is that, this year, the greatest threat to the American way of life comes from Congress.

No. Really.

This year the NDAA contains a provision that would allow for the military to detain indefinitely anyone that they label as a "terrorist." This includes citizens of the United States. To clarify, the bill that Congress has sent to the president allows for the military to detain any citizen for as long as they wish for any reason they wish. Congress has put the United States on the same level as Stalin's Russia and Hussein's Iraq.

If you don't think the government should have the right to drag you off to a secret detention cell for the rest of your life for any reason, and bar you any contact with the outside world, now is the time to tell them. There are two easy steps you can take.

First, contact the president and tell him to veto the National Defense Authorization Act while it contains provisions that would allow for the arrest and detention of American citizens by America's military. You can contact the president here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments. Choose "Civil Rights" for the subject of your message.

Second, contact your state's senators and your representatives. http://www.opencongress.org/ makes this insanely easy: to find out who your Congresspersons are and how to contact them, all you have to do is enter your zip code. Be sure to tell them that you're a voter in their district.

Your message doesn't have to be florid. Short, sweet, and to the point will do. All it takes for you to stand up for your rights as a citizen are about ten minutes of your time. Wherever you fall in the political spectrum, we can all agree that our basic freedoms are important to us.

Please stand up for your civil rights while you still can.

Fixing the MIT Shakespeare: Adding Line Numbers

2011-12-01T17:58:00.001-08:00

Since Shakespeare is in the public domain, you can find it on any number of websites, and one of the most popular is the MIT Shakespeare, but just because a thing is popular doesn't mean it's actually good. The MIT Shakespeare editions get a lot of flack for not being the best editions on the net, but they are, quite frankly, for most applications, good enough, and they are highly convenient. That last one matters to theatre folk.

But the thing is, those MIT Shakespeare editions are actually put together much better than most Shakespeare scholars who would give them the aforementioned flack realize. The problem is that you have to look under the hood, by which I mean "at the HTML code" of those files to see just how completely they are tagged. Most of the Shakespeare scholars I've met aren't necessarily eager to do that.

One of the chief complaints I hear about the MIT Shakespeare editions is that they don't have lineation, but the truth is that they do, it's just not visible in the browser. But since the MIT Shakespeares are so thorough, I actually used them as the basis for my work on Merry Devil, which mean writing a parser that would get those line numbers visible in the HTML.

Of course, adjusting the parser to be backwards compatible with the MIT Shakespeares is relatively simple.

In order to run this, you'll need perl installed on your computer. If you need to do that, try typing "install perl on windows" into Google for instructions. Alternatively, you may substitute windows for "mac" if it's appropriate.

Anyway, here's the script:

You'll have to download the script and the HTML file, and then from your command line, pretending you have a command line, run it like this:

perl addFifthLine.pl Coriolanus\ \ Entire\ Play.html > coriolanusWithLineNumbers.html

Or whatever the name of the play you've downloaded is. Open the play up in your browser, and you're all set. You have now added numbers to every fifth line of the play.

Of course, you're not quite done yet. You have to open up the file in a text editor (like Notepad, but not Word) and then add the following right before the <head> tag:

<style type="text/css">
#lineNum {
position: absolute;
left: 550px;
}
</style>

There are, of course, some limitations to this. The MIT Shakespeare counts shared lines as two separate lines, and the script has no way of differentiating them (using my improvements over the MIT style, this is not an issue). Also, the file is not on the internet for easy and convenient access, but you can always upload it to your own URL and access it from there if you want (and know how).

So... yeah, I guess that actually doesn't help most of you out there in Shakespeare scholar land much. But if you learn perl it will! Go check out perlmonks for some help with that.

Join us.....

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make with all of this is that the MIT Shakespeare's are actually a lot better than good enough, and with a little bit of effort, they can be downright awesome.

I'm Angry

2011-11-29T13:49:00.001-08:00

I'm angry. Very angry. In fact, I don't think I realized how angry I was until I watched Jon Stewart's take on the situation:

Shortly before the break, I was talking with a friend of mine who was utterly flummoxed at how we have got to the point that it's acceptable for a peace officer to casually pepper spray college students peacefully protesting. Honestly, I'm flummoxed, too. Why is this acceptable? Why is it so acceptable that they've been placed on administrative leave rather than being brought up on charges for battery?

The real problem, of course, is that these peace/police officers are just thugs and perverts in a uniform. For the record, I know that they're in the minority. I know that those who serve and protect the public have a difficult, dangerous, dirty job, and that the greater 99% of you honorably do things every day that most of us don't want to think about.

And here's the thing: I know you've got one another's backs, and I'm okay with that. I'm completely comfortable with you dealing with your own problems in your own way; by and large, you all do a fine job of keeping your house clean. But this time, not so much.

In all fairness, I know I'm talking about security guards versus cops here, and again, I know there's a difference. Security guards don't necessarily have a problem leaving incapacitated women lying on the street, whereas I fully realize that the Staunton PD would have handled that situation with greater delicacy and care. Perhaps the real problem is that we expect too much of our private security forces, and give them too much power and authority. Maybe the real problem is that there was no one to rough up those guards at USC in the locker room for pepper spraying a bunch of kids who were calmly sitting on the ground.

Then again, how do you explain the NYPD arresting journalists and cracking the skulls of Occupy Wall Street protesters?

I guess, more than anything else, I'm angry because we've seen a lot of people peacefully protesting corrupt systems of government lately, and much as I want to believe the police are the good guys, the images and reports we see out on the net show them acting more frequently like the hired thugs of corporate fat cats than the servants and protectors of the public. Not, you know, all the time, but enough that it's disturbing.

As someone who was brought up to respect law enforcement and think of the cops as the good guys, that makes me angry.

Return of the Second Shepherds' Play

2011-11-28T19:27:00.001-08:00

In the interest of full disclosure, this is mostly a verbatim cross-post from the Bad Quarto Blog, the official blog of Bad Quarto Productions. Point of fact, the only thing that keeps it from being so is this introduction, along with the fact that I seriously considered calling this post "Revenge of the Second Shepherds' Play," but then I thought better of it: revenge is not a Second Shepherds' Play trait, after all.

I wanted to share that The Second Shepherds' Play has a new cast, crew, and poster for 2011:

Rachel Quagliariello as Mak/Angel
Celi Oliveto as Gil/Mary
Ben Ratkowski as Col, the First Shepherd
Dane Leasure as Gib, the Second Shepherd
Jessica Schiermeister as Daw, the Third Shepherd

Directed by Kelly Elliot, with Musical Direction by Rachel Quagliariello

That's right, sports fans, I won't be at the helm this time. Seeing as how I'm in my last year of graduate studies in Shakespeare and Performance, and that I would like this collaboration to continue as a tradition into the future, I've managed to convince Kelly Elliot to take up the mantle direct the show. I won't lie, it's a little bit weird letting go, but two years in a row is long enough for anyone to direct the same show, and I can't wait to see what Kelly and her cast do with this most excellent piece of medieval pageantry.
If you missed out on last year's fun, here are some pictures that should remind you just how awesome it is to try stealing a sheep, disguising it as your newborn son, sing Christmas songs while doing so, and totally get away with it.

As much as we like to make fun of Mak and Gil and their mildly hair brained scheme, you have to give them credit, they totally manage to pull it off. The problem is that they pull it off too well, and actually make our three heros feel like massive tools for casting wicked aspersions on a couple that has been "blessed" with a newborn. That's one of the things I've always loved about this show; the good guys are too good to just walk away without trying to make the world a little bit better.

Anyway, the album I promised:

I hope to see you there!

Giving Thanks

2011-11-22T12:26:00.001-08:00

When I was younger, I had the benefit of working with some very bright, talented, and experienced people; some of the best in the business, I dare say, and their example and guidance was invaluable in setting me down the straight and narrow path. I made plenty of mistakes, of course, and my mentors were there to make sure that I bounced back from them and didn't make them a second time. Sometimes their courtesy was extended to a third or a fourth.

One of the reasons I say this is that the "war stories" often get more mileage. Hitting up the pub after tech, no one wants to hear about the time everything went perfectly and no one made any mistakes. Younger professionals don't necessarily like hearing about the performance of legends of the industry, and instinctively trying to measure their own performance in their job against someone with decades more experience. So in those circumstances you tell the stories about the times things went horribly wrong, and you pulled through anyway; as if to say, no matter how bad this may feel, I've been through worse, so keep your chin up.

Unfortunately this means that I don't get to brag about the lessons my professors and professional mentors have given to me, about the stage managers who ran a well oiled machine, the lighting designers who knew they were asking their intern spot ops to make a pickup it would take them at least two or three rehearsals to learn (when we didn't have any), the directors who were willing to take a chance on my designs that completely defied their expectation, and the producers/artistic directors who have been willing to take a gamble on me as a director. Even that doesn't cover the stage hands who have been there, done that, and have a closet full of t-shirts going back to the 1970s, and who have been able to give me a long view that I sorely lacked, or the countless others who have expected and demanded more of me than I ever thought capable.

I try to constantly thank my mentors by trying to be as good to my interns, apprentices, assistants, and junior company members as my mentors have been to me, but I wanted to take the time to write this very general thank you note as we approach our national day of gratitude. I'm not going to make a list of names because that's tacky, and invariably I would leave someone off, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.

Thank you.

A Devilishly Merry Update

2011-11-18T12:54:00.001-08:00

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with my Merry Devil project. By the end of this coming weekend, I will have finished my textual glosses and cleaned up the code, and while the edition still won't be complete at that point, the bulk of the work will be done. The rest is, by this point in my academic career, mostly a matter of extracting the materials I generated for my thesis and making them fit for consumption by the non-Master of Letters actor, director, or dramaturg.

So, woohoo! I'm about to get my life back!

Yay...

Only the thing is that, just like with stage management, there is something in the minutiae of editing an early modern text for the modern reader that appeals to my obsessive compulsive tendencies. I dare say that, in an ideal world, whenever I direct a show I would have the time and resources to explore the play as thoroughly as I have with Merry Devil, and would be able to find some apparatus for including the knowledge I gained from the process into some kind of general purpose databases.

Of course, in most cases I'm not the first fully staged production of a play to come along since the 17th century.

I certainly have a much deeper appreciation for the work that goes into an edition of a text, and will be hard pressed to ever bad mouth an editor who has done their level-best again. I think the most important lesson I can take away from this process is to presume that everything in the text is correct and as the author(s) intended unless you can pinpoint some specific textual evidence that proves otherwise. Like, for example, in Merry Devil when the non-existent character Frank Clare is referred to instead of either Frank Jerningingham or Harry Clare. Clearly that should be one or the other.

Unless, of course, you do what the actor saying the line did and take it as "Frank, Clare" so that both are addressed. But should we assume that a comma was dropped by the author or transcriber, or the compositor? My recent experiments with rhetorical punctuation don't even convince me those cases must be necessarily true.

I'd also like to think that this experience will prove useful for my MFA project, which now begins to supplant Merry Devil as the elephant in the room that I'm always thinking about, even when I'm not. I'm not sure it makes sense that editing an early modern play will help me construct a classically modern musical, but any hope I can cling to....

Oh yeah, I never told you about my MFA project, did I? Sorry, Internet, I'm not quite ready to spill any more beans than that yet.

Results from the Experiment in Breathing

2011-11-14T18:13:00.001-08:00

I presented the Coriolanus scene study I mentioned earlier, and am pleased to say it was quite well received, despite some initial trepidation at my somewhat controversial approach. My professor had remained rather nervous about my use of rhetorical punctuation as a guiding form up until he saw the performance this morning, and it's easy for me to understand why. Most classical actors are trained to treat the line of verse as Holy, and everything else as disposable.

Peter Hall eloquently lays out this problem. He feels that any pause in the speaking of a line of verse results in the betrayal of "the sanctity of the line," and that the best script to present an actor is one that is "stripped of everything but the essential full stops." Hall seems to argue that Shakespeare wrote lines of verse, and that all of the punctuation we receive in the text is there accidentally, except for the full stops. It's as if Shakespeare was only aware of the occasional full stop, and it was unethical scribes and compositors who added everything else.

I have a hard time accepting this reading. Quite frankly, because I have stared so long and hard at the work that probably went on in an early modern London print shop, I have a hard time believing that a compositor would be interested in making their life any more difficult than necessary, and while I accept that the Jaggard syndicate may have taken on some editorial function in preparing the play texts for print in the Folio, I somehow can't help but feel that they had bigger fish to fry than messing around with Shakespeare's punctuation.

To treat Shakespeare's punctuation as something disposable is to disregard one form in favor of another. In Shakespeare's earlier verse, where the punctuation tends to align with the verse, you can almost get away with it. In fact, in these situations, playing the verse and punctuation faithfully is often extremely similar, but in Shakespeare's later verse, and in the verse of more sophisticated poets, disregarding the form of punctuation means disregarding a form that sometimes compliments and sometimes supplements the verse form.

Those of you gathering pitchforks, relax: I still feel that verse is the primary form. In fact, Hall acknowledges, to some extent, that only Shakespeare's knowledge of the constant iambic pentameter beat in the heads of his actors gave him the ability to explore more sophisticated verse forms in his later work. That more sophisticated verse work often means verse that is sometimes at odds with the rhetorical form, and that's where interesting things happen.

One of the reasons why I looked at Coriolanus 5.3 is because it's hard. Volumnia has some meaty chunks of verse in that scene; on two occasions she goes on for a little more than a page straight. There are some directors that consider those chunks unplayable, and I will fully confess that I cut them lightly for my scene study because I knew that I would have a hard time finding a Marcius and Valeria to play in the scene in addition to the four other players, and so I cut them and references to them. It's the end of the term, after all.

What my Volumnia (anonymous because I haven't asked her permission) found was that the first of those long speeches tends to follow, with a slight cesura, the verse form, and exploits weak endings to keep linking the enjambed lines into one another. While my professor was quick to point out that the second speech is more end-stopped, I counter argue that it is more heavily punctuated than the first over all, and that if we apply the same rules of breathing to both speeches, Volumnia's modest cesuras become much more frequent and pronounced.

The key to all this is that, if you follow the verse form and acknowledge nothing but full stops, you're going to have the occasional cesura, and a good actor will deliver the pause with the same strength and speed with which they deliver a line. They will not pause and pose, and put on a show of deep thought. The momentary silence can be filled by a breath, which must be delivered meaningfully.

I think my professor was concerned because the pauses and breaths can break up the verse in ways that would render it meaningless. Applying a competing form to Shakespeare's verse is not something I would try with an actor who was new to the mechanics of verse, but for the actor who has mastered the use of Shakespeare's verse to create a performance, this will help uncover new shades of meaning, and will likely result in a better performance.

Love to Play

2011-11-11T10:51:00.001-08:00

I'm one of those types of people that would never watch a movie like Finding Neverland on purpose, but am also willing to admit that it gets the essential playfulness of the process of putting up a.... oh, shoot.... what do you call those things again? Play! exactly right. Actors, directors, and designers should all enjoy trying out new and different things, and should be eager for the opportunity to engage the make believe worlds they're embodying in different ways.

I'm always a little bit surprised when I meet someone who claims to be an actor who unequivocally declares that they do not like to play: this individual likes to set their worlds in stone and then repeat the same motions without change. I am, quite frankly, so dumb founded that I almost don't know what to say to such an actor; the most honest thing is probably that they should quit now, because they're not going to enjoy any aspect of any kind of work they get in the entertainment industry, but for some reason, that didn't occur to me at the time, so I'm saying it here.

Not wanting to engage the make believe world in different ways is a sign of laziness, and I get it: sometimes we're tired, we have everything exactly the way we think it should be, or there is something else weighing on our minds at that moment. We're not always in the mood to play, and that's okay. The most valuable lesson I've learned from trying to pick up the violin is that there are some days when I simply cannot play, and so on those days I either play scales, do some finger exercises, or just set it down and do something else, but if that happened most of the time, or even often, I think I would never pick it up again.

When this actor declared to me that he or she does not like to play, he or she was essentially saying that they had no intentions of picking up the instrument again, despite trying to make a career of playing it. Really, this person is not an actor; they might dress the part, and show up with an instrument slung over their shoulder, but the best they will ever do is go through the motions of performance. They will, to use Uta Hagen's term, rely on tricks.

I consider myself lucky that I have not had this particular actor in any of my shows; while some actors may not know how to play, and many are afraid to let themselves, I've never before run across an actor who simply didn't want to do it. Maybe I've just been lucky.

I'll open this up to you: how often do you meet actors who don't like to play? How about directors? How do you manage them in your rehearsals?

A Theory of Theatre as Reflected in Feline Behavior

2011-11-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

The other day, one of my class mates described his theatrical preference as being akin to the behavior of his cats: if something isn't moving and testing the boundaries of his periphery, than he ignores it. I couldn't help but be amused by this because my cats' behavior is exactly the opposite, and so is my own theatrical preference.

For my cats, the most entertaining things in the world are things that are not moving. A piece of dry food they can bat across the kitchen floor, for example, or perhaps a balled up sock that they can dig out of a drawer and drop into their water bowl. For the life of me, I'll never know what's so fun about dropping my socks into their water bowl, but they go to great lengths to do it.

Don't get me wrong, my cats are always excited when a beetle gets in the house and starts flying around, but they like to test the bounds of their environment and the behavior of things. The seemingly dead piece of food, a balled up sock, or even a stray piece of paper comes to magical life when they start biting, pawing, and pouncing at it, and they discover worlds in testing the boundaries of the previously motionless and static object.

And that's my approach to theatre. As a director, I think my favorite question goes along the lines of "what would that be like if you did that one specific thing like this?" It's not to imply that what my actor is doing is bad, or even uninteresting, in fact I often find that I have asked them to make a choice that is weaker than the one they have already made; sometimes I even do this deliberately to get them to discover how a thing may feel wrong in performance. Every now and again, we discover something different, interesting, or challenging that leads to new performance possibilities. Sometimes we even make new discoveries and solve problems in performance.

As my cats so eagerly demonstrate, the world is a much more interesting place when you're willing to push its boundaries than it is when you wait for its boundaries to push you. Then again, my cats are mystified by the glowing rectangles that I spend so much time staring at, and are deeply confused by the mystery of why I would rather be typing away at this keyboard when my hands are clearly better employed scratching behind their ears.

I'm having a hard time arguing with them at the moment.

When to Breathe

2011-11-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

I was recently coaching an actor who will be performing some of Shakespeare's late verse, and I directed them to treat the punctuation rhetorically. While rhetorical punctuation is not often taught in formal education, we all know it when we see it, and we typically know how to use it. "Best. Thing. Ever." would be an example; it's not a syntactically correct phrase, but even a stickler for correct grammar would feel comfortable using it when they want to create a special kind of emphasis.

In a nutshell, rhetorical punctuation asks for a pause for a comma, a pause twice as long as a comma for a semi-colon, a pause three times as long as a comma for a colon, and a pause four times as long as a comma for a period, which in rhetorical punctuation tends to be better known as a full stop. It seems to me that a pause is just the beginning; when it comes to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, those punctuation marks are ways of telling the actor when to breathe, and how much breath to use. If you have a full stop followed by three unpunctuated lines, you have to spread your breathe out over all those lines. If, on the other hand, you have a full stop followed by a monosyllabic word before coming to a semi-colon, that's Shakespeare's way of telling you that it's okay to use more breath to say that word; you'll get a chance to breathe soon.

Understanding why this is important to Shakespeare's later works requires understanding Shakespeare's use of verse. Where Shakespeare's early verse tends to be end-stopped, his later verse tends to be enjambed, and written in half-line phrases. Ralph Alan Cohen would teach you that this is because Shakespeare had become a better writer and this style of writing better approximates the incomplete thoughts and feelings that people usually speak in in life. I would tend to agree with him in this instance.

The rhythm of the language that Shakespeare's verse creates so clearly in his early plays is somewhat broken in the later ones, and while I am too much Cohen's student to think the verse is irrelevant, I see this later verse as a way of keeping time. The punctuation is the actor's guide for when to breathe, how much breath to invest the line with, and how to make Stanislavskian sense of the lines by breaking them into beats.

It's worth mentioning that this particular actor is both trained and experienced performing Shakespearean verse, and in the course of our work, I started contradicting this actor's previous training. "I thought you could only stop on the punctuation at the end of the line," says the actor.

I've heard that, too, honestly, but I wanted to try it this way. We who are classically trained are usually afraid of pausing during during the reading of verse unless we have a short line: pregnant pauses in Shakespearean verse are usually rather stillborn, and perhaps more often hysterical by nature, and tend to be the mark of a poor performer. It slows down the rhythm of the speech, and make the performance boring. Still, I would argue that these rhetorical cues to breathe are both consistent with and built into the language of performance.

By the end of our session, this actor was rather enjoying the freedom to breathe and to spend some more breath on words when the punctuation allows. I noticed that taking a quick breath in on a comma in a line very broken by them actually made the line sound faster than if the actor read over the commas without breathing: it created the aural illusion of a character out of breath.

I will be intrigued to see where this experiment leads.

Measures of Success

2011-10-31T14:12:00.000-07:00

Everyone is tired in Shakespeare and Performance land, but we're all tired in that sort of we-just-pulled-off-an-amazing-international-conference sort of way. I could try to distill the experience into a single blog post, but that couldn't possibly do it justice, but you can expect I'll be milking the 50 some odd papers I heard at the conference for a while to come.

What I'd actually like to talk a little bit about today is why the conference was successful, or at least why it was for me. I believe it's important for us to define success for ourselves whenever we set about any endeavor, and to define it in a way that isn't reliant on anyone else. A standing ovation every night is not, for example, a good measure of success because neither directors nor actors ultimately have any control over what an audience will do. As the stage manager for the conference, I can't define my own success in terms of the papers that presenters bring with them (although most of them were quite good).

My measure of success for this conference was that I would not deny any request that was possible for me to honor. This meant finding ways, in the minutes before a plenary session began, to include projections, props, special staging arrangements, and even actors that were not a part of the plan for the session. I am pleased to say that there was only only one request that I had to deny, and even in that case, I was able to provide the presenter with a viable alternative.

So I was not only able to keep things organized and efficient, I was able to accommodate the unexpected. I call that a success.

And, of course, I'm saying I a lot, but I actually mean "we" in this scenario. I've already given a shout out to Angelina, Maria, and Bobby, my diligent ASMs, but I find that such diligence and efficiency can never be praised enough. They worked with such skill and efficiency that, while I was standing by at the lighting console, I watched them accommodate unexpected requests so precisely that you would think they'd rehearsed for weeks. There's no substitute in the world for a good and dedicated crew to work with, and I was working with some of the best.

For me that is always another key measure of success: that we will help and support each other at every step in the process. I feel as if we all did that this week, and not just among my stage management team, and not even just among the Shakespeare and Performance students. I can't help but feel that the world of Shakespeare and early modern performance scholarship feels just a little bit closer in the wake of the events of this past week, and I am honored to have been a part of that.

Blackfriars Conference, Day Two. Or is it Three?

2011-10-27T21:51:00.000-07:00

Hey gang!

I told you I would pop in from the Blackfriars Conference to let ya'll know how it's going when I had a chance, and this is that chance. Unfortunately, all I really have time to say is that I'm tired. So tired. So very very very tired. This is like tech week in summer stock, which means that I am either exhausted and miserable or exhausted and euphoric, depending on the quality of the people I'm working with and for, and the work I'm doing.

I am happy to report I'm feeling exhausted and euphoric. I really love making this conference happen, and am thrilled for the opportunity to stage manage it. I want to especially send a shout out to my ASMs Angelina LaBarre, Maria Hart, and Bobby Byers, without whom I'm sure I would be idly spinning in circles most of the day.

And now I'm off to post things to the call board and get a straight four (hours of sleep, that is), but don't worry, I'm sure I'll be discoursing on what I learned for a while. Alternatively, you've been warned that I'll be discoursing on the conference for a while.

The Real Game Begins

2011-10-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

It's a mildly discouraging thought that everything I've done this semester has only been a preview for the whirl wind that the next few days will be. Most of the scholars will be getting into town tomorrow, and rehearsals for the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars Conference will officially begin. Staunton, Virginia will, for five days, become the global nexus of Shakespeare scholarship, and I'll be stage managing it.

For those of you who don't know, the way the conference works is that each scholar has the option of using actors to help demonstrate their research. This is encouraged to the degree that scholars who do use actors get a whole four extra minutes of presentation time before a bear comes chasing them off stage. Well.. an actor in a bear costume, anyway.

Of course these scholars will need to rehearse, and that's where Angelina, Maria (two of my ASMs) and I will hit the ground running tomorrow. Some scholars will rehearse later in the week (due to later arrivals), but most scholars will rehearse tomorrow afternoon, which gives them the chance to meet their actors in advance, and direct the scene they would like to present with their paper. We make sure they stay on schedule, give their actors practical blocking notes, and make sure all of that gets written down for future reference.

You know, what stager do. Except for scholars who don't necessarily know how the process of putting up a play works.

Then, starting on Wednesday morning, we'll coordinate shifts between each of the paper sessions, make sure the stage is set, and that the rehearsals that take place during the conference proper happen like they're supposed to.

For my non-academic oriented friends, just imagine like it's a five day long theatre festival, and you'll have a good idea about what we're doing. Hopefully I'll be able to check in from time to time to keep you posted on events, but if you want the play by play, the ASC's Education department will continue the tradition of live blogging that I started at the last Blackfriars Conference, so check back at their blog throughout the conference for the latest news from the world of Shakespeare scholarship.

How Much I Love Scheduling

2011-10-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

As I was re-jiggering the rehearsal schedule for the Blackfriars Conference, you know, the huge international, 5 day long, bi-annual Shakespeare conference that I'm stage managing that starts next week, I sarcastically groaned to Charlene, one of my fellow grad students, "did I ever tell you how much I love scheduling?"

"You seem to be enjoying yourself right now," she replied.

Therein I was forced to confront the fact that, yes, I actually do enjoy scheduling. And planning. And organizing. All of which are probably why they asked me to stage manage this thing in the first place.

I fully admit that my impulse to schedule, plan, and organize is driven by certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies that certain doctors might feel would be better treated with massive quantities of Luvox, but there is an art to proper planning that is as creative as any work I do as a director in a rehearsal room. If I add these numbers, shift this around, and turn that lever, then we'll all be able to be in the same room long enough to do the jobs we've come together to do.

Behold! I have created balance and order in the universe!

Say what you will about any play you've been in, but you will largely remember it as a positive or negative experience based on what happened in the weeks of rehearsals you logged, and your experience there is probably determined by a director, stage manager, or production manager who either loves and appreciates the art of bringing balance and order to a chaotic universe, or by any one of the above who made your life a living hell. I don't claim to be the best director in the world.... well... okay, sometimes I do, and sometimes I even mean it, but one of my principle strengths in this field is my ability to plan a structured schedule.

Sometimes my schedules are met with incredulity: "surely he can't plan a rehearsal two weeks from now down to the minute!" says an actor I haven't worked with before. "You're going to stifle our creativity if you try to plan things so rigidly!" says another actor in a similar position.

And then two weeks later I've made converts out of them.

Meticulous planning creates an environment of structured creativity that allows creative people to be there most creative. In the case of the Blackfriars Conference, scholars from around the world will be utilizing actors to illustrate their scholarship in a paper session that lasts no more than 15 minutes. They will each get exactly 15 minutes of rehearsal time with the actors they'll be working with. My ability to plan a schedule will enable the presentation of potentially ground breaking research in the fields of Shakespeare and Performance.

And now you know how much I love scheduling.

Editing is Hard

2011-10-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

As I continue to work to develop this new edition of Merry Devil, I've had a break through discovery: I am able to do basic textual glosses at the rate of about 25 lines an hour; bibliographic and performance notes take longer. There are just under 1500 lines in this play, which means that I'll be spending at least 60 hours on textual glosses alone.

Breakthrough discovery: editing is hard.

I shared this breakthrough with Dr. Menzer, who continues to advise me on the project. "Yeah," he said with a smile. "It sucks, doesn't it?"

Yes. Yes it does.

Just like when I was collating the text, it's not even something you can force yourself to do when you're tired. Glossing requires your full attention, and if you let it slip, you're going to make mistakes. It doesn't make sense to try to push through when your eyes are tired, or you can't get your mind off of something else.

Which isn't to say that this isn't rewarding work. To the contrary, it's very rewarding, and I'm learning all of the intricacies of the text I wish I had time to learn before directing it last year. I'm able to spot where other editors have made mistakes, or where they have missed a performative implication, I'm finding allusions to medieval ballads that might have informed music choices, and I'm seeing new possibilities at every point.

I am building the edition of the text that I wish I had available to me, and that just feels like important work.

Yeah... I'm doing something important. It may only be important to whomever else out there wants to deal with the best romantic comedy with a necromancer ever written, but it's important. I'm contributing to a 400 year old conversation. In however small a way, this work matters.

10 hours down....

A Butt-Load of Research

2011-10-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

When I hear someone say "a butt load," I am inclined to think in terms of the Urban Dictionary's definition, but one of the fun things about doing Masters of Letters style research is learning that a butt-load is an actual quantity.

No, really.

Some of you may recall I am working on a new edition of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, which is a product of the research I've been doing for the better part of two years now, and that means making up a glossary, which means that even when I know what a word means, I want to check it against one or two authoritative sources to make sure I'm not either lying to people or perpetuating someone else's lie. I can't have any bad or misleading definitions creeping their way into the new edition of the funniest romantic comedy with a necromancer EVER.

So one of the terms I was just cross-checking was "butt," as in "a butt of sack," which, as every Master of Letters knows, means "a cask of wine." Hmm... you know... no, on second thought I won't say it. It's too obvious.

So anyway, whilst crosschecking my definitions against authoritative sources, I stumble across the information that a butt would hold about 126 gallons of sack (roughly 476.96 liters for my pals in Canada and the UK who don't know how to use Google). So perhaps a butt-load refers to this measurement: and knowing that a gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, I start doing some math and arrive at the actual weight of a butt-load as being about 1008 pounds, or roughly half a ton.

Except I'm wrong. On further examination of my authoritative source, I find that there is, in fact, an entry for a "butt-load," which is defined as a unit of measure equal to about 6 seams.

Well that clear's that up!

I'm too obsessive compulsive to leave it there, and fortunately have no personal life to interfere with such mundane research, so I delve a little deeper and discover that a seam is about 75 gallons, meaning a butt-load is about 450 gallons, or roughly 3.5 butts, which weighs about 3600 pounds. Meaning that a butt-load is, in fact, just over 1 3/4 tons.

Take that, metric system.

Why You've Probably Learned the Wrong Lesson from Steve Jobs' Life

2011-10-10T17:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe if you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you've missed the news that Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer a few days ago. Yes, America has lost a key innovator of technology, which would have been bad enough if Jobs hadn't developed a mystique that went above and beyond his actual achievements. Jobs was good at a lot of things, and marketing his own genius was one of them.

Yeah, I'm a little jealous.

Something that's been tossed around is a paraphrase of a quote from a talk Jobs gave at Stanford's Commencement in 2005. I could describe it to you, but thanks to the technology that Jobs helped pioneer, you can watch it from the comfort of your own Internet connection, and I really think you should, because it is a very good, very smart, and very inspiring speech. So yeah, I'll wait:

The common take away is that, if you're not living every day as if it was the last day of your life, you're doing it wrong. Firstly, that's not even what Jobs says (because he's too smart to say something so stupid); Jobs' guidance is that if you're not doing what you would want to be doing on the last day of your life for too many days in a row, then you need to re-evaluate your life choices.

The truth is, I have my own list of things I would like to do on the last day of my life, and they by and large resemble what Jobs actually did: spend as much time as possible with the people closest to him. If I were to do that every day of my life, I would be extremely boring, and if Jobs had spent every day doing that when he was in his early thirties, then there's no way in hell I would be typing this blog post on a not-so-new-but-still-shiny-macbook.

Success and fulfillment takes time and work. If there's any take away you should have from his above speech, it's that. You can't let the individual ups and downs shake you too much, and you can't lose faith in whatever guides you on your path. You will have to do a lot of things that you don't want to be doing any day of your life, let alone the last day of your life.

Success isn't something that happens overnight. I was about to say "especially for those of us in the arts," but I'm too smart to say something so stupid. This is true for anyone who has achieved any level of success or mastery in their lives. Some people get their 10,000 hours of practice in when they're children, and have a bit of an edge when they're grown ups. Some people are standing in the right place at the right time. Some people are always standing in the right place at the right time.

You may never have that privilege. Pause and consider. You may never have the privilege of standing in the right place at the right time, and your passion may never lead you to any traditional measure of success. You may constantly sacrifice for it, and derive no tangible benefits.

If you still want to do it, if you're okay working yourself to the bone while people less skilled, talented, smart, pretty, whatever than you achieve the success you desire, than follow this passion until the answer to the implied question is "no," and do so without shame or regret.

The real lesson we should be taking from Steve Jobs' life is to not let failure, even big failure, keep you from doing what you love. If you work through those hard moments, one day those failures may only be momentary.

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

2011-10-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, Stephen Urkowitz visited the Blackfriars and gave a brief talk, in which he held up a copy of Lukas Erne's Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist and pantomimed machine gunning it. That was probably why I avoided using it as a reference when working on my thesis last year, but I was plagued all summer with the feeling that perhaps I should be reading it, so I made that one of my many projects in the last few weeks.

I'm glad I did. Far from being the work of irresponsible scholarship that Urkowitz clearly feels it is (based on his demonstration), I found Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to be an impeccably researched survey that prominently features the last few decades work on the subject of how Shakespeare's plays were printed, and how they were performed. While I ultimately cannot agree with Erne's final conclusion, the bridge he builds to that point is a masterful construction, and this book will be an excellent collection to any early-modern reference library, even if for the footnotes alone.

Erne's argument goes a little bit like this: we have a pretty good idea that Shakespeare's plays were not performed as printed on the stages of Elizabethan-Jacobean London, and since Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, he would know that he was writing more words than would possibly be performed. Therefore, Shakespeare wrote his plays with the expectation that they would be printed, and exist as both literary and stage objects.

Like I said, I think he makes a bit of a leap in his conclusion, but this is primarily because we have so little evidence for playhouse practice or literary intention that I am uncomfortable saying anything at all. Our program's scholar in residence, Tom Berger, is rather fond of the phrase "I don't know," and of cautioning us to not apply post-Enlightenment thinking to pre-Enlightenment anything. Recent guest scholar Roslyn Knutson will similarly warn us about not drawing conclusions about which plays were printed based on their popularity in performance, and I also can't help but feel the opposite is true. With more plays lost to history than recorded in print, and the absence of video archives to go on, there is simply too little evidence to say anything with certainty.

Where Erne succeeds is in drawing attention to the flaws in Stanley Wells' and Gary Taylors' editorial philosophies that the works as printed in the 1623 Folio were, more or less, accurate representations of the works as performed, which was the guiding philosophy for their highly influential Oxford Shakespeare. The problem with this assessment, of course, is that those plays are longer than the scant evidence we have for common playing times indicates would have been possible, some of them by a great deal. As I previously noted, Michael Hirrel's recent argument that Shakespeare and Jonson wrote longer plays because audiences wanted more of their words is both simple and obvious, but also happens to clearly contradict some of what we know, and possibly in violation of some laws.

For example, records indicate that plays had to be completed with enough time for audiences to be home before dark (remember, there are neither street lights nor police in early modern London). We also know that 2 PM was a decently common start time for the period, and there are numerous references to plays taking two or three hours (which could actually be as long as four) on the stage, sans any other entertainments. As Erne notes, playing Hamlet becomes impossible in January, as the actors would be playing in the dark at the Globe.

Which would amount to little more than supposition if there were not textual witnesses to the abridgment of theatrical texts. The earliest quartos of Hamlet, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor are shorter representations of longer Folio (and later-quarto) cousins, which all more neatly conform to the two-hours-traffic convention (even if that two hours might have been conceivably closer to four in some cases). My own pet project, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, lacks a longer text to compare it to, but the textual artifacts of the most authoritative texts reference action that never appears elsewhere in the play, which could conceivably testify to abridgment from a longer text, which might possibly indicate that abridgment was for performance.

You'll notice I'm saying "might" and "could" a lot. That's because we just don't know. That said, extant legal documents indicating playing times were limited to certain hours, textual witnesses to abridged texts, and literary references to customs of playhouse practice all mean that someone who argues that the longer Folio works were performed uncut has a lot to answer for. The best that we can say with confidence is that they may well have been, but likely not in all circumstances.

This argument leads us to another quandary, though: why would Shakespeare, or anyone else, write words knowing they would make the cutting room floor. If you accept that these plays were always cut for every performance, and the playwrights would know in advance what would be cut, Erne's argument makes sense. He was creating literary artifacts at the same time he was writing play scripts, which nicely accounts for why he would sometimes write close to double the amount of words that were performable.

Erne, likewise, has a lot to answer for, though. Shakespeare never clearly saw his plays into print during his lifetime; while a number of those plays were printed in quarto form, many in the form of those quartos which, as I mentioned before, bear some signs of abridgment. Of course it is possible that Shakespeare saw some of the quartos, especially those that bear a closer resemblance to their Folio cousins, into print as he did his poems, but there is no evidence that he did so. When you consider Peter Blayney's game changing analysis ("The Publication of Playbooks"), which reveals that publishing a play in early modern London was a huge gamble, it seems unlikely that Shakespeare did.

Any discussion of Shakespeare as playwright needs to mention Shakespeare as actor and businessman. He was a shareholder in one of the most (if not the most) respected performance company in London, and it seems unlikely he would have attained this position if he were not also a skilled performer. Most other playwrights worked on a contract basis, and Shakespeare clearly didn't have much money when he came to London, so without having some success as a performer, it would have been difficult for him to become a shareholder in a stable company.

In addition to being a sharer in the company's profits (and probably an actor), Shakespeare was also a householder at the Globe, meaning he received another share of the receipts and had an additional share of responsibilities related to the upkeep of the playhouse. This is to say nothing of his other real estate ventures, including his affairs back in Stratford, where he owned the second largest house (and, as Hirrel told me, probably would have owned the largest had it been for sale). By all accounts, Shakespeare was a conservative businessman, and taking gambles on publishing playbooks was both outside of his area of expertise, an outside the domain of his business portfolio.

Despite building a really solid bridge across the chasm, Erne still needs to make a leap of faith to the other side. There is simply no evidence to support any clear conclusions about why Shakespeare wrote more than would be performed. Shakespeare's plays may have been performed as written in some circumstances, and might have been severely abridged in others. Shakespeare may have written his plays with the intention that their full forms were printed one day, and may have simply died before he could do so. We also cannot discount the possibility that Shakespeare focussed his writing time on writing what he considered to be a good play, and left it to the judgment of his fellow shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men, who were some of the very best in the business at the time, to help abridge those works for the stage (whether some of the time or all of the time).

Whatever the truth is, there are no facts extant to report it, and until those facts are found, the truth of why Shakespeare wrote plays longer than most of his contemporaries will remain lost to history.

I realize, of course, that this evaluation of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist is coming a little bit late to the party, but as I said, Erne's research is impeccable, even if his conclusions require a leap of faith, and anyone interested in learning the details of the original printed forms of Shakespeare's plays would do well to spend some time with it.

Hymns for the Dreadful Night

2011-10-04T19:41:00.000-07:00

Piñataland's Songs for the Forgotten Future, Vol. 1, was sufficiently epic that, at a time when I was regularly logging 18-20 hours a week behind the wheel, I had a tendency to just leave it in my stereo and let it play. I guess it wasn't too surprising that the much delayed follow up, Songs for the Forgotten Future, Vol. 2 didn't have the same punch. It's hard to follow up the brilliant release of an album in a musical style that, while almost literally defying all description, is hard to stop listening to.

But now Piñataland is back with their third release: Hymns for the Dreadful Night, and they've brought back the magic of Forgotten Future 1.

Piñataland's success lies not just in their musical ability, but in their willingness to experiment with baroque style and dialectical narrative that call to mind Brechtian theatrical experiments. While the songs of Hymns lack the contextualizing clips that so thrilled me in Forgotten Future 1, the songs themselves return to examinations of the personal interiority of historical moments.

Piñataland defies musical categorization, so I won't try. Their sound shifts from rock to klezmer, folk, blues, pop, orchestral, celtic, and country, often in the same song, and sometimes simultaneous styles trod a measure in your ear that at first looks like an ungainly pairing, but proves absolutely irresistible. If you like The Pogues or Gogol Bordello, you'll likely find Piñataland worth a listen or five.

Conceptually, Piñataland looks at some of the murkier corner's of American history, with a special eye to New York, which might help explain the mash of styles that come to play in their albums. Forgotten Future was a musical celebration of New Historicism, and Hymns delivers the same sort of musical collage of what we thought the future would be, viewed through the lens of what it never could be.

I Will Be Ben Jonson Again

2011-09-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

The other day I received word that Meet Ben Jonson will be one of the late night offerings during the upcoming Blackfriars Conference. My first impulse was to cringe in horror at the thought of playing the titular character in a play whilst stage managing an international conference that plays host to the who's who of Renaissance scholarship, but then I thought about playing the titular character in a play for the who's who of Renaissance scholarship in what will probably be a pretty packed Blackfriars Playhouse, and kind of liked the idea.

So once more into the breach, I suppose.

Those of you who were in Pedagogy with me are laughing now.

30 Years Later

2011-09-25T17:15:00.000-07:00

I saw this story over on Slashdot earlier today, and was excited and talking about it with some of my younger friends, and their reaction puzzled me a little bit. It was something along the lines of "yeah, that's cool and all, but AIDS really isn't the death sentence it used to be."

I would be really interested in my aforementioned younger friend's willingness to say that to anyone who has AIDS, especially if they live beyond the care of modern western medicine, which thanks to congressional Republicans means those in America living at or below the poverty line and who can't afford health insurance.

Although there's a part of me that can't blame them. I wasn't old enough to be out clubbing in the early 80s, but I am certainly old enough to remember the fear and anxiety the disease caused in those days, and having an aunt who was a social worker only brought that one step closer to home. I can still remember eavesdropping on adult conversations where wiping down chairs with bleach and throwing out the trash with thick rubber gloves was standard practice.

Of course, we had our TV shows on the topic. I found one for you:

I remember sitting in health classes where they explained to us things along the lines of "it's okay to drink the milk," but somehow you could never really be sure. Those of us who lived through those early days, even those of us who were young, still carry that fear and anxiety with us.

So every time I see some promising new research regarding a cure or a vaccine, I can't help but feel a little bit excited. Those of you under the age of 20 who took to the streets and celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed and dumped in the ocean might be able to imagine it a little bit like that: the overwhelming reason that your generation gave when asked why you were celebrating (as if the reason wasn't self-explanatory) was that the boogeyman was dead. For those of us who grew up in the early 80s, AIDS was the boogeyman.

For millions of people in the world today, it still is.

Something to Believe In

2011-09-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

Jim Volz, who has had a hand in starting and managing so many classics companies during his career that "Ask Jim" has become a common forum at Shakespeare Association of America meetings, was in town visiting the American Shakespeare today. He had a hand in guiding the ASC through their first years having a home, and has become a friend and admirer of our graduate program. You might know him via this book; it's something I read years before arriving at MBC's Shakespeare and Performance program, and I wasn't going to miss the chance to hear him chat a bit.

There were two chief take aways from the session, which wasn't quite formal enough to be a lecture. 1) It's kinda nice being a graduate of a program that is the darling of most of the people in the Shakespeare/Classics worlds.

2) I really need something to believe in.

Maybe my success in Burlington years ago was one of the worst things that happened to me, because I've basically been adrift since. Somewhere along the way I forgot how it was, exactly, I was going to make the world a better place one show at a time, and then I started thinking that wasn't possible, and then I started wondering why I ever did.

I've said very recently that I'm tired and burned and need a vacation, but I'm starting to think I need something more resembling a sabbatical. I've done some work here recently that blew on the embers, so to speak, and I've had a flash of what I loved about this work, and why I'm very good at it. I was reminded of my secret powers to help others, actors in this case, see beyond themselves and touch greatness they never would have found on their own.

Everyone needs to believe in something, and that something has to go beyond the people who don't know what they're doing. It has to be greater than the producing directors who bully their employees, it has to go beyond the actors who simply don't show up to rehearsals, and it has to be greater than those illnesses you have to suffer through because you can't afford insurance or a doctor's visit. It has to sustain you through the deaths of your friends and family. It has to be greater than these, because it ultimately must sustain you through these.

Faith is the only thing that can guide you through the dark night of the soul, and those times when you question you faith the most is when it must be the most intractable.

That faith, in other words, for the theatrical crafts-person has to go beyond the work.

This is usually where I draw some breath taking conclusion, but I think that came a bit earlier on. I need a break. A productive break. I don't need to simply recharge my batteries, I need to know why, in my soul, I am doing this, and why it's important that I do.

I do feel fortunate, however, in that this isn't something I need to learn, it's something I need to remember.

Cold-cocked by the Weekend

2011-09-20T19:52:00.001-07:00

"Please stop hitting yourself in the head with that bed post," Clara asked after I relayed some of the highlights of why I was hitting myself in the head with a bed post. I think I've mentioned Clara before, she's a fellow grad student at MBC SAP and my violin teacher, and one of the few people in this world who would ever ask me to stop hitting myself in the head rather than ask for her own crack at my skull.

I'm not complaining, mind you, just observing.

After spending some quality time with whiskey and sleep, I think I'm finally ready to share this weekend's adventures.

Who is she to me?

The weekend started on Thursday. I was headed to the library in the early evening hours to grade some papers for my composition class. Unlike what usually happens when I'm walking down any sidewalk after parking my car, there was a girl laying down in the street resting her head on the curb. Unlike the lady that was walking in front of me, I thought this was slightly abnormal, and asked her if she was okay.

"Shut the fuck up," she replied, but barely. As in, I could barely understand the words. I asked again if she was okay, but she muttered something indistinguishable, and tried crawling up the back of the SUV she was next to.

I'm sure most of you are thinking that she was probably drunk, and the only answer I can give is "maybe." The thing is, a concussion, diabetic shock, and a host of other potentially life threatening conditions can appear strikingly similar to the effects of alcohol. The lady wandered into the street and ignored my asking if she needed help, so I thought someone with a uniform might do better.

I thought about calling 911, but as she didn't appear to be in immediate danger, I decided on MBC security instead. Guys in uniforms might get a better answer. And sure enough they came by, but weren't going to do anything until she fell over walking across the street. After chatting with her for a little while, they helped her to a house across the street where she lived, and a roommate was there to help her.

So the security guard came back my way and explained that the young lady's roommate was going to take care of her, and that she was a student at nearby JMU, and so when he had walked by earlier and seen her laying down, he had simply kept walking because, "she's nobody to me, you know?"

...

No. I don't know. Looking back on it, I kinda wish I had asked him to further elaborate on why he would walk by anyone laying in the street with their head on the curb because he didn't know them. The truth is, I've been agonizing for most of the weekend on whether or not I should have called 911 instead.

I kind of rationalize it like this: if this was an unusual state, her roommate would know that, and would have called someone. Maybe she could smell liquor on her breath? I don't know, but I'm trying to tell myself I did the right thing by not calling for paramedics.

We do it with the lights... fading to black?

If you've been to the American Shakespeare Center, you've probably seen the pieces of merchandise in the lobby that proudly advertise "We Do It With the Lights On." You know, because of Shakespeare's original performance conditions and all that jazz. During the preview performance of Henry V on Friday, however, they all started fading to black. Momentarily forgetting that I was an audience member, I went dashing backstage up to the lighting booth to see if I could lend a hand, and thankfully my breach of protocol was welcomed (although I still feel a little embarrassed by it).

We got the lights back up for the rest of the show, but with a 2 PM matinee the next day, I felt the need to give the system a work over that night. Result: I was in the Blackfriars until 3 in the morning solving this one, and implementing various backup systems just in case it should happen again. And not that I'm complaining about watching The Tempest or Henry V again (because they were both solid productions), but I still had papers to grade, you know?

Given the choice between grading papers and babysitting the Blackfriars just in case I needed to go to work again, I did my best with the former and opted for the latter. Hopefully my composition students don't mind the delay too much, but that, of course, also meant that I didn't have a chance to head to the library to print some sides for auditions the following day, or to do some other things I really needed to do.

But the thing is, I'm like the only one in Staunton VA who understands DMX, so I couldn't very well not do anything to help.

Lets do it the hard way!

We do a thing in our program called "unified auditions," which are theoretically when anyone who is casting a project in the semester gets to see people all in one place. This works far better in theory than in practice, though. I haven't been a fan of these things because, when I took Directing 2 (name drop: with Giles Block), I was under the impression that we cast our shows from these, but about 4/5 of the class had cast everything in advance. Fool me once, shame on you. So I never bothered with these things again.

Until this weekend. Now I'm in Directing 3, and while we were working our first scenes before unifieds, I was under the impression that we were going to be casting the rest of our scenes from these. Fool me twice, shame on me. Like last time, most everyone has been casting in advance using the tried and true methods that I've been employing for the past... year... really? Only a year? Huh.

So anyway, that was bad enough, but the point in the evening where this became a complete waste of time was when the rest of the Directing 3 students decided they didn't want to sit down and cast people and work around schedules there. Better, they feel, to cast who they want and deal with it if they don't want to be in the scene or the schedule won't work, etc.

Sometimes, I do not think highly of my fellow students.

The thing is, the chief advantage to this kind of audition, lovingly referred to as a cattle call, for festival type situations is that the directors can work together to find people they're happy with, make sure one or two actors are not getting over booked, and people with compatible rehearsal availability are being cast. But they didn't want to. I won't speculate as to why, but... well... you know how I feel about having my time wasted.

Some would argue that, at least this way, I got to see the first years show their stuff. True! But it doesn't matter. I'm going to be doing catch as catch can casting for these directing scenes anyway, so it doesn't really matter who can do what. That was five hours I could have been grading papers or doing other things.

Sometimes, I think highly of my fellow students.

For this episode in this weekend's adventures, we need to go back to Friday. I was sitting at Coffee on the Corner, one of our usual haunts, working on Merry Devil, and I turned to Brian, one of my fellow students who was actually in Merry Devil and asked him to confirm that I was scanning a line right. When I leave Staunton, wherever I go, I'm not going to be in a place where I can reasonably expect to turn to a person sitting nearby in a coffee shop and expect them to know anything about the work I'm doing.

It's hard to believe that I've only been here for a couple years. It feels like so much longer.

Are You Still Working on That?

2011-09-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

I mentioned to one of my fellow grad students that I was doing some work on Merry Devil the other day, and she asked me, rather indignantly, if I was still working on that. Then, just yesterday, Facebook was good enough to remind me that it was just one year ago that my fellows and I packed up our things and brought Merry Devil to the Philly Fringe. I am still working on a play that was, in a very real sense, completed one year ago.

There is, however, a sense in which the project is incomplete. One of the ongoing debates in textual scholarship is to what degree printed playbooks memorialize performances. Against the generation of playbooks previously known as the "bad quartos," one of the primary charges levied by some scholars (Pollard, most notably) was that they were "memorial reconstructions;" either by a minor player in the company or by an audience member hoping to make a quick profit.

Peter Blayney has, of course, rather deftly demonstrated that there was very little money to be had in printed playbooks, and thus there was no need to surreptitiously steal play texts and rush them to the printers, and the motivations for playing companies to print playbooks may have less to do with the need to earn a few pounds on the immediate sale, and more to do with publicizing a revival of playing.

Of course, there is another reason to own a playbook; it's the same reason that audiences bring their programs home from plays and buy T Shirts from the gift shop. We like to take something home with us, and the script of the performance is an especially useful mnemonic tool for those who have seen the performance. In an era before television and radio, it allows them to re-create the performance whether or not the playing company is reviving it on stage, and could consequently lead to a demand for revivals of the performance.

I, of course, have my memorial textual objects. I have my prompt book, programs, posters, notes, and personal log of the experience, not to mention the open log I kept at http://merryfringe.blogspot.com. I am also unconvinced that enough people saw Merry Devil to make all of the work necessary for producing a new edition worth the money I could possibly get from selling it. Much like the London book publishers, I am taking a gamble with extremely uncertain returns.

Thus we return to what attracted me to this play in the first place: it is the best romantic comedy with a necromancer I've ever read, and I think it's a shame more people don't know it. Apart from the fact that I'm a director/producer of plays and I wanted to bring Merry Devil to the stage, the production served the end of creating this edition. We are smarter than me, as I like to say, and the cast was invaluable in discovery not only the best textual choices when variants were offered, but also in finding some of the difficulties in mounting the production and in helping me find solutions to those challenges.

One thing that Merry Devil clearly lacks is a recorded production history, and by producing it for Philly Fringe, we were able to help give it that. The new edition that I am working on right now will be designed with the actor, director, and dramaturg in mind because those are the types of people who will work to bring this play to the stage and contribute to the performance history of The Merry Devil of Edmonton. That is the profit that I'm looking for.

As I said before, it's a gamble, but in this way I've got a lot in common with the book publishers of early modern London.

The Man with the Horse Pistol is a Respected Historian

2011-09-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Augusta Historical society sponsored a talk by William Feehling, author of The Road to Disunion Volume 1 and Volume 2, among others, at Mary Baldwin College last night, and no way was I missing out on that. He was speaking about one of those chapters of American history that I'm actually quite interested in, the Virginia Secession Convention.

While much of the lower South seceded with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the upper south took it's time, and many of the border states south of the Mason-Dixon line stayed with the Union. Here in Virginia, the state was every bit as divided as the rest of the country, and the Secession Convention looked to be much more of a union convention until shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

One of the most cogent voices for remaining with the Union, John Baldwin, came from our own "city" of Staunton. On the floor of the convention, he argued to a horse-pistol toting ex-Governor William Bell that Bell's raising of an insurgent militia to seize the arsenal at Harper's Ferry was illegal and stupid, and that, no, thank you, a democratically elected delegation would not cow-tow to a pistol toting madman.

I wasn't so clear on some of the finer points of this debate until last night either.

Anyway, to make his point, Freehling produced, from hidden beneath the podium, a replica horse pistol (a fully functional and loaded replica, for all I know), and waved it around the room, dramatizing Bell's attempt at co-opting the mechanisms that seemed to be keeping Virginia firmly within the Union. It was easy to imagine how much more nerve wracking that would have been with a foaming-at-the-mouth secessionist with his finger on the trigger, and I can't help but respect Baldwin a little bit more for standing up to Bell.

The truth is, I also can't help but respect Virginia a little bit more. There can be no doubt that the Confederacy was seceding because of slavery (again, look at the documents), but Virginia's case was a little bit different. As a lighting designer friend of mine pointed out a few years ago, North Carolinians didn't want to fight, either, but their cousins started shooting, and so they had to. Virginia was in a similar bind, and I can appreciate how Lincoln's order calling up troops to put down the rebellion must have incited those feelings further.

Something that I didn't know and hadn't considered was that secession was not always a popular referendum in the south, even in the lower south. Pistol-toting reactionaries like Bell were far from exceptional, and the influence of a few hard headed and armed men caused the bloodiest war this country has ever fought. In Virginia, however, in the days leading up to secession, liberty took a stand, and Baldwin's arguments against Bell's (and the rest of the Confederacy's) armed coercion created the impetus for West Virginia to secede from Virginia, and for the states of the border south to remain faithful to the United States.

And you know what? Since a respected historian, however briefly, pointed a horse-pistol at my face, I'll probably remember all of this for a very long time.

A Meditation on the Imminent Collapse of the Global Economy

2011-09-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

Because I'm a pretentious dork, I sometimes read things like The Harvard Business Review, and stumble across things like this. It sort of reminds me of something that William Gibson said in Pattern Recognition: everything Lenin had to teach us about Communism was false, but everything he had to teach us about Capitalism was true.

The truth is that we have, for the sake of worshiping the idol of the free market, and by extension all the things that America is supposed to stand for, abandoned Adam Smith's ideas of Capitalism a long time ago. I would like to think that modern Conservatives might help us out here, but their demagoguery is the problem I just mentioned above. The Liberals, on the other hand, want to do the right thing, but haven't come up with a way to pay for it.

I haven't lost faith in America, but I have lost faith in the people of my grandparents' generation, my parents' generation, and even my own generation to solve any of the problem we're facing. We're too old; too beset in the ideological conflicts of the past. Too consumed by the rhetoric of trickle down economics (or as Bush Sr liked to call it, "voodoo economics"), and the promise of our country to face the realities of the new century and the new global economy.

Forget about something scientifically demonstrable like climate change, we're still squabbling over whether or not homosexuals should be able to get married. Or should I say, we're still allowing ourselves to squabble over such piddling things whilst our wealthiest citizens and corporations continue to hoard our economic resources and refuse to be the engine of our economy that they are designed to be.

Even I can't get through a blog post without reciting the old litanies.

But the truth is, I am hopeful; my students make me hopeful. They are, for the most part, bright, eager, and ambitious. They are hungry to understand new things and to make a difference in the world. They still believe in something greater than themselves, and that they can be an agent of change.

I don't remember being young enough to believe in those sorts of things myself, but when I see the look in their eyes, I start to believe that anything might be possible. My generation, and all the ones that came before, the best we can possibly do is try to not make things too much worse, and then hand the world over to these young ladies and their cousins as soon as possible.

No... that's not true: We can also try our very best to teach them that everything we failed to accomplish really is possible, if only they can be better than we are.

Being Ben Jonson

2011-09-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

If you don't know the name "Michael Hirrel," allow me to introduce you. Hirrel is the scholar who recently suggested a reason for the extraordinary length of the plays of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (as compared to their contemporaries) so simple and obvious that, in the four hundred year history of scholarly analysis of these plays, no one had suggested it before: their audiences wanted to hear more of their words.

Me playing Ben Jonson (left) with Michael

Hirrel playing himself in a workshop of

Hirrel's play: Meet Ben Jonson. Directed by

Shannon Schultz. Photo by Shannon Schultz.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. While Erne does make an excellent point in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist that Shakespeare should have been aware that his plays would come into print some day, Erne's leap that Shakespeare crafted more material than necessary was a bridge too far. Shakespeare wouldn't have profited by his plays being printed, and if there is one thing that we can say fairly confidently about Shakespeare, it's that he was an excellent businessman. He owned the second biggest house in his hometown at the time of his retirement, after all, and as Hirrel pithily added in rehearsal the other day, "he probably would have owned the biggest if it was for sale."

But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here.

Late last semester an email went around that Hirrel was interested in workshopping a new play of his for possible performance at the Blackfriars conference this fall. Lets face it, if you're an early modern scholar writing a play about early modern playwrights, than there probably isn't a better place to come and workshop your play than Staunton, Virginia. It's the kind of thing we Shakespeare and Performance types can get behind even when major turning points of our M.Litt theses don't hinge on the work of the scholar in question.

Of course, my thesis did, and so I was eager to offer that, yes, I would be happy to help.

Charlene V. Smith as Captain Tucca in

Michael Hirrel's Meet Ben Jonson. Directed

by Shannon Schultz. Photo by Shannon

Schultz.

For those of you unfamiliar with what I mean by "workshop" a play, it goes a little bit like this. When a playwright has written a new play, they typically want to hear it read out loud and see it on its feet a little bit so they can get a sense of how it's working. They also are typically interested in soliciting the feedback of the actors and director so they can improve the play in subsequent drafts. In some cases, this can be a very lengthy process that (hopefully) leads to the creation of an artistically satisfying and commercially viable new work.

In our case, we had a few weeks, and lest you think that's not enough time for a play to improve, I dare say that everyone in the cast felt that Hirrel's re-writes during the process were leading to a much better script by the end. You also have to remember that our "performance" was mostly designed to demonstrate that, with further revisions and a little bit more rehearsal time, the play would make for fun late-night entertainment during the upcoming Blackfriars Conference.

For the purposes of this workshop, anyway, I was cast as Ben Jonson. Again, for the benefit of those who don't know, Jonson was what we might kindly call a bit self-confident in his own abilities as a writer. So much so that he self-published his own collection of poems and plays in a collected volume of "Workes" in 1616, a good 7 years before Shakespeare's plays would come into print. This was a little bit scandalous because calling plays "works" was, at the time, a little bit like referring to Spiderman comics as "literature."

For some reason, Shannon seemed to think I could pull off this whole pompous and arrogant thing really well. Go figure. Of course, it wasn't just myself and Hirrel. Meet Ben Jonson straddles the line between academic paper and theatrical performance, and draws heavily on portrayals of early modern playwrights written by early modern playwrights. You can go and read more about the War of the Theatres if you want.

Shakespeare (Kelly Elliot, left), Dekker (Liz Lodato, 2nd

from left), and Marston (Brian Falbo, right) torment Ben

Jonson (Tony Tambasco, center) with the divisions

between his passions and his aspirations, in a scene from

Michael Hirrel's Meet Ben Jonson. Directed by Shannon

Schultz. Photo by Shannon Schultz.

In Hirrel's play, they start to take over the stage/forum in a way that I think undercuts the image of Jonson and pompous and arrogant oaf at least a little bit. Then, as now, theatrical types tend to be shameless self promoters, and Jonson didn't take the first shots, after all. Playing the character, at least, it was easy to see how and why Jonson felt threatened, and why he responded the way he did. Perhaps it was the only way he could.

It's telling that, historically speaking, the playwright we honor most didn't clearly participate in the War of the Theatres, and the playwright we honor next to him was dead before the first shots were fired. I also can't help but see a certain tragic element to Jonson. Just as I fear future generations will remember Amy Winehouse for her fantastic public breakdown rather than for her innovative songwriting and performances, we will tend to remember Jonson more as Marston and Dekker's caricature than as the innovative writer and publisher who, in many ways, made it possible for us to have Shakespeare as we do.

The workshop is over for now, and I have no idea if I'll have any further adventures being Ben Jonson, but I can't help but feel the urge to make the time to read his works.

A Sense of Presence

2011-08-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently there are some folk around here who think I should have graduated by now, and remain confused that I still have to do the third year of my MFA program to get my MFA. Much as I'd like to chalk it up to my mad phat theatre skillz yo, it's apparently because I create the impression of a sense of history with this program and, maybe a little bit to my horror, this "city."

I can't help but smirk at that a little bit. If there's ever a time to move on to a bigger pond, it's when you start feeling like the one you're in is a good fit, but truth be told, Staunton has always felt a little bit small. Maybe that's the general lack of a theatre community here; yes, it was easier to get paying work in Potsdam, NY. But I digress...

I'm tempted to say that the last place where I felt like I belonged was Potsdam/Clarkson, where I did, lets face it, have a history. Some would say too much and too long of a history. In my more cynical moments I would be inclined to agree with them, but I try to make a habit of not second guessing my past decisions too much, so lets just say it was long enough.

Of course, that would be a lie. I've just completed my third season with the Weathervane Playhouse, after all. I don't think Brice would have lured me back for another season if it didn't feel like a cozy place to keep working, but much as some of the folks around here might feel I fit in in Staunton... well... lets just say that I would be more inclined to move back to Potsdam than to keep living here.

Choosing between extreme heat and humidity and bone-cracking cold, I'll take the bone-cracking cold any day. I realize that I may be alone in that assessment.

All of this, of course, is my way of dodging the oft ask and as-of-yet still unanswerable question: what next? I just don't know right now, but I'm trying not to worry about it. I don't see much sense in applying for jobs that I won't be able to take, so future plans beyond this place that has, much to my chagrin, started to feel a little bit like home, will have to wait.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm still not unpacked from this summer....

A Conversation with Someone Not Me Regarding My Plans for the Future: A Play in One Scene.

2011-08-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

SOMEONE NOT ME

So what are you up to now?

Back to school.

SNM

Oh, are you teaching?

Yes, I'm teaching two classes and taking three.

SNM

But I thought you graduated.

I did.

SNM

Huh?

I graduated with my Master of Letters. I have one more year to complete my Master of Fine Arts.

SNM

Wait... you're getting two degrees?

Yes.

SNM

Why?

It's a little bit of a reductive explanation, but the M.Litt is a research degree, and the MFA is a practical applications one.

SNM

But didn't you make a new edition of some play and then tour it to some fringe festival for your M.Litt?

The Merry Devil of Edmonton, yes; I and several students here took it to the Philly Fringe.

SNM

And that doesn't count as practical?

Not according to the way my program is structured.

SNM

So what are you going to do for your practical degree?

[Smiles mischievously] Something to top what I did last time.

SNM

Which is?

In the fullness of time, I will not shut up about it.

SNM

Great...

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

2011-08-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

There's some beautiful country in West Virginia. I just absolutely love that feeling like you're driving off the edge of the world into the kingdom of the sky, and then diving between bluffs at 70 MPH. You have to go a little bit slower when it's raining, sure, but the way the clouds hang just over the trees makes it worth it; it's like driving through Middle Earth.

Driving through Appalachia is one of my favorite parts about journeying to Ohio and back, but it's especially nice after spending three months in the flat lands of Ohio. I don't like living places where there aren't any mountains, and if Denison University was not at the top of a steep hill, I think I might go insane.

Still, it's kind of weird to be back after being away for so many months. I don't know if I was just plain exhausted from the drive, or if the air is different in western Virginia, but I couldn't shake a feeling of vertigo as I dusted the cobwebs off my apartment and settled in.

I'm pleased to see that Staunton remains how I left it, more or less. Now to unpack...

Suspension of Disbelief

2011-08-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

During our rehearsals for As You Like It, I pointed out to the cast that the wedding vows that Orlando and Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind exchange would have been considered legit by an early modern audience, to wit Sarah Keyes Chang (my Rosalind and AD) corrected me: Rosalind interrupts the ceremony to keep it from being a legitimate wedding.

The early modern Londoners had a hard time drawing a distinction between a theatrical event and a real one; and there was some concern on their behalf that the actor playing Orlando and the actor playing Rosalind might actually be married in the eyes of God and the law if they carried through with the ceremony. The fact that a boy was playing Rosalind only made that situation more problematic.

But we're more advanced in our post-enlightenment thinking, and it is not uncommon for us to see weddings and other sacred ceremonies performed on stage. Or are we?

The Good War begins with a veteran of WWII handing a flag to the cast, who salute it and raise it on a pole on stage. The show ends with the lowering and folding of this same flag. I've seen the honor guard ceremony a little too often in my recent past to be unmoved by it, but that is the purpose of the theatrical event, after all. If it wasn't moving, it would be pointless.

As moving as it was to me, to the veterans in the audience it was clearly more so. As the flag was raised and lowered, they stood and saluted. They were sitting in the front row, and everyone behind them followed suite, the gentlemen in the audience who were wearing hats took them off in respect, most everyone else placed a hand over their heart.

I think divorce statistics will testify that we, as a society, do not hold marriage to be the sacred, unbreakable bond the early modern Londoners did, but some things are still too sacred to suspend your disbelief for. The event itself transcends the theatrical context. The art transcends its frame.

What a Good Little War

2011-08-11T00:42:00.000-07:00

One of the shows I'd really like to do, but will likely never get the chance to is Oh! What a Lovely War. Probably because no one cares about WWI. Not even the people who were fighting could really tell what they were fighting for, and the musical satire lends itself well to the ridiculousness of the world killing the flower of it's youth for the pride of fat, right men. Here's a clip from the 1969 film version:

WWII is a slightly different story sort of. Very clearly we were fighting to stop a notorious dictator from taking over the world, and doing that meant teaming up with a notorious dictator who only took over half of the world. That's why we sometimes think of WWII as the "good" war.

Don't get me wrong, I would never dream of taking away the honor of a generation that lived through so much, and then fought for a world they'd only seen a few miles of. My grandfathers fought in that war; most of my generation's grandfathers did, and for better or worse we are their inheritors. The truth is, that generation gives me hope: their financial meltdown was a lot worse than ours. Their world was a much more dangerous place.

As we wrap up the season here at the Weathervane Playhouse, we're putting up a production of The Good War, which I couldn't help but cynically dismiss as an appeal to the ticket sales of the WWII generation, who tend to be the primary consumers of large theatre. Simultaneously, I was a little bit disturbed by the possibility of a musical treatment of the second world war. This was my grandfathers' war, after all.

It didn't take long for my cynicism to melt away. Actually, it's become the exact opposite: the WWII generation has the right to know that we still honor their sacrifices and accomplishments, this was my grandfathers' war, after all. And BROADWAY'S Jen Bender (the only appropriate way to write her name, the way Brice has been talking about her all season), has done well with the cast and the show. The cast at the Vane continues to be superb, and they are only better when under the command of a director so clearly at the top of her game.

There's a scene toward the end of the show when the Americans meet up with the Red Army. This vignette is particularly touching. Stalin's purge of his army meant that the Soviets were short on skilled commanders. They were poorly commanded and poorly trained in the face of one of the most efficient military powers in the history of the world, and the heroism of Red Army soldiers is often dismissed as being the result of the intimidation of NKVD overseers.

As a Russian soldier says in The Good War, only 3% of the Russian WWII generation came home. Women and children manned anti-aircraft guns against approaching Nazi tanks at Stalingrad. Even the Nazis were surprised to find their bodies in the ruins of batteries as they entered the city, but in one of the costliest battles in human history, the Russians, soldiers and civilians alike, made the Nazis fight for every inch. Stalingrad was both the war and Russian history in microcosm; a combination of Russian winter and resolve secured their victory at a heavy cost.

Maybe it's because I'm such a fan of Russian literature, but I can't help but find that touching.

And then comes the moment when they fold a flag. We all know that I've seen that often in recent history. Thankfully, they don't play taps when they lower the flag. That's a mercy, anyhow.

Early in the show's rehearsal process, Brice said it was brilliant. It's not. It is instead a highly pathological play. I do not see how anyone of the WWII generation, their children, or their grandchildren could escape that.

False Exits

2011-08-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

An observable fact of Shakespeare's plays is that scenes tend to end on rhyming couplets, and from this we extrapolate the theory of the false exit: when someone has a rhyming couplet, or they (or someone else) has more lines, it might be an indication that they intended to conclude the scene and walk off, but they (or someone else) has more to say. Hence, a false exit: the character starts to leave, but they don't.

That's kind of how things are right now at the Weathervane Playhouse. We concluded our summer season with a closing night performance of Chicago where we really nailed it, and then spent the past couple of days packing up and leaving. Except we didn't.

True, there was inventories to take, and cleaning up to be done, but where we would normally all be going our separate ways and leaving things behind in a state of general readiness for whatever Brice and the board books in the coming months, we are instead putting up another show: The Good War.

I'm in a really weird headspace with this. Our resident company has shrunk from around 80 to around 20, which is hard for me because the length of a summer stock season is just about how long it takes for me to get to know/like people. Every now and again, I'll catch myself wondering where Ethan, Kristen, or any number of the folks that I would normally see regularly are.

Then there's this other thing: I'm pretty sure I'm the oldest one in the company now.

It's like we tried to exit, but had something more to say.

Thoughts on Turning 32

2011-08-02T21:12:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche said that a man's belly is what keeps him from mistaking himself for a god. As we rehearsed As You Like It outdoors, I noticed that the top of my head was getting sunburnt, which is new this year. A pretty clear indication that I'm losing more of my hair as I grow older and frailer. I am hoping to get in at least a day hike or two this year, and the Virginia climate might actually make this possible into the winter, but the throbbing in my ankle and back after hiking up the Denison University hill forces me to reconcile that I might no longer be able to comfortably spend days or weeks out in the back country.

There are, of course, a number of things I can no longer do comfortably.... which is actually a bald faced lie. The reality is that I never could bring myself to engage in the all night bacchanalia of communal housing at summer theatre, but now I have a convenient and acceptable excuse: I'm too old. Look! I'm 32!

Of course, every time I try to use my age to bow out of something, someone nearby (whether I know them or not, oddly enough) is bound to chirp in that I'm still young. The folks in the marketing department still lump me in with the 18 year olds, so there must be some truth to that, but I still can't escape the knowledge that by the time my father was 32, he was married with two children. So there's that part of me that makes a very cogent argument that I'm letting time pass me by.

Funny thing is, I'm not even sure I care.

The truth is, the business I'm in isn't a good one. If watching Chicago weren't enough to remind me how much careers rise and fall with the whims of the emotionally unstable, certain events in my own life have stood testament to that. So there's that part of me that does what you learn to do in these circumstances: shrug your shoulders and move along to potentially more stable territory, wherever that may be.

On the other hand, I can't escape the fact that I could be making so much better money (and have benefits) working at Starbucks. And you wanna know something? I really don't like this business at all. That's not why I'm in it. I'm in it for the craft. If my time in Burlington taught me anything, it's that you don't need to make your craft your sole source of income. All told, I'm starting to wonder if that isn't maybe the best way to be.

It's hard to say where I'll be this time next year, but even as I flirt with the possibilities of letting this craft be a part time gig and occupying myself with serving the coffee that I love so well, I can't escape this truth: I'm returning for my MFA in directing this Fall semester. I don't think I would do that if I was thinking very seriously about leaving the business.

That means I've got a long, unstable road ahead, which will likely take me well into my late 30s, into the valley of the shadow of death that we've come to call "middle age." As much as it disturbs me that I might look back at 42 and wonder what I'm doing living in a dorm room for the summer surrounded by people half my age, there is one thing to recommend this business: it keeps you young. It keeps you thinking like a 20 year old.

Okay, okay, I'll admit it. It's not just the craft I'm in it for, it's also the adventure. And maybe I am too old for that sort of thing, but... well... you only live once.

A Mockery of Justice

2011-07-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine shared this article over at the Times, and I couldn't help but feel a mix of horror and respect. Part of the reason I write code is that I enjoy seeing how systems work and how their functionality can be manipulated, and the legal system is just another system after all. Then again, the legal system is the foundation for our society, and I can't help but shudder in horror that it could be thus manipulated.

A photo of the courtroom scene from a technical rehearsal
of the Weathervane Playhouse's production of Chicago.
You probably can't make out the Groucho glasses on the
members.

This is all particularly poignant because we're putting up Chicago here at the Weathervane Playhouse, and for all two of you who don't know the show or the movie, the musical is one big mockery of justice. What you might not know is that the show wasn't a huge hit when it first opened in 1975. Not compared to what it is in its more recent revivals, anyway. Apparently, we were too innocent to appreciate seeing the foundations of our society as a burlesque back in those days.

I'm honestly not in the mood to see it now myself. Last October, a woman named Bonnie Bohacek killed my father when she swerved into his lane and hit him head on while he was driving home from work. She was arrested and indicted on several charges, including manslaughter, and, as a different article so eloquently put it, "driving while impaired by morphine and other drugs." She was acquitted on almost all of those charges this past June, and will spend at most 30 days in jail. As I understand it, the judge invalidated the subpoena to obtain her blood samples, and thus the toxicology report, creating reasonable doubt that she was impaired.

Contrary to what Ms. Sumasar says, our system of jurisprudence is still based on the idea that everyone is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If Bohacek's jury felt there was a reasonable doubt as to the criminality of her actions, I can live with that. It doesn't mean I'll be in a rush to forgive her any time soon, and it doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see her suffer, but I can live with the jury's verdict.

The thought that Bohacek somehow manipulated the system and got away with a crime makes me want to throw up. I'm not in the mood to watch a show that constantly reminds me that is a very real possibility.

A Victory for American Students and Teachers

2011-07-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

The National Center for Science education reported on Friday that the Texas Board of Education has rejected incorporating creationism into the biology curriculum in unanimously deciding to not ask for creationist revision to their biology texts. "So what?" you ask. You're not a Texan. True, but as one of the largest markets for text books in the country, the Texas Board of Education's influence is broad. When they insist on curriculum revisions from book publishers, publishers will generally meet their demands, and those text books are used in other states with far less clout.

This was a unanimous rejection of bringing creationism into the biology class room. No one on the board felt that it was appropriate to muddy the evolutionary waters with faith-based systems of understanding the world. I can't help but feel that's a significant milestone.

Elegy for the Last Voyage of the Ship of Dreams

2011-07-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Gizmodo have put together this tribute to the shuttle program. I can't help but choke up a little watching the shuttle launches to "Clair de Lune" (especially Challenger). Shuttles have been flying for almost all of my life, and now that Atlantis has arrived home safe and sound, I can't help but feel a little bit older and less relevant myself now that they won't be going up any more. These ships represent the pinnacle of American ingenuity and ambition.

In a Facebook post, President Obama called this "the end of the era of American space flight." Not "an" era, but "the" era. I can't help but think we won't be going back into space any time soon. Not, at least, in the same way that we once pursued the exploration of the void between ourselves and our neighbors in the cosmos as national endeavor. There are some who might view cynically my desire to live to see the first flag planted in the red sands of Mars be our own Stars and Stripes, but I hoped I would live to see the day. Now, I can't help but feel like that piece of my American dream has come to an end.

Our desire to touch the source of Debussy's moon shine was a thing of beauty in and of itself, but no less so were those marvels of modern engineering: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavor, and Atlantis. These ships were, and the dreams they carried, were things of beauty, and now they sail no more.

Weathervane's Renaissance Season

2011-07-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

It's hard to describe the ecstasy that washed over me after last evening's performance of As You Like It. First and foremost because it was very good, but also because I had to shelve this show five years ago, and it's been kicking around in my list of un-done plays ever since. While it's not uncommon for productions to fizzle out before they become a reality, As You Like It was the only one (in my experience) that did so after we had started rehearsing. Finally, I don't have to carry that weight.

Rosalind (Sarah Keyes Chang) give Orlando (Jordan Phillips)
a remembrance of her, while Celia (Nonye Obichere) looks on.

What makes it even better is that this production here at Weathervane was so much better than the production in Vermont ever would have been. Forget the fact that I'm a better director now than I was then, these actors are so much better than I had back then.

Making this show all the sweeter was that it allowed me the chance to correct an error I made in grad school; I never got to work with Sarah Keyes Chang. She's a wonderful actor, and you'll be hard pressed to find someone as skilled, versatile, hard working, and willing to experiment. You couldn't ask for a better actor for this role, and I was glad to see her shine. We never got the chance to work together as actor/director before she graduated with her MFA and moved to be with her husband in Atlanta this past December, which had grieved us both, but now that has been set to rights.

Which isn't to say that she was the only one. I was talking with Brice after the show, and he mentioned that everyone in the cast had their moments. True, and unsurprising. In modern musical theatre, it can be easy for an actor to get lost in a chorus, but not so in Shakespeare. Give an actor the chance to act, and they will. I hesitate to iterate over a list of everyone in the play and everything they did well; it would be a long list.

Jacques (Ross Lemon) admonishes Touchstone (Carlos
Leon) to be married by a proper priest.

I am likewise hesitant to praise anyone specifically because I don't want to give the impression that one did well when others did not, but apart from Sarah as Rosalind, who carries this shows, I feel the need to give special commendations to Ross Lemon as the melancholy Jacques. I really wanted to cut the "All the world's a stage" monologue early on. I've never seen it done well, and usually it just sucks the energy out of the show. Actors and directors usually handle the lines with such weight and reverence that it feels like watching someone recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Still, how do you cut one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare's canon? When people go to As You Like It, they expect to hear "All the world's a stage," so I had to leave it in, and when casting for Jacques, finding someone who I thought would do well with that monologue was one of my primary concerns. If you can make "All the world's a stage" come alive, you can make anything come alive. Ross did that. His "all the world's a stage" was sarcastic, energetic, and funny. He took one of the most tired tropes in the English language, brought it to life, and made me glad that I left it in.

Two Pages (Kristen Krak and Nick Wilson) play music for
Touchstone (Carlos Leon) and Audrey (Katie Smith), who
find the singing very untunable.

I would be remiss if I didn't give special thanks to Kristen Krak and Ellis Greer. Kristen played guitar for every song in the show. Seeing as how As You Like It has more songs than any other of Shakespeare's plays, that's a lot of music, and she played it very well.

Ellis is the costumer behind the "summer of love" idea that gave the show it's hippy flair. I could talk about how cool that is for As You Like It, but I've been posting pictures, so you can see for yourself.

Something you can't see in the pictures is the phrenetic energy the cast brought to the show. Some of you may know that we didn't get as much rehearsal time as any of us would have liked, but I'm wondering if that was not to our advantage. We rehearsed the show enough to lay down some solid foundations of character and language and, of course, to block it, but the fine tuning was largely left to the cast to do on their own. The result was a little unpolished and a little experimental; that is to say it felt a lot like a Ren Season show at the American Shakespeare Center, which tends to be the best work you'll see at the Blackfriars.

I know, I'm a little bit biased, but I can't help but brim with pride at the work they've done. Especially when I overhear audiences leaving the theatre talking about how nice it is to see Shakespeare performed at Weathervane. Pick the apple, everyone....

The cast of As You Like It

The Sound of Children

2011-07-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

The Sound of Music is boring. Everything that happens happens exactly according to plan. There are no twists, surprises, or difficult decisions anywhere in the play; they've already been made long before it begins. All you have to do is sit back and watch gravity happen. There's no surprise, no wit, no thought, just a lot of heartwarming songs with kids.

And man that sells. We've had two performances of Sound of Music now, and both have been sold out. I'm tempted to bemoan the likely inverse ticket sale pattern for things I'm more of a fan of, but those kids are so damned adorable.

It reminds me a little bit about that time I was worried about perfecting lighting cue for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (I would link to that blog post, but MySpace, in a move to make me have no regrets about abandoning their shitty web site, has deleted everything before my 17 May 2009 entry). We could have just dropped those kids in the middle of the stage and had them sing and dance around. Nothing else really matters. People come to Sound of Music to see cute kids being cute.

Not even Rodgers and Hammerstein cared much about the story. You know how I know? So much of the damned music is repeated. Brice said he cut 200 bars of music and it still feels pretentiously repetitious. I can imagine how that conversation went.

Rodgers: Hmm... if they like this song in act 1, I bet they'll like it again in act 2!
Hammerstein: You know what I bet they'll love more???
Rodgers: What?!?!?!
Hammerstein: The song twice in each act!!!!
Rodgers: ZOMG ur brilliant!!!1!!1

That is probably exactly how the conversation went down back in the 50s. I mean, seriously, when the entire premise of your play is "seven adorable kids sing adorably while escaping Nazis with the assistance of nuns," you're kind of giving yourself enough leeway to not care about "plot," "character development," or even "narrative."

And yet, bitter curmudgeon though I am, even I can't deny the children are adorable.

Quality

2011-07-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

Something I enjoyed in Huck Finn that didn't make the cut in Big River was Huck's discussion of people who were "quality." The Widow Douglas, and the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords are both identified as such, along with a mention that the quicksilver laden bread that is floated to find Huck's corpse is the kind "like the quality gets." The south seems to have hung on to a notion of gentility that the rest of the country has, at least, theoretically abandoned, and this was particularly true of the antebellum south that Huck inhabits. There is a social hierarchy in play that Huck, despite being rich, is not at the top of.

Big River is a lot more black and white (pun intended). There are black slaves, and everyone else. Maybe the twentieth century reader of Huck Finn is unprepared to deal comfortably with Twain's more nuanced approach toward race and class, but I think we lose something in the deal. Early twentieth century labor reformers tried to convince us that race was a distinction the bourgeoisie perpetrated to keep the proletariat fighting each other instead of for greater socio-economic equality. It seems to me that Twain is of a similar mind.

Huck and Jim really aren't "worlds apart," as the Big River song goes, and their journey together is a narrative of Huck learning to appreciate that. His declaration that he'll go to Hell is a formal rejection of the Widow Douglass' attempts to civilize him; he didn't fit in there, and ultimately the bloody world of the Grangerford's and Shepherdson's is unsustainable. Huck has more in common with Jim, who in socio-economic terms is chattel property, and not a man.

Larry Wilmore is spot on in his appraisal of the importance of the word "nigger" in Twain's novel. The cultural similarity between black man and white boy undermines the casual dehumanization of black people that "nigger" achieves. Because it's such a great discussion, here's an embed:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Mark Twain Controversy

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

That said, while Big River (rightly) includes use of "nigger" in the text, they have undermined Twain's point by the way they have presented their stage adaptation. I fully realize that a stage play is different than a novel. It wouldn't do to have Huck and Jim naked on stage, or truly in the dark, but in failing to address Huck's comparatively low place in a caste system that he himself is always aware of in the eponymous novel, Hauptman and Miller have done their source material a disservice.

Blocked

2011-07-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

"So... are we blocked?" Carlos, who is playing Touchstone in As You Like It asked me following our last rehearsal for a while on Thursday.

Yes, we were blocked, musiced, and just about everything else, all in the space of sixteen hours. A lot of you just did a double take right now. If it doesn't sound like enough time, you're right, but that's the nature of summer stock: figure out how much time you need to work a show up to perfection, and then divide by three.

Not counting tech, most shows here get about 80 hours of formal rehearsal, but they have more music and dance numbers than we do, and usually involve more complicated sets, which really cause problems in tech, but make for more complicated blocking during the process. As You Like It will get, by the time it's over with, about a third of that time. That's admittedly a lot less than I thought I was going to get, and I might be worried if I were working with a less skilled group of actors.

Of course none of them have masters degrees in Shakespearean performance... okay, that's a lie, Sarah does, but that's all one. They're musical theatre actors, which means they have a great sense of rhythm. We quickly got passed the initial fears of the language, and they're by and large taking this text and running with it.

Not having as much rehearsal time means having to have a lot of faith in my cast's initial choices, which I'm actually very comfortable with because they are so clearly good. I help them scan a passage and figure out how to play with the rhythm that Shakespeare has given them, but they take that scaffolding and turn it into smart and fun character choices. There's no one in this cast who doesn't have a great sense of timing and full command of their bodies in the space I've given them to play.

We're closing Big River tonight, and about to change over into/tech The Sound of Music, which means that we won't have time to do much more than we've done already. A run through on the day before and in the morning on the day of is all we have. I'm very proud of them all, and am only grieved that I don't have more time to polish the work they're doing.

I wish we had more time to polish, but I'll take this group's rough draft over other some other companies' best any day.

Good Luck, Godspeed, and Have a Little Fun Up There

2011-07-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

I can't swear to it, but I think the last time I watched a shuttle launch was January 28th, 1986. Space shuttles were still new and exciting back then, and the fact that the first member of the Teacher in Space program was aboard all got us out of class so we could collectively watch the launch of the Challenger. When she exploded 72 seconds in flight, no one was quite sure what to do. I remember teachers being confused and trying to re-assure us that everything was okay.

I don't think I was more traumatized than anyone else who didn't have a personal connection with the Challenger or her crew, but I haven't felt the need to watch any other launches.

Still, as the saying goes, things are interesting when they happen for the first time or the last time, and this morning Atlantis lifted off at 11:29 AM, a few minutes behind schedule, for STS-135. It is to be the final flight of NASA's Shuttle Fleet. This launch went perfectly, and while the fate of the Columbia and her crew is a stern warning that no part of the flight is safe until Atlantis is safely home, her crew is by now beginning their post-launch routine of the final mission of the program.

If you missed the launch, you can watch on YouTube:

As our nation continues to struggle with economic decline, I can't help but wonder about the future of space flight. I shudder to think that future generations will look back on this as the last day we reached for the heavens. But for now, I want to add my best wishes for a successful mission and safe return to Atlantis and her crew. As Launch Director Mike Leinbach so eloquently said: Good luck, Godspeed, and have a little bit of fun up there.

Theatrical Editing in the Computer Age

2011-07-05T21:01:00.000-07:00

Surprise! I've been thinking a lot about editing lately! Or maybe that is a legitimate surprise. I suppose most people, on finishing their thesis, might be inclined to set the topic aside for a while and work on something else for a bit, but the fact is my work on Merry Devil isn't complete until I have completed the performance-edition that was the ultimate goal of the work I began well over a year ago.

Dr. Menzer is directing this project, and felt that I needed to read some more recent editorial theory. To that end, I have been reading Peter L. Schillingsburg's Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. It's very good; I wish I'd had it when working on my thesis. While I'm not quite ready to report any progress on that endeavor, it made me realize that, with two weeks until we open As You Like It here at the Weathervane Playhouse, it might do me well to discuss some of my adventures in cutting the text.

Yes, we are presenting a lightly cut text. Brice wanted the play to run under two hours, and using the twenty-lines-a-minute calculus, As You Like It runs over that by about fifteen minutes. And, honestly, there are some things in the text I would have cut anyway. It's a four hundred year old musical comedy about four hundred year old literature, and I'm not such a purist to think that some of that can't comfortably go away. While I think I would rather have included slightly more of the text than we ultimately have, I'm pleased with the text I've given to the cast.

Rationale in a nutshell: I cut the text for sense, length, and completeness.

Me, being me, I consulted a few different versions of the text before making my cuts. The MIT Shakepseare, often maligned by scholars, served as a pretty good copy-text for the operation; it meant not having to type in the whole play, and the HTML is encoded with line and speech numbers, which made discussions about cutting with my AD (fellow Master of Letters Sarah Keyes Chang, who also plays Rosalind) that much easier. The First Folio text (also available online) was my primary point of cross reference, but I also kept the Folger, Arden, Oxford, Pelican, and Signet editions handy.

Of all these, the Arden was the least useful. It's the Arden 2 edition dressed up to look like an Arden 3, and the prefatory material by Juliet Dusinberre is a about a hundred pages of hokum. If you're looking for a good basic reading edition, I would recommend Mowat an Werstine's Folger edition. Alan Brissenden's Oxford edition offers slightly more advanced prefatory material.

There actually isn't a lot to choose from in As You Like It. The First Folio is our only original source for the play, so there's none of the rationalizing against quarto copy that you have to do with some of the others, and unlike Merry Devil, the play is very complete in and of itself. Still, even for the purposes of a single performance, I was creating my own edition of the play, and that's something I don't take lightly any more. You can't cut what you don't understand, and maybe with the exception of the Arden edition, they were all pretty helpful towards my understanding of the play.

Those of you who have been reading this blog since the early days might recall that As You Like It was the play I was first going to direct in Vermont, but that production fell through. I actually don't have much of my notes from that time because of a computer crash; the bulk of them exist purely as marginalia I jotted down in the Pelican edition that I was using as my primary text (cross referenced with the Folio) back then. That has been one of the most personally amusing things for me about this project; seeing what I cared about for that performance versus what I care about for this one.

In the end, nothing could convince me more about the ephemerality of play-text editing than that. Five years ago, I would have used a different performance text, and cared about different things that I do now. In another place, where I could perform the complete text if I desired, I would have cut less. As Schillingsburg is fond of noting, the practice of editing requires a good deal of critical judgment and creativity on the part of the editor, and sometimes the editor's personal aesthetic is all he or she has to go on. Just as Mowat, Werstine, Brissenden, Dolan (Pelican), and Gilman (Signet), and the MIT compositors provided the raw material for this text of As You Like It, I am trying to keep in mind that I am only producing more raw material for someone else with the Merry Devil text I hope to produce.

What Happened on July 4th, 1776

2011-07-04T18:56:00.000-07:00

The Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783, and ratified by the Congress of the Confederation on 14 January 1784. Either of these days could be used to mark the formal birth of our nation. The Battle of Yorktown concluded on 19 October 1781, resulting in the decisive American victory that led to the surrender of the British, and ultimately resulted in the Treaty of Paris, but we do not use this day to celebrate the birth of our nation, either. And yet we also do not celebrate 2 July 1776, the day the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence, as our independence day.

We celebrate July 4th. The day our Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress as the day our nation was born. It was a day we decided to not simply declare ourselves independent from the British Empire, but also to lay out our founding principles. We all know the second sentence, some of us by heart, but in these times where the founding history of our country is casually re-written by anti-government partisans this final sentence strikes me as the most important:

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

You have to remember that the founding fathers didn't agree with each other about a lot, and many or most of them didn't even like each other very much. Still, they vowed to work together to form a government founded on the philosophical ideals they laid out in this document.

Yes, a government. Because these ideals are not possible without a government to ensure they are preserved for all citizens. You don't even have to read very far to find that:

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

A good deal of interpretation is involved in reading any document, whether a historical artifact or a piece of fiction, but the people who are trying to dismantle our social institutions are not trying to save our government, nor are they fighting for our freedoms. They are trying to undo 235 years of progress, most of which (I won't say "all") is founded on this principle:

All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The anti-government partisans of the Tea Party are working to undermine the basic principles they claim to celebrate, and as they've demonstrated, they're not afraid to re-write history in order to do it. On this 235th birthday of the United States of America, let us all pause to consider exactly what it is we celebrate on July 4th: not a treaty, a military victory, or a vote, but a declaration of principles that has been a model for the world for over two centuries.

Guv'ment

2011-07-02T12:34:00.001-07:00

A song that always delights in Big River is "Guv'ment," a blues solo by Pap Finn that sets his antisocial tirades to music. Twain doesn't have anything good to say about Pap, but Hauptman and Miller give him a few lines to make him slightly more appealing, such as his plea for Huck to remember him from a better day. That gives me pause because "Guv'ment" could all too easily become a Tea Party battle hymn, which would be unfortunate as its textual source lies in a racist polemic. But don't take my word for it, here's what Pap says in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio -- a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me -- I'll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger -- why, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way.

If there was ever a time when "nigger" ought never be emended to "slave," that's it.

Of course, Pap is also concerned with getting his hands on the money Huck has managed to transfer to Judge Thatcher. He is, in short, an anti-government libertarian concerned primarily with his own well being. Hauptman and Miller have neglected to bring his casual racism to bear, and inserted some redeemable qualities to a man that Twain describes as "a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn't know no other way."

Then again, the Tea Party has already done enough to co-opt and revise historical fact to suite their own narrative that I really don't need to worry about them taking anything from a piece of musical theatre. Still, I can't help but feel that Hauptman and Miller have done a disservice to their source material by toning down the character.

Bad Dress....

2011-06-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

"Any history of illness?" the EMT asked our friend, who was still on the ground.

"No, just accident prone," he said with a wince.

Owen goes down all the time (snap, snap), but he usually bounces right back up again, despite the advice of everyone around him that maybe he shouldn't, so we were all a little bit scared when he stayed down after a fall shortly after starting the second act of our invited dress performance last night. Fortunately, he is okay, but he's also in no position to continue running things backstage during Big River.

But you know what they say, right? Bad dress, good opening. I'm not sure as I believe in those kinds of superstitions, but when someone in the company goes down with an injury, it's definitely a bad dress. No matter how good things were going up to that point. As I think yesterday's post indicated, I had no illusions about last night being perfect, but then again, as artistic directors are wont to remind invited dress audiences, it is still a rehearsal.

Fortunately, we have a great company here, filled with tolerant and flexible people. Brian, the lighting designer, volunteered to step in backstage and take over Owen's track, and the acting company is every bit as tolerant and flexible. When a single, faulty $5 adapter shuts down a tech rehearsal, they patiently await a resolution, reviewing their material. When an accident brings a dress rehearsal to a halt and necessitates bringing someone else in to run back stage, they show up in good spirits early on opening morning for a full day of rehearsing to get there.

As we rehearse the second half of the show, I can't help but reflect on that saying. We are going to have a great opening tonight; I can feel it, but it's got nothing to do with superstitions: we've got a great bunch of people working here, and that is what ensures the success of our work.

Pick Your Exhaustion

2011-06-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

"If I a knowed what trouble it was to enact this history, I never woulda tackled it," says Huck at the end of Big River. On our last day of tech, I kinda know what he means. I'm not saying it's going to be a bad show, but I can only pull so many twenty-out-of-twenty-fours in a week. For some reason, the third show of the season has a tendency to jump up and drop kick you in the stomach here at the Vane, and elsewhere, too, as I recall and here report. I know I'm not the only one in that boat, but times like this I can't help but feel that maybe I'm getting a little too old to be doing this.

Getting being the operative word there. I don't think any of us feels like we wouldn't have enacted this history, but I think our general feeling is that we would do so with less wagons (which is theatre speak for a rolling platform). We've got a raft, a skiff, a canoe, a table, a dock, and a two-story house unit, which routinely docks with the two-story platform units on either side (people clime up on the roofs, so they count as two stories). It just takes a lot of rehearsal for that, and on summer stock schedules, that means cramming those rehearsals in the last 72 hours or so before opening.

This reminds me a lot of our production of The Producers here last year, which also had a lot of wagons. Truthfully, it's a comfort to remember that show was a hit, and we weren't in as good a place for that one as we are for Big River. Still, I can't help but think that we might try for something a little bit less fully realized on the Blackfriars. Huck and Jim's raft would probably be right in the middle of the stage, and actors would enter with bare scenery fragments in their hands. When Huck and Jim guided the raft to show, the actors with the scenery would walk closer to the raft. It would be a hell of a lot simpler.

Then again, it wouldn't look as good. Here's a taste:

That's pretty much the whole company performing the opening number. The sets, lights, and costumes sure are pretty, aren't they? So's the sound, just for the record, and I know the costumes at the American Shakespeare Center are pretty, too, but seeing the actors play on the same set all the time gets to be a little tiresome.

I guess you just have to pick your tiresome in this world. I imagine I'll be right glad to get myself a rest when this is all over, but it won't be too long before I get tired of that and look to get another project going.

For now, I need some more coffee. Making Big River perfect is gonna take just about all 29 hours that we've got left, but I get the feeling that, unlike Huck, I'll be glad for the chance to have told the story, even knowing how much work it would be.

Medicine Show within a Play

2011-06-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

You probably don't know that I'm the Assistant Director for Weathervane's production of Big River. In that capacity, Brice has asked me to keep a an eye on the Duke and the King (if you don't know Big River, it's a musical adaptation of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). Partially because I've got very good at comedy over the years, but also because both of these characters have affected speech styles, and an ear for rhythms of speech is something that Masters of Letters get very good at.

The Duke fascinates me, especially. A self-styled tragedian who tries performing mach ups of Shakespeare in the Arkansas back-country, and blames the "flat heads" for not swallowing his terrible bombast. In the book, the Duke and the King make a go at their Shakespearean performances, and only after they fail do they resort to the freak show of the "Royal Nonesuch." In the musical, they skip right to the Nonesuch, based on the King's inability to play Juliet.

I feel the need to mention that this sort of ultra-light scenes from Shakespeare isn't historically inaccurate. Some time ago I listened to something from the Folger, which I am too lazy to look up right now and properly cite, detailing the development of Shakespearean performance in America. Very small groups or traveling performers, or even soloists performing a mashup of scenes from Shakespeare could be extremely popular in an era before television and radio.

Except the Duke is very bad at it. What makes it funny, of course, is that he thinks that he's very good, despite his having to get by by selling an agent to take the tartar off of teeth (and most of the enamel along with it). Thus they resort to the Nonesuch which is, in the novel, simply the King stripped naked and painted in fantastic ways and doing a dance. In the musical he's slightly more clothed, and there's more of a medicine show feel to the whole thing. All the Duke has to do in the novel is add "Women and Children not admitted" to the sign ("and if that don't fetch 'em, I don't know Arkansas"), whereas in the musical he needs to do a Harold Hill like number to draw in a crowd. Perhaps the most crucial difference is that, in the novel, the citizens of Brick Town enjoy the Nonesuch, their only problem with it is that it's too brief.

While the Duke is drumming up a crowd in his musical number, one of the citizens of Brick Town notes that another medicine show has come to town, and it seems like a mildly more interesting afternoon than setting a dog on fire. That seems like a pretty low standard to me, which makes me wonder why they don't stick with the tragedy. Even a very bad Romeo and Juliet has to be more entertaining than lighting a dog on fire. Then again, I'm not from the Arkansas back country, so what do I know?

Miraculous self-improvement vis-a-vie itinerant preachers and snake oil salesmen has been a staple of entertainment for centuries. While you're less likely to see someone riding into your town on a covered wagon, the last time I watched a television to all hours of the morning, that's exactly the kind of fair that infomercials continue to peddle. I can't say that it was the greatest entertainment I've experienced, but it was at least entertaining enough for me to keep the television on.

As for the language of the Duke and the King, it's going to be a special challenge for both actors. Mark Twain was very specific in his use of dialect in writing Huck Finn, to the point where he includes n explanatory describing his personal experience with dialects, concluding it with the note that "I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all the characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding." That is, however, exactly what the Duke and the King do. The Duke adopts the affectation of a Shakespearean actor, the King of a preacher, and then later on the King tried to adopt the Duke's affectation for his own performance as the English uncle of three ladies. The two con men are little more than bundles of affectations.

So far Brice is pleased with what he's seen from those rehearsals, and I can't wait to see how Phil and Dennis (who are playing the Duke and the King, respectively) digest the work we did today. Fortunately, given the way summer stock schedules work, I won't have to for long.

What are the 39 Steps?

2011-06-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

That question is at the heart of Hitchcock's thriller, and the stage adaptation that we're running now at the Weathervane Playhouse. It's also on the lips of audiences making their way into the theatre. Out in central Ohio, most haven't heard of this long-running comedy, and for that reason alone producing it here can bit a bit risky. The self-conscious theatricality of most of the comedy in the show is another. In a theatre known for productions of traditional book musicals, how will a meta-theatrical satire with an off-off broadway production sensibility play?

I don't think I've heard laughter like we had on opening night before at the Vane. That's very encouraging. The 39 Steps has a romance, but it isn't a romantic comedy; it's actually a very cerebral comedy that requires it's audience to be familiar with conventions of film and theatre, but you still have to know Hitchcock's work to get the full pay off.

One of the comments often tossed around is that people don't like Shakespeare because Shakespeare requires you to think, and that people don't like thinking. I actually disagree with both of those premises, but the success of The 39 Steps here is an excellent object lesson in how much people do like to think. Theatre audiences, especially, respond well to intelligent plays that are well done, but the key lies in that "well done." No one likes to feel like they're getting a lecture when they've paid for an evening's entertainment, after all.

I suppose I could tell you how well the cast has pulled this show off, but I will instead point you to the review in the Newark Advocate. It's been a challenge working on this one, and it's nice to know our work is appreciated.

Sound Design Tour de Force

2011-06-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

"Cue up quadruple-K-point-5," Payson, our stage manager, said to my playback deck op in last night's rehearsal.

"Quadruple-K-point-5?!?!" said one of the actors in shock.

For those of you who don't know, sound cues tend to be indexed with letters instead of numbers because there are generally more lighting cues in a show, which are easier to call with numbers. If you have more than 26 sound cues, you start doubling up letters. The production of The 39 Steps that I'm designing now (it opens Thursday. Don't let my comps go to waste) has so many sound cues that we're quadrupling up the letters, and I'm starting to think I may have more cues than lighting. That's a new experience for me.

Designing this show (along with running the last one) has been occupying a lot of my time these past couple weeks, and I think I was getting slightly dispirited because of it. Don't get me wrong, I love that the show has such a fully realized sound scape, and John Hurley, our director, has kept pushing me in ever more cinematic directions throughout. After watching our first run through tonight, I was feeling very pleased with my work. It's just been more work than I think I anticipated, which has meant that some other things (like As You Like It) have fallen to the way side a bit.

Fortunately, as far as that goes, I have Sarah Keyes Chang, a fellow Master of Letters graduate (actually, she's finished her MFA), as my Rosalind and Assistant Director, and she's been able to devote more brain power to AYLI than I am at the moment. I'm sure I'll have wonderful things to be telling you about that soon.

As far as The 39 Steps is concerned, it's a delightful homage and parody of one of Hitchcock's (I almost said "Shakespeare's," to give you an idea of what I think of that man's work) earlier films, and all of his films in general. The licensing agreements didn't give us the rights to use anything from the films, however, so I've had to get in Hitchcock's head a little bit and try to trace some of the inspiration/source material for some of the more notable themes from his movies. On the whole, I think I've done a pretty good job, and combined with some of the more parodic sound choices, as Barlow's script dictates.

While Hitchcock's film is typical Hitchockian fare, Barlow has adapted the material to be a wonderful send up of Hitchcock's early work. What is suspenseful on screen is farcical on stage when two actors take on 150 some odd roles, including men, women, children, and inanimate objects. John had asked me to make the sound scape of the play a little more serious to serve in contrast to the comedy, and while we have deviated from that somewhat, I think the concept works quite well over all. I think my favorite moments come when we heighten the farce by making the sound take itself so very seriously. You know you're doing something very right when the cast is thanking you for the music you're underscoring them with, and one of them paid me such a compliment tonight. I call that a win.

Of course, the farce of the stage play will make a lot more sense once you've seen Hitchcock's original. So I'm going to leave you with this link to go watch it on Hulu and get to bed. I have another long day ahead of me. As I indicated above, I have a lot of sound cues to keep track of.

About that Time, Isn't It?

2011-06-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

As we were finishing the strike for Little Shop and thinking of heading home for the night, I couldn't help but notice that we were at about the same time where we were when Matthew was killed last year. It's strange to think about because his presence at the playhouse is still so strong. Small wonder for the man who made the theatre what it is today. None of us then had any idea that we were saying our last goodbyes, and I think passing the first anniversary (even though the season calendar does not line up perfectly with the date) made us all a little bit more mindful to do exactly that.

I think I feel badly for Brice most of all. He's the Artistic Director now, and I can only imagine that my request that he let me know when he got home was only one of many. Those of us who were here last year shared the painful experience in losing a friend, but the experience of losing a commander is more painful in some ways. I don't think any of us escaped the superstitious impulse that we might have to go through it again.

Since there were no early morning text messages asking us to assemble at housing, and no other details provided, I feel safe in presuming that everyone made it home last night. This time. But I know too many people who never made it home last year to delude myself into thinking that it can't happen again. Or even that it won't.

That said, if the experience was good for nothing else, it was for this lesson: the world keeps turning. Cruel as it may be so at first, the system of the universe continues to function irrespective of our grief. While others knew my friend longer than I did, I can take some comfort in this fact now, and I know he would be happy to see his theatre continuing to thrive without him. That was true of the work we did in the last season, and as the quality of Little Shop has demonstrated, it continues to be so now.

A Good Beginning

2011-06-08T20:25:00.000-07:00

Little Shop of Horrors is entering it's final weekend of performances here at the Weathervane Playhouse, so if you haven't had a chance to see it yet, this is the time. From here we'll be moving on to The 39 Steps, which may have more music and sound effects than any other show I've designed, which has been a challenge in it's own right.

As we head into this first change over, I feel the need to give a shout out to Ethan and Jordan, my assistants here in the sound department. They've come a long way these past couple of weeks, and I am greatly pleased to say are at the point where I can start handing them complicated projects and letting them figure out all the details. It's a particular point of pride for me that I have been often complimented on how well my shop is running and how reliable my crew is. I'm privileged to have these guys working for me.

Since I'll soon begin rehearsing both As You Like It and Big River, this is a load off my mind. I'm very glad to know I'll be leaving my shop in good hands when I am otherwise occupied.

How I Know I'm a Loser

2011-06-06T17:44:00.000-07:00

Back in my day, days off during summer stock were a rare commodity. Maybe you got one once every two weeks if you were lucky, and I was supposed to (and admittedly did) feel privileged when I was asked to help set up, run a console, and strike a guest artist performing during a theatre's dark day. But here at Weathervane, we try to give everyone a day off each week. When we can't, that can mean a couple half days, or two days the following week. You get the idea. Kids today are spoiled.

Not like I don't think it's a good idea. You would be surprised what a little bit of rest will do for one's cognitive ability. Staring down a list of fixes on two or three hours sleep, I was certain I would be able to complete them in no less than 3 or 4 hours. After getting a straight eight, I managed to get them all done in less than 30 minutes. A rested brain is a functional brain.

So this was supposed to be my day off. The only one I was going to get during Little Shop's run, but I just couldn't afford to take it. There's a pile of sound cues and musics I need to get together for The 39 Steps, and the sooner they can get them in rehearsal the better, so on top of the pile of things I've been doing to try to keep life in order, I've spent about a third of my time working on that show. I'll probably spend more on it, actually.

But that's not the only way I can tell. The other, bigger indicator is that I'm still getting catharsis from the same music I did when I was a teenager. For some reason, I can't help but feel that feeling like Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley still "get" me after all this time is a bad thing. Especially since I've never had a soft spot in my heart for suicidal heroin addicts. Really, fuck both of them. But also, their music is what might happen if you distilled self-loathing and then galvanized it into an audible form. For a taste:

I kinda hate to admit that after listening to that, I kinda do feel better about life. I'm still 15 years old, apparently. Not that I'm proposing that I need to do anything to change or develop more sophisticated tastes, mind you. I have more Haydn than Nirvana in my iTunes, which might have something to do with Haydn not being a suicidal heroin addict. Still, masochistic and depressing music is doing wonders to make me feel better.

I think I'll sign off for the day with this little ditty:

Yeah... that's the stuff...

Get It

2011-06-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

I think I could mix "Git It" for the rest of my life. For the two or three people out there who don't know the show, "Git It" is the number from Little Shop where the plant Audrey 2 offers to give Seymour anything he wants if Seymour will go out and kill people so the plant can eat. Here's what it looks like in the movie musical:

And just because these kids impressed the hell out of me by their willingness to take on Little Shop in a not very large black box space, here's what it looks like in a high school production I also found on YouTube:

This number is the fulcrum of the show, and also the best. Here Audrey 2 emerges as a fully sentient force that demands to consume more than Seymour himself is going to be able to provide. In order to feed the plant, Seymour is going to have to kill himself or someone else. And in just a few lyrics, Seymour and Audrey 2 have a rock solid buddy relationship that Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles share. If one buddy happens to be preying on the other, that's just verisimilitude.

We also learn what Seymour really wants. Money? Girls? One Particular girl? How about that Audrey? No. He wants a Harley so he can make a bunch of random guys on a random street corner jealous. Orin slapping Audrey doesn't give Seymour the motivation to go out and kill people, it simply provides him a convenient victim; a look at the Corman film reveals a Seymour who is perfectly willing to kill a number of innocent bystanders to sate the hunger of Audrey 2. In "Git It" we learn that Seymour is the monster of the story; Audrey 2 is just the enabler.

It's creepy, campy, disturbing, and fun. "Git It" is Little Shop of Horrors in microcosm. The fact that one of the principals in the song is a hungry, man-eating plant only makes it better. "Git It" might just be the best song from any musical ever written.

Without meaning any offense to the kids of Thomas Worthington High, and a puppet created by Frank Oz and the magic of cinema notwithstanding, our production at the Weathervane Playhouse is better. It looks hot, and if I do say so myself, it sounds hot. If you're in the greater columbus area, you've got one more week to see a rock musical at its best.

The Devil You Know

2011-05-31T01:30:00.000-07:00

Truth be told, the plant I made for that high school production of Little Shop back in the day looked a lot like it was made by a high school student. The Audrey 2 that we've brought in for the shows at Weathervane looks a lot better, is (generally) sturdier and (generally) capable of doing a lot more. That said, it does have three limitations.

First, the third stage pod, which sings "Feed Me," doesn't have lips, which theoretically makes it impossible for it to pronounce m's, b's, and p's. Oh the magic of theatre! It's a little bit distracting, but then again, I'm obsessive compulsive about such things. Also, the fourth stage pod doesn't have that limitation, so it's not something I have to live with very long.

Second, it's very symmetrical. We built a little bit of asymmetry into our plant back in high school because very little in nature is perfectly symmetrical, but those moments of asymmetry blossomed in the latter stages of the plant, which made it fearsome and grotesque. This brings me to...

Third, this plant is always fearsome and grotesque. The earlier stages of our plant in high school were cuter, and as the plant grew progressively larger and hungrier, it became less pleasant to look at. Strange and interesting, sure, but there should be something attractive about the plant early on. It should be the kind of cute little pet that you might want to bring home with you. I can't help but feel as if making the plant so dangerous looking early on is a little like a common scene design mistake in Macbeth: if Macbeth's castle is dark and foreboding, why does Duncan want to spend the night there? Why does he compliment the tapestries? If the younger Audrey 2 is so grotesque, why does it attract so much attention?

Honestly, it's one of the reasons I'm always a little hesitant to trust people who are too pretty. It makes me think they've got something to hide.

Like I said, these plants are really nice, and it feels good knowing that, structurally at least, the professionally built plant has a lot in common with the plant of my youth. Still, it feels a bit better knowing that there are still some things about those plants I built once upon a time that I still prefer, and that, had I to do it over again, I would keep.

Back to my Roots

2011-05-26T21:43:00.000-07:00

Because I like to establish masochistic patterns of professional behavior early in life, there really was no one first show I ever did because I started work on two shows at once within weeks of each other in my last year of high school. One of those was Little Shop of Horrors, for which I quickly became the person most responsible for the construction of the four different stages of Audrey 2, the man-eating plant that is, no offense to any others, the star of the show.

That experience wasn't very good for my health. Long hours and sometimes late nights, and a diet of Burger King and Vending Machines, left me with a pre-ulcerous condition that nearly cost me my perfect attendance in my senior year of high school, which I was determined to achieve just for the sake of doing. Yeah, I've always been stubborn. But anyway, I decided that this theatre thing couldn't possibly be for me, and so decided not to do it ever again.

Then in my freshman year of college I found myself doing the same damned thing for a less organized group of people, and somehow that helped me figure out this would be my career. From this, we can all clearly see my history of being stubborn and of making bad life choices. Or, at the very least, good life choices for very bad reasons.

So here I am, back at the Weathervane Playhouse for my third season, and what's the first show on the menu? That's right: Little Shop. Fortunately, Brice has rented us a nice plant (although, as props, scenic, and costumes will tell you, it needed some work), but with a new grid, stage monitor system, and wireless com system in place, what I was anticipating would be a pretty easy setup has turned into a major PITA. I keep telling myself "once it's hung, it's hung, and once it's in the rack, it's in the rack," and that does make me feel better, but the just-before-we-got-started departure of the managing director has left everyone scrambling.

Still, it's good to know that I can still find time to talk Lit & Phil with Brice. I am a Master of Letters, after all. Something that really bothered me about this show back in the day was the way that the message seems to be that there really is no way to better yourself in this world, especially not by trying to bring a little bit of beauty into it. No one cares about the roses in Mushnik's Skid Row Florist until they put a hideous looking fly trap in the front window. And, spoiler alert, everybody dies.

Maybe the sadist dentist had it coming, and Seymour is the one who did all the killing, but Mushnik? Audrey? Okay, so Mushnik is a tool, but Audrey? Because I am a student of early modern theatre, when I see a giant mouth on stage consuming live bodies, I think Doctor Faustus. Audrey 2 is a slightly greener and more musical version of the hell mouths that have been a staple of the Western stage since medieval times, and the fact that all those eaten by the plant are actually absorbed by the plant, with our romantic leads spending their after lives separated by a hell mouth and next to their temporal abusers, their damnation is even more obvious.

Audrey is neither a good angel nor a martyr because she is damned. So what did she do to deserve it? That's a question that's been perplexing me from the very beginning. The key comes in her own admissions. Orin beats and degrades her, but she stays with him because he is, in her own words, a professional. Orin throws around money in a place that doesn't have any, and has the appearance of a savior because of it, but his only pleasure is the pain of others. That makes him less a Jesus and more a Satan, but Audrey stays with him for his money; she's trying to use him, she's just not very good at it.

Normally, in a romantic comedy, you would expect love to have some kind of redeeming power, but Seymour's pet hell mouth decides to devour the only thing Seymour ever loved when he refuses to feed it. Seymour's rescue is too late, but Audrey asks to be fed to Audrey 2 after she dies so that the plant can continue to bring good things to Seymour. She does this, of course, knowing that Seymour fed Orin and Mushnik to the plant; i.e. that Seymour is a monster.

Still, I can't be too hard on Audrey, Seymour, or any of the others, really. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe gives us a rhetorical battle of logos. The Good Angel on one side and the Bad Angel on the other vying for Faustus' soul. Faustus simply chooses to listen to the Bad Angel and Mephistopheles' appeals to his own vanity. He always has a clear choice, despite Mephistopheles' excellent sophistry, and he always chooses badly. We like Faustus, we even pity him, but it is his own damned fault. Pun intended.

The world of Little Shop of Horrors is one without a Good Angel. Everyone is inherently alone with their own suffering, until Audrey 2 shows up and offers Seymour a way out. Without a Good Angel to tell Seymour he's talking to Mephistopheles, how is he to know any better? And Menken and Ashman's musical doesn't waste time with logic or rhetoric, it's pure pathos. You would have fed the plant, too.

Of course, Doctor Faustus isn't the only classical model Menken and Ashman drew on. There is a clear distinction between Seymour feeding Orin and Mushnik to the plant. Don't get me wrong, the music during that first feeding at the end of act one tells us that this is the start of something really awful, but Seymour is able to kill Orin by simply letting the latter man die through the free exercise of his own vices. Seymour doesn't have to do anything inherently evil, he simply refrains from doing something good. Of course you know what they say about all that is required for evil to exist...

If you take a look at the Divine Comedy, as Dante makes his way through the Inferno, he has no idea how he gets from one circle of Hell to the next until he hits the fifth. He always passes out in horror and lets the forces that be transport him to the next place. These first circles are dedicated to since of incontinence (weakness of the will). Dante poses that there is a different between giving in to casual lust or gluttony and choosing to kill someone for the same of those passions. The death of Orin is one of incontinence on Seymour's part.

Audrey 2 is as brilliant of an equivocator as Mephistopheles is, and lacking a Good Angel to tell Seymour that he shouldn't be killing people, he falls for Audrey 2's injunction that "a lot of folk deserve to die." Orin is beating the woman Seymour loves. Seymour can protect her, but while Mushnik has abused Seymour since he was a boy, Muchnik can't hurt Seymour any more. There's a different between a ten year old shooting an abusing parent and a thirty year old doing the same thing. Besides, Mushnik is right; and in a somewhat bizarre twist, is one of the few characters who ever suffers from a pang of conscience: Mushnik actually invokes the name of conscience when he asks Seymour to go to the police and make a statement about Orin's death, and Seymour feeds him to Audrey 2 to save his own skin. Just as Dante is clearly aware of how he got to the fifth circle of Hell, Seymour is clearly aware that he is actively killing Mushnik here. There's no wiggle room this time.

If you've seen the movie-musical version, you might know that they followed the original musical ending, but it didn't test well, so they re-shot it. In a very key way, it was more depressing than the musical ending. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can watch it on YouTube:

If you know the musical, you might have caught that there are no Zombie-Seymour or Zombie-Audrey to sing that lyric "we'll have tomorrow" in this version. No, we won't. In a world without a Good Angel to guide us, the devil just has to make us feel a little bit less damned. The planet Earth is a dark and dismal place, and even Audrey's fantasy about "Somewhere that's Green" is a dream of a manufactured, artificial place, scented not by pines but by Pinesol. Audrey herself is aware that she is going somewhere that's green when she asks Seymour to feed her to the plant, and while it might not be what she had in mind, I don't know as Menken and Ashman have distinguished from the housing development she longs for and the belly of the plant she gets.

But back to my classical models. How I love them so!

In Inferno, the worst layers of Hell are reserved for those who commit sins devoid of passion, or rather, contrary to what their passion should have been. Those who suppress their right feelings for the sake of profit are kept in the worst agony. Seymour commits such a sin in feeding Audrey to Audrey 2. Not his choice of language when accosting Audrey 2 in the play's penultimate scene: "you ate the only thing I ever loved" (emphasis mine). As Celia so eloquently puts it in As You Like It "was is not is." Seymour's use of the past-tense implies that he's not doing it any more. In placing Audrey's still-warm corpse in the mouth of Audrey 2, Seymour has made a convenience of the woman he should have cherished. He is the worst sinner in this world, and Menken and Ashman weren't exactly being subtle when they had Seymour willingly and knowingly jump into the Hell mouth that he has nurtured.

I've come full circle in my philosophical conundrum with this show. When I was a teenager, I was deeply disturbed by a play that offered the broken-down and beaten no way out of their situation. Now I am deeply disturbed by a play full of characters who are willing participants in their own damnation, and of a world where there is no Good Angel to keep them on the right path. The world of Little Shop of Horrors is one where God has abandoned us to the devil's devices, and lacking the presence of the Divine to guide us, we are bestial servants of our own passions. We are all consumers of each other in this world, and Audrey 2 is simply a manifestation of our own willingness to be damned.

Sleeves and a Hood

2011-05-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

As my Master of Letters graduation approached, all I could think of was that scene in Return of the Jedi where the emperor ominously tells Luke "from this time forward you will call me 'master.'" Honestly, it doesn't mean that much: my work continues, other projects are both going into and fast coming out of the pipe, and I will continue working on the project that was my thesis this summer, and probably for some time into the future. Mastery is not an destination, it's a journey, but now I have a certificate that says that I have come so far.

I was looking forward to graduation because I actually enjoy these ceremonial points in life, but what really made me smile was getting sleeves and a hood. For those of you who don't know, graduate academic regalia differs from undergrad regalia in that it has longer sleeves (which are actually constructed in the early modern style), and a hood. Although, at Mary Baldwin, the undergrads get to wear a hood to, which is kind of a rip off because we didn't do that at SUNY Potsdam, and I don't know of any other undergrad ceremonies that do. I had to write a bloody thesis to get my hood, damn it!

But whatever. I've got my sleeves and a hood now, and I bloody well earned them. I was tempted to show up at Weathervane wearing my regalia, but that started to sound a little bit over the top, even for me. Besides, part of the fun of that garb is that you only wear it on the most special of special occasions. It is ceremonial in a way that little or nothing else in our society is, and far be it from me to profane that mystery.

Marry in May

2011-05-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

There's an old saying that goes "Marry in May, rue the day." The tradition is likely grounded in Ancient Roman tradition that pitted Juno, goddess of marriage, against Maia, a fertility goddess. Take a guess where the months of June and May get their names from.

Maybe I'm thinking about this because I've been staring so fixedly at As You Like It. Therein, young love (aka lust) is metamorphosed into the sort of mature love that can be sanctified by the institution of marriage, which is one of the bulwarks of civilization. Marry in May, and you marry too soon. You give over to the childish passionate impulses that proved the ruin of that pair of less-fortunate-because-they-were-less-mature lovers in Romeo and Juliet. Marry in May, and you tried to build the foundations of your house on quicksand. It might seem silly, but as Mr. Webb said, "there's a lot of common sense in superstition."

Still, some have to fly in the face of it, I suppose. And like the damned in the Inferno, it would be wrong to pity them. They have chosen their own folly, and karma frowns on them. Today is a particularly bad day for a wedding. If you must marry today, do yourself the courtesy of suicide before the day is out. This last piece of wisdom comes from a dream I had. There is no scientific justification for honoring the wisdom of our dreams, of course, but as Mr. Webb said, "there's a lot of common sense in superstition," and I would not seek to fly in the face of it.

Staunton, Virginia: Unfriendly to Business

2011-05-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

"Isn't it enough that you pay taxes?" asked one of my bosses, upon learning that the so-called "city" of Staunton, Virginia was requiring me to obtain a business license. Answer, no, apparently it's not. In Staunton, Virginia, you not only pay taxes, you have to buy a license to pay taxes. And just because I know you're curious, the area is pretty heavily dominated by Republicans. Yeah...

So I was going to start out by writing that if you were thinking of setting up business in Staunton, Virginia, or making money in any sort of way whatsoever while living in Staunton, Virginia, Staunton, Virginia might be a bad place for you to move to. Not only can you not get a slice of pizza downtown past 10 PM, but you have to obtain a professional license for the privilege of doing, conducting, or participating in the process of business. This in a place that wouldn't even catch your eye were it not for the world's only re-creation of Shakespeare's original indoor playhouse and Mary Baldwin College.

Sure, I could trash Staunton, Virginia, but why should I? Nothing makes Staunton look bad like Staunton, after all, and I slowly started to realize that owning this license to do business has one greatly vainglorious perk: I am now officially a licensed stage director because I paid $30 for the privilege. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone starts delivering wheelbarrows full of money for me to direct a Broadway tour.

And to think I've invested all this time and effort in a graduate degree! All I ever had to do was go to city (lol) hall and fork over $30, and viola! Licensed professional stage director! Kinda puts the Master of Letter's I'm getting on Sunday in perspective, doesn't it? Hmm... you know something: "Licensed Professional Stage Director" has a nice ring to it. Maybe I should print up some new business cards.

Writing Creatively About Editing

2011-05-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

One of the common questions I've got from my fellow grad students is how this Writing Creatively About Science Class has been. It's been a little bit difficult for me to assess while inside of the moment. On the one hand, it was a 200-level undergrad class, which I only took one of whilst I was an undergrad, so the work was a little bit less intense than I'm used to. On the opposite hand, it was a chance to learn from a professional writer whom I have been a fan of for years, and whom I have come to greatly respect as a person and a professional.

While the focus of the class was on science writing, I have come to understand that the kind of science writing we were reading and scaffolding in this class is not indifferent from the types of writing that early modern scholars might be called upon to do. I recently read James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare to help me prep for my upcoming work on As You Like It. The book is rich, and richly sourced, and yet is written for a popular audience, not a scholarly one. Much as the facts of genetic history, new understandings of neurotransmitters, or the real world effects of radiation leaking out of Japanese reactors can be hard to convey to the mythical creature known as the General Reader without framing it in the context of a narrative, so to my studies in some of the finer details of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Honestly, as I look to the process of turning my thesis work on editing and bibliography into a new performance edition of Merry Devil, I can't help but feel that this class has been invaluable. It's given me a conduit to connect with readers who haven't spent two years of their lives breathing in bibliographic data.

Topping it all off, Prof. Sobel has guided me in the direction of a time consuming research project that has nothing to do with Early Modern London. As I start to consider life options beyond the Shakespeare Convent, that, too, is invaluable.

I'm going to miss this class, this professor, and my non-grad student classmates more than I ever thought I would. If any of you are reading this, thank you for a most interesting, informative, and unique experience.

Internship Mania, part 2

2011-05-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

Back in early April, I gave some advice to the aspiring interns and apprentices looking to land their first gigs in summer theatre this season. With the start of Weathervane's summer season just a few days away, I thought it might be pertinent to give a little bit more. This post is mostly meant for those of you who found an internship/apprenticeship and are about to head off for God-only-knows-what, but I want to take a moment to speak to the rest of you first.

If you didn't find a killer internship/apprenticeship, it's not the end of the world. In fact, pretending you land some form of gainful employment, you're likely to start the following academic year better able to afford text books than some of your peers. In fact, I have no doubt some of you did not pursue an intern-/apprenticeship for this very reason. Yes, you are missing out on valuable experiences &c; there are a lot of good reasons to do an intern-/apprenticeship, but there's also a lot you can do over the summer without one. Here are a few recommendations:

Learn to tie a bowline and a clove hitch. I generally make my interns do this before they arrive anyway.
Go to plays. As many as you can. And as many different plays as you can. Take notes while you're there. What do you like about the acting/costumes/sound/scenery &c? Most of your fellows who are doing internships only get to see five or six plays all summer. You can probably see more.
Volunteer at theatres. Especially during change overs, theatres can really use an extra set of hands. Here is a way to get some hands on tech experience, and get you used to the idea of working over-hire. Also, you'll be meeting and working with people who might help you find something next season. Volunteering as an usher is usually a decent way to see shows for free.
Read a lot of books. I promise you that you can never know too much math.

Hopefully, that keeps you busy.

For the rest of you, here are some brief tips on how to be a good intern/apprentice.

Don't over pack. Pretending that you're not working close to home, it can be tempting to bring too much. I promise you you will NOT have time to get through an entire box of books, and chances are you'll be sharing a small room with at least one other person. I've previously worked for theatres where my bed was a bunk in the attic, and the only storage was a stretch of floor to the side of it. It's easy to bring too much of things.

With few exceptions, do not bring your own tools. Chances are, your contract specifies that the theatre is not responsible if they're lost, stolen, or damaged, and if you own nice tools, chances are that you're not making enough to replace them. Just leave them home.
Do bring the following tools. These are pretty basic and inexpensive, and no stage hand should be without them:

A small flashlight
A pair of work gloves
Pencils
Pens
Sharpies
Some small legal pads that fit in your back pocket.
A seal able water bottle.
If you have a pocket knife or multi-tool, you won't be sorry you brought it.

Do bring something fancy-ish: A nice suit or dress, as appropriate. Theatres will sometimes have semi- or formal occasions, and you'll want to show that you can clean up nice.

Professional etiquette. Remember, you're an intern/apprentice because you lack professional experience. No matter how skilled or respected you are in your school theatre, you're here to learn by doing. This is a long version of saying do what you're asked, but there are some finer points to how to get the most out of this experience.

Do what you are asked to do by your supervisors without complaining about it.
Do not interrogate the choices of the designer and director you are working for. If you call their work into question, you're going to get the reputation of a snot-nosed punk, and you're life will be difficult this summer.
Do not question the ability of the people you're working with with anyone you're working with. If you need to vent, do so to a friend from outside the organization.
Do not do not do not question the decisions your supervisor has made in front of their supervisor(s). They probably thought of the same alternative you're thinking of, and have a very good reason for not bringing it up with the director. There's a lot more to being a designer than knowing how to hang a light, paint a set, or sew a costume.
However, do ask you supervisors why they do the things they do when there is time. Pretend like you don't know anything about their design process, and ask them why they chose to use a certain color, material, effect, &c. Just wait until after tech; remember how I told you to bring a notepad? Write your question down.
Do tell your supervisor that you don't know how to do something they've asked you to do if you don't know how to do it. That will save everyone time and aggravation, and there's no shame in it. That's why you're the intern/apprentice.
Do tell your supervisor that you're not comfortable doing something they've asked you to do if you think it's unsafe. Hopefully, they're looking out for your health and well being, but if the ladder looks too rickety, don't get on it.
Do not touch equipment belonging to other departments. As a sound designer, I wouldn't think of touching the lighting console without asking the LD or ME first.
Do say "please," and "thank you."
Do let your supervisor know when you've been pushed too far. Tech schedules can be a bear, and if you've been up for 20 hours straight and are fighting to keep your eyes open, there is no reason for you to be using the table saw or straddling a ladder. You're no use to anyone in the hospital, or worse.

Housing etiquette. You're probably living in cramped quarters with limited sink, fridge, bathroom, and cabinet space. Be respectful of others.

Do clean up any messes you make as soon as you make them.

This goes doubly for inside the refrigerator. I helped he GM clean out the toxic swamp that had accumulated in the fridge of a different housing unit last season, and everyone in that housing unit ought to be ashamed of themselves.
DO throw away your expired food. If it's not yours, alert your GM or housing manager. Don't participate in making a horrific mess by letting it grow.

Do wash your dishes as soon as you're done with them.
Do put your dishes away when you're done washing them.
Do help clean common areas.

Wow, that list turned out to be longer than I thought it would. Depending on the specific nature of your intern-/apprenticeship, there may be particulars that I haven't covered. The best plan is almost always to talk to your supervisor and general/housing manager before your arrival for their recommendations on what to bring, and how they would like to further your education.

The last general guidance I can offer is that, while you are here to further your education, you are also here to work. The work you will do as an intern or apprentice is usually not particularly glamorous, but it is usually vital to the success of the show, and the over all season.

Good luck, have fun, and have good shows!

What's in that Word?

2011-05-12T05:56:00.000-07:00

The line reads "I'm not in a rush to chop my tits off." It's from a play: The Sequence by Paul Mullin. We were reading it in my Writing Creatively About Science class today, which means we took turns reading it out loud. We do a bit of that in this class, but in the context of a play, I think it makes an incredible amount of sense, and we all know I love me a play about science.

The catch is, that's not what the student reader in class said. She said "I'm not in a rush to chop my breasts off." The context is a character talking about not wanting to get screened for a particular gene that would reveal a tendency for a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. She is perhaps angry, perhaps flippant, but her word choices here: "chop" and "tits" speaks volumes about her character. And yet the student didn't say one of these crucial words.

This was a chemistry student, and since she's in college, let's not pretend she's so stupid that she spells "breasts" T-I-T-S. Slightly more obviously, she's not comfortable saying the word out loud. I think this particular undergrad is a chemistry student. I hope she doesn't have similar compunctions about saying the word "oxygen," but then again, why shouldn't she? Why shouldn't it be as uncomfortable for her to say "five" out loud?

And why did we let her get away with it?

What if she had issues saying the word "five," and so instead said "six" in a lab? You might try to tell me that "breasts" is synonymous with "tits," but that is only true in the denotative sense. "Tits" conveys information that "breasts" does not, and yet we cavalierly accept that substitute on the grounds that this poor little undergrad doesn't want to say a word that makes her uncomfortable?

Too effing bad. Words have meanings.

I used to follow William Ball's guidance in A Sense of Direction fairly religiously, including his thesis that every director should be allowed to change 10% of a playwrights words. I have, however, recently been called out for not interrogating some of Ball's lazy assumptions, and I can't help but think that this is one of them. Sometimes directors need to change a good deal more than 10%, sometimes they shouldn't change any words. Mostly, in the context of modern plays, they're contractually not allowed. This is a case in point. Lacking the same cultural context as Shakespeare, we can, with an appropriate understanding of both his linguistic and theatrical contexts and our own, carefully change his words to better communicate his ideas to our audiences. But changing "tits" to "breasts" because you don't want to say the former word is lazy, stupid, and wrong.

I know, I know, this is a class reading, and not a performance, but maybe that's what makes it stick in my craw even more. If Mullin had got the name of an enzyme wrong, the number of cells in a punctuation mark wrong, or any other technical detail wrong, we would have been jumping down his throat. In this case, he was conveying technical information about the personality of one of his characters using the greatest invention mankind has yet to develop (language), and a reader changed that because it was inconvenient to her, and we let her get away with it.

Flesh Frozen

2011-05-09T18:44:00.000-07:00

I had the cast of Frozen over for a reading last night, and I am highly encouraged. Everyone else is picking up on the things that appeal to me about this play, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the project evolves. I think I've mentioned it here before, but so everyone knows, we're looking at late September performances in Washington DC. Stay tuned.

Of course, I knew the reading was going to go well. It's a great script, and I have a great cast. The adventure of the night was dinner. Some of you probably know that, whenever feasible, I make dinner for the cast for our first reading. Usually, I have a cast of actors who suffer from food allergies, intolerances, or are Vegan, vegetarian, or have some other dietary restriction. Meat dishes usually aren't on the menu. No such matter with the Frozen cast, so I experimented with chicken parm. Everyone seemed to like it.

Much as I enjoyed eating the chicken after it was cooked, I discovered that I enjoyed handling it raw. I can't quite explain it. Holding a slab of raw flesh must have appealed to the tiny reptilian brain function that keeps me from being Vegan or vegetarian. It's like the shirt says: if God didn't want us to eat animals, He wouldn't have made them taste so good. Apparently, He also wouldn't have made handling dead animals fun.

I'm remembering an episode of Aqua Teen that involved a game of throwing around raw chickens. Hmm....

Rubyturgy 0.1 is Now Available

2011-05-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce the first public release of Rubyturgy is now available for download. Feel free to head on over to SourceForge and give it a spin, and then let me know what you think. I'd be mighty obliged.

Social Time with Undergrads

2011-05-06T22:08:00.001-07:00

One of the students in this class I'm taking with Dava Sobel is actually a professor in the biology department, and as we've been reading about the development of the first immortal line of human cells, she thought it would be fun for us to take a look at them in her lab, and Sobel agreed, so that's what we did yesterday. I've seen them before, and as I'm not a cellular biologist, and nor do I have any aspirations to be one, one culture of HeLas looks much like another to me. Honestly the opportunity afforded by a small lab space with only two microscopes proved more educational, because it offered the chance to chat up some of the undergrads in this class and get the lay of the land a bit.

Did you know that the undergrads have a mail room? I mean, of course they do, what campus doesn't? But I'd forgotten about those. Actually, their complaints about their mail service here make me realize how lucky I was back in mine. They, apparently, only have a couple people working in their mail room, and there is a very small windows through which they can get packages, which means they've developed interesting and sneaky ways of bending the rules from time to time. Of course, this isn't limited to the mail room, but I don't want to say anything more for fear of giving anyone away, or spoiling their fun.

Suffice it to say that undergrads are people, too, and I had quite forgotten that. Not like anyone has done much here to actively remind us in the Shakespeare and Performance program (that's right, we're SAPs). For all the talk about how we receive the highest and most prestigious degree that the college offers, and the pressure for us to put in appearances at graduation because of that, there has been very little sharing of campus community between us and the undergrads. Here come the qualifiers:

That's understandable given that it's a residential college for women.
That's a shame because some of them are working on interesting things, which in at least a few cases are pertinent to our studies in the grad program.
The college is taking steps to correct that problem.

All that said, I think one of my undergrad classmate's put it most eloquently when, on hearing that we in SAP don't get any sort of introduction to the campus, she said plainly "that's sad." Yes. I agree. It is, but as I said in #3 above, the college is taking steps to correct that problem.

Something I've had to contend with in getting used to being in class and working in the same environment as the undergrads is that most of my memories of undergrad are not good ones. Or rather the good ones have been tainted. Or in other cases, I would have liked to have made different choices now that I know how they would have played out.

All that said, my social time with undergrads has helped me realize that I was making the best choices I could at the time. A slight divergence in those days would have brought me to a very different place now, and for all I know I would be typing up a similar blog post from a very different circumstance.

Also, not all of my memories are tainted, and I'm learning that I'm not so displeased with my choices as I may have led myself to believe at a glance. Being more comfortable with myself at that age makes it easier for me to be more comfortable around them now. Seeing as how I'm going to have to be teaching them in the Fall, that's a very good thing.

Suck it Up

2011-05-02T23:08:00.000-07:00

One of my friends recently wrote me the following:

I am also quite worried about my ability to design this summer. Since i have been here in <Name of State Redacted>, i have not gotten to design a show, which is a whole other story, and i am scared that i have forgotten how to design. How does a person deal with the idea that they have done all that they can do with something and now there is nothing new that they can create? I am really struggling with this dilemma right now and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

So here's my advice to my anonymous friend looking for advice.

1) Please observe the proper use of the majuscule "I" when using the first-person pronoun.

2) Don't be a wuss. I admit it, when I get away from doing something for a while, I'm a little bit nervous about getting back into it, and things might go a little bit bumpy for the first few days, but after that, it's like I never stopped doing it.

Case in point, for the last two summers, I've worked as the sound designer at the Weathervane Playhouse. After the summer is over, I return to the Shakespeare Convent (a.k.a. The American Shakespeare Center's partner program with Mary Baldwin College in Shakespeare and Performance) where a "mixer" is either a kitchen appliance or something you combine with your whiskey if you don't drink it straight. And yet I'll pull up to Newark, flip some witches, and mix a beautiful show when the time comes.

When I was younger, I used to worry about this thing, too. The first time someone gave me money to direct a show, I had a moment where I, in a panic, decided that I didn't know how to direct a show; then I realized that I had gone to school for this very reason, and had done it thrice before, and that first show with Clarkson, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would be the first of seven that I would do with that one company over the next few years. I think things turned out okay.

That little twinge of self doubt makes itself known whenever I step into a new situation; usually that's got more to do with new people than a new gig at this point in my career, but it's there. Fortunately for me, I'm awesome, so I suck it up, and do my job like I know what I'm doing, because I do. And you know what? Maybe you're not awesome like I am, maybe you don't know how to do your job. You know what you should do then? Take the word "designer" off of your professional description.

Truth is, there is absolutely no shame in that. The world needs good assistant designers. The thing is, we're not talking about a novice here, we're talking about someone who has done the job before, and who has worked in that space as long as I have.

My advice, my friend, is to suck it up and do your job like you know what you're doing.

Rubyturgy in Action

2011-04-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

The first thing I did when I go to Staunton back in the Fall of '09 was start hacking. Inspired by and interview I read with Giles Block (with whom I would later take a directing class), I thought it might be fun to have a program capable of anatomizing plays into their individual words. The number of times a word is used in a play, so goes the theory, can tell us things about what was on the playwright's mind. I've been using this ever since, but only recently decided that others might find it handy to, so in my spare moments (har dee har har) I've been working on making a user friendly interface to the program I call Rubyturgy. It's not quite ready yet, but consider this a sneak preview.

If you're reading this, you probably know that I'm directing a production of As You Like It this summer, but as is often the case, Shakespeare needs trimming for a modern audience. Now that I've prepared my text of AYLI, I can begin cutting it, and Rubyturgy can help me figure out what the bones of the play (to borrow a phrase from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Lue Douthit) are. So let's take a look at some of the results:

that occurs 343 times
rosalind occurs 275 times
with occurs 202 times
your occurs 194 times
have occurs 172 times
this occurs 166 times
will occurs 164 times
orlando occurs 163 times
thou occurs 142 times
celia occurs 125 times
good occurs 115 times
love occurs 114 times

The complete list is actually much larger, but for brevity's sake, I'm only including those words that occur more than 100 times. I have also filtered the results so that only words with four or more characters are counted. You'll notice three proper names on the list: Rosalind, Orlando, and Celia (everything gets converted to miniscule characters for comparison purposes). Those results will be skewed because their names appear heavily in speech prefixes, which Rubyturgy also counts in this run, but that is still useful to us. Not counting the common word "that," Rosalind's name occurs more than any other word in the play. No surprise there. Honestly, since this play is a romantic comedy, it is entirely unsurprising that three of the romantic leads should be in this list, or that "good" and "love" occur as often as they do. Conspicuously absent, however, is "Oliver," Orlando's eldest brother and Celia's love interest. That tells us something.

Critics are quick to point out that the words "gentle," "gentleness," and "gentility" get heavy use in this play. Let's see what Rubyturgy has to say about that:

gentility occurs 1 times
gentle occurs 16 times
gentleman occurs 8 times
gentleman's occurs 1 times
gentleman-like occurs 1 times
gentlemen occurs 2 times
gentleness occurs 4 times
gentlewoman occurs 1 times
gently occurs 1 times

I designed Rubyturgy to have all sorts of options for sorting output either numerically or alphabetically, so finding this is no trouble at all. I've copied out all words appearing in the play that are etymologically linked to "gentle." Using some basic math, we can easily see 35 hits. Not bad. Now lets go back to our Numeric sort and see what else falls in that range...

most occurs 39 times
brother occurs 38 times
must occurs 38 times
father occurs 37 times
senior occurs 37 times
them occurs 36 times
fool occurs 36 times
such occurs 36 times
very occurs 35 times
should occurs 35 times
much occurs 35 times
these occurs 34 times
make occurs 34 times
take occurs 34 times
give occurs 34 times
corin occurs 33 times
mine occurs 33 times
their occurs 32 times
audrey occurs 31 times
some occurs 31 times
heart occurs 31 times
better occurs 30 times
frederick occurs 30 times

"Brother," "father," "fool," all carry similar weight to the collected words that claim "gentle" as a root. That tells us something, too. In all fairness, I haven't done a similar etymological comparison on those words, so let's see what lies around "gentle," which had 16 hits. This list would get really long if I explored a similar range, so I'm going to limit it a bit more tightly:

fortune occurs 17 times
away occurs 17 times
prithee occurs 17 times
court occurs 17 times
amiens occurs 17 times
thus occurs 17 times
thank occurs 17 times
being occurs 17 times
other occurs 16 times
live occurs 16 times
sing occurs 16 times
gentle occurs 16 times
truly occurs 16 times
word occurs 16 times
william occurs 16 times
hour occurs 16 times
part occurs 16 times
hand occurs 16 times
mistress occurs 16 times
pretty occurs 16 times
matter occurs 15 times
together occurs 15 times
place occurs 15 times
leave occurs 15 times
find occurs 15 times
after occurs 15 times
even occurs 15 times

"Away," "court," "truly," "hour," "together," "leave," and "pretty" all catch my eye in that list. But all this has me thinking, what about "if?" Touchstone has a wonderful monologue describing the virtues of the word "if," and when a character calls attention to a certain word, you can believe that it has a weight all its own. We need to adjust our filter for the count of "if," since it's shorter than four characters. Re-running the scan tells us

if occurs 139 times

"If" is a pretty common word, and Shakespeare has a character draw special attention to it, but despite that, I didn't think it would occur that often in the text. It has me wondering what that "over 100 hits" list would look like now:

the occurs 702 times
and occurs 697 times
you occurs 521 times
to occurs 468 times
of occurs 425 times
that occurs 343 times
in occurs 315 times
is occurs 291 times
rosalind occurs 275 times
not occurs 257 times
my occurs 257 times
me occurs 234 times
he occurs 215 times
for occurs 208 times
it occurs 207 times
with occurs 202 times
but occurs 201 times
your occurs 194 times
be occurs 187 times
as occurs 172 times
have occurs 172 times
this occurs 166 times
his occurs 165 times
will occurs 164 times
orlando occurs 163 times
him occurs 154 times
thou occurs 142 times
no occurs 142 times
if occurs 139 times
so occurs 138 times
do occurs 127 times
celia occurs 125 times
good occurs 115 times
love occurs 114 times
are occurs 111 times
her occurs 107 times

Considerably longer, to be sure, but also quite useful. Shakespeare has given special weight to the word "if," but a number of others are used more often. In all fairness, most of those are pretty common or generic words, but that doesn't mean we don't learn anything. Just look at the number of hits for "you" and "your" for example.

Ultimately, the data that Rubyturgy produces will no more tell you how to cut a play, or what a play means than simply having the Folio text handy will enable you to do a good job editing the text. However, as I hope I have demonstrated, it can be useful for contextualizing data, and helping you discover patterns that you might have missed otherwise.

Out of My Element

2011-04-28T20:41:00.001-07:00

Some of you may recall my mentioning that Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter is teaching a class at Mary Baldwin this May Term, and you better believe that I'm in it. Especially after she told me she was working on a play, there was no way in hell I wasn't going to be in this class. The thing is, it's an undergrad class, and thing is that Mary Baldwin undergrads tend to be all female, it being a residential college for women and all.

When I first showed up here, it felt weird setting foot on that campus, but you get used to it with time. Also, our grad program is pretty evenly coed (as far as theatre programs go), and you barely notice. Sitting in an undergrad class, however, is just plain awkward. Forget, for a moment, the fact that I have a Y-chromosome, one of Sobel's first tasks was to walk around Pierce and observe things. In all fairness, she did ask if any of us hadn't been to pierce, and when I raised my hand, she commented that I must be the theatre student.

Yes, I am the theatre student.

See the thing is, our grad program doesn't really mix with the undergrad portion of the college. I can't speak very much for the other side of the coin, but the impression that I get is that we're both something of a curiosity to one another. Why on earth would they want to go to a small, almost unisex school in western VA? Why would we want to go to the same school for a degree in Shakespeare? Touche, imaginary undergrad girl I'm a having a conversation with right now.

For what it's worth, both sides are taking steps to rectify this, and I do know and have worked with an undergrad here: Danielle Guy, who was in Vagina Monologues. But the very fact that it took me a year and a half to be able to say that, and the fact that I feel compelled to name drop my token undergrad acquaintance should tell you something about our relationship with the undergrad program. Actually, with the campus itself. Not counting the program's downtown campus building, the Blackfriars, and the program office, our classes are likely to be held in one of two buildings. And then there's the library. I don't have much of a reason to know where anything else is, or what goes on there. So no, I still don't know where Pierce is, but I can only presume it must be a science building. You know, because I'm in a course entitled "Writing Creatively About Science."

Did I mention an undergrad course? It's a 200 level undergrad writing course. I only took one 200 level undergrad writing course when I was an undergrad, and I'm pretty sure that was in my second semester. I've just always been a better writer than that, but here I am, weeks away from having the coveted, pretentious degree "Master of Letters" conferred upon me, and I am in a 200 level undergraduate writing class with a distinguished professor who needs to remind students that they should be using spell check.

Did I mention that I just wrote and defended a 70+ page thesis?

I am very clearly out of my element here, but it's a chance to take a class with Dava Sobel, author of Longitude. She's working on a play, and she knows me as "the theatre student." This could either go really, really well, or really, really badly.

The Killer Angels

2011-04-26T12:12:00.000-07:00

One area of common ground my father and I enjoyed in the past few years was our mutual amusement at the way the south talks about the Civil War like they won it. He was stationed in Charleston SC for a time during Vietnam, and so got to see their take on history up close. I didn't really appreciate his fascination with the Civil War until I moved to Virginia. Southern states wanted to keep the institution of slavery intact, committed treason en masse, and got their asses handed to them. That, at least, was the narrative as it appeared to my ten year old self.

History is more complicated then that, of course, and if the Civil War still captures the imagination it is because of the history of the justifications for secession. No one wants to admit the war was about slavery, but it was, the secession documents of the time demonstrate that; but at the same time no one wants to admit it was about slavery, everyone knows it.

I don't just mean no one in the south, either. Something they drummed into your head in elementary school in New York was that we didn't fight the Civil War to free the slaves, we fought the Civil War to preserve the Union. Of course, if the south wasn't afraid of losing their slaves, they would have never have left, and after they did leave, there was no reason for the Union to pretend to tolerate the institution of slavery any longer. Still, looking back on it, no one wants to admit their grandfathers fought a war to preserve slavery or in the name of racist polemics that demonized the grandfathers of African Americans.

On my last trip to the Green Valley Book Fair, I picked up a copy of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, partly out of guilt at never having read it, and partly because I suspected it would bring me somewhat closer to my father's fascination with this period. Shaara handles the material brilliantly, at once giving you the romance of the gentlemanly officers and able-bodied, pure-spirited idealists of the south, and the equally able-bodied and pure spirited but multi-cultural Union soldiers.

Shaara gets to have things both ways. By planting a cadre of European officers in the heart of the Confederate army, he calls attention to the monoculture and new-gentry ridiculousness of the Confederacy and simultaneously makes it something foreign to the minds of Longstreet and Lee. Longstreet and Lee, for their parts, wrestle with the moral ambiguity of having forsaken their oaths of service, and now that they're no longer fighting defensively (the novel takes place right before Gettysburg), they wonder if they've lost the right.

If anything, Longstreet is the most sympathetic man here. He knows that fighting for their homes and way of life means fighting for slavery, and he also knows that no one wants to admit it. He also knows that Lee's brilliance has more to do with God's good graces, luck, and the incompetence of Union generals. Shaara's Longstreet could be a Union man; he just happens to be fighting at Lee's side.

As clear in their ideals are Union troops, Col. Chamberlain of the 20th main serving as the chief cipher, but Shaara punches through those ideals with the same alacrity that he does the Confederate romance. While Chamberlain is accompanied by men from diverse backgrounds and walks of life, none of them have ever seen a black man before, and when they finally meet one before arriving at Gettysburg, they are at a loss. He doesn't speak English, and they regard him as a curiosity, one of the soldiers in the regiment proposes, half jokingly, to sell the former slave so they can buy out of the army.

Sweeping and epic as The Killer Angels is, I'm finding I enjoy it as much as I do because it is an anti-romance of the Civil War. Neither side gets to walk away with their idealism unquestioned, but both sides escape with their integrity intact. Something that Americans of all regions are very good at, and very proud of, is our willingness to fight for our freedoms.