If this were a comic book, we’d see Hecuba in panel one, regal and pristine, the jewel at the front of her crown sparkling, her expression full of mystery. She’s surrounded by tapestries and beauty.

In the next panel, she is in exactly the same position, with the same look of mystery but behind her, blood and fire pour down the walls, her cloak replaced with a torn blanket stained with burn marks. The major distinction is the wound on her forehead, as purple as the amethyst, as red as the rubies.

If only flames could be intimidated by tears. We could include professional cry-ers on the volunteer fire department squad. Someone’s loss could prevent another’s tragedy. A breast-beating break-up could benefit a 4 alarm blaze, about to destroy the ballet studio. A death in the family might prevent another death in another family. Actors who could cry on cue could pick up some side-line work, crying for the public good. I’d sign up for that.

After months and months of, first rehearsing, then performing, Hamlet – this was the line that sang to me. When it was all over, I would often get it stuck in my head, like a song, sang it like a song, I can still sing it like a song.

I came to think about Hecuba quite a bit because of this musical line. I developed an affinity for her, always as the mobled Queen, even when I couldn’t tell you what mobled meant. I couldn’t tell you why I love it anymore than I can tell you why I love the horns that kick in “Tightrope”, right after she says, “Now shut up.”

Unless, perhaps, it’s the same reason, a highly lyrical line right after an interruption that puts space around a complete change in direction. I could sing it all day.

What would Fortune do without her wheel? Would she suddenly start distributing fates with a more even hand? No more spinning the wheel, sending people up or down it, she just divides up the fortune in exact equal portions and hands it to everyone. No one’s fate is worse or better than anyone else’s – it all works out and doesn’t work out for everyone in equal measure. Which really would be nice. It would alleviate all kinds of envy and professional jealousies.
But what would happen to the stories?

It is a real privilege to have spent enough time with Shakespeare over the years to recognize when he’s repeating words or concepts or motifs across the plays. Every night I say the word “synod” in another play but somehow in this sentence, I almost forgot what it meant. What, I wondered, would a general synod be? Synods not being a particularly common topic of conversation in contemporary culture or theatre or anything but here we are – two synods, two plays.
And while I couldn’t deliver you a dictionary definition of a synod, I have a size-able sense of what’s what just from context elsewhere. Which is the result of years and quality time spent with words and the relationship with those words grows deeper everyday.

All day long I have been cursing Fortune in just this way. I have been trying to work out how I have ended up in this position of only drawing 7 people a night at shows, and those mostly friends and family and mostly the friends and family of my collaborators. I think: I should just give up. There is no reason to continue in the face of such extreme ambivalence.

And yesterday I read a little posting by a much more successful friend who confessed to wanting to leave the theatre over and over again and the outpouring of protest and support for him was extreme. “No! Don’t go! We need you! We love your work!” Etc Which is all true. His work is great and people love it and need it. But I read it and imagined that if I were to publish a similar sentiment, no such outpouring would occur. I feel like people would say, “Oh, how hard for you. Well, whatever else you do will be great.” Or something that would imply, “We’ve all been waiting for you to do that.”
Or if anyone would protest, they would protest from somewhere far away from me and their support would be only in words. And that would only be a handful of people who know what the theatre means to me.

I tried to do some history – to work out how it is that my peers have found a way to draw audiences or get fancy gigs or book prestigious shows. Why are they succeeding where I am so heartbreakingly a failure?
And it feels like fortune, on one hand.

My collaborators keep leaving the city, for one thing. Or the art. Or both. And that’s just fortune. They got married and moved away. Again and again and again. So what was once a team becomes a one woman band and not because of the work, no, just fortune.

And where one company thrived by the sheer whimsy of the moment, we, I, have receded. And sometimes it’s because we booked a show in Tony season and sometimes it’s just a busy season and no one can come and sometimes it’s just the mood of the hour.

Sometimes in the arts, people like to talk about the cream rising to the top. Those people are usually the people on top because fortune favored them so.

Fortune has not often favored me in these last years and I don’t know how to win her favor back again.

Doesn’t seem fair that the sword should be bleeding before it even makes the cut.
It is, it would seem, a terribly important strike of the sword. The world itself has paused and thundered in anticipation of Priam’s death. The sword has all the power/remorselessness of monsters. The sword bleeds, even before it breaks the skin.

Thunder seemed so much bigger when I was smaller. It used to shake our little wooden house in the hills like someone was trying to snap us out of sleep. We’d stand behind the shaking glass and watch the lightning. Then we’d count between light and thunderclap to reassure ourselves that we were safe – that though thunder shook us, only the lightning strike was dangerous.
We could watch storms coming toward us over the valley and the house down the hill, then watch it roll past.
The fear was bone-deep but thrilling – something so large and so outside of myself.
I could barely comprehend it and all the blue-green hills soaked with the same water that shook with us.

The power of expectant silence.
The hush before catastrophe.
The way the world can hold its collective breath in anticipation of something that will change it all
or ruin everything.

This nothing that Pyrrhus does is terribly interesting. There is, of course, the way the verse does nothing for the subsequent 7 beats of the line. Many a First Player will strike this painted tyrant pose and then hold it for 7 beats, which is often 7 seconds of beautiful silence, a breath in the torrent of words that this play is. It can be a small freeze, a pause, a suspension of time.

It could also be the end of the speech. Perhaps the First Player finishes here and Hamlet encourages him to go on. The contingent of Hamlet scholars that are obsessed with Hamlet’s inaction will often get excited about this Do Nothing – they will see it as a reflection of Hamlet’s doing nothing about his father’s murder. I see the connection but it does seem a little shaky – only because Pyrrhus is so clearly the villain here and his doing nothing is actually a momentary reprieve and is in this moment a good thing to do. So maybe we ought to see Pyrrhus as more a metaphor for Claudius who ought to have done nothing with his metaphorical sword hovering over Hamlet senior.

Or perhaps this nothing that happens is simply the most skillful sense of suspense in a suspenseful story.