2000: The Christmas of Our Discontent

My first full-time job after I graduated college was as a third shift security guard at Kenosha Memorial Hospital. Job responsibilities included monitoring the ER, ushering newly-deceased bodies to the morgue, and securing leather restraints on combative patients.

When you work third shift you feel like an incredibly boring vampire. There were days when I would go to sleep in the morning and not wake up until 9pm. Seasonal Affective Disorder in the house.

We had some serious characters come into that ER. One morning a drunk woman crashed her car into a public school and was brought in crying for shame, thinking she had hurt some children and that it was her son's school. She was too hysterical to hear us repeatedly tell her that it was Sunday and the only thing she’d hurt was her ‘85 AMC Eagle.

One night there was a head-on collision. In one car there were three illegal immigrants hopped up on coke and in the other car – I swear this is true – a neo-nazi and his girlfriend. He was covered in swastika tattoos and he was the only one involved in the crash without a scratch on him.

But Christmas Eve was the worst.

I have a large family and between divorces and other sporadic dramas, we're sometimes required to attend five separate Christmas celebrations. So that year, I went straight from the Christmas party with my extended family at the Grandpa Llanas house to work and then it was on to my mom’s right afterward for a quiet Christmas morning with my brother and sisters.

I was running on 2 hours of sleep in 32 hours when at around 3 AM Christmas morning a drunk woman came in to the ER. She’d fallen off her bartstool repeatedly in one of Kenosha’s hundreds of bars, so they called an ambulance for her, and she was pissed. We strapped her wrists and legs to the cart to stop her from punching the doctor, and then took turns standing guard over her. Here's a small sampling of the pleasantries that came out of her mouth for the next four hours:

“You f*%#$*g nerd, I know you want to f*@# me, you virgin c*#$%*@*ing f#*#%t.”

Her mascara and eyeliner were smeared into glops and blurs, but they seemed poorly applied in the first place, almost like stage make-up. I tried to imagine what kind of mood she had been in when she’d made herself up the night before. What did she think was going to happen when she got ready to get sloshed on Christmas Eve? Was it her plan to wreak havoc on the lives of innocent hospital security guards?

Maybe she meant to be a villain.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (1:1)

Richard III is a villain. Exhausted by the frivolities that his recently elevated brother enjoys as King Edward IV. Richard opens the play with the infamous declaration: “Now is the winter of our discontent” (1:1) and then lays bear his grievances. He’s a hunchback and ugly and everyone else has got lovers with which to frolic except for him. So to pass the time he's going to get his brothers to kill one another so that he can be king.

What’s amazing is that he talks like this about himself:

But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; (1:1)

As if he has no skills with the ladies. But in the very next scene he manages to win over the Lady Anne with nothing more than pretty words.

Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep

To undertake the death of all the world,

So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom. (1:2)

In Henry VI part 3, Richard kills Anne’s husband the Prince Edward. And then kills Henry VI, her father-in-law. But he tells her if she can’t forgive him that she should stab him in the chest. She presses the sword to his skin.

Nay, do not pause: for I did kill King Henry –

But ‘twas thy beauty that provoked me.

Nay now dispatch: ‘twas I that stabb’d young Edward –

But ‘twas thy heavenly face that set me on. (1:2)

She drops the sword and marries him.

Richard can spit some mad game. If he dedicated himself to amorous endeavors instead of bloody thoughts, things might have worked out for the house of York. A major misallocation of skills on his part. Overlooked talents.

The Tudors eventually emerge as the power in England, and as the victors they write the history. It’s widely believed that they slandered Richard’s character and that they were the ones who generated the image of him being a hunchback and a machievel. Portraits of Richard III were actually altered to make him seem ugly (one eye narrowed and his shoulder raised). 

Shakespeare based his character of Richard on the Tudor account, but it’s almost more interesting to think of him as being an attractive young man, a normal guy who just suffers from terribly low self-esteem. He thinks he’s deformed and inadequate, like the 40 Year-Old Virgin. He doesn’t know what he’s capable of until he applies himself. If only someone had kicked him in the ass before he started down the path to the dark side.

After I left the hospital that Christmas morning I stopped for a moment at Simmon’s Island. Lake Michigan was frozen and glazed with powdery snow. I walked out a little ways onto the ice. Never in my life have I trusted ice. Every year in Wisconsin or Minnesota someone falls through on some lake or river and drowns in freezing agony. And Lake Michigan is a wild body of water with a will of its own. When I was young its undertow regularly pulled unsuspecting kids out to sea in the summer months, leaving abandoned Huffy bikes on the shore near Pike's Creek like so much well-preserved flotsam. But still I walked out to what I deemed the precipice of security and stared at the sunrise.

Richard III's villainy may have been cosmically necessary. The houses of Lancaster and York feuded and killed one another for decades. It began with the unnatural murder of a king, and the imbalance in the universe (the winter of discontent) had to be righted. Richard was the final balancing factor. He finished off his traitorous, usurping bloodline by being traitorous and usurping, making way for the better men of the House of Tudor to rule over more peaceful days.

Villains emerge to kick us in the ass, to call into action the better angels of our nature. When we know what must be done, but are unable to progress, they secede, they rebel, they terrorize. They drive us out onto the thin ice, farther over the freezing water than we ever thought we should go. Because it's only there -- on the very edge of safety -- when all things are at risk, that we can see the empty dangers of the future. And we know that it's time to quit our crappy security job and write a damn play. 

Cause there's always going to be a drunken Tudor slut falling off a barstool who shows up to hurl insults at you. So you might as well let her insult something you're proud of, otherwise what the hell's the point of being out on the thin ice anyway?

Why the F would anyone want to be king of England?

I've been in one real fight in my entire life. I went to a boarding school for high school and one year I had this roommate, let's call him Aaron. Aaron and I had been friends, we founded the LFA Chess and Checkers club together, we played pick up soccer and went on van trips to Hawthorne Mall. Then we became roommates and I hated him. Aaron was from Texas and outweighed me by about sixty pounds. He used to invite people into our room at midnight to play Monopoly when I was studying for History tests, he peed in my gatorade once and I drank it. And he knew I was crazy about this girl and he asked her to the winter formal.

So I tried to fight him and he kicked my ass. Or more accurately he didn't even have to kick my ass. We just wrestled and I never stood a chance. I couldn't throw a punch, because he had pinned my arms and gotten me onto the ground in the first five seconds. He laughed and told me to chill out. He laughed more when he saw how serious I was. I kept struggling for another ten minutes or so, until I was exhausted, but he was too fat and too strong and I was too big of a nerd. 

Sometimes, even if you're a nerd and a pacifist. You have to fight. Especially if you're the King of England.  

            Henry VI Part 3 continues the War of the Roses, where the house of York makes a claim against the house of Lancaster for the throne and war ensues. At the beginning of the play. King Henry VI, who is pious and peace-loving is cornered and relinquishes the inheritance of the throne to York and York’s family as long as they allow him to continue his reign in peace.

 

                                                            I here entail

            The crown to thee and to thine heirs forever,

Conditionally, that here thou take an oath

To cease this civil war (1:1)

 

York accepts. This pisses of Henry’s wife, Queen Margaret, who raises an army to kill York so that her son, Prince Edward, can be King, which is his birthright. Before she even comes knocking, York is persuaded by his sons to go back on his word and kill Henry and take the crown for the House of York. There’s a bunch of battles. York gets killed and his son, Edward, claims to be King Edward. This gets a little confusing because Henry’s son is Prince Edward. And it’s also confusing because there are in fact now two kings of England. King Henry VI and King Edward (the IV I think?).

People change sides and get married and in the end there’s revenge and heads on poles and King Edward (of York) kills Prince Edward. Richard of Gloucester kills Henry VI and begins to put his Machiavellian plan into action to take the throne from his brother in the final installment of the tetralogy: Richard III.

Richard figures prominently in this installment. He holds a severed head on the end of a pole at the beginning of this play and speaks to it, begging it to tell the tale of the victory the white-rose-wearing men of the house of York won against King Henry and the House of Lancaster:

 

Thus do I hope to shake King Henry’s head. (1:1)

 

            Later on Queen Margaret rallies her soldiers (the armies of Lancaster and the Red Rose) to arms at the battle of Wakefield:

 

            Off with his crown and, with the crown, his head  (1:4)

 

Queen Margaret wins at Wakefield and captures York and the Queen orders:

 

            Off with his head, and set it on York gates (1:4)

 

And then Warwick, finding Clifford injured to the point of death outside the city gates:

 

            Off with the traitor’s head (2:6)

 

King Edward:

 

For Somerset, off with his guilty head. (5:5)

 

            Obviously there is some association here with Alice in Wonderland, especially when you consider the oft-employed imagery of staining the white roses with blood or painting the roses red throughout Shakespeare’s Henry VI series:

 

Why do we linger thus? I cannot rest

Until the white rose I wear be dyed

Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry’s heart. (1:2)

 

            Maybe it’s because I saw Tim Burton’s 3-D mess, but I am none too interested in talking Alice. It’s a little more interesting to think about all these calls for decapitation as something out of Highlander. When they cut off a nobleman’s head there’s lightning and brouhaha and then they are infused with the dead man’s power and youth. 

There can be only one King of England, right? That’s why Richard has to kill Henry in the end even though he doesn’t fight and doesn’t want to be king.

            Decapitation is symbolic. As King Edward observes when they have Henry VI captured:

 

But Warwick’s king is Edward’s prisoner.

And, gallant Warwick, do but answer this:

What is the body when the head is off? (5:1)

 

            Like chess, capturing the king should mean victory. Unfortunately, the Herculean task of overthrowing a monarch is more aptly analogous to beheading the Hydra. In all the mess of a headless state many new heads emerge, each in turn wonting a good severing. After Henry relinquishes his inheritance, he essentially puts the crown up for grabs. This is how they end up with King Edward and King Henry and Prince Edward and Richard of Gloucester lurking and plotting.

            John Wilkes Booth played Richard III many times and was a Shakespearean actor of renown. It makes sense that he would believe that assassinating Lincoln would somehow undo the Union. He learned his history from the original theatrical Machiavel. But the fact that he commits his assassination after the war ended demonstrates something else: vengeance is futile.

            Almost every player in the War of the Roses has some blood they wish to avenge. The Earl of Westmoreland:

 

I’ll have more lives

Than drops of blood were in my father’s veins. (1:1)

Clifford slays York's innocent youngest son:

Your father slew my father; therefore die. (1:3)

 

Warwick is embarrassed by King Edward and switches sides to revenge his honor. Queen Margaret taunts York with a handkerchief dipped in his son's blood before revenging the murder of her lover, Suffolk. And the entire war was begun as vengeance for the generations earlier deposition and murder of Richard II by Henry's grandfather.

Revenge has a wicked momentum. Just ask the Hatfields. 

      Henry VI, for his part, is not interested in vengeance. He is happiest when he's being held captive by the Yorkists:

 

My crown is in my heart, not on my head;

Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones,

Nor to be seen. My crown is called content;

A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy. (3:1)

 

Henry tries to surrender and stand aside, but Lord Hastings makes it plain that words and treaties won’t settle this conflict:

 

            Away with scrupulous wit! Now arms must rule. (4:7)

 

When one’s rivals are warlike, even the most pacifist of men must be prepared to fight. And Henry was always going to have to pay the price for his grandfather's crimes against the Yorkists. He's the King after all, his head is the most important one to have off. And you can't cut it off yourself with words. He should have fought, even if he was going to lose.

I fought Aaron. Presumably it was over a girl. A girl who I never asked out. Who I liked in secret and with ineffectual gestures like fasting for Ramadan and writing terrible poems. When you fight for a girl, your chief rival is her affection. She's the one who needs to be confronted on the battlefield. Not your 220 pound, mo-hawked roommate.

For me, fighting Aaron was actually about fighting Aaron. It was about revenge. And revenge doesn't get you anywhere with the ladies. 

Words Are My Only Weapon

The first professional writing I did was as a columnist for the Kenosha Midweek Bulletin. Every week I would comb the internet for inspiration and then spew 800-word satirical diatribes against the Bush administration. Once I wrote about him being replaced by a digital version of himself like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. Another column was about the invasion of Iraq as a remake of an old television series that I vaguely remembered as a kid like they're doing with V now.

I was not a very good journalist. I always went for the most extreme opinion that I could and I used incendiary, disrespectful language. Luckily there was a forum in the Bulletin, called Sound Off!, where anyone who liked could call up and leave a 30-second message that would then be printed in the paper (provided it passed standards and practices of the Kenosha News Organization) and my detractors had ample opportunity to dismantle my arguments.

There were lots of angry calls. Almost every week someone would demand my immediate deportation to France, or call me a snot-nosed punk. I think my favorite was the one where someone told everyone else to relax because Gabe wasn't real, he's clearly that Jared guy from the Subway commercials. You can see below that I actually do look like him in the picture that ran beside my column every week.

The point is. I never inspired anyone to make any intellectual comments. I never started a dialogue. For three years I wrote for that paper, and I think the only person my column ever made any difference to was me and my Grandma who clipped every single column for a scrapbook.

In Act 4 of Henry VI Part 2, Jack Cade and his lower-class companions lead a rebellion against the young king. Cade claims to be the rightful heir to the English throne. While rousing his followers, he proclaims the miraculous math that will rule his kingdom:

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny. The three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. (4:2)

After a few hurrahs, Dick the Butcher, one of his followers and friends lets loose this famous Shakespearean quote:

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. (4:2)

Soon after this, an accountant is brought before them, and when it is discovered that he can read and add and sign his name. Cade determines his fate:

O, monstrous!

…

Hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck. (4:2)

Literacy can be a weapon of inequality. Education and book-learning are methods of oppression that elevate some and leave others behind.

Jack Cade’s rebellion against Henry VI is also against education and the tools high-fallutin' lords and ladies use to control the common. It's a bloody, inhumane rebellion that unsettles the monarchy so that York can march on the King and make his legitimate (and also bloody) claim to the throne. But despite Cade's ignorance, there’s something that makes his soldiers (the butchers, tailors, blacksmiths and laborers of Cade’s army) sympathetic.

It's knowing that in the conquest of France (see Henry V), they were the ones who perished on the battlefield, and that in Medieval England they were utterly disenfranchised and the nobility, who played at governance, did not care for them except as a political tool.

Cade and his rebels are terrible people who are terribly oppressed. Oppression drives some to desperate methods and foolish rationalization.

In the American politic we have seen public discourse disintegrate since the signing of the constitution. Two years ago we had Sarah Palin thrust upon us. The poster-child for ignorant populism. Now the Tea Party, in all it’s glorious ridiculousness, threatens to drag the Republican Party further and further from it’s illustrious past. Toward a base element. A kindling.

In all the popular clamor against my radical columns, I was sometimes lumped together with other liberal journalists, such as Molly Ivins. It seems strange to me in retrospect that people would ever associate my satirical bombast for actual journalism. I was just a smartass punk with a laptop.

But I couldn’t help it. I never felt more powerless than I did the night Al Gore lost Florida. I wanted to take arms against what I perceived as outrageous injustice. I wanted to fight and rebel. But luckily I’m a writer and words are my only weapon. So my thoughts could not be bloody. I sought only character defamation and the extraction of my enemies’ argumentative teeth. Parliamentary dentistry.

The saddest part is that Cade’s rebellion, was initiated by the Duke of York. Who wanted him to assault the King’s claim to the throne, and weaken it. Cade succeeded in seeding the doubt in people’s mind that Henry’s monarchy is tenuous, inherited from a traitorous murder (York’s great grand uncle or something was King and was murdered by Henry IV).

Cade was tricked. Manipulated by a nobleman and a politician. York layed out his plan in soliloquy:

And for a minister of my intent,

I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman,

John Cade of Ashford,

To make commotion, as full well he can,

…

I know no pain they can inflict upon him

Will make him say I moved him to those arms.

Say that he thrive, as ‘tis great like he will,

Why then from Ireland come I with my strength

And reap the harvest which that rascal sowed. (3:2)

That’s the way of it for we, the low players. It is our small movements that loosen the lids on jars of political jam across history. But the preserves, the power, the control, the sweet spread inside, is reserved for the lords. Men of a better ilk. Men who can read and write their names and perform complex calculations of character manipulation.

Cade gets his in the end. He is slain by a gentleman named Alexander Iden who brings his decapitated head to Henry, and earns himself knighthood. Violence begets violence. Slander begets slander.

My column-writing career is long-over. I just hope I made a few people laugh. Somewhere in the rhetoric and fury a good point or two was lost. I’m sure I didn’t change anyone’s mind. I felt weak at the time, and I wanted to pick a fight. I think that’s okay, because conflict forces us to grow. And I was the one with the most growing up to do.

Fat Gabe in his Barcelona jersey.

Photo taken circa August 2001.

Joan La Pucelle de Llanas

In 1999 the Llanas family had a gigantic family reunion in Lubbock, Texas. For three days we ate barbecue and danced the two-step while listening to stories about the three Llanas brothers Bibiano, Marcos and Amador who left Mexico after Pancho Villa was assassinated. On Sunday morning we went to mass in a church that the women of the Llanas family helped build. My little cousin, Ali, who must have been two at the time, ran up to the altar in the middle of the mass. The priest said: “Keep an eye on her, she looks like she wants to be the first female Pope.”

I have 3 sisters, 3 stepsisters, a mom, a stepmom, a grandmother who was raised in a lighthouse, and another grandma who keeps my grandfather alive by the sheer force of her love.

Oh, for the strong female protagonist! The Pippi Longstockings, Harriet the Spies, Stargirls and Norma Raes. When I read Anna Karenina, I had to quit a hundred pages from the end because I could no longer bear to see her too brilliant individuality melt and resolve itself into a silly dew because of the wandering affection of Vronsky (that rogue!).

That Joan of Arc is a fascinating historical personage is a ridiculous understatement, but I make it nonetheless. I may have first learned who she was when I saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 4^th grade, but I think I never really understood that what she did was real until I read the scenes in Henry VI Part 1 where her deeds and French character are utterly assassinated by the English playwright.

She is called Joan La Pucelle and she appears to rally the French against the occupying British forces. Obviously, she is a villain to the English and therefore a villain in Shakespeare’s play, but there are peculiar deviations from actual history in this play that are downright un-Shakespearean. Meaning they serve to over-simplify characters and flatten the impact of important moments instead of his usual tricks of shrinking time and re-sequencing events for heightened dramatic impact.

The problem is that the trial of Joan of Arc is unbelievably well-documented. The transcript was used in the movie The Passion of Joan of Arc and it demonstrates almost exactly the questions that were asked of Joan and what her answers were. Thirty years after her execution (and 130 years before Shakespeare penned the play) these documents were used to demonstrate her absolute innocence, the corruption of the Catholic officials who sentenced her to death, and establish the case for canonization.

In the play Joan convinces the Dauphin to accept her leadership by fighting him. Charles yields:

Stay, Stay thy hands! Thou art an Amazon,

And fightest with the sword of Deborah. (1:2)

According to the records of the Trial of Joan of Arc, she convinced the Dauphin of her mission by disclosing to him the three private requests he had made in prayer to God. And during the trial she said: “she herself bore her standard during an attack, in order to avoid killing anyone. And she added that she had never killed anyone at all.” (The Trial of Joan of Arc, p. 82, trans. W.S. Scott) She was an adviser and a military strategist. She was the rallying cry for France. She may never have swung her sword in assault at all.

There’s a scene late in the play, when Joan’s capture seems imminent and she conjures fiends from hell, and asks for their help to defeat the English.

You speedy helpers, that are substitutes

Under the lordly monarch of the north

Appear, and aid me in this enterprise.

ENTER FIENDS

This speed and quick appearance argues proof

Of your accustomed diligence to me. (5:3)

What the hell are demons doing in a historical play? The only historically accurate thing about their appearance is that they don't actually help her defeat the English.

It’s not the only time in this particular series of plays that demons are conjured. The ambitious Duchess of Gloucester conjures a demon in Henry VI Part 2 to ask him about the future. Silly women, always conjuring demons.

But it gets worse for Joan of Arc. Her father shows up before she's executed and she denies him:

Decrepit miser, base ignoble wretch!

I am descended of a gentler blood.

Thou art no father nor no friend of mine. (5:4)

But according to the transcript of the trial: “She answered her father was named Jacques Tart and her mother Ysabeau.” (The Trial of Joan of Arc, p. 64 trans. W.S. Scott).

Then, according to Shakespeare, she claims to be pregnant by the Dauphin in order to avoid execution and when that tenders no mercies, she claims it was actually Alanson who loved her. So it turns out the English were right in accusing her of witchcraft and whorishness. But according to records in The Trial, she was examined during her imprisonment and found to be a virgin, which alone should have disqualified her from being convicted of witchcraft according to the laws of the 15^th century church.

It’s possible Shakespeare had purely slanderous sources for his historical information. It’s also a popular theory that Shakespeare wrote only the portions of Henry VI that are good, and that other playwrights wrote the unfair and problematic passages. I think it likely that as a young playwright, Shakespeare was still making mistakes and accepting the direction of his patrons or the audience, who would have wanted Joan to be demonized. For God is British and could not possibly have been on the side of the French.

The slander against Joan, reminds me of the sometimes slander against Pancho Villa. I watched an A&E Biography on Villa once and although factually accurate, he was painted with a villainous brush. A tempestuous, egotistical murderer.

To my great grandfather and his brothers, Villa was a hero. He gave them cause to fight and to hope for lives better than those dealt campesinos. It's true he was greatly flawed and not nearly as cool as Zapata, but what do you want? Not every revolutionary leader can be a saint.

After the revolution, the fight he inspired in my ancestors brought them to Texas. That fight lingered in my grandfather, who raised his family in Wisconsin, where he would have good work for almost forty years. The fight sent my uncles and aunts and my father to college. It teaches and serves and leads and creates. It's sending my little sister to medical school. A strong female protagonist. It might not be the papacy, but these days papal dreams hardly seem the hallmark of virtuous ambition. I guess some villains never change.

Henry VI Part 1: Fathers, Sons and Soccer Practice

There’s a story my dad used to love to tell. He coached my first soccer team when I was six years-old. In the middle of a game the ball rolled up to me and I kicked it as hard as I could. It went sailing into the air and down the field, over other kids’ heads. I ran straight to the sidelines and said: “Dad! Did you see THAT?!”

When we were young it was impossible to go to a place in Kenosha where my dad was unrecognized. The grocery store, restaurants, the gas station, if we all went as a family to the high school track to run around or hit tennis balls off the backboard there was always some adult I’d never met who would say: “Hey, Ernie!” and my dad would say, hey Rick or Mike or Rusty or Booker. He was a firefighter and a softball player and such accomplishments are enough to cement a father’s heroism in his young son’s hopeful mind.

George Bush and George W. Will Smith and Jayden Smith. Henry V and Henry VI. Fathers often cast long shadows from which their sons struggle to escape. Check out this eulogizing by the Duke of Gloucester to the late great Henry V that opens Henry VI Part 1:

England ne’er had a king until his time.

Virtue he had, deserving to command;

His brandished sword did blind men with his beams;

His arms spread wider than dragon’s wings;

His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than midday sun fierce bent against their faces.

What should I say? His deeds excel all speech.

He ne’er lift up his hand but conqueréd. (1:1)

A mere 20 lines later, Gloucester describes the young Henry VI: “an effeminate prince whom like a schoolboy you may overawe.” (1:1) Granted, Joan of Arc is one of the major characters in this play, so describing someone as effeminate might not carry the same derogatory meaning that such knights normally ascribe to it, but it ain’t like he’s talking dragon’s wings about the heir to the throne.

Shortly into the play the French rebel, the houses of York and Lancaster argue and pluck red and white roses to start the War of the Roses, and the great military hero of England, Talbot, is abandoned in battle because of the civil discord.

Talbot is the scourge of the French. And while fighting Joan la Pucelle (of Arc) he and his son, John Talbot, are killed. They had been separated for 7 years by war, but Talbot called his son to the battle to teach him the family business:

O young John Talbot, I did send for thee

To tutor thee in stratagems of war (4:5)

When he sees that they are badly outnumbered, he tries to send his son away, but John refuses to fly:

Is my name Talbot? And am I your son?

And shall I fly? O, if you love my mother,

Dishonor not her honorable name

To make a bastard and a slave of me! (4:5)

Before Talbot dies, his son’s body is brought to him:

And in that sea of blood, my boy did drench

His over-mounting spirit; and there died

My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride. (4:7)

Icarus is, of course, the average son of Daedalus from Greek mythology. They flew on waxen wings to escape Crete and foolish Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea where he drowned. A cautious tale of venturing from beneath your father’s shadow.

But there are also accounts within this play of the sons who outdo their fathers. Standing watch at Orleance is the Master Gunner, who leaves his son on the watch in his stead. And when the opportunity arises, the son fires on Talbot and Salisbury, and he kills Salisbury.

Later on in the battle of Roan, the dying Duke of Bedford mentions Pendragon:

Not to be gone from hence, for once I read

That stout Pendragon, in his litter sick,

Came to the field and vanquishéd his foes. (3:2)

If you don’t know who Pendragon is, that’s okay. It’s only really important that you know that his son was King Arthur. Another son who outshone his father.

The opportunity is there, but Henry VI’s cards have been dealt. The evil of the early imagery of the play bodes poorly for the young king. “Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!” (1:1) Day and night, like York and Lancaster, the warring factions of heaven.

What’s interesting is that this trio of plays was written before Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. So, it's possible that for the audiences attending Henry VI that the legend of Henry V is as perfect in their minds as Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur. His father was not a human. He was a myth, a folk hero. A giant among kings.

Eventually, Shakespeare humanizes Henry V in those other histories. He shows his flirtations with criminals and drunkards in Henry IV parts 1 and 2. And even in Henry V after he conquers France, there’s the courtship of Catherine, when he bumbles through the French language in declaring his poor, soldier's love. It’s important that the legend of the father dissolve so that the son may achieve a unique success in life.

For my part, my father was humanized to me in two parts. The first of which relates to soccer.

My dad coached a soccer team with another woman before my parents got divorced. I was in college and I would sometimes come to practices and run little clinics on heading or shooting. There was a moment I observed between my dad and this woman when we were working on trapping. He was throwing the ball to her and she was trapping it while sixteen nine year-old girls ran around doing the same thing. Amidst all that giggling and the flying soccer balls. I saw my dad throwing the ball… but it wasn’t like watching my dad. It was like watching me. He was awkward and stumbling exactly the way I was around a girl I like, having no idea what to do. It was chemistry. I saw that connection and felt pangs of confusion. A strong want to combat the momentum of events. But I'm a midwestern boy, and despite my mother, I buried that confusion. Cause we hope ignoring such things makes them go away. But they don't. Eventually my parents got divorced and this woman became my stepmom.

My dad became a person entirely in my eyes soon after my parents were divorced. One day he had this weary look on his face. There was some superficial stressful thing that froze him for a moment. And he rubbed his eyes and scratched his head with both hands and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.” He wasn't really saying it to me. And he wasn't really saying it about this stressful thing that had happened. He was saying it about everything in the world. 

You can forgive a person for almost anything when they admit that. Because even though they don't know what they're doing, at least they're trying.

Fathers can overreach. They wrongfully conquer sovereign nations and leave the mess to their sons. They fall in love with other women. They believe they can fly. Sometimes their sons suffer for it. But sometimes they do the right thing and sacrifice their mythological legacy for mere humanity, and it's okay. We're still going to run to them on the sidelines after we send that ball flying through the air. They're still our fathers, even if they’re only men.

"Titus Andronicus" at Theatre of Note

I went to see Titus Andronicus Saturday night at Theatre Of Note in Hollywood.

I am going to say a lot of critical things about this show, but a foreword: I REALLY LIKED IT. It must be a hard play to land tonally, and they did it effectively if not very originally.

It was derivative of Julie Taymor’s movie Titus. From the unfit anachronisms in costuming and staging, to the Alan Cummings-esque Saturninus. Although, despite the similarity between this Saturninus and Mr. Cumming’s (clear sexual deviousness, spineless whining, and George W. Bush-like entitlement) he turned in one of the best performances of the cast.

Unfortunately, the choice to play Saturninus as a whiny punk makes Titus’s handing over the empery of Rome to him the first act of madness in the play. Clearly, Saturninus is a moron and a crybaby and in contrast to the cool and professional-looking Bassianus, he is unfit to hold the rule of Rome. But despite the action being crazy, Titus isn’t played as crazy in the first scene. In this production he hardly seemed affected by the horrors of war from whence he came. He was cool, clean and concise in his action. And he doesn’t go insane until after he chops off his own hand (a terrifically acted scene by Dan Mailley).

I wouldn’t feel bad with Titus seeming together in the first scene, except that I made the mistake of reading the director’s notes before the show started. Thomas Craig Elliot, the director, wrote:

“Every time the action of the play seems too far-fetched, too implausible, I once again read stories about genocide in the Balkans, of hacked limbs in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, of rape used as a weapon of war. I read stories of veterans who have failed to reintegrate into society – stories of former comrades killing each other over twenty dollars, of husbands strangling wives in their sleep, of unprovoked brutal rape and murder.”

Come on. Seriously? The violence and horrors of this play are so over the top and intermingled with Aaron’s playful malevolence as he executes his plans against the Andronici, that it’s frankly an insult to veterans of actual warfare to draw any parallels between your little production and the theater of combat. Not to mention that now instead of enjoying your play, I was made to feel guilty for enjoying it. As a former Catholic, I have a particular aversion to this strategy. A note to directors: try not to make your audience feel bad about having fun at your play before the house lights come down.

Not that it wouldn’t have been interesting to make a choice to have Titus actually dealing with the issues of PTSD and reintegration, but he bore no characteristics of PTSD that could be detected by a layman, and the Taymor-inspired anachronisms in costume and design defeated any potential linkage to serious issues of modern times.

I’m really tired of anachronisms. Sometimes you need to be consistent onto yourself. I really get nothing out of seeing the servants of Saturninus don a Third Reich armband, hunt with machetes and then see the Goth army rallied via text message. I'm not joking. A blackberry. Shoot me in the face.

That being said, I was still able to laugh at Aaron’s unbelievable ability to manufacture villainy upon villainy and to care for nothing but furthering the cause of evil. And like I said, overall, I liked the play a lot.

It doesn’t sound like I did, does it? I have that problem. I’ve never been one to heed Thumper’s advice: “If you can’t say something nice. Don’t say nothing at all.” I like bunnies.

85% of the performances were outstanding, and theater being the actors’ medium, I’m happy to forgive any directorially folly in favor of the sweat and efforts put forth by the cast. Aaron, Saturninus, Titus, Tamora, Demetrius, Lavinia, Marcus… they were strong, at times frightening and dangerous, and appropriately moving.

I would recommend that you go see it, but sadly Saturday was closing night.

L

8th Grade Gabe: Much Ado About Extra Credit

Gabe Llanas

Mrs. Duda

8th Grade English

March 11, 1992

Extra Credit Play Review

Much Ado About Nothing

The Racine Theater Guild's performance of William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing was a fine performance indeed. It bore all the hallmarks of excellent and educational theater and was very funny also. In this extra credit essay, that I was asked to write to make up for the C that I was unjustly given because of the analysis of a very short poem that I did in class, which was every bit as good and meaningful as Mike Matteucci's analysis of "Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too," I will talk about my thesis of the play in some supporting paragraphs, and then a conclusion.

The play is a very good play. In it some soldiers come home from war and Leonato throws them a big party. Benedick and Beatrice argue with each other. They are very smart and witty. But it was hard to understand what they were talking about. Then after a few minutes, it was like someone dropped a babelfish in my ear, and I was able to understand the language of the Bard.

Benedick's friend Count Claudio falls in love with a girl named Hero and wants to marry her, but he's a chicken. So Don Pedro makes a very smart plan to wear a disguise and talk to Hero for Claudio and woe her for him. The plan works even though Don Pedro's wicked brother, the evil Don John the Bastard, tries to make mischief on everyone. Then everyone tricks Beatrice and Benedick to fall in love with each other, which was obvious that that was going to happen, because Benedick talks about women at the beginning of the play: "I will live a bachelor" (1:1) which is obviously foreshadowing that he will eventually get married. But then Don John tricks Claudio into thinking that Hero had intercourse with another guy so he doesn't want to marry her. And the friar comes up with a great plan to pretend that she died of grief, and after she is fake dead they find out everything was a lie.

Most of the people feel bad, Benedick and Beatrice really do fall in love, and then everyone gets married and is happy. As you can see there are a lot of plot things that happen throughout this play, which make it very good.

My brother, Ian, told me that if I was going to go to a play that I should ask a girl if she would like to go to the play with me, because girls like culture and arts. So I called seven girls. Nicole said no, Jenny had a basketball game. Marian had a basketball game too, Laura wasn't allowed to go on dates (even though I told her we would just be going as friends), Jessica thought I said Dave when I called, so she thought I was Dave Ruffalo and I was really confused because apparently she and Dave Ruffalo went out for five days last year and then he kissed Erika in a game of spin the bottle and they broke up and I never kissed Erika or even played spin the bottle, so it was really confusing. Michelle said she was going to her grandma's, and when I asked her how come she wasn't going to the basketball game, she said they didn't have a basketball game that night, which was curious. Finally, I went next door and asked Molly if she wanted to go and she wasn't home, so I asked her mom, and her mom said yes, Molly would go to the play with me.

I wore a tie and some slacks and my grandpa's Navy trenchcoat, and Molly wore a nice coat and a plaid dress that sort of looked like our school uniform, but wasn't. My sister Katie made me buy her flowers, which cost 4.99. I did not want to buy flowers because new comics come out on Tuesday and the new X-Factor has part 5 of the X-tinction Agenda and I have to buy two copies of it.

My palms were very sweaty and all Molly and I talked about was Weird Al Yankovich. She thinks he's dumb and I disagree. I thought taking a girl to the play was a bad idea. But then the play started and it was pretty good. especially the part with Dogberry the police officer who kept telling everyone to remember that he had been called an "ass."

My mom picked us up after the play, and I let Molly ride in the front seat and I sat in the back next to Cassie's car seat. I don't think it was a date because we didn't hold hands or kiss or hug goodnight and plus I don't even like Molly except as a friend.

Now I will talk about Benedick. He changed during the play from thinking he would never get married, to falling in love with Beatrice and getting married to her. He says something at the end of the play:

In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion. (5:4)

The footnote says giddy means changeable. Man is a changeable thing. Which means that people can change. I don't know that I ever want to change. I kind of like things like they are now. School is very easy and summer vacation is fun. I'm afraid about going to high school next year. I don't know if people will be all grown up. I don't want to have to ask girls to dances or go to parties where people are drinking alcohol. I like to be friends with the kids in the neighborhood, who are mostly younger than me. We play Nintendo and Ghost in the Graveyard, and it's sad to think that you won't always have the same friends.

Mrs. Duda, you gave me a C when I did my poem analysis in class, which was by Robert Frost and was called "Precaution" and went like this:

I never dared be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old.

You said it wasn't long enough, but I think it's deep enough. I think no matter what we start out as when we're young, we're going to go out there and live and be some different thing. In science when we studied cells, we learned that all of the cells in our body are regenerated every seven years. So in seven years not a single part of me will be the same as it is now. And then in seven years after that, I'll be all new again. Even cooler than that, I read in some book about the police that people's memories aren't even real memories. You recreate your memories every time you think about them. So the more you think about something the more and more imaginary it becomes. because you keep changing it a little bit every time you remember it. So not only are you a different person with different cells in the future, but your memories are different too.

Benedick was right, man is a giddy thing. It doesn't take long to be totally changeable and totally different than what you were before. And I think this is how you know that William Shakespeare was very wise when he wrote Much Ado About Nothing. Because Benedick says something deep like that, but also you get to laugh at Dogberry, when he talks about everyone remembering to write down that he was called "an ass."

Hamlet vs. Me

We're about to get underway with preproduction of Kung Fu Hamlet, a play created over half-priced wings at the Green Mill on Grand Ave. in Saint Paul by my No Refunds Theater Co. cohorts, Matt Dawson, Chris Howie and myself. We've done the show several times in the past to universal acclaim. It's like Cliff's Notes on crack.

There’s this episode in the last season of Northern Exposure where Chris in the Morning is doing a verbal defense of his dissertation on Casey at the Bat as a metaphor for the inevitable decline of western global dominance. The University of Alaska has sent two professors of literature to conduct the defense. One is a traditionalist, who believes in Chris’s analysis is symptomatic of the destruction of aesthetic appreciation of classic literature. The other is a deconstructionist who loves every word Chris utters and hates everything white and Eurocentric about culture. The two profs hate each other and almost wind up in a fist fight.

Late in the episode there’s a dream sequence where Chris is a soldier, pinned down in a tiny building with the remaining members of his regimen: Van Gogh, Beethoven, Poe and Shakespeare. He gets a call over the radio, “What? They just took out the western canon! Melville! Talk to me!”

Shakespeare grabs his rifle. “They’ve gone too far!” And he rushes out the door only to be gunned down!

Chris catches him, “No, Shakes, no!”

And Shakespeare groans, “’Tis a far, far better thing I do…”

Chris says, “Shakes, that’s Dickens.” But Shakes’ eyes roll back in his head and he dies.

Chris grabs his gun in a fury and runs out the door. Firing like mad, he dodges explosions and rolls across the ground, crawling. He hears footsteps and jumps to his feet pointing his rifle at his enemy – And it’s HIMSELF!

He’s assaulting and defending the classics at the same time.

In the end he takes the two professors out to a baseball diamond, recites the poem and strikes one of them out. Illustrating that what the poem is really about is the feeling of striking out. It's about baseball, and the opportunity for greatness on the line with every at bat.

I don't really see Kung Fu Hamlet as an assault on classic literature. Hamlet is a story that Shakespeare told better than anyone else, but like many of his plays, it had been told before.

There was a Nordic Tale recorded in Latin in 1200 AD about a prince named Amleth who pretends to be crazy in order to outwit his uncle who has murdered his father and married his mother. Amleth kills a spy in his mother's bedroom and is sent to England to be secretly executed, but he outwits everyone, murders his uncle and becomes king.

I feel that stories need to be retold, they need to be kept alive, and sometimes they need to have a little kung fu sprinkled on top to make them really kick-ass.

Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

I wanted to do another post about Hamlet, but every time I thought about it I was gripped with a passionate malaise and I wound up writing a bunch of nonsense.

Strange.

I went to a production of Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery this weekend. It was pretty good.

They screen movies at the cemetery at midnight during the summer months and I've never been. I'm not much for midnight movies anymore. I tend to fall asleep. Also I don't really enjoy watching movies while sitting outdoors either. There are all sorts of discomforts -- moisture, critters, chilliness -- and I'd rather be inside and warm and cozy. That's a sure sign of aging, isn't it?

But Twelfth Night was being performed in a little theater that was a converted chapel. It's a nice space for this show. The seats were set up around the perimeter and all the action was in the middle. It was a matinee, so there was a little column of light cascading in from a stained glass window, not unlike the light that falls into the map room in Indiana Jones and points the way to the well of souls.

The comedy in this production was pretty awesome. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and the mayhem they caused was fun, but it was really Charles Janasz as Malvolio who stole the show. His oppressive grimace was spot-on and watching him piece together the contents of the forged love letter was like watching Chico interpret Harpo's whistle-narrated semaphores telling him that they have to stop Groucho from being seduced by the blonde bombshell before Margaret Dumont catches him and the sweet kid who's depending on them will lose her family hotel/sanitarium/opera house/department store.

Actually, the production was like a Marx Brothers movie in a lot of ways. You sort of had to meander through the underwhelming Olivia - Viola - Orsino love triangle in order to get to the marvelous comedy. The same is true in a number of Marx Brothers movies where Zeppo or Allan Jones has some yawntastic love story that you tolerate because the goofy is so very pleasing.

There was also live music accompanying the show (in addition to the Fool plucking away at intervals). But there was a hipster quality to the costuming and style of the show and that spilled over into the music, which worked all right for some of the tunes, but when it came to the end of the show... well, frankly it was sad. And Twelfth Night is not a show that should leave you sad. I guess that's what happens when Malvolio is the character we love the most and in the last scene he marches off stage in tatters proclaiming that he will be revenged upon everyone.

The last line of the play should be filled with joy and revelry and a promise for future delights:

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you everyday. (5:1)

But the odd, ethereal melody made it a little bit disconcerting. I sort of didn't want them to strive to please me everyday if this was the music they were going to use. Moody indie-rock was an appropriate selection for the scene in the kitchen when the fool plays for Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. It is set up thusly:

FOOL: Would you have a love song or a song of good life?

TOBY: A love song, a love song.

ANDREW: Ay, ay, I care not for good life. (2:3)

I don't know though. Sir Andrew does have a good point. As John Cusack says in High Fidelity: "Which came first, the music or the misery?" Love and melancholy are too closely intertwined. Maybe it's more appropriate in modern times that even in a happy ending, we are sad. It's not like the Fool falls in love at the end of the play, so if he's going to sing a song, it should be a minstrel's lament. He's a wayfaring clown, and it's his lot to wander and witness the bliss of everyone his comedy touches. But he has no access to that bliss himself. Like Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven, his wings are constantly eluding him.

       Maybe they'll be there, around the corner, in the next town, on the next stage, in the next session of comic romance where he facilitates love and mocks misery with his sad bastard music and his rocky wit.

OPHELIA!!!!!!!!!

My younger sister Rachel used to write me emails in ALL-CAPS when I was in college. Email was relatively new technology at the time -- I had yet to sign up for my first hotmail account (mcninja64@hotmail) -- and so proper electronic correspondence decorum was not yet widely established.

I had a pretty rotten spell in college, feeling isolated and missing my glory days in high school where I’d been prefect, star soccer player and egomaniacal dictator of an extra-ineffectual student government. I knew Rachel looked up to me, cause I was her big brother. She went to the same prep school that I went to on the same scholarship I’d received. She and I used to play soccer together in the backyard of our house for hours and hours in the summertime after we’d watch reruns of Wings on USA. I tried to be a good role model, I did. But for some stupid reason, when it came to those emails, I was a real jerk.

One night -- when I was feeling sad about some misery of my own making – I got an upbeat email from her, in all-caps that spoke excitedly about something or other in her life and told me to be happy or cheer up or something, and I replied and went on a tirade about how the all-caps were annoying and how she didn’t understand that life wasn’t always fun and happy and that sometimes you had to just be mad about things. It was angsty and cynical and I’m sure I felt like I was teaching her an important lesson about the real world. But I was being a bad big brother. She must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. Her emails came less frequently after that. Fewer exclamation marks. Unenthusiastic subject lines. Proper capitalization.

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

Hamlet abuses Ophelia, tells her to get to a nunnery to avoid bearing children who may be boys, for boys will be sinners and dishonest like he is. He says horrible, nasty things to her, then he kills her father and unlike Othello, it is not the unnatural nearness of the moon to the Earth that makes Ophelia mad. It’s the natural douchebaggery of man.

But then, after she dies and Hamlet sees Laertes and his modes of grief, he leaps to, not to be outdone.

I loved Ophelia – forty thousand brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum. (5:1)

How could he dare say such a thing! Laertes was a pretty good brother. He was looking out for Ophelia’s virtue in cautioning her to stay away from Hamlet and his many tenders of affection. He loved Ophelia.

We’ve been in Hamlet’s position too. When you’re in love with a girl, and all your emotions are tied to hers, you think that it’s more profound than any love her family could provide. But of course that’s wrong.

I made a depressing mistake once and read the online journal of my ex half a year after we’d seen each other last. Searching through the archives, I found the chronicle of the night she left. How she drove from my arms to her dad’s embrace, and he held her and comforted her and made her feel safe. That used to be my job. But I didn’t do it right, I wanted more things for myself. She would always have his arms. And her mother’s. And she would have the ears of all her friends who despised me for taking her away from them.

My love was inferior.

If Hamlet could have found Ophelia’s blog and read the strange, floral ramblings she executed after he murdered her father, he might have learned the same lesson. Not that it would have mattered. At this moment in the play Hamlet has already declared his thoughts to be bloody. He’s killed Polonius and orchestrated the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His virtual insanity smacks of actual insanity as his corrupt moral compass wavers. Too close to the magnetic destination of his vengeance.

When revenge is the motive, there will be innocent casualties. When we can’t cope with our own dissatisfaction, love’s umbrella breaks down. And someone always gets hurt.

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

They just happen to be the closest thing.

Elsinore, Wisconsin

             In 2003 the Lakeside Players in Kenosha, Wisconsin staged William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Before the run was complete a marriage was over, someone checked into a mental hospital and one of the most interesting directorial decisions I’ve heard of regarding this play dissolved largely unseen into the over-tread floorboards of the Rhode Opera House in historic downtown Kenosha. A stone’s heave from the birthplace of Orson Welles.

            The husband-wife directing team had unrealistic expectations to say the least. They believed there would be such a clamor to see the show that people would be lining up around the block for tickets. If you know anything about Kenosha (and you can probably make some accurate assumptions if you stretch your imaginary muscle) you know that Kenoshans never really line up for anything unless it was to file for unemployment after the Chrysler lakefront assembly plant closed down in ‘89. Lee Iacocca had promised to keep the plant running for at least five years after Chrysler bought American Motors, but after only a year it was announced that 5,500 autoworkers would lose their jobs. Shipping died soon thereafter, the dock's primary use became fishing, and Kenosha grabbed hold of its bootstraps.

            The Rhode Opera House stood in the shadow of that lakefront plant for decades. The plant was an eyesore, a giant brick and rust structure blocking any decent view of Lake Michigan. As if someone had planted an old Death Star on the Harbor. But it was our Death Star. And now it’s been replaced by modestly occupied, high-end condos.

            One would think the condos would bode well for the Lakeside Players and downtown consumer culture. But losing jobs means losing money. No money means no leisure time. And no leisure time means no idle quests for poetic enrichment. Thus the thought that staging a 400 year-old play in Kenosha’s wayward economy was going to be profitable was strange indeed. Borderline maniacal if you want to be dramatic about it. And that accounts for the mental hospital aspect of this story.

            Hamlet might have played well in Kenosha if they had run it like Little League and cast different teams of children in the individual acts, and given eager parents the opportunity to direct or run the spotlight and purchase photos of their performing offspring at inflated prices. Every child's costume could boast advertisements from local businesses: Ruffalo’s Pizza, Mars Cheese Castle, Captain Mike’s Bar.

Or if they could have gotten Brett Favre to play the perplexed Dane. A moratorium would have been placed on cheeseheads being worn during performances so as not to impede anyone’s view. Favre has proven himself all too in tune with Hamlet’s indecisive nature. And when they choose to act at the climax, both Hamlet and Favre find themselves throwing tragic interceptions and disappointing those who love them most.

But onto that bit about dissolved genius.

In the first act Hamlet is visited by the Ghost of his father, who has come from hell to tell his son that he was murdered by his brother and that Hamlet must seek revenge for this foul and unnatural act. The Ghost calls Hamlet to action and it’s his design that brings the house of Elsinore crashing down. He is the architect of all the proceeding violence:

Thus was I sleeping by a brother’s hand

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reckoning made but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!

If thou hast nature in thee bear it not,

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest. (1:5)

On the Lakeside stage in 2003, the Ghost’s call for revenge was more than a call. He had a physical hand in every murder in the play. His hand is upon Hamlet’s when Hamlet stabs Polonius in the closet. Ophelia’s suicide was played as a murder, with the Ghost coming onstage and strangling her. It’s that image in particular: Ophelia, the innocent, the girl corrupted and controlled by the men around her, struggling against the gray grip of the Ghost’s hands around her neck… that was genius.

 Hamlet has probably been staged hundreds of thousands of times, so it’s possible that someone else stumbled upon this idea before our Kenosha comrades. It’s certainly symptomatic of some pretty serious daddy issues. But it was a perfect moment. And my head is forever hatless to the directing team's effort.

As a blue-collar kingdom, Kenosha thrived for almost a century. Ramblers started coming off the line in 1902. Later this year they’re going to close down the only remaining Chrysler Engine Plant in town, the last vestige of our automotive heritage. 800 more workers will lose their jobs. The state legislature has just voted to pay for the cleaning of the polluted land under the plant after it’s demolished. 100 acres for “future economic development.” But what are a people who don’t manufacture anything? 

There’s resilience in the hearts of Wisconsinites. We’ll build coffee shops and restaurants and open bookstores if that’s what they tell us we should do. We’ll take capitalistic risks, and enjoy the American dreams of being your own boss, and working 80 hours a week without health insurance or pension. We'll stage over-ambitious theater with furious sound. We’ll pull and yank on our bootstraps until our callused hands tear and our children have all gone to California in search of riper industry. 

But there are icy fingers around our throats, the ghosts of villains long-vanished from our daily activity.  How long will Lee Iacocca's broken promise haunt us? Sundering families and calling us to desperate investment? Not until all of our bodies are piled up in Kenosha Harbor and Fortinbras waltzes in to take over the kingdom. 

Whoever the hell Fortinbras is in this ridiculous analogy.

I don't like to make light of divorce because it's a subject that colored the cynicism of my twenties, so as for the directing team's marriage that ended with this production of Hamlet... I don't really know what happened between them. I'm sure there have been other couples whose vows fell victim to the bard. I guess sometimes two people come together for a while, they create something beautiful like a play or a family, and that kind of perfection just can't be permitted to endure.

Here's my sister Cassie in 2001 looking at the back of the Rhode Opera House

in Kenosha, home of the Lakeside Players. That empty field there used to be 

filled with part of the American Motors Assembly Plant. It is still a vacant field today.