The Holy Terror: An Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard II by Kevin Connell The “holy terror” is a king named Richard, seemingly trapped in adolescence. Perpetually doomed to act out like a child (rather than out of evilness or hatred), he is a sensitive soul, deeply affected by the death—when he was nine years old--of his father, Edward the Black Prince (b.1330 - d.1376). “Connell's adaptation, which adds text from a variety of sources to an abbreviation of Richard II, streamlines the story and themes of Shakespeare's original. . . . A bang-up job of good old-fashioned storytelling.”-- Martin Denton (NYTheatre.com)
Play E-Book includes 8 color photographs; ISBN: 978-0-9825828-0-0; Available through PayLoadz (link above) for $9.99--regularly $15.00
(Sophia Lear’s article appeared in the New Republic, 7/7.)
In London in the 1940s a man named Percy Allen, overwhelmed by grief at the death of his brother, sought out the renowned psychic of the day, Hester Dowden. Through Dowden’s primary connection to the dead—an ancient Athenian named Johannes—Allen spoke at length to his recently deceased brother. Astounded by Dowden’s occult talents, Allen decided that she could assist him professionally as well: Allen, president of the Shakespeare Fellowship—a group that believed the Earl of Oxford was the author of Shakespeare’s plays—returned to Dowden and asked her to summon the spirit of the Earl of Oxford, or Shakespeare, or Francis Bacon. Dowden—fortuitously enough the daughter of a Shakespeare scholar—managed to summon all three, and they confirmed that Oxford was indeed the man. Oxford was even generous enough to relay a few unpublished verses. Allen ecstatically published his discussions and findings in Talks With Elizabethans in 1947. This was not the first time Dowden had precipitated a book’s publication: Alfred Dodd’s The Immortal Master, in which the ghost of Francis Bacon assures Dodd of his own claim to Shakespeare’s oeuvre, was released in 1943.
(Feingold's article appeared 6/15 in the Village Voice.)
I love Shakespeare so much that I can never understand why people want to make a religion of him. When you love someone, deeply and persistently, you don't want to pretend your love is perfection and install him on the high altar of a shrine, far out of your reach. You want to be with your love every day, knowing him so intimately that even his little faults become part of his charm.
Author of the forthcoming FIFTH AVENUE, 5 A.M., Sam Wasson's BYE BYE LIFE: The Loves and Deaths of Bob Fosse, poised to be the definitive biography of the legendary choreographer whose legacy extends across the worlds of dance, theater, film, and television, with an off-stage life that was fueled by pills, drugs, and serial infidelity, and whose fingerprints on popular culture remain indelible, to George Hodgman at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in a pre-empt, by David Halpern at The Robbins Office (NA).
Simon Callow minds his language as he revels in a study of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays
If there is any one aspect of Shakespeare's work that singles him out from every other great writer, it is the astounding comprehensiveness of his treatment of love and sex. Not only do those great themes figure prominently in virtually every play he wrote, he explores, with detailed vividness, a range of sexual and amatory experience that leaves Masters and Johnson looking pretty skimpy. From the most exalted Petrarchan effusions to the basest bodily function, he covers the waterfront.
Every week the staff of Manhattan’s renowned Drama Book Shop undertakes the formidable challenge of helping actors find the best monologues for auditions and classes, answering hundreds of questions regarding the latest—and classic—plays from the U.S. and around the world; and recommending theatre craft titles--from lighting design to beating the pavement--which give best value. They even have a working theatre in their basement!
Here they are on Stage Voices, picking the best of published work to keep us up to date and aware of the little known---the next best thing to actually being in the shop, listening to their wise counsel and sage advice.
DRAMA BOOK SHOP WEEKLY PICK:
FUBAR by Karl Gajdusek
Samuel French, 2010 Acting Edition: $9.95 (Please call to order)
F*cked Up Beyond All Recognition. An apt expression for the action of this play, even if the title is awkwardly placed into the dialogue.
When choosing my play of the week I had three or four possibilities in mind. I chose FUBAR because it seemed the most truthful; not that I can necessarily relate to these characters, but when analyzed against the backdrop of my older friends, who are in their mid-thirties, the play seemed to be an accurate portrayal of a generation.
Mary and David have moved to her recently deceased mother’s home in San Francisco. When Mary was a child, the domestic violence between her mother and father scarred Mary to the point that she can't even trust her own relationship with David. The thing that she can't get around is how her mother forgave her father, and lived a happy and fulfilled life after his death.
She refuses to unpack the boxes because with them comes the pain of reconciliation. David meanwhile meets up with his old friend Richard, an upper middle class white collar drug dealer, and Richard’s wife Sylvia, a free spirit, wannabe-esoteric sage-medium-realist. David takes up recreational drugs as a way to escape his problems with Mary, and his desire to, every once and a while, pop her one.
After Mary is beaten up by a mugger, she starts going to the gym to learn how to fight, while David plays his old high school games and gets involved with Richards wife.
FUBAR takes the Gen X crowd and shows the quiet desperation behind a solitary life, but elevates it beyond the traditional kitchen sink drama. Or maybe the kitchen sink drama has moved on and developed into the more contemporary hour long television dramedy of today, with a little humor here, a little sex there, some drugs and some domestic sparring.
Regardless, it's a good tight script, with lots for an actor to draw from.
Cast: 3M/2W, late 20s - mid 30s
Scenes/Monologues: Several good sized monologues for both M & W, great scenes for 2 and 3 people
What's up with New York theatre? And does issue-based drama ever really work? In two exclusive extracts from his new book, David Mamet has some answers
Game does not disappear because of over-hunting, but because of destruction of habitat. It takes 100 square miles to support a grizzly bear and hundreds of acres to support a herd of deer. In the theatre, the habitat in which the artist must flourish is the audience.
In 1967, when I was at acting school in New York, there were 72 new Broadway plays produced. In 2009, there were 43, of which half were revivals. Why the diminution? The habitat has disappeared – the audience, which is to say, the middle class, is gone.
Every week the staff of Manhattan’s renowned Drama Book Shop undertakes the formidable challenge of helping actors find the best monologues for auditions and classes, answering hundreds of questions regarding the latest—and classic—plays from the U.S. and around the world; and recommending theatre craft titles--from lighting design to beating the pavement--which give best value. They even have a working theatre in their basement!
Here they are on Stage Voices, picking the best of published work to keep us up to date and aware of the little known---the next best thing to actually being in the shop, listening to their wise counsel and sage advice.
You don't need to know much about the astrological phenomenon of Saturn “returning” to appreciate the beauty of this play. The title serves simply as a means of looking at a man at three pivotal points in his life--every Saturn Return. (It takes Saturn roughly 30 years to orbit the sun; in astrology, this phenomenon is called a Saturn Return. It is believed that at this time you will get a major dose of karma.)
But Saturn Returns by Noah Haidle doesn't deal with karma as much as it deals with Gustin's relationships to the women in his life and his inability to change. The play is nostalgic without being sentimental. One empathizes with Gustin as he continues to make the same mistakes and refuses to let go. In Gustin, we see a little of ourselves. The play continually asks, " if only...?"
What stayed with me while reading Saturn Returns was how beautifully constructed it was. I grew to care for each person (and each stage of Gustin’s life) with such intensity. There was never a moment when the play was not vivid and fully imagined in my mind. But the real treat for me was that after going down this road and becoming emotionally invested in the characters, Haidle delivered a stunning ending. There is nothing worse than a play with a lackluster finish. I often feel that the playwright just didn't know how to wrap things up, put on a pretty tied-up bow, or simply stopped writing altogether. With an ending that could be seen as sentimental to some, Saturn Returns offers the audience solace and closure. It allows you to exhale and appreciate the story as a whole.
Saturn Returns seemed to come and go quickly when produced at Lincoln Center in 2008. Perhaps because it took a year-and-a-half to be published, this play seems to have fallen off the radar. It is a perfect play for the Regional Market. With its small cast, unit set, and intimate setting, it would be a marvelous addition to any theatre company's season.
Cast: 3M, 1W Wonderful scenes for a man and a woman.
(Dave Itzkoff's article appeared in the New York Times, March 30.)
A Touch for Funny Bones and Earlobes
MONTECITO, Calif. — “I’ll buzz you in, Dear,” a bright, familiar voice said through an intercom outside a Spanish-style ranch home here. A gate opened, and at the end of a circular drive, crowded inside a doorway to avoid an unusual steady California rain, stood the oblivious Starlett O’Hara, the vainglorious Nora Desmond, the tempestuous Eunice Higgins and the one woman who embodied them all, Carol Burnett.
(The
following selection is based on an essay on O’Brien from The Daughters of Maeve
by Gina Sigillito—available from Citadel Press, Amazon link below.)
Exclusive
EDNA
O’BRIEN
Writer,
Playwright
1932-
“When anyone asks me
about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and
misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”—Edna O’Brien
Perhaps
more than any other female writer in modern literature, Edna O’Brien has laid
bare the dichotomy of the Irish character. With her fierce sensuality, deft,
supple prose and lyrical voice, she has explored sex, feminism, love, and the
female heart more adeptly than any author of her generation. Ironically,
although she reminds of Ireland’s finest writers, she also remains its most
tortured. At the age of twenty-eight, she published the Country Girls Trilogy, the novel that would introduce two girls
looking for romance and adventure in Dublin. While it took the world by storm,
it was banned in Edna’s own country for its “shocking” depiction of female
sexuality. Like her literary hero James Joyce, Edna would be shunned by her own
countrymen and be forced to leave Ireland to free her own voice. As she
explains about her fellow writer, “ James Joyce lived all his life away and
wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland
bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have. I don't
rule out living some of the time in Ireland, but it would be in a remote place,
where I would have silence and privacy. It's important when writing to feel
free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are answerable, you're
throttled. You can't do it.”
Edna
O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare on December 15, 1932 in the West
of Ireland. It was a strict upbringing that would influence some of her
greatest short stories. Although little is known about her parents, she often
depicts a strict, somewhat joyless childhood in her works. Later, in her
novels, A Country Girls Trilogy and
short story collection, A Fanatic Heart,
she recalls a tyrannical, alcoholic father and a kind, but passive mother.In later interviews, she described her father’s
drinking binges, which would last two or three days, and his crushing
depressions that often frightened her as a child. She has often commented that
her parents were opposed to any kind of literature. It was an opinion that
would influence the rest of her work. As she recalls, “In a country so
dedicated to the banning of books, it is amazing and maybe relevant that
literature is still revered.”
Nevertheless,
Edna was a gifted student and won a scholarship to the Convent of Mercy in
Loughrea. She then moved to Dublin to escape the stifling countryside where she
worked in a pharmacy, studied at the Pharmaceutical College at night, and lived
with her best friend. As she recalls, “Dublin was where I veered towards and
eventually I got there, arriving by train, the suitcase reinforced with twine,
the head full of fancy; concerning my destiny as being that of a heroine
who, upon being brought from Munster, faded into the city, for consumption has
no pity for blue eyes and brown hair.”During her time in Dublin, she fell in love with the works of James
Joyce and Shakespeare and began writing pieces of her own that were published
in the Irish Press. It is this time
in Dublin that would become the inspiration for what many consider to be
her greatest work, The Country Girls
Trilogy.
A
brilliant coming-of-age novel, Country
Girls traces the life-long friendship of Baba Brennan and Cait Brady, two
convent girls seeking adventure, love, and excitement in Dublin. In the novel,
Cait escapes her repressive, backward town in the West of Ireland and works in
a chemist shop. She also meets and falls in love with a married man named
Eugene Galliard, a filmmaker and writer of Czech descent. By some coincidence,
Edna met and married the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler in 1954 in a
“metamorphosis from child to bride,” who must have greatly inspired the
character of Eugene in the novel.Her
devoutly Catholic parents were vehemently opposed to her marriage to Gebler,
who was also Jewish. The two had a fraught relationship, and Gebler was jealous
of his wife’s growing renown as a writer.The couple had two sons and divorced ten years later in 1964.
In
1960, Edna published The Country Girls
Trilogy, which was the first novel written by a female Irish author to
depict women’s sexuality openly and honestly. As she recalls, “"The novel
is autobiographical insofar as I was born and bred in the west of Ireland,
educated at a convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled with a sense
of outrage."Because of its
frankness, it was banned in Ireland. And just like her idol, James Joyce she
felt she had to leave her native country to freely express her voice as a
writer. And like him, she wrote of nothing else. During this time, Edna would also explore her
passion for the theater with her first play, A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers. As Grace Eckley remarks in her
biography, Edna O’Brien, “reviewers’
remarks on its performance in London also indicate the audience was not yet
ready for the unpalatable feminine reality Miss O’Brien depicted.”
In
1971, Edna returned to the Ireland of her childhood in A Pagan Place, her homage to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus,
Edna’s protagonist must deal with her burgeoning sexuality, her artistic drive,
and the oppressive Catholicism that surrounds her, as seen in this passage.
You tried to whistle. Only men should
whistle .The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women
crossed their legs. It intrigues you thinking of the Blessed Virgin having to
blush so frequently. The bird that had the most lifelike whistle was the
curlew.
The
novel echoes Joyce’s stream of consciousness style and sense of
disillusionment, and remains one of Edna’s darkest and most poignant works. In 1976,
she published Mother Ireland, a sensual and unrelenting memoir of her childhood
in Ireland in which she writes, “To be on an island makes you realize that it's going to be harder to escape and that it will involve another birth, a
further breach of waters.” In 1984, Edna wrote A
Fanatic Heart, a short story collection that revisited her life in the
convent. In it we see all the brutality, oppression, and sometimes joy that she
experienced. The short story “The Doll’ depicts the cruelty of the nuns and tells
the story of one girl who is tortured by the sister who teaches her class. In
“Sister Imelda” she recalls her love for a young nun who has just entered the
convent. She also discloses some of the more bizarre aspects of convent life,
where baths were considered “immoral” and the girls had to undress under their
nightgowns in preservation of their modesty.
Throughout
the 80s and 90s, Edna continued to pen award winning stories and plays about her
native land. As she writes in her short story A Scandalous Woman, “I have always thought that ours was indeed a
land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial
women.” She returned to her passion for
the theater and wrote and produced, Virginia,
in 1981, which explored the letters of Virginia Woolf and starred the
formidable Maggie Smith. Premiering at the Public Theater in New York, the play
was lauded for its portrayal of Virginia Woolf as more than just a feminist
icon. O’Brien chose to explore Virginia’s romantic life and her eternal quest
for love and her feelings of isolation and abandonment that stemmed from her
fraught relationship with her father.It
was the perfect topic for Edna, whose own relationship with her father would
color so much of her own work. It was also during this foray into theater they
she encountered some of the challenges that plague female playwrights. “The problem is getting a play on.
It's much harder for a woman," she says. "I'm all for young writers
but I'm also for writers who don't have to be young. What should be judged is
the merit of the work, not whether it's by a black, white, old, young, gay,
androgynous or whatever writer. The rigidity by which things are judged in our
cultural world irks me very much. I would write a political play, I would write
about Darfur if I knew Darfur, but I don't."
Judi Dench's memoir AND FURTHERMORE, covering her life, both on-stage and off, in a book that takes the measure of both her astonishing career and her private life, to Michael Flamini at St. Martin's, for publication in October 2010, by Susan Howe at Orion (NA).
SHAKESPEARE IS SHAKESPEARE
(Sophia Lear’s article appeared in the New Republic, 7/7.)
In London in the 1940s a man named Percy Allen, overwhelmed by grief at the death of his brother, sought out the renowned psychic of the day, Hester Dowden. Through Dowden’s primary connection to the dead—an ancient Athenian named Johannes—Allen spoke at length to his recently deceased brother. Astounded by Dowden’s occult talents, Allen decided that she could assist him professionally as well: Allen, president of the Shakespeare Fellowship—a group that believed the Earl of Oxford was the author of Shakespeare’s plays—returned to Dowden and asked her to summon the spirit of the Earl of Oxford, or Shakespeare, or Francis Bacon. Dowden—fortuitously enough the daughter of a Shakespeare scholar—managed to summon all three, and they confirmed that Oxford was indeed the man. Oxford was even generous enough to relay a few unpublished verses. Allen ecstatically published his discussions and findings in Talks With Elizabethans in 1947. This was not the first time Dowden had precipitated a book’s publication: Alfred Dodd’s The Immortal Master, in which the ghost of Francis Bacon assures Dodd of his own claim to Shakespeare’s oeuvre, was released in 1943.
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