Unto the Breach…For the Final Time

Readers,

I’ll be departing Wednesday to spend the Labor Day holiday in seclusion, finishing work on my epic, three-part Kushnerian play addressing the health care debate, which culminates in a barn-burning final act  featuring all the celebrities and public figures who met their end in this the Summer of Death ( The Awl™) donning Mexican wrestling masks for a cage match in Limbo.

Or not, actually.  I will once more — yet for the last time!  Bittersweet! — be in Westport New York, on this trip to rehearse and ostensibly perform Henry V.  We will take pains, be perfect. (Or at least as perfect as the sure-to-be-present hangovers allow.)  And in our downtime we’ll be free to dawdle and luxuriate at the manse, affectionately called “granny’s house,”  wherein we’ll catch up on some back issues of Us Weekly, perhaps take a dip in the pool, and what else, oh yeah, drink more.

As is custom, every summer there seems to be something of global or national import occurring on or around our time there.  Hurricane Katrina, the beginning of the John Roberts confirmation hearings, Sarah Palin added to the McCain ticket.  I shudder to contemplate what might befall us on this trip.

Anyhoo, updates will resume on my safe and sane return.  Presumably!

Adieu!

To Tweet, Or Not To Tweet? That Is The Question

Congratulations for making it past that terrible headline!   Though it was inspired by this story, where a blogger has whittled down the plots of Shakespeare’s plays into digestible tweets. Like Cliff’s Notes, for people without the attention span to even read Cliff’s Notes.   Take popular favorite A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “A love potion straightens everything out and several couples end up happily together. Rustics are mocked. Watch out for fairies.”  Or Richard III:  “Edward IV dies, a caricatured villain usurps, murders innocents, & dies on a battlefield in sore need of a horse. The Tudors win.”  Really, these twittered synopses are especially useful for the obscure plays that everyone pretends to have read but maybe just skimmed through, so 140 characters will tell you all you need  to know for, say, Timon of Athens:  “An overly generous man is let down by his ‘friends.’ He subsidizes rebellion & whores w/VD & dies a bitter man, cursing society.”  Indeed he do!  Though, if that’s too literate for you, you can read episode recaps of the first season of MASH or synopses of all the Oscar-winners for Best Picture.

A fun exercise, sure.   But does the distillation offer anything to the conversation beyond cleverness?  If you think it does not, then ponder this flipside:  Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) twitters the observation that “ A book would break down into a few thousand tweets, maybe 10 a day for a year.”

So, then:  the greatest writer in the English language can be reduced to 140 characters, and the next Great American Novel may be composed one tweet at a time. O brave new world that has such micro-bloggers in it.

Shakespeare Moves to Twitter [Great Writing]

All the Twittered Shakespeare Synopses [Pandora's Skull]

Related: Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition) [McSweeney's]

Once More Unto the Breach

I’m going away as I usually do for Labor Day to do a thing, to a place where cell phone reception is spotty at best and the series of tubes that make up the internet have not been laid. Suffice it to say, no updates until I return. And as it is the Summer of Monsters, perchance this time I’ll finally get to see Champy, the elusive monster of Lake Champlain.

Shakespeare Revisited: More Shakespearey

Ah the sequel, the once unique idea that has become a ubiquitous Hollywood mainstay. Next to the big-budget remake, sequels often produce some of the most mind-searingly turdtastic travesties committed to celluloid. But then comes news that a project called Hamlet 2 will be bowing at Sundance: “In this rambunctious comedy, a high school drama teacher injects love and passion for theatre into his students by creating a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” It stars Steve Coogan and Amy Poehler, so ostensibly its will be funny. If it succeeds at Sundance (and if you can make it there, you can make it to worldwide distribution and huge DVD revenues) what other titles by the Bard could get the ironic sequel treatment?

• Two Gentlemen of Verona and a Baby. Valentine and Proteus have their skirt-chasing ways disrupted when a baby is left on the doorstep of their bachelor pad. With the help of their able-bodied servants, can these two gadabouts shape up and care for their new charge?

• Merry Wives of Windsor 2: Trophy Wives. Recent divorcees Mistress Page and Mistress Ford are eager to get back at their exes with the help of an old friend: John Falstaff (played by Tom Arnold).

• The Tempest 2: Climate in Crisis. In this animated feature, Prospero (voiced by Al Gore) once again picks up his magic staff in an effort to stop the melting of the ice caps, assisted by Caliban and Whiteout the polar bear.

• Othello 2: The Moor the Merrier. Technically a prequel, the film delves into Othello’s early years with his family, including the flatulent matriarch, Mama O. Hilarity ensues when Othello brings his girlfriend Desdemona home to meet the folks. All characters played by Eddie Murphy, natch.

Manga Shakespeare? Hai!

As a Shakespeare geek who used to be an anime/manga fan as a kid (outed!), I’d be lying if I said I weren’t intrigued by Self Made Hero’s Manga Shakespeare Series. Following successful adaptations of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, the company  is planning to release versions of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in early spring.

In an interview with Newsarama, SMH’s Emma Hayley explains why the manga style meshes well with the works of the Bard:

The pacing and storytelling in manga is far more akin to performance. Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen and not just read. The manga medium is a good bridge between performance and text. There is also an aliveness and flow to manga which really grabs the attention of the reader, and can help to overcome the sometimes difficult language in Shakespeare’s plays.

This certainly has to be better than, say, a graphic novel version of Ibsen’s The Master Builder.

Self Made Hero, Shakespeare & Manga [Newsarama]