#Spoken Word Theatre

[sophsun1]

#i want to study gale and his acting choices under a microscope

Queer as Folk – 2.14: The Dangers of Sex and Drugs

[daily-brain-worms]

"What do you want, Steph?"

"We've been watching you Gracie~ Someone's been a little....naughty~"

"Oh boy, a Spankoffski! I'm gonna have the whole set in my toybox!"

"Stephanie, yum yum!"

"Pay the price, or fuck off!"

- Pokey, Blinky, Tinky, Nibbly and Wiggly; spoken during 'The Summoning' from Nerdy Prudes Must Die by Team Starkid

Bonus: "Don't frighten him Pokey, you nasty boy~"

[albertxylin]

Touch

It's incredible what can be stripped away without losing meaning. Light, words, sound, Everything except the presence of another. How we communicate through our bodies, Through held hands and touching foreheads, Tight embraces and the feel of panting breath on skin, Cool and wet and yet the sweat evaporates anyway. Fingers draw circles as they map anatomy, Revelling in the joy of discovery Of a secret known by two. It is the gentle cupping of a face, The leaning in for a kiss, The intimacy of a shared bed And all the love undeniable even unsaid.

[ozkar-krapo]

Peter HANDKE [w/. Wayne HORVITZ]

"Radioplay"

(LP. Theatre For Your Mother. 1979) [AT]

[fideidefenswhore]

Despite relentless pressure to acknowledge her illegitimacy, Mary had always held out. But now, under the very real threat that her dear friends would otherwise go to the block for supporting her claim, Mary finally submitted and put her hand to the document that declared the invalidity of her parents' marriage and her own bastardy. The lives of Exeter, Carew, and their allies were saved, if only temporarily, by Mary's sacrifice, but their political influence had been shot.

Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Jessie Childs

[princesskuragina]

Brutus by the Buttress really is the king of songs that are bad to listen to (honorific). This sounds terrible I'm putting it on loop

[thestarlightforge]

“Is There A World”

3/15/24

******

My mood’s so fuckin erratic

Cause tell me why I’m ecstatic

Over one hearted text

From a pretty not-a-girl?

A joke I made look effortless

That took 3 hours to write—

Just like everything in my life:

Appearing mysteriously

Apparating as if magically

Never sharing the struggle

Like the wizard boy I always wanted to be—

Henry Rose Murphey.

Say his name, why don’t we?

I’m hungry for connection

But I hate my own voice

And I wish I knew how to make the choice

To treat those texts I send

The way I feel when I receive them:

Like little bursts of light sent along the weave.

I send them, and half the time, all that I perceive

Is “I’m a bother. A roach. A waste.”

That it’s what I get for taking up space.

I ask for conversation and feel needy

Even though logic says the feeling deceives me

Because if one them suggested

I’d trade a moment of savoring their voices,

That their little texts don’t have me rejoicing,

That they aren’t why I believe in magic to begin with,

I’d say, “that, there, is a myth

Deeper than Medusa.”

That despite my trauma,

Despite my fear of even looking their way,

I wish we could stay just like this, forever.

That sometimes, I wish they would cut off my head

Because at least then, if they go, they could take me instead

And my gaze, still, could guard them.

Speaking of the gays—

An unacceptable segue,

But the lesbian casting in Percy Jackson practically confirmed it—

I also hate how much of this

Is just outside hate turned inward,

Because children don’t start off this way.

Their hearts become corrupted because they learn to say

These cruel things to themselves and others.

And I wish it were, “If I had my druthers,

I’d go back and do it all again.”

Maybe then, I could pretend

My writer’s voice could fix it all,

That people there wouldn’t still install

These hateful thoughts inside my head,

And maybe, thereabouts, instead

I could find the right thing, at the right time, to say

To a younger me, or them—to make them stay.

Like one magic word was indeed too much,

And by editing a moment longer, such—

That I would never breathe this present day

Because my something else to say

Would’ve led to different Wonderlands—

I could have avoided this dread I know by heart.

Where, in the dead of night, I start

To chase self-hate down rabbit holes.

But Alice wouldn’t ever know

The feel of my loved ones’ shoulders

When we hug, when it’s quiet, because there’s nothing (and everything) left to discuss.

Love is a choice.

That’s a fact I don’t always like

Because it means, in fact, in spite

Of whatever you may feel,

In order for love to be real

It has to be given, and taken, and given back.

It means that love is an act.

Not of falsehood necessarily,

But one to be rehearsed, practiced carefully

Until you learn your lines, your relations, your space

And only then can you erase

That frailty in your spirit

From when you said “I love you,”

And then, they wouldn’t go near it.

But this need for recursion doesn’t always disturb me.

I admit, it took a lot of therapy

To believe this dark, ominous cloak

Wasn’t just some cosmic joke.

But after years of guided wandering,

I’ve found a glint of comfort, pondering

That rehearsal is my happy place.

It’s where I learned to gently trace

The outlines of a life in which

Someday, I could flip that switch

And understand that, when I talk,

My friends think, “I love you, too.”

A version where I start anew.

And maybe that can be true

With a little verse or a text.

Perhaps I won’t always panic,

Assessing what might happen next,

And learn to trust and love myself,

Recover a bit of mental health,

Because they are the stars

And my texts got a heart

And maybe, the warmth they give me, I give them, too—

And that’s a good enough start.

[markredfield]

In honor of the anniversary release of Stuart Gordon’s RE-ANIMATOR (18 October 1985) starring Jeffrey Combs…we invite you to listen to NEVERMORE~An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe !

Audible worldwide

& other fine audiobook retailers!

Another incredible collaboration from the RE-ANIMATOR team!

Written by Dennis Paoli, Directed by Stuart Gordon, Produced for audio by Mark Redfield. Recorded before a live audience!

RedfieldArtsAudio.com

[brianbilston]

2024 Tour

In the last few days, I’ve read poems in Ely, Birmingham, St Andrews, Edinburgh and Brighton; each event was lovely and special in its own way. A big thank you to everyone who came along to them, and indeed, to all the 15,000 people who have dragged themselves to my 59 shows this year. In terms of 2024, a couple of new dates have been added: BARROW-in FURNESS (19 Feb – with Henry Normal):…

[loplainlointhemorning]

my teeth hurt and I wanna kiss a girl so bad

[literarylondonhq]

End of Season/2nd Birthday Theatre Party!

Local celebs, actors, writers, producers, directors – and the parish Priest! – all came together for a celebration at the Tabard Pub Theatre in West London – Chiswick W4. Artistic Director Simon made a short speech.

[iceini]

12 Gifts Of The Holy Spirit

12 Gifts Of The Holy Spirit

Often have I told my friends the truth about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and have found myself wishing that I could give them a chance that would show them more of this truth which has been the delight of my youth, and to which I love to propagate, now that I am older. I declared my love for the gospel of our Lord and Savior through many preachings in the churches, to which I was sent as a…

[ardiebeaphotography]

Lia & Royal - Dear Best Friend 04 by ArdieBeaPhotography Via Flickr: My niece and her dance partner choreographed this piece to a spoken word poem with very, very sparse instrumentation behind it. The rhythm and 'melody' of the dance came almost entirely from their own movements as they interpreted the words. It was a stunning achievement of both dance and understanding. I came away from the night buzzing with all the amazing performances, but utterly overwhelmed by the depths and capability she had revealed in this extraordinary performance. She is awesome.

[albertxylin]

Birdsong of History

I hear the call of a bird that died out a century ago, Preserved in imperfect recordings Of second-hand whistles, The last ghost of an echo that cannot be heard Over the din of a busy parking lot. The truth of that song, Of the birds that nestled in trees now lost in the ocean, Of the land swallowed by rising seas, Is something we will never know again. Last words are often drowned out by the sound of dying.

Even as the last hollow-boned corpse falls into the water, Even as the bleached white skeleton is slowly overtaken by seafoam, It is rescued by a keen eye And reconstructed as best we can.

Someone thought to preserve what was already lost. Someone saw what was once there And it was beautiful. Someone learned of a song they will never hear And decided it was a story worth saving.

[ozkar-krapo]

Dylan THOMAS [v. Richard BURTON]

"Under Milk Wood"

(2LP. Argo. ? / rec. 1954) [GB]

[damienkarras73]

An essay on Furiosa, the politics of the Wasteland, Arthurian literature and realistic vs. formalistic CGI

Mad Max: Fury Road absolutely enraptured me when it came out nearly a decade ago, and I will cop to seeing it four times at the theatre. For me (and many others who saw the light of George Miller) it set new standards for action filmmaking, storytelling and worldbuilding, and I could pop in its Blu Ray at any time and never get tired of it. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was deeply apprehensive about the announced prequel for Fury Road's actual main character, Furiosa, even if Miller was still writing and directing. We didn't need backstory for Furiosa—hell, Fury Road is told in such a way that NOTHING in it requires explicit backstory. And since it focuses on the Yung Furiosa, it meant Charlize Theron couldn't return with another career-defining performance. Plus, look at all that CGI in the trailer, it can't be as good as Fury Road.

Turns out I was silly to doubt George Miller, M.D., A.O., writer and director of Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet One & Two.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is excellent, and I needn't have worried about it not being as good as Fury Road because it is not remotely trying to be Fury Road. Fury Road is a lean, mean machine with no fat on it, nothing extraneous, operating with constant forward momentum and only occasionally letting up to let you breathe a little; Furiosa is a classical epic, sprawling in scope, scale and structure, and more than happy to let the audience simmer in a quiet, almost painfully still moment. If its opening spoken word sequence by that Gandalf of the Wastes himself, the First History Man, didn't already clue you in, it unfolds like something out of myth, a tale told over and over again and whose possible embellishments are called attention to in the dialogue itself. Where Fury Road scratched the action nerd itch in my head like you wouldn't believe, Furiosa was the equivalent of Miller giving the undulating folds of my English major brain a deep tissue massage. That's great! I, for one, love when sequels/prequels endeavour to be fundamentally different movies from what they're succeeding/preceding, operating in different modes, formats and even genres, and more filmmakers should aim for it when building on an existing series.

This movie has been on my mind so much in the past week that I've ended up dedicating several cognitive processes to keeping track of all of the different ponderings it's spawned. Thankfully, Furiosa is divided into chapters (fun fact: putting chapter cards in your movie is a quick way to my heart), so it only seems fitting that I break up all of these cascading thoughts accordingly.

1. The Pole of Inaccessibility

Furiosa herself actually isn't the protagonist for the first chapter of her own movie, instead occupying the role of a (very crafty and resourceful) damsel in distress for those initial 30-40 minutes. The real hero of the opening act, which plays out like a game of cat and mouse, is Furiosa's mother Mary Jabassa, who rides out into the wasteland first on horseback and then astride a motorcycle to track down the band of raiders that has stolen away her daughter. Mary's brought to life by Miller and Nico Lathouris' economical writing and a magnetic performance by newcomer Charlee Fraser, who radiates so much screen presence in such relatively little time and with one of those instant "who is SHE??" faces. She doesn't have many lines, but who needs them when Fraser can convey volumes about Mary with just a flash of her eyes or the effortless way she swaps out one of her motorcycle's wheels for another. To be quite candid, I'm not sure of the last time I fell in love with a character so quickly.

You notice a neat aesthetic contrast between mother and daughter in retrospect: Mary Jabassa darts into the desert barefoot, clad in a simple yet elegant dress, her wolf cut immaculate, only briefly disguising herself with the ugly armour of a raider she just sniped, and when she attacks it's almost with grace, like some Greek goddess set loose in the post-apocalyptic Aussie outback with just her wits and a bolt-action rifle; we track Furiosa's growth over the years by how much of her initially conventional beauty she has shed, quite literally in one case (hair buzzed, severed arm augmented with a chunky mechanical prosthesis, smeared in grease and dirt from head to toe, growling her lines at a lower octave), and by how she loses her mother's graceful approach to movement and violence, eventually carrying herself like a blunt instrument. Yet I have zero doubt the former raised the latter, both angels of different feathers but with the same steel and resolve. Of fucking course this woman is Furiosa's mother, and in the short time we know her we quickly understand exactly why Furiosa has the drive and morals she does without needing to resort to didactic exposition.

Anyway, I was tearing up by the end of the first chapter. Great start!

2. Lessons from the Wasteland

Most movies—most stories, really—don't actually tell the entire narrative from A to Z. Perhaps the real meat of the thing is found from H to T, and A-G or U-Z are unnecessary for conveying the key narrative and themes. So many prequels fail by insisting on telling the A-G part of the story, explaining how the hero earned a certain nickname or met their memorable sidekick—but if that stuff was actually interesting, they likely would have included it in the original work. The greatest thing a prequel can actually do is recontextualize, putting iconic characters or moments in a new light, allowing you to appreciate them from a different angle. All of season 2 of Fargo serves to explain why Molly Solverson's dad is appropriately wary when Lorne Malvo enters his diner for a SINGLE SCENE in the show's first season. David's arc from the Alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant—polarizing as those entries are—adds another layer to why Ash is so protective of the creature in the first movie. Andor gives you a sense of what it's like for a normal, non-Jedi person to live under the boot of the Empire and why so many of them would join up with the Rebel Alliance—or why they would desire to wear that boot, or even just crave the chance to lick it.

Furiosa is one of those rare great prequels because it makes us take a step back and consider the established world with a little more nuance, even if it's still all so absurd. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe is an awesome, endlessly quotable villain, completely irredeemable, and basically a cartoon. He works perfectly as the antagonist of that breakneck, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote-ass movie, but if you step outside of its adrenaline-pumping narrative for even a moment you risk questioning why nobody in the Citadel or its surrounding settlements has risen up against him before. Hell, why would Furiosa even work for him to begin with? But then you see Dementus and company tear-assing around the wasteland, seizing settlements and running them into the ground, and you realize Joe and his consortium offer something that Dementus reasonably can't: stability—granted, an unwavering, unchangeable stability weighted in favour of Joe's own brutal caste system, but stability nonetheless. It really makes you wonder, how badly does a guy have to suck to make IMMORTAN JOE of all people look like a sane, competent and reasonable ruler by comparison?!?

…and then they open the door to the vault where he keeps his wives, and in a flash you're reminded just how awful Joe is and why Furiosa will risk her life to help some of these women flee from him years later. This new context enriches Joe and makes it more believable that he could maintain power for so long, but it doesn't make him any less of a monster, and it says a lot about Furiosa's hate for Dementus that she could grit her teeth and work for this sick old tyrant.

3. The Stowaway

Here's another wild bit of trivia about this movie: you don't actually see top-billed actress Anya Taylor-Joy pop up on screen until roughly halfway through, once Furiosa is in her late teens/early twenties. Up until this point she's been played by Alyla Browne, who through the use of some seamless and honestly really impressive CGI has been given Anya's distinctive bug eyes [complimentary]. It's one of those bold choices that really works because Miller commits to it so hard, though it does make me wish Browne's name was up on the poster next to Taylor-Joy's.

Speaking of CGI, I should talk about what seems to be a sticking point for quite a few people: if there's been one consistent criticism of Furiosa so far, it's that it doesn't look nearly as practical or grounded as Fury Road, with more obvious greenscreen and compositing, and what previously would've been physical stunt performers and pyrotechnics have been replaced with their digital equivalents for many shots. Simply put, it doesn't look as real! For a lot of people, that practicality was one of Fury Road's primary draws, so I won't try to quibble if they're let down by Furiosa's overt artificiality, but to be honest I'm actually quite fine with it. It helps that this visual discrepancy doesn't sneak up on you but is incredibly apparent right from the aerial zoom-down into Australia in the very first scene, so I didn't feel misled or duped.

Fury Road never asks you to suspend your disbelief because it all looks so believable; Furiosa jovially prods you to suspend that disbelief from the get-go and tune into it on a different wavelength. It's a classical epic, and like the classical epics of the 1950s and 60s it has a lot of actors standing in front of what clearly are matte paintings. It feels right! We're not watching fact, we're watching myth. I'm willing to concede there might be a little bit of post-hoc rationalization on my part because I simply love this movie so much, but I'm not holding the effects in Furiosa to the same standard as those in Fury Road because I simply don't believe Miller and his crew are attempting to replicate that approach. Without the extensive CGI, we don't get that impressive long, panning take where a stranded Furiosa scans the empty, dust-and-sun-scoured wasteland (75% Sergio Leone, 25% Andrei Tarkovsky), or the Octoboss and his parasailing goons. For the sake of intellectual exercise I did try imagining them filming the Octoboss/war rig sequence with the same immersive practical approach they used for Fury Road's stunts, however I just kept picturing dead stunt performers, so perhaps the tradeoff was worth it!

4. Homeward

Around the same time we meet the Taylor-Joy-pilled Furiosa in Chapter 3, we're introduced to Praetorian Jack, the chief driver for the convoys running between the Citadel and its allied settlements. Jack's played by Tom Burke, who pulled off a very good Orson Welles in Mank! and who I should really check out in The Souvenir one of these days. He's also a cool dude! Here are some facts about Praetorian Jack:

He's decked out in road leathers with a pauldron stitched to one shoulder

He's stoic and wary, but still more or less personable and can carry on a conversation

Professes to a certain cynicism, to quote Special Agent Albert Rosenfield, but ultimately has a capacity for kindness and will do the right thing

Shoots a gun real good

Can drive like nobody's business

So in other words, Jack is Mad Max. But also, no, he clearly isn't! He looks and dresses like Mad Max (particularly Mel Gibson's) and does a lot of the same things "Mad" Max Rockatansky does, but he's also very explicitly a distinct character. It's a choice that seems inexplicable and perhaps even lazy on its face, except this is a George Miller movie, so of course this parallel is extremely purposeful. Miller has gone on record saying he avoids any kind of strict chronology or continuity for his Mad Max movies, compared to the rigid canons for Star Trek and Star Wars, and bless him for doing so. It's more fun viewing each Mad Max entry as a new revision or elaboration on a story being told again and again generations after the fall, mutating in style, structure and focus with every iteration, becoming less grounded as its core narrative is passed from elder to youth, community to community, genre to genre, until it becomes myth. (At least, my English major brain thinks it's more fun.) In fact there's actually something Arthurian to it, where at first King Arthur was mentioned in several Welsh legends before Geoffrey of Monmouth crafted an actual narrative around him, then Chrétien de Troyes added elements like Lancelot and infused the stories with more romance, and then with Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory whipped the whole cycle together into one volume, which T.H. White would chop and screw and deconstruct with The Once and Future King centuries later.

All this to say: maybe Praetorian Jack looks and sounds and acts like Max because he sorta kinda basically is, being just one of many men driving back and forth across the wasteland, lending a hand on occasion, who'll be conflated into a single, legendary "Mad Max" at some point down the line in a different History Man's retelling of Furiosa's odyssey. Sometimes that Max rips across the desert in his V8 Interceptor, other times driving a big rig. Perhaps there's a dog tagging along and/or a scraggly and at first aggravating ally played by Bruce Spence or Nicholas Hoult. Usually he has a shotgun. But so long as you aren't trying to kill him, he'll help you out.

5. Beyond Vengeance

The Mad Max movies have incredibly iconic villains—Immortan Joe! Toecutter! the Lord Humongous!—but they are exactly that, capital V Villains devoid of humanizing qualities who you can't wait to watch bad things happen to. Furiosa appears to continue this trend by giving us a villain who in fact has a mustache long enough that he could reasonably twirl it if he so wanted, but ironically Dementus ends up being the most layered antagonist in the entire series, even moreso than the late Tina Turner's comparatively benevolent Aunty Entity from Beyond Thunderdome. And because he's played by Chris Hemsworth, whose comedic delivery rivals his stupidly handsome looks, you lock in every time he's on screen.

Something so fascinating about Dementus is that, for a main antagonist, he's NOT all-powerful, and in fact quite the opposite: he's more conman than warlord, looking for the next hustle, the next gullible crowd he can preach to and dupe—though never for long. For all his bluster, at every turn he finds himself in way over his head and writing cheques he can't cash, and this self-induced Sisyphean torment makes him riveting to watch. You're tempted to pity Dementus but it's also quite difficult to spare sympathy for someone who's so quick to channel their rage and hurt and ego into thoughtless, burn-it-all-down destruction. When you're not laughing at him, you're hating his guts, and it's indisputably the best work of Chris Hemsworth's career.

It's in this final chapter that everything naturally comes to a head: Furiosa's final evolution into the character we meet at the start of Fury Road, the predictable toppling of Dementus' precariously built house of cards, and the mythmaking that has been teased since the very first scene becoming diagetic text, the last of which allows the movie to thoroughly explore the themes of vengeance it's been building to. A brief war begins, is summarized and is over in the span of roughly a minute, and on its face it's a baffling narrative choice that most other filmmakers would have botched. But our man Miller's smart enough to recognize that the result of this war is the most foregone of conclusions if you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention, so he effectively brushes past it to get to the emotional heart of the climax and an incredible "Oh shit!" payoff that cements Miller as one of mainstream cinema's greatest sickos.

Fury Road remains the greatest Mad Max film, but Furiosa might be the best thing George Miller has ever made. If not his magnum opus, it does at least feel like his dissertation, and it makes me wish Warner Bros. puts enough trust in him despite Furiosa's poor box office performance that he's able to make The Wasteland. Absolutely ridiculous that a man just short of his 80th birthday was able to pull this off, and with it I feel confident calling him one of my favourite directors.