#even if he does make Shakespeare incredibly slutty

[ingravinoveritas]

I think it's somewhat amazing that David did happily play Lump. I watched this yesterday and went through a process of unbelieving delight. Ever since Doctor Who he is in the position to turn down every role offered to him, he can choose from a large number of projects, he has that standing now and has had it for years. And then he gets this absolutely ridiculous script, reads these lines, and thinks 'the voice of the naughty and shameless heart of a lesbian who doesn't want to die a virgin and tries to get it on with her nurse? Sign me up'. This isn't something he got a lot of money for, this isn't something that's going to get a lot of attention, this isn't, without meaning to disregard the creative process, a piece of big artistic value, it's really only fun. Do you know what I mean? I don't know how to phrase it better and in a way that doesn't sound too derogative, because that's in no way how I want to come across, I just think I'm not the only person who wouldn't have watched this by reading the premise alone, if it weren't for David's name in it? I also think I only enjoyed it *because* of David's voice acting, which really had me giggling a lot and made the whole thing so funny and charming in the first place. The fact that this role wasn't something he turned his nose up at/that this script wasn't something he thought of as too ridiculous... that's just so amazing to me, in the best way? Although I don't know why I'd even be surprised, seeing that David has never been scared of doing comedy and that he's always been willing and able to put on silly costumes and say the most absurd lines, all the while still managing to absolutely sell it. It's just never awkward with him. Somehow it's always art and high level acting, even if we're talking about an indecent, lewd, glaswegian vital organ. Incredible.

Hello, Anon. First of all, “Lewd Glaswegian Vital Organ” is totally going to be the name of my new punk band. Point blank, period. So thank you for that glorious turn of phrase. I completely get what you are saying about David taking the role of Lump, and if I may offer my interpretation: It’s the fact that he doesn’t think the role is beneath him. Like you said, he was in Doctor Who and has had his pick of parts ever since then. He’s done Shakespeare, for crying out loud, and I’m sure we could list at least a few Shakespearean actors who would consider “lowbrow” humor to be beneath them.

But it is a testament to the kind of actor David is and the kind of person he is that he has never thought of himself as being “too good” for a comedic role. It makes me think of the joke in the movie Galaxy Quest, with Alan Rickman’s character Sir Alexander Dane:

“I played Richard III. There were five curtain calls. I was an actor once, damn it! Now look at me. Look at me!”

Another example is the Tony Awards several years ago, when it was hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, and the epic opening number he did where several celebrities in the audience were part of the act. He bounced over to Al Pacino at one point and joked, “Al Pacino. You’re way too famous to participate in this bit!” And that is the exact antithesis of David, who has never acted like he is “too famous” for anything.

The other thing, too, is what you said about David not being scared to do comedy. He doesn’t write it off as a “silly” thing or give it less weight and/or attention than his dramatic roles...he actually takes it seriously. A wonderful example of this is his role as Davina. While that was before he was famous, the role existed in the context of a comedy show, yet David played it seriously. He didn’t play her as a caricature or a mockery of trans women, but as a fully realized character. David made Davina funny because of how she was able to fuck with the other characters and be better/smarter/wittier than them, not because of her being trans.

He also did the same thing with Crowley. David never made Crowley’s genderfluidity the butt of the joke, and made Nanny Ashtoreth a real character. The humor in Nanny wasn’t from David being dressed in drag, but from singing a lullaby about pain and death. He is a talented actor because he is dedicated to every role he plays, to understanding those characters and turning situations into humor, rather than people.

So yes, I agree with everything you’ve said here, Anon. We are so fortunate that David is as wonderful as he is, and we are lucky to have him...

[just-sort-of-happened]

Remember in 15x05 when Lilith says that God has a, “...very weird, very pervy obsession with”, Dean?” (Starts around 2:30)

Like, he died getting stabbed in the back, being penetrated, up against a wall, tenderly touching foreheads w someone. Like, it’s a very feminine, sexualized death that you expect a sexy female character like Ruby to get. She gets meta boned by Dean while Sam holds her arms and she makes an O face. A stabbing is a symbolic kind of rape and a sexy stabbing is a mainstay of horror movies. Why we would tolerate this tripe in the case of Ruby’s death is that, well, this is her nemesis, in the original sense of the word: in a just world, this is what she has coming, no pun intended.

In the end, Chuck, the evil creator, the writers the network, get their pervy Dean death and the ending where one brother dies, as predicted all season, because as Lilith says, “foreshadowing!”

Like, self-consciously pointing out how perverted and predictable your ending is going to be doesn’t make it more interesting, meta or clever. It’s just crap that knew it was crap all along.

Lilith even says Chuck is not Shakespeare, he’s more like a third-rate Dean Koontz. Warning the audience you’re about to screw up the ending does not make the ending good.

When Dean and Sam are arriving at the vampire lair, on their last case, Dean says it looks like, “something out of Wes Craven’s erotic fantasies”. Now, I’m thinking he said that because saying, “wet dream”, might have been too racy for TV but still adding the word, “erotic”, there, really sets the stage. A third rate hack who is sexually obsessed with Dean is about to give him a sexploitation horror movie ending.

Did you know Wes Craven directed porn before becoming a horror movie director? Did you know his first horror movie is the infamous sexploitation, rape-revenge flick, “The Last House of The Left”, (1972)? If it feels like Dean got fucked, or even raped, in this ending, it’s because he did.

If you’ve ever seen Night of the Living Dead (1968), then you know (spoilers ahead) that one of the finest heroes of our time, Ben, does the right thing at every turn. He is strong, intelligent, brave and a true leader under extreme pressure. At the end, once he’s managed to be the only survivor of his party, he is gunned down by the police who assume he is a zombie, on sight.

This legendarily bleak ending works because this is a horror movie. The end itself is a horror. This is the feeling I get when I watch Dean die this cheap, bizarre, sexualized death: that this is a horror episode and he’s getting a horror death. All other genres used in the show be damned.

After embracing the drama side of the show to its fullest, after having the real emotional climax of the show be Cas’s confession, the writers the network decided to dispose of Dean Winchester like he was a horror movie bimbo, being punished for giving us so many boners.

It had already occurred to me that maybe the whole driving force behind the show has always been Jensen Ackles’ sex appeal. It is that sex appeal that created, I think accidentally, W*ncest and then, slightly less accidentally, Destiel. The raison d’être of the show is to watch hot guys be hot. But the protagonist of the show was so hot that anyone you put him next to seems to want to fuck him.  If you're a writer who admittedly also has the hots for Dean/Jensen Ackles then at the end maybe you have to punish him for this hotness.  In a slasher film the slutty woman dies first, as a punishment.  The last woman standing, or, ‘final girl’, is usually a virgin, a, ‘good girl’.  This is literally why Dean had to die and Sam had to survive.  Dean is the slutty, excessively sexy, bisexual, epicentre of the lust of everyone, men, women, creatures: everybody.

I really think that the original concept of the show is homoerotic: two guys having adventures, on the road.  To no-homo that concept they made the two guys brothers but because they’re sexy and they have chemistry people shipped them, anyway, against logic.  So, to diffuse this awkward situation they introduced Castiel, to siphon away some of that tension.  Now, we got another hot guy who has chemistry with Dean and is not his brother, the show runners could breathe a sigh of relief.  But, then the Cas character evolves to be a dude whose whole life revolves around Dean and Dean also really, really cares about this, ‘weird little dude’, and the subtext ramps up to incredibly high levels.  Like, the thing is just text a lot of the time.  Dean’s bisexuality also ramps up from subtext to text.  The fans love it.  Or don’t see it, depending on who they are.

Then, when it’s time to see how it’s going to resolve: Cas, the angel, literally an angel, gets to express his love but Dean, sinful, sexy Dean, he does not.  He gets to die, not for love, but for fate.  A fate sealed in the beginning of the narrative when he was the bad boy and Sam was the good boy and the bad girl dies and the good girl survives.

Maybe it was supposed to be a return to genre: to give them a horror movie ending.  Even the last of the denouement feels like a horror movie.  Heaven, soft-focus, empty, shallow: doesn’t it feel like the end of Carrie (1976), when everything is so good that you immediately feel fear?  Then a hand reaches up from the ground and drags the only survivor under?  The hand that grabs you and pulls you under is when you realize that this facile, stock nightmare is the ending.  

[directlywithlizzie]

Director’s Notebook: Sense and Sensibility

Let the research begin!

The Journey to Jane

After spending a delightful autumn with the Bennet sisters staging Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley for Oregon Contemporary Theatre, I’m looking forward to Spring with the Dashwoods. Prior to these projects I had fairly limited experience with Jane Austen’s novels. I’m a embarrassed to admit now, I was for a long time reluctant to read them, echoing the extremely sexist sentiment expressed by some of my male friends and fellow English majors in college, “I’m not interested in trivial stories about women tittering about the house gossiping about marriage.” No, no! I wanted to read serious literature in college, the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Milton! For a long time I was under the delusion propagated by some in academic circles that there was “Literature” and then there were a number of literary subcategories by authors other than White Cis-Gendered and Male to be studied in specialized elective topics courses.  The capital “L” GREAT LITERATURE was canonized because it was assumed to be capital “U” UNIVERSAL while everything else, while perhaps possessing literary merit, was somehow less-than. Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf might get a passing nod in a British Literature survey course, but Kazuo Ishiguro or Zadie Smith? Forget it! Because if, God-forbid, too many white women or people of color became required reading, it would come at the cost of some poor dead, white male author . . . and then where would we be?

It wasn’t until graduate school that I found feminism and began to discover how patriarchy and white supremacy permeated even the most liberal spaces of society. (I know . . . right?) At one point, an old white, male tenured professor gave the grad students a list of several hundred capital “G” Great Plays “every theatre graduate student must read” before even considering a career in academia. The list was (unsurprisingly) white and male. The only female playwrights that appeared were Aphra Behn and Lorraine Hansberry and the only people of color were Luis Valdez, August Wilson, and (again) Lorraine Hansberry. I argued in a small seminar course with said Old White Tenured Professor about the need to open up the canon, that if we weren’t actively working to do this . . . then who would? Students would never know about Catherine Trotter, Margaret Cavendish, Hrosvitha, George C. Wolfe, Suzan-Lori Parks, Cherrie Moraga, and Lynn Nottage to name a few. He smiled in that kindly patronizing Old White Tenured Professor way and said, “Sure, we should read these authors, but does that mean we don’t read Shakespeare anymore?”

In my mid-twenties, I discovered how my education and life experience, for all its privilege, had deprived me of perspectives not fixed in white-maleness. In literature, pop culture, and life experience, my existence was always as other, always on the fringes of what the mainstream considered to be some idea of “Universal” humanity. My girlhood icons were so limited: Princess Leia and Tela were rare females amidst a sea of men on quests to save the galaxy. I came to consume and mimic the male comic voices of Monty Python, 90s era Saturday Night Live where women were generally dismissed or entirely absent. I reveled in “boy’s club” humor that lampooned women as frivolous, stupid, or slutty. I took pride in the fact that most of my friends were male, that I was “one of the guys” and took the comment “you write like a man,” as the greatest possible compliment. My literary heroes were Holden Caulfield and Benjamin Bradock. Looking back, I see a young girl whose tastes and interests were shaped by patriarchal assumptions that women simply matter less. At the time I would proudly say something like, “Well, if they were good enough, then they would have made it!” Good enough by what standard? I never thought to ask that question. I was always a voracious reader and I could have found Jane Austen and the Brontes on my own . . . but people don’t know what they don’t know. And what I “knew” then, reinforced in and outside the classroom, was that my time was better spent admiring Joseph Heller than Louisa May Alcott.

And all that time . . . Jane Austen had been waiting for me with something I would have loved all along. In 2009, I directed Arcadia, my first Main Stage production at Oregon State University. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play captured my imagination during a high school trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Arcadia wasn’t the first play I ever saw or was affected by, but it was the first play that truly gave me pause to say: Theatre can do that!?! In some ways Arcadia influenced me to pursue a career in theatre. The script is incredibly witty, smart, and romantic . . . and the setting in a late 18th century English country estate and precious heroine makes it all the more appealing!

Here in 2019 I get to revisit many of the same themes and the visual aesthetic I had the pleasure of exploring ten years ago. Sense and Sensibility and Arcadia are, of course, stylistically two very different plays, but they do share similar themes of status, social class, and clever young women struggling with their roles in “polite society” of the 1790s. Young Thomasina, the math prodigy at the center of Arcadia, possesses wit and imagination well beyond her years and cloistered experience as the only daughter of Lord and Lady Croom. Thomasina shows little interest in fulfilling her duty to “marry well,” and instead pours her passion and energy into her studies and her tutor and friend, Septimus Hodge. Thomasina, like many Jane Austen heroines, exists within her society as an outsider-insider, a misfit within the upper-crust. Like Lizzy Bennet or Emma Woodhouse, she possesses her own mind and asserts her agency, however unlike them, Thomasina meets a tragic fate while Austen’s characters experience unambiguously happily-ever-afters. Thomasina Coverly has been one of my favorite characters in all of literature since I was fifteen years old, long before I knew anything about her literary predecessors. In a roundabout way, she was my gateway into appreciating the worlds of Pemberley or Barton Park. Without knowing it, I adored Jane Austen before having actually read any Jane Austen.

More to come as the process gets underway!