Mari Ness - At the Shakespeare-by-the-Sea play last night:

Channeling Pogue can be dangerous. I sincerely hope that you have the proper leather trappings.

Or at least some very good massage oil or lotion for later.

Apparently much of our audience was under the impression that Romeo and Juliet was nice, friendly, kiddy stuff. I would have thought the women being led out in chains in the first scene would have told them otherwise, but apparently, even that combined with the title was not enough of a clue.

I did, though, get a mental image of a large purple dinosaur, sporting chains, declaiming the Queen Mab speech, and a second image of the same purple dinosaur waving a gun around and killing Paris for no apparent reason except to cheer the hearts of small children, and having offended the ghost of Shakespeare enough for one day, stopped thinking of these images.

(By the way, no matter how many times I see this play, I can't help asking myself, Shakespeare, dude! Why'dya kill Paris? Don't you have ENOUGH bodies littering the stage already at this point? But I suppose that half of the fun of Elizabethan tragedy is that you can never really have enough bodies and pointless deaths.)

But it's so freaking distracting in that play. You know, in Hamlet, when various people flop over dead, it's just, well, inevitable karma, except for the ones that have the kindness to die offstage (Rosencrantz and his cross-dressing sidekick.) The bodies just build and build and build, and then the final guy comes in and says, "You know, if I'd known I could have killed you off THAT way, I wouldn't have bothered with the whole raising taxes so I could get an army to invade Denmark and all that that. This works.

But in Romeo and Juliet , you know, you've had your violence. You've had your final death scenes. Tybalt's blood is all over the stage, and what you really want to do now is see is Juliet is really so freaking stupid that she won't bother even ONCE to suggest, "Hey, you know, maybe Romeo just took a sleeping potion so he'd be able to wake up with me 'cause after all two hours ago everybody thought I was dead," and if she is really going to have the unearthly luck to just happen to know how to slice her throat and wrists correctly and not have one of those totally messed up suicides, and if the director is going to leave in those weird bits in the play where the watchmen say, "Hey, let's arrest this Balthasar dude," and NOT ONE PERSON suggests that just maybe Balthasar had his own little agenda going here, 'cause what was up with that whole mixed up message thing, and if the director is going to leave in that weird bit where the priest says, cheerfully, "Well, you know, I married these two secretly without their parents' permission knowing damn well they were both minors, and then the only bright idea I had was to drop a freaking SLEEPING potion on Jules here, and to tip so damn badly that I couldn't get a quick message through thus spoiling the entire point," and the city manager dude says, "Look, priest, we know you're a holy man," which has to be the most inexplicable line in Shakespeare, bar none, and while you're waiting for all of this, the whole Paris death bit just seems, you know, superfluous.

(One thing that I did really like about this production -- instead of doing the usual jolly Friar Lawrence thing, they did a dark and mysterious Friar Lawrence thing, which still didn't help out the plot flaws much but did allow the friar to show off his chest a lot.)

Yeah -- what kind of a priest just happens to have that much poison in hand, and why?

And what is it with all of these deceptive priests in Shakespeare saying that women should pretend to be dead, anyway? It's like the great Shakespearean solution to women: Pretend to be Dead, And All Will Be Well if you're in a Comedy, and Not So Well if You're Not.

Maybe he was trying to get back at the Dark Lady for not letting him fully indulge his bisexuality with the extraordinary handsome Young Man.

(To completely inaccurately summarize the sonnet sequences mentioned below)

Well, I've always thought that Iago's main problem was that he wanted to get Othello and Desdemona together with him in a nice threesome, but I must admit that's not a reading with a lot of textual support.

Titus Andronicus has suggestions of orgies, of course. Those Roman dudes.

Love's Labour Lost has all of the four girls/four guys thing going on, and I'd tell you more about this if I could remember anything about that particular play, despite the fact that I remember reading it.

And then we have all that fun stuff out in the woods with As You Like It.

But the orgy winner has to go to Midsummer's Night Dream. I mean, do you actually expect me to believe that those four young folks discovered their various mistaken lusts for each other in the evening and then just happened to wake up next to each other in the morning all pure and undefiled and such? In a play with bestiality, no less?

Hey, you can always butt in whenever.

Based on some of the sonnets, I'm not really sure just how suppressed Shakespeare was.

As far as we know, anyway, only men were legally allowed to work on the stage in Shakespeare's time, so usually the female parts were taken by young boys. This is why 1) Shakespeare rarely has more than 3 or 4 female parts in any one play, and usually only one major female role and 2) so many of those females end up pretending to be men -- it's a lot more convincing for a young boy to pretend to be a woman pretending to be a man than to just pretend to be a woman. Plus it makes some of the dirty jokes that much funnier.

Actually a more dangerous sign of the future of society was that Adrian Empire was also out there, teaching the history of the Renaissance and doing swordplay demonstrations.

For numerous reasons I felt it was safer not to watch.

They did provide a sword-swallower, though.