Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

Good but the usual Greenblatt treatment - take a subject about whom almost nothing is factually known, and build out the social/intellectual/historical era around the black hole of the character's existence, and posit how he must have participated.

Marlowe is regarded as being Shakespeare's progenitor with his plays TAMBURLAINE, DR. FAUSTUS, and THE JEW OF MALTA. He was the first playwright to succesfully use blank verse in his works, and though Shakespeare surpassed Marlowe by a stunning margin, it's possible to see how Marlowe had to come first.

Watched SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE again last night, in which Kit Marlowe features.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

 

Re-reading this after seeing it superbly performed by Scena Theatre at the old Source Theatre building at 14 and T Streets NW.

Up Against It by Joe Orton

 

Familiar Orton ground - the unusual nature of this treatment is that it was (allegedly) considered by Brian Epstein and the Beatles for their follow-up film to HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Would have been amazing to see - although Orton cut the main characters from four to two. The action is predicatable - damaged, violent, crime-focused young men attack - and are attacked by - a damaged, violent, criminal society.

Togdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

 

Re-read this at the beginning of the month, and three days ago saw the powerful production at Round House Theatre in Bethesda. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, for good reason: sort of a True-West-in-the-ghetto drama about two brothers trying to succeed in life and love by switching places, with resonant echoes of a broken family and their inheritances from that.

Rough Crossing by Tom Stoppard

 

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Re-reading Waiting for Godot after all these years, in the midst of finishing up Deirdre Bair's biography of Beckett, I'm struck by the simplicity and insistence of the text. Generations now have tried to apply some sort of symbolic system on the play: it's about slavery, it's about the existence of God, it's about communism. Beckett himself always rejected all these sorts of filters, arguing, as a poet might, that it's about the words. Concentrate on the words and exclude ideology, and the weirdness of the words and characters and situation create their own system.

Up Against It: A Screenplay for the Beatles by Joe Orton

Just saw A HARD DAY'S NIGHT again so was thinking of this fateful final creation of Joe Orton's. Sort of silly really, but I still like it, as I do all things Orton.

Hurlyburly by David Rabe

 as astonishing as ever to re-read. bleak and hilarious.  word-storms.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

GREAT graphic novel.  Like the show OCR too, but it seems to be just the sheen of the novel without the grit. Going to see it March 10.

Rick Foucheux as King Lear at Avant Bard Theatre, Arlington VA

I am sure my love's more richer than my tongue.  Cordelia

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.  Lear

The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft.  Lear

Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow upon the foul disease.  Kent

Fosse by Sam Wasson

Clybourne Park, a play by Bruce Norris

Penelope by Enda Walsh

Wow, what a thing this play is! A 90 minute crucible of poetry, vaudeville, little magic and mime, Herb Alber tunes, 9000 jokes and four men in speedos wooing Odysseus' wife. No intermission. Couldn't breathe until I got home.

Just finished reading it, a whole different, lesser experience. Still extraordinary though.

Old Times by Harold Pinter

The Rivalry at Ford's Theatre

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

Playboy, Shadow of the Glen

Saw the extraordinary Druid Theatre Company's production of The Playboy of the Western World and The Shadow of the Glen at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theatre Thursday night. 150 minutes plus of spell-binding language. Synge would be the Irish Shakespeare, if there were such a thing, but he's too Irish: not one word when a hundred will do, a black comedy that has your face splitting with a grin until the last fifteen minutes when it gets mighty grim might fast.

CHRISTY -- [turning to the door, nearly speechless with rage, half to himself.] -- To be letting on he was dead, and coming back to his life, and following after me like an old weazel tracing a rat, and coming in here laying desolation between my own self and the fine women of Ireland, and he a kind of carcase that you'd fling upon the sea...

WIDOW QUIN -- [more soberly.] -- There's talking for a man's one only son.

CHRISTY -- [breaking out.] -- His one son, is it? May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy divils in the twists of the road, and one old timber leg on him to limp into the scalding grave. (Looking out.) There he is now crossing the strands, and that the Lord God would send a high wave to wash him from the world.

WIDOW QUIN -- [scandalised.] Have you no shame? (putting her hand on his shoulder and turning him round.) What ails you? Near crying, is it?

CHRISTY -- [in despair and grief.] -- Amn't I after seeing the love-light of the star of knowledge shining from her brow, and hearing words would put you thinking on the holy Brigid speaking to the infant saints, and now she'll be turning again, and speaking hard words to me, like an old woman with a spavindy ass she'd have, urging on a hill.

WIDOW QUIN. There's poetry talk for a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop.

Then I went to Giant at 11:15 PM to buy coffee, not a soul in the store except one guy in the Coffee aisle, an old friend I hadn't seen in two years, about to finish his undergraduate degree at the age of 42.

Last night, cross-dressed at a Halloween party.

I'm exhausted.