<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Drooling on the Pillow

Saturday, June 18, 2005

What Is Yasir To Me Or Me To Yasir? 

For the Goddess' birthday I got tickets to the matinee today of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hecuba at BAM.

That's love.

I did a production of the Oresteia in college and at the Pearl Theatre downtown I did Antigone. Surely that's enough for one lifetime.

It was a real culture-vulture crowd and they really seemed to get off on it, but I'll be frank; Greek drama doesn't do it for me. And this was the RSC and Vanessa Redgrave. It was done just about as well as it can be done and, for me, it was an hour and forty minutes of brain-drilling boredom.

Now, the reason they did it and the reason Redgrave accepted the role is that they saw some parallels in the script to W and the war in Iraq. I was surrounded by people who wanted to signal that they got every single shred of irony frictioned off by the supposed parallels by forced laughter at the most inappropriate moments. Kids, Greek drama and irony are not a match.

But it did occur to me this afternoon that what it does resemble most in modern theatre is agit-prop. The same inevitability, the same lack of nuance, the same relentless level of passion and the same lack of simple life. It's drama. It's Greek. To me, it's still spinach.

Vanessa Redgrave may be a nit-wit, but she is a great actress.

To even the scales I made Lane promise to take me to a monster truck rally for my birthday.
Posted by: Sluggo / 10:41 PM
|
Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com Listed on BlogShares