I am keeping a journal of all the plays I see this term, in part to have a moment to reflect on and respond to the works I see, and also to simply remember what all the shows were and what they looked, sounded, and felt like. In writing my entry for Miss Littlewood, I found myself running out of room on the page, and discovering new complexities about my feelings on the piece. In an effort to flesh-out and organize these thoughts, I decided to re-write my entry, while hopefully staying true to my original thoughts. The sections in italics are taken from my original writing, immediately after the show.

Miss Littlewood – Swan Theater (Royal Shakespeare Company) – July 4

Miss Littlewood, in its inception is a profoundly important musical dedicated to the life of one of England’s most important theater makers in recent history. A musical (or play) in her honor should be an important and female-empowering work of art, just like her life. Unfortunately, while the original concept of this musical was undoubtedly interesting and important, the final result didn’t just miss the mark, it hit an entirely different target. That target, arguably, was a musical devoted to exploring Joan’s memories of Gerry Raffles. Having a “present day” Joan “directing” the show almost seemed to imply that Joan had created the show we were watching. Accepting this theatrical device, one would expect to see a show about the life and soul Joan poured into her work. Instead, we saw a show all about Gerry, as the actual writer, Sam Kenyon, seems to have decided Gerry was the most important thing not only in Joan’s life, but in her legacy as well. Unfortunately, I have never seen a show more clearly and yet surprisingly written by a man. It was written in 2016 by Kenyon, making the show a problematic over-simplification of the life of a hugely important theater maker.

Kenyon didn’t just simplify, he also chose to focus on the love interests of Joan, instead of her work in the theater. Obviously, when writing a 2.5 hour show about the life of a person, one will inevitably need to pick a focus, but it is regrettable than Kenyon chose to focus on the least unique facet of Joan: the fact that she fell in love. Kenyon even goes so far as to have his Joan say, “He’s the only reason any of you showed up.” Which is not only objectively incorrect but also rather confusing. Gerry Raffles was far less of a public figure than Joan; he was a producer and behind-the-scenes kind of person and therefore, “Mr. Raffles the Musical!” would likely not fill the house. It might make sense for Gerry to be the only reason Joan shows up, but it diminishes her life and legacy for her to imply that Gerry is the only reason we (the audience) showed up as well. Similarly, there were multiple times when Joan’s major productions were more or less flipped through with quick projections, almost as if Kenyon was just speeding through time until the next moment Gerry showed up, yet again diminishing the life and work of his subject. Somehow, the musical ABOUT a revolutionary female theater maker (I originally wrote playwright, that’s how little this show taught me about Joan) was literally about a man. The show certainly had some positive attributes, one of the most obvious being the casting of eight women to play Joan. There is undoubtedly a benefit to creating eight strong female roles, and thereby forcing a stage picture which features so many women, almost the opposite of the effect in Fatherland, however, this does not make up for the problematic content these characters deliver.

With all these rather obvious oversights, the musical simply seems unfinished. If I were in the workshops with Sam Kenyon, I would have said “Sam. This musical is about Gerry.” I hope, he would be upset and want to change it; yet it seems like the show has gone through quite a few workshops and iterations, and yet, here we are. Maybe English theater is not yet as far away from the “By, for, and, about men” model as one might like to believe.

In a country that is so saturated with Shakespeare, it makes sense that theatrical companies are consistently on the hunt to find ways to reimagine and ‘spice’ up his work. Many productions today employ modernized concepts in order to heighten the relatable sentiments and characters that exist within the original text. Federay Holmes and Elle Whiles’ co-directed production of As You Like It remained loyal to the original Elizabethan style that one might expect from the Globe, yet aimed to connect their production to today’s audience through the diversity of the company. This production seemed especially spurred by the mission of finding the truthful human element of Shakespeare’s words, regardless of gender, race, of ability. According to the new director of the Globe, Michelle Terry, their casting focused on the universality of the text by employing ‘a gender-blind, race-blind, disability-blind’ casting method in all of their works. However, with the large prevalence of unexpected casting choices that felt somewhat unrooted in textual significance, their choices began to feel like a forced gimmick and a demonstration of the Globe’s progressiveness rather than a genuine attempt to create an inclusive theatrical space for all actors involved in the piece.

Michelle Terry’s casting methods aim to support her mission for the theater to put particular emphasis on ensemble-driven pieces through a strong company of actors. The boldest casting decisions in As You Like It take center stage. Jack Laskey depicts the iconic Shakespearian heroine, Rosalind, and Nadia Nadarajah gave a nuanced and touching portrayal of Celia, who brought another dimension to the poetry through British Sign Language on stage. While there was more to this production of As You Like It than the casting, the most thought-provoking choices were concentrated in their notion to expand the traditional Shakespearian society and experiment with the flexibility of the text through the bodies on stage.

While Jack Laskey’s performance of Rosalind did have endearing moments which illuminated the text for today’s audiences, the power of Rosalind’s powerful character arc was less nuanced when portrayed by a male actor. When Rosalind subverts the expectations of her rigid society, dresses as Ganymede, and instructs Orlando on how to be a more attentive partner, there should be a palpable sense of danger that Rosalind is speaking utterly out of her assigned societal boundaries. The bravery of Rosalind to disguise herself as Ganymede and the male transformation itself lost all of their power in Laskey’s performance. In fact, while watching the production during the Ganymede scenes, it was easy to forget that Rosalind had ever been a female character in this particular production. Laskey looked and felt far more comfortable on stage in the male incarnation of Rosalind than he did in either the opening or closing segments, dressed in Rosalind’s female garb. Laskey’s performance gave the production an aspect of historical authenticity, as a young man would have originally played Rosalind. However, in the current state of the theatrical and performing arts, large theater companies are no longer in the position to give leading female characters with agency to men in order to heighten realism of ancient practices. By taking this role away from an actress, the Globe has comfortably reinstated the position of power to a man in this production and simultaneously stripped all of Rosalind’s subversive agency.

Celia’s signed performance by Nadia Nadarajah brought wonderful depth and accessibility to Shakespeare’s bewildering poetry. Her infectious expressiveness with hardly any spoken word often meant that the audience could not peel their eyes from her in any scene that took part. Nadia Nadarajah was able to bring complex life to Celia as a deaf character; communicating in BSL with the other actors on stage heightened the poetic imagery of Shakespeare’s words and created literal art with the body. However, given the singular beauty of Celia’s performance, the dynamic with a male Rosalind as the speaker for the pair proved more complicated and problematic. There were various moments on stage where Rosalind’s character appears to not only be interpreting the events to Celia, but also speaking for the both of them on stage. As modern audience members, we are conditioned to pay more attention to those that are speaking on stage and Rosalind’s overwhelming vocal stage presence seemed to overshadow that of Celia’s. Although all of the characters were signing to one another and Celia understood, Rosalind often vocally expressed the actions of the scene to Celia for audience clarity. However, Rosalind’s redundant explanation of the scene to Celia felt condescending and patronizing at times. When both Rosalind and Celia were communicating with a third party, the dialogue was often given to Rosalind, which gave her most of the agency in the scene. Given that Rosalind was being portrayed by a man, this troubling relationship had greater patriarchal implications and cast a greater shadow on the entire production. By the end of the piece, all of Celia’s communication felt like it had been filtered through the male Rosalind; a Shakespearian mansplaining, of sorts.

Perhaps, the dynamic between these actors fell flat as a result of dispersed direction. Not only was the production credited as co-directed by Federay Holmes and Elle Whiles, but all actors were encouraged to be at every rehearsal even when not working on their own scenes, in order to help devise and form the artistic vision of the piece. Terry, who considers herself as primarily an actor first, values the artistic process from the point of view of the cast of actors. However, in this case, the wide variety of contributing voices was felt in a misguided notion of the artistic goals for the work on the whole.

Overall, As You Like It was bold in its attempt to push back against the rigidity that is too often associated with works of Shakespeare. Hopefully this will just be the beginning of the realization that these words are universal truths that can be spoken by anyone irrespective of the suggestions in the original works. However, the Globe still has steps to be taken in order to ensure that the casting decisions do not feel like a demonstration of progressive thought or creative concept. Future casting hopefully will not draw from the artistic integrity and power of the piece; heightening some artistic choices in order to disenfranchise different voices on stage. Instead of creating a greater sense of inclusivity, the casting of this show wound up being divisive in other ways.

Tartuffe is perhaps one of the most famous comedies written by Moliere and is still performed regularly to this day. In this latest rendition of Tartuffe done at the Theater Royal Haymarket, Gérald Garutti and Christopher Hampton collaborated to create a new adaptation that is in both French and English- a presumably fitting and interesting tribute to the ways that the French and English languages, have interacted and affected each other since the Norman conquest in 1066. Now, as a general rule, I find multi-lingual productions of just about any theatrical piece to be fascinating (this approach increases accessibility, puts languages and their cultures in direct conversation with each other, and brings artists of many backgrounds together for the sole purpose of creating art, to name just a few of the possible outcomes). Quite frankly, I had high hopes for this production, especially given the long history between the two countries and the limitless possibilities that could come into play based on this between the characters of Tartuffe. Unfortunately, I was left quite disappointed as the bilingual aspect of the show was never fully developed in favor of other points the creative team wanted to make. This left the changes between French and English feeling almost arbitrary and nonsensical as they were seemingly done at random with little justification as to why they were taking place.

The production concepts behind Christopher Hampton’s adaptation were certainly ambitious enough. Tartuffe, was not only to be performed in both French and English, but was also then set in modern-day Los Angeles. Tartuffe himself rings true to the leaders of mega churches and televangelists found all around the U.S.- the ones who promise salvation or healing or whatever a person might need if only you keep sending them more money. Those who prey off the desperate in the name of salvation provide an excellent parallel to what a modern-day Tartuffe character might be. Indeed, many televangelists only begin to face repercussions when their greed becomes too great to ignore, as Tartuffe does when he tries to usurp Orgon’s place and take ownership of his property. This production could have been quite interesting indeed had it been decided to focus on the effects of monetized religion in America and would have presented a more cohesive picture than what made its way onstage.

Gérald Garutti chose to overhaul the ending of Tartuffe and replace the deus-ex-machina King character that brings Tartuffe to justice with that of Donald Trump. Pending on how one interprets the end of Moliere’s script, this parallel drawn could be both interesting and apt. A rich businessman gaining power and then using it to protect other rich businessmen is certainly not an unfamiliar notion and, indeed, could provide cutting social commentary if done well. Garutti and Hampton, unfortunately, present a caricature of a final scene where they assume that the audience knows nothing about the events of the past two years and is thereby quite heavy-handed in packing the “greatest hits” of the Trump candidacy and administration into the final ten minutes of the play. Given how polarizing a character Donald Trump is, and how much he has and continues to dominate the new cycle this approach reads as heavy-handed and in poor taste. It leaves the audience feeling ever so slightly sympathetic for Tartuffe- who is supposed to be the villain of the piece. Above all, what this production suffered most from was its refusal to focus on just one of its many production concepts that, individually, would have made for a fascinating and relevant rendition of Tartuffe. In its refusal to do so, the audience is left with a vague idea of many unrealized concepts that leave the production feeling disjointed and without the grace and genius of the original.

Student 5: What a beautiful opening scene.

Student 7: Sooooo compelling.

Student 8: So delightful.

Professor: That first scene was expressionism to the nth degree.

Student 8: That play was 80 minutes long. Now that’s a play. No play should ever be longer than 90 minutes without a break for me to go to the loo.

Professor to Student 3: What did you think?

Student 3: I must say that I simply did not like it.

Student 7: Okay when I said I loved this play and was really excited for it, I forgot what actually happened in it…

Student 1: LOL

Student 5: Well it’s all about – wait do you know like the history of the play?

Student 1: No, I didn’t take 17.

Student 5: Okay cool. Well Sophie Treadwell was working as a journalist and even though she wasn’t allowed to report on it because she was a woman, she witnessed the trial of the first American woman to be executed by electric chair – Ruth Snyder – and was fascinated by the story so she wrote this play.

Student 4: How did they change sets so fast??

Student 2: Each episode was a fully new set all done silently as they projected the scene titles.

Student 8: Magic.

Student 6: Yeah okay that was very impressive.

Professor: I love having production-minded students in this class.

Student 1: Can we talk about casting?

Student 7: I just think that casting was…racially stressful.

Student 8: So stressful!

Students 1,2,4,5,6 (unison): YES

Student 3: Oh mah gahhd!

Student 8: Colorblind casting does seem to be more of a thing here.

Student 3: Yeah I feel like they’re at a different place in that conversation than we are in US theater.

Student 7: That play felt like non-Americans attempting to comment on American race relations without knowing a single thing about American race relations?

Student 5: I mean it was advertised as a commentary on pressing issues in America today.

Student 1: Excuse me??

Student 7: Wait there are A LOT of issues in America right now that we need to deconstruct and protest but I think there are MUCH better ways to do so than casting black men to play the villains in a play about a white lady. And there was even a depiction of the relationship between America and Mexico that went by fully un-commented on! There is so much horrifying, troubling stuff going on in America right now that we could comment on and do something about! In an informed way! Discussing race and identity in America is SO IMPORTANT and has to be done so much more intentionally onstage.

Student 3: Let’s talk about the way our justice system treats black men.

Student 7: Let’s talk about how the rights and liberties of the disenfranchised in America hang in the balance of the supreme court.

Student 1: Let’s talk about sexual violence and intimate partner violence.

Student 6: Let’s talk about workplace harassment.

Student 4: Let’s talk about the crisis situation between America and Mexico.

Student 5: Let’s talk about the boring patriarchy even!

Student 2: Let’s talk about something at least.

Student 3: Yeah okay also why did they have to play Wade in the Water during the execution of a white lady and then call it “an African-American Spiritual” in the closed captions when they very specifically credited each of the other song choices?

Student 8: I think that phrasing is in the script at least?

Student 5: I was bopping to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” though.

Student 8: The soundtrack was delightful.

Student 2: Did it really need the bright neon flashing bars of light?

Student 1: The opening moment of the subway made out of the neon lights was cool though!

Student 7: #theatreshouldbeaccessible

Student 6: All of the lighting was lit though.

Student 2: I don’t think the decade jump worked for me.

Student 1: What do you mean?

Student 7: Yeah what decade jumps?

Student 2: Like the concept of the production. How each episode was set in a different decade. In the script, the whole play is set in the 1920s when it was written but they staged it so each episode was a different decade leading up to now.

Student 1: Wait what?

Student 3: Oh mah gahhd.

Student 7: Wait I totally missed that. I did think the power pantsuits looked fun in that living room scene and I couldn’t figure out why they had cellphones in that other scene. I guess that does make sense.

Student 2: Yeah that was like the whole concept of the production.

Student 7: Okay but that was one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever seen.

Student 4: The scene in the bedroom?

Student 3: Oh yes. I heard some reaction sounds coming from that side of me in that scene and just thought “I totally agree.”

Student 6: Which scene?

Student 1: The scene in the bedroom!

Student 7: Just such a beautifully done scene!

Student 4: There wasn’t enough soliloquy or sword fighting.

Student 3: It was so beautiful and emotional and expressionistic.

Student 6: Fam, that mirror on the ceiling was lit.

Student 7: I think it made her a lot less sympathetic of a character. Oh man I so badly wanted to be on her side.

Student 2: I mean she did murder her husband.

Student 7: Sure, but she’s a strong women beaten down by the suffocating and oppressive patriarchal society! I wanted to root for her! I am very uncomfortable with how often I was on the side of the men.

Student 6: Have you ever been on the side of the men?

Student 8: I guess that means you’re not a feminist!

Student 8: I think the jumping through time thing makes it lose the whole “our lives are controlled by machines” thing because the machines kept changing.

Student 1: I just said that!

Student 7: The thing is that the idea of discussing machines running our lives is an important one! Especially today! We talk so much about how phones and computers are so so present in our lives, especially with regards to millennials and people who have grown up with the whole world of information at their fingertips.

Student 4: And then I mean I think there’s the much bigger conversation about drones and nuclear war and the role that technology has in our democracies and politics.

Student 7: It’s just such a hugely relevant topic that was handed to them with this script and they didn’t explore at all! Even in their attempts to “modernize” it.

Student 1: I just saw a play that was trying to be about women and about machines but I don’t know what it said about either of those things or how those two things interact?

Student 8: It was obviously saying that women are machines!

All the world’s a stage, but some plays get a lot more performances on it than others. Macbeth is one of those shows that, at any given moment, it seems more likely than not is being performed on some stage, somewhere around the world. How can you possibly breathe new life into yet another production?  

In Stratford-upon-Avon, the RSC is trying many things that make their production of Macbeth stand out, from the constant presence of the porter to a thematic emphasis on time to a design aesthetic that looks and sounds like it came out of a 1960s horror film. The presence of these elements creates a compellingly eerie production while also serving to highlight the absence of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s child, whose constant specter haunts the performance and brings a subtler touch of horror to the stage.

This is a ghost not often seen in Macbeth. Indeed, it is a ghost whose presence is only ever alluded to in Shakespeare’s text. But in Polly Findlay’s Macbeth, the trauma of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s missing child is brought to the surface through a variety of production choices, beginning with the casting of the witches as children, clad in pink footie pajamas and carrying baby dolls. The reason why children would so haunt Macbeth doesn’t become clear until several scenes later, when Lady Macbeth breaks down in tears in his lap over his declaration that she should “bring forth men-children only,” and it becomes painfully apparent that these two characters have suffered some sort of grief surrounding their children.  The absence of any children in their household is further emphasized by shared moments with other characters’ children, including Macbeth’s jovial interactions with Fleance before he turns around and gives the order for his death and Lady Macbeth hearing the recording of the Macduff children’s murder before her descent into madness (and possibly seeing it as well, though the sightlines of the theatre made it difficult to tell what exactly was going on), thereby seeming to imply the cause of it. In Macbeth’s final nightmarish moments before his battle with Macduff, several horror-film-esque tableaus of children also serve to reinforce Macbeth’s grief and terror about his lack of children.

Before this production, I hadn’t really thought of Macbeth as a story about children. Ambition, yes, greed, yes, the cyclical nature of violence, yes. But Macbeth does also have two of the most well-known children of Shakespeare’s works—Young Duff and Fleance. Young Duff doesn’t stand out so much in Polly Findlay’s Macbeth, but the final image of Fleance standing before Malcolm as the Violence Timer resets itself does make us realize that the unwritten future of this story lies in the choices of children. Banquo’s children will be kings, eventually, somehow. Most likely through more violence—it’s what they’ll learn from their parents, after all, and they will keep the wheel of violence turning as they were taught to do, begetting more violence with each generation.

And then there is the unwritten ghost, the unknown specter of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s child in which Niamh Cusack’s Lady Macbeth seemed to root so many of her choices. What happened to this child? Did it ever really exist in the first place? We don’t know. We don’t need to know. If we did, Shakespeare presumably would have said something about it, and Polly Findlay gives us no further answers to these questions. What matters is the child’s absence, and that absence is something I believe the RSC did an excellent job of portraying, and in doing so gave us a deeper glimpse into the humanity of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

In a world full of noise and action and chaos, moments of stillness stand out all the more. In this production, where the clock was quite literally ticking, the image of Lady Macbeth frozen with grief on the ground in her husband’s arms at the mention of children is one of the more heart-wrenching moments of the show and one that will certainly stay with me.

Fatherland is an ambitious, contemporary play created by Simon Stephens, Karl Hyde, and Scott Graham based entirely (and exactly) on interviews conducted in their respective hometowns. The script cycles through the stories of fifteen different men, with each of their answers overlapping to create clear themes and conclusions about fatherhood. Through chant-like songs, precise choreography, and provocative lighting and set design,  Fatherland engages with the building blocks of the societally accepted role of “male.”

Indeed, wherever we go, our fathers – and our hometowns – leave their indelible mark. That much is clear in this production. The problem, then, lies in the telling of those stories, those marks. In creating so large a pool of storytellers, the number of stories in Fatherland quickly eclipses the significance of their individualities. We never delve too deeply into any one man’s story, and once the emotional gates begin to open, we cut to a different time, place, and father. The creators, so carefully written into the script, refuse to share their own experiences. Like Craig (a potential interviewee who ultimately decides not to participate because of the one-sided and objectifiable nature of the project), we as an audience are left wondering 1) how they could ask others to do what they themselves cannot do, 2) what happened with their own fathers that makes their experiences so hard to talk about, and 3) what the function of their secrecy is; does it detract from the other men’s stories or does it, as they claim, keep the focus on their interviewees?

And lastly, there is the obvious, overhanging question of gender. Never before have I seen so many men onstage. And it left me wondering: what if the subject were to remain the same, but our interviewees flipped? I thought of some of the women in my life – the self-identified tomboys, “Daddy’s girls,” and the like. I thought of my own father and how he remains my biggest cheerleader, even as impending adulthood continues to strain our relationship. My mind clung to the question most often asked in the play: “What is your first memory of your father?” With no background, no context, I asked this question of two women, and decided (unlike the writers of Fatherland) to leave their beautiful answers unedited:

“When I was like 3 or 4, I was joined at his hip. He had a shed behind our house, we lived in a trailer home – and I would always go back there with him to ‘help’ him with whatever he was working on. He would pick me up and put me on his work table and say, ‘hmmm how are we going to do this’ (in reference to whatever project he had). And then he would say ‘I know! If we put both our heads together we can figure it out!’ And we would press foreheads and then suddenly, he’d be like: ‘Thank you! Now I know what to do.’– He would always tell me it was my brain that helped him.”

“After working all day in his makeshift basement office, my dad would come running up the stairs, baseball glove in hand. He’d peek his head into whatever room I was in and, with all the excitement of a kid my age, ask: ‘how ‘bout a game of catch?!’ I’d say ‘yes,’ he’d say ‘right on,’ and out we’d run into the setting sunlight, waving off mother protesting at the stove, claiming dinner would be ready in ‘five minutes’ – always ‘five minutes.’ We’d line up diagonally in the backyard, my back against the garden wiring, his against the tall, unpainted picket fence. An old southpaw, his throws were jerky and awkward, lofting like a rainbow through the air. Mine were no better – I remember rarely throwing it within three feet of him back then. But dad was raising a ballplayer; one who’d out-run, out-hit, and out-throw the boys one day.”

Granted, these responses were written, not spoken, and thus lend themselves to more structured eloquence than the immediate verbal responses of the men interviewed. But the content of these stories still reveal an unexplored realm of Fatherland: vulnerability and beauty. Where Fatherland and its contributors are most often exploring physical memories contributing to masculinity, these feminine perspectives engage the intellectual beauty of memories. Both of the stories above focus not on the physical act of fixing a car or playing catch, but on the details surrounding the memories. They touch on the settings and feelings associated with the past, not merely the actions (actions which, coincidentally, are conventionally associated with masculinity).

I fear that, in an attempt to be “inclusive” and far-reaching in their approach, Stephens, Hyde, and Graham have missed the mark on the nuance and specificity needed to show the humanity of man – not just the masculinity of him.

Fly by Night, a new work by the artist Duke Riley, boils down to this: 1,500 pigeons, all with LED lights strapped to their legs, swooping together over an outermost corner of London, against a backdrop of the coming dusk. It’s very simple really. The birds have lights. We watch the birds. End of play. But some strange alchemy of curry, blankets, weird donuts, wine, friends, and a long hot journey results in an experience that feels, in its own quiet way, essential.

Though it was first conceived to honor the pigeon keepers of New York City, the London production has been billed as a commemoration of the “unsung heroes” of the Great War. The coops that serve as the primary set piece are modeled on those used in WWI, and the site of the production, Thamesmead, was home to a munition factory known for its production during the War.  The piece’s simplicity and near silence create space for immense breadth of interpretation, and thus the rhetoric of the marketing is perhaps more likely to fill that space than it may for most plays, and therefore more worthy of critical inspection. Through this lens,  the description, “commemoration of the unsung heroes” does the piece a troubling disservice. The unsung heroes of WWI are certainly not a bunch of birds. To make a homage to the homing pigeon is to minimize and sideline the war’s immense human suffering and to glorify its tools.

However, the actuality of the production dismantles this rhetoric through its commitment to care. Every aspect of the experience, from the careful instructions for the long journey to Thamesmead, to the availability of blankets and food onsite was obviously lovingly considered. This infusion of care made the evening a demonstration of the best facets of humanity. To commune, to delight, to eat and drink, and wonder at beauty and absurdity is antithetical to war. I’m still not entirely sure if I would consider the piece a work of theater, but it functioned as an intentional, nearly ritualistic, consecration of goodness, resulting in an at times transcendent beauty.

Gazing up at the swirl of lights, I had several blissful moment of displacement, forgetting who I was and what I was watching, my vision commandeered by the dance of seeming stars. Within its ritualistic goodness, this production also accessed a deep sort of innocence. Unbound by any structure beyond a beginning and an end, I found myself considering what I need out of a production. It’s enough for me, I think, to simply sit comfortably and watch something beautiful. I’m still trying to work out the relationship between what gives me pleasure and what makes me think and how merit factors into both. But through the pleasure of watching these birds I felt myself connected to a history of creation, in which we try to access something new by doing something beautiful. And more importantly, in a moment of intense global violence and pain, I felt connected to those who had experienced it with me, who made the long trek together simply on the promise of watching something weird and lovely, together.  

The title of our class blog, Small Planets, is inspired by Elinor Fuchs’s classic essay, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play.”  (A reminder that you’re expected to read this essay, as well as two other short essays on theatre criticism, prior to our first seminar on the 23rd . . . )  Each production we’re seeing this summer–whether it’s an installation paying homage to carrier pigeons of WWI, a production of Othello at the Globe, or an interactive exploration of virtual reality–presents a world of its own, a world that we’ve been invited to inhabit.  A world with its unique soundscape, geography, language, and politics. We seek to enter each of these new worlds with a spirit of adventure and critical awareness.  We seek to be audience members who are, as Fuchs puts it, “aroused to meaning.” May our journeys begin!  Safe travels to London, and see you soon.