Unenchanted April

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Poets used to love springtime. Remember Chaucer?:

 

 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye . . .       Or how about some Shakespeare?     It was a lover and his lass,   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,   That o'er the green corn-field did pass,   In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,   When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring.       Eh.       I myself do not much like the spring. It can be very pretty, granted, and I do think crocuses and daffodils are very nice. But there’s something a little – I don’t know – relentless about it. And I notice that, over the past hundred years, a few poets seem to be agreeing with me.       How about that ol’ T. S. Eliot?:       April is the cruellest month, breeding   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing   Memory and desire, stirring   Dull roots with spring rain.         But my personal favorite is New England’s own Edna St. Vincent Millay:       To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.       I love those last few lines.       Happy springtime, everyone!

Theater review: "The Winter's Tale," Providence, October 2012

I saw last week that Brown/Trinity was going to stage Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” downtown, in the Pell/Chafee Center. I bought tickets immediately.

 

 

 

 

“The Winter’s Tale” isn’t staged very often. It is an odd play, which Shakespeare most likely wrote late in life. It’s about the king of Sicily, Leontes, who becomes irrationally jealous of his wife Hermione, who (he’s completely sure) is having an affair with his best friend King Polyxenes of Bavaria. He tries to kill his friend the king, unsuccessfully; he imprisons his (pregnant) queen; he has his little son sent away.

 

 

 

The Oracle of Delphi tells him that he’s wrong about everything. He erupts into a rage, and then his wife dies, and his son. Unrepentant, he sends his newborn daughter to be eaten by wild animals.

 

 

 

One of his courtiers takes the baby girl to “the seacoast of Bohemia” (there ain’t no such place). He abandons her there, and is then (in Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction) “pursued by a bear,” who kills him.

 

 

 

The play’s last two acts are about redemption. The wife, Hermione, lives, and so does the baby girl. The son of the King of Bohemia marries the daughter of the King of Sicily. And so on.

 

 

 

It is sweet, and bittersweet.

 

 

 

This production was lots of fun. The sets were minimal: some sheets, a toy ship. A few of the actors are worth mention: Elise LeBreton, a dignified Hermione; Catherine Dupont, a wonderful Emilia; Ben Grills, a funny / dignified Shepherd; Mark Larson, a very funny Clown; and Zdenko Martin, a convincingly roguish Autolycus.

 

 

 

At the end of part one – “exit, pursued by a bear” – there was a whole chorus line of bears, performing a very athletic dance number. Then they ran up into the audience, and one of them stuck her bear-masked face into my face and growled, and I laughed like hell.

 

 

 

Then, at the beginning of Part II, after the intermission, the minstrel / scoundrel Autolycus came onstage, wearing a hat that looked just like the one I bought two weeks ago on Montmartre.

 

 

He’d taken it from under my seat. He came up into the audience after his musical number and returned it to me, very sweetly, and told me to be more careful in future.

 

 

 

Imagine! My hat’s a Shakepearean actor!

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Sunday blog: Who is Sylvia?

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Today, May 8, is the birthday of my friend Sylvia. I have always loved her name. Shakespeare got a pretty good song out of it:

 

 

Who is Sylvia? What is she

that all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair, and wise is she;

the heaven such grace did lend her,

that she might admired be.

 

 

Is she wise as she is fair?

For beauty lives with kindness.

Love doth to her eyes repair,

to help him of his blindness,

and, being helped, inhabits there.

 

 

Then to Sylvia let us sing,

that Sylvia is excelling;

she excels each mortal thing

upon the dull earth dwelling:

to her garlands let us bring.

 

 

And now listen to what Schubert (and the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) did with it!

 

14_Gesang_(An_Silvia),_D891.wma Listen on Posterous

 

 

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As you (may or may not) like it

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Partner and I went to see a production of “As You Like It” at Brown last weekend. Now, before I continue, you must know that I am not a Shakespeare snob. I only remembered that “As You Like It” was the play with Rosalind and Celia, and the Forest of Arden, and the “seven ages of man” speech.

 

 

As we seated ourselves, we saw some tables, chairs, and scripts lying around onstage. I am not Walter Kerr, but I know metatheater when I see it.

 

 

The first few scenes were done as mock script-readings. The characters were only approximately in costume. All the entries and exits were read aloud. This was okay, if not terribly original. But some of the scenes, especially the Rosalind/Celia dialogue, were delivered in what I think of as “Shakespearean blabbering," with the actors speaking as quickly and affectedly as possible, for "comic effect."  (Think of Michael Keaton in “Much Ado About Nothing.”)

 

 

At least they didn't use fake British accents. I still have painful memories of a production of “Comedy of Errors” some decades back, in which all the actors twitched and squeaked as if they were on heroin, with bad British accents no less. It made me want to knife myself.

 

 

The first half of "As You Like It" had some nice scenes nonetheless. One was done as a short series of black-and-white silent movies, speeded up, with the actors live on stage providing the missing dialogue in rapid paraphrase: “No, I'd love to let you in, it's great to see you, but seriously, you can't come in, your brother wants to kill you!” Later, the curtain rose on an actor dressed as a panda bear, who stared at the audience for a moment, then retreated. I think the message was: “Welcome to the Forest of Arden. It’s not a normal forest.”

 

 

Partner and I escaped to the terrace at intermission. “It's not too bad so far,” I said.

 

 

“Hm,” Partner said.

 

 

The second half of the show was less successful. The actors blurted and shouted and waved their arms. The panda came back a few times, but he/she wasn't quite so cute after a while. (This is called the Law of Diminishing Returns.) And it was long. Three hours of not-very-well-staged Shakespeare is quite a lot.

 

 

So: not so great.  But nice try.

 

 

I hope they do “Titus Andronicus” next year. That’s the one with people being baked into pies.

 

 

I’d love to see that on stage.  Maybe with a panda for comic relief.

 

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