Was browsing YouTube for a few of my favorite movie swordfights. Yes, the left-handed thing from Princess Bride was clever, and sure, the upgrading from foils to sabres in The Great Race added tension. You might be cool with the quips, but you’ll never be “Cryano de Bregerac dueling Valvert while simultaneously composing a ballad…
I learned a lot while reading this enjoyable essay by Jimmy Maher. Looked at today, however, Sherlock certainly wasn’t a bad note to go out on. Being built on the sturdy foundation of everything Infocom had learned about making text adventures to date, it’s not notably, obviously innovative, but, impressively given that it is a…
By a set of strange coincidences, complicated by the history of Europe’s uneven adaptation of the Gregorian calendar, April 23 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the deaths of both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. In June I’ll be playing the villain in the Cabaret Theatre’s production of Man of La Mancha (which incorporates…
My daughter plays the narrator, my wife plays the cat, and my son plays the robber. A 9-minute “All for One Stories” radio play. Produced by WAOB Audio Theatre. Similar:Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player "Useless"The Big Boy GraveyardThis 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsWashington Post Cartoonist…
I have a pretty good idea whose woods these are, believe me. And let me tell you something, my people say he’s a complete nobody. This guy lives in the village. So what if he sees me stopping here? I dare him to sue me! I dare him! Rottingpost Similar:The Big Boy GraveyardStop sharing those unsourced memes…
Gearing up to teach “Digital Storytelling” this summer. Not sure whether I have time to add this tool to the syllabus, but I’m definitely going to play with it. ink is a scripting language built around the idea of marking up pure-text with flow in order to produce interactive scripts. At its most basic, it…
I read “The Name of the Rose” during the summer between high school and college, because my high school drama coach (who had been my freshman English teacher) recommended it. I’m sure I’d get a lot more out of it if I read it again now. I assigned “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”…
Much of what Krystal writes about the novel also applies to drama, but the difference is that theatre presupposes a community. The writing, editing, manufacture, sale, and criticism of books is, of course, a communal endeavor, but the novel as an artifact can be experienced in isolation. Fiction, speaking very generally, is about the individual…
We went through a Lloyd Alexander phase at my house a few years ago; I read through the whole Prydain series and a few of his stand-alone works. I did enjoy Disney’s The Black Cauldron, which is technically impressive, and ambitious in its storytelling, but made a muddle of two of the five Prydain books.…
Elsinore is a game where you play as Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She’s stuck in a time loop, a la Groundhog Day or Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Her goal? To prevent Hamlet, a Shakespearean tragedy so tragic that it borders on ludicrous, from ending tragically…. As Ophelia, you gather information and interact with people…
A photographer blogged about taking photos inspired by Wuthering Heights. Note please the dark clouds and the wall of rain looming in on us…. We were racing against the impending drenching, and chuckling at the comments from a family of climbers “oh how beautiful! I think they just got married!” We had to break the…
I just watched the recent Great Gatsby movie. I didn’t care for the use of modern hip-hop music, though I can accept it as a director’s choice to appeal to modern audiences — like the added narration about the stock market and prohibition. But with all the money they put into the costumes and the…
My mother had a cousin who served in Viet Nam. In the late 70s, he brought dozens of Vietnamese refugees to America, and one summer there were 30-40 Vietnamese men and boys living in my house, sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor of our rec room, as Cousin Jim worked out places for them to stay,…
When I teach Shakespeare, I will from time to time deliver a short speech for my students, but this was my first time performing Shakespeare before a paying audience. As Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I got to share the stage again with my daughter Carolyn as Puck. (She also had a separate speech…
Harper Lee, whose 1961 novel To Kill a Mockingbird became a national institution and the defining text on the racial troubles of the American deep south, has died at the age of 89. Lee, or Nelle as she was known to those close to her, had lived for several years in a nursing home less…
[F]or a brief time in the mid-nineteen-eighties major literary publishers, including Simon & Schuster and Random House, opened software divisions, and major bookstores stocked works of “interactive fiction.” Popular writers, including Douglas Adams and Thomas M. Disch, turned their capable hands to the burgeoning form. It was in the midst of this excited moment that…
While we might point to violent video games or sexually explicit films as potentially dangerous and corrupting influences on tender or vulnerable minds, the novel is treated as uplifting and salutary, regardless of its content: a kale smoothie for the soul. When we do talk about books being ‘dangerous’, it is usually with a knowing…
You are invited to time travel to two art exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen: the Sir Joshua Reynolds retrospective in 1813 or the Shakespeare Gallery as it looked in 1796. These two Georgian blockbusters took place, years apart, in the same London exhibition space at 52 Pall Mall (it no longer exists). When Austen visited…
I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice in about 25 years. I always liked Mr. Bennett, though now that I have been married for more than 20 years, I can more fully appreciate his line from Chapter 1: “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I…
Today is Carolyn’s day off from Oliver Twist… the show’s final week starts tomorrow, and ends with two shows on Saturday Dec 19. Now, the iconic story of Oliver Twist makes its U.S. premiere in a production with local ties and significance for one Pittsburgh-based theater company. If you have yet to catch PICT Classic Theatre‘s Oliver Twist—which opened on…