Recently in the Drama Category

This bit of educational theatrical fun sounds awesome! Via.

Travelling from past to future through a landscape of machines and ideas Walk the Plank and Thingumajig Theatre have created an interactive journey through the courtyard of Manchester's Town Hall. The audience will help inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage find the clues to repair his Difference Engine; solve the spider's riddles, hidden in the worldwide web; persuade the counting madman to open the gates to the Hall of Shadows...and discover the secret workings of the steampunk arcade. --The Manchester International Festival

There's no information in the non-subscription IMDB, but there is an entry for a movie based on Rossum's Universal Robots.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300594/

The original play was a talky social comedy mixed with a melodrama (complete with a "missing papers" plot twist), and the big action sequences happened off-stage (with characters either referring in passing to events that happened years ago, or characters looking through windows and describing what they saw). So I worry what "enhancements" might make their way into a big-budget production. (Sigh.)

If anybody knows more about this movie (faithful art-house reproduction of the original play? CGI-infested revisionary abomination?), I'd welcome the news.

Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month.

One of the more unusual plays in this year's Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the creators of Adventure Quest have been kind enough to provide a brief "walk-through" that captures the genre's peculiar narrative conventions.

You are standing in the market square of the town of Despairington. There are several buildings here, including the potter's shop, the pie factory and the apothecary. Each appears to have been long abandoned. (Their owners were presumably among the many townspeople who joined the Octopus Cult last winter and killed themselves by drinking poisoned ink.) A large boomerang rests on a nearby crate of mangos.

You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.

The marketing text is a parody, not a tribute. The text on the site reads like a text adventure, but it plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with a single choice on each page.  The color scheme is flat enough. (Where does the color cyan exist, except in the 16 color home computer palette?) But the pixels are much too small. The detail on the roof is far too fine. 

Both the words and images are off-base just enough to make me doubt that the play itself will be anything more than a silly pastiche. Still, I found the site amusing. via

Okay, I'm officially lame. I teared up a few days ago during Star Trek, and tonight I teared up during this song from The Magic Treehouse: The Musical, based on a series of easy-reader books by Mary Pope Osbourne. The touring show was in my town tonight; we had front-row seats. The song is a perky, sappy tribute to brotherly and sisterly love, and the lyrics perfectly describe my own kids.

Jack: You're so brave!
Annie: You're so smart!
Jack: You make me laugh!
Annie: I love your heart!
[...]
Annie: I'm the arrow, you're the bow.
Jack: I'm the tic-tac, you're the toe!
Annie: You're the engine.
Jack: You're the steam.
Annie: I'm the peaches!
Jack: I'm the cream!
Both: What would I do without you?

A tear actually slid down my cheek after the "steam" line, and I reached for my wife's hand so she could feel it.

I am so lame...

Now I'm going to listen to this song again.

If you have a Facebook account, you're probably familiar with the "25 Things About Me" meme.  Mike McPhaden unearthed "Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me," of which the best (IMHO) is the following:

14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I remind her that i) she was Italian, an impulsive race ii), she was actually played by a middle-aged Eunuch named Ned, and iii) she died. That always shvts her right vp.

In my Literary Criticism class, next week we'll be looking at The Yellow Wallpaper -- most of us probably for the umpteenth time.  Here's a comment that just appeared on the course website, that reminds me why I spend six hours straight re-configuring a server from scratch because it got infected with a virus 12 hours before the first meeting of the class.

Hey there!

I am an NYC actress (and a former English Literature major) currently in production on a one-woman show (yes, ANOTHER one) of this phenomenal story. I was doing some research and just this afternoon spent some very enjoyable time reading the blog entries from your students in 2007.

I have been in love with this story since I first laid eyes on it in HS American Literature course, and then a few years later in undergrad. From the time I read it, I thought it was written just like a monologue, and dreamed of doing it someday.

I will say that actually memorizing and "living" the words as I speak them has opened up all sorts of insights for me that I never had upon reading/rereading/deconstructing/etc. for many, many years! That said, I still discovered new things to think about from your students, and am very much looking forward to peeking in on their discoveries (if that is allowed).

Thanks so much,

Annalisa

Yup. That's the kind of thing that makes the pain worthwhile.

The McCarthy purges were a disgraceful blot on the national record of any nation aspiring to free speech, and are still, evidently, a matter of passionate concern.

When Elia Kazan, who sang like a bird, was awarded a lifetime Oscar 40 years later, many in Hollywood made it plain that his betrayal was a matter of the rawest feeling.

Still, there is something naive and faintly bizarre about Miller's much-admired response to the McCarthy period, The Crucible, comparing the communist hunt to the 17th-century witch hunt. As Kazan's wife pointed out, the difference was that there really were communists. It was disgraceful to pursue people for their political views, but it was absurd to suggest that the political views were dreamt up in bouts of mass hysteria, like the accusation of witchcraft.-- Philip Hensher (Telegraph)

Arthur Miller lived for some 50 years after his greatest literary successes, though I have taught (and will teach again this spring) his 2002 play Resurrection Blues. 

My family saw the American Family Theater's production of Babes in Toyland this morning.

Barnaby the Bumbling Villain, sneering from under a painted-on handlebar mustache as he gloats over his possession of the widow's mortgage, pursues the heroes to Toyland. There, after much stock-character humor (cunning disguises, stunning surprises... lovers divided get coincided) the climax comes as the heroes pin Barnaby down, tickle him, and force him to eat a gumdrop from the "goody gumdrop tree." 

This sets up a musical transformation that begins with Barnaby tossing his black hat offstage, then catching the white hat thrown by a stagehand. After a few dance routines with the newly reformed Barnaby, we see his pantomimed proposal to the widow he had initially been trying to throw out onto the street.

I thoroughly enjoyed the melodrama, and my six-year-old was hopping up and down in her seat to the songs.

As we were filing out, I asked my ten-year-old why he looked so thoughtful.

"They shouldn't have forced Barnaby to eat the gumdrop," he said. "Even if he's a villian, they interfered with his free will.

I didn't know what to say. Other than telling him this was another one for the blog.

Great use of 3D technology to enable the study of an historic art form. Virtual Vaudeville:

Watch legendary comedian Frank Bush in a vaudeville performance from a variety of perspectives in the theater, from the most expensive boxes to the cheapest balcony seats. Compare the reactions of different spectators and even experience the act through the eyes of the performer. Switch between any of eight perspectives at any time and read the extensive hypermedia notes to gain a richer understanding of the performance in its historical context.

A short comedy sketch that emphasizes the importance of finding the right editor.

McSweeney's:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a little better.)

From an article I published in 1997, back when I thought I was pretty hot stuff to include postage-stamp-sized video clips on a website. The website also featured a Java simulation of the outdoor pageant that celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi (which is today).

The outdoor theatrical event in the medieval city of York, England, known to its performers and audiences as the "Corpus Christi Play," is a collection of brief religious plays that together represent the story of Christian salvation. The York cycle is one of four that have survived in more or less complete form. The others are known as Chester, Wakefield, (after the cities where they were performed) and N-Town (now identified with no known city, but formerly identified as Townley). The York cycle was performed nearly every year, on the feast of Corpus Christi (Latin for the Body of Christ). The plays were already an established tradition in the late 14th century, and they continued in one form or other (weakened by Protestant censorship) until the mid-to-late 16th century.

Just watch it. You'll get it.

NPR's In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman).

"I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men -- men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking," Dennehy says. "And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth."

I rotated this play off of my syllabus this year. I'm sure I'll bring it back.

Filed away to read on a rainy day (after I've cleared some big projects from my to do list): Jonathan Bate

The original manuscripts of Shakespeare's works do not survive: the sole extant composition in his hand is a single scene from Sir Thomas More, a multi-authored play that cannot really be described as 'his'. Shakespeare only survives because his works were printed.

The scholarly editing of Shakespeare began in the eighteenth century, when the model for such activity was the treatment of the classic literary and historical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. The recovery of those texts had been at the core of the humanist Renaissance. The classical procedure was to establish which surviving manuscript was the oldest, the aim being to get as close as possible to the lost original, weeding out the errors of transcription which had been introduced by successive scribes in the centuries before the advent of print. As Shakespeare began to be treated like a classic, the same procedure was applied to his texts. The eighteenth century also witnessed his rise to the status of national genius, icon of pure inspiration. That image required the imagining of a single perfect original for each play. Shakespeare couldn't be allowed second thoughts - that would imply some deficiency in his first thoughts. So it was that over time, there emerged a preference for early texts over later ones and a belief that the editor's job was to restore a single lost original, something approximating to the text as it came 'pure' from the hand of Shakespeare.

We are very unlikely ever to recover the manuscripts of the plays as Shakespeare originally wrote them (the ambition of the 'new bibiographers'). In the absence of surviving promptbooks, let alone dictographic or video records, we will never recover the plays as they were first performed (the ambition of the 'Oxford revisionists').

All plays change in time, metamorphosing as they go from writing to rehearsal to performance to revival. Many agencies (the playwright and his collaborators, the actors, the book-keepers and scribes, the compositors and proof-readers) were involved in the creation of what we call a Shakespearean text. Despite a hundred years of advanced bibliographic investigation, there is still a remarkable lack of scholarly consensus about the nature of the copy for many of Shakespeare's plays.... Perhaps it would be best to abandon the idea that any one text represents the 'definitive' version of a Shakespeare play. After all, the quest for a 'definitive' text, based on a 'single lost original', was premised on the principles of classical and Biblical textual criticism. It is not necessarily appropriate for more modern literary and especially dramatic texts.

Yahoo! | AFP:

The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday.

Like the myth about lemmings hurling themselves to their death, this new detail, found from a study of bones found iat the base of the site, will take a while to spread. I'm just filing this away in case I need to mention it the next time I teach Lysistrata.

The Walls are Closing In

 
It's all my fault
that now I hear their death -
their screams of pain
within their final breath.    


No, we are alive.

And thanks to you,
we'll get out.

A whole song about such a literal event?  Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely to what is happening on stage, have to be about the hopes and fears of the characters. There are a few other songs that seem to be closer to the right idea, but I wasn't really impressed by what I saw.

The New York Musical Theater Festival has some tidbits about an upcoming showing of a musical based on The Last Starfighter. Too bad I'm not really within day-trip distance of New York... this one would tempt me. My nine-year-old son would probably enjoy it, but the trip would be hard on my five-year-old daughter. Oh well... looks like the show has gotten good reviews. (Jason Scott raved geeky raves when he saw it a few years ago.)

From JONATHAN BETUEL's screenplay for the beloved 1980s sci-fi film comes the cosmically entertaining romantic musical fantasy THE LAST STARFIGHTER. It's Spring 1983 in a Sierra Nevada trailer park. High school senior Alex Rogan's hardworking, unrewarded life takes an unexpected turn when he breaks a video game record and is spirited away by the game's inventor, the alien huckster Centauri, to fight for the Star League in a faraway galaxy. Centauri leaves behind Beta, a body double droid of Alex, to cover Alex's absence with his mother, brother and beloved girlfriend Maggie while Alex is off fighting the evil Zur and the Ko-dan Armada. Beta's comic mishaps on Earth with Maggie and the neighbors in the trailer park, and shape-shifting alien assassins in pursuit of Alex on his home turf, alternate with Alex's heroic starfighter achievements. Alex must reach inside himself to discover his true potential - the universe and his life depend on it!

A luminous group of anti-Stratfordians write:

Not one play, not one poem, not one letter in Mr. Shakspere's own hand has ever been found. He divided his time between London and Stratford, a situation conducive to correspondence. Early scholars naturally expected that at least some of his correspondence would have survived. Yet the only writings said to be in his own hand are six shaky, inconsistent signatures on legal documents, including three found on his will. If, in fact, these signatures are his, they reveal that Mr. Shakspere experienced difficulty signing his name. Some document experts doubt that even these signatures are his and suggest they were done by law clerks. One letter addressed to Mr. Shakspere survives. It requested a loan, and it was unopened and undelivered. His detailed will, in which he famously left his wife "my second best bed with the furniture," contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase and mentions no books, plays, poems, or literary effects of any kind. Nor does it mention any musical instruments, despite extensive evidence of the author's musical expertise. He did leave token bequests to three fellow actors (an interlineation, indicating it was an afterthought), but nothing to any writers. The actors' names connect him to the theater, but nothing implies a writing career. Why no mention of Stratford's Richard Field, who printed the poems that first made Shakespeare famous? If Mr. Shakspere was widely known as William "Shakespeare," why spell his name otherwise in his will? Dying men are usually very aware of, and concerned about, what they are famous for. Why not this man?

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is "this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn't work for 'my subject.'" Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include "thought experiments" where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt --on the spot -- to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler's List. It's just dumb (and lazy) of educators -- not to mention ineffective -- to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives' "language" is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea. --Marc Prensky --Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (marcprensky.com)

Extremely relevant when it was written in 2001, and still important now. When I recently gave a talk about simulations in Holocaust education, I didn't mention this passage, but I probably should have.

--Echochrome - the Escher Game (YouTube, Via Game Girl Advance)

What a hypnotically simple interface! This is a PSP game. Since I'm not a platform gamer, I'll have to admire this one from afar.

Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac -- both 18 -- cry out, "Just like in 'Lady and the Tramp'!"

And Schwartz could take it no more. "Stop!" he yells.

"Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"

Really?

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of not so much the Me Generation as the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," says workshop student Craig Patterson, 17, of Grove City, Ohio. "I almost always prefer the movie version of a book. Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can." --Linton Weeks --The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It (Washington Post (will expire))

Hmm... a reporter sits in on a summer film class, and is shocked --- SHOCKED!! -- to learn that the students who are motivated enough to pay for it are likely to think in visual terms. What is this world coming to?

To be fair, the subhead is "Students in Film Class a Microcosm of a Visually Oriented Culture," so the WashPo makes it clear these are not random students. And even among English majors (who one would think are more likely than the average student to be interested in reading), I do often notice that even students who are excited by writing often approach a first-person narrative as if they are describing a movie. Thus, they write "A big smile spread across my face" or "I gave him a puzzled look," conveying the interior state of their first-person protagonist from an external, visual point of view. Most have never considered alternatives, such as quoting dialogue ("You remembered the violets!") or the protagonist's unvoiced thought ("Was Smitty trying to use a 20-gauge reamer on a blown gasket? God, what I wouldn't do to get away from these clueless hicks!"). If you plan the story to SHOW why the protagonist likes violets, and even if you don't actually stop to explain what a 20-gague reamer is and why a hick would think it was appropriate to use on a blown gasket, when the protagonist's reaction to the violets or the reamers convey information about character, setting, plot, etc., then the details have done their job.

RUR Cats (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme.

In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as "automaton."

As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them "labori" would be too stuffy. His brother Josef, a cubist painter and author, muttered, "Then call them Robots," drawing on a Czech word meaning "menial labor" or "servitude."

The illustration is from a Josef Capek's children's book, A Doggie and a Pussycat: How They Wrote a Letter.

Okay, that was pretty obscure, but now I can get on with my life.

Jorn Barger, a Joyce enthusiast whose many creative electronic endeavors include coining the term "weblog," offers this animated map of Dublin, showing the progress of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses. The chapter takes place on June 16, which has of late been celebrated as Bloomsday.


Last week was the Feast of Corpus Christi, which in the medieval town of York, England was celebrated with a huge outdoor festival that included wagons that were the sets for short religious plays that dramatized Christian history from the creation of the world to the final judgment (also know as Doomsday). This 2D animated map showing the progress of pageant wagons through the streets of York was part of my first scholarly publication, in 1997. I wish I'd thought of adapting the existing code to the Ulysses scenario.From Bloomsday to Doomsday

With all the gratuitous use of Shakespeare language and imagery in the series (including its four spin-offs, a successful franchise of feature films and a short-lived animated series), is there an underlying reason to the use of the Bard's works? Does the combination of classic literature and pop-culture sci-fi result in something greater than the sum of its parts? According to Stephen M. Buhler, the use of Shakespeare in the Star Trek universe, specifically the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, serves to define which characters are the villains. (Buhler 18) In general, he says the contemporary popular film use of characters who have the ability to quote Shakespeare is used as a device to establish moral ambiguity and to symbolize personal viciousness. (Buhler 18) Here he relies on the many quotes of the villain of the film, General Chang (Christopher Plummer) and the chameleon shapeshifter Martia (supermodel Iman). (Buhler 22)

However, not every Shakespeare-spewing character is evil and Mary Buhl Dutta argues that, instead, the use of Shakespeare in the original Star Trek series served as endorsement for the male-centric, Americanized ideal of a typical Shakespeare hero. (Dutta 38) Within the progress of the series, the lead character of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) "becomes" Macbeth, Hamlet, Ferdinand, and Petruchio. Always the hero, he has the ability to defeat the villain, even when his Shakespearean counterpart could not. For example, Dutta points out that in the episode "Catspaw", Kirk is essentially Macbeth (Dutta 40), yet here he has the ability to resist the evil pressure of the Lady Macbeth figure of Sylvia, unlike the original Macbeth.

Marc Houlahan furthers this theory by arguing that the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek is not only an endorsement but rather a continuation of America's attempts to Americanize Shakespeare. (Houlahan 29) As the financing of BBC's official versions of Shakespeare, by four major American corporations (Time-Life, Exxon, Metropolitan Life Insurance and the Morgan Guarantee Trust Company) and the creation of the Folger's Shakespeare Library (located between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress in Washington DC) serve to show America's attempt to claim Shakespeare as their own, so does Star Trek's use of the Bard's materials. (Houlahan 29) Thus he uses again the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to illustrate the assumption the Captain Kirk and the system of government that he works for, the United Federation of Planets, is a representation of the United States of America. Thus, Kirk's use of Shakespeare, as well as General Chang's serve as an attempt to mainstream Shakespeare for a primarily American audience. (Houlahan 30)

Going in a totally different direction, Emily Hegarty argues that the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek: The Next Generation serves as a symbol of high culture. (Hegarty 55) She writes, "It [the series] uses Shakespearean allusion to underwrite repressive and elitist ideological gestures within its populist format." (Hegarty 55) She uses the example of a Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate", in which Captain Picard uses Shakespeare sonnets to express desire, confirming the ideology that Shakespeare is the quintessential symbol of love poetry in our culture. (Hegarty 56)

With all the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek, one might think that the symbolism would be lost and eventually become stale and, in fact, it arguably has. Fewer references to Shakespeare are found in the last three series spin-offs, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. However, within the framework of the original series, The Next Generation and the (at least early) films, Shakespeare has become an integral part of the universe that the show inhabits. It uses Shakespeare as a springboard to discuss new ideas and to maintain a connection with the future and the past. --Shakespare and Star Trek (Memory Alpha)

If I recall correctly, wasn't there an episode in which Picard had to pretend he was in love with a woman, possibly as part of a bluff? I seem to recall that he started off giving a very vague, unconvincing declaration of love, and then when he shifted into poetry, he started hamming it up. The subtext to the audience was clear -- he didn't love her at all, he was just drawing on his knowledge of Shakespeare to simulate love, and part of the point was that the aliens involved (the Ferengi -- depicted in The Next Generation as greedy and rather stupid caricatures, if it's possible to caricature a fictional race) weren't expected to recognize Shakespeare. I wonder if Hegarty takes that into account. (I just looked it up... the episode was Ménage à Troi.)

This activity is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. As a detective, you must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, solve the case. You can interview suspects using Quicktime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with Quicktime Virtual Reality images, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. --Mixed Reception (chemcollective.org)

Haven't checked this one out yet.

When we refuse to "budge an inch," excoriate "rotten apples," or admonish slackers to "sink or swim," we speak in his voice. Although the arts sections of newspapers teem with products from self-anointed "artists" who will not survive their publicity budgets, Shakespeare after roughly four centuries still pleases general audiences, challenges intellectuals, and provokes academics. How can we not presume that such a stupendous orchestrator of character and insight operated with a coherent, multifaceted theory of human nature?

On the other hand, our ignorance of Shakespeare the man - he left no diaries or letters in his short life of some 52 years - and the clashing multiple versions of some of his texts, have always dovetailed with a contrary belief that his greatness arises precisely from utter openness to the varieties of human behavior, emotion and thought, his ability to render in concrete scenes and daring metaphors more non-reductionist nuances of the heart and mind than an army of writers centuries later.

This Shakespeare soars as the universal artist because his plays and poetry offer a kaleidoscope of the human condition while speculative bios, short on fact and long on inference, end up too dull an instrument to cut him down to size. He's a channeler rather than a source of wisdom. --The readiness to deconstruct is all (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I wish this article had come out a week earlier... I would have discussed it in my Lit Crit class. (It's still a good read.)

It was six hours before opening night. Sarah Holdren, director of a Yale student production, had just entered the theater for a routine pre-performance errand when the man who runs the hall gave her an update: In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, a Yale administrator decided that she didn't want any weapons used or portrayed during theatrical productions. --Elia Powers --Stage Fright (Inside Higher Ed)

Puh-leese.

Grown-ups and all but the youngest kids know that the swords on stage aren't real. And those young kids probably won't be able to sit through a live theater performance that isn't tailored to them, so they would not likely be in the audience.

"It's almost always the first play I teach," she said. "I do that because very often students have only encountered Shakespeare in high school and have a misunderstanding of him as safe, moral, and dull. This one really dislodges the idea that Shakespeare is full of eternal moral truths. It takes place in a different world from what they expect."

And how does Titus go over with her students?

"Many of them have a very hard time with it," she told me. "They expect to be able to like somebody in a piece of literature, to find somebody they can identify with, and that is quite difficult in this case. It's hard to identify with Titus, who kills his own son for dishonoring him. The moral ambiguity of the play is very, very difficult for some of them." -- Denise Albanese, interviewed by Scott McLemee --A Dish Best Served Cold (Inside Higher Ed)

Great analysis of Shakespeare's slasher farce, Titus Andronicus.

I still swell with pride when I recall that as an undergrad, I asked Gordon Braden, who was teaching the Shakespeare survey at the University of Virginia, about the role of rhymed verses in this play. I pointed out that we are most likely to see rhymed verse when Aaron is either performing or talking about his most wicked, most violent deeds -- a detail that suggested to me that Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing, rather than than that Shakespeare made a terrible play.

Prof. Braden said that Shakespeare often used rhymed verses to end scenes, which is true most of the time, but, as I pointed out in the 100-student lecture hall, "Not in this play." Prof. Braden cocked his head, opened up his book, and checked a few scenes, then agreed with me that Shakespeare's use of rhymed verses is unusual in this play. (He didn't actually agree with me about what I thought the unusual rhyming meant, but that was all I needed to feel like I was pretty hot stuff that day.)

I ended up writing a paper on "Head-hewing, Limb-lopping, and General Nastiness in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus."

Performing a morality play - especially one penned in the Middle Ages - might not seem too appealing to an average college theater student.

Dr. Terry Brino-Dean, associate professor of theater and director of the Seton Hill University theater program, has come up with a way to give "Everyman" -- a medieval drama that deals with man's fear of dying and his hope for redemption through his actions on earth -- a contemporary twist.

In a theatrical style that college students can relate to, Seton Hill's new adaptation of "Everyman" is a musical with songs by the American folk rock duo The Indigo Girls. The Everyman character is played by five students who tell the story while sitting around a drum circle on a camping trip. --Candy Williams --Seton Hill's 'Everyman' keeps medieval text, adds modern music (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

I attended this show last night with my son, Peter (age 9) who thought it was great. He got the main message -- that your material possessions won't follow you into your grave, so you should pay attention to how you live your life.

Until just now, when I looked it up for this blog entry, I thought that my only knowledge of the Indigo Girls was their rendition of "Iko Iko" in the opening scene of Rain Man, but IMBD says that was actually perforemed by a group called The Belle Stars.

So I guess I actually knew less than nothing about the Indigo Girls.

The production used the full medieval text, with some modernization of archaic terms. I quickly grew to understand the effectiveness of having Everyman's speeches (some of them rather long) broken up and distributed among five actors who share the role throughout the play. Having each actor refer to "I" and "my" rather than "we" and "our" did emphasize the solitary nature of the quest -- each "Everyman" was making a solitary journey, but in keeping with the peer-to-peer culture the play depicted a group of peers experiencing the message in parallel.

During the talk-back session afterwards, I invited Terry to talk some more about his choice to make Everyman into a group, because that seemed to be so much at odds from the message of the play -- that we enter our graves alone, except for our Good Deeds. Having Everyman played by 5 different people who could put their arms around each other and comfort each other seemed to work against that message. (Like a good teacher, he bounced the question back to the audience first, though after a few comments he did note that the play does have both a communal and individual message, and his production chose to emphasize the communal one.)

More if I have time -- too much shouting and pounding. No, I'm not referring to the drum circle that opened the show (which was a lot of fun to watch), I'm referring to the perils of blogging with small kids at home.

(Update, several hours later:)

Also during the talk back session, I noted that the actors who played Death, Good Deeds, and Knowledge did not sound at all like they were speaking rhymed verse. I said something like "I'm an English professor, so I notice these things, and I mean that as a compliment. Those lines are hard to speech."

I was so surprised at the irony of my own slip-of-the-tongue that I said, "Hard to speech? I think I'm going to bail out now."

After that, Terry closed the session, and my son started jumping up and down with glee, pointing at me and saying "This guy killed the discussion! This guy killed the discussion!"