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.

 

Our Daughter’s Love: the LGBT movement (part 1)

As you may or may not have noticed, I’m a bit behind.  And so, to return to where I’m meant to be, the next series of posts will deal with a timeline of the LGBT movement’s presence, life, and practice in the United States’ past. First as it informs our play’s action, and then as it informs our world today. I have no claim to be an expert, nor do I dare say that I’ll be able to completely cover every important event relevant to this subject. Apologies in advance if I misspeak or use an unacceptable name or label, and if I do then please let me know ASAP so that I can get on changing it.

But certain things need to be said and known, and even as cursory as this will be that doesn’t change how important this particular subject is to this production’s setting and, to a certain extent, point.

*~*~*~*~*

Those of you who have searched anything like “LGBT history” on the internet will find many timelines start in 1924 and skip straight to the 1960s.  Which is understandable, as ’24 was when Henry Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago. This was the USA’s first documented gay rights organization, one which soon also produced the first American publication for the homosexual community – Friendship and Freedom. Political pressures force it to disband soon thereafter, and as I said most timelines then jump to tumultuous events of the ’60s.

But to do so ignores so many milestones both large and small (and domestic and international) in the preceding and intervening years. Milestones such as:

1906, where what may very well be the first openly gay novel (with a happy ending no less) was published in the United States.

In 1912, when The Young Women’s Journal – a Mormon magazine – is home to the first explicit reference to lesbianism in the United States.

1919, which saw the release of Different From the Others, a German film which portrayed gay men sympathetically. In the same year Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld – who had a bit part in the film – also co-founded Berlin’s Institute for Sex Research. This institute, a private research and counseling office with a library that eventually held thousands of books and worked to promote conversation, communication, scholarship, and acceptance, was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.

Or 1917, when Russia’s October Revolution elected to repeal elements of Russia’s previous criminal code and announced that homosexual and heterosexual relationships are equal under the law. Sadly, this lasted for all of five years.

Or 1923, when British-born (but later resident of Canada and the USA) poet, photographer, and philosopher Elsa Gidlow published On A Grey Thread, perhaps the first collection of openly lesbian love poetry in North America.

Or how about we go back to 1924, when Panama, Paraguay, and Peru all legalized homosexuality. The fact that it was ever actually illegal anywhere is frustrating to the point of apoplexy, but we know that. These three countries are presented as contextual example and touchstone – to list the back and forth seen by so many countries around the world, from Iceland to Argentina to Poland to England, between the decriminalization and recriminalization and legalization of homosexuality, would be to fill an entire blog post in an of itself. And probably require a diagram. Or three.

1931 saw Germany step out yet again, producing and releasing the first explicitly pro-lesbian film Madchen In Uniform.  And in the same year, because why stop there with progressivism, Berlin hosted the first known vaginoplasty and transformed one Rudolph into Dora. Too bad about that whole thing where one Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor two years later and started sending everyone to concentration camps.

In 1936 America’s first lesbian bar – Mona’s 440 Club – opened in San Francisco.

Speaking of publishing, 1939 saw teacher Frances V. Rummell publish Diana: A Strange Autobiography, the first out-and-out lesbian autobiography complete with a (true) happy ending.

On the darker side of things, when the Allied forces liberated the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, anyone interned there for homosexuality is required to remain and serve out their sentence per Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code (which was technically part of the law until 1994). Doctor Hirschfeld had been fighting to have Paragraph 175 repealed since as early as 1897. And repealed it was, in 1929. The rise of what would become the Nazi party, however, prevented the implementation of the vote’s result.

On the lighter side of things, in December 1946 what is now known as Cultuur en Ontspanningscentrum (translated as Center for Culture and Leisure) was founded in the Netherlands. It is the oldest LGBT organization we have as a world, at least insofar as ones which have continued to exist from their inception go. And while that’s brilliant and beautiful and fantastic, it’s not even the best part. You see, “Cultuur en Ontspanningscentrum” was instituted as a code name to cover the group’s real interests and purpose, but it was not the first used. No, that honor goes to the title “Shakespeareclub.” Founded by gay men who were associated with a magazine called Right to Live, the organization’s initial interest was not just in achieving social emancipation but also providing an opportunity for culture and recreation to the gay men and lesbian women of their community. The name was not changed until 1949.

“Welcome to the Cast” and other stories

Yesterday – I think it was yesterday? – I shared a story written by Jorge Luis Borges that I also shared with the cast at the start of the rehearsal process.

It was part of a greater collection of quotations and stories, and it struck me that some of you might be interested in the rest of them as they’re what first helped me form the tone and shape of the show.

So, without further ado, you’ll find them below!

*~*~*~*~*

I MAY HAVE SEEN THE DEVIL

“And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates… and the doors close behind me… it’ll be just like coming home.”

 Welcome to Elsinore Asylum.

A bare stage of bared hearts.

Known also by another name:
The Garden.

One of the mind,
of the land,
of the world itself.

An old passion play for a new day?
Perhaps. In its way.

What follows are some evocative thoughts, poetry, and imagery from the mouths and minds of better men and women than I which may or may not give some small modicum of lift to your wings as we embark on this journey. Do with them as you wilt, whether that be nothing or everything.

Conscience is a mother in law whose visit never ends.

~ Anonymous

 

“There are only three things in life which are certain: I live, I will die, and I cannot keep silent”
~ Samuel Beckett

 

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

~ Oscar Wilde

 

… poetry is the product either of a man of great natural ability or of one not wholly sane; the one is highly responsive, the other possessed.

~ Aristotle

 

I think that time is a Predator, and it stalks us all our lives. I say quit running. Cover yourself in mud, light a torch, and fistfight that ugly motherfucker.

~ Jason Pollock, of Chud.com

 

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth. Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.

~ Alan Moore

 

Dante and Shakespeare are agreed on one point: in consigning to the lowest circle of Hell the traitors, those who strike against the divine order of love that binds the world and all its manifestations together in unity and stability.

~ SHAKESPEARE’S WORLD OF IMAGES, by Donald A. Stauffer
 

 

Sometimes we’re in a state of heightened emotions that take our normal centre – which runs on its own clock, it’s own rhythm – that when people suffer from remorse, anxiety, panic, that the emotions become so huge and other things are capable to come into those emotions. Are they summoned up, or have they arrived?

~ Actor Ciaran Hinds, in an interview about the film The Eclipse

 

“But, I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here . I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the cat. Or you wouldn’t have come here.”

~ ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, by Lewis Carroll

 

“Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;
Thou know’st, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and ry. I will preach to thee. Mark…
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.”

~ KING LEAR (IV, VI, 182-187)

 

One part of love is innocence,
One part of love is guilt,
One part the milk that in a sense
Is soured as soon as spilt
One part of love is sentiment,
One part of love is lust.
One part is the presentiment
Of our return to dust.

~ Clive Barker

The Mad Hatter: “Where was I? Where am I? Where will I be? Ah yes, the apparent disorder of the universe is simply a higher order, an implicate order beyond our comprehension…. sometimes… sometimes I think the asylum is a head. We’re inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it’s your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass. And we are you.”

~ ARKHAM ASYLUM: A SERIOUS HOUSE ON A SERIOUS EARTH, by Grant Morrison

 

To make his horror complete, Caesar, pursued to the base of a statue by the relentless daggers of his friends, discovers among the faces and blades the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his favorite, his son perhaps, and he ceases to defend himself to exclaim: “You too, my son!” Shakespeare and Quevedo echo the pathetic cry.

Fate takes pleasure in repetitions, variants, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the south of Buenos Aires province, a gaucho is assaulted by other gauchos, and, as he falls, recognize and godson and with gentle reproach and gradual surprise exclaims (these words must be heart not read): “But che!” He is killed and never knows he dies so that a scene may be re-enacted.

~ THE PLOT, by Jorge Luis Borges

 

[Shakespeare is not] a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers, [but rather] it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality: -these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.

  ~ Herman Melville

In the traditional version of the shaman, the magician, the one who walks between the worlds, one of the things that make it possible to walk between worlds is a wound. The perfected body, the perfected soul is in a higher place. In the unperfected wounded self, the wound is an ability which grants you the power to look outside the conventional, luxurious, hedonistic, the sensual things which preoccupy us in this world into some other place. I think it’s one of the reasons why very often artists are wounded, are psychically wounded in one way or the other. I think actually the truth is everybody is psychically wounded, the issue is whether you own up to it or not.

I think what I’m trying to do constantly is when I have these kind of journeys into empowerment, is that there is always a price for that empowerment. It’s the yin and yang; without paying the price, you can’t have the empowerment, but the empowerment to some extent may even cause you to pay the price. You have to grasp something very painful, you have to have to open yourself up to very painful experiences. The pain of the world if you will.

And I think that one of the things that artists do, that magicians do, religious figures do is open up the place in us which we seal off very quickly as children, because we realize if we open up too much, it hurts too much. The world is full of hurt. People die, people leave, the world changes radically, unpredictably; things that we love finish, things that we hate begin. The experience of the world from an early age is primarily, I think an experience of loss and pain and despair. In order to heal those feelings paradoxically you have to put yourself up to them. My books are very often ‘Look it’s okay to be wounded, it’s okay to be imperfect but be aware that the wound should not just be suffered, it should be used. It should be a way to become the richer, more loving more constructive more articulate human being.

~ Clive Barker

The Stories We Tell Ourselves (or, part two of Hamlet’s “Universality”)

Now I fear I’m getting really semantic, even just as to there being a difference between points 1 and 2 as articulated in my last post, but:

2) The circles of human interaction.

The circles I speak of are two-fold in their potential – either the circular nature of how humanity interacts with itself, or how it interacts with the world.  The Bible, and so many books like it, recounts certain stories that illustrate “original sins” and other blueprints for or archetypes of human interaction. And generally they tend towards the negative, crafted and/or presented as condemnations of the wrong and dangerous ways to act. But, sadly, they’re not wrong. Many of them do depict how human beings tend, at the end of the long day, to treat each other. Shakespeare knew this – he even has Claudius blatantly reference in one speech “[my soul] hath the primal eldest curse upon it: a brother’s murder.”

Or, to really cook your noodle, maybe human beings act in such ways because of the stories they’ve grown up with. Which would  be an excellent example of a vicious cycle. Take for example my own current health condition: Crohn’s Disease. It’s an inflammation of the intestines due to… well, science is still figuring that out. Some combination of too many antibiotics when I was a child and genetics and diet and food quality and stress and who knows what else, anyway. Whatever the reason, in very broad and basic terms, here’s what was happening to me before I began treatment through medicine and then diet: my intestines weren’t processing food properly due to inflammation, so some carbohydrates, sugars, and starches would sit in my intestines. Partially digested, just hangin’ out. This led to them fermenting, which in turn led to them breeding bad bacteria. My intestines, to keep the bad bacteria away, excreted a mucous as protection. But the mucous, hardly sentient or capable of distinguishing what it was and wasn’t meant to keep out, also prevented good nutrients from being digested and absorbed. In other words, the very action my body took to protect me also served to prevent me from getting what I needed to stay strong (and alive, for that matter). And so the bad bacteria was kept at bay (but kept breeding, because it had nothing else to do with its day), the good nutrients slid right on by, and I got worse and worse (and worse).

The perfect example of a vicious cycle.

And, perhaps, not dissimilar from the way the stories we tell ourselves change us and the way who we are changes the stories we tell.

Impartiality. Objectivity. Even the “truth” (in relationships, the world, the universe, and humanity) that Hamlet spends so much of the play pursuing – it’s all malleable and adaptable.

To be more blunt: it’s not real.

Reality, perspective, history, future, nature, cause – all of these are structures built by the mind to apply sense and order to something we simply, fundamentally don’t conceive. Not “can’t,” because I’ve no idea how we might change and evolve in the coming centuries (if we survive). But, at this time, we don’t. Instead we have layer upon layer of lies, big and small, all agreed upon. A “lie” in this sense not necessarily referring to something bad, but just to… applied fabrication. We on the whole agree that money matters. We agree murder is destructive to society. We agree that X is beautiful and Y is not. We agree that children shouldn’t play in the street or walk home alone. We agree that power ultimately corrupts. We agree that war tears the soul and that monsters exist. We agree that greed will get its practitioner in the end. We agree that there is some order to our minds, our world, and our universe.

We agree because we have to. We agree because otherwise we wouldn’t know how to get out of bed or what to do in the world once we went out into it.

And the way we agree is we tell stories.  Myths, legends, plays, films, poems, dances, sketches, novels, fables, fairy tales, history books.

We tell stories because they’re true for us.  Because they articulate a core codex of patterns, desires, and elements of relationships – a language of interaction and connectivity – which we can use to dictate how we act.

Speaking of stories, I’m starting to realize I might have lost the plot a bit. Wandered off the forest path and into the dark woods that may very well consume me alive if I don’t find my way back to a relevant point soon.

Hamlet is one such story, one in a line that was long when it was written and is far, far longer now.  And once again we come to an avenue which, if traveled down, would make this post also far longer. Suffice it to say, here are just a few of the ways Hamlet as a play articulates said circles of human interaction – with other humans and, more importantly, with the surrounding environment.

1) British director Richard Eyre spoke in 1987 about how he believed much of the play Hamlet was about the character Hamlet trying to kill the feminine in himself. This isn’t new information for this blog, but it IS a good articulation of a greater struggle that has plagued many cultures for centuries upon centuries.

2) Hamlet the play showcases a world in flux, one beset before its action with multiple deeds of violence both on both personal (Claudius’ murder of his brother) and nation-wide (the wars with Norway) scales. Claudius comes into power at a time when the fate of Denmark very much hangs by a frayed thread, as liable to be blown apart by a passing gust of wind as it is the careful machinations of an opportunistic enemy. The play then builds on this anticipation, Hamlet being charged with violence early on and then spending the first 2/3 of the play deliberating about whether to act on that impulse. But (perhaps) unknown to Hamlet, the world and time in which the play takes place is a brutal one, birthed by violence and waiting with venomous, bated breath for more. And Hamlet does in time oblige in grand and vicious fashion – but not before being brutalized by that same environment, worn by thought and feeling and doubt, beaten down by chaotic forces of connivery and suffocating masculinity. Which brings us back around to another of those vicious cycles – humanity created (and entrenched itself in) a brutal environment before the action of the play, thereby crafting a set of circumstances that contributes to the creation of brutal human beings to better propagate its existence as a constant state.

3) Elsinore, as depicted in the play, is a physical construct. The action takes place almost wholly within its stone walls, and Nature (and nature) is often spoken of or alluded to as having been corrupted. Misused. Twisted. Time, the rules of the world, Nature itself is out of joint, and it is in part because of this disconnect between humanity and Nature which is again and again pointed to as being a root part of the problems that plague the characters. Of their increasingly desperate and dangerous decisions. And of their doubts that shake their faith in God, people, the universe, and everything.

In regards to #1: yes, there are certainly cultures found around the earth, both in its past and present, which venerate women and the feminine and accord them honors and rights forbidden to men. They’re also, you might note, not the dominant perspective of worldwide society.

In regards to #2: human past and present are filled with countless cultures which have put beliefs, laws, and perspectives into practice that encourage a violent, assaultive, brutal way of dealing with people and the planet. Rome, for example, may not have started as a practicer of crucifixion and slavery, but in time its emperors were ordering that Christians be smeared in oils and herbs and mounted on stakes and lit on fire and its people were routine attendees of a massive stadium that dealt in the torture and death of countless souls.

In regards to #3: going back for a minute to “way of dealing with… the planet,” human beings – and Westerners in particular – have rarely successfully lived in harmony with their environment. Vanity projects, need for housing, the evolution of industry, and more have all contributed to societies which built on nature with little regard for the eventual resonance of that work. Even when the tools and lessons as to that resonance were readily available. I say “successfully” lived in harmony because there are those communities that have tried, and either in time been conquered (see many First Nation peoples) or simply shut down by the self-serving and limited-sight greed of those wishing to keep a stranglehold on their power at the expense of consideration, compassion, or common sense.

 

I should probably stop writing now.

A Whole History: Hamlet’s “Universality”

Just about every interview I’ve ever seen or read regarding Hamlet – in particular those with whomever is playing the title role at the time – touches on (or spends the entire interview talking about) Hamlet’s “universality.” Both as a play and as a character. And they’re not wrong. That universality is one of the premiere reasons why this play has endured above so many others for so long.

But what do people mean when they speak about Hamlet’s “universality?” Well, sometimes they’re talking about the ways the characters interact in the play or descriptors of generalized human experience. And there is a whole host of possibilities from which to pull to fit this bill – betrayal, love, loss, abandonment, murder.

Sometimes they’re talking about the universality of emotional experience – fury, pleasure, joy, ecstasy, madness, passion, melancholy, sorrow, grief.

Sometimes they’re talking in a greater thematic sense – justice, revenge, paternal or maternal relationship, filial obligation, existence, nihilism, despair, questions concerning life and death and life after death, God, truth, the power and purpose of the feminine within all of us.

Which is all well and good and absolutely on the mark. The play does contain each and every one of those, plus plenty that I didn’t even list. But I’d argue that the observation of Hamlet’s “universality” touches on something larger. Or a set of somethings, the two of them larger and deeper and more expansive than what human beings think or feel.

I guess what I’m getting at is…

1) the cycles of human history and 2) the circles of human interaction.

Because here’s the tricky thing about some of those smaller “universal” elements like emotional response – they’re not necessarily as universal as you think. Take for example an NPR article I read recently (which you too can do so here) that goes into how a tribe of pygmies deep in the Democratic Republic of Congo were played certain music cues and pieces which affect many Westerners (whether they have a personal connection to the music’s source material or not). And how those same pygmies did not have the same response I or my friends or many of their friends do, because our very relationship with music, emotion, and community are different than what might be – or indeed is – found elsewhere in the world.  For the pygmies, even the music played during funerals exudes and expresses a certain kind of joy, celebration, and inspiration.  This particular tribe simply doesn’t let itself dwell on negative experience, electing instead to pursue their lives (and deaths) with a different perspective.

Would Hamlet still speak to them? Of course an audience must not first be a “Western” one in order to “get” Hamlet – as the Globe’s current tour demonstrates (referenced on this very blog a few posts ago). So what is it, then, if we remove the influence of some of the more common cultural touchstones and elements from a production of Hamlet? Or even from the play itself? What is left?

There’s always the chance that what I’m about to get into is fundamentally semantic in nature, and does little to reveal anything new for those of you who have known Hamlet for some time now. But, for whatever it’s worth:

 1) The cycles of human history.  

Eden is not a place. Perhaps it never was. Shangri-La is not. Atlantis is not. Such places – and stories – may well be based on some semblance of fact. Atlantis, for example has arguably strong roots in the very real Minoan Civilization of Crete (the structure, the culture, the method of destruction). But that doesn’t change the point that it is doubtful there has ever been an ideal, conflict-less environment where humans have been involved. Perhaps self-contained pockets have been born, and grown, and lived for a time. But, after that time, other human beings have come in. And, driven by greed or fear or fortune or fame or hate, they have corrupted or even destroyed that pocket. No society, culture, people, or country have risen without experiencing a subsequent fall. No belief system has not faced persecution. No people have not suffered repression. There is, to date, a sad and vicious cycle which has rippled through the whole of human history, sometimes spanning many generations before manifesting again. But manifest it does, to re-enact the same pattern on the participants.

That’s not to say it’s a rule, but rather the norm. Whether it can ever be truly broken, whether peace and harmony and all that jazz can ever truly be achieved, is an utter unknown because it has not yet been seen. So long as we’ve been here, roaming and foraging and hunting and building and loving and killing, we’ve always found the way back to what we know. Like the human eye picking out a face in the peeling bark of a beech tree, the brain applying a symbol of order it can conceive in order to understand and relate to this thing.

This is a short story titled The Plot, borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, that I gave out to the cast at our first read-through (and yes, it really is :

            To make his horror complete, Caesar, pursued to the base of a statue by the relentless daggers of his friends, discovers among the faces and blades the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his favorite, his son perhaps, and he ceases to defend himself to exclaim: “You too, my son!” Shakespeare and Quevedo echo the pathetic cry.
Fate takes pleasure in repetitions, variants, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the south of Buenos Aires province, a gaucho is assaulted by other gauchos, and, as he falls, recognize and godson and with gentle reproach and gradual surprise exclaims (these words must be heart not read): “But che!” He is killed and never knows he dies so that a scene may be re-enacted.

So there’s that.

 2) The circles of human interaction.

I’m actually going to come to this in a separate post, because in the writing it’s becoming taking on a new identity altogether its own. And, not to scare you, becoming longer than I initially anticipated.

A Whole History: Performance (part three)

Jesse. Yeah, you. LaTourette. Don’t read this post. It’s full of other people performing Hamlet.  But no pressure, I promise, no matter who is up here – this is all just by way of illustrating the myriad ways actor after actor have tackled the same role. Shakespeare’s writing in general, and Hamlet in particular, lends itself to a rare and wonderful variety of interpretation in performance.

Here are some examples, pulling from a number of different Hamlets who all one way or another find themselves exploring the same famous question. Plus a few more Hamlets who tackle other speeches, because that’s what was available. Any way and either way, it’s well worth noting that nigh-on every single video showcases a different tone, setting, energy, and age of its lead character.

First, to make sure we don’t get too serious with this whole thing:

Patrick Stewart

*~*~*~*~*

And with that said, on to everyone else.

Kenneth Branagh

Richard Burton

Mel Gibson

Ethan Hawke

Laurence Olivier

David Tennant

*~*~*~*~*

Kevin Kline

Jonathan Slinger

*~*~*~*~*

Jude Law

*~*~*~*~*

And then, to end where-ish we began: