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infinitelytheheartexpands · 5 months

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on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, the sudden onset of grief when you weren’t in the room where it happened, and the impossible art of growing up in a very short time: or, why the princess of france from love’s labour’s lost means a lot to me personally

on the heels of reading as the princess of france with @socialshakespeare

heads up, the rest of this is going to get Very Long Very Quickly, so i’m putting it under a cut. tw for discussions of cancer, parental death, and grief.

so when @socialshakespeare announced that it would be doing love’s labour’s lost this month, in the box where you can put any additional notes about your casting preferences, i pretty much begged the admins to let me have a turn as the princess of france. y’know, i said, as a sort of twenty-first birthday present. and i was cast as the princess of france! thank you, socshakes! <3

but there was a very specific reason why i asked to play the princess of france.

and that reason is simply: she reminds me of me. more particularly, she reminds me of me from 2020, but me from 2020 was really the germination point of me today.

“savannah, everyone changed in 2020, 2020 was a fucking unbelievable year and it changed us all. it changed our whole world.” yeah. i’m well aware. but there’s a specific reason for me.

***

see, in early 2020, i was having a pretty decent time, actually. it was my senior year of high school, i had a great group of friends (much like the princess had her three ladies except my core friend group was bigger than that), things with my family weren’t great but i knew that come august i would be able to move out.

that first period of covid was awful and it changed so much and at times it felt like i was having a mental breakdown, but it wasn’t what ultimately ripped me apart that year.

you see, in 2018, about a month before my fifteenth birthday, my father was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. for a good long while, though, it seemed like he might beat the odds. treatments were working, he went to one of the best hospitals in the country to get good care, and we believed that he just might make it.

and then in the summer of 2020, things rapidly took a turn for the worse.

on july 20, 2020, we all got sat down and told that the treatments weren’t working anymore, and they had elected to put my father on hospice care. i sobbed all that night and into the next morning, but i had a cashier job that summer at walmart. i was an essential worker and i had to power through.

in love’s labour’s lost, everyone knows even before the princess arrives that her father is extremely sick. for heaven’s sake, it’s why the princess is there in the first place instead of the king. and yet the princess powers through. there’s deals to be made, familial honor to be defended, and there’s also that tiny matter of falling in love and playing with the joy and laughter that come with it. and the princess embraces it.

she is young, she is optimistic, she is a bit sheltered maybe yet so smart, she has devoted friends, she has seemingly all the time in the world because no one knows when the time runs out so might as well believe it never will, right?

my high school graduation came five days later, on july 25. a rare opportunity to see friends then and, at long last, after a two-month delay and twelve years of study before that, a chance to celebrate. relatives came in. we had cake and flowers. we took photos on the soccer field in 90-degree weather but it didn’t matter because we were together and we were so full of joy on that blue-sky day.

and after that, only nineteen days until leaving. i had been counting the days for months, excited for new possibilities, not understanding the impact. it would be easy, i thought. all that needed done were to pack my bags and suitcases and buy some last-minute things, say my goodbyes for now to my favorite people, enjoy every moment i could, and wait in a haze of delightful agony and optimism until the morning of august 13 came.

this went as planned for about three days.

july 29, 2020, started like any other day. i got my things together, had an argument with my stepmom about doing the dishes (you said i can’t do the dishes when it’s late and everyone’s asleep after i get off work, when do you expect me to do them), decided to start the dishwasher right before i left for work (if she was mad about it, then she could unload the dishwasher as needed and we could have this conversation when i got home, i reasoned) and went to walmart for my shift that day. i cut one of my fingers on a taco seasoning packet, watched some of the salzburg 2007 production of berlioz’s benvenuto cellini on my lunch break, and in general otherwise it was a pretty normal shift. and like all normal shifts, i took my sweet time getting out and getting home.

at about 5:15 i was dawdling and trying to find an excuse to not get in my car just yet when i got a call from my stepmom that basically went like this:

me: hi

stepmom: hey. are you coming home yet?

me: i will be there in a little bit.

stepmom: it’s been raining so you need to be careful getting home.

me: it hasn’t rained that much and i know how to drive in the rain.

stepmom: just be careful getting home. bye.

so i sighed and went “well i can’t put this off any longer”, and got in my car and put some more berlioz on and drove home, thinking about how she sounded upset over the phone and oh i was going to get a tongue-lashing for leaving the dishes in the dishwasher all day.

and just as i was pulling up, i noticed my older brother’s truck outside. huh, i thought, that’s weird. why is he here?

i pulled into the driveway and saw my stepmom sitting on the step outside the side door by herself. two thoughts about what this meant went into my head at about the same time:

option 1: uh oh my stepmom is big mad and she waited out here just so she could tell me off right when i got home

option 2: uh oh my brother and my stepmom got into a fight again for whatever reason and she just can’t deal with it right now

(both of these, for the record, were entirely plausible things that could have happened)

so i parked and got out and decided to not commit to either of these but just play this very strange situation as coolly as possible. i believe my exact words were “hey, what are you doing out here by your lonesome?”

and like monsieur marcade, she could only get out a handful of words, and it was left to me to fill in the meaning.

the meaning: savannah, your father is dead.

and, to quote a different shakespeare play, “i must be from thence.”

my father died and i wasn’t there.

***

this is the same fate to befall the princess of france: her political mission mixed with girls’ trip has taken her to navarre, to a world full of annoying yet beloved men and delightful games and amateur theatre filled with passion. and then she learns that her father all the way in paris has died, and she wasn’t there.

now we don’t know what the princess’ relationship with her father was like; this is not something that is discussed at all in the play. but i know what my relationship with my father was like. we didn’t always understand each other or agree on everything, but i loved him. and in a childhood where the concept of family was a loose one due to an over decade-long stretch of family drama, he was the one constant.

and then four days after my high school graduation, he was simply gone, never to return.

now some folks will probably go back to those days of late july and early august 2020 and see that i posted exactly nothing about all this. why? i just needed a space where i could forget, where i could live in denial for a little longer, where i could cling to something in my life that wasn’t about this unimaginable loss until i couldn’t anymore.

living in the late 1500s, with a whole country to newly run, no social media, and a permanent existence in the public eye, the princess does not have this sort of escape. she knows right away the awful truth. it is inevitable; she must leave this happy sojourn, this newfound love.

her first line after she realizes her father is dead shows that plainly: “boyet, prepare. i will away tonight.” and even as she plans to shut herself up in a mourning-house, it is at the same time that she will be learning first hand how to run her kingdom.

sixteen days after my father’s death, i left home to learn how to live on my own. and even before that, i got only five days of bereavement leave from work, and i went back to work the day after my father’s funeral. let alone the rest of the frantic preparations for leaving home and starting a brand new life alone—in the middle of a pandemic and now, with this grief weighing on me.

life and the world do not wait for grief.

and sixteen days is too fast to grow up.

you can’t just flip the switch from child to adult, especially when you’re grieving.

and when the world forces you to do so, it is truly awful.

there’s no closure to it. as another character mourns in the closing moments of the play, “our wooing doth not end like an old play.” well, neither did the princess’ relationship with her father.

to continue with the shakespeare allusions, as much as i love and am heartbroken by the deathbed reconciliation between king henry iv and prince hal in henry iv, part 2 (a scene i was lucky to get to read with socshakes last september and which still lives in my head rent free), sometimes it simply doesn’t work out that way and you’re still left to pick up the pieces and forever wonder what might have been in those final moments on top of it.

living without that—without those answers, without closure, without any sort of comfort, on top of everything else—is so, so hard.

it is widely accepted that the love’s labour’s won mentioned in the catalogues is, in fact, a lost sequel and not an alternate name for any number of surviving shakespeare comedies. and while i have never found love in the manner of any shakespeare comedy, i believe nonetheless that i am living the princess’ story—a young woman, always grieving, trying to learn about life and figure out how to live it in a hostile world, trying to balance all the things, trying to come to terms with closure that will never come to her.

love’s labour’s lost fills me with an ache by the end. a true heartache, a deep emotional pain like few other stories i have ever come across. when i first saw it, i praised it for being messy and real. i saw me in it. i saw my own grief. i saw what i could have been, the kind of person i was before that fateful and fatal summer, the realization that we must leave that self behind because they can no longer navigate this new world, the not wanting to let go, the not understanding why but knowing you have to anyway. to know you have to take the other road.

***

recently, for a local exhibit, a museum asked people in the area to send in writing about their regrets, something they wished had happened differently. mine was eventually one of the ones selected for inclusion. here it is.

in another lifetime, i am there when my father dies.

i am there, holding his hand, feeling the blood that connects us rush through him, hearing his breaths—however shallow.

skin on skin.

i’m able to tell him one last time that i love him, i will always love him. perhaps through all the pain that comes with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, the sleep-like state he was in for most of the last two days, he will hear me and even respond.

my family can all grieve together, knowing we all saw it happen and we all got a strange sort of closure.

my relationship with him on this earth would not feel like a perpetually unfinished story, with an ending written when i wasn’t even there.

but it is this lifetime.

someone once said grief is just love with no place to go. i believe that. and, well, this is my life. i have to muddle through and believe, make closure out of thin air and time, let love go nowhere and everywhere.

***

so, life imitates art and vice versa. and thank you @socialshakespeare for letting me have this story that has come to mean so much to me in the few short months since i first came across it. <3

#personal #thoughts #love’s labour’s lost #love’s labor’s lost #on humanity #on grief #on growing up #tw cancer #tw parental death #tw grief #words words words #theatre #plays #theater #my writing #if you made it this far thanks for reading <3 #shakespeare #william shakespeare

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agentravensong · 1 year

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post-hamlet thoughts

tl;dr my college did hamlet and i was in it and it was cool

first of all, in case i hadn't made this clear already, this was entirely student-produced. i mean, we got some money from the theater department, but people-wise, it was all students.

i've told the rest of the cast this time and time again, but they're so good. insanely dedicated and humbling in their talent.

our hamlet, horatio, ophelia, and laertes were all freshman, and they were all stellar. ophelia and laertes broke my heart every night in the second half with their anger and their sadness. horatio always brings top energy to scenes and had lots of funny moments (espec counting his doubling as the second gravedigger) but also made me feel things (we staged act 4 scene 6 as him alone on stage reading hamlet's letter to the audience and he killed it every time). and our hamlet was just incredible; a pleasure to act against as guildenstern and a pleasure to watch / listen to in their more emotional scenes.

and everyone else was great too! our polonius was always funny but also had genuine moments of connection with his kids; our cladius brought some great depth to the role (his take on the monologue in act 3 scene 3 was great) while still being despicable, especially in his manipulation of laertes; our gertrude brought our director's take on her to life impeccably; and, of course, i had a wonderful and hilarious partner in our rosencrantz :)

not to mention our quartet of players (who also filled out the other miscellaneous roles) who had a ton of great moments. shout-outs in particular to the guy who doubled as the first gravedigger and sang his sung lines as a sea shanty (honestly, i think he could have been a great guildenstern or rosencrantz in another universe).

the crew, of course, was also amazing. there were like 150 cues? my friend (the writer i mentioned in this post) did a fantastic job with the lights. the people behind the staging and makeup did just as well. and the costumes were so fun! everyone looked great; we had a consistent black-white-red-brown color palette that tied it all together. special shout-out to the player king wearing a white shirt with a black cape while cladius wore a zipped-up leather jacket and a white cape.

oh, and me and ros? we got fedoras :) i may share a photo later. maybe.

we did our show in the college black box theater (inside the fine arts building), which i do not currently have the brain cells to try and explain the layout of. it's a kind of weird space, but i think we made the most of it. for the majority of the show i was off stage left, meaning i was hanging out at the top of the stairs which serve as the main entrance and exit to the theater (sitting/standing where i couldn't be seen by the audience obv). you can't really see the stage at all from there but you sure can hear the actors, and by the time of the show that was (mostly) enough for me.

as far as how the actual shows went?

friday was our most engaged audience. their laughter was greatly appreciated in the early scenes ...slightly less so when everyone was dying in the final scene. i mean, i get it, people start dropping like flies and actually foaming at the mouth and spitting out (fake) blood; it's a lot. i applaud hamlet and horatio for staying in character through it. everyone did a great job that night; it was probably better than all our dress rehearsals as a whole.

saturday, at least from my pov, had kind of weird vibes at the start? i don't know how much of it was people getting to bed late the previous night, how much of it was overconfidence, and how much of it was people getting in their own heads, but it was our lowest energy show. the audience wasn't as audibly engaged either, but they did give us a big applause. i felt more good than bad about it by the end, for sure.

especially in retrospect, because, despite us having a smaller crowd at today's matinee, everyone was back on the ball. the ending in particular i think was the best we've ever done it. it was probably my best performance as well.

to be clear, i wouldn't rate any of our three shows below an 8 out of 10, for what that's worth. everyone gave so much to their performances; the funny bits were funny even when the audience didn't seem to think so, and i was always getting caught up in my feelings in the second act. you can't ask for much more than that.

now, here's a compilation of things from the production in no real order:

i already posted about this, but having the blood stains on stage where people die from the beginning of every show? *chef's kiss*

i'll also restate the thing i mentioned in the tags of that post: characters who were murderers had symbolic blood makeup after they killed someone. cladius had a bloody ear from the start of the show, the meaning of which becomes clear once you see the player king get poison poured in his ears; hamlet got blood on their face during intermission that's meant to be polonius's blood; and, arguably most significantly, gertrude had bloody handprints around her neck when she entered at the end of act 4, which, in addition to her hair and arms being dripping wet, is meant to suggest that the story she tells about ophelia's death is, in fact, a cover for something less accidental.

as mentioned above, our director's take on gertrude in general was, from my understanding, pretty different from the standard. to quote from his character spines, "you fundamentally want to prepare your son hamlet to be king; you are playing essentially a game of chess to do so." it was really compelling to see in action. the way she performed act 4 scene 7? chilling.

speaking of those character spines, the first line of horatio's is literally just, "You are in love with Hamlet." and boy howdy did that come through

prime example of that (other than just, all of his and hamlet's interactions, which were wonderful): when horatio finished reading the letter from hamlet, he sniffed it, in a very sweet and very not-platonic way

it was an unintentional running gag throughout the whole process that other cast members would forget between ros and me which character we were playing - to the point that every performance, when hamlet first greeted us, even though i would get to them first, they addressed me first, and it's written that they say my name first, they would call me rosencrantz and our ros guildenstern. ...someone should write a play about that.

i might have posted about this already, but in ros and i's first scene with hamlet, when the two of them start talking about child actors, hamlet made us sit in the thrones, and we would make moves to leave of varying boldness that they, of course, never let us follow through on. this then got basically repeated in act 3 scene 2 except that horatio got to join in on the fun of relentlessly mocking us

(the thing where hamlet handed me their copy of william shakespeare's complete works while they dud the "what is a man" mimi monologue got dropped at some point in the dress rehearsals, unfortunately. they did flip through it with the players though)

during the play within a play, polonius would keep falling asleep and ros and i would keep waking him up

(we also got to do some fun silent banter back in act 2 scene 2 while hamlet and the players were doing their thing)

then the bit after that with the recorders, aka guildenstern's defining moment, was just so fun. hamlet and horatio basically sandwiched ros and me between the two of them, and hamlet and i played off each other very well (at least imo), and though i couldn't see what horatio and ros were doing behind me i know that it got some good laughs. and i could tell every night that the scene landed despite the shakespearean language barrier, so i can't help but be satisfied.

my other best moment was when the king told me to go get polonius's body from the stairs and i got to slump and make a "do i have to?" face before my (final) exit. i managed to actually get some chuckles from that tonight, from the crowd that, again, laughed the least in general, and i can't put into words how euphoric i was to have that be my last moment playing guildenstern.

from the rest of the second half of the show, which i am not in, i will highlight a) the gravedigger eventually realizing after shoveling for minutes on end that he's been shoveling literally nothing (love me a good little fourth wall break) and b) when hamlet and laertes come to physical blows over ophelia, horatio, on his line, steps between them, draws laertes's sword, and takes a stance pointing it at laertes to hold him off, all in basically one glorious motion.

oh, and the ending, of course.

as i alluded to way earlier, we had fake blood and alka-seltzer tablets that the people who died in act 5 scene 2 used to great effect (particularly the people who died via poison)

speaking of that scene, the sword fight was very neat! well-choreographed and well-enacted. real foils btw

and the way hamlet and horatio performed the ending? more than anything, the way hamlet said "give me the cup; let go!" - that shit hurt, in the best way, every night. (and though hamlet died in the king's throne (with the king's crown on), horatio held / clung to them the whole damn time)

for a lighter final note: our polonius doubled as fortinbras and came on at the ending in this huge, heavy, vampire-ass cloak, accompanied by our director as the messenger from england who announces my and ros's death :)

thankfully, we did record our last dress rehearsal, so we do have a version of it that we'll get to watch back in the future. i won't be able to share it with any of y'all (we will apparently be in BIG trouble if we post it anywhere online) but it'll be nice to have for me.

funny thing that happened while i was typing this long-ass post out: i kept using present tense and then realizing i had to change it to past tense. and by "funny" here, i mean, uh... oof.

we never got a perfect run-through where no lines were skipped over, but, i mean, it's fucking hamlet. we did this shit in like a month and a half (with a week lost to spring break); it's more than impressive that the show turned out how it did. it was a group labor of love, and one of the best things i've ever gotten to be a part of.

and i miss it already.

...at least there's movie night on tuesday :)

#hamlet #so excited to introduce these guys to rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead. they'll never see hamlet the same way again #man. i've really missed acting. or rather... being part of a production like this #shout-out to whoever was originally cast as guildenstern but dropped out because they didn't realize a shakespeare play #would be a big commitment #and thereby gave me the opportunity to be in the show despite having been too busy and insecure to audition #i might come back and add more to this tomorrow if i remember more things that i want to have a record of #i could talk more about how rehearsals went #or about the few places in which i may have perhaps done things differently than our director if it wasn't his show #but i think for now this is enough #thank you all for following along on my hamlet journey #i will say that there is a greater than 0 chance that i'll post some shitty hamlet fancomics here in the future #so. if that's something you really want. let me know. i guess.#and again i don't think any of the cast have tumblr #but if you do and you see this: pls never stop acting #i've got your back <3 #yes i am posting this at 1 am when i have class tomorrow (today technically). what of it

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