It snowed a couple inches last Saturday. By Tuesday, the temperature had rocketed into the mid 40's and melted all the snow. By yesterday it has climbed as high as the low 60's. This is February. I can't decide if it's just a weird year, or if this is just a weird part o' the state.
I wish the ground would dry out enough to go outside and play.
Speaking of playing, the original two Wee attempts kicked the bucket with two hours down and ended up going for a couple hundred bucks. A more recent attempt stayed at fifty bucks until the last hour and a half. Oh well. I still believe it's a potential.
Basically, my weekend has as good as begun. I have one class tomorrow morning; we're watching a movie.
The movie's En compagnie d'Antonin Artaud, which for some rediculous reason is translated as "My Life and Times with" AA. Artaud created Theatre of Cruelty, which everyone ignored until the 60's when everyone started taking the same drugs as this guy and Peter Brook wrote The Empty Space, which is basically a Bizarro version of The Theatre and its Double.
We've got an option in an assignment to write our own theatrical Manifesto. I think I'm going to go for it, and say that we need to get over the 1960's. Since then, there really haven't been a whole lot of new theories of the theatre. By that I mean that all the theories of the 60's seem to come out of this, "The theatre is dead, the theatre is boring, the theatre is pretentious, and (most often) the theatre is awful." And then go on to explain that if only people would see theatre as a potential religious, social, engaging experience, everything would be OK.
I would argue that theatre people DO see theatre that way now. We don't need to hear that theatre is awful, we don't think so. We think that commercial theatre is awful (ask your average sophomore theatre major what they think of Cats or The Lion King). We don't need a revolution for members of the theatre, we need to make the exciting, interesting theatre that exists be patron friendly. We need to make Suzan Lori-Parks and other experimental forms of theatre exist on the same plain as Andrew Lloyd Webber. How? That's what my Manifesto's going to be about.
I think it involves shedding the shackles of the 60's, which were great, but aren't immediate for my generation. (Or probably the last one either.) Boal, Brook, Bogart and Brecht are important, but they're no longer current, and I'm surrounded by theatre professors who still think of them that way. The 50's and 60's are over. The 80's have become the past, and what great theatrical revolution do we have from that time? The Golden Era of the reign of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Truly, nothing good came out of the 80's.
Anyway, next week is the famed and glorious week that the profs for both my classes are gone, so it's like getting an extra Spring Break. I hope it's sunny.