Author: duane

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Review : The Great Night, by Chris Adrian

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Imagine, for a moment, an Oberon and Titania who live in modern day San Francisco. Oh, they’re still king and queen of the fairies, still magical creatures. But, just like mortals, they have their flaws. They fight, they make up. After one particular fight, Oberon brings Boy to Titania as a peace offering. This is not new, the fairies often snatch young boys from the surrounding neighborhood and bring them to live “under the hill” for a time. Not as equals, of course. As toys. And, when they’re bored of their toys, they throw them back.
Something is different about this one, though. This one is not a toy. This boy they treat as a son. Titania deeply loves the boy, an emotion that is also deeply foreign to her (and she does not always like or appreciate it). Sometimes she can not live without him, other times she curses Oberon for ever bringing him to her.
Something else is different about Boy — he has leukemia. What happens to Titania and Oberon next is some of the saddest fiction I think I’ve ever read. The author’s descriptions of parents inside a hospital cancer ward as so realistic you feel like you’re right there with them (and it is not a place you want to be for long). This only stands to reason since Chris Adrian, author of The Great Night, is in real life a pediatric oncologist. So he, however unfortunately, knows all too much about this area.
I’m three paragraphs in, and that’s just the premise for the story. I could take a whole novel of that. “Titania and Oberon living in modern day San Francisco. They kidnap a boy, learn what it means to love him and to be parents, and then have to deal with his mortality as leukemia takes him away. Boom. Go.” I would buy that book.

But this book is more than that. This book is Adrian’s retelling of Shakespeare’s entire story, with a few twists. Oberon, after a particularly horrible fight with Titania (who blames him for all of their pain), has left. Titania desperaretly wants him to return and sends her fairy servants out in search of him daily. In this story, though, Puck is not a mischievous sprite – he is an untrustworthy creature who spends his time in chains. Puck is able to convince Titania, in her grief, that he will surely find Oberon if only she unchains him. She does so and we discover what the other fairies already knew – that Puck is a world-eating monster. The rest of the story is spent with the fairies alternately running away, attempting to fight, or basically kissing their fairy behinds goodbye because the end of the world is surely upon them.
Meanwhile, up in the human world, three distraught lovers have become lost in the park. Each has his (or her) own backstory about how love, sex and relationships have gone horribly wrong. It doesn’t take long for these mortals to run into the fairies, and they all flee from Puck together.
But wait, there’s more! What of Bottom and the mechanicals? Here we get a band of homeless people who have become convinced that the Mayor is solving the city’s homeless problem with cannibalism. So, naturally, they decide to stage a musical retelling of Soylent Green, the old science fiction movie about the same topic.
How does it all end? Well, with lots of sex, I’ll say that. I don’t know if that’s a statement that the author’s making about Midsummer or about San Francisco, but he certainly doesn’t need any double entendres or innuendos to make his point.   
The story is not an exact retelling of Midsummer, and doesn’t try to be, as you can see. Ultimately, I found that I liked the Shakespeare bits and didn’t care much one way or another for the rest. Like I said, I would have read an entire story of nothing but the backstory about Titania, Oberon and Boy. Or how Puck had come to be captured, I’m sure that would make a good story as well. It’s just that, when you start adding characters to Shakespeare, you lose me a bit as your audience. I’m in it for the Shakespeare, and coming at it from the angle of what you do with the Shakespeare. When you take some Shakespeare out and add some of your own creation back in? Well, now you’ve basically asked me to put the two side by side … and I’m not sure what modern author would win that battle.
Chris Adrian was named as part of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” and, as mentioned, is currently in his pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at UCSF. This is his third novel.

Shakespeare + Opera + Ballet

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

If you like a bit of ballet or opera with your Shakespeare and you’re in the neighborhood, the Royal Opera House in London is staging both Verdi’s Macbeth and Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Romeo & Juliet later this month.

Verdi’s Macbeth is always a popular opera, with instantly appealing music and a familiar story taken from Shakespeare’s play. The treacherous and scheming couple at its centre make for wonderful operatic villains – the type of strongly drawn characters that Verdi portrays in his music so well. With Simon Keenlyside making his Royal Opera debut in the title role, and with Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera, conducting the opera, this is a revival with an extra thrill. Macbeth’s ‘dagger’ soliloquy and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene are just two of the play’s famous moments that inspired Verdi to wonderfully inventive and atmospheric music. The heroic Macduff, a chorus of witches and the vivid apparition of the eight kings complete an opera that has the composer at his most theatrical. Phyllida Lloyd’s production, last presented by The Royal Opera in 2006, uses Verdi’s 1865 revision, especially noted for Lady Macbeth’s great aria ‘La luce langue’ and the wonderful Act IV opening chorus, and brings out the dark motivations of the Macbeths and the light of justice for those they wrong.

The Royal Ballet is thrilled to announce that it will perform Kenneth MacMillan’s timeless classic Romeo and Juliet at The O2 in June 2011. This will be the first time the world-renowned ballet company has performed in a UK arena and promises to be a ballet spectacle to remember.

A stellar cast of Royal Ballet dancers including Carlos Acosta, Tamara Rojo, Mara Galeazzi, Edward Watson, Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg will dance the roles of the famous star-crossed lovers for four shows, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the Royal Ballet Music Director, Barry Wordsworth.

Any geeks out there an opera and/or ballet fan, and want to tell us about it? I have to admit I’ve seen neither ballet nor opera with a Shakespeare twist. I would say “other than the occasional channel surfing past PBS” but as I think back I’m not sure I’ve even seen that much.
I can, however, tell you about the time a professional wrestler stopped mid match to quote Hamlet’s Yorick speech. True story.

You Are What You Read

~ duane ~ 8 Comments

Although this article makes the Harry Potter comparison , I’m still very interested in the underlying idea that when you read, you”psychologically become part of their world and take away emotional benefits.”
Forget wizards, let’s talk Shakespeare. Isn’t this describing exactly what we’ve always known Shakespeare to be great at? We love the Henry V speech because *we* take our own personal motivation from it. We get all deep and existential with Hamlet because hey, it’s not like we know any more about the undiscovered country than he did, and we’re still just as consumed by it.
A fairly obvious question would be, “Doesn’t all fiction do this?” and I suppose the answer is “Yes…to an extent.” Sometimes to an extent so small that you don’t even notice. It takes a master to build universes. Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and yes even Harry Potter. For every “classic” (forgive me for calling Harry Potter a classic already), there are hundreds of knockoffs and wanna-be’s that tried to paint an almost identical universe, and came up short.

How Old Was Anne Hathaway?

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Whenever I see one of these 51 Facts About William Shakespeare lists, I always give it a quick glance to see if a) anything’s just wildly wrong, and/or b) to see if there’s anything new and interesting that I didn’t know.
I like this list. It does seem to cover mostly standard information – when he was born, died, what his father did for a living, etc..
But #11 was new to me:

Because Anne Hathaway Shakespeare’s tombstone states she was 67 when she died in 1623, it is generally believed that she was eight years older than her husband. However, the figures 1 and 7 are easily confused–so she might have been 61, only two years older than William.

Is that true? That this is the only information used to give us Anne’s age, and that it is questionable? I’ve never heard that, and I’ve heard an awful lot of conjecture about William Shakespeare’s marriage. I’ve yet to hear someone say “Anne was almost 10 years older than Shakespeare…..or, not.”

Happy Mother's Day!

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Happy Mother’s Day to the mother of my children my wife Kerry, to my own mom Mary (aka “Nanta”) and my mother-in-law Kathy (aka “Gammie”), and all the moms out there! (I realized that if I put a comma between “mother of my children” and “my wife Kerry”
We’ve done worst mothers, we’ve done a comprehensive list of all the mothers and we’ve even done sonnets for Mother’s Day. So, what should we cover this year?
Who do you think is the most *interesting* mother character? I’ll let you define that how you want. Lady Macbeth, maybe, precisely because there’s no child in the play? Gertrude for her complex and sometimes faulty balancing of relationships between what it means to be a mom and to be a wife? Hermione for her loyalty to her crazy jealous husband?