Tag Archives: Theatre

Is This the Beginning of Zombie Shakespeare?

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I just got done with a dramaturgy session with my director for Measure for Measure (the show I’m dramaturging this year at Tufts and keep promising to fill you in on).  During the drive home, I was all prepared to write a nice long post about the process, how things are going, what a dramaturge actually does, etc.

…but then one of my friends posted this trailer on my facebook wall which clearly made it all but impossible to do anything but comment upon it.

I’m so egregiously excited that I’m having trouble formulating words.  Zombies?  Hamlet?  Spoof movies?  These are a few of my favorite things.  Add chocolate peanut butter, yarn, and shopping and you’d have a giant ball of Dani-crack.

I will begin with the following confession: I have seen nothing more about this film than this trailer.  I’ve done a small amount of research just to try and ground myself in some film-facts and figure out when it will be released to the general public (no answer as of now, by the way, much to my chagrin and dissatisfaction).

But based on what I’ve seen, I couldn’t be more excited if I tried.  A movie that deals with Shakespeare reverently but playfully?  A movie that makes fun of itself while simultaneously touting some good old fashioned Shakespearean values?  A movie that has the potential to be one of the most hilarious Shakes-scene of our times?

The film’s basic premise is that a group of indie film-makers want to make a version of Hamlet but lack the budget for a Kenneth Brannaugh-esque period piece.  Jokingly, they say the only thing they could make on their given budget is a B zombie film… so they solve their problem with a creative re-mix of both.  Midway through, their backer is found dead and so they become enrapt in a plot to cover up her death to ensure a green light for their film.  I’m sure that this causes plenty of outside complications as well, but I’m less concerned about those at the moment.

With the prospect of a zombie Hamlet, My mind immediately jumped to the possibility of the Norwegians being zombies led by a sort of lich-lord Fortinbras.  Denmark could almost literally become a prison due to high security measures set in place in order to prevent further zombie invasions and, upon the collapse of the court at the end, the zombie masses enter to find the corpses of the Denmarkian royalty.

The inclusion of zombies also problematizes death within the play.  What kind of outbreak are we dealing with?  Runners or Shamblers?  Nanovirus or witch doctors?  If nanovirus, then Claudius could well be made into an arch-villain having infected King Hamlet with the virus and making him patient zero of the outbreak.  Hamlet’s ghost could instead be a return of the shambling King as a sort of covert super-zombie come to wreck revenge upon the individual responsible for the attack.  If Witch Doctor induced, there could still be a measure of this creation-against-creator as King Hamlet would be unable to lift a hand against his Lord and Master now-King Cladius and thus must have his son act as agent.  Alternately, in a world where zombies are created by magic, ghosts become equally plausible.  King Hamlet could be a sort of revenant, requiring a flesh body to perform deeds upon the living and thus spurring his son to the task.

 This also complicates Hamlet’s killing of Polonius, as when he hears a rustling in the curtains of his mother’s bedchamber he could potentially believe it to be an undead foe and, thereby, shoot said foe in the head before it leapt out to attack.  Polonius becomes an unfortunate victim of the country’s political strife as opposed to the sacrificial lamb of Hamlet’s madness.

Ophelia’s death is similarly complicated, and the possibilities innate in a zombie-infested Denmark make richer her last scene in which she appears onstage having run mad.  Perhaps she has been bitten by her risen-from-the-dead father and her not-quite-a-zombie-yet fever is the cause of her madness.  Alternately, anyone can go crazy in the world of the zombie holocaust.  The uncaniness of the walking dead and the permeation of casual death into society will just do that to a person.

Also; what does this mean for Act V?  Does the royal court lay dead at the feet of the zombie invaders only to rise themselves as mindless brain-nommers?  Is Horatio the only human left alive in a world now peopled by the walking dead?

Since the film isn’t actually a zombie version of Hamlet but rather about the making of a zombie Hamlet, I don’t truly expect my questions to be answered.  I do, however, very much look forward to seeing it and firmly believe that I will have found a new go-to “bad day” movie.

…and if anyone has the money and inclination to actually direct a production of Hamlet set

“…Is this the end of Zombie Shakespeare?”

during the zombie holocaust, please oh please oh please hire me.  I’ll do anything to be involved in that production.  I’ll even put myself on your line and audition to be a piece of meat… I mean… actor.  But mostly, I want to find a reason to have to research what kind of duel you would possibly be able to stage while the zombie hoards were shambling at your door.  Pistols won’t cut it due to the multiple touches, but I could definitely see claymores or battleaxes coming in handy and thereby the Princes being versed in their usage… or maybe bludgeoning weapons are the way to go since cricket bats are definitely a staple of the zombie genre.  That, however, would complicate the poison premise, but we could maybe make it work somehow…

Zowie, Powie, Holy Cow

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This week, instead of engaging in post-semester flop, I’ve actually had a fairly busy schedule.  Two adventures in particular stand out as being blogworthy…

On Wednesday as a sort of post-mortem field trip, my eighteenth century professor organized an outing to the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale to see their current exhibit “The God of Our Idolatry”: Garrick and Shakespeare.  The Lewis Walpole Library is a collection of materials pertaining to British Eighteenth Century Studies.  It began as the private collection of Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (a loyal and noble son of Yale), whose fascination was drawn by eighteenth-century eccentric genius Horace Walpole (sidebar: Walpole wrote what many deem to be the first Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and also built himself a gothic castle just south of London which he called “Strawberry Hill”.  He decked it out with turrets, towers, false walls, staircases leading nowhere, and a dwarf butler.  Strawberry Hill is open to the public today, though probably sans dwarf butler).  The Library boasts over 32,000 manuscripts, some of which are theatre-related (playtexts, broadsides, drawings/pictures of actors in character and out, etc.).

The library is on beautiful, lush grounds.  Two buildings (the archive itself and the resident scholars’ house (the “root house”)) actually date from the eighteenth century.  A croquet set was arrayed on the lawn upon our arrival.

We were welcomed into the root house to have lunch (it’s furnished in old-school New England style and simply charming) before being ushered into the New Library.

That’s approximately when I decided that I would like to drop everything and live there.

The New Library is an oaken room furnished with bookcases in every corner, leather

I WANT TO LIVE HERE!

wingback chairs, and a baby grand piano.  It’s lit by a chandelier hanging from the cavernous ceiling, and a large arched window at the far corner.  I felt like I had walked into the library from Beauty and the Beast.  I would have been content to just sit in this room all day (perhaps with a book of my own and a snifter of brandy) and pontificate on life’s finer qualities.

But the fun didn’t stop there.  The exhibit was exciting and interesting, of course.  I had just finished writing a paper on Garrick, Shakespeare, and Hamlet, how could I not have fun in a roomful of Garrick paraphernalia?  And let me tell you, the more I learn about Garrick, the more I love that man.  He was simply so delightfully impressed with himself (and, by the way, because of this, the rest of London was as well).

But that wasn’t all!  Then they took us into the reading room where (as usually happens when a group of visiting scholars is being shown an archive) they had pulled materials related to our research interests.

And there, sitting on the table, just waiting for me, were two volumes of the Johnson/Steevens edition (London: 1773).

It doesn’t matter how frequently I handle archival materials, getting to touch documents and books which are hundreds of years old always always gets a rise out of me.  I sat down and lovingly paged through the volumes (they had pulled the index and volume two).  I used the book snake copiously (because book snakes are STILL awesome!).  I reveled in the book cushions.  I tried not to drool on it.

JOHNSON/STEEVENS EDITION!

Oh yea, there were other really interesting things on the table (photograph files, original editions of The Constant Lovers and other plays, eighteenth century satire pictures, etc.), but JOHNSON/STEEVENS EDITION!

So, yes, it was absolutely worth the two-hour-each-way drive to get there.  The exhibit, by the by, is free and open to the public during their normal gallery hours (Wednesday 2-4:30), or may be viewed by appointment if you’re really interested.  Really nifty stuff, but likely not worth the hassle to get there unless you’re a super dork like me.

Adventure two: took the best friend to see Little Shop of Horrors for his first time last night (can you imagine, he hadn’t heard the music, seen the movie, or seen the play!  There are still people in this world like that!).  We caught a production by New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts.

I’m having trouble finding shots from the Broadway Revival, but here’s a shot of a regional show which used the original puppet plant from the ’82 off-broadway production to give you a sense of the scope of the thing, and how all-encompassing it should be.

On the whole, the production was fairly solid and traditional.  Unfortunately, I have an extremely soft spot for this show and did manage to catch the 2003 Broadway production which was spectacular so it’s really hard for Little Shop to impress me.  This was a pretty good training-wheels show, and if I hadn’t seen the Broadway production I probably would have been more impressed.

The Charles Mosesian Theater is a big awkward space.  It’s a raked-house proscenium style stage with an audience pit that fans out to the side, creating really awkward sight lines at the extreme angles (which, unfortunately, we were seated in).  In addition, the space is large enough to be good for most musicals, but I truly feel that Little Shop requires a fairly small space.  In order to instill the real terror that the show demands, you want an intimate house that feels like the action can truly leap off the stage and attack you.  To pull off the show’s ending, you need to be able to engulf the theatre in energy and that is extremely difficult to do in a house that’s over one hundred seats.

This production, unfortunately, did not deliver that.  It felt like I was watching a film and didn’t really reach out and grab me.

The performances were solid, but didn’t go above and beyond.  Particularly disappointing was Blake Pfeil’s Seymour who, while he was able to conjure sufficiently weasley and lovable, copped out of every major song-capping note he was given.  Rather than belting that last, glorious, musical-theatre note, he instead chose to speak the last line of his songs.  This may be partially due to the show’s direction which also erred on the safe side of traditional.

On the whole, if this production had just been pushed to the next level, it would have been fantastic.  Even barring the awkward sight lines.

Theatre isn’t safe.  Acting is perhaps the most horrible profession someone can go into.  An actor is paid to tear open the inner recesses of himself and explore his deepest, darkest parts publicly, before an audience, eight times a week.  Little Shop is a campy, comedic romp in the macabre and a study about greed, desire, and the extremities of humanity.  If you play it safe, it becomes a hackneyed walk in Poe’s garden with some songs that everyone already knows.

Little Shop of Horrors plays through May 20th at Arsenal Center for the Arts.  For more info and tickets, check it out here.

Definitely a Hurricane

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So last night, in an effort to run away and join the Shakespeare circus for an evening instead of agonizing over the proper usage of periods in Chicago-style citation (seriously, Tufts, you are BLOWING THE MIND of this MLA-girl… guess I should get used to it since this is the rest of my life… sigh), I took my gay best friend to see Bad Habit Productions’ Much Ado About Nothing …with a twist.

The show’s a straight-up Much Ado performed with only five (count them! Five!) actors.

One of the things that I love about theatre companies who don’t normally do Shakespeare doing Shakespeare is that they tend to bring a sense of fun to it.  There was a spirit of play that permeated this show which really kept the energy moving and the audience willing to smile along with it.  The actors (for the most part) were multi-talented and at least half of them played several instruments and sang at some point in the production (one of the many script concessions was the addition of contemporary pop music which I did love).  One actress in particular, Sierra Kagen, truly blew me away.  She played a heart-felt Leonato, a sniveling Conrade, and an outright uproarious Margaret.  The only problem I had with her was that when she was onstage I had trouble looking at anyone else because the things she was doing were just so darn engaging.

Evan Sanderson really got to strut his stuff as Dogbery, which is great because his primary role (Claudio) can be a real bore to play.  I mean really, who wants to spend an entire show as a wide-eyed, fresh-faced male lead intent on nothing but winning the hand of the pretty girl?  Sanderson’s sense of comic timing and his subtle touches (best use of a lisp I’ve heard onstage in a long time) made the eccentric watchman truly light up the space.  Bravo, Sanderson.  Well done.

Unfortunately, the company’s weakest actress (Sasha Castroverde) played Beatrice and that (to be completely honest) really made me angry.  So, I have this thing.  Call it a retired actor thing.  If I see someone in a role which I know I can perform better (especially if it’s a role that I want to perform), I get very angry and distracted and there’s little I can do to keep myself from leaping out of my chair and delivering the lines for the actor onstage.  Someday, this instinct is going to get me into a whole lot of trouble.  I recommend the commencement of bail-money fund-raising immediately.  Last night, there was little I could do to take myself away from the fact that Castroverde simply did not have the fire in her belly for this role.  This was made doubly unfortunate because her Benedick (David Lutheran) was exceedingly talented.  Also… Castroverde seriously needs to work on her posture.

One downright brilliant concession made by the company was the fact that, while all the other roles were consistently played by one actor, the part of Hero was shared between all five.  Gender-bending and wonderful, every member of the cast took a turn at throwing on an ugly brown wig and a hideous blue dress to play the boring damsel.  This concession really took a snoozer of a part and made it into something interesting (and packed a punch when such lines as “your Hero, every man’s Hero!” and “one Hero died… but I do live”, and “Another Hero!” were uttered… though I do wish the director had made a nod at his genius concession with these lines.. they just beg for it!).

The script itself was fairly heavily cut, but anyone who isn’t a super-dork like me won’t really notice.  Some cuts were necessary due to the character set to speak the line simply not being onstage because the actor was playing someone else at the time.  Others were doubtlessly made to accommodate the many added musical numbers.  Either way, the cuts were fairly seamless and there wasn’t anything eliminated that I actually missed.

Perhaps the weak point in the production (and this, unfortunately, is a consistent weak point in Shakespeare productions done by non-Shakespeare companies) was the text coaching.  Word to the wise: text coaching can make a good production great and an awful production tolerable.  If you ever wind up directing, producing, or working on a production of Shakespeare, make certain that there’s a text coach on hand who knows her stuff (…hire me?  Please?).  While this production did make me smile and chuckle, it could have done with some more punch in the text department.  That would have truly taken it to the next level.

The production only has four shows left (it closes this Sunday), and you should definitely make an effort to go see it.  It’s well worth the cost of admission to see the four dynamos and one middler try and pull off the wedding scene (which, by the way, they do surprisingly well).  Tickets are available via Bad Habit’s website or, for the thrifty theatre-goer, Goldstar.

Then I Saw This Play… Now I’m A Believer

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So here’s the thing:

Yes, I’m a Shakespeare scholar.  Yes, I’m hardcore about my work.  Yes, I take my job very very seriously.

But I still love going to the theatre.  I still love to belt “Defying Gravity” in the shower (and at karaoke night, if I’ve had enough to drink).  I still love to have fun.

Theatre is not only a part of my life, but it has actually become my life.  I can’t say that it was always this way (I went through a brief stint working in IT… ask me how long that lasted and I’ll have to check and see how much of my soul is missing), but I can say that it has been this way for most of my earthly existence.

If I were to weigh every single production that I ever saw, or wanted to see, against the years of actor’s training, practical theatre experience, reading of books, writing of papers, and general engagement with the side of my job that falls most directly into the category “wibbly wobbly timey wimey ideas”, I would never relax.  I would never enjoy myself.  I would never be able to have an evening’s worth of true entertainment.

So yes, my standards for a production are high.  But no, I don’t walk into a theatre expecting every time to see the Trevor Nunn Lear starring Ian McKellon (which, by the way, was absolutely jaw-droppingly spectacular, and not just because good Sir Ian bared it all to play the part… and I do mean all).

That said, I saw something truly wonderful this weekend.

Some dear friends came to visit me from the far-off land of Utah.  One of their ulterior

aforementioned Utah friends. Yes, we dressed for the premier. Yes, Liz is wearing a Sergeant Pepper-esque tailcoat. My life is amazing.

motives was to support their favorite band (Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys) as the band made its theatrical debut with an apocalyptic sci-fi steampunk musical.  Yes.  You read that correctly.  The show is called “28 Seeds” and is performing at my favorite space in Boston, the cyclorama at Boston Center for the Arts.  My friends brought me along as resident theatre expert, though admitted to me after the show that they weren’t certain what my thoughts would be on the matter.

The project itself has undergone some evolution.  It began as a radio play before being picked up by local experimental theatre company Liars & Believers.  After a deep collaboration, Sickert and the gang present this multimedia, interdisciplinary masterpiece which seamlessly blends rock music, technology, and live performance.

The set -- check out all those monitors!

The story appears a little scattered at first with bits and pieces strewn here and there like the set of the show itself.  However, have faith good people.  It all comes together, I promise.  Like any quality piece of gritty science fiction, every ounce of this seemingly disparate information is used to draw the whole she-bang to a campy finale and really, who would have it any other way?

The play’s strategy utilizes my favorite part of a theatrical production: the audience’s brain.  The collaborators of this piece obviously trust their audience to put it all together.  Nobody is spoon-fed, everybody is expected to have a certain degree of intelligence.  You must be at least this smart to ride.  And this strategy, time and again, truly pays off.  There’s a fine balance between over-protective handholding mommy and lackadaisical freewheeling hippie anarchist, but 28 Seeds strikes that balance nicely.  When you hit this note correctly, it ensures that your audience walks away thinking about the production.  If you tell me everything I need to know, there’s nothing left for me to wonder.  If you leave me with something to gnaw on, I’ll want to see it again to figure out how everything was laid down in order to, at the precise moment, tumble upon itself like a complicated dominos configuration fueled by diet coke and mentos.

The amount of sheer talent which went into this collaboration is evident in every detail; from the wonderfully outrageous musicians, to the surprisingly stunning dancers (no, really, you’ll be surprised when they bust it out), to the seamlessness of the story-telling.  It’s almost like watching Cirque de Soleil; there’s so much going on onstage that you’re sometimes unsure where precisely to look.

I suppose calling this piece a “musical” isn’t entirely accurate because “musical” implies the random outbreak of the show’s internal characters into emotion-imbued song.  Rather, Sickert and the band are onstage the entire time, sometimes interacting with the action but more often utilizing frequent musical interludes to comment upon it.  Much like the computer monitors that take up a portion of the stage itself, the band serves as a method through which more and different information is conveyed.  Though I will be the first to admit, it was sometimes difficult to watch the actors when the truly intoxicating Rachel Jayson (violist) was sitting two feet away from me, sporting a corset like nobody else this side of the apocalypse ever could.

In addition to being just a wonderfully fun experience, the show also incorporates elements that make my inner feminist smile.  Two out of three of the major scientist characters are women, the president is a woman, and the only man who seems to have any power at all is an obviously idiotic general who utilizes his power to make the worst mistake humanity has seen.  Curious what it is?  Go see the show!

As you can imagine, this show has its quirks.  If you are offended by nudity, brains in jars, or poking fun at performance art, you should probably give this a miss.  Otherwise, find a way to go see it.  28 Seeds performs Wednesday-Sunday until May 12th.  As an extra special bonus, I will be re-attending the show on May 11th, so if you happen to be there that evening, make sure you say hi!

Ready for my Close-up

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Now that I’ve had a few days in my own home to marinate, I’d like to give you more of an inside peek of my trip to California before I’m off again to Baltimore on Wednesday.

The Conference

I arrived at the conference hotel when it was full dark and checked into my room in time for a shower and some quality time with my book before going to sleep with the knowledge that my conference companion would be busting in the hotel room door somewhere around one AM.  Conference buddies, by the by, are must-haves!  Academia is a transient profession.  As romantic as “THE IVORY TOWER” sounds, the more I am imbued within it the more I tend to think of it as a floating castle.  I would LOVE for there to be one, giant, gleaming white citadel with an expansive library, plenty of sunny reading nooks, and unlimited amounts of coffee.  In reality, what the academy really is is a few musty offices in under-funded departmental buildings, subterranean seminar rooms with too many chairs and not enough windows, desks upon desks located within peoples’ own homes, stacks of library books, all connected by a global network via the internet and well-placed e-mails exchanges across this rainbow bridge of a pipewire.
Conferences, however, are where all this becomes tangible.  You find yourself in a room full of people who have read the things you’ve read, want to talk about the things that you want to talk about, and can bat around theory over lunch.  You put some booze into these people and suddenly you’re talking about the symbolist reading of zombies in Romero’s movies, or how Bahktin would have read “The Hunger Games”.

Since we are so spread out, so widely arrayed across the globe, it’s inevitable that your friends will move.  You will move too.  And conferences are places where you can double-team your agenda: see your friends, and make professional connections!  Talk about a win!

In this case, I was slotted to spend the weekend with a close friends whom I got my Master’s with in New Jersey before he moved to Pittsburg and I moved to Boston.  As fate has these things, we reunited in San Diego.

Said friend and I getting all gradi-fi-cated with our Masterses.

According to said friend, I “sleep like a Viking” because his entry into the room didn’t even stir me from slumber.  I woke the next morning excited to catch up with him, and buzzing for the conference.

And to top it off, there were palm tress outside my window!

Conference strategy number one: at check in, read through the schedule and highlight panels you may want to see.  You will be too tired throughout the day to really think about what is/was interesting to you, so do yourself a favor and set up your schedule early.  If there’s a window of time in which the panels don’t speak to you (or they’re about texts you haven’t read), skip them!  Go take a nap!  Decompress in your hotel room!  You will need it, trust me.

So day one was spent flitting from panel to panel, enjoying the wonderful conference-provided lunch, and looking forward to relaxing at the post-day-one reception.

And relax we did.  Wine, dinner, lovely company, and a chance to chat with all the smart people whom I had seen speak that day (including the key-note who was downright brilliant, and a woman, score for intellectual femme fatale!).

My panel, as I have mentioned, was the first panel on day two so I went to bed early in order to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for said panel.

A note: I have never been to a conference (and especially a small conference) where coffee wasn’t available in copious amounts.  At this particular conference, there was a coffee break between every single panel.  This meant the very real danger of over-caffeinating.  BEWARE the over-caffeination!  It can make you feel icky, shaky, and off your game – the last thing you want when you’re trying to present your work.

Day two was slightly more difficult to get through since I have a low threshold for “sit and listen” and an even lower threshold for “social hour”.  I did take a break towards the end of the day and spent some much-needed decompression time in my room rather than be disrespectful to the panelists whose panel I would otherwise have glazed my way through.  In the future, I intend to pace myself a bit better – I’m bad at this – and take breaks BEFORE I feel my brain leak out my ears in an effort to prevent said brain leakage.

Hollywood

My fabulously talented brother, as you know, is a Hollywood filmmaker.  After the conference, since I had flown all the way out to his coast, I spent some time living his glamorous lifestyle.

As a theatre girl, it was extremely interesting to see how the other half lives.  I got to sit in on

Said photoshoot in progress. That's a lot of blood!

production meetings, locations scouts, and even a photo-shoot where I wound up lending a hand as a special effects makeup artist (they were running short on hands and time and, lucky enough, I have the skills to fill in for something like this).  We used more fake blood than I can really relate in writing, but the product looked really cool and I think the photographer got what he was looking for so it was a win overall.

Conclusion: Hollywood ain’t for me.  There is an art to what they do out there, but it’s very different from what I’m used to.  Creativity is expressed as an entire project rather than an individual outlet.  In the words of my brother “everyone is allowed to be a little creative in their own niche”.  I suppose, in a way, the same is true of theatre, but I truly feel that theatre is a less limiting media.  While everyone working on an individual project is in some way limited, adding technology to the mix both curtails and bolsters the abilities of the artists to fabricate a universe.  People become slaves to the technology; the camera dictates what can and cannot be done.  Actors fill into slots on the screen, really just becoming giant puppets rather than living people.  This isn’t the illusion that we get, though.  As a film audience, we see something encompassing, something close, a false portrayal of intimacy.  We are situated as physically closer to the images on the screen since a camera can zoom into something the way a theatre audience cannot, but the human connection is gone.  We connect with light and sound, not actual people.

That, however, is a philosophical difference that I don’t think I have room to go into here.  It deserves its own podcast, actually…. Hm….

I suppose that any of this is also dependant upon the individual project and the spirit of that project.  An attitude of acceptance and cooperation will go a long way in any artistic endeavor, while creative animosity only leads to a stifling and stuffy product.

Traveling

My brother also took me to the BIGGEST BESTEST USED BOOK STORE EVER! I felt like Belle in the Library!

Due to an extreme amount of self-discipline, I was able to accomplish everything I had slotted for plane-time work.  Six hours on an airplane can just fly (heh… get it?  Fly?) when you’re trying to avoid doing the homework you brought, but luckily I managed to eke it out before my will drained to empty.  Pro tip: work first, goof off with in-flight movies second.  That way you have a built-in reward for finishing your stuff, and you don’t have to panic when the plane is landing and you’re still frantically re-writing your conference paper.

So now I’m spending a few blissful nights reunited with my own glorious bed before I jet off again.  After that, it’s smooth (if packed chock full) sailing until the end of the semester.  I think these few days have allowed me to put out the major fires and that I’ll be at a manageable work-load if I continue at a good clip.

…I’ve been wrong before though, and my histrionics definitely make for more flavorful blogging.

The Weekend in Reviews

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This weekend past, I had the good fortune to see three shows over the course of four nights.

Since I’m currently in conference-prep mode, I don’t have the time or sanity to do a full review of each of them, but I would like to say a little something about all of them.  So here’s the weekend in reviews!

Macbeth
Performed by Theater906 at Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts
Directed by Emily C.A. Snyder

For all intents and purposes, this was community theatre Shakespeare.  Now I’ve had some bad experiences with CTS, and some good ones… and I’m sorry to say that this show simply did not deliver.  It had potential; its primary focus was upon the idea of “castles built on sand”.  It was set on the seaside at some point between the world wars, and the title character’s hands (once steeped in blood) never washed clean.

There were a few major flaws with the production: 1) it treated its audience like idiots.  I don’t have a problem with “new” and “different” readings of these plays if they are firmly

The set for MacB. Pretty nice as sets go!

grounded in text and well dramaturged, I don’t even have a problem with a bit of textual manipulation, but if you’re going to do it trust your audience to follow along with you.  The conceit of “sand castles” was written into the program, presented in all the advertising material, and shown out in front of the theatre.  You don’t need to beat us over the head with it in an artsier-than-thou montage during the curtain call.  Have a little faith in the people who see your show.  2) There were some big, bold ideas that were presented in the performance (i.e. Duncan as an angel of death figure who came and retrieved the corpses of the dead, Lady M’s obsession with children, violence violence violence intersecting innocence), but they simply weren’t played ENOUGH.  If you’re going to do something big, go big or go home.  If you do it too small, your audience simply won’t follow you.  Because the director refused to commit to her grand choices, they simply read as half-hearted attempts to connect with a concept that wasn’t fully fleshed out.  3) Macbeth should never be played as Hamlet.  Yes, he runs mad.  Yes, his wife goes bonkers.  But Macbeth’s madness is a different madness than Hamlet’s.  It’s not as weak and bumbling, it has an innate strength and danger to it.  I don’t want to see the King of Scotland writhing on the floor because he killed one man.  Remember: MacB is a SOLDIER.  He’s killed before.  It’s not the act of murder that takes his sanity from him, but rather the sense of divine wrongness in the act of defying natural order.

On the whole, give this one a miss… unless you really feel like you need to get some wear out of your black beret and sunglasses.

Twelfth Night
Performed by the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre at Roots Café in Providence
Directed by Bob Colonna

My love for TRIST and Bob Colonna is no secret.  THIS is the kind of Community Theatre Shakespeare that gives me hope for humanity.

Colonna is masterful at taking a cast of amateur and quasi-professional actors and building them into an unstoppable force of Bardery.  In his Twelfth Night, he cut the text down to two hours, pumped up the volume, and created a rip-roaring evening of vaudevillian hilarity which had us grinning ear to ear.  Colonna’s actors don’t miss a beat, and are simply unstoppable in their boundless amounts of energy and enthusiasm.

Malvolio (front) reads the letter egged on by Sir Andrew, Fabiana, Sir Toby, and Maria

Moreover, Colonna’s textual coaching is unbeatable.  His actors punch the punches with enough force to leave you reeling.  They hit every note (in the case of his Feste with an astounding amount of beauty and power) and aren’t afraid to do things a little differently (doubtless this is a result of Colonna’s creativity with the text and direction).

Side-note: you can always tell when an actor is rehearsing for Sir Andrew Aguecheek because he runs around trying to figure out how to do the “backtrick”.  Someday I want to see someone out with a full back tuck handspring combination…

Unfortunately, I got to this show late in its run so you won’t be able to catch it.  However.  Colonna has promised me that he’s directing As you Like it to perform in June at Roger Williams memorial park.  I will post further details as soon as I know them… but when I do take my word on this: GO.  If you have to steal your neighbor’s donkey and abscond with the rent money to get to Providence, find a way to make it work.  Trust me; it will be worth it.

Romeo and Juliet
Performed by the Stoneham Theatre Company at the Stoneham Theatre
Directed by Weylin Symes

Yea, I know.  How many Romeo and Juliets can one person see in her lifetime?  This one was new and different because Stomeham coupled their adult company with their teen company so the adults played adults and the teens played teens.

As you can imagine, this presents a bit of a problem in terms of sheer experience.  Shakespeare is notoriously complex textually and, while I have seen transcendent teen Shakespeare, it is extremely rare.  To pull it off you need a creative director, a kick-ass text coach, and more than a little bit of luck.

Unfortunately, this production fell short on a few of those items.  While the teens did okay, there was an obvious discrepancy between their ability to speak and that of their older colleagues.  Moreover, the text was poorly cut.  Many bits of this play simply don’t read to a modern audience – the nurse’s long monologues at the beginning, the Queen Mab speech (unless you’re Michael Pennington, but really, who is?)… it needs some careful handling to really plow forward in a way that doesn’t lose its audience.  Unfortunately, whomever handled the text for Stoneham didn’t have a very deft hand with this.  The long bits were long and plodding, and important plot points (i.e. the friar’s letter going astray due to plague) were cut completely.

An old friend of mine (a fight director) held an axiom which I think is vital to dealing with a text as iconic as Romeo.  Here’s the problem: how often has your entire audience heard these things?  How can you even begin to think about putting your mouth around the words “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” without thinking about ALL THE OTHER FAMOUS ACTORS WHO HAVE DONE SO IN THE PAST.  It’s a Harold-Bloom-esque conundrum that plagues the modern actor about to set into any iconic role (Richard Plantagenet “now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York…”; Hamlet “To be, or not to be?  That is the question”; The Witches “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble!”; etc…).  So here’s what you have to do: you have to assume that there is at least one person in that audience who has never had any contact with the text before and doesn’t know how the play ends.  You have to play to that person.  You have to craft a performance so that that person understands your story without any prior knowledge of what may be going on.

This play failed to do so.  They leaned too much upon the cultural capitol which they were mining to put butts in seats and, in doing so, did their entire production a disservice.

The fight direction, on the other hand, was downright amazing and some of the best violence I’ve seen onstage in a long time.  Bravo for that.

On the whole, it was a thought-provoking weekend.  Now here I go, back to conference prep mode; dive!  DIVE!

Ibsen’s Tallest Hour

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Last night I had the good fortune to witness a piece of theatre history.

Since its workshop in 2002 at the New York Theatre Workshop, Mabou Mines Dollhouse has created quite a splash in the theatre community; and with good reason.  Mabou Mines has taken a mainstay of classic (though dated) theatre and through an incredible sense of social propriety (or lack thereof), humor, and metatheatricality, created an entirely new experience.  This isn’t an easy thing to do with something as well-worn as Ibsen (and certainly not with something as well-worn as Ibsen’s most famous play), but I think Mabou Mines has definitively proven that they’re not afraid of tradition, nor to take a risk on a project which could flop or soar.

Nine years of touring all over the world and five international theatre awards

Cuter Majestic Theatre.... GORGEOUS!

later, the production has landed in Boston at ArtsEmerson for its final run before it is put to rest.

Honestly I’m not entirely certain where to begin talking about this.  If you’ve been following the press at all, you’ll know that the biggest splash it’s made has been in the casting of Amazonian women against dwarfish men (no, really, they’re dwarves) and the choice to set the play entirely within what is literally Nora’s dollhouse; a Christmas present for her children.  The furniture and props are all sized for the show’s male actors and the women spend a great deal of the evening on their hands and knees or otherwise stooping to accommodate this.

What the big press points don’t tell you is the next step deeper: all of the actors speak in Swedish-chef-like Norwegian accents which vary in thickness from the play’s beginning to its end.  The play’s first scene is barely decipherable as English (and I’m pretty sure that Helene’s lines are complete Swedish chefed).  Maude Mitchell as Nora Helmer gives the performance of a lifetime, but I’ll get to her in a moment.  For now, let’s just say that her voice would be more at home within a Disney Princess Barbie than a real woman.

Nora and Torvald

But this is just the beginning of the play’s concession to the ridiculous.  Lee Breuer brings the melodrama back to Ibsen (as, I think, one really must to have Ibsen play before a modern audience).  As soon as you are comfortable with one bit (i.e. the accents), Breuer hits you with something else.  I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice to say that by the final curtain it’s as though the designers have thrown up their hands and said “Aw hell, just have everything!”.

Breuer knows how to train an audience.  The adjustment time allotted for each individual conceit shrinks throughout the progress of the play.  What this mean is that the first act (really a compression of Act I and Act II in Ibsen’s source text) drags on for its second half, then hits you upside the head with a sledgehammer about two thirds in, and leaves you with a version of the infamous tarantella scene that I’m not sure we’ll ever see matched in theatre again (be warned: they use strobe lights).  The second act comes on fast and hard and just doesn’t stop until an operatic ending which (like I said) pulls out any stops that may or may not have been left (I’m still deciding which).

Don’t worry, they’ve kept the requisite door slam.  You can’t have A Doll’s House without the door slam.

Last night there was an added complication in that Kristopher Medina, the actor who usually plays Krogstad, played Torvald Helmer.  Medina is a towering 4’6” (as opposed to Mark Povinelli who usually plays Torvald and is 3’9”).  This made Torvald the tallest man on the stage.  In a show which obviously makes continual nods at height and size as symbols of power, I wonder how differently it would have read if Krogstad had been the more physically imposing of the two men.  As it was, it was nearly ridiculous to think of Nic Novicki (Krogstad’s understudy who went on for him last night and who stands at a statuesque 3’10”) doing physical harm to Torvald.  Why should Nora fear for her husband’s safety as she does?  Was it simply a matter of her continuing to be a silly little girl?  In any case, I think the original casting would have changed the story… I’m simply wondering to what degree.

Let’s talk about Maude Mitchell for a moment.  If she had just showed up, done this performance, then disappeared into the ether, I would be insanely jealous of her talent.  More than that, Mitchell is actually the co-adaptor with Breuer, has spoken at several conferences and festivals (both academic and otherwise) around the world, and is currently working on a book entitled “Playing Nora: ‘The Door Slam Heard Round the World,’” which contains thirty interviews with actresses who have performed the role of Nora.  Not only is she immensely talented, but clearly also brilliantly smart.  It’s just not fair!

In Breuer’s world of toys and games, Mitchell becomes a (literally) toy of a woman.  She speaks in aforementioned hushed Disney Barbie Swedish Chef language.  She croons more like a bird than a person.  She crawls on her hands and knees the entire production and somehow makes that graceful.  When she does stand to her full stature, she spins and whirls like a top.  She makes sounds and plucks at the garments of the men like an endearing squirrel.  She is, in every sense of the word, a doll.

There’s only one problem with this.  If Nora is a doll, then how can she be sympathetic?  Both myself and my companion last night agreed that we left the theatre perhaps not enamored of Torvald, but at least with some understanding of his attitudes and actions.  They were rational.  They made sense.  Nora, as a doll, couldn’t possibly exist in a world outside of her doll’s house.  Someone had to take care of her.

Moreover, I found myself unconvinced that Mitchell’s Nora would be able to deal with the Krogstad business which the script demands of her.  I found myself dubious at best at her ability to raise children, but the presence of a handy dandy nursemaid (who seemed quite capable… especially at stealing scenes) allayed that particular inconsistency.

In addition, I wondered what it was (precisely) that I was seeing.  Since the entire play takes place inside the doll’s house, what was the world like outside the doll’s house?  Were the characters as they were only within the doll’s house and did they mystically become something different outside?  Was this really a world where all the men are short of stature and women are nothing more than pretty little animals attending to them?  Did the doll’s house somehow show us the essence of a human being Richard III style and clear our minds of all accessory which may prevent us from seeing the truth of what was going on?

I left the theatre unsure what to say and on the whole I’m mostly still processing what it was I saw last night.  I’m left with more questions than answers… but I think that’s what Breuer wanted.

You should make every effort to go see this show, but only if you are invested in theatre, have read A Doll’s House before, and aren’t offended by Satyrs with giant phallic costume pieces.  It runs through Sunday at ArtsEmerson and then the show retires forever.  This is most definitely something that we’ll be talking about for many years to come.

Uncanny Theatre

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It’s midnight on a Friday.  You’re just stumbling home from an evening of pubbing or (if you’re me) away from your computer after a long day of research.  You realize that you have an e-mail in your inbox, it’s a rendezvous time for the next day.  You sigh, remembering suddenly that you had booked something and just couldn’t recall what…  the e-mail includes a link to a google map and tells you to meet there at two the following day.

Flash forward to Saturday afternoon.  You’ve managed to make the rendezvous with your travel companions.  A man in a long cape and a white beard meets you there to tell you a

the man with the beard

story; it’s a story about you, a story about something you’ve done in the past, a story about time traveling.

He weaves his tale and you realize that this story is about to pick up right now.  There’s a test, he says, being administered as we speak.  It’s on the corner of Dartmouth and Newbury….

And off you go.  You rush to make it to the test, you meet a man in a suit waiting there for you, of course someone passing by you “accidentally” dropped an answer key so you are certain to pass this thing…

…and your time-venture has begun.  “Choose your own Time-Venture” is just the most recent event put on by The Banditos Misteriosos.  This quixotic organization bills itself as “Boston’s Mysterious Playmate”.  Three or four times a year, the Banditos organize free, fun events which use Boston as a playground.  They don’t advertise (other than by word of mouth) and they aim to put forward experiences which I would term “geektastically fun”.  Past events have included a celebration of Boston day which revolved around a “historically accurate” water gun fight between the Back Bay Swamp Creatures and the Revere Horsemen, a pillow fight flash mob, and a giant Boston-themed scavenger hunt.

“Time-Venture” was particularly interesting to me due to its performative implications.  How can we classify this event?  There were definitely actors playing roles (just about every street corner had someone playing something whether it was a time machine mechanic, an agent with the time-traveling organization, or a crime boss from whom you needed to receive a pivotal piece of the time machine).  The actors were costumed and followed a

time-machine mechanic fulfilling his destiny to be a can-can dancer... really, folks, you can't make this stuff up.

“structure” rather than a specific “script” and your encounters with them were arranged to form a cohesive story.  However, what cannot be ignored is the element of choice.  This was, essentially, a live-action choose-your-own-adventure novel.  Each waypoint had at least two options to choose from and tasks which had to be fulfilled in order to enact those options.  At one waypoint, we were required to take pictures of ourselves fulfilling our destinies in order to convince our liaison that we believed in fate.  At another, we had to solve a letter-replacement cipher in order to decode a message.  At a third, we had to use the time-traveling tools which we had acquired to bend the encounter to an outcome which favored us.

Scholar Glynne Wickham recognizes five basic elements which, at the most fundamental level, create a theatrical event.  These are: 1) the existence of a theatre (a stage and auditorium), 2) the imitation of actions in sequence (story-line), 3) the means of identifying person and place (costumes and setting), 4) actors, 5) audience.  If we go by these parameters, then “Time-Venture” could easily be termed a theatrical event.  The only quality which would be up for true debate here is the existence of a theatre.  The Banditos’ mission statement (“Boston is a playground. Banditos Misteriosos is the city’s mysterious playmate. We are an organization dedicated to bringing Boston alive with a slew of activities that are free, open to everybody and most importantly, just a little bit out of the ordinary..”) makes extraordinarily clear that their intended venue of performance is the city itself.  Can we term a city a theatre?  “May we cram within this wooden ‘O’ the very casks that did afright the air at Agincourt?”.

Well, okay, let’s get more specific here.  Yes, the entire event unfolded over the course of a section of Boston.  However.  Each specific encounter was scripted for a specific street

a mediaeval pageant wagon

corner (or park, or sidewalk).  So, in a way, we could equate “Time-venture” with mediaeval pageant wagons.  For those who aren’t up on their theatre history, in medieval England during important religious feasts and festivals, the working-class would stage cycles of plays on what were called “pageant wagons”.  Each wagon was assigned a portion of the story to tell, and the wagons were paraded throughout the town, stopping at pre-arranged stopping points and commencing their bit of the story.  If you stood in one place long enough, you saw an entire play.

For “Time-venture”, rather than the audience standing in place and the play coming to us, we walked to the play.  Perhaps there were no raised scaffolds involved, but there were certainly performance spaces.  Each performer held his own “area” and, as in normal conversation, we as a group remained at arm’s length to fulfill our interaction.

Perhaps an argument could be made about the interactive nature of the text.  A play, after all, is something written by a playwright to show a certain story.  In the case of “Time-venture”, the story was in our hands.  Our group wound up first attempting to fix the broken time machine, but then becoming double agents to subvert the evil organization which was trying to go back in time and re-cast Star Wars.  We gathered the elements of the time machine from old friends, drug lords, and secret rendezvous, and used them to destroy the time machine and save the past.  Other groups, I am told, had very different experiences based upon their choices.  But does that make either of these stories less cohesive?  There remained a beginning, middle, and end.  There remained obstacles to overcome.  There remained choices.

Simply because we were placed in the middle of the action rather than passive observers of said action did not make the action any less dramatic.  We were the volunteers from an audience during an improv show.  We were the heroes of our own story.  Like it or not, we had become actors.

I highly recommend checking out the Banditos and attending any event they run.  They were a pleasure to interact with, made us feel welcome in this ridiculous adventure, and completely enfolded us in an uncanny world of strange goings-on.  What an afternoon of entertainment!

Treasure Huntin’

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So here’s the thing about research: it’s like a treasure hunt.

You enter into a research proposal sometimes with a very clear idea of what you’re looking for but, more often than not, with only a vague concept.  You have to be open to the notion that what you will find will shape what you’re on the hunt for.  You have to understand how to roll with the punches.  And you have to have a creative approach to digging through databases and texts.

A good researcher isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.  I can (and do) sit behind my

You know who else hunts for treasure?

computer and schlog through electronic resources, but it’s in the stacks that research really thrives and in the archives where research gets really exciting.

I’m taking a course this semester on Research Methodologies.  This is extremely important for me at this juncture in my career for several reasons: first because I will be using these skills for the remainder of my time within the Academy (an extremely long, if not indefinite, period); second because though I have performed research before it hasn’t quite been on the scale that I’m currently wading into; and third because my previous research has been primarily based in English literature not Theatre history.

There’s a great deal more archive work that goes into theatre research.  Oh sure, straight-up lit scholars have books and manuscripts and letters and printing presses to look at, but theatre people have mountains upon mountains of ephemera; playbills, drawings, paintings, sketches, character concepts, prompt books, actual theatres, the ruins of theatres, props, costumes, video and sound footage, the list drags on.

Here’s the distinction: literature, in many ways, is a two-dimensional course of study.  This is not to say that it is inferior or in some way smaller than Dramatics.  This is simply to say that the experience of reading a book is one which remains upon a page.  It is a relationship between reader and text and, for the most part, text can be (and has been) preserved since its initial readership.  Certainly the complications of editing, printing, revision, and historical context remain so lit crit is by no means a straightforward notion, it’s simply a field of scholarship based upon a process which is better able to survive.

But take all that.  All of it.  And add the complication of a performance.  A performance is an experience, a three-dimensional thing as wonderful as it is fleeting.  No single performance can ever be repeated.  No audience will ever be re-assembled and, even if they are, they are fundamentally changed between first assembly and second.  They bring a different load of life experiences one day than they do the next.  The performers too; Wednesday I felt this moment, Thursday I didn’t, Friday I was sick and had trouble speaking my lines.

These complications are what make performance studies so very difficult (and so very engaging).  I’m still studying text, but the text is a jumping off point rather than an end in and of itself.  It’s the groundwork of the puzzle, not the entire puzzle.

HTC is housed in Houghton which, while not as impressive as their main library, is adorable.

So it’s the beginning of the semester.  I’m beginning to flesh out my research ideas for the fall.  I live down the street from the Harvard Theatre Collection, the oldest and largest collection of its kind in the United States (debatably the world in terms of size – they are in contention with Oxford for that title).  Archives are infinitely more exciting and frustrating than libraries.  Archives, by their nature, are more difficult to catalogue.  There’s a lot more that can slip through the cracks.  They are chaotic, hectic.

But the thrill of paging through the prompt script for the first ever production of The Importance of Being Earnest (which I got to do this week!  SQUEEEE!), the excitement of finding some remnant of days past which has become so important and focal to your life (hey, research is my life, leave me alone), the rush of realizing that you are looking at something which William Henry Ireland wrote himself (Harvard has everything… everything) simply can’t be replicated.

Some days, it’s the little victories which matter.  Locating that article which could be truly pivotal.  Hauling your bum to the library so that you can look at the books and hold them rather than dig through MARC records.  Making a long-awaited photocopy.

The hunt for evidence does not necessarily equate a hunt for truth.  It’s a search for the bones of an argument.  A quest for the stuff that dreams are made on.

In digging, I can’t help but think of a fellow academic who also famously hunted for

oh, Dr. Jones....

treasure.  His contention (“We do not follow maps to buried treasure and ‘X’ never, ever, marks the spot…”) is one, however, which I will have to disagree with.  While often I am required to deviate from a beaten path, generally X does mark the spot.  Every time I get a hit for my keywords, whenever an article is titled something similar to my thesis, when I find a document referenced which I, too, have referenced, I know that I’m on the right track.   Sorry, Dr. Jones, but I am inclined to respectfully disagree with you on this account.

And so the journey begins.  I’m slowly developing a treasure map.  Here’s hoping it leads somewhere fruitful.  I have no doubt that it will lead somewhere interesting.

The Great Globe Itself

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Our Reuels now are ended: These our actors,
(As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and
Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre,
And like the baselesse fabricke of this vision
The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces,
The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolue,
And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded
Leaue not a racke behinde:

-The Tempest IV i, 1819-1827

Shakespeare’s theatre was called “The Globe”. To punctual the smack of depth which this title meant to instill, above the entrance to the theatre were inscribed the words “Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem”; a quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like it translated to Latin from English. In the Queen’s tongue it means “All the World’s a Stage”.

This is not an insubstantial thing. To an actor, a playwright, a director, or really a theatre person of any flavor, the theatre itself is the whole world. You live there, breathe there, eat there, cry there, bleed there… and if you are a true theatre person more than these things the theatre is where you come alive. The deep emotion; the pain, the suffering, the immense vitality that you experience in a theatre is unparalleled by any other sensation. And if you’re a good actor, you’re able to take the audience with you.

A theatre is a place of raw, roiling humanity. It’s a place of communal experience, and every theatre holds its own brand of magic.

I love theatres. I am a connoisseur of theatres. Theatrical spaces, to me, are the most exciting things in the world. They are spaces of absolute zero and infinite potential; spaces built to come alive with the vibrancy of creativity.

Every theatre has its own energy. Try this little experiment. The next time you enter a theatre, take a look around. Take a moment to breathe in the space, really experience what it’s like to be sitting there. How does it make you feel? What sorts of thoughts run through your head? What are your expectations for what you are about to see? Lather, rinse, repeat every time you walk into a theatrical space. Get a feel for where you are – what about this theatre makes you feel the way you do? Exposed set pieces, proscenium arches, the relative distance between the stage and the audience? Just begin to notice how the theatrical space impacts the theatrical process.

Players' Ring exterior

I have fallen absolutely in love with some theatres through the years, and my most recent affair is with the Portsmouth Players’ Ring. Nestled right on the harbor in the adorable town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the Ring has a deep and (dare I say) sordid past.

It’s a 75-seat blackbox on the ground floor of a historic building. This works to its advantage in several ways; the first is that (since it is a historic building) grant money is slightly easier to come by during these rough-on-the-arts economic times. In addition, the building itself as a tourist spot in and of its own right draws a certain crowd.

Though the very kind (and extremely informed!) woman who runs the space has yet to find information to substantiate this rumor, word on the street is that the building used to house a brothel. It is, after all, right on the water… it serviced the sailors and then it serviced the sailors. Somehow, this just seems right for a theatre.

These days, a brick exterior houses three stories; theatre, shop, and storage respectively.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me “blackbox” theatre means that a well-meaning organization owns a building with a spare room which was second-thoughtedly converted into a “bastion of cultural well-being”. Usually they are sparse spaces painted in all black with crammed removable seating. The fancier ones have a real light grid. “Blackbox” means creativity, not necessarily quality.

Exposed wooden beams, reminiscent of Elizabethan Styling

The Ring supersedes these expectations. Internal masonry (which, by the way, is indicative that, brothel or otherwise, the building was a commercial one during the eighteen hundreds) is preserved and decorated with costume sketches in the lobby. Exposed wooden beams inside the theatre itself lend a homey grounded and antique feeling which only wooden theatres have (seriously, you haven’t been in a theatre until you’ve been in a wooden theatre). The lighting situation is perhaps the most impressively creative aspect of the space; glorified track lighting is plugged into sundry power ports across the ceiling and controlled from a small booth at the back of the theatre. Everything is on a dimmer so theatrical lighting effects, while sparse, are still manageable. House lighting includes decorative strings of Christmas lights, which add charm to the space.

The stage itself is a three-quarter round with a raked house. This puts audience members right into the action as the first row is, literally, sitting on the stage. It also provides some interesting staging predicaments as angles must be played to three sides rather than one, but that is nothing that cannot be overcome by a good director. Since the Players’ Ring does have a resident company, presumably their usual fare is accustomed to working in the space and thereby well acquainted with such predicaments. It also works extraordinarily well for the productions which I’ve been attending, Tuesday night improvisational comedy by New Hampshire’s Stranger than Fiction. The intimacy of the house encourages a certain degree of audience interaction, which is perfect for this breed of performance which hinges upon audience participation. By the way, if you’re in the area, you should really check these guys out. They only have a few more weeks of regular performances, and it is well worth the $12 ticket price ($10 with a student ID).

I was enthralled. To make matters even more enticing, during intermission

Adorable Lobby!

audiences are welcomed into the lobby where a vast collection of theatre mugs are offered up for use along with free coffee and tea as well as an assortment of cookies.

Ocean air, adorable port town, AND wonderful community theatre? I may never leave this place. A word of advice to the Portsmouth Players: if you begin to hear some strange noises in your scene shop during the night, or find that your tea is consumed at an above-average rate, it isn’t your requisite theatre ghost. It’s a Shakespearean scholar who has decided to (literally) take residence in your wonderful testament to the arts.

They’re doing Timon of Athens in June. I may die of happiness.