It's time for the ten minute Midsummer scene. This requires at least three actors and at least six minutes worth of scene.
I've got David and Stacie appearing as Puck and Titania. Totally unable to find an Oberon, I talked Nathan into it. The thing about Nathan is, he's very self-concious. He doesn't like public speaking, he doesn't like acting, he doesn't like it when people look at him. He's also going to have a hard time with Shakespeare's language. Looks like I have my work cut out for me.
In case anyone is interested this is the scene I'm doing. It starts at the beginning of the scene and ends just before the entrance of Demetrius and Helena. Observant readers have noticed that I haven't mentioned the actress playing Fairy. This is partly because I can't find anyone to do the role and partly because of my "artistic choice".
The fairies are all members of Titania's train- she's Queen of the Fairies and they're her servants and subjects. They're all light and happiness and goodness and fun spirits. I think of them all sort of as Titania's protegees, and that they look exactly like her. I'm planning on making little one foot high paper cutouts from photographs of Stacie and putting them on fishing line so they "fly". The voice of Fairy would be done by Stacie, but recorded and digitally played with, maybe sped up or given an echo or bells under her voice, I don't quite know what I can do yet, and then played while the little cutout moves around on stage. Later there would be a swarm of them to follow Titania around during the scene. As David put it, "oooh, mini-Stacies, yea!"
Oberon and Puck, however, are representatives of the dark and scary side of Fairyland. Oberon, as King of Fairyland, is more like the Valar in The Silmarillion, and Puck more like the Norse semi-diety Loki. They've got power, and it's not necessarily all friendly power. David also wanted to wear his black pleather pants in a scene and probably be shirtless too. In this world, it works. Oberon reminds me of a picture I saw in I think my history textbook in high school. It was a Romantic period painting of a man in a long black coat standing on a cliff on a day that looked like it was ready to storm, but hadn't yet. I can't find this painting because I don't know what it was called or who it was by. (If anyone reading could give me a hand, it would be greatly appreciated.)
I figure since both Titania and Oberon are in control of the natural world, and since they're pissed off at each other and that's setting the weather into a tumult, they're each in control of opposing sides.
I have big ideas, I don't think they're going to turn out. Oh well, that's what rehearsals are for.
However, it could just be me. I'm in a sort of a "what am I doing with my life?" phase at the moment. I want to get out, but I don't know how to. This morning I was talking to friend Shua who was dropping a couple of classes and he asked me why he was here. I told him he was getting an education so that when he was plunging out the toilets in a Big Boy- and he made me stop. Quite right of him, but we both were thinking exactly the same thing at that moment.
Maybe I won't be at a Big Boy, but I sometimes am beginning to wonder if after I graduate and get married whether I'll be anything more than Nathan's wife. That's not what I want. I know I'm made for better things than that, but I don't know how to do those things with what I have now.
I don't feel like I'm doing anything that makes a difference. I took a playwrighting class, and I came out of it really without anything. I'm taking both an acting and a directing class now and I just don't feel like I'm getting what I want to know.
When I was in high school, people told me what was good and what wasn't. I had people to tell me when I sucked and when I didn't. Generally they told me I didn't, but it happened. Now no one tells me anything. They give constructive criticism based on given situations, and that's not what I want. I want someone to tell me, essentially, whether I should quit my day job. Should I actually persue anything or am I on the completely wrong track?
I want to hear the gossip, the things people say about each other when their backs are turned, the stuff that people believe to be true. I don't want to hear the things that people say because they have to say something helpful, I want to know what they tell their friends afterwards.
Take Ubu. People in the department thought it was entertaining, but they didn't like it. Ask them about it in class and they go on about the pace and the energy and the "artist's responsibility". Out of class, it was a piece that should not have been done because it compromised the original intent of the play and it was little more than a lot of jokes with no content. Which is the more compelling repsonse?