Bartender Geek

Last season, there was a swath of productions of Titus Andronicus, as college troupes saw it, realized it was a fun play which didn't deserve its negative reputation, and decided to perform it themselves. I would be really happy if the same thing happened with King John this season, and the Actors' Shakespeare Project production, playing now until June 8th, demonstrates why.

See, Titus picked up a reputation as being too bloody and over-the-top to be performed, but a couple good productions, including ASP's, showed folks that "bloody and over-the-top" is not actually a BAD thing in a play. This play has a reputation as being so full of deception and plot twists that it can't be followed -- and it doesn't deserve that. Oh, it's chock-full of deception and twists, but that's a good thing. I suppose that, if one was reading the play, one would have trouble following who was backstabbing whom, but when it's performed on stage with a competent cast, the actors are able to take you through with no trouble whatsoever.

Yes, the plot twists and turns, and you never know what's going to happen in the next scene. But, no matter where you go, there you are. It's not hard to keep track of what's going on, even if you can't predict what will happen next.

It's sort of like one of those walking labyrinths, like the one that my parents built in their backyard, or the ones that a number of churches have painted on the floor. It consists of a single twisting path, looping back on itself, but with no deviations. You walk through the path, never knowing quite what the path will be, but nonetheless, never getting lost. There is only one path, and it takes you through it -- no matter how convoluted it looks from the outside.

Hold onto that image, by the way. We'll be coming back to it.
( Warning: Class 5 plot twists within )
So -- to conclude: the Actors' Shakespeare Project shows us that a complex plot need not be a confusing plot. Their actors and production team lead us through the labyrinthine paths of King John's many betrayals and twists, letting us feel the emotional impact of each one, but never losing us or confusing us.

Tickets are forty bucks, plus or minus a couple bucks depending on which seat, for adults, thirty to thirty-five for students. But remember, guys: they also may have student rush tickets available just before the show, for just fifteen bucks. I encourage you to go and check it out -- I'd like to see if you in the college companies like the play as much as I do. If so, I'd love to see what you'd do with it if you put it on yourselves.

The first question about any production of Henry V -- any production going back to the first time that Shakespeare's company put it on after he wrote it -- is "how do you deal with the audacity of trying to put an empire-spanning war, including one of the most dramatic battles in English history, on a stage?"

Shakespeare's answer was to, in effect, "hang a lampshade on it". Do you know that phrase? It means to call attention to the ridiculousness of a concept, to encourage the audience to go along with it. Actually, the time Shakespeare REALLY did this was in Twelfth Night, when, after the "big reveal" of everybody disguised as everybody else and all the other wackiness, one of the characters says, "If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction." In Henry V, he uses a slightly different tack. He simply tells the audience that the task of representing what he's representing is impossible. So we, the audience, will have to fill the rest of it in.

I assume most of you know the speech that opens the play. If you're not familiar with it, you may want to take a quick look at it before I go on.

Now, there are two ways you can go with this: you can take this as a challenge to fight against, and prove that you CAN do more to represent reality, or you can embrace it, and trust your audience to fill in the gaps. Of course, one can debate about what Shakespeare would have done if he could -- if he could, would Shakespeare have done a Cecil B DeMille "cast of thousands"? Would he have preferred to do a Battle of Agincourt with seventy thousand CGI warriors fighting?

It's an interesting question, but "what Shakespeare would have done" is not terribly relevant to the question of how a director wants to present the play.

The Actors' Shakespeare Project, under the direction of Normi Noel, has chosen to embrace the "trust the imagination" school of thought. They present a lean, spare production, in which the forty-some-odd characters in the play are portrayed by five actors: Ken Cheeseman, Paula Langton, Doug Lockwood, Seth Powers, and Molly Schreiber.

The space they use is the basement of the Garage in Harvard Square, the same space they played Titus Andronicus and Love's Labours Lost last season. Those of you who have seen those productions can remember the . . . challenges . . . of the space, not least of which is the big freakin' support post smack dab in the middle of the room.

This production uses a similar layout as they did in Titus, making the support post the center point of the stage, with seating on all four sides around it. This, naturally, means that, no matter where you sit, there WILL be times where you can't see exactly what is happening, or, at least, you can't see the facial expression of characters. Of course, the blocking they use attempts to minimize these problems, but it nonetheless can be frustrating. I know that some people I've talked to were annoyed by this when ASP put on Titus in this space, so be aware that many of the same issues exist.

But they also use this. It is a small space, and an awkward one, and they use that as part of the energy in the play. When Ken Cheeseman asked, ". . . can this cockpit hold/The vasty fields of France?", a ripple of laughter went through the room, as we recognized the simple truth of that. The Prologue worked in a way I've never seen it work before -- because the space was so small, the task of bringing forth this tale so impossible, the idea of presenting the scope of the story so ridiculous, that we, the audience, accepted the task of filling in the gaps with our imaginations.

Who remembers Infocom text adventures? Like Zork and the rest? There was a way in which the best-written ones were more immersive than games written today with photo-realistic graphics and all the rest. There are ways that radio plays are more immersive than television, and books are more immersive than radio.

And storytelling can be the most immersive of all.

That, at least, is the goal of this presentation of Henry V. The role of "Chorus" -- aka, the narrator -- is taken by different cast members at different times. And, for me, those were some of my favorite moments in the play -- when one of the members of the cast comes out, and talks to us, filling in bits of the story that just can't be staged.

Because of the space, because of the energy of the production, I, at least, felt comfortable allowing my mind's eye to fill in all the action sequences. This goes for the fight scenes, too. In previous productions, I've seen the fights done (in movies) with special effects and realism, I've seen impressive fight choreography, and once, I saw the fights done as interpretive dance. That last one was kind of embarrassing to watch.

In this production, the fighting happens offstage. We see people running in, exhausted, wounded, and sick, or victorious and bold, or disheartened, and from that, we know what happened. There is one exception: just before the "Once more into the breach" speech, they use a rather symbolic piece to show the English onstage attacking and being thrown back -- and, to me, that was one of the weakest moments in the play.

One final bit that I want to mention is the final scene, where Henry woos Katherine, the Princess of France, as part of the treaty to make a lasting peace between England and France. In order to have a happy ending (or, rather, as happy an ending as you can honestly have in a history), the play ends with a romance, to end the violence. The concept is that this marriage is, or at least, can be, a marriage of love, as well as one of political expedience, and Molly Schreiber and Seth Powers get only one scene in which to attempt to have two people meet and fall in love.

They nail it. The scene is just adorable. I don't know what else I can say about it. Maybe "KAWAII!!!"

Henry V
Directed by Normi Noel
January 10 – February 3
Downstairs at The Garage
38 JFK Street, Harvard Square

When we were in DC for the Marlowe plays, we went out to lunch with our friend Akiva Fox, the dramaturg for the company. Over lunch, he'd mentioned that he'd found a movie version of Thomas Middleton's (or maybe Cyril Tourneur's) play The Revenger's Tragedy. It was filmed in 2002, and put together by Alex Cox, who was the director of Sid and Nancy and Repo Man. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Liverpool, and stars Chris Eccleston as Vindici (The Revenger), Derek Jacobi as the Duke who killed Vindici's beloved, and Eddie Izzard as the Duke's son Lussurioso (The Lecher) who is trying to seduce Vindici's sister.

Okay. Let's recap. A Jacobean revenge play, set in a post-apocalyptic world, directed by Alex Cox, and starring Christopher Eccleston, Eddie Izzard, and Derek Jacobi.

It took Lis WEEKS to track down a copy in any of the libraries we are members of.

We watched it last night.

Those of you who have Netflix? Put this one on your queue. It's not one I'd watch over and over again, but it was fun, and it's definitely worth watching, at least once.

So,. the other day, temima and I saw the Beowulf movie, in IMAX 3-D.

I'm sure most of you have seen Hal Duncan's review of the movie, and, the thing is, while I cannot find a single thing to disagree with him about, I somehow feel that I enjoyed the movie more than he did.

See, here's the thing: in the movie, everything that, in the poem, somebody else also saw, Beowulf does, more-or-less. Oh, there are changes: Wiglaf, far from being a young warrior in his first battle when he faces the dragon, is Beowulf's oldest friend and comrade-in-arms -- the very first time we see Beowulf, he and Wiglaf are talking. And the battle against the dragon is entirely different. When fighting Grendel, Beowulf manages to wrap a big ol' chain around the monster's arm, and get it around a post, giving him the leverage he needs to rip off the arm, but he DOES rip off the arm and it IS a superhuman feat of strength.

But, the things which nobody but Beowulf sees? Those may be entirely different . . .

Beowulf is always in the company of other warriors, except once -- when he goes in to fight Grendel's mother. So, who's to say that his account is accurate? And that whole bit of the movie is the bit which most people seem to hate most, but which, to me, works the best.

The movie uses the source material of Beowulf to tell a different story than the poem. The movie creates a story from which the poem could have possibly been created -- but it's not the same story. The idea is that the poem is the story that Beowulf is letting people believe -- but it's not, entirely, the true story.

And I find that kind of subversion a lot of fun.

Obviously, there are going to be spoilers here. So here's a cut-tag.
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Lis and I saw two plays this weekend; she's going to review one, and I agreed to review the other. But I'm procrastinating.

So, instead, I'll mention that, while we were in Lee (a town out in Western Mass, in the Berkshires), we stopped at a diner for lunch, which we discovered was the diner in the Norman Rockwell painting "The Runaway" -- that's the one with the police officer sitting on one diner stool, and a little kid sitting on the stool next to him, and they're talking (the kid has a little bundle of stuff on the floor by the stool). At the next table was a half-dozen college-age kids, who were talking about, among other things, their religious upbringings. In the course of this, one of the women mentioned a Jewish joke that neither Lis nor I had heard before -- this is a rare event.

Q: How do you get rid of rats in a synagogue?
A: Give them bar mitzvahs. You'll never see them again.

Pittsfield, Massachusetts has a really neat museum. It's the town art/science/history/aquarium museum. It's, like, three floors including the basement. Top floor has some paintings and sculpture, including some plaster casts of Famous Statues (Venus de Milo, Winged Victory of Thrace, that sort of thing), and some gorgeous Italian nineteenth century stuff. It also has space for temporary exhibits, which is what drew us there -- it was a traveling exhibit of Toys Of Our Childhood -- Slinky, Spirograph, Mister Potatohead, Matchbox cars, Easy-Bake Oven, you know the sort of thing. Mom -- you have to go out there in order to take a picture with the human-sized cutout of Barbie.

I suspect that they cleared out exhibit space for that, because there was also a room with just exhibits piled up. They had a mummy. And lots of other stuff that you couldn't see because it was basically jumbled together like in someone's attic. So I suspect that all those exhibits and paintings and stuff are SUPPOSED to go in the rooms where the traveling exhibit was.

The main floor has rocks, including radioactive ones, dozens of taxidermied animals and birds, dioramas of the wildlife of different environments, collections of seashells, and the like.

The basement is an aquarium, with a few other animals besides -- a good selection of snakes, a scorpion (with a black light -- did you know that scorpions are fluorescent under ultraviolet light?), a (Judy, avert your eyes) tarantula, frogs from around the world, toads, turtles . . .

We also went to the Norman Rockwell museum. There are a few Norman Rockwell paintings I'd like prints of, some to send to other people. For instance, I think my niece needs a poster of "Shiner". That's the one of a girl sitting outside the principal's office, clothes torn, hair messed up, with a huge black eye, and an even huger grin on her face.

It doesn't suck.

Two word review: "Don't bother."

A longer review, with which I fully agree, is here.

This is not the worst movie ever made, not by a long shot. There are LOTS of movies worse than this one. See, in order to be really bad, you have to be trying to do something, and either succeed, but it's a really bad thing to try to do, or fail amazingly utterly. This movie isn't trying to do anything. At all.

So, it's really not anything other than pointless and boring.

It's like . . . you know how martial arts films have plots which are just kind of vague excuses to string together fight scenes?

Imagine that someone made a martial arts film, but totally forgot to put in any martial arts. And then, when they realized that, #1, they had no martial arts, and, #2, their movie was twenty minutes long, put in, oh, 140 minutes of CGI ships, and the occasional town, blowing up, for no particular reason, and CERTAINLY no reason that you care about. Lots of people die, I guess -- "hey! That monkey just shot a missile into a bunch of soldiers!" but you don't care about any of them, either positively or negatively.

Except. . .

Okay, fine, I'll put in a "spoiler" cut, even though, if you've not seen it, you should just not bother, and if you have seen it, you know you shouldn't have bothered.
( Read more... )

Robert Altemeyer did a bunch of studies over the decades about authoritarian personalities. There are two kinds of personalities in this: people who want to be in charge of everything in a fascist manner, and people who want someone else to be in charge of everything. In some ways, the second group, the people who want someone to boss them around and take away their freedom, is the more interesting group, because, at least for me, they're harder to understand.

Dr Altemeyer summarized his decades of research in a breezy, easy-to-read book called "The Authoritarians", which he has now released for free, here:

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

I don't know if I learned much from it -- it largely confirms my prejudices about authoritarians. However, it, at least, is based on actual double-blind peer-reviewed research, instead of on my gut prejudices.

In any case, it's fascinating, and rather terrifying, reading. I've always assumed that my prejudiced gut feelings about authoritarians were somewhat more extreme than reality; in fact, authoritarians are even more like my prejudices than I guessed.