377 days - Blog #29 to cut or not to cut or the precious of Shakespeare

Theater is a funny sort of drug.  All I did was box office for Aladdin… and yet I still feel that need to busy myself with a project now that this one is complete.

Actually, it’s been a while since I have been so compelled.  Mayhap that is because this project was peripheral and did not tax my life and schedule so completely I welcomed the vacancy the set strike leaves behind.  But… I am thirsty for more right now and find myself ready to take on a large project.

I thought I should probably not divulge the details I have decided to impart in this blog.  But if it doesn’t go my way and I don’t get the thing I wish for… well, I can use that as a lesson of graciousness in my writing.  (So remind me of that, dear reader, in a couple months if that be the turnabout.)

Anyway, after mulling over several scripts and that colorful spreadsheet of box office numbers, I have resolved to submit a Christmas play.  Christmas, Jessie style.  

The seed was planted long before I tread back into the Barre Players waters.  Indeed, I wouldn’t doubt that seed prompted my decision to go back.  But I started this year of supper club, where the theme of themes has been Shakespeare, with Twelfth Night.  To get my head around the play again (after, cough cough nearly twenty years since performing in it), I found many a youtube clip of the play.  The best were teasers for the Broadway show I did not get myself to NYC to view in person… but if things go well in the next four months, I will pay the shipping from the UK for the Globe version.

Having listened to a variety of interpretations, I thought… okay… yeah, I could go back to this play.  Moreover, I could live with it for the better part of a year.  Or more.  Because part of that living starts now.

I have determined my theme.  I have determined a premise or two or three.  I have also determined this show needs to be cut to a two-ish hour time.  That’s easy.  Not.

So I’ve created a word document and started employing my dexterity of select, delete.  It’s gratifying and immediately doubtful.  

I’ve done this before.  Not this play.  Shakespeare.  Directing.  In fact, the last play I directed was Shakespeare… and therein provokes the breath of hesitation.

People are crazy about Shakespeare.  It is a drug.  No, a religion.  I mean, have you noticed my syntax in this blog?  It just permeates the brain…and something about it catches hold and, wow, it’s mine.  Me.  But the stuff is hundreds of years old.  Hundreds.  Think of all the actors and directors in that timespan.  Or… all the English majors and professors and scholars and critics.  And.  Every.  Single.  One.  Of. Them.  thinks they know/feel/understand/get/believe/KNOW Shakespeare better than all the rest.  And everyone else is… sort of right, maybe… well no, absolutely not… okay, but really, I’m the one who knows, KNOWS, KNOWS better than everyone else.  Because, Shakespeare speaks to me.  Like God. 

I have writ here once or twice how Shakespeare was the thing that unraveled the knitting of my religious beliefs.  At some point when I was 18 or 19, I realized that if people couldn’t resolve what the text of Hamlet meant with any definitive clarity, how could they be so settled and resolved on the Bible?  No.  Let me rephrase that.  That if people could contort the meaning of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night to suit their own inclinations (and that was a text half as old as the New Testament), what was to stop them from doing that with a bunch of scripture?

I’m not really writing to stir up trouble about Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John.   Just Will.  Or Edward (because I’m an imp and feel like whacking that hornet’s nest).

Actually, no.  I’m not looking for argument.  Which is why I’ve come to this window to write this blog and avoid the editing in the other window.  Because I want to find a script that will allow an actor or audience member to leave their Stratfordian/Oxfordian/iambic pentameter breath at the end of the line/Elizabethan purist/interpretive/dated/ it’s been done to death/Shakespeare is boring baggage at the door.

I’ve listened to it at least twenty times in the last three weeks.  It still makes me cry when Viola/Cesario is reunited with Sebastian.  When the fool comes solely to the stage at the end and says the play is done.  I want to do this play.  I want to find a set of actors with whom I can discover new meaning to this centuries’ old text.

Old.  But not precious.