A Certain Slant of Light

I posted a while back that Julius Caesar was “my first and oldest Shakespearian love,” which in one sense in true, but in another sense is tragic A Comedy of Errors erasure.

When I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!

So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.

That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.

(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)

Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.

Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”

All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.

Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.

In high school, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in British Lit. In fact, we acted part of it out, which was delightful fun. Then Mr. Jeffries let us watch the Diana Riggs film, in which Diana Riggs probably played a side role of some kind, but at the time I was deep in my Avengers phase (John Steed & Emma Peel, not the Marvel Avengers) so it was of course Diana Riggs who caught my attention.

And in 2023, I saw a delightful ballet version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And in between… surely I’ve seen other versions over the years? I feel like I’ve seen it lots of times! I’m very familiar with the story! But I’m coming up empty on other productions.

Maybe it feels so familiar because A Midsummer Night’s Dream often shows up in children’s books, most notably Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows, where Nat plays Puck.

Anyway. The university theater department put on a production, and although college theater can be a bit of a crapshoot, I can’t turn down reasonably priced Shakespeare.

And it was fantastic! I went with my parents (the tickets were my dad’s birthday present) and we all laughed so hard. The conceit was that the play was taking place at a music festival, and the rude mechanicals were the backstage workers, so the play started with them wandering around the theater pretending to make last minute adjustments: “Does it look like that light is going to fall again?” “No, it couldn’t possibly fall a third time.”

The rude mechanicals may have been my favorite part of the show, particularly Bottom who is such a recognizable type as an extroverted clueless dude who seems vaguely stoned but is probably just Like That as a person. The rude mechanicals are putting on a play and Bottom, who has been cast as Pyramus, excitedly offers to play every single part. Meanwhile, Flute shudders to hear he’s been cast opposite Bottom as Thisbe. (Flute was played by a girl who is playing a man who is playing a girl, and as Thisbe she had the highest, twitteriest possible falsetto. I couldn’t exactly understand what she was saying but it was so funny it didn’t matter.)

But how can I say that the rude mechanicals were my favorite when the fairies were also so delightful? Oberon was played by a girl dressed like Xena, Warrior Princess, with gigantic platform stompy boots. Puck was madly in love with her, and Oberon flirted back because that’s just what Oberon does. At one point they’re literally eating popcorn as they watch the four lovers quarrel.

(And I can’t sleep on the four lovers, either! I particularly loved Helena, in hopeless love with Demetrius and taking a big swig from the wine bottle about it, but Demetrius and Lysander were also lots of fun, strutting and preening once Puck’s love-in-idleness has made them both madly in love with Helena. I had a little trouble understanding Hermia but she had the spirit.)

But, returning to the fairies, although Oberon flirts with Puck, at the end of the day she has eyes only for Titania (and Puck gazes after Oberon wistfully as Oberon goes back to her wife). And Titania’s four fairies were so much fun. Special shout-out to Cobweb, the goth fairy, who is so done with everything but ESPECIALLY so done with feeding grapes to the donkey-headed Bottom.

The program noted that, rather than having a traditional director, this play had been a collaboration between all the performers. You could especially see this in the interplay between the fairies and the rude mechanicals, both of whom have a web of relationships with each other. For instance, when Bottom returns to the rude mechanicals with his own head again, he’s hugging and fist-bumping everyone, and then he’s going in for a hug with Flute - and at the last moment they’re both like, nope, we don’t actually like each other, glad you’ve got your head back bro but not gonna hug you.

They played on a basically bare stage: a moon hanging in the background, a platform surrounded with sticks (this is where Oberon and Puck sat eating popcorn), and a bed that rolled out from under the platform for Titania’s bower. The costumes in contrast were pretty elaborate. I’ve already mentioned Xena, Warrior Princess Oberon and Cobweb the goth fairy, but there was also Bottom’s cardboard donkey head (somehow more impressive for being obviously cardboard) and the rude mechanicals’ costumes for the play within a play, including the guy who played Wall wearing two sheets, and the girl who played the moon by standing on a little stepladder and holding up a disco ball and gazing out at us with simulated petrifaction. (The play within a play was so funny I laughed till I cried.)

Just a great time all around. I wish we hadn’t gone to the last performance, because I would have loved to go see it again.

Hadestown is on tour, and as so many of my friends have raved about it, of course I had to see it when it came to town last week.

Since it earned rave reviews on all sides, I went into it expecting to love it, and perhaps because this expectation had built it up so much, I was a little disappointed. But also, I’ve been thinking about it on and off all week, which is not true of some shows that I enjoyed more in the moment, so I may end up loving it in the end.

Some great songs for sure. I liked the Hades/Persephone duets best, especially the one where she's basically singing “Why did you go full Saruman and turn your kingdom into an industrial wasteland?” and he's like “Think of the fires as the heat of my desire for you, babe!” Although of course the lyrics are far richer and more poetic.

In comparison, Orpheus/Eurydice seemed underpowered, which I suppose is fair enough when you're going up against the gods. But since Orpheus's whole thing is that he's such an amazing singer that he nearly sings his wife out of Hades, surely he ought to have the powerhouse voice of the show? Whereas I thought that he was the least interesting singer, although of course this may reflect more on my weakness as a listener than any deficiency in him. I’d like to listen to the original Broadway cast recording to compare.

Whatever my quibbles, the musical struck me enough that I finally wrote down my own Orpheus retelling. This is in fact a retelling of a story I wrote in high school, which has been lost to digital rot, probably for the best as I think having to rewrite it from scratch with my adult powers made it a stronger story attempting to polish up a high school tale. So I’ll be looking for a home for that!

On January 2nd, National Theater at Home dropped a new version of Coriolanus starring David Oyelowo, and I decided to give it a go. I’ve never read or watched Coriolanus before, and had only the vaguest idea what it was about: “Sounds like it’s set in ancient Rome? Probably?” So I was worried I might have trouble following it, as I often do with Shakespeare’s English history plays, but I think the English history plays assume a deep familiarity with the Wars of the Roses that Shakespeare’s original audience undoubtedly had and I do not, whereas I probably know as much about ancient Rome as ye average London audience of 1592.

As our story begins, Caius Marcius is an amazing Roman soldier, so amazing in fact that he’s just been granted the name Coriolanus in honor of a recent victory over the Volsci. His friends are clamoring for him to to stand for the consulship.

The problem: Coriolanus is notoriously proud, and even more notoriously loathes the plebeians. To become consul, he must secure the plebeian vote. This involves standing in the market and showing off his battle scars to all comers. With ill grace, he agrees to stand in the marketplace and ask for votes. But he doesn’t show his scars, asks for votes through gritted teeth, and generally gives the impression of considering the whole thing beneath him.

The plebeians give him their vote with reluctance, and afterward grumble that he wasn’t respectful. The tribunes whip up their grievances till the plebeians are ready not only to rescind their vote, but drag Coriolanus out of his house and kill him. (Apparently “the lower orders would be FINE if it weren’t for OUTSIDE AGITATORS” is a tale as old as time.)

The tribunes manage to pull things back to the point that Coriolanus is put on trial instead of murdered out of hand. Coriolanus’s friends beg him to speak gently. Coriolanus accedes with bad grace, barely tries to leash his temper, and after about two questions launches a tirade about how much he hates the common people and their stinking breath and they shouldn’t even have a vote to begin with. As a result, Coriolanus is exiled from Rome.

Intermission!

Part two: The Wrath of Coriolanus. He’s big mad. He’s SO mad that he goes directly to Rome’s enemy the Volsci and offers his services to his hitherto-enemy Aufidius. Let’s conquer Rome! Aufidius cheers that this union with his erstwhile enemy is even better than his marriage day, and the Volsci set out on the warpath.

However, at the gates of Rome, they are met by a series of delegations. First one of Coriolanus’s fellow generals, then his friend Menenius, and last of all his mother Volumnia

Volumnia also brings Coriolanus’s wife and son and some women from Roman, but Volumnia herself is the powerhouse of this scene, and indeed possibly the whole show, dominating even Coriolanus, who became a great soldier at least in part because of her uncompromising demand for soldierly valor. (There’s a scene where she coos dotingly over her grandson’s latest game: capturing butterflies and tearing their wings off.)

The actress is Pamela Nomvete, who is fantastic in all her scenes, but particularly in this one, where she sympathizes with his anger (how DARE the plebes treat her baby boy that way), chides him to display more love of country (leading an army against ROME, though?), and at last kneels down and begs him to spare Rome in a ringing voice that breaks his resolve. We’ve got enough plunder, he tells the Volscians. Let’s go home.

At this point he has such authority in the Volscian army that they do, indeed, spare Rome. But Aufidius is pissed. Coriolanus has stolen his army right out from under him and denied him the sack of Rome while he’s at it! So once they’re back in the Volscian city of Antium, Aufidius charges Coriolanus with treason, reminds his fellow Volscians how many of their fathers and brothers and sons Coriolanus killed before he betrayed Rome, and steps back to watch as the citizens stab Coriolanus to death a la Julius Caesar.

But unlike Caesar, Coriolanus in his pride has built no powerbase, befriended no Marc Antony. His power dies with him.

***

A couple of notes: large parts of this production take place in what appears to be a museum of Roman antiquities. (In the first scene, the hungry plebeians start spray-painting on the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus.) I thought this was an interesting way to foreground the iconography of Rome in what was otherwise a modern-dress production, and because the iconography of Rome remains in many ways the basis of our iconography of state/imperial power, it draws attention to those themes in the production.

I personally felt that the plebeians were right to reject Coriolanus as consul: even if you don’t mind the whole “I hate plebeians and their stinking breath” thing, surely his subsequent actions show he’s not fit! Not sure Shakespeare is on my side on this one, though.

There is apparently a recent Hiddleston production of Coriolanus, which I know because every time I told someone I was watching Coriolanus, they asked, “The one with Tom Hiddleston?” I’d like to watch that one too in order to compare, but I think David Oyelowo was a great first Coriolanus.

We read As You Like It in British Lit in high school. (As I’ve been writing these reviews, I’m realizing that I read a ton of Shakespeare in high school.) Sweet Celia abandons her father’s court in order to go into exile with her beloved cousin Rosalind, who repays Celia’s loving devotion by ditching her in order to woo some guy by cracking misogynistic jokes with him. Thanks! I hate it!

However, I liked Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing so much that I ended up watching his As You Like It too. But I remember nothing about it, except that it was set in 19th century Japan, but all the actors were white, but IIRC not in a way that the film ever comments on or explains. (Are they missionaries or something? I have no idea.) I did not feel this was a successful transposition of Shakespeare in time and space.

But people who love Shakespeare always seem to love Rosalind, so I thought, okay, let’s give the National Theater’s version a try. Maybe third time’s the charm.

Nope!

Or, okay, the production has many good points. Fascinated by the decision to present the first part of the play (at court) as an office and then have a gigantic pulley pull up all the tables and chairs so they’re hanging down over the stage, and the hanging skeins of furniture are the Forest of Arden. Weird and interesting. Love the people sitting among the chair forest providing the sound effects, love the scene with the sheep where the sheep are just people in white sweaters, love all the scenes with the singing. (Is it shape-note singing? I don’t know what kind it is but it’s gorgeous.)

But Rosalind remains a gigantic dick and I can’t stand her. As Celia says, “You have simply misus'd our sex in your love-prate,” but worse than spouting misogynistic bullshit at Orlando (who doesn’t even agree with her! They’re not even bonding over it! So what’s the point?) is the way that she treats Phoebe. She harangues Phoebe for not loving the shepherd Silvius, like Phoebe owes it to Silvius to return his devotion, then tricks Phoebe into marrying Silvius by promising to marry Phoebe “if ever I marry woman.” What a fucking asshole.

As with the Problem of Claudio, this is too engrained in the play to really take it out. But unlike Much Ado about Nothing, there is simply not enough that I like about As You Like It for me to keep bothering with it. There’s simply so much other Shakespeare that I could be watching.

***

It occurs to me that maybe the reason I keep putting off Twelfth Night is because I’ve been subconsciously afraid Viola will be just as much of a dick as Rosalind. Readers! Do you think that this is so?

troisoiseaux recommended the National Theater Much Ado about Nothing, and as I’m absolutely weak this play I had to see it.

My history with Much Ado about Nothing begins with Kenneth Branagh’s vision in a sun-drenched Italy, all gorgeous people in lovely clothes frolicking about a villa having a glorious time. It continues with Joss Whedon’s black-and-white “I filmed this over a weekend with my actor friends and it shows” version. (Although even that had a flash of brilliance in Beatrice’s “I would eat his heart in the marketplace” speech.)

Also APPARENTLY the Mumford and Sons song “Sigh No More” is largely built of Much Ado about Nothing quotes? I just realized that. A little embarrassing really! No wonder the lyrics are so poetic.

And I’ve spent years intending to see the David Tennant/Catherine Tate version, which perhaps FINALLY I will get around to watching, now that the National Theater reminded me once again just how much I enjoy this play.

The stage is set at the Hotel Messina in the 1920s/30s. The general vibe struck me as twenties, but Beatrice’s costumes are pure 1930s screwball comedy, as befits the ancestress of Rosalind Russell and Claudette Colbert. It’s sharp and stylish, all jazz renditions of Shakespeare’s songs and Benedick hiding under an ice cream cart to eavesdrop on the Duke and Claudio discussing Beatrice’s supposed unrequited love for him. They had an aesthetic and they committed and God I love that.

The acting is also delightful. The mains are all wonderful: Beatrice and Benedick have that delicious “I hate you but maybe because I love you” vibe down, Hero is sweetly charming as a modest maiden in the flush of first love, Claudio is over the top and impulsive that makes it almost possible to forgive his later actions.

But the smaller parts are delicious, too. I loved the attention on Margaret, whose seduction ends up putting Hero in such peril, once Don John convinces Hero’s fiance that it is Hero up their being seduced. Like Hero, Margaret is a giddy girl in love (or lust, anyway), a quick witty young woman who awkwardly raises a hand at Hero’s wedding, trying to get a chance to explain—only for Don John to shove her aside. (Now in real life, one might feel that Margaret should have tried a little harder. But listen, she can only achieve so much against the tyranny of the script.)

And the guards! I must confess that in all the other versions I’ve seen, I found the guards deeply annoying and not comical at all. But somehow here they are charming! And, okay, the head guard is still also a little annoying, he has to be a little annoying to explain why Hero’s father thrusts the guards aside when listening to them could have saved so much trouble, but mostly he’s annoying in a genuinely funny way.

I can’t remember if Much Ado about Nothing is generally accounted one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” but it’s always been a problem play for me because it’s so genuinely funny and lighthearted and sweet… except for the central incident of the play, where Claudio repudiates Hero at the altar because he thinks he saw her cheating on him at the window last night. (The girl he saw is, as aforementioned, Margaret being seduced by one of Don John’s minions.) Hero fakes her death, Claudio discovers she was framed and repents, and then they are married, HAPPY END.

Only to a modern audience, this ending doesn’t seem happy at all. He was willing to ruin her life by repudiating her at the altar! Why should she ever go back to him? And because this incident is absolutely central to the play, the moving force of the entire second half, you can’t take it out or even much mitigate it.

The Branagh version doesn’t try to mitigate anything: Claudio actually throws Hero to the ground at the altar. Here’s the Shakespeare play! This scene is what it is, and make what you will of it!

In the National Theater productions so far, this tends to be their attitude toward language that we moderns find objectionable, which I respect. It is what it is, the product of a very different milieu than our own, and it’s silly to bowdlerize it.

However, this production does emphasize Claudio’s youth and impulsiveness. As he ages and settles down, perhaps he may become a better husband than the repudiation scene might lead one to expect. And, to be fair, there’s no evidence that he’s likely to become violently jealous again: Don John had to stage an elaborate ruse to convince Claudio that his angel Hero could possibly be unchaste, because Claudio wouldn’t listen to mere slander.

But goddamn, though! That repudiation at the altar! Love the play, but that scene is always tough, and it will probably always annoy me that Claudio’s “punishment” is perfect happiness in the end.

One thing I did particularly like about this production: the last lines, which are usually the Duke’s, go to Beatrice instead. She’s the one who’s going to invent “brave punishments” for Don John, and he’d better run fast and hard so she never gets the chance, because oh MY is she going to come up with something good to punish the man who nearly ruined her beloved cousin Hero.

I’m afraid you’re going to get a prologue about My History with this Play about every single National Theater play that I review. Sorry, but not sorry enough to restrain myself!

With Medea this history is at least fairly short: two years ago in Zoom theater, we did the translation by Michael Collier & Georgia Machemer, and it knocked my socks off to such an extent that ever since I’ve been seeking out not only Medeas but also any and all Greek tragedies. I saw Oedipus at the Indiana Repertory theater! I’ve faithfully voted for Greek tragedies in every Zoom theater poll, and we did indeed do Bakkhai! (More commonly spelled Bacchae, and I was sorry to see this one isn’t on National Theater, because I’d love a chance to see it. National Theater does have Antigone though, which I haven’t seen since the fourth grade class across the hall put it on, which knocked my socks off too come to think of it…)

Most of all, however, I’ve been seeking out Medeas. Pasolini’s film version also blew my tiny mind, in a different way than the play - it retells not just the play but the whole Medea story, starring Maria Callas the famous opera singer, who does not sing here but remains a mesmerizing presence throughout with her large dark always-watchful eyes.

It’s also a movie with a thesis statement, not merely telling a story but making an argument, which I intended to post about at more length back when I saw the movie… and then did not, and now I can’t remember the details, a meditation on the place of myth in human life, the eruption of violence from beneath the veneer of rationality, the culture clash of Medea the high priestess from a land where the king in his death time is sacrificed to bring fertility to the fields with her new home in ancient Corinth.

I also saw a college performance of Medea last spring, about which one might kindly say that the actors were giving it their all. And it had some interesting staging: when Euripides has something recounted secondhand because it happened off-stage, or before the play began, etc., the actors enacted it behind a screen so you saw it in shadow as the story was recounted. Very effective, especially for the bit where Medea kills her children.

And at last we come to the National Theater Medea, starring Helen McCrory as a powerhouse Medea: ranting, furious with Jason for leaving her for the princess of Corinth, possibly just a little bit unhinged. But she’s still hinged enough to play nice when King Creon comes to tell her that she has been exiled. “Why?” she demands, and the king tells her, “Because I fear you.”

Everyone in this play fears Medea, but no one fears her enough. When Medea begs on her knees for one more night in Corinth, the king grants her request. Then he leaves, and she stands up with a glitter in his eyes: this will give her enough time to enact her revenge

You can sort of understand it for King Creon’s impulse toward mercy here, as he’s never seen her in action, but Medea’s ex-husband Jason who saw Medea cut her own brother into pieces surely ought to know better. Clearly, however, he does not. He’s all, Babe, I abandoned you to marry the hot young princess… but listen, I did it for US! Because this will make our sons the relatives of royalty, thus ensuring their advancement in life!

(Awkwardly, at this point these sons have been banished with Medea, which means they may well starve to death by the roadside, but no matter.)

And when Medea pretends that she’s finally seen the wisdom of his plan, the chump actually falls for it. He lets their sons deliver a wedding present right to his new bride. It’s a beautiful robe, imbued with poison, which burns up the girl and then her father the king when he embraces his dead only child.

I didn’t like the translation by Ben Power as much as the Collier & Machemer we used in Zoom theater - it didn’t seem as graceful to me, and there are times when it seemed too modernized (like the bit where Medea laments that women give up their “agency” to their husbands). And as usual when a production is set in modern times, I felt that it would have been more interesting in its original setting, really engaging with the alienness of that setting as Pasolini’s production did.

(I think modern adaptations are often an attempt to highlight what is universal in a story, but unless you go full Clueless, often they end up drawing attention to the parts that are in fact historically specific. Surely in modern times, someone from Medea’s homeland would be trying to get her extradited to be tried for stealing the Golden Fleece and murdering her brother, for instance.)

And I’m not entirely sure where I stand on the chorus, all dressed up in flowered dresses like the world’s creepiest 1950s housewives, dancing in a manner that suggests someone gave them the stage direction “Dance like a broken automaton who keeps getting subjected to electric shocks.” On the one hand, it’s very effectively creepy! On the other hand, they felt pitying rather than sympathetic to Medea’s plight, which may be a reflection of the translation as much as anything else, but I think it weakens the play.

All that said - what amazing performances all around! The children were excellent: they don’t speak, but they spend a lot of time on stage, and you begin to hope against hope that they won’t meet their inevitable deaths. (They do, of course, as always happens in tragedies.) King Creon brought an excellent gravitas to his role, sternness mixed with that kingly magnanimity that proves his undoing. I preferred our Zoom theater Jason (a smarmy slimeball), but one suspects that Jason would see himself in this production’s Jason, who seems to genuinely believe his protestations that ditching Medea was all part of a wise and noble plan to advance the whole family!

And Medea of course is the standout, heartbroken, furious, the epitome of “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” acting sweet and docile if it will get her what she wants but boiling with rage underneath - yet still with a genuine softness toward her children, which makes it all the more terrifying when she works herself up to the point of killing them. The impact is all the more painful because she does love them and it does not stop her.

And then she carries children off in sleeping bags (presumably so she could carry weighted sleeping bags rather than the actual children). The entire final scene, her whole last confrontation with Jason, she’s got these sleeping bags, she hauls them in along the ground and then hoists them up on her shoulders, and they’re heavy, and at last she’s alone onstage and turns her back on us and staggers off on the road to Athens, bent under the weight of the dead children slung across her shoulders…

It’s so effective that I can’t even complain about the fact that ONCE AGAIN Medea doesn’t get her big exit in a chariot pulled by dragons. I’ve never seen a production go full dragon chariot. PLEASE, I’m dying here, if the ancient Greeks could rig up a chariot pulled by dragons for Euripides, then surely a modern theatrical company could manage it!

troisoiseaux kindly gifted me a month-long subscription of National Theater at Home for Christmas. I leapt on it like a rambunctious terrier, and at once watched Underdog: The Other Other Bronte.

In some ways I am the perfect viewer for this play, as I have read every published novel by the three Bronte sisters (haven’t ventured into the juvenilia, admittedly), am in the midst of a Charlotte reread, have visited the parsonage at Haworth and the graveyard in Scarborough where Anne is buried, etc.

On the other hand, I am perhaps not the ideal viewer for this play, as my reaction to both Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was, “Wow, the judgement of posterity was so colossally right about these books. They are boring and no one would be reading them if Anne weren’t the Third Bronte Sister.”

So actually I am totally on board with Anne’s reputation as Third and Least Literarily Interesting Bronte Sister! Nodding in agreement every time that Charlotte says something that implies that maybe she doesn’t take Anne’s writing seriously because Anne perhaps doesn’t write as well as Emily and Charlotte! Simply disagree with the play’s basic premise that Anne’s reputation is unjustly low because Charlotte suppressed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death.

Would it have been kinder and more sisterly if Charlotte let the publisher continue to print editions till the public got tired of the book on its own and let it sink into deserved obscurity? Sure. Do I think it’s a loss to literary history that she did not? No.

Having said that, for a play where I disagree with the basic premise, it was a lot of fun to watch. All three sisters are fantastic, and so is the energy between them, lending emotional weight to arguments about whether they are cooperating or competing or, perhaps, both? because maybe it’s possible for women to have complicated feelings about each other? for sisters to love each other but also feel jealous when one sister achieves the success that the other sister yearns for?

The staging is also amazing (although I was a little sad that the heather moor lasted for about two minutes at the start of the play!). The stage is a circle within a circle, and the outer ring revolves, so that when, for instance, Anne goes out to be a governess, she’s on a sort of treadmill, walking on the outer circle but staying in the same place as she and Charlotte read aloud the letters they wrote to each other.

Aside from the sisters and Branwell (who appears occasional to bewail the fact that he, too, is crushed by gender roles! Would rather paint than support his spinster sisters! Gonna go get drunk about it!), all the bit parts are played by four actors, who also sometimes act as a Greek chorus (quoting from reviews of the sisters’ book, for instance), and perform a lot of the work of a stage crew: striking together coconuts for the sound of the horses’ hooves as Anne and Charlotte head to London, for instance.

All in all, a good time! It didn’t change my mind about Anne Bronte’s literary reputation, but left me with a great enthusiasm to read my upcoming Bronte biographies and also watch more shows on National Theater at Home. This was not exactly what the creators were going for but I feel it was a great success nonetheless.

Earlier this year I joined a zoom theater group, and last night we did Euripides’ Medea (translated by Michael Collier and Georgia Machemer) and it blew my tiny MIND. I haven’t experience a Greek drama since fourth grade, when the class across the way invited us to their production of Antigone, and it would be nice to see it someday performed by non-fourth-graders, not to cast aspersions on their production, which also blew my tiny mind.

BUT SO MEDEA. When the play begins, Medea has been divorced by her husband Jason, who is going to marry King Creon’s daughter. Medea is understandably VERY pissed, not least because if it weren’t for her, Jason wouldn’t be famous enough to marry any king’s daughter at all! He would in fact be dead, killed on his quest for the Golden Fleece, which he only achieved because Medea killed a bunch of people for him, not least her own brother.

And now that ungrateful wretch wants to divorce her! Medea has made SUCH a ruckus about Jason’s foul behavior that King Creon, concerned for the safety of his daughter, has decided to exile Medea and her sons.

Apparently King Creon is not quite concerned enough, however, because he agrees to let Medea stay one last day in order to get her affairs in order. Presumably he’s envisioning her selling her chickens or something, but for Medea, getting her affairs in order means one thing: VENGEANCE.

Honestly astonished that Jason thought that Medea, the brother-murderer, would quietly let him marry someone else, but patriarchy is a hell of a drug and Jason is an incredibly smarmy mansplainer who has the audacity to explain to Medea that when he left her for another woman, he was doing it for Medea. Jason will have more sons, plus connections in the royal palace, and will aid Medea’s own sons and also Medea herself! Or at least it WOULD have if Medea hadn’t gotten so MAD and gotten herself and her sons exiled.

Medea takes advantage of her one day to prepare for exile by murdering Jason’s new bride with a dress that poisons her then sets her own fire (which also kills King Creon as he embraces his daughter’s corpse), then murders her own sons so that Jason will spend the rest of his life crushed in grief. She sighs (paraphrasing), “It sucks that I have to murder my own sons.”

The chorus, which sometimes seems to consist of Medea’s neighbors (generally supportive of her rage! Less supportive of child murder!), but also occasionally is just disembodied commentary on the action: “You don’t HAVE to.”

Medea: “No, I’m gonna.”

Exit Medea! Murder off stage! (“Mother, no!” wail Medea’s sons.) Enter Jason, who has just seen his bride set aflame! “This woman has destroyed my life!” he bellows, intent on confronting Medea.

At which point Medea reappears. She is flying A CHARIOT PULLED BY DRAGONS. She is carrying her son’s corpses with her, so Jason can’t even have the comfort of burying them. “How does it feel with my teeth in your heart!” Medea gloats, as Jason howls impotent imprecations. And away she flies to Athens, where she has already prepared a refuge for herself, with a friend who has sworn a solemn oath by the gods that he’ll look after her no matter what! (He was not aware of the child-murdering plans at that point.)

Then the chorus asks the audience:

“Think of the story we’ve just listened to:
Who won? Who lost?”

This drama of bloody revenge ends with a book club reading guide! Amazing. AMAZING.

Back from Bloomington! I went down to see the opera Rodelinda with friends; none of us had ever heard of it, so we all went in with no idea what it was about, and were pleasantly surprised by the super gothic German aesthetic that it had going on. Staircases in a bleak black stage lit with candles on each steps! All the male characters with some epic dwarf-like braiding going on! (The king in particular looked like he had stepped right out of The Hobbit. Also, the king and his most loyal servant dude were both played by women. Operas, man.) Men-at-arms clinking with chain mail, and dancing figures of Love and Fate, which honestly worried me when I saw it in the program - it sounded possibly very cheesy - but in actual fact I think they were my favorite thing in the performance.

I was especially taken with Fate's costume, with no skin showing anywhere; black slippers, black gloves, a rough black skirt and wild black hair, everything black but for the white mask sparkling over the face and white candles on the shoulders (electric of course, but positioned in melted candle wax so they looked like real flaming candles). Uncanny.

It was also suuuuper long, which seems to just be how Baroque operas roll. I do tend to prefer the svelter nineteenth-century operettas; they're made for modern people with short attention spans.

We also went to my favorite Bloomington bookstore, where I acquired a copy of The Three Musketeers (it has a helpful comics-style glossary of characters on the front flap where most books have a plot summary; I totally could have used that in The Count of Monte Cristo). Someday the Dumas adventure will continue! Someday.