We stopped in this town purely to hang out.
It’s a Quainte Towne. Ice cream Shoppes and Antiques. Oh, and – Stonewall fucking Jackson’s house is there. Old cigar-smoking republicans in blue blazers and khaki pants use it now for high-school reunions. The modern South.
It’s also home of the American Shakespeare Center. They play in a replica of the Blackfriars theatre, home to Shakespeare and his players before they moved over to the Globe. They also do pretty original practices staging. For you laypeople, that means (among other things) that the lights are on the whole time – equally on stage and on you.
They were good enough to get us tickets to see the shows they have running right now. Comedy of Errors, and Hamlet. It’s how I was trained, and I’m sold on it. (It seems odd that such a giant theatre like the Guthrie should put its students in the hands of fanatics and lovers of the original practices staging movement when they themselves are so…. well, their production of Two Gentlemen of Verona was set in a TV studio, and they had do-wop singing between scenes.) I, for one, am better able to hear the plays in that way than in any other way I have seen. It seems so natural, so obvious, and makes the rules we have set up about audience involvement and fourth walls seem so silly, so beside the point.
Our last night in town, their acting company invited our Acting Company over for a party to their housing: sort of a ramshackle old building with an idiosyncratic outlay of parlors and bedrooms (brothel?). It was somewhere between the house that your friends who started an art-band lived in, a frat house, and a victorian manor. They’ve been touring, off and on, since last September, we since January. There aren’t that many people touring nationally with Shakespeare. I estimate realistically that we had fully a quarter of the current community of nationally touring Shakespearean actors present in that house, eating leftover wedding cake and trading war stories.
Next up, Penn State.
