Weekend Open Thread:
Moving
Last Week at Portico: ¶ After months and months and months of not getting it right, I finally forced a final draft of Brian Morton’s The Dylanist to materialize. This makes Mr Morton the first author whose novelistic oeuvre I have written up in toto. All four are lovely books, not infused but positively tanned in a vision of New York as a place where no one ever really dies. ¶ If you know what Jim Jarmusch was up to in No Limits, No Control (a movie billed, at least on gigantic placards at the Angelika, as The Limits of Control), you know how to reach me. Not that I care, particularly; the movie’s really too beautiful for everyday “meaning.” ¶ Touré’s essay on post-blackness may not constitute the best book review imaginable (of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor), but it’s a must read. When you’re done, check out the Book Review review.
Report on “Mary Stuart”:
Have no fear of my giving anything important away here. Just know that it was an evening of tour de force acting, without its being histrionic. Schiller’s play nicely captures the feel of Shakespeare’s history plays; somewhat expository at first to set the scene and then the action takes over and we are borne along with the characters into the heart of the drama. True, the play assumes a working knowledge of the familial connections of Europe’s royal houses and the consequences of same, which is understandable given the normal educational level of the audience for whom Schiller was writing his work. For the more decadent American audience, sapped by TV and other modes of modern claims on one’s attention, a short explanatory geneology would have helped for those who wished to fully understand the whys and wherefores. Beside this minor point, the play’s the thing, as they say, and the actors executed it brilliantly. The, at first, somewhat dour production comes into its own in the second half, making for a stirring, without being overwhelming, visual experience.
I was delighted to find the superb supporting cast was very familiar without the names coming to me; a case of long-working actors, familiar through the varied media of theatre, film,TV and even commercials, who have honed their abilities through long years to reach a point such as this – to support two great actresses with verve and not act as mere milquetoasts to the two the principals. A worthy evening of intelligent theatre, and, not “miked”, so what one hears IS what is said and in the manner it was delivered.
I will not comment on anyone’s performance by name, go see it and decide for yourself; it will not be regretted.
Ozymandias indeed.