Our Daughter’s Love: loneliness, layers, and the denial of humanity

“Now I am alone.”

So says Hamlet about halfway through the play.

Arguably though, it’s hardly news by that point. A realization, sure – but something Hamlet perhaps knew but was not consciously aware of up until this point.  Either way, it’s not news to the audience. The entire play is potentially predicated upon the notion that Hamlet is, through a combination of her own action and her world’s response, alone in her experience.

Because this is Shakespeare we’re talking about, and one of his keenest and deepest works at that, it’s a statement that is of course layered in multiple levels of meaning.

On the first, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have just left the room – and so Hamlet is alone in a literal, physical sense.  On the second, Hamlet is alone in terms of her perspective – she has just shared her true feelings and thoughts and fears and doubts with two people she thought to be her good friends, only to have those two people either brush aside or outright knock down everything personal she has shared. On the third, Hamlet realizes she is alone in experience – she glimpses that part of the brushing off and shutting down might have happened not just because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in the employ of the king and queen (and care more about their reward than Hamlet’s well being), but also because they as human beings simply aren’t interested in conceiving. In examining the world in such a stark, startling way (you’ll note this is the same scene in which Hamlet talks about a human being being nothing more than a “quintessence of dust” – see some of my past posts about Hamlet, mortality, and the atomic bomb).

So far we have her recognizing how she’s along in a physical sense, an emotional sense, and a mental sense.

And then there’s the fourth level, where she’s alone in a community sense. Her two friends are the latest in what is by then a long line of people who she believes have betrayed her trust, have blatantly lied or expressed confusion or disgust or doubt with her. And what she probably fears – but of course cannot know for sure until she witnesses what she believes to be proof just a scene or two later – is that they won’t be the last.   And then there’s the fifth level, where Hamlet is alone in a moral sense. It’s this moral sense that sets her apart from other Hamlets written by earlier playwrights, and it’s this dogged, desperate, deliberate pursuit of a moral certainty that sets her apart from the play’s other characters. She seeks the truth almost above all else, truth which she hopes will guide and define her decision making as it shapes her story.  There are probably yet more levels to be had, but I’ve already talked a lot about layers and levels and need to move on.

Incidentally, we’ve been making a lot of jokes at rehearsal about how Shakespeare is like an ogre, and how ogres are like onions. Or cakes. Mostly onions though. Anyway.

Move on, as it happens, by moving back. Back to the fourth level – that of community.

Hamlet’s dual senses of alienation and isolation are, arguably, self-induced to a large degree. She decides to not share her thoughts with most characters, speaking instead via soliloquy to the unbound – and thereby unpredictable – audience.  I say “unbound” because there is a new audience each night. Like a jury, they do not actively respond to what Hamlet gives them – they form their own internal response in the moment and then digest it after. I say “unbound” because they are, by virtue of the rules of their existence in the play’s space and the play’s time, not locked in to the same vicious circle that keeps Hamlet and most all of the play’s other characters chasing each other, aching on a soul-level but never able to make contact and connect. The audience is removed but not impartial, safe yet an accomplice, and above all able to be changed.

And that is key for Hamlet. It’s key for a woman in her period and her circumstances to know that her voice might still be heard. It’s key for a lesbian woman in her period and her circumstances to know that there is yet hope for acceptance and support and respect and love somewhere out there in the shifting, coughing shadows. Because in our play’s year of 1946, in its small town/asylum setting, in the unstable nexus of her age, her evolving perspective, and the emotional tumult rocking everyone at Elsinore, Hamlet has never felt more alone. Unable to understand what God wants of her, unable to discern whether the ghost she may or  may not be seeing is an evil and destructive one, unable to speak plainly, unable to find an ear she trusts, and above all unable to act on the love she feels for women in general and Ophelia in particular… it’s no wonder she descends, manic, into the pit.

And so we come to the vicious circle (another subject about which I’ve written plenty about before) – Hamlet will try to speak the truth about her thoughts and feelings to someone, only to have that someone cut or shut them down. And so Hamlet in turn shuts down, keeps her thoughts and feelings inward, and loses the wrestling match with them by the end.  Which in turn causes certain characters to isolate themselves, entrenching deeper in their own judgements about Hamlet, which in turn confirms for her that they’re either not to be trusted or outright out to get her. Though she tends to equate those more than she doesn’t.  OR Hamlet will just outright decide in advance to withhold certain elements of her thought and feeling from a character (such as Horatio or Gertrude), which means that character is lacking any empowerment on Hamlet’s part to be proactive in aiding her, and so they are reduced to a passive place where they can do little but try to ease certain small cases of circumstantial suffering. Which Hamlet in turn uses as license to withdraw more, any possibility that they might be able to help her if only she would even talk to them pushed out by her own obsession and depression (as well as all the doubts and fears and hurts generated by the first vicious circle I wrote about).

Hamlet can’t help the way she is. Moral, human, empathetic, woman, lesbian. And there’s nothing to”help” – those are all beautiful things, simple truths that make up her whole self. But she’s in a rough way and a tough spot, a world and time and place where none of those are valued and all of them are viewed as signs of weakness, of damage, of disturbance. And on top of all of this, she young and she’s in mourning and she doesn’t have anyone in the world she trusts to help her with her… maelstrom of thought and feeling. No one who she trusts to help her focus it, to parse it all apart so she can come out stronger on the other side of this whole mess.

And, perhaps… perhaps that is the tragedy shared by nearly every other character in the play. Ignorance and fear, and how those two clouds give so many human beings the tools to repress their own understanding of humanity and thereby suppress the humanity of others. To sweep away the homeless, to hate the skin that covers someone’s heart and mind, to tear away someone’s way of love because it’s different from yours, to shut away the damaged and the challenged because if you can’t see them locked in themselves and suffering without a compassionate guide they trust to help them then they don’t exist, to beat and abuse and demonize a prisoner, to torture your enemy… none of these choices, or any like them, have never served any end but to spark another round of vicious circles. And all, when the question/answer are potentially so damn simple.

Because beyond law, beyond civilization, beyond government and power and religion, beyond everything – what greater crime could there be, what greater tragedy, than to deny someone else their humanity?

Our Daughter’s Love: creative thought process and application

This show’s current state form, feeling, and function, in most every respect, have been ones which I more uncovered after beginning rather than knowing straight off the bat. But they’ve never felt forced – rather as if my mind looked at what it had each step of the way, applied its lifetime of experience and knowledge and perspective, and drew a pattern for me between the play and its possible purpose.  Maybe that’s the way this always goes, like seeing Darth Vader’s face in a burnt slice of toast or a giant’s body in a mound of fallen rocks or a dragon in a cloud – the mind generates patterns to better understand its world, to provide some baseline of connecting with as much as possible as often as possible.

Which is all to say I wasn’t setting out from the start to put on a play that so smoothly brought history, text, character, and contemporary resonance under one roof of the connective emotional resonance that is the LGBT experience. That Hamlet would be a woman was the first element I decided/discovered, and from there it was very easy to say that Ophelia would remain a woman. That immediately made their relationship unique within the period – originally set as circa WWI, but once research sparked me to shift it to immediately after WWII and I read my Stage Manager’s research as to the relationship between women and asylums then everything fell in to place.

This discovery has intimately informed the staging (look out for the action of  “Hamlet’s Commitment” in Act II), the acting (listen out for any time the adults or Laertes talk about Hamlet and/or Ophelia’s “love”), and the deeper unspoken histories and perspectives shared by certain characters (let’s just say our Rosencrantz is unlike most any other you’ve seen in terms of tone).  And perhaps most importantly, our doubling down on this theme has imbued the show with a very particular contemporary resonance and relevance that it might not have otherwise had. I’ve written at length – and I’m far from the first to do so – about Hamlet’s “universality” and how it has certain themes and questions which apply everywhere and everywhen. But we’re in dark days, rough days, fearful days, where the world’s public allowance of the LGBT community onto its stage is still very new and an alarming number of powerful and violent people are still resistant to that change. We’re in early days, where public acknowledgment, acceptance, and safety of the LGBT community is barely a hundred years old in thought and maybe barely fifty in practice.

This is Hamlet fitted to new communities and concerns, applied to their illumination because there’s no reason not to. Because it’s the right thing to do. And best of all, because it absolutely works in context of the play. The narrative, the characters, the text – they all lend themselves well, with really very little shuffling, to telling this story in this way at this time with nothing and everything gained lost in the translation.

Hamlet’s sexuality must be addressed at some point in the course of rehearsing this play, no matter the actor’s gender.  This is because 1) the character’s relationship with Ophelia is not an arbitrary one nor an ignorable one, and 2) the sexuality of any character (or indeed human being) is essential to their, well, character.  Not necessarily in a “label” sense, but rather just in the sense that how connected (or disconnected) they are with their own sexuality will inevitably inform they way they carry themselves, as well as interact with the world and with other characters/human beings. And one thing which Hamlet’s current sexuality does for us is exacerbate thoughts and feelings and experiences already expressed by the character in the text – of persecution, of not being understood, of being alone, of being betrayed, of denied love, of the relationship between desire and  the natural world + order and society + cultural structure. It’s all already there, and making this particular character choice gives us an enormous natural leg up in starkly defining Hamlet’s very responsive relationship to her world and, even more importantly, how that changes her over the course of the play.

And it does. For the worse, sadly. But, as I’ve written before, that’s part of her tragedy.

Our Daughter’s Love: the LGBT movement (part three)

A few dates and important things here, and then this blog shall march along to the textual analysis side of this subject.

1970: if time travel is ever invented and you want to use it to march alongside the very first Pride Parade, then head back to New York City circa this year.

1971: the last man jailed for his homosexuality in Canada is released.

1972: Sweden becomes the first country to provide official support for new discoveries people make in their gender identity by giving transsexuals the right to legally change their gender. And, because why stop there (hint: there isn’t a reason), it also offers hormone therapy for free.

Also in 1972: Lesbianism 101 becomes a course offered at the University of Buffalo.

Also also in 1972: A divorce case awards custody of the children to Camille Mitchell – an out and open lesbian. The judge does include a provision that her lover cannot move in to the house so long as the children live there, but it’s a start.

1973: It is declared by the he Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council that homosexuality is not an illness. In 1973. That’s not even fifty years ago. A month later the American Psychiatric Association follows suit.

1979: the Rainbow Flag is first flown as part of LGBT pride.

1980: the Democratic Party is officially the first U.S. political party to include “homosexual rights” as a part of its platform.

Also 1980: Steve Endean founds The Human Rights Campaign (http://www.hrc.org/).

1982: Wisconsin somehow takes the honor of being the first state to ban discrimination against the homosexual community.

Also 1982: After a few other names are tried, the term AIDS is officially used by the CDC.

1984: Massachusetts Representative Gary Studds is re-elected even with his public reveal on the Senate floor the year before that he is gay.

1985: Rock Hudson brings AIDS sharply into the public eye by being the first celebrity to die from its ravages.

1989: Denmark brings the “civil partnership” into being, affording gay couples all the rights of married couples, minus those of being married in a church and adoption (though the latter right was restored in 2010).

1990: the World Health Organization gets its head on straight (no pun intended) and follows the suit of certain other countries by declaring homosexuality is no longer to be considered an illness.

1991: viewers of the how L.A. Law are treated to the first publicly-broadcast lesbian kiss on television.

1994: the US military institutes the now-infamous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Also 1994: homosexuals who feel unsafe in their native country are granted refugee status by Canada. Because they’re cool up there. Not just because it’s actually damn cold.

1995: certain drugs are shown to be effective when it comes to treating AIDS, though they are not without their own potentially-seriously detrimental side effects.

1996: while the world moves onward and upward, the United States passes the Defense of Marriage Act.

Also 1996: viewers of Friends are treated to television’s first lesbian wedding.

1997: the Journal of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association becomes planet earth’s first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study and support of health in the LGBT community.

1999: California kicks things off on the civil partnership front in the United States by legalizing said partnerships (albeit initially without adoption).

 

I don’t mean to shortchange things here, but there’s even more history to be had as these dates get closer and closer to 2015 than there was when I was trying to encapsulate the causes and effects of World War II – suffice it to say, the intervening years have seen “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repealed, a major section of the Defense of Marriage Act declared unconstitutional, the Boy Scouts challenged on their stance regarding acceptance of homosexuality, same-sex marriage legalized, LGBT rabbis and priests supported, public members of the LGBT community elected to nearly every level of public office, an openly gay character be written into a wide-release animated film (ParaNorman), and so so so much more. All beautiful, all wonderful, all necessary if we’re to continue living as a planet-wide community of human beings.

Because as it was, is, and will be with the women of this world, with any and all peoples of every First Nation, with people of every color and creed, this goes beyond civil rights or social rights. Like all of those, this is a question of human rights.

And in that respect, we’ve still so far to go. The changes between our time now and years past is night and day, but only by comparison. We’re nowhere near – nowhere in sight – of the true other end of the spectrum that holds hate and fear and repression on one side and freedom and love and communication and collaboration and respect on the other. Imagine how different things could be in five years, in ten, in fifty. Can we keep up the momentum? Can we hold the ground we’ve gained? Can we rally more arms and legs and backs to continue pulling, pulling, pulling until the shackles of ego are burst and the bonds of fear and dark feeling broken?

One thing an interested person can do is to get involved, and an excellent place to do so is a local community resource in Capitol Hill called Gay City (https://www.gaycity.org). Books, entertainment, psychological support, health awareness, events of activism, and beyond are all offered as a part of its service to Seattle as a city-wide community.

Which is why we’re partnering with them for two performances, where they’ll have volunteers on hand with material and we’ll be donating the proceeds to their great work. So thanks to them for their support and promotion. It’s our pleasure to be connected with their name and all that they do.

Our Son’s Love: Beyond Binary Gender

One hundred years is a long time. Within the context of recordable human history, anyway. Even within the context of the span of human history. And it’s still just a drop in the cosmic bucket.

But it’s what we have. And a little over one hundred years ago, a Russian immigrant named Emma Goldman was at work out on the streets of the United States. Her speeches and writing supported the development of the anarchist philosophy and were an important voice in the fight for women’s rights.

Her efforts to combat the draft during World War I led to her being deported to Russia, while subsequent travels and experiences took her from support of the Bolsheviks to subsequent denouncement of them and their methods to support of Spanish anarchists during their country’s civil war. She was arrested or challenged by the police on multiple occasions for multiple reasons, including attempting to incite a riot and distributing information about birth control. And, in the words of German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, “she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public.”

While we’re at it, in the words of Emma Goldman herself: “The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” And to quote her once more, because I can: “The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”

Around the time Goldman was deported to Russia, Alice Paul and members of the National Women’s Party were smack-dab in the middle of their own (eventually successful) fight for women’s suffrage. A fight which, while passionate, came at the expense and exclusion of all others. In fact, they were rather conservative on most every other question of politics and rights. And it is an example which is not the exception but rather the general rule of the time, where a group fighting tooth and nail for its rights in one particular context would either ignore or outright exclude other underprivileged or minority groups fighting their own similar fights.

But this was all a hundred years ago.  And also less than a year ago.

And the balance is still no easier. We’ve made bits and pieces of progress here and there, but sexism and racism and hatred and fear are as rampant and entrenched as they’ve ever been. The faces may be different, the expressions, the visible degrees. But to deny their very active, vitriolic, and insidious presence is to put both hands over the, shut the eyes, and yell “LA LA LA LA LA LA.” So it’s altogether understandable for a group that has established a base for itself, crafted a haven and a way to confront and transform the challenges it witnesses every day in society, to want to hold on to that. But times change, and the constructions of reality shift, and the layered universes of society, culture, interaction, creation, structure, and human experience only grow more complicated the more we unveil.

Which is all just a rambly preamble for an absolutely fascinating article I read recently about ever-bending gender barriers and society’s attempts to adjust to them in the context of a traditionally women’s college. To quote from it, pulled from a section about a shift from using the term of “Sisterhood” to the more all-inclusive “Siblinghood”:

Some female students, meanwhile, said Wellesley wasn’t female enough. They complained among themselves and to the administration that sisterhood had been hijacked. “Siblinghood,” they argued, lacked the warm, pro-women connotation of “sisterhood,” as well as its historic resonance. Others were upset that even at a women’s college, women were still expected to accommodate men, ceding attention and leadership opportunities intended for women. Still others feared the changes were a step toward coeducation. Despite all that, many were uneasy: As a marginalized group fighting for respect and clout, how could women justify marginalizing others? 

“I felt for the first time that something so stable about our school was about to change, and it made me scared,” said Beth, a junior that year, who asked to be identified by only her middle name because she was afraid of offending people she knew. “Changing ‘sister’ to ‘sibling’ didn’t feel like it was including more people; it felt like it was taking something away from sisterhood, transforming our safe space for the sake of someone else. At the same time, I felt guilty feeling that way.” Beth went to Kris Niendorf, the director of residential life, who listened sympathetically and then asked: Why does “sibling” take away from your experience? After thinking about it, Beth concluded that she was connected to her classmates not because of gender but because of their shared experiences at Wellesley. “That year was an epiphany for me. I realized that if we excluded trans students, we’d be fighting on the wrong team. We’d be on the wrong side of history.”

I won’t go on too much longer, as it speaks very well for itself about questions and an experience that I admittedly have little personal insider perspective on beyond those small ways in which I don’t always act in a traditionally masculine fashion. But as medicine becomes more capable, as language swirls and evolves, as the human mind expands its capacity to conceive of new ways it can potentially redefine the structures of its reality, there will only be more questions. And they’ll continue, as they have for a hundred years (and more, of course) to be challenging questions. But the only way forward is to continue talking about them. That’s what this post is about, that’s what this article is about, and that’s a part of what this production is about. It uses a text from the early 1600s and setting of the late 1940s to illuminate the ways in which so many conversations must still be kept alive, burning and bright. We cannot stop, we cannot stay. We can only tell our stories and continue to push back the darkness. Together.

You can read the full thing here: When Women Become Men At Wellesly College

In other news, here’s an interesting sidebar extract from the article (emphasis mine):

In the 19th century, only men were admitted to most colleges and universities, so proponents of higher education for women had to build their own. The missions at these new schools both defied and reinforced the gender norms of the day. By offering women access to an education they’d previously been denied, the schools’ very existence was radical, but most were nevertheless premised on traditional notions: College-educated women were considered more likely to be engaging wives and better mothers, who would raise informed citizens. Over time, of course, women’s colleges became more committed to preparing students for careers, but even in the early 1960s, Wellesley, for example, taught students how to get groceries into the back of a station wagon without exposing their thighs.

 

Trans students are pushing their schools to play down the women-centric message. At Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke and others, they and their many supporters have successfully lobbied to scrub all female references in student government constitutions, replacing them with gender-neutral language

Our Daughter’s Love: the LGBT movement (part two)

Jury Duty + rehearsal + work + cooking + everything else can really wipe you out.

Still working to get this thing back on track, beginning with where we left off a few days ago:

1947: Lisa Ben (a pseudonym of author, editor, and songwriter Edith Eyde) writes and publishesVice Versa, North America’s very first lesbian publication.

1950: remember Paragraph 175? East Germany partially does away with what the Nazis added to it. Which, for a land that had been at the forefront of so much sexual progressivism and this close to repealing one of its most repressive laws, was a welcome half-step back in the old direction.

Also 1950: Los Angeles is home to the founding of The Mattachine Society, the United States’ first sustained homosexual activist group. While originally intended to be called Bachelors Anonymous (as a play on Alcoholics Anonymous), the final name was derived from that of certain societies in medieval France whose  members wore masks and could thereby criticize the ruling class with the immunity of anonymity.

1952: Marijane Meaker uses the pen name Vin packer to publish Spring Fire, the best-selling (as in 1.5 million copies) first entry in what would become the lesbian pulp fiction genre of writing.

Also 1952: Mattachine Society membership increases after a member, accused of and arrested for allegedly soliciting a police officer, contests the charges and the jury finds itself unable to decide. This is known as a hung jury. I may or may not be specifically mentioning that fact for a very specific referential and humorous reason.

Once again in 1952: George William Jorgensen, Jr. gains the honor of being the first publicized case of sex reassignment surgery by successfully becoming Christine Jorgensen.

1955: even as The Mattachine Society founds a chapter in New York, the United States’ lesbian community joins the politics front through its formation of The Daughters of Bilities in San Francisco.  Not only a rights and awareness advocacy group, the Daughters also served as a community support and even conducted research.

1957: the first fabulous seeds of Rocky Horror Picture Show are sown with physician Harry Benjamin’s coining of the word transsexual. More serious seeds are sown when psychologist Evelyn Hooker manages to publish a study of homosexual men which serves as a major source for the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders.

1958: The United States Supreme Court formally rules that First Amendment rights extend to gay and lesbian publications. It is the first time the Supreme Court has ruled on any sort of case involving homosexuality.

1960: two women are discharged from the U.S. Air Force reserves on the grounds of being gay. They successfully challenge the discharges, though their “success” has to do with the court being unable to find enough evidence to demonstrate that they were lesbians and not that a discharge for such cause was inherently discriminatory.

1961; Jose Sarria, an openly gay man, runs for the the public office position of San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

1965: by way of demonstrating how far we still are behind certain other nations of the world when it comes to certain aspects of philosophy and moral maturity, this was the year that saw Everett Klipper arrested in Canada for “private, consensual sex with men.” Identified as “incurably homosexual” his sentence is “indefinite preventative detention” as “a dangerous sexual offender.” The Canadian public, gay and straight alike – yes, as in the whole country – took umbrage with the severity of the sentence to such a degree that legal reform was introduced as swiftly as 1969.

1966: The Mattachine Society challenges the New York State’s Liquor Authority and its ban on serving alcohol to gays through a “Sip In.”

Also 1966: what may be the first Transgender riot occurs and is recorded in San Francisco.

1967: you may have heard of, or even participated in, a “Pride Parade.” This has, as it turns out, roots which run deeper than the surface interpretation of that phrase. It was in this year that twelve plainclothes police officers raided Los Angeles’ Black Cat Tavern and beat/arrested employees and patrons. Protests were held in response, protests organized by an organization calling itself Personal Rights in Defense and Education. PRIDE.

Also in 1967: visitors to New York City could now peruse The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, also known as planet earth’s first homosexual-focused bookstore.

And also in 1967: because of my personal pride, so to speak, the first Latino-American homosexual group is founded in Argentina. It is called Nuestro Mundo – Our World.

1968: East Germany continues to work on that shifty, tricky Paragraph 175. Homosexual acts by consenting adults over the age of 18 are decriminalized.

1969: First a bookshop, then one of the most famous riots in the history of the United States and subject of Roland Emmerich’s next movie – The Stonewall Riots.

Also 1969: West Germany finally joins the reduction-of-Paragraph 175 bandwagon.

Also also 1969: remember that legal reform in Canada I referenced? It’s called Bill C-150 (romantic name, I know), and it formally decriminalized homosexuality in Canada. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau supported its passing with the statement “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” True story.

Also also also 1969 because why stop there: The Daughters of Bilitis branch out to Australia, establishing that country’s first homosexual rights organization.

 

The timeline in terms of LGBT rights and history only gets more jam-packed from here, which is great for that community but a bit tricky for this blog. It would take me a few more posts at least to recap everything of medium to high resonance and relevance between 1969 and 2015, so just for the sake of limited space and time with the mission of this blog what I’ll most likely do is spend half the post tomorrow recapping the really big events and the other half beginning character and textual analysis as they pertain to this subject.

Let’s hope life lets up a little, because I don’t want to shortchange this subject (of all subjects) but my time in terms of the play’s opening is swiftly running out. But I’ll make it work.

Because this IS important. Essential. And undeniable.

Our Daughter’s Love: selections of America’s first published lesbian poetry

“We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.”

So spoke Elsa Gidlow. It’s one of the most clear-sighted, sensible, and inspiring thoughts about the connection between human beings and their innate creativity that I’ve yet heard. Artistry extends so far beyond painting, writing, acting, dance, all that stuff – it extends to the use of mathematics to redefine the distance between this star and the universe’s expanding edge, it extends to the shared wisdom of a particular person’s perception, it extends to the way in which one human being might express to another entity the span and depth of their love. However the case, whatever the cause, the end is the same: we create, and there is an unknowable, unquenchable, undeniable artistry in that.

But speaking of one of those more traditional forms of artistry I mentioned, what follows are a few selections from the life and works of Ms. Gidlow. Whether they’re from the groundbreaking 1923 publication of her poetry collection On A Grey Thread or not doesn’t really matter. Whenever in her lifetime she composed them, the same remains true: they’re honest, they’re earnest, and they were crafted by a brave voice that never let go of or saw any need to apologize for who and how she was.

Because there is no reason. She was a human being. That’s it.

 

CHANCE

Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.

If it had been a rose
I might have smiled and pinned it to my dress:
We should have said Good Night casually
And never met again.
But the white iris!
It looked so infinitely pure
In the thin green moonlight.
A thousand little purple things
That had trembled about me through the young years
Floated into a shape I seem always to have known
That I suddenly called Love!

The faint touch of your long fingers on mine wakened me.
I saw that your tumbled hair was bright with flame,
That your eyes were sapphire souls with
hungry stars in them,
And your lips were too near not to be kissed.

Life crouches at the knees of Chance
And takes what falls to her.

 

CONSTANCY

You’re jealous if I kiss this girl and that,
You think I should be constant to one mouth?
Little you know of my too quenchless drouth:
My sister, I keep faith with love, not lovers.

Life laid a flaming finger on my heart,
Gave me an electric golden thread,
Pointed to a pile of beads and said:
Link me one more glorious than the rest.

Love’s the thread, my sister, you a bead,
An ivory one, you are so delicate.
Those first burned ash-grey–far too passionate.
Further on the colors mount and sing.

When the last bead’s painted with the last design
And slipped upon the thread, I’ll tie it: so;
Then smiling quietly I’ll turn and go
While vain Life boasts her latest ornament.

 

FOR THE GODDESS TOO WELL KNOWN

I have robbed the garrulous streets,
Thieved a fair girl from their blight,
I have stolen her for a sacrifice
That I shall make to this night.

I have brought her, laughing,
To my quietly dreaming garden.
For what will be done there
I ask no man pardon.

I brush the rouge from her cheeks,
Clean the black kohl from the rims
Of her eyes; loose her hair;
Uncover the glimmering, shy limbs.

I break wild roses, scatter them over her.
The thorns between us sting like love’s pain.
Her flesh, bitter and salt to my tongue,
I taste with endless kisses and taste again.

At dawn I leave her
Asleep in my wakening garden.
(For what was done there
I ask no man pardon.)

 

LOVE’S ACOLYTE

Many have loved you with lips and fingers
And lain with you till the moon went out;
Many have brought you lover’s gifts!
And some have left their dreams on your doorstep.

But I who am youth among your lovers
Come like an acolyte to worship,
My thirsting blood restrained by reverence,
My heart a wordless prayer.

The candles of desire are lighted,
I bow my head, afraid before you,
A mendicant who craves your bounty
Ashamed of what small gifts she brings.

 

Magic in the Moment: Actors, Character, and Last Night

Rehearsal last night was incredible.

Awe-some, in the original sense of the word “awe.”

With the amount of time before we open quickly crunching down, our rehearsals are becoming increasingly about finding that delicate balance between recapping what we’ve found before, and stripping the text down and blocking choices away so that the actors can put all their energy into communicating with each other. Just seeing, breathing, being with each other, and welcoming whatever might happen.

In case you’re curious, we’re two for two now with brilliant and unexpected new discoveries that have deepened the characters in question and their greater place in the show in ways I never dared to imagine. This post is meant to share with you a few very special moments that have added an entirely new spectrum of colors to that larger tapestry of recent rehearsal experience.

I put up a post a while back about equating directing and what I imagine fatherhood to be. Last night only recalled that for me in the biggest and boldest of ways.

Here’s what happened:

We were reviewing the famous “nunnery” scene, set immediately after the even more famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, where after a bit of banter and argument Hamlet truly tears into Ophelia and tells her “get thee to a nunnery.” Three times. It’s a crucial scene for the way their relationship plays out later in the play, it’s crucial as a part of the cause for Ophelia’s sorrowful descent into madness, and it’s crucial as a part of who Hamlet is slowly transitioning to be in light of what she has been tasked to do.

It’s been nearly a month since we worked the scene – December 17th to be exact, and even then it was part of a run of the first half rather than actually being worked – so we started by talking about it. Talking about who the characters have become in the interim, how they’ve changed and/or solidified. We talked a bit about Hamlet and Ophelia’s relationship in a grater sense. And then, the two actors sitting opposite each other, we did it. No text in their hands, no blocking. They saw and breathed and received, first as Jesse and Melanie, then as actors and human beings, then as Hamlet and Ophelia, then as partners and lovers and friends and human beings. And when they were ready, they started speaking.

So they did the scene (which is barely two pages long), and I responded with the some insights it had sparked about what the scene could be and where the characters were emotionally and how they were responding psychologically.  Each actor let me in on their thoughts and response and choices and process. And then something happened.

I don’t know how it even started. I really don’t.

I was just making some notes, making sure I didn’t forget some catchy something someone had said (I think it was Melanie). And then I looked up, tuning back in to what they were saying to each other…

… and I realized that they were arguing in character. I don’t mean that they were using the lines, or even Shakespeare’s language. But they were calling each other by character name, arguing about their world and their relationship. They were having a discussion that I could easily imagine was plucked from any of the years they had known each other. And to watch these two characters come to life, manifest in three dimensional space, as alive as you you or me, organically building on and responding to what the other said or did… I’m tearing up just thinking about it. I didn’t in the moment, but now, recalling how I was really there, the witness to such a wondrous event of creation and inspiration…

I keep trailing off because I keep realizing I don’t know how to come anywhere close to articulating just how truly special an experience it was. As an actor and writer myself, as a friend, as a director, as their director.

After what I guesstimate was two minutes, though I’m pretty sure I’m wrong, their argument reached an impasse and they turned to me as themselves once more. I wasn’t even sure that it had actually happened.

And while in a way that moment is now passed and gone, as ephemeral as any and all of those that make up this life… in another way, it is immortalized by the simple fact of its existence. The impact of having lived that, for them and for me, will inform (even if completely subtly) everything we do with those characters in the world of this play that comes after.  What was done cannot be undone. And we – you, me, every audience member, every creative involved with the show – are better for it.

Time, Place, and Characters: where, when, and who we are

Some of you (most of you? [all of you?]) may have certain questions about the specific setting of our show and any alterations made in its service.

So here I am, to hopefully set those questions straight!

Much thanks to my cast and team for their questions that helped me discover new resonances and decide on definitive answers.

*~*~*~*~*

Setting (time and date and place): Rural New England, tucked away in a brambly corner of Massachusetts (where H.P. Lovecraft placed his own creation “Arkham Sanitarium”). There is a general atmosphere of nightfall, dread, and chill throughout the whole of this greater geographical region, even into the mid-Atlantic states just to the southwest. And to my mind, it’s where we are.

1946 is the year, immediately post World War II.  Why this particular year was chosen is something I’ll go into as part of a later post.  But suffice it to say, it’s when we are.

The outer reaches of winter are our date.  This both coincides with the month in which we’re performing (February) and the transitionary time between winter and spring.  The earth is cracked and hard, the brittle grass silver with frost, the sky deeply overcast and the nights long and full of howls.  Wind, and maybe otherwise.  Who knows what’s there, out in close-set woods that rooted themselves in this ground long before the ancestors of our characters ever made their way (or were brought against their will) across the seas?  But our New Englanders know that spring is coming, that longer days and brighter sun rays and blossoming flowers will soon surround them again.

If they can survive long enough. Because the core action of our play takes place at the precise time that conviction, relationship, purpose, and principles are all thrown into doubt.  It’s a transitionary time for the characters as well, they who are both fully-fledged human beings and echoes of their environment.  They are part-and-parcel with the asylum and with the world.  Their struggles are the world’s struggles, their inner life an eerie reflection of the earth’s outer life.  Which is something that goes into the particular year we’ve chosen, something I’ll go into with more depth tomorrow.

Roles (and how they’ve changed): while our script uses the terms “King Claudius”, “Queen Gertrude”, “Lord Polonius”, and so on, they’ve remained solely for reference purposes in connection with a character’s power rather than the role they actually play in this new time and place.  And so, here’s a quick primer covering 1) who is even still in the play and 2) how they fit in to it all.

Hamlet Sr. (the Ghost): patriarch of a Kennedy-type family, and very qualified head warden for the asylum.  While he has his money and his influence and much of the nearby town has been built in his family’s name, the asylum is his passion and his focus.  And he ran it as a mechanical but effective place, taking strides in the name of science and human advancement while viewing cost as a necessary evil.

King Claudius: younger brother to Hamlet Sr., and hardly qualified to run a medical institution.  But a kinder man and an eager one, who has his way of doing things that he’s convinced will better serve the community in which he’s lived all his life.  He steals the chance to escape his brother’s long shadow but soon discovers himself out of his depth in more ways than one, a man trying to juggle a dozen balls with two hands and no juggling lessons.

Queen Gertrude: not just a woman in 1946 but a black woman, with a single child.  With a daughter. It’s fair to say that neither she nor her daughter nor their life together was what he husband envisioned, and he had little issue making that disappointment known.   She’s made it this far in one piece, she’s kept the train on its rickety rails by virtue of her own will and volition, but it’s hard.  It’s worn her down.  And now her husband’s dead.  His brother, a kinder, warmer, more available man, has taken his place.  To call that much improvement, however, would carelessly discount the danger still very present in her circumstances. How much does she really know Claudius? Is he going to retain Polonius as an employee and advisor? What status will her only child – a biracial girl – have in this new regime without the begrudging-but-effective protection of her biological father? And can she afford to mourn, to feel, to show anything that might be perceived as weakness? Or will she be thrown into her own asylum? Her world, already a rough one to begin with, has never been more dangerous.

Laertes: older brother to Ophelia, and older than Hamlet as well.  A soldier in the recent war, present for the liberation of Paris and more, in his mind he’s already left Elsinore behind.  France is his home now, the chance for love and a new chapter in his life after growing up on the grounds of an asylum and then living through an entirely different sort of madness on the beaches, fields, and forests of Europe.  And he’s a fighter, a boxer who believes strength comes from a very specific place.  His opinion of women and of the world will be tested, giving him his own dark struggle in the days to come.

Lord Polonius: a cunning, clever young-ish doctor who has worked his way up from nothing and brought his family with him into the far-reaching light of Hamlet’s family and the asylum’s opportunities.  But the man and doctor he was are threatened by the death of Hamlet Sr., and Polonius will have to fight for his place in the new regime.  To prove his usefulness and the value of his (perhaps more controversial) methods while he’s still employed.  There are unsubstantiated rumors about what happened to his wife, though no one disagrees that she was at one point committed to the asylum.  But beyond that… whether she died accidentally during treatment, was transferred out for a lobotomy, or still suffers in some forgotten cell? That’s only for the intrepid, the foolish, and the mad (who have seen far more than they care to speak) to ever know for sure…

Ophelia: “a feeler and a healer,” as we’ve been calling her, Ophelia’s father never quite had the money to send her away to Hamlet’s private school.  So she and her brother were educated in the town nearby, but every summer Hamlet returned to share three or four sweet, brilliant, beautiful months with her.  And her steel trap of a mind snapped up knowledge as fast as Hamlet could share it.  Their relationship has only ever been public in certain senses of that word, and they often used the asylum’s expansive grounds and Ophelia’s detailed knowledge of the town to hide and discover and explore.  Each other, the world with each other, and all the dreams of what they might one day hope to publicly be for each other.  While not outright trained as a nurse she nonetheless has spent a great deal of time in the asylum’s wards, working with patients because of the compassion, goodness, and earnest honest of her heart.  She lives a life defined by her society and those people she cares for, one which is swiftly thrown into disarray not long after the start of our play.

Hamlet: a privileged life in a problematic time is the start of Hamlet’s story but hardly the end.  The daughter her father didn’t want, she has struggled for most of her life to become the child he dreamed of having.  And despite his own judgement or opinions, he chooses to work with her in his way, to lead her on the strict path of succession and buck societal expectation of what she might achieve in her world.  If he has to have a daughter, then he’ll be damned if she won’t learn to be the smartest, strongest, and most successful woman recent history has seen.  So Hamlet is packed off to school to study harder than everyone else and become the woman he wants her to be.  But at age 20 she found a love of her own in the factories of war and in engineering, a love which led her down an altogether different path.  Or it did until her father’s death and her return home.   Back in Elsinore, once more amongst the patients and the personnel she knows so well, able to see how things are falling apart in Claudius’ reign, she remembers why she went away to study in the first place.  What it was all for, and the greater purpose it was meant to serve.  And as she works through it all, as she goes through her own physiological, psychological, and emotional growth, a quest is presented to her.  A journey into the heart of a darkness shared by her, the asylum, its people, and its future.

Rosencrantz: a woman who also grew up with Hamlet, Laertes, and Ophelia, but never found the same fun with them that they did with each other.  She and their mutual friend Guildenstern, both a bit older than Hamlet and Ophelia but not quite as old as Laertes, found a way to get away from it all with the war.  They became army nurses, using what they witnessed and learned in the asylum to fuel their resistance to the madness, horrors, and loss of every new hospital they were assigned to. But with the war over and Hamlet seemingly gone insane, Rosencrantz is called back to Elsinore as both a friend and someone with some experience in nursing and medicine.  Called back to speak to her old friend, to discover the cause of her wildness, and maybe to advance her own ambitions in the process…

Guildenstern: part and parcel to Rosencrantz’s story, Guildenstern has often shouldered the altogether unwieldy responsibility of being a broker between Rosencrantz’s harsher world view and the playful antics of Hamlet and Ophelia.  At the end of it all her loyalty is always to the friend who has most supported her and shared the greatest with her, and for all her good intentions and hopes for a world in which it all somewhere works out, it won’t take long for her to discover that very few other human beings in her circle share even a shred of that optimism.

Horatio: a man who, while in school with Hamlet (though she was about two years under him), found a greater calling as a priest.  Our play’s witness, but also an active participant in compassionate ministration to the mass of mad souls that fill the asylum’s halls.  He comes back to Elsinore for the funeral of a man he and the whole country knew formally, stays for the surprise wedding of Gertrude and Claudius, and then stays on even longer once he sees he’s needed.  Then his friend returns, he encounters a Ghost, and a crisis of conflict between the spiritual and the physical worlds erupts in the forefront of his soul.

First Clown: an autopsy surgeon who has made his home in the bowels of the asylum.  To tell you any more than that would spoil the very fun surprise we have for you.

Second Clown: same story here.

The Mad Chorus, 1-5: patients from all walks of life, of multiple creeds, skin color, religion, and reason.  Some of them have been committed for a long time, some less so.  Some made progress under Polonius’ practices, while others have lost the plot altogether.  Now under Claudius’ misrule they roam more free than they ever have before, only to find something waiting for them out there in the world…

gay marriage and our play

And once again the actor introductions must needs be sidelined for a day.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court in my good ol’ hometown of Cincinnati upheld a gay marriage ban for Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee (read the story here).  This decision actually overturned rulings made by lower district courts of those same states in favor of supporting human rights.  Gay marriage.  Both.  This decision means that the Supreme Court will most likely become involved in shorter order than it might originally have liked, but that’s too bad.

Because this shouldn’t still be an issue.

Which is a whole bonnet full of bees, and I’m not looking to rant in response to my own personal politics.  But what’s important about this, why I’m bringing it up, is that it needs to be heard.  To question the status quo, to challenge the root causes of fears and doubts and limitations and anger and insensitivity.  Even of indifference.  And it is because this needs to be heard that we are, in part, putting on this play in the way that we are.

With out Hamlet being played by a woman as a woman, and our Ophelia classically cast, we now have a queer relationship as one of pillars on which our production stands.  In a different post I’ll go more into the terrifying treatment (and reasons for that treatment) women were submitted to while navigating this country’s mental healthcare system in the first half of the 20th century, but the very short story is that same-sex compassion and attraction and partnership was considered unnatural and/or of the devil and/or curable and/or a disorder and/or emotional confusion brought on by “being a weak-willed woman.”  Simply being a woman became the cause of countless callous and otherwise unjustified cases of commitment.

Was, and still is.  Just because women can’t be put away by their husbands for being bisexual or lesbian altogether doesn’t mean that we’re past the prejudice, the fear, the dismissal, or the abuse.  Just because women are a little bit less likely to be beaten in public for sharing affection doesn’t mean we’re past the often very real possibility.  And even if we’ve made a few inches of societal and cultural progress, that doesn’t mean we have any license to sprawl out in the sun and give up the race.  Because there isn’t just a sun above – clouds still gather on the horizon, iron-grey and swollen with thunder, lightning, brimstone, and rain heavy enough and chill enough to quench the fiercest fire.

No, we have to keep pushing.  Shoulders down, head down, cleats dug deep into the course as we strain, step by step, to graduate from a fight to a jog to a full-on sprint of FREE EXPERIENCE AND EXPRESSION.

No one in our play approves of the relationship or connection shared by Hamlet and Ophelia.  Each for their own reasons, of course, be it Polonius’ bias due to his own backstory involving his wife or Laertes’ outspoken prejudice or Claudius and Gertrude’s opinion as informed and limited by their characters having grown up in the early 1900s.  Only Horatio has compassion for them – Horatio, who for us is being played as a priest, who finds a greater calling to warmth, compassion, and love in his heart and soul and service.  Horatio, who despite whatever he may feel personally for his friend is willing to be a rock of support and friendship for whoever needs, wherever they need it.

Otherwise they’re on their own.  And the secrecy and the struggle and the fear and the doubt that they feel in their present and for their future… it all comes to an explosive head when Ophelia first reveals to her father what everyone in Elsinore has fearfully suspected.  She gives him the love letters sent to her by Hamlet, hoping to do whatever she can to discover the cause of her partner’s possible madness and do whatever she can to ease it.  Even if that “whatever she can” becomes revealing the truth to very someone who is possibly the worst person in the world to hear that news from her mouth.  She takes an incredible risk for love and hope, only for her father to take that information public in the most manipulative way possible to further his own ambition, and for her partner – for Hamlet – to misunderstand and take deep, wounded offense.

And therein lies another portion of her tragedy, alongside the greater tragedy of the play’s characters and world.

Not unlike how I suspect this current chapter of human history will be one day viewed, provided we make it out alive.