Marianne Faithfull, Arthur Miller, and Hams for Hamlet

Plus: Sleep No More props for sale

Quick Links

• Depending on when you read this there may still be time to bid on props from the long running Macbeth-and-Rebecca immersive theater mash up Sleep No More. Get the taxidermied javelina, Essex portrait, or silverware-salt-cross of your dreams!¹

• Junior Nyong’o has joined the Public Theatre’s already-stacked Twelfth Night cast (Bill Camp as Toby!) as Sebastian opposite his real-life sister Lupita as Viola.

• "My dad still likes to talk about the four-hour Winter’s Tale he had to sit through in the late 90s on the Lower East Side where I was in a rubber horse mask”²

• “O brave new world that has such…Just Stop Oil protesters in it?”

• Stella Adler via Isaac Butler on the difference between A Doll’s House and Hamlet: “At the end of Hamlet, everything is resolved because everyone is dead…The ending of A Doll’s House solves very little.”

• Arthur Miller’s first radio play was a 1939 comedy about Shakespeare forger William Henry Ireland. You can listen to it here and read here. There’s a Biff-like bit where William confesses to his father and manages to talk quietly and get down to the facts:

  WILLIAM: (GENUINELY) Oh, I'm sorry for you, Father. For you, I am sorry. But it's all your own fault.

  SAMUEL: But I would have read your verses if that is what you--

  WILLIAM: (INTERRUPTS) And you would have called them drivel, and so would you, gentlemen. But as soon as that drivel became two hundred years old and was signed by a great name, you sank to your knees before it! So, if an idiot can give the scholars some advice, sit you down again and study your Shakespeare, for if you knew your business, Shakespeare would be Shakespeare, and William Ireland, great! Good night, and forgive me, Father.

  Then the ghost of Shakespeare shows up and asks if “To be or not to be” is too long.³

• Did a freemason or a Latin-learning child doodle in this First Folio?⁴

• The B-school folks are back, this time using Shakespeare to illustrate the new concept of “teaming.”⁵

• Play On Names Taylor Bailey Interim Executive Director.

• “In 1912, in Chicago’s industrial hub by Lake Michigan, marionette mermaids performed Shakespeare’s works.”

• That time (1933) when you could trade “ham for Hamlet” at the Barter Theatre.

• Back in the halcyon days of June before this newsletter had proper headlines, I wrote that ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakes might merge, now they will.

• I mentioned the Love’s Labor’s Won in the Grolier’s “Imaginary Books” exhibition in a previous newsletter but neglected to mention Raymond Chandler’s threatened Shakespeare in Baby Talk with an essay on “As Ums Wikes It.”

• Globe actors attempt to explain the plot of Cymbeline in 60 seconds.⁶

• Tennant’s whispery Macbeth.⁷

• Even Shakespeare messed up restrictive clauses.

• The Folger has created a tabletop role-playing game called Fole-lios set in a “fantastical realization” of the Library.

• The RSC announced a hat trick of Hamlets.

• A yet-to-be built submarine will be known as HMS Achilles rather than HMS Agincourt “to avoid annoying the French.”

• The Acting Company’s Comedy of Errors directed by Devin Brain looks delightful, see if they are coming to a town near you.

• Why Henry IV Part I works well as a school tour: “we’re going into it with a completely blank slate.”

• Look, scheduling is always hard. (submitted via proxy by the lovely Jenn Deon who recently handed out Shakespeare by the Sea toques to an entire ballroom.)

• Hannah Khalil, the adaptor of Henry VIII at the Globe will be part of the Bristol Old Vic’s Five Year Commitment residency.

• Rehearsal photos: Hamlet at the RSC and Othello on Broadway.

Obituaries

• Marianne Faithfull, who played Ophelia opposite the let’s-say-mercurial Nicol Williamson.

  I had once played Ophelia on stage high on heroin – taking it just before the mad scene, it might even have helped in some perverse way.⁸

• Phyllis Dalton, costume designer of “Henry V” as well as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” and “The Princess Bride,” a film that she initially thought was “a load of rubbish.”

• Joyce Piven, director, teacher, and actor. Sarah Ruhl in American Theatre:

  Years later, in the Piven Theatre Workshop’s Young People’s Company, she had us repeat lines from Shakespeare over and over, exploring and heightening. “Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes: nothing of him that doth fade/but doth suffer a sea-change/into something rich and strange.” Last week I read that poem over the phone to Joyce while she was in the hospital, her daughter Shira holding the phone up to her ear. I wanted to remind Joyce that she’d been transforming all her life, so this latest transformation was nothing to fear.

Upcoming Talks

• February 3 – Whitney Trettien on “Baconian Quacks and the Origins of Digital Media” via UPenn’s Workshop in the History of Material Texts.

• February 25 – Rupert Goold on “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of Shakespeare Scenes via Notre Dame.

Recommendations

• A fatal lemon.

• The thermodynamics of cacio e pepe.

• Mickey Rooney’s Weene World was a very real thing.

• Crime and Punishment, ballet edition.

• Quentin Tarantino is writing a play.

• Opera sidebar: We could have had a Brahms opera about Melusine, Boston Lyric Opera does Hot Ones⁹ (Habaneros and habaneras), Salome’s props designer on severed heads, I love an opera with an added “woo!”

1. Also available: rocks in “fair” condition. Bidding starts at $100.

2. Greg is the menschiest of men. I assistant directed a show where he played a deeply un-excellent human onstage while remaining consistently lovely offstage. I’m reasonably sure I still have his opening night gift of a can of vodka soda in the back of my fridge.

3. The ultimate expression of this idea was yet to come.

4. Probably not. “The reader seems to have been a man from the eighteenth century.”

5. Collaboration. It’s collaboration. My dream of corporate Shakespeare is still Slings and Arrows-based and I have a powerful urge to avoid “how Shakespeare explains…” essays. Case in point: “It could be argued that to look at Shakespeare using evolutionary psychology is anachronistic but I’d suggest that it is far more so to read him through the denaturalised liberationist paradigm.” I can expand my universe without you, thank you.

6. Good Tickle Brain’s three panel summary and “spot the rogue plot element” may be helpful.

7. In the theater, audiences wore headphones but at the movies “the recording will be mixed to integrate the audio effects into the final experience.”

8. Slings and Arrows (two links in one week!) is firm on the subject: being high doesn’t help.

9. Re: Hot Ones – I’m still looking for the Shakespeare play where Peter Dinklage was bolted to the wall.