Shakespeare for Dramaturgs

We have now added podcasting and blogging to the list of things Geoff wants for Midsummer. It should be really awesome, but it's a lot of responsibility for me. He also wants to write a piece on the Wiki to be published in Theatre Topics. I get more nervous about this every day.

Geoff is looking at a 60's-80's prom concept right now. I think it's really interesting. Theseus and Hippolyta as Prom King and Queen, the faeries having an underground anti-prom that the lovers flee to, the mechanicals as the AV club. The costumes and the music could end up really awesome. (Goth faeries is fairly intriguing) We listened to some Ann Hampton Callway, and I'm to be putting together a CD for him of things that would work for the end of the play. This makes right the things that distress me about the dramamturgy class.

Having read the first entry in the first of The Production Notebooks, I find myself preferring Geoff's case study, possibly because he goes into more detail. I am concerned, personally, with my changing connection with Geoff. I think he's a great professor and I love him, but he's a different kind of dramaturg than I think I want him to be. He's a very academic dramaturg, which makes him an excellent teacher, and he's passionately committed to the theory of dramaturgy, but...he doesn't work in the professional world much and, in fact, he prefers not to. I'm itching to work professionally more. I think eventually it's going to cause a rift between us because of my more aggressive nature.

It seems wise and beneficial to truly document my process for Midsummer, as it may come in handy later.

On March 25, 2005, I was invited into a meeting with Geoff and Jac about possible plans for the coming years in theatre. Geoff said that he was interested in directing Midsummer and that he wanted me to dramaturg it. He talked a little bit about his process and how he saw the coming year and a half going. He said that he realized that I'd worked with the play before and wanted me to think and be sure that I could follow whatever course he decided on. He talked for about five minutes before he let me say yes.

Over the summer holiday, I re-read the script, ordered some research materials, and cut and pasted the entire script into the pair of oversized sketch books that will be my main work point for this process. I began the process of transferring the folio punctuation into the Arden copies I had pasted and found it very slow going. I got about five Arden pages in when I discovered a Folio suggestion that the "Stand forth" lines in the first scene were stage directions and not spoken lines as they are usually used. The implications of this are interesting in terms of the pacing of the scene and the changes in meter wrought by not speaking these lines. I also began running scantion in my script, seeking out lines with irregular meter and discovering the various ways that the lines could either be made to fit in iambic pentameter through changes in emphasis or pronunciation or the reasonings possible behind feminine endings and other changes in meter. The problem with this work is that it is very detail oriented and I find I greatly benefit from companionship while working on it, making it less than ideal for summer work.

Since returning to campus, I have met with Geoff and am beginning a truly gung-ho dive into the text and the process. My current emphasis is on the faeries. I am reading books about faeries, faery tales themselves, essays about the effects of faery tales, connections between modern faery tales and ancient myth, and the thoughts of authors who write modern faery tales. I have the New Variorum edition of the play text and my Folio edition in modern type will be arriving this week. I am collecting music relating to faeries, including any songs I can find with the word "fairy" or "fairies" in the title, as well as Henry Purcell's opera The Fairy Queen, also Elizabethan lute music. Next weekend's goal will likely be the beginnings of image searches. I would love to alllow this to eat up all my time, unfortunately, I still have to complete my undergraduate degree...

Baltar's first name is Gaius. So was Octavius Caesar's. Connection? Don't know why but reading about Antony and Cleopatra made me think of Apollo and Starbuck. Strange feeling, should explore. No time now.