Minicon Schedule

I will be doing a reading at Minicon from 5:30 to 6:30 on Saturday evening, in Atrium 2.

I'm going to read some material that was cut from Going North, because I can.

My voice doesn't hold out very well for an entire hour, so I'll probably read for a little over half an hour, take any questions or sign any books people want to offer up, and then let you have a little more time between the end of my reading and the beginning of Emma Bull's at 7:30 than you would if I persisted until 6:30.

Pamela

Minicon Schedule

I will be doing a reading at Minicon from 5:30 to 6:30 on Saturday evening, in Atrium 2.

I'm going to read some material that was cut from Going North, because I can.

My voice doesn't hold out very well for an entire hour, so I'll probably read for a little over half an hour, take any questions or sign any books people want to offer up, and then let you have a little more time between the end of my reading and the beginning of Emma Bull's at 7:30 than you would if I persisted until 6:30.

Pamela

Multifarious weekend, continued (mostly The Tempest)

Once we were up on Saturday we put in several hours cleaning Eric's place. He has very little time to do it, and the sink had backed up other people's washing water, redolent of bacon grease though at least of nothing worse, the previous Tuesday, so things were in great need of attention. Eventually we got very hungry, walked over to the Athens Cafe, and had an abundant late lunch. Eric stated definitely that he would not want any dinner before we went to hear the BFA Actors perform The Tempest, and I said that I probably wouldn't but would be hungry after. He suggested that we just stop at the Hard Times after the play. They're open 22 hours a day, a very useful schedule in a vegetarian restaurant.

We got busses to my house and arrived with maybe an hour to spare. David was in the media room, seeing if it would be possible to process photos on his laptop using the large flatscreen TV in there. The process was far too slow to satisfy him, but a side effect of his efforts was that we got a wonderful slide show of zoo photos from guppiecat's expedition a week or two ago.

We took Lydy's car and went back to Rarig Center. The previous evening Eric had remarked that when he was attending the U of M, he had noticed how the robins sang in the trees outside Rarig. They were still doing it both times we came to see plays.

The stage was bare when we went in. We read our programs, and saw that Prospero was Prospera, possibly taking a leaf from the Helen Mirren movie, which I haven't seen yet. Ariel was also played by a woman, and Ferdinand's parent became Alonza.

Prospera was a very imposing young woman, quite terrifying at times. She began the play by invoking the four elements, which appeared as various actors with long poles, sweeping the stage to make up the sounds of the storm. Somebody also did thunder from offstage. When Prospera's calling up of the storm was done, the people with the poles lined them up into the shape of a boat, with themselves inside, and used them to distort the shape of the boat and hurl it about in the storm's violence. It was a really impressive piece of stagecraft. All of the actors were barefoot, in this scene and throughout.

The scene where Prospera told Miranda about her origins was one of the best I've seen. Some of the lines lend themselves to unintentional comedy, but the actors avoided this. I'd wondered if Prospera's being a woman would change the dynamic between her and her daughter, and I thought it did, mostly because of my cultural baggage. I don't suppose it's much nicer to have an autocratic and domineering mother than to have a father like that, but it seemed more like a personal and perhaps necessary idiosyncracy of Prospera's than like a custom with a huge social weight behind it. When I see Prospero dealing with Miranda, I always think of Shylock, Lear, old Capulet, Gloucester, and other Shakespearean fathers. But here she was only herself. I forgot to ask Eric about this aspect of things, so I may just have had an idiosyncratic reaction.

Caliban was played by a man, wearing shorts and some daubs of mud and getting around primarily on all fours. His hair was cut very short on the sides but formed a crest along the top, vaguely like a sea monster or perhaps some kind of bird. He was both sympathetic and horrifying, and showed again the authoritarian nature of Prospera. The actor had very good comic timing.

Stephano and Trinculo doubled Sebastian and Antonio, which made for some very swift costume changes. The scene where Trinculo creeps under Caliban's cloak to escape the storm, and Stephano comes across the composite monster, was very cleverly and athletically done and also played very, very broadly; Eric thought too broadly, though there is certain scope for fart jokes in the text. It's possible that Trinculo in particular was played antically to better distinguish him from Antonio. Stephano/Sebastian was a lovely heavyset fellow who could be upright, noble, and arrogant, or slouchy, sloppy, and crude, with body language alone; the costume change was hardly necessary. Trinculo had a good if exaggerated line in body language as well, a nervous, jerky, easily terrified person in bright pink tights and a large white shirt, but the transition was not quite as smooth.

Ariel was extremely good; I could understand everything she said from the start rather than having to feel my way back into Elizabethan language through the individual speaking style of the other actors. She had no wings, but moved like a butterfly or some other frail wild thing. Since she and Prospera were both women, I didn't see much change in their relationship from that of the play. There was a visceral and appalling scene wherein Prospera, rather than just reminding Ariel of her imprisonment in the cloven pine, actually recreated it in Ariel's mind, apparently causing as much pain as the imprisonment did. Ariel also had a very good singing voice.

I recall three other outstanding scenes involving Ariel. First was the one in which Prospera has given her blessing to Ferdinant and Miranda. Those two were kissing passionately and working up to more intimate actions, Prospera was trying to give Ariel instructions while intermittenly yelling at Ferdinand and Miranda to cut it out, and Ariel kept peering around her to see what Ferdinand and Miranda were up to. Second, and the most impressive, was when Ariel reported to Prospera how the King and his followers are faring in the prison Prospera has cast them into. Ariel's intonation on the word "prisoners" was very compelling. I had forgotten that Ariel acts as Prospero's conscience in that scene. In this production, that scene and Ariel's -- not exactly emphasis, it was more subtle than that -- on the word "prisoners" collected together the ways in which everyone in the play is a prisoner, and foreshadowed Prospera's last speech, in which she asked the audience to set her free. The third memorable scene was when Prospera, having dealt with her sister and her followers, has Ariel bring in Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. After Prospera says of Caliban, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine," and while the others are talking and marvelling, Ariel is moving her hands around the space Caliban occupies. It looked to me as if she was humanizing him, but she might have been healing him. Afterwards he says, "What a thrice-double ass was I, to take this drunkard for a god, and worship this dull fool!"

Prospera was an autocratic, sometimes cruel, forbidding figure for much of the play, and I don't usually cry during The Tempest, but her final scene, when she stands alone, without staff, robe, or book, and speaks the epilog, ending, "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free," I wished I had remembered to bring some Kleenex.

There were some interesting things done with singing and drumming that I hope Eric will remind me of.

In a slight anticlimax, we went to the Hard Times, which was very noisy indeed, and I found myself informing Eric, when he said that I looked unhappy, that it was TOO MUCH WORK to eat my sandwich. It turned out I was starting a migraine, but at least it had the grace to wait til after the play, and was gone by the next morning.

Pamela

Multifarious weekend, continued (mostly The Tempest)

Once we were up on Saturday we put in several hours cleaning Eric's place. He has very little time to do it, and the sink had backed up other people's washing water, redolent of bacon grease though at least of nothing worse, the previous Tuesday, so things were in great need of attention. Eventually we got very hungry, walked over to the Athens Cafe, and had an abundant late lunch. Eric stated definitely that he would not want any dinner before we went to hear the BFA Actors perform The Tempest, and I said that I probably wouldn't but would be hungry after. He suggested that we just stop at the Hard Times after the play. They're open 22 hours a day, a very useful schedule in a vegetarian restaurant.

We got busses to my house and arrived with maybe an hour to spare. David was in the media room, seeing if it would be possible to process photos on his laptop using the large flatscreen TV in there. The process was far too slow to satisfy him, but a side effect of his efforts was that we got a wonderful slide show of zoo photos from guppiecat's expedition a week or two ago.

We took Lydy's car and went back to Rarig Center. The previous evening Eric had remarked that when he was attending the U of M, he had noticed how the robins sang in the trees outside Rarig. They were still doing it both times we came to see plays.

The stage was bare when we went in. We read our programs, and saw that Prospero was Prospera, possibly taking a leaf from the Helen Mirren movie, which I haven't seen yet. Ariel was also played by a woman, and Ferdinand's parent became Alonza.

Prospera was a very imposing young woman, quite terrifying at times. She began the play by invoking the four elements, which appeared as various actors with long poles, sweeping the stage to make up the sounds of the storm. Somebody also did thunder from offstage. When Prospera's calling up of the storm was done, the people with the poles lined them up into the shape of a boat, with themselves inside, and used them to distort the shape of the boat and hurl it about in the storm's violence. It was a really impressive piece of stagecraft. All of the actors were barefoot, in this scene and throughout.

The scene where Prospera told Miranda about her origins was one of the best I've seen. Some of the lines lend themselves to unintentional comedy, but the actors avoided this. I'd wondered if Prospera's being a woman would change the dynamic between her and her daughter, and I thought it did, mostly because of my cultural baggage. I don't suppose it's much nicer to have an autocratic and domineering mother than to have a father like that, but it seemed more like a personal and perhaps necessary idiosyncracy of Prospera's than like a custom with a huge social weight behind it. When I see Prospero dealing with Miranda, I always think of Shylock, Lear, old Capulet, Gloucester, and other Shakespearean fathers. But here she was only herself. I forgot to ask Eric about this aspect of things, so I may just have had an idiosyncratic reaction.

Caliban was played by a man, wearing shorts and some daubs of mud and getting around primarily on all fours. His hair was cut very short on the sides but formed a crest along the top, vaguely like a sea monster or perhaps some kind of bird. He was both sympathetic and horrifying, and showed again the authoritarian nature of Prospera. The actor had very good comic timing.

Stephano and Trinculo doubled Sebastian and Antonio, which made for some very swift costume changes. The scene where Trinculo creeps under Caliban's cloak to escape the storm, and Stephano comes across the composite monster, was very cleverly and athletically done and also played very, very broadly; Eric thought too broadly, though there is certain scope for fart jokes in the text. It's possible that Trinculo in particular was played antically to better distinguish him from Antonio. Stephano/Sebastian was a lovely heavyset fellow who could be upright, noble, and arrogant, or slouchy, sloppy, and crude, with body language alone; the costume change was hardly necessary. Trinculo had a good if exaggerated line in body language as well, a nervous, jerky, easily terrified person in bright pink tights and a large white shirt, but the transition was not quite as smooth.

Ariel was extremely good; I could understand everything she said from the start rather than having to feel my way back into Elizabethan language through the individual speaking style of the other actors. She had no wings, but moved like a butterfly or some other frail wild thing. Since she and Prospera were both women, I didn't see much change in their relationship from that of the play. There was a visceral and appalling scene wherein Prospera, rather than just reminding Ariel of her imprisonment in the cloven pine, actually recreated it in Ariel's mind, apparently causing as much pain as the imprisonment did. Ariel also had a very good singing voice.

I recall three other outstanding scenes involving Ariel. First was the one in which Prospera has given her blessing to Ferdinant and Miranda. Those two were kissing passionately and working up to more intimate actions, Prospera was trying to give Ariel instructions while intermittenly yelling at Ferdinand and Miranda to cut it out, and Ariel kept peering around her to see what Ferdinand and Miranda were up to. Second, and the most impressive, was when Ariel reported to Prospera how the King and his followers are faring in the prison Prospera has cast them into. Ariel's intonation on the word "prisoners" was very compelling. I had forgotten that Ariel acts as Prospero's conscience in that scene. In this production, that scene and Ariel's -- not exactly emphasis, it was more subtle than that -- on the word "prisoners" collected together the ways in which everyone in the play is a prisoner, and foreshadowed Prospera's last speech, in which she asked the audience to set her free. The third memorable scene was when Prospera, having dealt with her sister and her followers, has Ariel bring in Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. After Prospera says of Caliban, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine," and while the others are talking and marvelling, Ariel is moving her hands around the space Caliban occupies. It looked to me as if she was humanizing him, but she might have been healing him. Afterwards he says, "What a thrice-double ass was I, to take this drunkard for a god, and worship this dull fool!"

Prospera was an autocratic, sometimes cruel, forbidding figure for much of the play, and I don't usually cry during The Tempest, but her final scene, when she stands alone, without staff, robe, or book, and speaks the epilog, ending, "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free," I wished I had remembered to bring some Kleenex.

There were some interesting things done with singing and drumming that I hope Eric will remind me of.

In a slight anticlimax, we went to the Hard Times, which was very noisy indeed, and I found myself informing Eric, when he said that I looked unhappy, that it was TOO MUCH WORK to eat my sandwich. It turned out I was starting a migraine, but at least it had the grace to wait til after the play, and was gone by the next morning.

Pamela