#flashbacks to literally every school project and most theatre jobs

[scripturient-manipulator]

Well, time to fix what other people fucked up. Again.

I’m the vice president of the LGBT+ club here at my college and it’s...not going great. It suffered under horrible leadership for several years before my time (enough so that people were harassed out of the club) and has since dwindled to powerpoint presentations. It’s a whole mess. But THIS is about Queer Monologues. For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s a night where people read pieces they’ve written about their experience being LGBT+. Poems, rants, true stories, complaints, their thoughts on a certain subject (we had several Leelah Alcorn pieces when that tragedy was recent). It’s a night to just be queer and talk about being queer. Now, as several of you have probably noticed, this semester has been a shitshow for me in terms of mental health. And the club hasn’t been much better. Our president has missed at least the first half of every meeting thus far because she’s too busy being at another group’s meeting. Which, by the way, is actively working against us. Yet she decides what happens, and throws some random powerpoint into my lap half an hour before club to present. And she has some...not thought out views on recent activity and people. Nothing is happening, the club is not a fun place to come to. The one (1) time she said she would be coming on time I took the night off because I couldn’t handle myself much less anything else and had been barely functioning at meetings the other times. And what happens? She doesn’t come on time. Which leaves our poor secretary (who I try to make sure never has to talk because he’s incredibly anxious) and treasurer up the creek without a paddle or any warning they’d be there. And the presentation she’d put together was a bunch of clips of the new Rocky Horror Picture Show. So our treasurer does really well, she gets people talking for once, discussing the good and bad and the club’s going well and are agreeing that there were some issues when you have a trans woman play Frankenfurter when labels and gender identity and all sorts of stuff get thrown into the mix and get considered in historical context (my buds, I am not having a discussion on that point, I wasn’t even there) and she comes in and, without reading the room or asking what they were saying, loudly proclaims that she loved the movie and thought it was better than the original.

SO right now we’re at a point where I’ve been ignored in saying that we need to get organizing for Queer Monologues because it’s on November 29th and there’s been many mishaps in communicating with the people who helped us last year because she will give me zero (0) definites on anything. Now this is an event you gotta start planning early. People have to know about it, they have to commit to writing pieces, they have to write the pieces, you have to veto or let in the pieces because we’re not going to allow stuff like “hi I’m gay and we should all kill ourselves” or unintentional whoopses like how last year my poem got vetoed because it was celebrating trans people who were alive and accidentally had a line that could be read as dissing those who have passed away/committed suicide. Which wasn’t meant, and they knew that, but it could have been taken that way and triggered someone, so it was rightly removed.

None of that has happened. We literally had the informational this past Monday, and one person showed up to that. One. For a wildly popular event that at least forty people showed up to last year and that was a small crowd. And I want to use this next meeting on Monday as a writing time but our president refuses to because she’s sure that people will write over Thanksgiving break and “all we can do is promote the event”. Augggghhhh. And I’m not confident enough to say “fuck it, she’s not here, it’s writing night boys and girls” because A) anxiety and B) I’m still recovering from being the most burnt out I’ve ever been in the last couple years and C) that is some fuck-you-ing I am not emotionally prepared to face the repercussions of right now.

Now she’s just like “yeah I’ll spam email some people who haven’t even shown up to club but they signed our sheet at the Club Fair so” and I’m just like uuugggghhhh we have nothing right now. So what am I doing? Shooting off emails and praying that very busy college students will somehow find it in their time to prepare for a quickly-upcoming event that’s not only A) after a break but B) coming up on finals time so it’ll be another thing for them to write. I’m gonna be going to another club on Tuesday if they let me and basically I’ll be racing around trying to make something work because once again I am the only member of a group project who’s doing anything and the only costume designer who will do anything. Oof.

[rndyounghowze]

Hamlet by Aquila Theatre at Stockton College in Galloway, NJ

Something's rotten in the state of Jersey with Aquila Theatre’s touring production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare which stopped at Stockton College for a performance. This production directed by Desiree Sanchez brings something more than Shakespeare but the question of existence itself. Hamlet is the center of a 400 year old story of woe and intrigue. Someone has murdered Hamlet’s father. Gertrude, his mother, has married Claudius, his uncle. What's worse Horatio has seen his father’s ghost has come back from the dead with a message: “I have been murdered and you must avenge my death” Add in the schemings of Polonius who thinks Hamlet is just a lovesick puppy over his daughter Ophelia, the meddling of his parents who use Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to keep tabs on him, and the well wishes of his friend Horatio and you can tell that Hamlet is soon to be torn at the seams by everyone’s expectations of him. How is he going to fulfill every obligation? Does he even want to go on at all? Desiree Sanchez as director worked together with the cast and crew to bring something visceral to the play. When someone watches Hamlet it is easy to watch with your upper brain, the one that wants to dissect it as literature. But through skillful work with actors and long work with designers to shape sound and light she presented a piece that brought us back to the caveman’s campfire. We’re watching Shakespeare in modern dress but we're also talking about the oldest questions of life, family, legacy, and what would we do to preserve each if death were crouching just outside the light in the darkness. I think that she did a wonderful job bringing actors to that dark edge while still making it something that they can do over and over while on national tour. She also seems to curate the whole picture using physical bodies, light, set, and costumes to make the whole experience. Some directors you can tell whether they favor working with actors more or whether they are just putting bodies on stage under pretty lights. Sanchez rides that line down the middle and uses all the resources at hand. That's a perfect skill to have while designing a national tour.

Our cast of eight may as well have been a cast of thousands with the kind of energy they brought to the production. Lewis Brown (Hamlet) gives us a character of struggle. He brings the full body and voice into what he does. I once always thought that Hamlet’s soliloquies were purely verbal and mental but you could tell he was leaning his whole body into it. He turned the iambic pentameter into a physical effort and showed us not only struggle with people but the struggle between the forces in his head. Lauren Drennan’s (Ophelia) did something that I never knew could happen. She made me feel sorry for Ophelia. There is always a sense of naive innocence when you talk about Ophelia and in her voice and her tone she started there but then as things got real and her life started falling apart she turned that innocence into a train wreck. She melded her voice and her body and her energy to become something that made me shiver. During her talk about the flowers I wanted to look away but found I couldn't. I wanted to run onstage, scoop her up, and take her away. Drennan brought her whole acting training to bear to make a character that made me feel guilty for sitting still. Now that was talent! Tyler La Marr (Horatio) served as a Sergeant in the Marine Corps and did two tours in Iraq. What better person to play a man do torn between duty to his country and duty to his prince. Immediately I found a man who was honorbound and struggling with those convictions usually willing to die for them but in his case brave enough to live for them. Kudos! My hat goes off to Guy de Villiers (Claudius) and Rebecca Reaney (Gertrude) who made me feel dirty as the king and queen. But it's also hard to play a king and queen that people hate but they still are captured by and have to take notice of onstage. There were times where I didn't believe their chemistry but I didn't know if that was because their characters literally had none in the story or if their performance was slightly off. I do feel however that it's something that is not as vague in most of their performances of this play. James Lavender played a host of characters from Polonius to the Ghost to the Grave Digger (as well as Osric). I want to focus on the work that he did as Polonius and the Ghost though. Playing both those fathers he brought forth the theme of legacy in the face of mortality. He brought a warmth to Polonius that I haven't seen and a tragic anguish to the Ghost that I've never seen. It really is a touching performance from such a versatile actor.

My hat is also off to Harriet Barrow and Michael Rivers who had to both play the parts of the players and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I felt that they did the best that could playing two characters that seemed to have conflicting emotions. And motivations. In fact I don't know if the director made the right choice putting the characters together at all. But I so admire the actors for pulling off the feat this mashup presented. Barrow pulls off a wonderful performance as Marcellus and the priest. I feel that I loved Rivers’ Bernardo far more than I did his Laertes and I'm not sure that's supposed to happen. Rivers was obviously at home in Shakespeare and while one of his characters left something to be desired I truly admired his professional caliber performance.

I also want to give a lot of credit to lighting design by Joel Moritz, sound design by Andy Evan Cohen, projections by Lianne Arnold, and Lara de Bruijn’s work on costumes. Together they took a minimal touring production and made every little element have meaning. Even a shift in costume, a square of light, and a piercing shriek of sound could be a major change in psychology or plot. It's such a breathtaking piece of art that these guys have collaborated on and you must go see it!

When you're directing or producing Shakespeare you’re always wearing two hats. The first hat is the director who must become an advocate and lover of this story and bring together a team of artists on one solid mission to bring it to the stage. The second hat is one of an adaptor who must turn a five act Elizabethan script intended for an ancient stage into a two act piece of modern theatre. Unless you're directing museum theatre you're no longer performing Shakespeare in the way it was originally intended. Director Desiree Sanchez also wore these two hats and I don't envy her that job even while I celebrate her work. To adapt Shakespeare in one sense is to make no one happy. There is half the audience that is having flashbacks from years of English teachers shoving the bard down their throats and half the audience are Shakespeare devotees who have seen or read it several times and will swoon the minute they hear a soliloquy or get outraged the minute they see something they love get cut. But like I said earlier to produce Shakespeare today is to change it. So essentially half the audience won't care and half the audience wants to take you out back after the show and punish you for your “crimes”.

This is what made Sanchez’s adaptation so surprising. I first noticed something was awry when the first act was over and I saw some clamor amongst some audience members around us. The person next to me and my wife asked us “Did you notice that they cut “To Be or Not To Be”? My first reaction was to shrug and go “wait did they?” My wife, who is often far faster on the uptake than me snapped her fingers and went “that's what was missing!” The circle of humanity around us seemed a buzz. As if they were saying, “How dare they cut that one piece?” But I was desperately searching my brain trying to figure out where it was supposed to be. You have to understand that I'm a mixture of these two types of people in the audience. I was force fed Shakespeare in high school and then became a lover or him in college and grad school. I went from saying we should never produce Shakespeare again to saying we should desperately revive him and the old canon. The through line of this is that I've had to read, memorize, and discuss that speech my whole academic life. How could I have been watching Shakespeare so intently that I forget that soliloquy!

Right as the lights were going down for the second act my wife said, “We saw what they did with ‘Murder on the Nile’ I bet they’ll put it somewhere in the second act.” I was dubious but found myself silently rooting for her as the show went on. Then it came to the scene at the graveyard. We know that Claudius and Laertes have hatched a plot to kill him. We have already seen him hold the skull of a dear beloved Yoric in his hands. We see Hamlet and Laertes fight over the body of Ophelia. Most of us know the ending is coming. We know that most of these characters are not long for this world. We know that Hamlet will soon go to a grave of his own.

And then Hamlet comes on stage again with these images of life and death fresh in our minds. He comes onstage at a time where both of these predescribed factions of the audience know the plot and then begins to utter those immortal words. A silent hush fell over the audience. My wife grabbed my arm and I was shocked. Not by the audacity of changing the script but because how much weight those words had in that moment. In a graveyard of dry bones with murder plots abound where we know death is imminent Hamlet doesn't talk about life or death. He talks about existence and whether he wants to be on this or not. The sheer weight and density of that moment became so palpable that it lay like a heavy blanket over the whole audience. Sanchez didn't just awake our visceral selves in this play but got two steps ahead of our brains and played our emotions like an instrument. She made Shakespeare new to people who had seen it a million times. Maybe there were some people left in the torch and pitchfork contingent but the standing ovation at the end of the play tells me there weren't many. I got home home and looked up Hamlet and there it was in Act Three. “To be or not to be that is the question”.originally the lamenting of a young man (what my wife calls an “emo teen”) Sanchez made it into the heavy thoughts of a suffering adult. Hamlet seemed to grow up in this version. I also found a myriad of characters that I had totally forgotten were in the play. Aquila Theatre managed to make an old play, not one of my favorites even, and make it hit me where I live. Not only that it hacked my memory and made me watch the play with my emotions not my theatre degree. And for that rare and special gift I give them thanks.