Some things make a post
Minicon looms, and I wanted to put down, however hastily, some matters that I will probably never commit to this medium if I wait until after the convention.
We have a new cat. Raphael put up some photos of her the other day, here: http://centuryplant.dreamwidth.org/12245.html
She was chosen partly with the requirement that she not discommode my ancient amiable orange cat in any way. Her adoption agency blurb contained the remark, "She doesn't seem to have a mean bone in her body." This appears to be true. So there have been maybe three or four hisses since we brought her home on February 14th, and one squawk from I am not sure which cat, but no yowling and cussing and no fighting at all. Occasionally either Ari or Cassie will take a soft swipe at the other cat, but the other cat is never prepared to play at that moment. Cassie has fallen off the bed when swiped and Ari has hustled away hunching his shoulders. More often they just stare at one another. I am happy not to be living in a state of perpetual warfare punctuated by peeing on things not intended for that purpose, but I hope they will work it out at some point. Cass clearly would like another cat to hang out with. Ari is seventeen and fussy. We'll see.
Yesterday was my 17th anniversary with Raphael. We had Szechuan food and perhaps a surfeit of television. It was Raphael who showed me the Sonoran Desert when we first met, and now I miss it every spring.
Eric and I celebrated our eleventh anniversary in February. He was going to be at Capricon on the day itself, so we decided to celebrate the new moons on both sides of that date, a new moon having figured strongly in the first week of the romantic part of our relationship. There was much sushi, some Greek food, and Ten Thousand Things' performance of As You Like It at Open Book. I ought to have written it up just after it happened. It was a splendid production, with parts doubled and redoubled, actors snatching off their hats or putting on their shirts to change personalities in a nano-second. I did come away with the strong feeling that the only two people in the play actually made for one another were Rosalind and Jacques, but I suppose really it would be unfair to impose Jacques on such a sunny temperament.
David and I will have been married for thirty years this December, and really must do something festive about that.
Eric was out of town the weekend before last, and will be preoccupied at Minicon by various matters, so we decided to have the weekend in between as a very large date. I took the bus to Cedar Riverside on Friday evening and met him at the Hard Times Cafe. We usually go there for brunch of a Sunday afternoon, and I have a well-travelled rut for those occasions. I decided to break out of it and had a vegan grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of ginger-carrot soup. The soup was excellent. The sandwich was grilled just right and their whole-wheat bread is lovely. However, their soy cheese is actually vegan, which it should be; however, I cheat with soy cheese and use a brand with caseine in it so that it will melt. The melting qualities of the genuine vegan cheese are fairly notional.
After dinner we walked over to Rarig Center on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota and saw the BFA Actors' performance of Pericles.
The play itself is very odd, a series of dramatic scenes connected by long narrative sections spoken, for some reason no critic has ever been able to persuade me is actually a reason, by the poet Gower. (Yes, yes, the story is in Gower's Confessio Amantis; nevertheless. I once said to Mike Ford that Pericles read as if Shakespeare had wanted to write a novel but couldn't because the English novel had not yet been invented. Mike immediately went into a delightful riff about Shakespeare's sitting by the telephone waiting for Flaubert to call and explain the novel to him.
In any case, it's a strange play with a huge number of characters, a troubled textual history, and a peculiar structure.
The BFA Actors rocked it. In the first place, they removed Gower, but, since the narrative is indispensable, they gave Gower's lines to Diana, the goddess of chastity, who in the play as written makes a brief appearance at the very end, in a vision granted to Pericles. When we walked into the little in-the-round theater, Diana was standing on a box in the middle of the stage, almost as still as a statue, barefoot in a long blue gown, holding a silver bow. She did a stupendous job. Sometimes in her voice I heard the echoes of Derek Jacobi's Chorus in the movie of Henry V; at other times, she was a goddess indeed. Her invocation at the conception of Marina has echoes of Puck's last speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream. She sat on the floor to speak the lines, but she was not antic. She was stern and thoughtful almost throughout.
The program said there were ten actors performing more than sixty roles. The structure of the play does lend itself well to doubling. Even Diana doubled some parts. When she played Cerimon the healer, it was hard not to think he was an avatar of the goddess; and the way she flung off his cap and sweater to become herself again underlined this.
The incestuous couple at the beginning were quite creepy and frightening, but there were bursts of inappropriate laughter from part of the audience. A BFA Actors production of Cymbeline that I saw with Lydy and her friend Christopher six or eight years ago was made much more difficult to enjoy by repeated bursts of laughter and catcalls, presumably from alleged friends of the actors. Luckily, only the actor playing the incestuous king seemed to have friends of this kind in the audience, and they seemed mostly to be reacting to his decadent robe and high-heeled shoes in the first scene. They tittered and carried on a little later on, but not hugely. I would still have liked to shut them up.
The actor who played Pericles was really remarkable. These kids are the sophomore class, and he didn't look like an older, returning student. Pericles is a curiously mature person and it's easy to make him seem improbable or boring, but in this actor's hands he became a real person whose fate one cared about. I'm still not sure quite how he did it. His tender speech to his wife, "A terrible childbed have you had. No light. No fire," made tears come to my eyes and the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
The intermission came just before the first brothel scene, and when we came back into the theater it was all lit with red, and a couple of young women dressed in red and black costumes were doing the best they could to pole dance without poles. They harried the late members of the audience into their seats with various lascivious gestures.
The brothel scenes are hard to pull off for a modern audience. It's easy to mock Marina. It's also pretty clear in the text that the effect of Marina's virtue, her driving away custom, and the reaction of the madame and the bawds to her doing so, is supposed to be hilarious. The brothel in this production was actually about as scary and creepy as the incestuous pair at the beginning -- the whores were being beaten and abused by the panders and the madame, nobody was at all happy about anything. I had remarked to Eric that this was not at all a sex-positive play, but they managed the brothel and the characters threatening Marina in such a way that her valuing her virtue more than her life seemed the only reasonable response. She was actually uncannily like her father, not meek nor cringing nor maidenly in the usual degraded sense, though perhaps in the more Dianalike sense she was. There was a moment when she called on Diana to save her, and Diana, who had been sitting at the top of one of the aisles, leapt up and fired an arrow at one of the panders. But it only checked him momentarily. Marina had to do the work of preserving herself.
Earlier, during the shipwreck, the newborn Marina's nurse sings her a song. It did not sound very Shakespearean to me, and it doesn't seem to be in the play. It sounded like a riddle, which is suitable, since Pericles begins the play by guessing a riddle for the incestuous king. I only recall the answer, "It is the sea, it is the sea." When the grieving Pericles is brought to Marina to be healed, she begins by singing him this song. Again, literally, the separate hairs of my head did stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
The recognition scene is also hard to do properly. They performed it very simply, neither rushing nor prolonging it more than the text does of itself. Pericles had his back to me the whole time and I had only a side view of Marina, but it didn't matter in the slightest. I had to keep wiping tears off my face. And then Shakespeare, who never did know when to stop, bless him, has another recognition scene between Pericles and Thaisa, and THAT WORKED TOO.
At the very end Diana describes the fates of all the characters. The incestuous king and princess are struck down; the murderous foster parents of Marina are struck down; the good people live happily. At this point I noticed with an upleasant shock that the king and princess were black or mixed race, and the princess doubled the murderous foster queen, so all the bad people were of color and the good people white, except for Marina, who was Asian.
Eric pointed out, when I said this, that Kleon, the foster king, was about as white as they come, and got struck down, and that's true. He didn't do evil, but he did cover it up when he discovered what his queen had done. I am still chewing on this.
We walked downtown from the West Bank and got a 14 bus to Eric's place.
I think I will go ahead and post this, and talk about the rest of the weekend in another post. There's another play yet to come.
Pamela
We have a new cat. Raphael put up some photos of her the other day, here: http://centuryplant.dreamwidth.org/12245.html
She was chosen partly with the requirement that she not discommode my ancient amiable orange cat in any way. Her adoption agency blurb contained the remark, "She doesn't seem to have a mean bone in her body." This appears to be true. So there have been maybe three or four hisses since we brought her home on February 14th, and one squawk from I am not sure which cat, but no yowling and cussing and no fighting at all. Occasionally either Ari or Cassie will take a soft swipe at the other cat, but the other cat is never prepared to play at that moment. Cassie has fallen off the bed when swiped and Ari has hustled away hunching his shoulders. More often they just stare at one another. I am happy not to be living in a state of perpetual warfare punctuated by peeing on things not intended for that purpose, but I hope they will work it out at some point. Cass clearly would like another cat to hang out with. Ari is seventeen and fussy. We'll see.
Yesterday was my 17th anniversary with Raphael. We had Szechuan food and perhaps a surfeit of television. It was Raphael who showed me the Sonoran Desert when we first met, and now I miss it every spring.
Eric and I celebrated our eleventh anniversary in February. He was going to be at Capricon on the day itself, so we decided to celebrate the new moons on both sides of that date, a new moon having figured strongly in the first week of the romantic part of our relationship. There was much sushi, some Greek food, and Ten Thousand Things' performance of As You Like It at Open Book. I ought to have written it up just after it happened. It was a splendid production, with parts doubled and redoubled, actors snatching off their hats or putting on their shirts to change personalities in a nano-second. I did come away with the strong feeling that the only two people in the play actually made for one another were Rosalind and Jacques, but I suppose really it would be unfair to impose Jacques on such a sunny temperament.
David and I will have been married for thirty years this December, and really must do something festive about that.
Eric was out of town the weekend before last, and will be preoccupied at Minicon by various matters, so we decided to have the weekend in between as a very large date. I took the bus to Cedar Riverside on Friday evening and met him at the Hard Times Cafe. We usually go there for brunch of a Sunday afternoon, and I have a well-travelled rut for those occasions. I decided to break out of it and had a vegan grilled-cheese sandwich and a cup of ginger-carrot soup. The soup was excellent. The sandwich was grilled just right and their whole-wheat bread is lovely. However, their soy cheese is actually vegan, which it should be; however, I cheat with soy cheese and use a brand with caseine in it so that it will melt. The melting qualities of the genuine vegan cheese are fairly notional.
After dinner we walked over to Rarig Center on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota and saw the BFA Actors' performance of Pericles.
The play itself is very odd, a series of dramatic scenes connected by long narrative sections spoken, for some reason no critic has ever been able to persuade me is actually a reason, by the poet Gower. (Yes, yes, the story is in Gower's Confessio Amantis; nevertheless. I once said to Mike Ford that Pericles read as if Shakespeare had wanted to write a novel but couldn't because the English novel had not yet been invented. Mike immediately went into a delightful riff about Shakespeare's sitting by the telephone waiting for Flaubert to call and explain the novel to him.
In any case, it's a strange play with a huge number of characters, a troubled textual history, and a peculiar structure.
The BFA Actors rocked it. In the first place, they removed Gower, but, since the narrative is indispensable, they gave Gower's lines to Diana, the goddess of chastity, who in the play as written makes a brief appearance at the very end, in a vision granted to Pericles. When we walked into the little in-the-round theater, Diana was standing on a box in the middle of the stage, almost as still as a statue, barefoot in a long blue gown, holding a silver bow. She did a stupendous job. Sometimes in her voice I heard the echoes of Derek Jacobi's Chorus in the movie of Henry V; at other times, she was a goddess indeed. Her invocation at the conception of Marina has echoes of Puck's last speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream. She sat on the floor to speak the lines, but she was not antic. She was stern and thoughtful almost throughout.
The program said there were ten actors performing more than sixty roles. The structure of the play does lend itself well to doubling. Even Diana doubled some parts. When she played Cerimon the healer, it was hard not to think he was an avatar of the goddess; and the way she flung off his cap and sweater to become herself again underlined this.
The incestuous couple at the beginning were quite creepy and frightening, but there were bursts of inappropriate laughter from part of the audience. A BFA Actors production of Cymbeline that I saw with Lydy and her friend Christopher six or eight years ago was made much more difficult to enjoy by repeated bursts of laughter and catcalls, presumably from alleged friends of the actors. Luckily, only the actor playing the incestuous king seemed to have friends of this kind in the audience, and they seemed mostly to be reacting to his decadent robe and high-heeled shoes in the first scene. They tittered and carried on a little later on, but not hugely. I would still have liked to shut them up.
The actor who played Pericles was really remarkable. These kids are the sophomore class, and he didn't look like an older, returning student. Pericles is a curiously mature person and it's easy to make him seem improbable or boring, but in this actor's hands he became a real person whose fate one cared about. I'm still not sure quite how he did it. His tender speech to his wife, "A terrible childbed have you had. No light. No fire," made tears come to my eyes and the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
The intermission came just before the first brothel scene, and when we came back into the theater it was all lit with red, and a couple of young women dressed in red and black costumes were doing the best they could to pole dance without poles. They harried the late members of the audience into their seats with various lascivious gestures.
The brothel scenes are hard to pull off for a modern audience. It's easy to mock Marina. It's also pretty clear in the text that the effect of Marina's virtue, her driving away custom, and the reaction of the madame and the bawds to her doing so, is supposed to be hilarious. The brothel in this production was actually about as scary and creepy as the incestuous pair at the beginning -- the whores were being beaten and abused by the panders and the madame, nobody was at all happy about anything. I had remarked to Eric that this was not at all a sex-positive play, but they managed the brothel and the characters threatening Marina in such a way that her valuing her virtue more than her life seemed the only reasonable response. She was actually uncannily like her father, not meek nor cringing nor maidenly in the usual degraded sense, though perhaps in the more Dianalike sense she was. There was a moment when she called on Diana to save her, and Diana, who had been sitting at the top of one of the aisles, leapt up and fired an arrow at one of the panders. But it only checked him momentarily. Marina had to do the work of preserving herself.
Earlier, during the shipwreck, the newborn Marina's nurse sings her a song. It did not sound very Shakespearean to me, and it doesn't seem to be in the play. It sounded like a riddle, which is suitable, since Pericles begins the play by guessing a riddle for the incestuous king. I only recall the answer, "It is the sea, it is the sea." When the grieving Pericles is brought to Marina to be healed, she begins by singing him this song. Again, literally, the separate hairs of my head did stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
The recognition scene is also hard to do properly. They performed it very simply, neither rushing nor prolonging it more than the text does of itself. Pericles had his back to me the whole time and I had only a side view of Marina, but it didn't matter in the slightest. I had to keep wiping tears off my face. And then Shakespeare, who never did know when to stop, bless him, has another recognition scene between Pericles and Thaisa, and THAT WORKED TOO.
At the very end Diana describes the fates of all the characters. The incestuous king and princess are struck down; the murderous foster parents of Marina are struck down; the good people live happily. At this point I noticed with an upleasant shock that the king and princess were black or mixed race, and the princess doubled the murderous foster queen, so all the bad people were of color and the good people white, except for Marina, who was Asian.
Eric pointed out, when I said this, that Kleon, the foster king, was about as white as they come, and got struck down, and that's true. He didn't do evil, but he did cover it up when he discovered what his queen had done. I am still chewing on this.
We walked downtown from the West Bank and got a 14 bus to Eric's place.
I think I will go ahead and post this, and talk about the rest of the weekend in another post. There's another play yet to come.
Pamela