So, apparently I’m an actor now.

I think I’ve mentioned in the past, but David, the HR guy at my new office is an actor himself, and one of the senior people at a local group. In the time I’ve been here I know that they’ve done stuff like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Fool’s Gold and Annie. He’s admitted that he’s got no Shakespeare in him, never done it. Never had the opportunity.

Until now, it seems. He tells me a couple weeks ago that one of their donors said he’d drop a huge chunk of cash on them, if they’d do some Shakespeare. Specifically, on Shakespeare’s birthday. Even more specifically, King Frickin’ Lear. Why someone would want to pay good money to require a bunch of actors who admittedly know nothing about Shakespeare to tackle Mt. Everest I have no idea, but fools and their money, you know how the expression goes.

“You’re screwed,” I told David.

“Want to help? he asked.

“Ummm….ahhhh…..errrrrrr……” I said. I’m great when I’m behind the keyboard and I’ve got Google and my other friends at my side. But am I really foolish enough to try this stuff for real? Other than some play-writing in college – where my job was entirely to sit behind the word processor and turn in a script – I’ve got no real connection to the theatre at all. I’ve said that many times.

“Absolutely!” I told him. Apparently I was just that foolish. He knows full well that I’m not an actor. He just wants me to sit with him and the director during a few rehearsals and such, and ask some questions. I at this point have no idea what those questions will be, but I’m assuming it’ll be a lot of “explain what’s happening right now so the actors know what they’re doing” sort of stuff.

So I get introduced to everyone, and sit in on a rehearsal. They weren’t terrible. They were all (well, most of them) giving it their best shot. Nobody had anything memorized at this point but I could tell that they were at least trying to find the verse while still trying to act it and not just fall into the rhythm of students reciting it for their homework. A couple of times an actor pauses to ask exactly what’s going on with his character at a particular point, and they all turn to me for the “translation”. That’s fun, I enjoy that. Every now and then Derek, the director, leans over to me and says things like, “Goneril should be nastier here, don’t you think?” and I give my two cents.

Poor Fool had a tough time of it. He’s trying to be too funny, even though he completely doesn’t get most of the lines (he lets us know that the whole “seven stars because they are not eight” joke is completely stupid). Here my own weakness at this stuff begins to show, and I do a pretty terrible job of trying to get him through it. Fool’s got some fairly deep stuff to say, and I don’t know how to make it sound convincing.

The real problem turned out to be Edmund, this guy named Ken. Dude is just lost. He’s saying the words but you can tell it’s not really connecting in the brain. “He’s not getting this, is he?” Derek whispers to me.

“Not really, no,” I whisper back.

He then cuts the scene short and tells Ken to listen to me while I show him how to do it. This is the whole “stand up for bastards” speech so I start in on Edmund’s motivation and such, but then director is all “Nonono, we’ve been over that…show him how to connect what you’re saying to what Edmund is saying.”

So I give it my best shot. After all this is just reciting a speech, I can do that. I start in with the “Thou, nature, art my goddess…” and the actors up on stage start yelling “We can’t hear you!” and my friend Dave starts nudging me to go up on the stage. I’m not sure how many times in my life I’ll have to decide between reciting Shakespeare and throwing up on my shoes, but this time I went with the Shakespeare. I went up on stage and started in again. “Now we can’t hear you!” Dave shouts from their seats in the audience. Once more I launch into it, projecting as best I can. I have been on stage before, to give technical presentations. So I do know at least a little something about how to project my voice. But all at once like this, with a script? Never!

I actually get through it and wrap it up on the best “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” line I can muster. There’s an exclamation point there in my copy, I honestly have no idea if that’s always there or what, but I figure it’s a sign to end with a bang, not a whimper.

They actually applauded! I can only assume that it was out of encouragement and not talent, I’m not fooling anybody. I turned seventeen shades of red and sit back down.

I don’t really remember all the details for the rest of the night, because I spent it all going over that scene in my brain again and again, tearing it apart by each syllable, pondering how I might have done it differently. Now that it’s over, I want to do it again!

That was a few weeks ago. I go to more rehearsals, and much of it is the same. I get more confident that people are actually paying attention to my opinion, and I’m less reluctant to launch into a soliloquy every now and then, although the opportunities become few and far between as the actors are picking it up very, very fast.

I get into work this morning and Dave finds me almost immediately, asks me to come to his office. “So,” he says, “You want to be an actor.”

“Not really,” I say, “No.”

“Yes,” he says, “You do. We all can tell.”

I do little but blush and shrug. I guess I kinda do?

“Here’s the thing,” he says, “I’ve been talking with Derek and he’s not happy with Ken at all. We love Ken, he’s done great for us with other shows, but he’s just not picking up the Shakespeare thing like everybody else is. And he even told us when we asked him, he doesn’t want to do it.”

“You’re not gonna say what I think you’re gonna say, are you?” I ask, turning beet red to ghost white I’m quite sure.

“Want to play Edmund?”

Speechless.

Seriously. I’ve heard the term, I’ve used the term, but I think this might well be the time my mouth would not move to form words. Weird feeling.

“Let me rephrase that,” he says, “I know you *want* to. But will you?”

I swallow a few times and finally manage to get my voice back. “Can I play Fool?” I ask.

I don’t think he was expecting that. “Why would you want to play Fool?”

“Because it’s April Fool’s Day, of course.”

This piece from Slate.com seems a custom followup to yesterday’s article about Majorie Garber’s new book, but as far as I can tell they are not related.
Here, Bill James asks why the London of 400 years ago gave us Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson, but the Topeka, Kansas of today (a city of roughly the same population) doesn’t see to be churning out the literary masters at the same rate. He says that Shakespeare’s London fit one of two categories – either it was an act of God, a random clustering of what turned out to be a very unusual amount of talent….or else you take the position that talent is everywhere, and it has more to do with what your environment does to foster that talent.
James chooses B, and goes on to argue that we don’t develop great writers in America – we develop sports heroes. But honestly, after a paragraph like the following I’m honestly not sure if he’s pulling our leg a little bit:

We are not so good at developing great writers, it is true, but why is this? It is simply because we don’t need them. We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don’t genu­inely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day—fudging just a little on the definition of the word need. We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes. We have gotten to be very, very good at developing the same.

I’m going to assume he’s joking. I don’t even know how to respond to something like “one can only read so many books in a lifetime.” Maybe if one spent less time watching “new games every day” one might have more time?
What do you think? Is he serious? He’s playing it awfully straight if he is.

Thanks to regular reader Angela for the link!
Alan Cumming, fresh from playing Sebastian in Julie Taymor’s Tempest, wants to tackle more Shakespeare. And he’s got a doozy of an idea – he wants to try Lady Macbeth:

“I want to do a production of Macbeth where I play Macbeth one night and Lady Macbeth the next – and the girl who plays Lady Macbeth will change around too. I think it’s a way at looking at gender, what defines a man.”

I like this idea, and I respect him as an actor for even bringing it up. We often hear about giving male roles to women – Helen Mirren’s Prospera comes immediately to mind, though we also had a post recently about a gender-bent Hamlet as well. It’s not often you hear male actors speak of their desire to tackle a female role.
Also, maybe I’m misunderstanding him, but is he suggesting that the female lead, when he is playing Lady M, would take on Mac? So depending on when you saw the show you’d either see it played straight (ahem), or bent? I think I’d feel obligated to see both versions, if that’s the case.
What do you think? I know, I know, no girls in original version, boys plays girls’ roles all the time, yadda yadda. I’m not talking about 400 years ago, I’m talking about today, by contemporary expectations and standards, what do you think? What sort of expectations are you going to bring to the show if you know that a man is playing Lady M? If a man were playing Lady M and a woman playing M, which one do you think you’d pay more attention to?

Here, of course, that’s a rhetorical question. We know the answer. But Marjorie Garber is taking it to the next level in her new book, The Use And Abuse of Literature.

For Garber, of course, literature does matter. “Language does change our world,” she writes. “It does make possible what we think and how we think it.” Echoing an argument made by the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom, Garber claims for literature a sort of stem cell-like power to generate fresh and new imaginative experiences in those who read it.

The article is short, but it seems that the book will be something of a throwback to the old “two cultures” debate — should you teach literature or science? Sure, both, but at what ratio? Which is more important?
Readers of this blog may answer that easily, but that’s why our language has words like “should” – because what we want is not always the same as what is. How many times a day do I see some form of the question “Why teach Shakespeare? Is Shakespeare still relevant?” In my world everybody would know the answer to that question, and stop asking it.

I’ll be watching for reviews of this book, I’m curious to see how much discussion it generates.

You may have already seen by now this NY Times article entitled How Shakespeare Invented Teenagers:

Yet our whole modern understanding of adolescence is there to be found in this play. Shakespeare essentially created this new category of humanity, and in place of the usual mix of nostalgia and loathing with which we regard adolescents (and adolescence), Shakespeare would have us look at teenagers in a spirit of wonder. He loves his teenagers even as he paints them in all their absurdity and nastiness.

When I first saw this come through I was surprised at how short it was, until I realized that it’s just a snippet from the upcoming book “How Shakespeare Changed Everything”, by Stephen Marche.
Honestly I read it and skipped it, and I’m only posting here to get a little discussion going since everybody and his uncle Antonio has been linking it. I couldn’t help but think, “Didn’t we already go through this with Bloom?”
What do you think? Did Shakespeare invent teenagers?