Notions (Part 3 of ? [SPECIAL BIF!SOCK!POW! EDITION])

My earliest experiences with superheroes(TM) were plenty early. I can't pinpoint it, actually. I just know it was early enough that I started dressing as Superman(r) for Halloween when I was something like two. (No doubt this had something to do with the movie coming out when I was quite young.) Since then, I've had gradually increasing experience with that world. Oddly enough, I came to the origins of all that--comicbooks themselves--rather late in my youth. It wasn't until I was about 11 that I started noticing comicbooks. (Not quite true--I came upon a Conan-the-Barbarian comic when I was something like 8. It scared me.) It wasn't until late high school (and Friend Younce's collection of the Sandman comics) that I started collecting graphic novels for myself. Since then, it's been a pleasure that enjoy with very few side effects. In fact, it can contribute to weight loss. To my wallet.

So my appreciation for comicbooks as a genre is rooted in hero worship, tempered with an education in theatre and eventually realized in my early twenties, when I took my first crack at writing a comicbook script:

• Freaky Chicks. I wrote approximately the first issue--a self-contained origin story of sorts--which introduced us to the two main heroes. The ideas were many in this little adventure, and I was trying to avoid writing a straight-forward comicbook, but ultimately the "superhero"(TM) conceit was that these girls were put together by fate, had very different personalities and abilities, but abilities that complemented each other perfectly. To wit, one was an abrasive young woman who could survive any external injury, but couldn't heal from any; the other a quiet sort who had the ability to heal, presumably through religious gift. The script was about the abrasive one discovering her ability and the two discovering one another.

This script has a long, sad history. I started it in hopeful, long-distance collaboration with an artist friend, and we never really got going with it. I shopped it around a little thereafter, but didn't really have the contacts with the kind of artist I was looking for. Now, most sadly, the only version of the actual script exists on a defunct hard drive I lug from apartment to apartment. For some reason, all my notes and correspondence on the thing transferred to my latest laptop, but not the script itself. Balls. It may be for the best, because I have to imagine at this point that it could use some reworking.

I have had another idea I could see myself sitting down to flesh out some time, though:

• Aspirant: Two guys this time, best friends from age five. One is maniacally crazy about building himself into a vigilante a la Batman. The other is incredibly regular about his life, wants very basic things, but also feels compelled to prevent the first guy from killing himself in his foray into vigilantism. What the first guy doesn't know, is that his friend Joe Normal has superpowers. He's a rather-more-vulnerable-Superman sort. Joe just doesn't have any of the drive Guy One does to defend justice. Again, very set in a real-world environment; no capes all over the place, or anything like that. I got pretty upset when I saw this sort of relationship being outlined between Peter and his bro in Heroes, but they have thankfully taken it in a different direction.

This last would actually make a pretty great movie in my mind as well, on the indie level. An independently produced superhero(TM) movie would just be old-school bad-ass in my imagination. In practice, well . . . here again is where my lack of experience in film making makes for a dodgy proposition.

It's interesting posting my ideas on the Aviary here. For a long time I felt it took the steam out of my creativity to share my ideas with people, so I avoided this kind of entry. Now, however, I suppose I have become a more collaborative creature (as frustrating as collaboration can sometimes be), because sharing my ideas here has me more excited about them and thereby more ready to work one or two out for awhile. In the immortal words of Stephen Colbert (character): Thanks, Nation.

This Is How We Do It

The past week has been a busy one, especially in comparison to the actual clocked hours of teaching last week, never mind my peculiar travel habits for the re-up of

As Far As We Know

. The bulk of the work has been to educate a group of incredibly mixed experience into Zuppa del Giorno's style of theatre . . . and, in the process, remind even ourselves of what it is we do.

That may seem odd. It seems one of the most consistent subjects I bring up on this here 'blog is Zuppa, that ever-adventurous work I've been doing pretty consistently for the past five years. When we're not doing a show, we're planning for one, or teaching workshops, or recruiting students or venturing off to Italy. Yet somehow, in all that hustle and bustle, we've gotten away from our roots--that is, creating a play directly from improvisation on a scenario. In Italy, we devoted much of our energy to incorporating Italian into the scenario.

Operation Opera

was as much about writing the scenario as it was improvising upon it, and

Silent Lives

was similar in that sense, and completely different in the sense that it was a clown show. There are entire technical elements of our original work that I had lost sight of in the rest of the machinations, elements such as David's "Newtonian Impulses" and the ways in which we strip down a scenario to its most basic elements, and strip away language as a communication tool.

So we've all been learning together. It's fascinating to watch the students toil in such unfamiliar territory, probably doing many of the same things wrong and right that I did in 2002. Fascinating, too, to watch how Sam, Erin and Geoff trust in the process so implicitly in spite of being new to it. I suppose acting experience in general (though, perhaps specifically experience with improvisation) helps actors perceive the merit in doing things as thoroughly and gradually as this process demands, in spite of having the intense deadline it does.

And then again, maybe I don't give my fellow actors quite enough credit. It's an amazing group. (And just how have I been so lucky this year as to only work with incredible people?) Which is just to say that the "new" actors to Zuppa's process are very disciplined and talented artists who somehow get it. They just get it. Thank God they do, too, because when your working with people who don't it adds a whole lot more work to an already intensive work process.

So just what is this work what takes me away from my beloved Aviary for so long? How can we have so much to do when we don't even have a scenario related to our play yet? I am so glad you asked! The bible of our little group is a book of

Flaminio Scala's collection of original commedia dell'arte scenarios

. These scenarios provide very little information in the way of dialogue or explanation. They begin with a character breakdown such as you would see at the beginning of any published play, but with no character descriptions as such, since the characters they they would be known by their type to the original actors. Then there is a paragraph or two about "the argument," which describes a little about back history and relationships, though generally not reaching much farther back than a month or so. Finally, there is the scenario itself, which is divided into paragraphs titled after the character or characters concerned in the central action of each. The scenario merely describes the action of the "scene," and provides no explanation as to specific actions of characters or motivations for such, so there's much to be interpreted (including the extensive use of pronouns: does "he" refer to Pantalone or Arlechino this time?). The scenarios don't even say "the two fail to understand one another because _______." They say, "they speak at cross-purposes."

So David will begin by assigning parts (in our case, occasionally assigning two parts to one actor, unconcerned with the supposed sex of the character), then he will read the scenario a few lines at a time, and we actors will fulfill its demands as he reads, rather like the theatre sports game "Typist Narrator." In this round, there's typically very little interpretation, and we can speak whatever dialogue helps us understand the action. The point is to absorb the scenario. After once through, we try again, and again, until we can run through the thing without narration. Then David gets us to run it more and more efficiently, giving us only five minutes to fulfill all the actions, then three, then one. This gets us centered on the action, and away from flourishes and embellishments that may have snuck in after several runs.

Then it gets difficult.

One of the distinctive features of traditional commedia dell'arte is very specific, very full physical characterizations. (This was part of the benefit of working with the students last week on creating grand characters for busking.) One part of effectively using such characterizations is learning to use one's body to communicate as specifically as one might with words. The scenarios lend themselves to this approach in the way they were recorded: no dialogue, only action. The trick, then, is to train oneself to speak with the body as significantly as with words. After learning and stream-lining the scenario, then, we begin on several challenges:

• Three-Word Phrases - The actors can only speak two-to-three words at a time, and must shave down their free dialogue to what's essential (not to mention learn to really dialogue in order to create more opportunities for each other to use another two or three words).
• One-Word Dialogue - The actors can only speak one word at a time, which drives them to use their physical life to imbue that word with as much specific meaning as possible. I.e., saying love comes to mean love that wrenches me in confusing directions whilst lifting my heart into my mouth.
• One-Word/One-Gesture Unification - Closely related to many impulse-passing exercises we warm-up with, this challenge is perhaps the most challenging (well: for me, anyway). The idea is that a scene is about passing energy back and forth, and to do so with as much commitment as possible. This is the challenge that gets us closest to the traditional style of performance. One actor begins it, with his or her body, creating a continuous motion that communicates his or her need until he or she passes it off to the scene partner with a single word punctuating the end of the motion. THEN the actor must suspend in that pose until his or her scene partner passes the changed impulse back in the same manner. (It feels very unnatural to western actors trained in "naturalism," but really it's just a different rhythm to applied to the same concept of unification.)
• Dance Through - After One-Word/Gesture, this one is typically a relief. Plus, it frees actors to make different, less-obvious choices with their characters and actions. This challenge allows NO language, only physical action, to communicate the story. Music is played throughout (we used Strauss waltzes, but I've enjoyed this with mixes of different types of music as well), and the actors are encouraged to allow the music to inform the manner in which they play the scene. Not only does this relax the actors into using physical choices to communicate, but it helps strip away physical "language," those gestures that have agreed-upon definitions, such as the thumbs-up or flipping someone the bird.

As you might imagine, after going through all these different versions of a scenario, one learns it pretty well. To keep things fresh, we often switch roles around somewhere in all this, so everyone pays very close attention to everyone else's scenes. In this way, we actors really learn the scenario, and not just "our part" in it. (...B.S., B.S., my scene with Arlechino, B.S., B.S., ...) As you may also imagine, this work helps us learn what to expect from one another in general, our strengths and enthusiasms, and builds tremendous ensemble mentality. We also work, amidst all this, on developing an instinct for the "comic three;" not just as a comedy rule, but as a method of tracking an improvisation and patterning the rhythm of interaction. A joke between two people generally has two developing beats and a punchline. If an action repeats, it does so in segments of three(s). And when acting with our scene partner, we receive his or her impulse, suspend and process it a beat, then send it right back out again. Threes are helpful.

I have the benefit or having seen how impressive the results of this groundwork can be. It helps to create a show completely unique and rewarding to a western (and I believe any) audience, and allows us to get very comfortable with that strange crisis of the moment on stage that improvised shows create: What will happen next? The audience doesn't know because we don't specifically know. It's all life. Through this work, however, we know where we are when we float in that uncertainty. Next week we begin developing the scenario with Steve, and we begin that period of rampant change and uncertainty, when sometimes all one wants is for someone else to make a decision and write us a pretty little script. Together, however, we will find the courage to not know what the hell we're doing.

This Way to Tech Day

Or perhaps I should say: This way to tech in two hours. To be fair (fairness above all),

As Far As We Know

had much more time than we perhaps otherwise might’ve. We were the first to start what was sure to be a much longer day for the space itself, so the theatre wasn’t already clogged with props and costumes from other shows, and we even got in rather earlier than our stated time slot. It was just enough to get by, though.

The Fringe

(or perhaps it’s the space we’re in) requires part of one’s tech to be a timed run of the show. For us, that means two hours to figure out a very tech-heavy show, and two to run it. And that’s it. So we got everything rigged to run, and Jen Schreiver and Joe Varca got a start on the light, sound and video set-up and cues.

And then we ran.

All things considered, it went well. We got through the whole thing, anyway, and it clocked in within the required time limit. There’s plenty still to be worked out in every category, hat-to-tails, but we saw the bear dance, and it didn’t run wild and devour any of our volunteer tech staff. (That’s a metaphor, in which “the bear” represents “our production”…just for those of you who know nothing about the show. It contains, sadly, no dancing bears.) Mind you, I’m still terrified. We never again set foot back in the theatre space prior to opening; at least not until 15 minutes before our debut.

What jacks up everybody, methinks, beyond the already anxious position of finally showing all our cards on this former work-in-progress, is the exciting good news of last night. New York Magazine (my favorite for crosswords [Maura Jacobson, you rule!]) has us at the top of the

short list

of not-to-miss NYC Fringe shows. So, you know. Wow.

Apart from all the technical aspects as-yet unknown, there’s a lot of my personal process that I have yet to nail. In the space of three scenes—all of them either memory, dream or hallucination—I need to create a whole, individualized human being. In the midst of doing this, I have these funky-ass movement things to do. Abstractions: ones that will work, if only I can do them with the same intention that I might a “normal” scene with utter verisimilitude. Most of them involve walking slowly backwards. One involves walking backwards completely blind, my entire head covered by cloth. This was, of course, my invention.

And the stage and our entrances are bizarre, on the whole. The stage is a long, narrow thrust extending from thirty feet away into the midst of three seating sections. We have essentially four entrances: two from either downstage corner (from which there is only audience to hide behind) and two from either upstage side. These upstage entrances are set wide apart, owing to a backdrop that is about as wide as the stage floor is deep. In other words, for both of my backward marches I have to navigate no fewer then four right-angle turns without being able to target exactly where they need to happen.

As is my wont, I find a very apt metaphor in this (one excluding dancing bears, much to my chagrin). The show is marching blind into the fold, and the only way to make it work is to be as vigilant as possible, and as prepared as possible to make good out of the accidental. We know the stakes, and can only imagine the potential results. It is ultimately out of our hands—there are just too many factors at play. Until we get there, we just have to believe as much as possible…and work our asses off making sure that belief is grounded in enough action to match our faith.

So you better believe the next three-days-and-change will find me doing a lot of backward walking and line exploration. Abraham Lincoln spoke a great quote (one which I’ve tattooed in Sharpie on my stilt legs): “I may be a slow walker, but I never walk back.” I have to hope Abe would appreciate my position and afford me a little excuse to moonwalk my way on and off stage. I hope he would appreciate our little show, too. I think we’ve struck a nice balance concerning the issues of war and politics, even if it does present the American military as being a bit more flawed than I perceive it to function (a necessary adjustment for dramatic purposes). One who may be more politically liberal may actually feel upset with the protest letters our fictional family receives in the midst of their struggle. Then again, I have virtually no independent perspective left. I’m too close. I’m all over the place.

And I mean it literally. We had, of course, discussed this at great length, but it wasn’t until I saw our technical rehearsal today that I realized just how pervasive my face would be in the production. Those of you who know me may have some difficulty with this, especially given how few scenes I have to establish myself as a character. In the second act, images of my face literally border the entire stage, and Faith Catlin and Alex Cherington—as Jake’s parents—wear t-shirts with my face peering out from them. It unnerves me in rehearsal. It will most likely destroy the tissue of the play’s reality for them what know my actual person. Sorry gang. On the plus side, it must be great exposure for my career.

Assuming the show turns out well, that is.

Gull(ability)

I became very interested in philosophy in my early twenties. It was around a time when I was just figuring out most of my priorities in my work and life in general, and it helped that I (a Unitarian Universalist) was freshly in love with a girl who had some very strong, specific ideas about life, the universe and everything. One wishes to rise to such specificity, after all. So I began reaching out--in the inimitable U.U. fashion--for any and everything around me related to philosophy. I rapidly began leaning eastward, based on a completely non-substance-abused altered state I found myself in one day. Here's a short list of some of the books I explored as a part of this process:

• The Case for Christ
• A Grief Observed
• The Celestine Prophecy
• Hero with A Thousand Faces
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Way of the Peaceful Warrior
• The Tao of Pooh
• Tao Te Ching
• The Analects
• The Art of War
• Chuang Tzu
• Siddhartha
• The Prophet

I came to find a lot of personal truth in Taoism, such as I understood it, and incorporated it into my core philosophy of Unitarian Universalism. (Let's not get into religion here; pretend we're at the Thanksgiving dinner table.) One's spiritual and philosophical journey continues, etc., etc. Being a U.U., I find people with answers a little silly. People with answers often find this frustrating. I suppose this is part of the motivation behind all these books written about the way we should all be living. Sure, there's a selfless hero's quest to such a contribution to the history of literature; every self-help author has had some profound sip from the fountain of Truth and returns to his or her humble hometown to share the wealth, like a mama bird, regurgitating into her young, blind ones' beaks. But let's face it, too: No matter how ecumenical one is, writing a treatise on what one believes is at least a little about saying, "I know something you don't."

Written apparently in a similar spirit is the famed book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach. I'll admit two things: I haven't read the book, and I can't get a terribly clear picture of the author's intention in writing it. It seems, however, to have been embraced by anarchic Christianity as a really good metaphor for how a life should be lived, and by all accounts (no: still haven't read it) there are some good reasons for this identification.

Last night I attended Kinesis Dance Project's presentation of Gull(ability), a work-in-progress sort of thing in its first stages. The dance featured Friend Patrick and Friend Melissa (who is also Kinesis' founder/choreographer/artistic director) along with three other dancers, and was squoze (is SO a word) into the Manhattan Theatre Source stage, which itself was further reduced in spacial capacity by a proscenium demi-arch, presumably built for this weekend's premier there. True to my college habits, I read up on the various notes and critiques of Jonathan Livingston Seagull prior to attending, in order to better appreciate whatever parallels Friend Melissa might draw. This was probably a dumb idea on my part.

I forgot two things. Firstly, Melissa tends to treat her inspiration for shows as just that, making her product unlimited by any artificial allegiance to identifiable details from the source. There were people emulating seagulls, and there was the dissatisfaction in an individual for the given circumstances of her life, but from there it took off into explorations and free-verse in the form of dance. And therein is my second neglected fact: It is a dance. I forgot that my best mental state for watching dance is one of extreme receptivity--a relaxed mind taking in waves, rather than an analytical one struggling to make sense of it all. That difference of mental state makes all the difference between an evening of sublimity or one of frustration. I found the sublimity, but wasted a lot of time sputtering about in the detritus of logic and analysis.

And so maybe too there was a third neglection (is SO a word) (the three thing just never gets old for me, do it?). The Taoists are big on being receptive. It's sort of their whole thing, really (see 7/16/07 for a brief reference to my take on this), and part of the appeal of the philosophy for yours truly is the way in which it reminds me how valid and valuable that approach can be, in any experience. I neglect my self-learned lessons sometimes, to my and my friends' and coworkers' disadvantage.

Gull(ability) doesn't seem to be interested in telling a story per se; at this stage, it is much more an alternately humorous and existential expose into the neuroses of four seagulls, and the aspirations to nonconformity of one. This does not sound entertaining, I confess, but in the hands (and feet [and legs]) of Melissa Riker and her crew of uninhibited dancers it achieves out-loud laughter. They do not seek to impersonate seagulls, or even to embody them (a term I hate seeing the generic use of in artistic circles). Rather they interpret seagulls in movement and shape into human forms, each one a little characteristic of the individual dancer, which is nice, seeing as how that's most likely a distinction animals make amongst members of their own species. A particularly memorable sequence involved a series of tableau in which the dances all came together to form the shape of a single seagull from different perspectives, weight-sharing and flat-out climbing atop one another to create wings. The entire performance was infused with this sort of child-like joy, which we can safely state is a trademark of Melissa's choreography to date.

In contrast to that joy, Gull(ability) also contained some movement that began humorously, but through repetition became almost disheartening. The dancers would haul their left legs up and down, or perform a brief, formal series of pelvic twitches with glassy stares, and hysterical laughter was elicited repeatedly by the latter. As the piece went on, however, it became clear these twitches were unthinking, unfeeling impulses--compulsive--and something about them seemed empty and sad. This, interspersed as it was with "solos" in which each gull came on stage with a bundle of seemingly precious items and made a nest out of them somewhere on stage or in the audience, suggested to me only after the performance the hollowness of the pursuit of a material life.

Then again, maybe it was just a comment on conservationism?

In terms of what I'd like to see this piece progress with (and Melissa asked for feedback, so stop judging me to be judgmental), of course I'd hate to see any of Melissa's patented sense of humor leave, and the sound design by Benjamin Oyzon was beautifully layered. I would like to see a more succinct narrative of our seagulls' personal quirks. Or perhaps an expanded view of who they are, as seagulls (a sentence I never would have guessed I'd one day write). I felt it needed to go one way or the other, or else let their nesting build toward something, otherwise it becomes (at least in form) too predictable to me. But this is an actor talking. I'm always trying to make it about story.

When very often, it's better just to not act, and let the moment be what it wants to be.

ITALIA: June 22, 2007

Here’s where we went wrong, yesterday: When in Italy, you need to have desires, or goals. It is a land of great passion, desire and appetite. HOWEVER, no desire should ever, EVER take greater priority over your next cup of coffee.

Which is to say, listen to yourself and go with it. Don’t make yourself dopey by foregoing a good meal in order to get in the car to Florence quicker. You’ll only end up settling for roadside food and a caffeine insufficiency too late to really turn things around for you. Today we took this lesson to heart. First of all, our adventures of the previous day and the lateness of the hour of our return permitted us to sleep in quite a bit. I myself slept until 12:30, a normally unheard-of feat. When we were all up, the priority was a good meal. We knew we had the show in Pitigliano to attend later this night, so felt justified in moving at a simple pace and structuring things around when we accomplished them. This is why Italians are always late, and rarely frustrated.

So we had a nice lunch, and planned to visit our favorite little store in Orvieto for groceries and a visit with its proprietor, Vera. Doing this with no particular rush, we found we had plenty of time to eat, David swam and I exercised and acro’d on the lawn a bit (at one point looking up to find one of our neighbors on her porch watching with an expression that suggested a combination of fear and confusion), and we drove off to Orvieto feeling pretty fine. Once within its walls, Dvaid did some errands whilst Heather and I had cappuncini, used up our internet café cards and bought a plant for Vera. (The woman continually, unrelentingly takes lots of time to happily speak with us, not to mention gives us free bottles of wine and soda, when we visit her; we’ll never catch up on the gift front; she’s too good.) After a while we wound our way to Vera’s and had a lovely visit, incapable of escaping without having the wine we were trying to BUY from her hoisted upon us for no charge.

This entry—most of these later ones—grow more and more about a vacation than acting, theatre or The Third Life™. That’s one of the reasons we came here, I admit. As artists, we really don’t get “vacation time.” As Todd noted while he was here, so long as we get to do our work we generally don’t feel a need for vacation. What a lot of people outside of the effort of a Third Life® have trouble understanding is that we do work when we go out of town for a show, or take time for a tech week. The fact that we’re generally happier and better adjusted when we return just makes some people assume it was more like what sets them right, namely a couple of weeks out of the year to lie on a beach and sip margaritas, or some similar activity. As actors (and a director) our “vacations” coincide with our work, in part because that work is of necessity a third thing in our lives. It thrives most in these times we aren’t working to support our livelihood or focusing on a personal life. In other words, when we make time for it.

Not that I’m not grateful to be typing this on a sunny, vine-laced terrace in Europe, and not that it’s not luxurious and relaxing. I just wanted to express that observation to clear a little air.

So after dinner we headed to Pitigliano to see their production of Othello, or (as we shall henceforth refer to it):

La Strage del Teatro.

We had our warnings. Looking back, we had numerous cautions. And, I suppose, the worst of all possible outcomes would have been a show that sort of awkwardly straddled the fence between decent and sucky. Finally, to paraphrase Bernard in Black Books: “Enjoy. It’s dreadful, but it’s quite short.”

First of all, stupido Americani that we are, we arrived a half an hour before the time listed on the poster to have a gelato and take in that glorious Pitigliano sunset again. In so doing we witnessed the lead actor arrive, and one of the other, more punctual actors greet him at the door already in costume, said costume comprised of a lot of black gauze and satin. The doors didn’t open until the hour posted on the poster, and the show (if such a thing it may be called) didn’t begin until 10:00. Ah, we thought, let us remember this timing for when we plan a performance in Italy.

Imagine every parody, every farce, every pretentious off-off Broadway show, movie or skit you’ve seen, the subject of which is theatre or theatre life, roll them into one and make everyone speak Italian. You’ll approach what we witnessed. I have often thought it interesting, though etymologically difficult, how similar the words “tragedy” and “travesty” are. The idea has been made flesh. And black satin.

I’ve just conferred with my comrades, and there’s just no way to encapsulate all that was wrong with this show. Think of an aspect of theatre, and make it horribly, horribly wrong. David seemed to think that the director was someone who had seen a style of theatre in Rome or elsewhere Italian and decided that’s what he wanted to do, regardless of the show involved. I credit the director with less direction and more pretense and personal indulgence. Every character was dressed in black, gauze and satin, against a black backdrop. There was music during every interlude, of which there were dozens, and there was interpretive dance by non-dancers. Plus the acting was bad to the point of a approximating a slide show on what not to do on stage.

Redeeming qualities? Well, it was interesting to note—by way of this production and conversations with Andrea—that apparently not much Shakespeare is done in Italy. The language doesn’t translate well, and given the physical background of Italy’s theatre tradition, a language- or poetry-based theatre must seem fairly inaccessible to the general public. So what’s popular where Shakespeare is concerned (and he must be very concerned indeed), and was what we saw yester night, is to take the story and not the text itself. This is very interesting to me for two reasons. The first is that we would pretty much never think of doing this in the English-speaking countries unless the play was mere inspiration for an entirely different setting or conflict (West Side Story, for instance). The language is a major purpose of the plays for us, in other words. Secondly, transliterating Shakespeare strikes me as very similar—or perhaps a reverse-engineering—of what Shakespeare did to the commedia dell’arte plays he may have witnessed as a youth; plays such as may influenced A Comedy of Errors or All’s Well That Ends Well. Finally, for all the pretension of the director, the actors themselves were very earnest and modest in their efforts. This reminded us of Michael Green’s Coarse Acting plays, but it also reinforced for us that what we experienced was overall a positive experience, more full of good intention than an actual; disregard of or disrespect of us as an audience.

We drove home happily counting the Shakespearean clichés and regaling one another with our reinterpretations of favorite foibles. If the mark of a successful play is the continued effect it has on its audience, then this production of Othello was indeed successful.

Too successful, in its way.