The Auld Triangle for St. Patrick’s Day

March 17, 2016March 17, 2016 / jpbohannon / 5 Comments

I was organizing a bit of a celebration of Irish poets for St. Patrick’s Day at my school, and I figured I might contribute by singing a tune or two. Really, I was only going to do an a capella version of “The Auld Triangle”–the wonderful song/poem from Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage.

Brendan Behan

And “The Auld Triangle” was in my mind because I had decided to sing it tonight (the 17th) at Steven’s Green. My old band was playing there and I usually get up and do one or two songs with them. And “The Auld Triangle” was what I was thinking.

When a colleague e-mailed to ask if he could bring a penny whistle to the poetry thing I told him my plans. He wasn’t familiar with the tune, but said he would look it up on YouTube. I don’t know what he found–Luke Kelly’s version with the Dubliners is the first hit–but I went and found this Ceiliuradh (celebration) from 2014 at the Royal Albert Hall.

This video captures everything that should be celebrated about being Irish: it is cross-generational, it revels in its history, it enjoys itself and others. The camaraderie among the players–Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine and Paul Brady (all once members of Planxty), Imelda May, John Sheehan from the Dubliners, Lisa Hannigan, Glen Hansard, Elvis Costello, Conor O’Brien from Villagers–is infectious and joyful. But moreso it is the audience–an audience joyously celebrating its heritage in the “veddy-proper” Royal Albert Hall.

I watched the video three times and became more choked up with each viewing. Happy St. Patrick’s Day–watch the video here.

Review: Oscar: “Bugger! Queer! Sodomite!” sang the chorus.

March 1, 2015March 1, 2015 / jpbohannon / 1 Comment

The East-Coast Premier of Oscar

On an extremely cold Sunday afternoon in February, I attended the Philadelphia Opera Company’s production of the opera Oscar. There has been a lot of enthusiasm about this production beyond the expected buzz that a premier would cause. Recently, the Free Library of Philadelphia discovered three unknown manuscripts of Wilde in its basement as it was in the long-going process of digitizing its collection. Because of this find–academics and scholars are quite astounded–and the accompanying exhibit at the Rosenbach Museum, which houses a good deal of Wilde paraphernalia, the arrival of an opera based on the Irish playwright, poet and bon-vivant seemed particularly timely.

I don’t attempt to be any sort of expert on opera. I know the stories of several of the most famous and can recognize the melody of several of the more familiar arias, but other than that seeing an opera is basically always a jump into the unknown for me.

And perhaps because of my inexperience, I found the music to be the least memorable part of a very memorable performance.

First the story itself is a mesmerizing tragedy–a tragedy in the literal sense of a great man falling and a tragedy in the “man-on-the-street” sense of a heartbreaking story. Wilde, one of the most famous personalities of his time, is brought into court for crimes of “gross indecency”–which in 19th century England meant homosexuality. And while his friends arrange for him to escape to France before the trial commences, Wilde believes its the honorable thing to stay and fight the case in court. And of course, Wilde loses. He is found guilty and his years of hard labor at Reading Gaol, make up the second half of the performance.

And secondly, the staging and the sets were extraordinary.

The opera begins when the orchestra finishes the overture and the house applauds. During this applause, Oscar Wilde makes a curtain call, coming through the curtains,

Oscar Wilde taking a curtain call at the opening scene of Oscar

accepting the applause–which has now been combined with recorded applause–to thank the house for its generous reception to Lady Windemere’s Fan. We then move quickly to Wilde talking with his friends about his options in the celebrated court case. (There is a bit of slapstick with two Keystone-Kop type henchmen that are busy poisoning Wilde’s name among innkeepers so he cannot get a room anywhere. He ends up hiding at his friend Ada Leverson’s house.)

The court case–a circus in itself–was mounted as a Fellini-esque carnival with the jury represented as so many toys from a child’s toy box. There were tumblers and rocking horses, clowns and rag-dolls. The judge, when he appeared, popped out as a jack-in-the-box, all loose-limbed and spineless with a simpleminded smile on his face. The scene closes the first act.

The judge at the Oscar Wilde trial.

As bizarre and surreal as the court-room scene, the next scene is stark and daunting. Wilde is given his prison clothes and his hard labor. And throughout he is haunted by the presence of his beloved Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas whose father initiated the criminal action. (Actually, Bosie’s father’s initial action was leaving a calling card for Wilde that called him a “posing sodomite.” addressing him. Against the advice of his friends, Wilde charged him with libel. It was during this libel case that evidence of Wilde’s homosexuality came to light and allowed the crown to prosecute him for “gross indecency.”)

In the opera, Bosie has no lines or any singing. He is simply an ethereal character who throughout both acts flits into Wilde’s memories. He is played by Reed Luplau, a dancer whose sinuous moves are both graceful and haunting. In prison, he climbs upon Wilde’s prison bars like some avenging angel.

Bosie–Lord Alfred Douglas–haunting Wilde before the trial.

When Wilde is released, he is a broken man. He left England for the continent and spent three years in poverty before dying in a shabby Paris Hotel. Oscar Wilde was 46 years old.

The opera has been reported as being written by Theodore Morrison (with John Cox as co-librettist) with the countertenor David Daniels expressly in mind. And the visual is a very good one, for Daniels at times looks very much like Wilde. As a countertenor, however, the voice to me seemed much, much too high–almost a falsetto at times–and off-putting. Contemporaries had noted that Wilde had a “lilting” voice, but I don’t know if that accounts for high pitch. Wilde was a relatively big man and that voice does not seem to fit the body. An acetate (of dubious authenticity) of Wilde recording Reading Gaol at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 replicates a higher-pitch voice, but that–it can be argued–could be a result of recording speed and early technology. Nevertheless, to me it seemed unreal, at odds with those around him–including his friends.

The music itself was atonal and the lyrics seemed pedestrian. One would expect more wit coming from the mouth of Wilde.

* * * * * * * * * *

Dwayne Croft as Walt Whitman in Oscar

In front of the desk where I write there are two bookcases. The one holds volumes of poetry. The other biographies. I happened to look up–for assurance–to see if my Oscar Wilde biography was there and was pleased to see that it sat next to Justin Kaplan’s life of Walt Whitman. For I forgot that Whitman’s ghost is also a character in Oscar. As a narrator–he mentions that the events of the trial and imprisonment took place five years after Whitman had died and fifteen years after he had met Wilde in America– he seems to serve as the maitre ‘d to the pantheon of literary greats that line the wall in the first and final scenes. His brilliant white suit and steely-grey beard at a touch of gravitas, that seems to rise above the nonsense of British legality and the circus of Wilde’s trial.

In the end, Wilde dies and enters the halls of literary greatness, escorted by Whitman himself.

Movie Review: Much Ado About Nothing dir. Joss Whedon…another inevitable comparison

July 1, 2013July 26, 2013 / jpbohannon / 1 Comment

Fran Kranz as Claudio in Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing

The summer of 2013 began with the release of Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, and everyone was in a race to compare it with the Robert Redford version from the 1970s. To be truthful, I never cared for Redford as Gatsby, but thought the rest of the cast was spot on. The opposite goes with Baz Luhrman’s film, in which I prefer DiCaprio’s Gatsby to the rest of the cast.

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby (1974)

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby (2013)

But we forgot about all that–and rather quickly– before the summer actually began, and now we have a new version of another “classic” work of literature: Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Joss Whedon, which must undoubtedly be compared with the Kenneth Branagh version of 1993.

The story behind Whedon’s project is fun. It was something that he had long wanted to do, and finally his wife suggested that instead of going away on vacation for their 20th-anniversary, they make the film. And they did…entirely in their gorgeous home. Whedon gathered many of the actors who had played in his previous productions, and the first that Hollywood knew about the film was when they announced that photography had been completed. They had wrapped things up in 12 days.

Whedon chose to film in black-and-white which gives the film a stylish patina. And yet, I found it drained some of the emotion from the story. Benedick (Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice (Amy Acker) are likeable enough, and quite funny at times, but they shine mostly when they are apart…there are few sparks when they are together. Invariably, one has to compare them to Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson–whose fire (both on film and personally) was palpable. And the golden sunlight of Tuscany, the shimmering palette of the entire film, gives Brannagh’s version a much richer patina.

Amy Acker as Beatrice and Alexis Denisof as Benedck

Emma Thompson as Beatrice and Kenneth Brannagh as Benedick (1993).

Whedon’s actors all handle the dialog well and naturally, and after a few minutes you might even forget you are listening to Shakespearean English.

In both films, the constabulary are very good–verbal slapstick and mental banana skins. Nathan Fillon’s doltish Dogberry in Whedon’s film is every bit as memorable–and laugh-inducing– as Michael Keaton’s dimwitted portrayal in the 1993 version.

And the performance of Clark Gregg, as Leonato, Hero’s father is likeable and believeable. Much of the audience will quickly forget that he is Agent Phil Coulson of the Avenger’s franchise (also by Joss Whedon).

Clark Gregg as Leonato and Jillian Morgese as Hero

However, there are a few choices that Whedon made that I am not so sure about. The character of Conrade, for example, which was played by Richard Clifford in the Brannagh version has now been changed to a female role, played by Riki Lindhome. This in itself is usually not a problem. For instance, in Michael Almareyda’s Hamlet (starring Ethan Hawke), Marcello was changed to Marcella and played by Paula Malcomson. But nothing is changed, the part is minor, and her lines are few. In Whedon’s Much Ado…, the Conrade character is quite sexy and there is even a bit of titillating bed-play between her and Don John (Sean Maher), although the words of the play would not lead us to think so.

There is also a scene that is not in the play–during the opening credits–where Benedick sneaks out of Beatrice’s bed in the early morn. Beatrice lies there feigning sleep, but slyly opening her eyes as he dresses and leaves. We are left with the vision of her wide awake in bed, with eyes that speak of her aloneness. If this scene is supposed to prepare us for the friction between the two when the play proper begins, it fails.

Whedon shares writing credits with William Shakespeare, and, to be honest, he does a very admirable job. He has cut judiciously, and the only time he has changed the language was in Act 2 where he excised an anti-Semitic remark and changed it to a statement about love’s foolishness. The new line flows seamlessly into the original.

In all, I prefer the Brannagh version, but that is not to dismiss Whedon’s, which also I like very much. Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is inventive and imaginative and aimed at a whole new audience. The filming is crisp, fresh, and confidant–and quite stylish. Whedon has successfully taken Shakespeare out of the classroom and made it very hip, without destroying the story at all. It is certainly worth viewing…and more than once. If this was his gift for his 20th anniversary, I hope he tackles another Shakespeare title before his 40th anniversary comes around.

Here is the very elegant and engaging trailer:

Waiting for Godot: Crying in Beckett

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013 / jpbohannon / 2 Comments

A while back, I had posted about a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame that I ‘d seen at the Arden Theater in Philadelphia. In it, I quoted my favorite lines from the play:

HAMM: (letting go his toque) What’s he doing?

(Clov raises lid of Nagg’s bin, stoops, look into it. Pause.)
CLOV: He’s crying. (He closes lid, straightens up.)
HAMM: Then he’s living.

The character Hamm has made the immediate inference that if his father is crying, then he is alive. And we, by extension, apply it to the human condition. I remembered this line–and the act of crying– this week when teaching Waiting for Godot. (Actually, the crying seemed more appropriate than ever for someone trying to teach Godot to 18-year old boys during their last week of school when the temperatures are in the mid-70s and the sun is bright! Hah!)

Early in the play, Estragon and Vladimir point out the tree where they are supposed to wait for Godot. (It is the only piece of scenery. The scene description reads simply: A country road. A tree. )

Mark Bedard (Vladimir) and Mark Anderson Phillips (Estragon) in Samuel Beckett s ‘Waiting for Godot,’ at Marin Theatre Company. photo 2013 by Kevin Berne

Estragon: [desparingly] Ah! [pause] You’re sure it was here?

Vladimir: What?

Estragon: That we were to wait.

Vladimir: He said by the tree. [They look at the tree.] Do you see any others?

Estragon: What is it?

Vladimir: I don’t know. A willow.

Estragon: Where are the leaves?

Vladimir: It must be dead.

Estragon: No more weeping.

This is the exact inverse of the lines from Endgame. In Endgame, the syllogism is that if you are crying then you are alive. In Waiting for Godot, the syllogism is that if you are dead, then there is no more crying. More or less the same thing.

Later on, as Vladimir and Estragon rebuke Pozzo for his treatment of his slave/servant, Lucky, there is more conversation about crying:

[Lucky weeps]

Estragon: He’s crying!

Pozzo: Old dogs have more dignity! [He proffers his handkerchief to Estragon.] Comfort him, since you pity him. [Estragon hesitates.] Come on. [Estragon takes the handkerchief.] Wipe away his tears, he’ll feel less forsaken.

[Estragon hesitates]

Vladimir: Here give it to me, I’ll do it.
[Estragon refuses to give the handkerchief. Childish gestures.]

Estragon and Vladimir with Lucky from samuel-beckett.net

Pozzo: Make haste before he stops. [Estragon approaches Lucky and makes to wipe his eyes. Lucky kicks him violently in the shin. Estragon drops the handkerchief, recoils, staggers about the stage, howling with pain.] Hanky!
[Lucky puts down bag and basket, picks up handkerchief and gives it to Pozzo, goes back to his place, picks up bag and basket.]

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What are we to make of that? What is the significance of Lucky’s crying? Of Estragon and Vladimir’s desire to comfort him? Of Lucky’s lashing out at his comforter? And of his immediate subservience to his persecutor.

There is, of course, much more going on here, but the small emphasis on tears should be noted. Earlier Beckett had equated crying with living. Are we simply to be reminded that Lucky is a living, human being, and leave it at that? (We knew that anyway.)

Or perhaps we are to examine the difficult symbiosis between the comforter and the comforted? The helper and the helped? The cry of pain and those who hear and those who refuse to hear?

What is our responsibility to those who are “crying”? To those who are inconsolable? Good questions, all. And ones that we should take the time to think about every so often.

Blogging, Beckett and a Seven-Year Old Boy

March 3, 2013March 4, 2013 / jpbohannon / 7 Comments

It was one year ago last week that I started blogging. But I quit before that anniversary came around.

Yes, I quit blogging in late November, because I could no longer do it. I loved doing it. I had met some extraordinary people–Romanians in London, Americans in Ecuador, an art colony in Italy. I enjoyed thinking about the books I read, the music I heard, the films I watched. And I enjoyed trying to get those thoughts “down on paper.”

Henry dressed as the “Holy Roman Emperor Saint Henry” for Halloween last October.

But then my life changed drastically and blogging found itself way down on my list of priorities.

I became responsible for a seven-year old boy.

Henry is a delightful young boy. He is creative, bright, and personable. And it is my job, to a degree, to nurture and protect him. I shower him with love and I make sure that he knows he is loved. I try to pay attention to what he does and what he says and what he feels.

We play silly word games. We read together: I to him on the sofa; he to me on the steps, (where the game is that I must go up or down a step every time he turns a page.) He is seven years old, but will still hold my hand when we walk places, at least for now. We often take “adventures” together, and these are usually simple jaunts across the city on public transportation. We take a trolley and then a subway and then a train and then we reverse ourselves, adding in a bus on the return trip. He points out train yards and sidings, trolley tracks and subway couplers. We stay and wave to the drivers after we get off and they drive away. (He does LOVE his transportation!)

Sure, there are time when I must get him to do things that he doesn’t want to: to try foods he does not like (that comprises everything that isn’t pizza) or to stop talking and listen when others are speaking or to slow down with his homework, with his handwriting. I try to teach him, and I try to do so with patience, with gentleness and with love.

For the most part, when I am not at work, I am with him, or I am asleep. And when I am at work, I am thinking about him and worrying about him.

Henry and I on the R5

Having a seven-year old in your 30s is one thing; having a seven-year old in your late 50s is something else altogether. I haven’t read a book in I can’t say how long. My film-going is greatly constricted. And my television viewing is completely limited to Phineas and Ferb (don’t ask!) and America’s Funniest Home Videos. And yet his enjoyment of both of these shows is genuine and sweet. He laughs with purity and with delight. And that, I wouldn’t trade for anything.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I went out last Thursday night with my wife and some friends to see a play: Endgame by Samuel Beckett. I had read it many times, but had never seen it performed, and so we made definite plans to get there.

Endgame is the second of the four major plays that Beckett wrote following World War II. (Waiting For Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape and HappyDay.) Situated firmly in the Theater of the Absurd, Endgame presents Hamm, a blind, crippled man who sits in a make-shift wheel-chair in a single, disheveled room. He is tended to by Clov, who, conversely, is unable to sit. In the room are also two trash bins. In the one is Hamm’s legless father, Nagg, and in the other, his legless mother, Nell. Hamm pontificates on the bleakness of life, on the attraction of story-telling, on the uncertainty of a future. It is one of my favorite plays.

In one piece of dialogue that I particularly love, Hamm asks Clov to open the trash bin to see what his father is doing:

          HAMM (letting go his toque)
          What’s he doing?
               (Clov raises lid of Nagg’s bin, stoops, look into it. Pause.)

            CLOV
          He’s crying.
               (He closes lid, striaghtens up.)

HAMM
Then he’s living.

I love this. How simple, how poignant, how piercing. It perfectly captures Beckett’s–and to a large degree, my own–world view. For better or worse, my personal philosophy has long been greatly informed by Beckett’s. Or else, I had already formed it and because of that I found Beckett. But, for one reason or another, I am drawn to his bleakness and emptiness–and to the black humor that attends it.

Nancy Boykin and Dan Kern as Nell and Nagg in Arden Theater’s production of Endgame. Philadelphia, February 28, 2013.
© Photos by Mark Garvin

Scott Greer and James iJames as Hamm and Clov in the Arden Theater’s production of Endgame. Philadelphia, February 28, 2013.
© Photos by Mark Garvin

As I said, I have long enjoyed and embraced Beckett’s dire existentialism. But now, I can no longer afford it, can no longer afford to wallow in such bleakness, to delight in such barren absurdity. I have to try to tamp it down. For I have Henry now to take care of, and that is very much the purpose of my life.

Hackles, Philly Fringe Festival and a personal ghost

September 17, 2012September 17, 2012 / jpbohannon / 7 Comments

Photo courtesy of Groundswell Players

The Philly Fringe Festival and the Live Arts Festival have been running concurrently in Philadelphia for the past few weeks. This usually means that there is an abundance of cutting edge theater, dance, performance, readings going on throughout the city, and this year it seems even more so.

For the past three years we have had a friend, Pia Agarwal, who worked for the festivals and always gave us a heads-up on what to see. And she was never wrong.

But she’s moved to Austin, so we were on our own.

Fortunately, I know Nick Gillette, who is finding some success in the local theater scene. This year, for the Fringe Festival, he directed one play, Myths and Monsters, at the Adrienne Mainstage and performed in another Hackles at the Crane Arts Old School White Space.

On Saturday night I went and saw Hackles. I have been in this venue twice before and each time have been wowed and impressed. This night was no different.

Groundswell Players in rehearsal for Hackles
(photo: Emma Lee/for NewsWorks)

“Devised” by the Groundswell Players–students at the Pig Iron School for Advance Performance Training–the play features four actors who take on a variety of roles. The main roles however are a blind old man, his daughter, his cockatoo, and Death itself. Scott Shepherd, who played the cockatoo–incredibly well by the way–also played the daughter’s hesitant boyfriend. The other additional roles–teacher, fellow students, policeman–were negligible and merely stock figures to keep the plot moving.

When the cockatoo dies, the daughter–played by Martha Stuckey–believes she sees Death come and take the bird’s soul. Later, she witnesses an accident (off-stage) and sees this female incarnation of Death (played by Alice Yorke) more clearly and more definitely.

She tells her blind father (Nick Gillette), who is fascinated by what she relates and who believes that the dead continue to contact us through the holes in the static of his off-station transistor radio.

There is still more death, in the past and yet to come, but there is also great hope: the play ends with the awkward daughter and her boyfriend figuring out how to slow dance while Al Green’s version of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” plays on the father’s no-longer-static radio.

The set was very cool–pure white walls with clear plastic opened umbrellas suspended from the ceiling. There was minimum furniture–the father’s table and chairs and a cabinet-like piece that was spun around–and great lighting. There were two or three scenes with a scooter and roller-blades which could have been discarded, but as for the rest, it was perfect.

The play combined physical performance, comedy, metaphysics and domestic drama in a piece that was entrancing, engaging and thoughtful.

But the play was not what raised the “hackles” on my neck!

After the play, a number of us met in the parking lot, going over what we were doing and where we were going next. Someone had an iPhone and asked someone else to take a picture of us all gathered.

No one, however, invited the ghost, who appears behind my head.

I have now studied this picture backwards and forwards, have enlarged it as much as I could and still see clearly, and it doesn’t make sense. Granted, the play dealt with death and the afterlife and the conviction that spirits communicate with us regularly, but I didn’t expect them to come out to an abandoned grammar-school parking lot. She seems to be in period costume–and our play was in modern dress; In fact, Death was dressed in a sexy black cocktail dress. So she’s not from the play and she isn’t from the audience; her proportions seem larger than those walking out of the building; and she wasn’t with us.

So where do we go with this?

Titus Andronicus…A Shakespearean Bloodbath!

April 26, 2012April 29, 2012 / jpbohannon / 2 Comments

I had never seen it before. I had never read it before. But I got cheap tickets to see Titus Andronicus Wednesday night at The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater.

Not knowing anything about it, I took out my Penguin Collected Plays to read the editor’s introduction. Here’s what it said:

“Titus Andronicus is a ridiculous play. This gallimaufry of murders, rape, lopped limbs, and heads baked in a pie, lavishly served with the rich purple sauce of rhetoric, may have been to the taste of the Elizabethans, but what is one to make of it to-day?”

Another comment I saw said to imagine it as if Shakespeare had written Pulp Fiction.

My god, what did I get myself into…all because of the lure of a $10 ticket.

The performance was electrifying. A group of seven actors who were engaging and competent, a dozen or so hand puppets, shadow-puppets, and lots and lots of blood presented what resembled a petite guigonol more than what we think of when we think of a Shakespearean play.

Some say that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s deadliest play, but it pales next to Titus, and the violence here is so much more gratuitous than the violence in the former play. To give you an idea, lying about the stage at the end of the last scene are an evil queen murdered by Titus, her emperor husband murdered by Titus’ brother, Titus’ daughter–who Titus kills shockingly by breaking her neck–and Titus himself. Yet the body count doesn’t even begin to describe the depravity. The queen and emperor are dead, but only after Titus had fed them a pie made with the bones and entrails of the queen’s sons whom Titus has killed. He has slain these two sons because they had raped his daughter, cut out her tongue, and cut off both her hands.

Had enough? It is even stranger. In an earlier scene, Titus is a broken man. His poor daughter sits next to him, unable to speak of or point at her attackers. Her husband has been murdered by the queen as well, and her two brothers (Titus’ sons) have been set up and charged with the crime. In this particular scene, the queen’s henchman makes a deal with Titus. He will return the sons to their father in exchange for his hand. Titus chops off his hand and gives it to the man, who promptly returns with three bell jars, one containing Titus’ hand, the other two containing the heads of his sons. As the scene ends, Titus leaves the stage with one of the containers that holds his son’s head, his brother (who has found Titus in this pitiful condition) carries the other, and his poor daughter, with no hands of her own, carries the container holding her father’s hand in her mouth. This is perhaps the only pitiful scene in the play because the rest is so “over-the-top” violent that it become cartoonish. (I tried to count the number of dead, but kept losing track. Not counting his twenty-one dead sons that Andronicus is returning to the family grave in Rome when the play begins, I come up with 14 corpses, three dismembered limbs and two beheadings. Geeesh!)

Titus Andronicus comes early in Shakespeare’s career. It is his first attempt at tragedy, and he was capitalizing on the Elizabethan penchant for these bloody, revenge tragedies. And he was learning on the job. There seems to be little of the “interiority” in the characters, that self-awareness that will come later and that makes the characters of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear so human, and so tragic. He is working through the language, the germs of genius are evident, but he has not yet the confidence to take the linguistic leaps that he demonstrates as early as a year later.

As I walked out of the theater, I mentioned to the usher that I couldn’t believe that I was chuckling and smiling after what I had just witnessed. Maybe there IS something cathartic about it…but I don’t think so. Maybe it was the sheer boldness, the cleverness of the production, the wit of the design. I don’t know. I do know it was a very good night of theater and the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theater should be quite proud.

Later, when I got home I discovered that the play had been made into a film by Julie Taymor, Titus. I vaguely remembered this now. I guess it will be next on my movie list. But then that poses a question: Why?

Why, in recent years, has there been a major motion picture by a major director? Why does a small local theater choose to do a Shakespeare play that very few people are aware of? It had been all but forgotten until the mid-20th century when Peter Brooks famously staged it for the RSC with Vivian Leigh as the put-upon daughter, and then it took on a new life. In recent times, there have been many productions in the UK, in the US, in Japan, productions that emphasize the political…ones that emphasize the family dysfunction. (Click here for an interesting article on the history of the play’s performances.)

But the question remains: why? Why has it been reborn in our time?

Have we become inured to violence? Completely desensitized? Or does the extreme violence of the play now reflect our own violent world? Our own shattered realities? I wonder about my own experience at the performance–the violence of the play was not upsetting or revolting; it was, in fact, silly–and I am a person who for the most part shies away from violence in the films and books that I choose. As I said, the production was cartoonish and even slapstick. But then what does that say about us?

If art is supposed to make us think beyond our initial reaction, then my experience with Titus Andronicus was a success. I can’t get it out of my head.