These days it feels like a gesture of emotional safety—like securing a seat belt around your soul—to step out of the confusion of our daily existence and look at life as a full blown allegory. What happens when you allow it to all be an enchanted journey, with symbols and meaning that come together and […]
Shakespeare
The Many Faces of Othello
Ira Aldridge playing Othello in the 19th century, from a painting by James Northcote Humans have a built-in pattern detection facility that is a key method for making sense of things. Making sense is, after all, an essential survival skill. Barraged daily by a firehose of sensory data, we have to employ some means of […]
Prosperian Enchantments
The Tempest, at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge MA (Photo: A.R.T.) Ah Prospero. You are my favorite character in all of Shakespeare! The masterful conjurings, the lonely exile, the fierce revenge still raging after twelve years away from the lost Dukedom of Milan, the Other embodied in ethereality and earthiness, the willingness in the end […]
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Dreams of Eden
In Robert Hass‘s essay, “On Teaching Poetry,” contained in What Light Can Do, he references W. H. Auden‘s book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand, named after a phrase from Shakespeare‘s Sonnet 111: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the […]
Boston Common: All’s Well That Ends Well
Will LeBow as the King of France in All’s Well That Ends Well, now playing on the Boston Common Do not miss the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company‘s production of All’s Well That End’s Well, free on the Common through August 14. Last year’s production of Othello with Seth Gilliam and James Waterston (reviewed here) was spectacular […]
Theater App, or Something Else?
If you live in the Boston area, DO NOT miss this: Sleep No More, at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline. It runs through January 3. And if you have a nature that is excessive and appetitive like mine, you might need to go twice. (I’ve already purchased another block of tickets to go with […]