Lots of teenagers in the audience this time, the youngest crowd I've ever seen at the American Players Theater. They'd come to see that well-known young person: Hamlet. For some, it was the first time they'd ever attended a live theater performance. I know, because the players who were introducing the kids to the experience asked for a show of hands. It brought tears to my eyes to see that there were teenagers, here in southern Wisconsin, who had never attended a play. And now: "Hamlet"!
I greatly enjoyed the ride out to Spring Green, with a nice view of fall foliage. The colors are still more green than any of the fall colors — red, orange, and yellow — but Meade calls this "peak" color. He likes the green. Your aesthetics may vary. But keep in mind that if you accept green as one of the colors, your color peak will come at a different time from the peak of leaf-peeper traffic, so there's an advantage to going with the Meade aesthetic.
At APT, you park and walk up a hill through forest. Walking back down, I stopped to photograph this sculpture, "KB-3" by John Himmelfarb, which I liked a lot:
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My wife & I just saw Hamlet last year @ our alma mater, Sewanee (University of the South). Not outdoors, but the young folks did an excellent job w/ it.
Meade needs to take better care of his truck.
Such a lovely contribution. A Post that I really am affected by and appreciate. My sincere thanks to you, Althouse. Take care.
There are many art pieces like this dotting the landscape of the Ukraine.
The thing you call a "sculpture" in Wisconsin is what we call a "front yard" in rural California.
I like the sculpture ... mostly because it isn't in my yard. Or my neighbor's yard.
They do a great Hamlet there.
Glad to see high schools still going there as we did a few decades ago. It sure made the play we just spent 5 weeks on come alive and the antiquated language more decipherable.
Sadly missed visiting this year.
Like poetry, I've never understood the almost religious attitude to live theatre. I've seen quite a bit of it over the years from hs productions to Broadway. I like it well enough. Just don't understand the mystique. Some of it is sincere but a lot of it feels like posing.
On the other hand, since Saturday I have been binge watching "slings and arrows" on Amazon.
It is an 18 part comedy/drama series about a Canadian Shakespeare company. Really, really, engrossing.
Each 6 ep season focu
focuses on the production of a play. 1-hamlet 2-macbeth 3-king Lear.
I give it 5 stars and 2 thumbs up.
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
But keep in mind that if you accept green as one of the colors, your color peak will come at a different time from the peak of leaf-peeper traffic
We drove County Road M and offshoots around the lakes outside of Cable into the National Forest around the lakes and on back roads for about 100 miles in 6 hours and saw 20 cars tops. It has always suprised me how few people are willing to drive dirt and one lane roads to see sights like this.
5-20% green=perfect.
I think the title of the sculpture should be "Second week of deer camp."
I'd predict it's the young people's last play that they attend.
Everything online is more interesting.
Poor kids are now traumatized.
@John Henry, if you don’t get what theater is all about, well, then you don’t get it. As for me, I love it.
So many themes in “Hamlet”! His uncle murdered his father and stupidly let’s Hamlet live to take revenge. He may have Oedipal feelings towards his mother, who was having an affair with her husband’s brother. He drives the woman who loves him to suicide. By the end of the play the stage is covered in corpses. What’s not to like?
Interesting footnote. Back in my undergraduate days (the mid-1960s) my theater professor told us that in the Protestant England of Shakespeare’s day a “nunnery” was slang for a brothel. (Don’t forget that Elizabeth’s England was in a religious war with Catholic Spain.). Don’t know if it was true, but I have never been able to hear Hamlet tell Ophelia to “Get thee to a nunnery” without reacting to the line.
Well, you'll want to go to the market, the one with the two gas pumps in front, make a left there. Then travel a ways down that road, it gets a little bumpy and you might be doubting you're still on the correct path, but you are. You'll see the Methodist church at one point. Keep going. Go over a little rise and then a bit farther, then make a right at the Himmelfarb on to a dirt, sometimes mud, road. Ma and Pa are about a hundred yards yonder. Ma said she'll be welcoming you with a fresh apple pie.
That sculpture is a typical working truck in any Cuban city or town.
John Henry writes, "Like poetry, I've never understood the almost religious attitude to live theatre."
I've never encountered an "almost religious attitude to live theatre", but if I had, I would probably agree with you. Such devotion is just an imposture. However, the charm of live theatre is that it is live. The experience one has is unique and can never be recaptured in its entirety. You may have heard of the butterfly effect, something similar is in operation during every live performance of every drama, dance, music, or epic poetry recitation that makes it irreproducible.
That truck sculpture makes me think of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I wonder how many high school students — or even college undergraduates — would get the reference.
(Yes, I know that the make and model of the truck is from at least two decades after the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, but still …)
I looked closely, and there is a distressingly large number of white people. Certainly, a purple state such as Wisconsin would live its leftie credo as well as fervently preach it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this is supposed to work.
- Krumhorn
Well the first thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire,
The kinfolk said "Jed move away from there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the truck and they moved to ...
Spring Green, Wisconsin?
Alongside "To be or not to be?" "How old was Hamlet?" gets asked a lot. The usual answer (confirmed in Yorick's skull scene?) is that he was 30 or thereabouts. But there are probably so many variant texts that you could make a case for a different answer.
Now on to "How many children had Lady Macbeth."
Like poetry, I've never understood the almost religious attitude to live theatre.
Live performance leaves its traces in almost every published play. Have you ever wondered why such a slow-paced drama as Hamlet ends so abruptly with poisoned foils and poisoned chalices buzzing like hornets and all the principles dead in the space of ten minutes? Can you imagine Richard Burbage after reading the first draft?
"Five hours, Will? Art thou fucking nuts?"
I can hear the happiness in you voice. What a great road trip. Madison to Spring Green in October.
I did a work road trip Tuesday. From home to Madison County IA, about 110 mile (no I did not stop at any of the covered bridges. But the trees just started to turn over weekend so it was, great to see all the river valleys start to get color. 70F full sun, light breeze. All with the backdrop of 36 ft grain heads, attached to big shiny combines, bringing in the crop we have been tending since April. The very best of the Midwest.
That truck sculpture makes me think of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I wonder how many high school students — or even college undergraduates — would get the reference.
I did immediately. The "artist" (How loose that word has become in the age of Biden. I must remember to applaud that troupe of artists who visit my curb every Tuesday morning.) was un-creative enough to call that work KB-3, while the obvious title is What If the Jodes Didn't Know How to Pack.
I see the set and think either a fort is going to surrender or a witch is going to be hanged. That's sort of close to what happens in Hamlet, isn't it?
The great advantage of live theater is that people will give you grief if you are making phone calls or checking your email, so you have to kind of pay attention.
You and Meade saw Hamlet over the weekend? I saw Pericles, Prince of Tyre on Friday night, The Tempest on Sunday afternoon, both done by professionals in a reconstruction of Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse, and an hour-long version of Macbeth Sunday night, done by 3rd-year grad students in Shakespeare Studies. Too bad there's no prize for "most Shakespearean weekend".
What Hamlet should have done:
https://youtu.be/9Eont_yEGZs
We visited Spring Green for four ATP plays earlier in September. We saw The Rivals up the hill in the outdoor theater, and The Moors in the indoor Touchstone Theater, both on Saturday. Sunday was supposed to be our big Shakespeare extravaganza with Love's Labor's Lost in the afternoon, followed by Hamlet in the evening, but sadly, both outdoor performances were rained out.
The thing you call a "sculpture" in Wisconsin is what we call a "front yard" in rural California.
When I worked at GE, I had to make some snap housing decisions. It was sub-conscious at first, and then I understood what I was doing.
I would drive into the apartment house parking lot, and count the number of cars-on-concrete-blocks-without-tires. If the count got to high, it was LOCK-THE-DOORS-HONEY-IM-RUNNING-THE-RED-LIGHTS!!! We were in the wrong neighborhood!!
I would totally like that truck restored and to drive it. I bet it's the kind you have to double-clutch to change gears.
Just to be clear, I've probably seen more live theatre than 90 percent of Americans. All types and at all levels. Generally I've enjoyed it.
My comment was about the attitude toward theater. I called it religious. That's not really a good descriptor for what I see but was the best I could come up with.
What I meant was an attutude ailing the lines of "I enjoy theatre, that makes me a better person than those who don't go to theatrical productions" perhaps smugness would be another word.
I also get annoyed by people who use "but it's live theatre!" (or opera, or ballet or poetry etc) as an excuse to force others at gunpoint to pay for it.
Live theatre is great, at least potentially, but it is just another entree on the entertainment menu. No reason to think of or treat it any differently.
John stop fascism vote republican Henry
>>Back in my undergraduate days (the mid-1960s) my theater professor told us that in the Protestant England of Shakespeare’s day a “nunnery” was slang for a brothel
I heard that one too, back around the same time. Makes more sense as to how insulting it was to Ophelia.
The live theater I saw as a teen was, you know, the stuff put on by the theater group at my high school. The two I remember, in particular, were The Fantasticks and The Indian Wants the Bronx, both with classmates I knew in featured roles.
Saw a number of live theater performances in Cambridge in my undergraduate years. One was a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with Andy Horowitz playing Pseudolus (I knew his older brother Peter from both undergrad and law school). A good friend of mine played Kate in a production of Kiss Me, Kate. I didn't see it, but there was an infamous production of Antony and Cleopatra by Peter Sellars put on in the indoor pool rMoom at Adams House.
My undergrad/law school years were more important in cementing my love/knowledge of classic Hollywood, which was all over Cambridge and the big H at the time. Including the temple of Bogie at the Brattle, which is still chugging on. Just saw that they reran the remake of Raisin in the Sun tonight, a play I was not aware of (beyond the title) set in an area of the South Side I was oblivious to until fairly recently.
ART came to Cambridge a few years later. The first show was a dark, originally Pappas (I think) production A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Mark-Linn Baker playing Puck. Had a subscription for a few years, until I couldn't deal with being in Harvard Square around midnight on a Tuesday night when I had to go in to work in the morning. I think the last thing I saw there was a production of Lysistrata.
Recently, I've goneto a lot more theater (Steppenwolf et al.) when in Chicago than I do in Boston. A lot of what I would like to see in Boston is up in Stoneham, which requires a PITA drive.
--gpm
That "sculpture" is what my scrap guy calls half a load.
Now on to "How many children had Lady Macbeth."
The clear implication of the text, I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me. (Act I, scene vii), is Lady Macbeth has given birth at least once. However, there is no evidence that the Thane of Glamis and his spouse have any living children.
History records that the real Lady Macbeth was Gruoch (daughter of) Boite. She had at least one son who reached adulthood by her first husband who died in a fire. Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, (Macbeth) was her second husband. There's no record of any children from that marriage.
I had the misfortune of seeing a really obnoxious production of Macbeth the autumn before COVID struck. The director, a theatre major at Chapel Hill, had the peculiar idea that Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth had a teenage son. This wholly illogical and superfluous character rebels against his murderous parents and then usurps most of the important plot elements assigned to Macduff, including beheading his father. I suppose she has graduated by now and is inflicting herself on Hollywood or Broadway.
That's great venue. Well acted Shakespeare is a joy. Badly acted Shakespeare is torture. We attended "The Merry Wives of Windsor" there a few years ago. It was on the cusp.
Regarding the observation that nunnery was Elizabethan slang for a brothel.
Yes, that is true. But it is also true that to Elizabethans nunnery also meant a place where nuns live. We should recall that between Elizabeth and her half-brother, Edward VI, came the other half-sibling, Mary Tudor, the first regnant English queen since Mathilde Fitz-Emperess and a staunch Catholic. Her reign was entirely preoccupied with the effort to undo the Reformation in England, which included the re-establishment of several religious houses, including nunneries. Though a Protestant, Elizabeth sought to cool the hostilities between the new faith and the old one. Consequently, at least one convent, the Bridgettines of Syon, persisted in England from before the Act of Supremacy right through to Cromwell's republic. During Shakespeare's writing career two other exiled English sisterhoods returned from the Continent, the Benedictine Sisters of East Bergholt (1598) and the Poor Clares of Darlington (1609).
Furthermore, the entirety of Act III, scene i contradicts the nunnery equals whorehouse interpretation. Here's the line: Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I may be wrong, but it would be difficult for a whore not to be a "breeder of sinners" if only in the metaphorical sense.
Lastly, there have been so many English euphemisms and slang expressions referring to prostitutes and prostitution that is difficult to avoid double entendres. The unofficial clubhouse of London's playwrights, including Jonson, Marlowe, and the Bard himself, was a place called the Mermaid Tavern (or Inn, it's given both ways in the literature). Mermaid was popular slang for a whore, especially a young and attractive one. Do you think those celebrated men of letters gave that much thought?
When I was in high school, my teachers had the novel idea that plays are meant to be seen. We read no play we were unable to see live. My class saw a Shakespearean play every year, "the Crucible" and "Oedipus Rex". When I got to college, and an English class included a play, no effort was made to see a performance of the play. What a letdown it was.
"You and Meade saw Hamlet over the weekend? I saw Pericles, Prince of Tyre on Friday night, The Tempest on Sunday afternoon, both done by professionals in a reconstruction of Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse, and an hour-long version of Macbeth Sunday night, done by 3rd-year grad students in Shakespeare Studies. Too bad there's no prize for "most Shakespearean weekend.""
We'd still win the prize for "most Shakespearean Thursday."
Does "Thursday" sound like a word Shakespeare never used? But Thursday is obsessed about in "Romeo and Juliet":
"O' Thursday let it be: o' Thursday, tell her... But what say you to Thursday?... My lord, I would that Thursday were to-morrow.... Well get you gone: o' Thursday be it, then.... Marry, my child, early next Thursday morn.... Paris... Shall happily make thee there a joyful bride.... Thank me no thankings, nor, proud me no prouds, But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next, To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church, Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.... Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch! I tell thee what: get thee to church o' Thursday, Or never after look me in the face...."
It's a dreaded day.
I love "fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next."
I just spent some time visiting/exploring the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
That's not a sculpture.
I concur with the Meade aesthetic. Green rules.
I drove thru that area many years back. It's delightful. Glad you steered clear of the Horror House on the Rock.
Dr Weevil said: "I saw Pericles, Prince of Tyre on Friday night, The Tempest on Sunday afternoon"
You must live in or near Staunton, Virginia. We have tickets to see Pericles this evening.
Hope its not the woke mess that Twelfth Night was.
Dr Weevil said: "I saw Pericles, Prince of Tyre on Friday night, The Tempest on Sunday afternoon"
You must live in or near Staunton, Virginia. We have tickets to see Pericles this evening.
Hope its not the woke mess that Twelfth Night was.
re : 'sculpture' == did granny's Truck have breakdown in Madison on way to California Beverley Hills? or did she make roadkill? for stock up
Car-killed deer and other wildlife Deer-vehicle crashes continue to be a major concern for Wisconsin motorists. The majority of deer-vehicle collisions occur during the months of October and November when deer are most active during the breeding phase.
The stage design made me think Hamlet before I read the rest of the post!
My grandson (a 7th grader) was one of the students who got to see Hamlet. He loved it! He found the ghost believable, because if Hamlet had not seen the ghost, he would not have been able to create the play that shows Claudius' guilt (with the murder by poison in the ear). He felt sorry for Ophelia, and for Laertes, too; after all, Laertes had good reason to be angry at Hamlet, and yet Laertes was also being used by Claudius. He could see how Hamlet was confused at seeing Claudius praying, because Hamlet knew Claudius was too evil; and it turned out that Claudius knew that, too. A very good experience, except that back at school they didn't discuss it!
John Himmelfarb is a very interesting artist. I especially love the prints he made that were developed into large murals on the walls of a Metra underpass in Hyde Park, Chicago. They show imaginary trucks expressive of mental states like "Aspiration."
More Shakespeare trivia: At the end of his career, Shakespeare went all Marvel and got into CGI. It was his undoing. His last play was Henry VIII, and he used a cannon on stage for dramatic effect. The cannon firing set off a fire that burnt down the Globe Theater.... Shakespeare was at his best in small, intimate comedies about cross dressers. A lot of gore in the tragedies and history plays, but he had to compete with the neighboring bear baiting arenas. A lot of brothels in that neighborhood too. Maybe a few obscene puns helped him compete for the Elizabethan entertainment dollar....I've read that the really prestige platform was the pulpit. A good preacher drew the most impressive crowds.
Scotland, PA is an amazing version of Macbeth set in a fast food restaurant. The discussion about the female version of 1776 got me thinking about it. Maureen Tierney and her husband produced it: she's incredible as the Lady Macbeth character. It sounds improbable, but it really is worthwhile. And if you watch the Orson Wells version, you get the sense that it sucked far more to live in a castle in the 11th Century than in rural Pennsylvania in the 20th.
If the sculptor would like to come get all the rusting tractor parts and other old tools and debris that surface on my property, he's more than welcome. There even used to be a still, dug down into a holler so the police could overlook it, but it's gone now.
“ My grandson (a 7th grader) was one of the students who got to see Hamlet. He loved it! ”
So glad to hear that.
It’s a long play to sit through and you have to pay attention. The students seemed to be at least doing that, but I couldn’t tell how they really felt.
I would guess Ophelia’s madness to have made the biggest impression, along with the description of her death and her burial.
Not exactly on point, but I've always loved this painting of Ophelia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophelia_(painting)
Actually, Hamlet's fight with Laertes and his death (with all the other deaths) made the biggest impression. It was too bad Hamlet and Laertes had to die, but at least Hamlet achieved his revenge. He seemed to feel kind of a mixed satisfaction.
Did Shakespeare know that the play Hamlet was a wilderness of mirrors? Every time I experience it, I leave bewildered.
Did Shakespeare know that the play Hamlet was a wilderness of mirrors? Every time I experience it, I leave bewildered.
For everyone but Karlito2000, who's already seen it:
Here is the stage of the first modern reconstruction of Shakespeare's indoor theater, the Blackfriars Playhouse, where he played to more select audiences. It is indeed in Staunton, and I live a block away and go there often. There are at least a dozen modern versions of the Globe, where he entertained the masses.
For Karlito2000:
Yes, I live a block from the theater, and go there often. If you've been there more than a few times, you've probably seen me. And that's me in the balcony in the picture.
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