(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
A poor thing, but mine own: Colina Middle School in Thousand Oaks, California put on a production of my student play Hamlet with Extra Cheese , available until the Tromp of Doom from Brooklyn Publishers. Here we see Birnham Wood come to Dunsinane, Julius Caesar and the fickle plebes at the Senate, Lady and Mr. Macbeth, et alia.
8 comments:
Yay! Congrats and kudos to the author! -- Pat
Wasn't Thousand Oaks in the path of the one of the fires last week? The burning of Dunsinane?
Anyway, congratulations.
I don't think the two events are connected, although there are people in this benighted land being detained for less.
While we're at it, your own location-- Northfield, Minnesota-- was the site of a failed bank robbery by the Cole Younger/Jesse James gang, not that I'm blaming you.
Oddly, we do have some tenuous connection to that robbery. Joseph Lee Heywood was filling in for the bank's treasurer while the treasurer was off at the Centennial exhibition. Heywood was shot and killed after he refused to open the vault. Heywood was at the time also the treasurer at Carleton College and the treasurer of the Congregational Church. My wife has just finished a very long tenure as treasurer of that same church. She is Heywood's distant successor.
She is an honorable person, but I bet she'd have let 'em have the cash.
That is very cool. Congrats! See, you don't need Kenneth Brannagh to direct your work. The kid in the last pic looks like he's having more fun than anyone in any Brannagh flick.
-Jef
My family's appointment with history is a bit more vague. My great-grandmoher was telling her grandchildren that Abraham Lincoln visited a neighbor's house in Missouri when she was a child. When the more intellectual of my uncles expressed doubt, she snapped back, "Well, then, it was Jesse James!" and went right on with her story.
Delivered 2 copies to Bagdad, Arizona jr/sr high school drama teacher. Wouldn't get much of an audience if they run it (tiny copper miningtown of 300) but the teacher was thrilled. Smile, Dee Ann
Today Baghdad, tomorrow Samarkand... And thank you, DeeAnn-- that's the kind of thing I want to happen with the play. Whenever I hear academics and graduate school mavens complain about the dearth of kids interested in classics, I have to ask them what they're doing to promote interest among younger kids, the "farm club" system as it were. Athletics and some engineering programs at the college level do all kinds of outreach to to the public schools, but the humanities departments of most universities act too self involved (or snobbish) to do the kind of outreach that would trigger interest from elementary to high school. Not every kid is expected to play ball at the college level or become an engineer, but they at least build a more hospitable environment... why not more amateur Shakespeareans?
Post a Comment