Last week was a great week.
Friday, I kicked things off with a visit to the Global Hamlets Symposium, which, given the 20-minute time limit imposed on the assembled Shakespeare experts, felt like I’d stumbled across a live Ted Talk channel created exclusively for theatre nerds with a taste for history and international affairs. Who knew that watching serious Shakespeareans doing scholarship-lite could be such a great way to spend a beautiful fall afternoon?
Well, I guess I did.
The speakers — Nick Hutchison (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), Alexander Huang (George Washington University), Margaret Litvin (Boston University), and David Schalkwyk (Folger Shakespeare Library) — weren’t just informative, they were funny, playful, and combative as they considered the role Shakespeare’s Melancholy Dane has played in China, South Africa, and the Middle East.
A drinking song
Opera Memphis’s General Director Ned Canty was also at the conference with baritone Joel Herold who sang the ironic drinking song from Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet.
It’s always fun to encounter Canty in different contexts and observe his campaign to change Opera’s image. He recently slipped me a handful of stickers he’d made which took Shepard Fairey’s famous image of Andre the Giant and changed the word “Obey” to “Opera.” It doesn’t say “Opera Memphis” anywhere. There’s no website or season ticket offer. Just “Opera.”
Canty said he doesn’t approve of sticker vandalism. But (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) if Obey/Opera stickers start showing up places, what’s a guy to do?
I was surprised that nobody involved in the Hamlet symposium followed me to Becky Shaw at the U of M. It’s a savage comedy that borrows heavily from the original Man in Black. I was more surprised at how much of Shakespeare I saw in Katori Hall’s Hurt Village at the Hattiloo, and have to wonder if I wasn’t fully under the influence of a great symposium. But no, intended or not all the Gorky and the Shakespeare is all there packed into the most Memphis-centric play you’re likely to see any time soon.
In my truncated review I compare Hurt Village to Hamlet, but that’s not right. Or it’s not enough, rather. Memphis is a place where people spin rhyming soliloquies when they walk down the street by themselves. But Hurt Village is more like a history play. It’s Richard III and Romeo and Juliet but with almost no emphasis on the lovers who won’t survive long enough to kill themselves.
At one of Rhodes previous Shakespeare symposiums a scholar described Romeo’s journey from ineloquence to mastery of the sonnet. That’s was the first thing that entered my mind when Hall’s unlikely Romeo character turned out to be a stutterer. One gets the impression that his condition might have improved had a first kiss not also turned out to be a last kiss.
One regret: I missed Project: Motion’s opening weekend of Mixology. Hopefully I’ll make it by before Sunday’s closing.
This is another good week for seeing shows.
