Beauty in the Filth

14th July 2011

Post with 6 notes

Twelfth Night

Dear tumblr:

I will now attempt to be more thorough with my advertising. I am in a production of Twelfth Night this summer with AtmosTheatre, which is being staged along a guided hike through the Redwood forest of the peninsula. I am playing Sir Toby Belch, a drunkard, and uncle to the Countess of the land, who puts merriment first and good manners nowhere on his list of priorities.

The show previews July 16th, opens the following day (this weekend!) and runs Saturday and Sunday afternoons until September 4th. Showtime is 1pm, but I recommend planning to arrive at noon for two reasons: 1) there is a lovely picnic area and you can bring food, booze, and other comforts with which to enjoy the scenery 2) getting lost on the way there is not unheard of. :) Tickets are available at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/158262, and they tend to sell really quickly (I’m told the run of the show is nearly 2/3rds sold already), so please buy quickly if you intend to come. I recommend a car to get there, but I’ve seen some people bike that path *shudder*.

Here’s some excerpts from the director’s note, for folks who are
not familiar with the play.

I have long maintained that Shakespeare’s comedies are darker than his tragedies and I think that is most true here, in Ilyria, a world of pirates, thieves, drunks, liars, incompetents and pretenders, ruled by a pair of good-hearted but ineffectual aristocrats who have both become victims of their own mania: one obsessed with the dead who have abandoned her, the other obsessed with a romantic ideal he can’t attain…Into this wild coast Shakespeare sends his twins-compassionate, resourceful Viola, and dashing, loyal Sebastian- who must survive in a strange land without even the comfort of one another to cling to. It’s an exciting story, for sure, but it’s not a pretty one, and there is an air of despair in the many songs that anchor the play, a bitterness to the love poetry, and an undercurrent of violence and desperation to the comic sub plot about two status jumping servants who declare war on one another.

And yet there is so much joy in TWELFTH NIGHT too, as there must have been for any settler who walked out of their log cabin some spring circa 1700 to find their garden growing at last, or came home one Christmas night to find a long-lost friend waiting at their fire with tales of places inconceivable. I think the human heart, still a formidable frontier itself, must have been so alive in those days when the woods were still endless, the seas virtually impassable and entertainment restricted to camp songs and heavy drinking. Laughter, often in the face of pain and loss, must have felt so truly medicinal, just as the sun is warmest in those last October days before the frost coats the pumpkins and the nights become long and filled with ghosts.

—Stuart Bousel

Source: endymionrising.blogspot.com