Little

Yes, do. Try and calm yourself, and make your mind easy again, my frightened little singing-bird. Be at rest, and feel secure; I have broad wings to shelter you under. How warm and cosy our home is, Nora. Here is shelter for you; here I will protect you like a hunted dove that I have saved from a hawk's claws; I will bring peace to your poor beating heart.

Henrik Ibsen, Norweigan playwright, was friends with a couple named Laura and Victor Kieler. Laura had written a sequel to Ibsen's 1866 work Brand called Brand's Daughters: A Picture of Life, and she made Ibsen's acquaintance shortly afterward. Over the next five years they visited on and off. In 1876, however, Victor became ill with tuberculosis and the doctor recommended convalescence in a warm climate. Unbeknownst to her husband, Laura financed the trip through a loan on which she forged a signature. Victor was furious when he found out, demanding a divorce and taking the children with him. The emotional strain landed Laura in a public asylum, although she returned to her family after a month. Ibsen, who had declined to help Laura, was left feeling guilty about his role in the affair and the result was his landmark feminist play, A Doll House.

A dramatic backstory to be sure, but the play itself was kind of a let-down.

The problem with reading plays is that they're meant to be performed, not read. My disappointment with A Doll's House likely stems from this fact. Realist in style, it consists entirely of everyday dialogue with (to me) little aesthetic value. Still, it had its moments. Torvald's character is particularly interesting - as part of my job in a library Rare Books Department I cataloged a collection of poetry and correspondence from a local woman who lived in Ibsen's day. Her husband's letters address her exactly the same way Torvald speaks to Ibsen's heroine Nora. Anyway, turns out, according to third-party sources I discovered elsewhere, he had abandoned his first wife and child in another city to marry her without finalizing his divorce first! It's knowledge of real-life history like this that can add another dimension to your reading. Don't trust men who call you things like "my little squirrel" or really "my little" anything because that's belittlement and it means they don't take you seriously as an adult human being.

Also, the beginning of Act II, when Nora asks her children's nurse "how could you have the heart to put your own child out among strangers?" The response is that "I was obliged to, if I wanted to be little Nora's nurse." What Ibsen intended as commentary on social class is also, from an American perspective, commentary on racism as well. It's hard not to picture the nurse as a mammy - the black woman who raises the white folks' children instead of her own. Even without the added layer of racism, the exchange is loaded with implications of the word mother and what it signifies to different women. The Victorian "Angel of the House" was very much a bourgeois ideal that upheld the middle-class white woman as the arbiter of all things motherly at the expense of poor women and, in the United States, women of color as well. It's only a small part of the overall work but one that stood out to me.

But I'm afraid I don't have much else to say about this one. Henrick Ibsen is not Tennessee Williams. As a reading experience, A Doll House just fell flat for me. Oh well, better luck next month

A Doll House can be read online here.

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A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . . What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.

Brokedown Palace II: The Funny Edition

The Rose Tattoo
By Tennessee Williams
122 pages, plus supplemental material
New Directions
April 23, 2010
Original Pub. Date: 1950





They make the life without glory. Instead of heart they got the deep-freeze in the house. The men, they don't feel no glory, not in the house with them women; they go to the bars, fight in them, get drunk, get fat, put horns on the women because the women don't give them the love which is glory, - I did, I give him the glory. To me the big bed was beautiful like a religion. Now I lie on it with dreams, with memories only!

My first Tennessee Williams play was The Night of the Iguana, originally performed in 1961, which I read back in March as part of the Non-Structured Book Club. It was a bit much at times, but I enjoyed Williams's decadent setting and the vivacity of the characters. Another Williams production, The Rose Tattoo, which debuted at Chicago's Erlanger Theater in 1950, has been recently re-released with a new introduction by playwright John Patrick Shanley. Once again, I would like to thank Frances for sending me her extra ARC.

The Rose Tattoo concerns one Serafina delle Rosa, a first-generation Sicilian-American who lives somewhere on the Gulf Coast with her 15-year-old daughter Rose. Her husband Rosario, a small-time drug smuggler, was murdered and Serafina lost the baby she was carrying shortly thereafter. Since then, she has sequestered herself and her daughter from their small Italian community and spends her listless days in a worn shift, sewing gowns and fine clothes for other people's special events. Three years have passed and it is now Rosa's high school graduation, signaling her movement out from under her mother's authority and into adulthood and her own self-realization. This terrifies Serafina, who wants Rosa suspended in time with her and her late husband's memory. Even worse is that sailor Rosa has fallen for! But then Alvaro Mangiacavallo ("eat-a-horse" in Italian), a goofy truck driver with a sexy body, arrives that afternoon and - oh Dio! He reminds Serafina of Rosario and has even gotten his very own rose tattoo!

According to Shanley, "The Rose Tattoo is over the top. It is a lurid play, redolent of the smell of goats, the cries of ragged children and squawking birds. Its perimeters are defined by women, hairy-legged women, gossiping, clownish women, whores, and witches." I actually had a feeling of déjà vu. The oppressive tropical ambiance; the voluptuous, larger-than-life widow; the emotional stagnation and pervasive carnality - The Rose Tattoo and The Night of the Iguana feel like two versions of the same story. Written about a decade later, Iguana comes across as a more mature work, with its themes of sexuality, religion, mental illness, and human nature. It also lacks the neat resolution of The Rose Tattoo and the cast of characters is more diverse, ranging from pure and detached (Hannah) to Serafina-like (Maxine) to falling apart as we speak (Shannon).

Which isn't to say that The Rose Tattoo is a mediocre play or not worth it if you've already read/seen Iguana. It's a comedy starring a tacky, ridiculous woman who lives surrounded by dress dummies and Catholic kitsch. Alvaro is a love-struck doofus. The Italian accents are preposterously exaggerated and the overall setting is clearly a satire of the close-knit, gossipy immigrant community. Serafine tries so hard to be spiritual she simply ends up ironic.

SERAFINA: Oh, Lady, Lady, Lady, give me a sign!

[As if in mocking answer, a novelty salesman appears and approaches the porch. He is a fat man in a seersucker suit and a straw hat with a yellow, red and purple band. His face is beet-red and great moons of sweat have soared through the armpits of his jacket. His shirt is lavender, and his tie, pale blue with great yellow polka dots, is a butterfly bow. His entrance is accompanied by a brief, satiric strain of music.]

Iguana certainly has comic relief but Tattoo is such a self-parody that it borders on metatheater. It knows its atmosphere is overheated and blatantly sexual and populated by caricatures. The humor comes from its own premise and execution. If anything, The Rose Tattoo, despite being the earlier of the two, is also a parody of The Night of the Iguana, which has many of the same elements but asks to be taken seriously. It's like Iguana reflected in a funhouse mirror.

This new edition of The Rose Tattoo also includes The Dog Enchanted by the Divine View, an earlier one-act piece by Williams that became the genesis for Tattoo. I haven't read anything else by Williams so I wouldn't know if his other plays are more differentiated, but I found The Rose Tattoo to be a great companion piece and counterpoint for The Night of the Iguana. I enjoyed reading them and would love to see both onstage.

Sexism. Racism. And Rainbows.

In 1971 Paulette L. Williams, a student at Barnard College, attempted suicide. In addition to the recent breakup of her short marriage, she had struggled for years with feelings of alienation and depression, likely exacerbated by the racial taunts and attacks she had endured as a child following Brown v. the Board of Education. But throughout it all, her well-to-do parents always encouraged her artistic expression. Growing up, guests to her family's home included Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Williams's involvement in the Woman's Studies Department at Sonoma State College and discovery of dance eventually helped her heal. She changed her name to Ntozake Shange, which means "she who comes with her own things" and "she who walks with lions." In the introduction to her Obie-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Shange writes that, "Knowing a woman's mind & spirit had been allowed me, [and] with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible." In 1975, For Colored Girls, inspired by Judy Grahn's The Common Woman and the feminist theater work of Halifu Osumare, was performed for the very first time at the Bacchanal, a woman's bar outside Berkeley, California. By 1976 it was appearing on Broadway, where one witness recalls that ". . . all sorts of people who might never have set foot in a Broadway house - black nationalists, feminist separatists - came to experience Shange's firebomb of a poem." In September 2009, Tyler Perry announced plans for a film adaptation starring Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Whoopi Goldberg, Macy Gray, Kerry Washington, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, and Jurnee Smollett.

Shange describes For Colored Girls as a "choreopoem." It's basically a series of nineteen connected poems recited by six women identified only by the color of their clothing: yellow, purple, red, green, blue, and orange. While some take the form of rambling monologues, there are also brief snippets of verse exchanged back and forth among the women, as though they were a group of friends engaged in conversation.

lady in blue
that niggah will be back tomorrow, sayin 'i'm sorry'

lady in yellow
get this, last week my ol man came in sayin 'i don't know
how she got yr number baby, i'm sorry'

lady in brown
no this one is it, 'o baby, ya know i waz high, i'm sorry'

lady in purple
'i'm only human, and inadequacy is what makes us human, &
if we was perfect we wdnt have nothin to strive for, so you
might as well go on and forgive me pretty baby, cause i'm sorry'

lady in green
'shut up bitch, i told you i waz sorry'

This deeply intimate feel is reinforced by Shange's use of very down-to-earth speech and metaphors to describe complex emotions and the deep psychological concepts of identity, internalized oppression, and coping with the pressures of racism, sexism, and classism. A near-loss of self and pride suffered in an unhealthy relationship, for example, is portrayed by the "lady in green's" monologue about how "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff."

somebody almost walked off wid all my stuff
not my poems or a dance i gave up in the street
but somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
like a kleptomaniac working hard & forgettin while stealin
this is mine / this aint yr stuff /
now why dont you put me back & let me hang out in my own self
somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff
& didnt care enuf to send a note home sayin
i waz late for my solo conversation
or two sizes too small for my own tacky shirts
what can anybody do wit something of no value on
a open market / did you getta dime for my things /
hey man / where are you goin wid alla my stuff /
this is a woman's trip & i need my stuff /
to ooh & ahh abt / daddy / i gotta mainline number
from my own shit / now wontchu put me back / & let
me play this duet / wit this silver ring in my nose /
honest to god / somebody almost run off wit alla my stuff /

(In the video below it's the "lady in red" for some reason.) The weighty themes are further balanced by a good dose of humor, such as the story of a precocious young girl who ventures into the Adult Reading Room at the library, falls in love with TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE, and then meets a boy her age named TOUSSAINT JONES.

There is also, of course, dancing and movement throughout that reinforces the spoken word. At one point, which must be striking to see onstage, the ladies are all dancing and urging one another to find joy in herself and her worth to the world. Then the stage direction calls for a sudden change in light and for the ladies to "react as if they had been struck in the face." Then:

lady in blue
a friend is hard to press charges against

lady in red
if you know him
you must have wanted it

lady in purple
a misunderstanding

lady in red
you know
these things happen

lady in blue
are you sure
you didnt suggest

Unlike The Vagina Monologues, the ladies of For Colored Girls do not sit and rely solely on the emotional resonance and intensity of their lines to carry the play. They are constantly in motion, using both voice and body equally to express themselves.

My initial thought was actually that For Colored Girls was going to be similar to The Vagina Monologues, as a group of female performers each take a turn talking about the struggles and the lessons they've learned as women. There is an element of that, but For Colored Girls is not simply a play. When reading drama, there is always a tension inherent to the solitary, internal act of reading a work meant to be seen and heard, with each actor bringing their own interpretation. During the recent group read of Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana, for instance, some participants felt that the dialogue was rather over-the-top but also wondered if being recited onstage or onscreen toned it down.

For Colored Girls, however, is equal parts poetry and can easily be read as such. In that way, it functions both as a group event and a personalized experience. Shange's words alone carry immense weight, and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf is not soon to be forgotten.

Thanks to Tami for introducing me to this excellent work.

Brokedown Palace

How about Africa, Asia, Australia? The whole world, Latta, God's world, has been the range of my travels. I haven't stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I've always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see! - the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!

Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana is the third play I've read this month, following Thomas Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Incidentally, every one of these has been for a book club. In other words, none of them are something I read on my own, particularly since I usually don't read plays other than Shakespeare and a few Greek tragedies. The Night of the Iguana is the first selection of a "non-structured group read" consisting of the old 2666/Kristin Lavransdatter/Woolf in Winter circle, plus several new faces. We don't have a particular pattern this time, although somehow everything seems to sync with my literary tastes. How, I don't know because I've never been able to describe what exactly it is that I like. I can describe what I don't like but that's so negative.

The Night of the Iguana was first performed at the Royale Theatre in New York on December 28, 1961. The setting is a rundown hotel on the tropical coast of Mexico during the early years of World War II. That global calamity, however, is far far away, only occasionally intruding in the comical form of some blustering, loudmouthed German guests. The drama here is deeply personal and intimate. Larry Shannon, a defrocked Anglican priest with a taste for teenage girls, is currently employed as a tour guide. He has brought a busload of women from a female Baptist college in Texas to the establishment of one Maxine, a lusty, larger-than-life proprietor who is not mourning the recent death of her husband Fred. Shannon and Maxine have apparently known each other for years, and she recognizes the pending signs of another one of Shannon's periodic breakdowns. Dropping into the middle of all this is Hannah, a refined middle-aged New England spinster, and her grandfather Nonno, a minor Romantic poet. They travel together around the world doing sketches and reciting verse.

The impression is one of emotional, physical, and social isolation. The hotel is an island blanketed in stifling tropical steam and choked on all sides with rainforest. Only vague references are made to a nearby small town. Maxine gets away with sexually brazen behavior that will likely condemn her in the United States in this era, and Shannon is presently safe from arrest for his relationship with 17-year-old Charlotte Goodall. Any reminder of world-shaking events outside is limited to Herr Fahrenkopf's exclamations about one of the Fuhrer's speeches on the radio, which the American characters immediately dismiss as a mere annoyance. The stage direction at several points calls for the characters to be in "cells," meant to represent the rooms of the hotel but having other obvious connotations as well.

Although the setting remains fixed, Shannon and Hannah are both portrayed as perpetual travelers far from home - or rather, from their places of origin, since neither has an actual home to ever return to. Maxine's hotel is rather akin to a purgatorial stopover for people weary of the journey of life. A torpid, tumbled-down place where you have to remain for awhile until you've dealt with whatever issue you have that's taken you to the end of your rope, like the iguana struggling to escape. (A side note: Dante's Inferno presents sin as immobility, a lack of growth and movement closer to God. In complete contrast to the Mexican heat, the Ninth Circle of Hell is a frozen wasteland where the condemned are completely encased in ice. So the next time someone tells you, "When Hell freezes over. . .") There's a lot that comes out in the final act, which makes for a strong climax despite its complete lack of action beyond talking, laying on a hammock, and drinking tea. Heavy-handed, yes, but also enlightening at times and surprising in the revelations revealed about Hannah.

My initial reaction to The Night of the Iguana was similar to how I felt at first about The Cherry Orchard. Focusing entirely on human interaction seemed dull to me until both plays began to pick up about halfway through. I also loved the setting in this one and how well Tennessee Williams was able to create a vivid atmosphere of decay, stagnation, and powerful sexual tension. And a lot of the dialogue was enjoyable to read and must be wonderful to see performed. Shannon has the best lines:

[On the German family] "What in blazes is this? A little animated cartoon by Hieronymus Bosch?"

[On Hannah's poppyseed tea] "Caesar's ghost! - it could be chased by the witches' brew from Macbeth."

There is nevertheless a troubling amount of casual racism in Williams's depictions of Maxine's employees Pedro and Pancho, as you can see in the film adaptation below: the "lazy Mexican" stereotype mixed in with the "Latin lover" trope. Pancho and Pedro are basically props to flesh out Maxine's character and we never see any other Mexicans. There is something off-putting about a drama set in a foreign, non-white country starring only white Americans. But hardly unexpected, given the time in which the play was written. Beyond that, though, The Night of the Iguana is a truly intriguing character-driven story and I would very like to see the movie next.

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Other readers:

• Claire at Kiss a Cloud
• Emily at Evening all Afternoon
  
• Frances at Nonsuch Book
  
• Jill at Rhapsody in Books
• Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos
• Sarah at What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
  
• Theresa at Shelf Love
  

Chopped Down

Tonight my book club met with a professor of Russian literature from a local college to discuss Anton Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard, which he completed on his deathbed in 1902. He did not live to see its 1904 premiere, directed by Constantin Stanislavski, who insisted that what Chekhov intended to be a comedy was actually a tragedy.

The plot is very simple: Lyúba is the aristocratic landowner of a large estate that includes what was once a world-renown cherry orchard. She has returned with her daughter Ánya from an extended trip abroad to increasing financial difficulty at home. Lopákhin, a wealthy businessman whose father was one of Lyúba's family's serfs, insists that she sell the estate to him so that he can demolish the cherry orchard and parcel the land into sites for the summer homes of the nouveau riche. The play also includes Lyúba's brother Gáev, her foster daughter Várya, Pétya the eternal student, Sharlótta the governess, Yepikhódov the family clerk, the maid Dunyásha, the servant Yásha who accompanied Lyúba on her travels, and Firs, an 87-year-old servant who is the oldest member of the household.

The Cherry Orchard is centered on the interaction between each of the characters and between the characters and their historical context. Czar Alexander II had issued an Emancipation Manifesto in 1861 that freed the serfs and, in the process, gradually deprived the grand estates of their cheap workforce. It was a necessary measure, however, as Russia's sorry performance in the Crimean War had made it clear that Europe's remaining feudal state needed serious reform. By Chekhov's time, the late nineteenth century, the ramifications of this measure were still being felt, as seen in the entropic atmosphere of The Cherry Orchard. An old system of stability is beginning to disintegrate into uncertainty or even chaos. The social strata is collapsing in on itself as the wealthy serfs buy their masters' land and servants like Yásha crave the trappings of status. Where they are headed, no one is certain. Pétya makes a big show of being a radical firebrand but even he is apprehensive about the possible consequences of his proto-Bolshevik ideas.

Chekhov himself, of course, was the grandson of a former serf. But despite his own deep connections to the events forming the historical basis of The Cherry Orchard, he is not entirely unsympathetic to Lyúba and Gáev. Free-spending, sexually amoral Lyúba can certainly be seen as the prototype of the decadent aristocrat but Gáev seems to recall the one positive virtue of nobility that an artist like Chekhov could appreciate. Reflecting on a bookcase that has been in the family for over a century, Gáev says:

Yes ... Quite a thing ... (He runs his hand over it.) Most honorable bookcase! Allow me to salute you for more than a hundred years of service to the glorious principles of virtue and justice. Not once in an entire century has your silent summons to productive labor faltered. (Through tears.) From generation to generation you have maintained our family's courage and faith in a better future, you have nurtured in us the ideals of goodness and social consciousness.

Whereas Pétya spouts rhetoric about "suffering and relentless hard work" bringing Russian into the modern age and Lopákhin brags about waking at four in the morning and laboring with money til night, Gáev hearkens back to the elite virtues of elegance and refinement. His occasional rhapsodies on the the beauty and value of nature and old furniture, though moving and lyrical, stand in almost pitiful contrast to the idealistic utilitarianism espoused by Pétya and, to a lesser extent, Lopákhin, who admits that reading a book only put him to sleep.

Gáev's speeches are not only irrelevant but also a source of embarrassment to the younger characters, who constantly try to shut him up. The anxiety at work on the national scale in The Cherry Orchard is expressed on a more intimate level through the relationships between individuals. No one listens to anyone else and what is expected, such as the prospective marriage between Várya and Lopákhin, never happens.

SHÁRLOTTA (pensively). I have no real identity papers, no way of knowing how old I am, but I always think of myself as young. When I was a little girl, my mother and father toured the fairgrounds giving performances, good ones too. I did the salto mortale and various other stunts. And when Mama and Papa died, a German lady saw to my education. So far, so good. Then I grew up and took a post as a governess. But don't ask me where I'm from or who I am - I don't know ... Don't ask me who my parents were or even if they were married - I don't know. (She takes a small cucumber out of her pocket and bites into it.) Don't know a thing.

(Pause)
I want so much to talk to somebody. But who? ... I'm all alone.

YEPIKHÓDOV. (playing the guitar and singing)

What care I for worldly pleasure.
What care I for friend or foe...
I do so enjoy playing the mandolin!

SHÁRLOTTA. That's no mandolin; that's a guitar. (She gazes at herself in a hand mirror and powders her face.)

YEPIKHÓDOV. To a fool in love it's a mandolin...

We then have Yásha and Yepikhódov discussing the trip abroad, and then Yepikhódov boldly declaring himself to be a "man of culture" and ending his lines with "I always carry a revolver with me." The impression is of people who cannot connect or find a common ground and whose conversation is disjointed and unorganized. They are like elements that cannot coalesce or coherently arrange themselves.

Though never appearing literally, death - the inevitable result of decay and decline - has a strong symbolic presence. Firs, age 87, remembers when "we had generals and barons and admirals at our parties," whereas now Lyúba and Gáev can only beg for the postmaster and stationmaster. He recalls the fame of the cherry orchard and the high prices its produce once fetched in Moscow. "Peasants had their masters; masters had their peasants," he says. "Now they're all scattered. You don't know where you stand." But Firs is even more archaic than Gáev's speeches. At the end of the play, everyone insists he was taken to the hospital, but Firs has actually been forgotten (which he realizes) and left locked in the empty house. He goes over to the couch and lies there motionless as the curtain descends.

What happened to everyone else? We know that Lopákhin has bought the estate, Várya is going to be a housekeeper, and Gáev has accepted a post at the bank which Lyúba insisted he decline. But will they adapt? What will become of their lives in the new era?

What's next?

Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy. - Roberto Bolaño

The Whole World's a Stage, Part Deux

Yesterday, Sunday, February 28th, was the third meeting of Padfoot and Prongs's Good Books Club. Padfoot and I were joined by Lula O. and Janefan for a discussion of Thomas Stoppard's 1968 play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which tells the tragic tale of its bumbling title characters. Minor comic relief in Shakespeare's Hamlet who met a fatal end, Ros & Guil now take center stage in their very own quest to make sense of the grand events that seem to be sweeping them along. Not only have they been assigned to find out what's eating the Prince of Denmark, they also have to deal with that troop of actors whose play mirrors the plot of Hamlet. What could it all mean???

Padfoot and Lula were convinced that Ros & Guil were already dead from the start. (Their interpretation of two characters, I noted, was akin to the role of the Fisher King in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land.") It wasn't just the title, Padfoot and Lula argued, but the odd vibes they got from the opening scene, with Ros & Guil's ruminations on probability and divine intervention and the impression that they had been playing coin toss - and landing on heads every single time - practically forever. I still wasn't convinced. I countered that the play was leading up to their deaths, in accordance with the overarching themes of art, life, order, and absurdity. "There's a design at work in all art - surely you know that?," says the Player. "Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion." The point of the plot, I felt, was that Ros & Guil were trying to understand a series of causes and determine what the effect of would be on them (death).

We arrived at a compromise: that Ros & Guil were in a limbo of sorts. Neither alive or dead. You got the feeling that the drawing of the curtains did not mean the end - that Ros & Guil were doomed to start the whole thing over again until they finally figured shit out. But they are, after all, characters in a play. So it's basically a metatheatrical casualty loop that Lula compared to "one of those Star Trek episodes." A play within a play within a play, with an invisible scriptwriter somewhere, or, more accurately, a variation of Voltaire's "cosmic clockmaker" who got the whole thing rolling and then walked away. "Wheels have been set in motion," Guil, the more sensible of the two, observes, "and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order."He then recalls a Chinese philosopher who had dreamed he was a butterfly and spent the rest of his life wondering if he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a philosopher. You have to envy his certainty, Guil concluded.

Meanwhile, Padfoot was properly horrified that I had seen neither the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead movie nor The Princess Bride! I promised to rectify the situation as soon as possible. Although I can't quite bring myself to be all that enthusiastic about a kid's fantasy story, I really must see the film version of this, which was directed by none other than Thomas Stoppard himself. Plays really are meant to be seen, not read, and having already seen Hamlet onstage, I look forward to the translation of Stoppard's words into acting.

Up next: Brave New World, yet another twentieth century Shakespeare reference!

Previous Selections:
Mother Night
Something Wicked This Way Comes

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The rest of the group was quite silly over Gary Oldman, who played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films. So while we're on the subject of Shakespeare and sci-fi/fantasy actors, I give you Ian McDiarmid in the BBC's 1979 production of Macbeth, also starring Ian McKlellen (Gandalf in the LOTR films) in the title role.



Can you believe that cute little redhead became Emperor Palpatine???