Hamlet and The '70s

Not our base text for Hamlet, more a decorative reminder of the task ahead.

October finds me in Pittsburgh, in residence at the Manchester Art Farm, directing Hamlet for Pittsburgh Classic Players. There is no website for the Manchester Art Farm and you won’t find an entry for it in that yellow-paged relic of the pre-digital era. It is a nickname the landlord gave but it suits this beautiful red-brick home and the garden that surrounds it. You can find Pittsburgh Classic Players online and I hope that you will. They are an ambitious new company founded by three fellow alumni of Mary Baldwin College’s Shakespeare and Performance program and it is such a privilege to join them as the director of their inaugural production.

When you consider directing a classic, you know that you will be asked that fair but petrifying question: what are you going to do with it? The fear around the question is not just the terror of the white blank page or the knowledge that you will have to live with and be accountable to your answers. The fear also revolves around your suspicion that secretly the world thinks you have no business directing that classic work of staggering genius unless you are also a staggering genius who has something new to offer – and when it comes to Hamlet, well, it’s been done. Trust me, it’s been done. Of course, things do not have to be new to be worth doing. We read things that have been read before, cook things that our great great ancestors cooked. None of us, alive today, discovered sex and yet…

Defenses and tangents aside though, you are doing something with that play, at least you should be. The beautiful thing about plays as rich as those Shakespeare wrote is that there is more to do with it than one could possibly, or wisely, do in one production. – There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio (1.5) – The question, what are you going to do with it, is really an invitation to preview the story you are about to toil so hard to tell.

So what am I doing with Hamlet? Well, I am telling a story of family, loss, grief, sorrow, love and despair. There is deep love and ambivalence in the Hamlet family. These are relationships haunted by specters of disappointment and disapproval. There is a trend in modern productions of Hamlet to minimize Hamlet’s depressive nature and play up his agency as a kind of would-be action hero. (It can be done and well. It’s just not what I want to do. Not this time). A friend pointed out to me that you can say a lot about Hamlet by calling him a feminine revenge hero and it occurs to me that the very characteristics Hamlet is criticized for early in the play – his caution, his sensitivity – are qualities we more frequently associate with women. I want a Hamlet that embraces and explores those qualities. And though I tried for awhile to ignore the influence of Patti Smith's Just Kids on my imagination as I prepared for Hamlet, I soon realized that my Hamlet would have been at home (still tortured, but at home) on the Lower East Side of New York in the 1970s. To me that is where all the Wittenberg kids hang out spouting philosophy. 

And though I am emphasizing the personal in Hamlet, I have not cut the political: it informs the characters’ sense of self and means their decisions reverberate in a terrifying way. Denmark is a country in the midst of a tumultuous transition: trouble abroad, political intrigue at home. Hamlet is a kind of a canary in a coal mine; though of course the colors are inverted as he wears his suits of black and the kingdom tries to soldier on with pomp and pageantry. I can see Gertrude wearing Pat Nixon's canary yellow mimosa silk satin encrusted with Austrian crystals inauguration gown. I am not planning a direct transplantation of the play; Claudius is not Richard Nixon, and there are no guns in this production. Still, it is useful to ground my thoughts on the play in a specific time and place.

The disconnect between the court’s sense of self and the erosion of the state is not the initial reason I chose the 1970s with the Nixon White House and New York City’s Lower East Side as my main source of inspiration for the look and tone of Hamlet, and yet, there it is now staring me in the face: it was a tumultuous and transitional time, a time of corruption and disillusionment. No wonder Hamlet is fighting not to be king but to go back to Wittenberg. Hamlet is a play of poets and politicians, neither of which save Denmark. That's the story. At least that's where I'm starting.

Oh, and here is a taste of what I'm obsessively listening to...

The Joys of Summer

Summer is my season. I love the world most when I have no need of a sweater and when the day stretches into the evening, making that 6 am alarm and the subsequent shift at the survival job seem like a distant memory, a prologue to the real day. For the second year in a row, there are few rehearsals this summer, planning takes their place.  

Last year, it was finding venues for How I Learned to Drive, Cressida, Helen, and Fool for Love. Of those four projects, only Helen did not come to fruition. I had to put her on the shelf and there she remains, for now. This year, I have a venue – The Backdoor Theater – and a company –

Salt and Sage Productions – and there is even more planning to occupy the long summer days.

We are preparing for a tour of Jenny’s solo show, Cinnamon and Cigarettes, followed by three full productions – The Twelve Dates of Christmas by Ginna Hoben, Great Falls by Lee Blessing, and What Every Girl Should Know by Monica Byrne – and a reading series of Jacobean sex tragedies. Our to do list, though terrifying in length, fills me with glee. I cannot wait to be back in the rehearsal room exploring addiction, broken promises, bad dates, relationships, road trips, trauma, survival, pregnancy, travel fantasies, adolescence, and friendship. It is quite the season. 

In addition to all the planning, I have devoted time this summer to two complimentary forms of training: Linklater and Alexander. Linklater is a vocal technique and Alexander is a physical technique, however, both at their core are all about breathing. We do a lot to inhibit our breath and undoing those inhibitions and engaging in new ways is alternately terrifying and exhilarating with these two states sometimes living within seconds of one another.

As I spend the summer planting seeds for future theatrical endeavors and training my body to breathe freer, I feel a bit like the gardener in Paisley Rekdal’s poem, Happiness. In the poem, Rekdal speculates that her neighbors may be offended by the time and effort she pours into her garden. She admits that her garden takes her away from their concerns, telling them: “I can wait longer than sadness. / I can wait longer than your grief.”

The gardening of the poem is no mere act of escapism, it is a way of connecting – “If I could not have made this garden beautiful/ I wouldn’t understand your suffering,/ nor care for each the same, inflamed way” –  and an accomplice to her inner demons: “there is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments.” The garden is a landscape of beauty and the site of suffering as the sparrows fight there. 

Rekdal’s garden is both a metaphor for poetry, itself, and the inner-being of the artist: there are noble and less than noble elements to both pursuits; neither is pure, “selfless” and “selfish” intentions commingle and there is a certain absurdity, a beautiful humor to it all: imperfection is natural, our best intentions and our worst selves live side by side, and our dramas are – well, kind of funny.

Love Fool Dreams

Tommy Harrington as Martin (L), Jenny Newbry Waters as May (C), Arthur Delaney as Eddie (R). Photo Credit: Ari Grey, Graphic Design: Linden Kueck, Tickets available here.

Fool for Love opened last weekend. We play two more weekends with eight more performances. I wish it were two more months with eight shows a week: the play is teaching me that much and I love watching it alongside an audience. To stay with the numbers for a minute, or rather a paragraph, Fool for Love is my eighteenth directorial outing, twentieth if you count the two plays I directed in high school, and fourth since graduating with my Masters of Fine Arts. Fool for Love is, also, the first show of mine to hit its fundraising goal with forty-three individual donating amounts ranging from five to five hundred dollars. Twice is the number of times I came home and sobbed my heart out from tech week stress.

How does it all add up? I could have told you without counting the productions on my resume that directing is the passion and vocation that I hope blossoms into a career. I could have told you that there are people out there passionate about the same kind of theatrical work that I find so exciting, people who would want to see this production of Fool for Love succeed, even if they could not actually make it across the country for the show. And my husband could tell you that I always cry at some point (or multiple points) during a process because I take the work to heart, because I set a very high bar for myself in terms of not just the product but the process, and it rattles me when I fall short. There is a gulf between knowledge and experience though and to quote one of my favorite character's "joy's soul lies in the doing." I may have known those things, dreamed about them, doing is another (and richer) story.

So what next? I have a few ideas. For now though, I want to savor the two more weekends and eight more performances of Fool for Love. In case you can’t make it to the show or are thinking about making it and need a little persuading, here is a little list of things, in no particular order, that excite me about the show:

1) Sam Shepard’s dramatic structure is incredible. Fool for Love is not a plot driven play, rather, there is an accumulation of emotion through a repetition of actions. Eddie and May go in a big circle. Their present is their past and possibly their future. Shepard calls for Fool for Love to be “played relentlessly and without a break.” Our production comes in at about 65 minutes and takes me on a new emotional journey every time.

2) Fool for Love is incredibly tactile. Our scenic designer installed two rope walls that both mimic the horizon line of the desert and allow Eddie and May to literally tangle themselves up as they try to disappear in, or stand out against their environment, or gain the upper hand on one another. May and Eddie may be out of touch with many things but they are in touch with their bodies, there is a constant physical dialogue between them and every surface they encounter.

3) Eddie and Martin. May’s ex-lover and her current boyfriend size each other up in a hilarious and strange battle of wits that is rife with sexual innuendo. As a woman, I sort of feel like the play has let me into the guy’s locker room. The bond between Eddie and Martin is both sudden and profound. Eddie needs this man as his confessor and it’s beautiful to behold.

Martin (Tommy Harrington) and Eddie (Arthur Delaney) going over what exactly the reason is for taking a girl to the movies. Photo Credit: Matt Schneider

4) Fool for Love is filled with shadows. The Old Man haunts Eddie and May; he is both himself and a figment of their imagination. Eddie and May live in the shadow of their parents’ love and its disasterous end. Our lighting designer installed a single overhead practical as the main light source for May’s motel room. The centrality of that single bulb can make the space feel confined in the manner of an interrogation room, or later like the epicenter of an expansive wild fire. The blending of the intimate and the mythic is one of my favorite things about storytelling, about drama, about Fool for Love.

Sometimes a production feels like more than just another production, sometimes it feels like a sign post, an anchor for what you want your work to be about, for how you want to work. Fool for Love is one of those productions for me. Working with this cast – Jenny Newbry Waters, Arthur Delaney, Brian MacEwan, and Tommy Harrington – has been a complete delight. The designers – Megan Wilkerson and Molly Browne – have rendered the emotional core of the play in visual terms that I never imagined. So yes, before thinking about what comes next, I am going to enjoy the hell out of what is currently before me. We play two more weekends, if you find yourself in Portland, Oregon between now and April 21^st, you should join me at The Backdoor Theater! Tickets Available Here.

Eddie and May coming together over the objections of The Old Man. Photo Credit: Matt Schneider

Home and Shepard

PDX Airport

I just returned to Portland. I spent the past few days in Staunton, Virginia, staying with two of my closest friends and collaborators, seeing shows at the American Shakespeare Center, and reading more of Shepard’s substantial body of work in preparation for Fool for Love.  

I decided to direct Fool for Love almost a year ago. I had just seen the film version of Fool for Love and taught Shepard’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Buried Child in a introduction to drama course. I had been a fan of Shepard’s plays and prose prior to this paired encounter, however, something about Shepard at that moment got under my skin. There is a restless quality to Shepard’s writing which felt apt as time alternately skulked and sped toward graduation and my subsequent move from a small town in the Shenandoah Valley to a moderately sized city in the Pacific Northwest. That Shepard’s characters often pass through New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment (or Entrapment as locals sometimes quip), where yours truly was born and raised, also contributed to my sudden affinity for his particular brand of story-telling.

Dulles Airport

Still, I had never produced a show on my own. I needed someone else on board, a person with whom I felt inspired to work, and to whom I would feel a disappointment if I did not manage to bring the production to fruition. Actress, Jenny Newbry Waters, who had played Don John in the Much Ado About Nothing I had directed for Portland Actor’s Ensemble, came immediately to mind. Don John is a great villain with a limited range: Jenny is a great actress whose range extended far beyond one of Shakespeare’s more cardboard villains. I approached Jenny with two titles I was considering – Fool for Love and Pinter’s Betrayal – and a time frame – the upcoming fall – for production. Jenny wanted May in Fool for Love, however, fall would not work for her. She was leaving town to teach at the University of Idaho. Would I wait and do Fool for Love in the spring? Yes, I found another title for fall, How I Learned to Drive, and pushed Fool for Love into the spring.

And now rehearsals are beginning! Arthur Delaney, who just closed Cressida with me, is Eddie, May’s sometime lover and half-brother. (Arthur also played Claudio in the aforementioned production of Much Ado.) Tommy Harrington, who was Alan in Feral and Uncle Peck in How I Learned to Drive, is Martin, May’s current boyfriend. Brian MacEwan is The Old Man, the father of May and Eddie and a product of their collective imagination. I cannot wait to get to rehearsal and be reunited with so many of my favorite collaborators. Don’t get me wrong, there is a certain thrill to doing a show with an entirely new group of actors. It requires a kind of bravery and clarity that is both challenging and energizing. However, there is also an enormous reward to working with the same artists again and again. Jose Rivera puts it nicely in his 36 Assumptions About Playwriting: “Find your tribe” then “stick to your people and be faithful to them. Seek aesthetic and emotional compatability with those your work with.”

Just as my trip to Ashland felt like an appropriate retreat prior to rehearsals beginning for How I Learned to Drive, my visit to Staunton was exactly what I needed to clear up some emotional space and catch my breath before Fool for Love. On the flight going from Portland International Airport to Dulles, I finished Don Shewey’s biography of Sam Shepard. The following quote that Shepard gave an interviewer in 1979 lept out as central to this particular journey:

“I feel like I’ve never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet at the same time I don’t know exactly where I fit in. And the same thing applies to the theater. I don’t know exactly how well I fit into the scheme of things. Maybe that’s good, you know, that I’m not in a niche. But there’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place where you can reckon with yourself. Now I’ve found that what’s most valuable about that place is not the place itself but other people; that through other people you can find a recognition of each other. I think that’s where the real home is.” (97)

In flight from Denver to PDX

I have called many places home: Albuquerque, Portland, Staunton. However, Shepard is right. And trite as it might sound, my home is my husband reading Moby Dick to me before I go to bed. My home is eating waffles with dear friends while lesson planning Othello. My home is in rehearsal. Tonight I come home. Again. 

2013: Plays and Caffeine

Saturday was filled with coffee. The cup I drank when I got up at 6 am to prep for a meeting about a guest visit to a class on Shakespeare’s Comedies and a design meeting for Fool for Love. Both these meetings took place at coffee shops, so…more coffee. And then there was that cup I drank before heading out for the closing night of Cressida. There was also laundry and husband time and thai food with family and drinks with friends. It was as fantastic a day as it was a long.

There have been a lot of long days lately, most not as balanced (or varied) as Saturday. I am still at the full time survival job and two plays I directed opened in January: Feral and Cressida. 

Production Photo by Rio

Feral premiered as part of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival of New Works at The Bob White Theater Warehouse. Compass Works produced the play, written by their very own artistic director Bruce Hostetler. Interviews with homeless and formerly homeless individuals provided the raw material for Feral. Bruce conducted some of those interviews, the rest came from an interview project done by Sisters of the Road. Feral rehearsals began January 2^nd. The show previewed on January 24^th. Whirlwind.

Rehearsal Photo by Heath Houghton

Cressida opened at The Headwaters and ran three weekends. The show was a remount of my MFA thesis production with a new cast and a few revisions to the script, including my music director’s brilliant idea to add some of Emilia’s speech into the Othello willow song that Cressida sings on her voyage from Troy to Greece. We began rehearsals for Cressida in October, mostly finished the play before the holiday break, and came back for pick up rehearsals in January. Cressida opened January 24^th. Crazy.

And now both those shows have closed and my desk looks like this:

Yes, the mug has coffee in it.

Fool for Love rehearsals begin February 26^th. Before then, there is a fundraising campaign to launch, design meetings to attend, costumes to shop for, and a get away trip so that I can catch my breath.

2012: Five Favorite Productions

Last New Year’s Eve, I spent the day flying across the country and arrived to an empty house. I had another semester left on my MFA and was gearing up to return to rehearsal for two different productions. I was happy to be pursuing theatre, a thing I love to an irrational degree, however, there was some sorrow at the high cost of that pursuit including spending most of three years living on the opposite coast from my husband. This New Year’s Eve, my work life is every bit as full. I am about to return to rehearsal on Cressida, begin rehearsals for Feral, and am continuing to write Helen. I am every bit as stressed and scared and excited and humbled and anxious about this set of tasks as I was at the prospect of finishing my MFA. However, tonight I am at home in Portland, there is posole on the stove, and when I crawl into bed my husband will join me and my cat will insist that a purring pillow is way better than a regular pillow. And so it goes.

As a lover of lists and theater, I have decided to make a list of favorite productions or theater going experiences a New Year’s Eve tradition. Last year I wrote on ten, this year I realized that I had already written more than anyone was going to read in regard to five; so I switched my top ten list to a five favorites list. Isn’t alliteration the best? Happy New Years! And to everyone who reads this, thanks. 

1) Party People

by UNIVERSES

directed by Liesel Tommy

at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Party People was the BEST: moving, daring, inspiring, smart, sexy, serious, full of sound and fury signifying plenty. The plot revolves around two young artists putting on a gallery exhibition about the Black Panthers and Young Lords. Veterans of those movements are brought together for the first time in decades, and wounds that perhaps never closed are stretched open. A cursory plot synopsis cannot do justice to the theatrical experience of Party People, which is as much a dance and spoken word piece as a multi-media narrative. Party People raises potent issues of the recent past as well as the present--what became of the civil rights dream, what did the rise and fall of militant freedom movements signal, and what of the counterrevolution that the CIA and the drug war ushered in?

Party People also engaged my inner theatre theorist. Shakespeare mostly owns the history play genre, with ten plays named for English monarchs. Though Shakespeare populates his plays with common folk, rebellion leaders, whores, and soothsayers, the locus of his historical vision is the king. Defined as a genre originating in Early Modern England and flourishing briefly in the 1590s, of which Shakespeare’s Henriad is the exemplar, the history play is heavily sympathetic to the “great man” theory of history. It should come as no surprise that America has never really done the history play as Shakespeare did. * Theatre based on interview projects from Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight, Los Angeles, to Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project, to Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank’s The Exonerated build upon a vision of history grounded in social history and our post-modern preoccupation with contradiction, the problematic nature of memory, multiplicity of sources, and fragmentary nature of texts. Party People seemed to offer a new trajectory for the history play, a transcendent one whose like I hope to see again.

2) Body of an American

by Dan O’Brien

directed by Bill Rauch

at Portland Center Stage

My other favorite play of the year allows me to continue to geek out over the subject of history play. Body of an American recounts the relationship of Dan, a young writer, and Paul, an older photographer and war reporter. Dan is based on the playwright, while Paul is based on journalist Paul Watson, who snapped the infamous Pulitzer-Prize winning photo of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia during the 1994 U.S. military operation. Two actors share the roles of Dan and Paul, as well as a host of other people from an Eskimo artist to a Somali cab driver to NPR’s Fresh Air host, Terry Gross. The program notes explained that through the doubling and sharing of roles, the play hoped to deconstruct the traditional one-man show and reveal something of the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder. The success of the script dividing characters in this way depended in large part upon the vocal virtuosity of the actors, who shifted roles swiftly without the visual aid of costume changes.  Luckily, the actors were extraordinary. The show felt like a radical return to theater’s storytelling roots. Here was a show not afraid of narration, not afraid to speak directly to the audience. Though there were many scenes in which the actors relate to each other as separate distinct characters, the passages in which they seem to jointly soliloquize drew me into the story, as if bundling up before the proverbial campfires of an older time.

That the one-man show is to theater what memoir is to literature may not be an original observation, but it is a useful one, especially for this show. The Body of an American is really Dan’s memoir as his sense of himself and the world, expanded through his complicated relationship to the complicated Paul. The play flashes back and forth between a miniature and a monumental scale; the day to day and the geopolitical. What does it mean to bear witness? What is the price? How do we cope with our own mortality, with loss, with love, with family? The Body of an American is simply a remarkable play, and I hope that it will enjoy another production soon.

3) Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (M/M/C)

adapted and directed by Bill Rauch & Tracy Young

at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

My top three choices of 2012 all confirm my card-carrying nerdom: a transcendent spoken word-dance-multimedia performance piece on the systematic dissolution of the Black and Puerto Rican freedom movements, a deconstruction of the one-man show that contemplates the savagery of geopolitics and the psyche, and a parallel-fusion production of three classic tales of ambition. Yeah, I like the heavy stuff. 

The show was simply one of the most impressive spectacles I have ever witnessed. The black monumental set shared the epic beauty and simple grandeur of Adolphe Appia’s designs for Wagner’s operas. Tradition was on display throughout this radical production: the Grecian robes and giant masks deployed for Medea, the Highlander hair and kilts for Macbeth, and the happy pageantry of pastels for Cinderella. Roger and Hammerstein’s score took turns with the raucous energy of the music written for Medea, a musical for which there is no surviving score. This gesture toward classical cultural assumptions of what each play looked like served to keep the stories familiar and separate. For the first two thirds of the production, most of the joy of watching derived from marveling at how amazingly on point every actor had to be to keep all the wheels spinning. One of the greatest kernels of wisdom a professor ever shared with me was this: some plays rely on the illusion that acting is easy, others rely on our understanding that acting is hard. Medea at one point says “I am in agony”; no one can think that the emotional heights an actor must scale to deliver a line like that convincingly are easy (and Miriam Laube was phenomenal in M/M/C as Medea). In the final third of the production, the actors appeared in character but out of ‘costume,’ wearing all blacks, wigs removed, beards shed.

The stripping down of spectacle in these final movements hinted at the truth in all three plays’ observations of ambition, how it drives us, and its potential price to our humanity. I found the appearance of the actor after this change especially striking in the case of Lady Macbeth and Cinderella. Chris Moore played Lady Macbeth. His original costume made him look like a living copy of the iconic John Singer Sargent painting, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. (For OSF regulars, the costume may have hearkened back to another male performer’s turn as Lady M, that of Greg Linington in Equivocation.) When Chris came out, sans wig, to do the “out, out, damn spot” scene wearing jeans and a t-shirt, it was not anything so simple as “surprise, a guy.” I would wager most of the audience, even those who did not read their program, already knew that. The costuming had not so much hidden that Chris was a man as emphasized that Lady Macbeth is a woman. Asking the audience to accept or remember (since men originally played all the parts in Shakespeare) a male Lady Macbeth at this late stage in the play was a brave choice, made all the braver by the tenderness of this woman trying to wash away the imagined blood of an old man. The other difference that really hit me is seemingly much more trivial. Laura Griffith wore a blonde wig as Cinderella--a really good wig, which totally deceived this patron. The actress was actually a brunette, or at least she was when I saw the show. I am still puzzling over why this unmasking seemed so poignant; my guess is that it has something to do with the reminder that theater is a business and just like television and film there is a hyper-policing of type, particularly type as it relates to “classic” characters like Cinderella.

I would have happily seen Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella three times over.

4) Philaster, or Love Lies a Bleeding

by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

part of the Actor’s Renaissance Season

at the American Shakespeare Center

While we are on the subject of the body, how about a very visibly pregnant actress playing a boy, who is actually a girl disguised as a boy, a fact hidden from the audience until the fifth act? Bet only a couple hundred of you have seen that before, and I bet nearly all of you saw the same production I did. Miriam Donald Burrows gave one of the most winning performances I have ever seen as Bellario or Eufrasia, the courtier’s daughter who disguises herself as a page boy to serve the heroic (and ridiculous) Philaster. The play is an adult fairytale, and the ASC navigated its strange tonal shifts, poetic demands, and serious silliness with pizzazz.

5) A Midsummer Night’s Dream

by William Shakespeare

directed by Penny Metropolis

at Portland Center Stage

Kate Power’s direction of the American Shakespeare Center’s touring troupe production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream appeared on last year’s list. I doubted that I would see a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream anywhere close to its parallel for years. And then I saw this one. Despite the common text, comparing Kate and Penny’s plays would be a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, since their contexts and styles were so radically different. I treasure my memories of both. I have probably seen at least one production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream every year for the past ten years. In high school, I acted in Midsummer; in college, I stage managed Midsummer; and in grad school, I directed one high school production and co-directed one camp production with elementary and middle-schoolers. I could easily be sick of Midsummer by now, but I’m not and I doubt I ever will be.

So what made this one such a delight? Well, take twelve stellar actors, add a fanciful set and the most amazing costumes – EVER – and you would have this production. The costumes worked both as costumes (doing things like signifying status, grouping characters, and hinting at personality), and as fashion. I wanted to snap out my cell phone and text pictures of the clothes to one of my most fashionable friends throughout the production. Oberon’s cape looked like a top of gorgeous swamp grasses. Titania’s gown was a waterfall of bunched fabric that Rodin would have happily sculpted. The fairies had plants sprouting from their hair. Puck had a sculpted mane and the changeling boy an Afro, both serving as bases for fanciful plumage. Hippolyta wore the best dresses. Hermia wore capris! (Actresses in Shakespeare productions always wearing dresses or skirts is one seemingly innocuous theatrical convention that gets under my feminist skin.) When the lovers including Theseus and Hippolyta appeared on their wedding day, their tuxes and wedding gowns matched without being identical and the flower corsages in their hair recalled the fanciful ‘fros of the fairies.

I had a few bones to pick with this production. They changed Bottom’s profession from a weaver to a gardener, which strikes me as far less poetic an occupation, at least in a play of interwoven plots. They had a talented child actor onstage to frame the play as the dream of the changeling child who belongs as much to Hippolyta as Titania. (The play followed the common doubling maneuver of mechanicals as fairies, Hippolyta as Titania, and Theseus as Oberon.) The elitist Shakespeare scholar in me wanted to scream that the child had no business on that stage! Beyond the lack of textual support for the Indian boy being onstage, I reflexively dislike the easy sentimentality of adding a cute child to anything in order to make it more whimsical, meaningful, romantic, etc. (Later, while listening to Emma Smith’s excellent podcast Approaching Shakespeare, I learned that Adrian Noble’s 1996 film version of Midsummer used the pajama clad boy in much the same way, so I gather my feelings on children onstage/onscreen are a minority opinion. Sigh.) I have to admit, though, that the boy was really good and his weird hair-do made his presence more tolerable.

*I sadly did not get to see Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, also at OSF and consequently do not know where Schenkkan’s treatment of LBJ lies in terms of historical theory sympathies.

 

At Work Again

I spent most of October spinning my wheels. I meant to finish the first draft of Helen. I meant to send out cover letters and resumes to Shakespeare festivals across the country, in search of future employment. I planned to draft the press release for Cressida. The list went on. Instead, I read books, went to the gym, and watched more episodes of soapy television dramas and bubbly sitcoms than I care to admit. So when the temp agency called to offer me work on a corporate audit, I decided to take it. And so far, going back to work has helped me get back to the work.

The work right now involves three plays: Cressida, for which rehearsals begin today, Helen, the play I am writing, and Feral by Bruce Hostetler, a new play that Compass Works hired me to direct in January. Feral is a poetic account, moving between “reality and symphony,” of a newly homeless father’s first night on the streets. The source material for the show are interviews with over 500 people who are, or who have lived homeless. The stories are alternately heart breaking, terrifying, and life affirming. These are characters who need and want work in a way that I am fortunate enough to just barely comprehend.

The next three months will be grueling: writing, directing, and producing while holding down this other job. Luckily the office job is a place where I can work on things at a subconscious level, where ideas can percolate as I focus on thousands of lines of data. The other way that the office job is helpful is that it forces me back into relying on the public transit system to get around. Buses and trains teach you a city in a deeper way than driving does. You cross streets you may not otherwise. And the people. You get to watch so many people and wonder about their various walks of life as they come and go.

Reflecting on my month of idleness and this new month of productivity: there are a few things I hope I will remember after the shows close and my corporate contract is up. One is that as hard as I fight it, I do not want to work all the time, I do need rest, and a month of idleness is not the worst thing in the world. Second is that creative work requires a good deal of time not being directly stared at, next time I am working from home, I have to find my equivalent of thousands of lines of data. (Ibsen apparently spent the first year of work on a new play, taking long walks to just think through it’s structure. He didn’t write until the second year. Or at least, so says Fiona Shaw in an interview on “Downstage Center.”) And third, I am someone who needs to get out into the world, who needs the hustle and bustle of a crowd, and the chatter of life around her.

Final thought: One of the best meditations on work is Phillip Levine’s poem “What Work Is.”

The Blue Line, this past summer during idler and warmer times.