Scene: The Kitchen. Yorick is at the table, eating porridge. Yorick’s brother, Borick, rushes in.
BORICK: Yorick! Come quickly! The mare’s giving birth!

YORICK: Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?
(laughter)

BORICK: But your wife is with her and she’s fallen, she needs us to carry her to the surgeon.

YORICK: Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?
(more laughter)

BORICK: The stablehand was giving her a look I wouldn’t trust my cat with.

YORICK: Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?
(more laughter)

BORICK: Alright, then, give us a spoon.

I love this image. Gentlemen write down the jokes in their notebooks?! And not AFTER the play, no, no, before. They want to be READY for the jokes. I don’t quite understand that impulse. I feel like knowing the jokes ahead of time can kill them a bit. But, I suppose, it’s like a catch phrase – you like to anticipate its arrival – the way I used to wait for Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian to shout “Acting!”

Writing them down, though. Why?
Just in case you forget what you’re hoping to see?
So you can shout out requests like at a rock concert?
This line conjures a whole world of the culture of theatre going that feels just out of reach and so so interesting.

This line is so often cut, I feel it’s possible I’ve never heard it spoken. The metaphor of a suit of jokes is a little confusing – but the notion of it being his calling card, his means of recognition makes some sense. It’s remarkable to realize that catch phrases were a thing LONG before Saturday Night Live. As a child of the 70s – I thought SNL had invented the catch phrase.

I imagine that a catch phrase could start to become something you wear, like a coat. When people saw Dana Carvey on the street, they said, ”Isn’t that special” – not what he wore. Steven Martin’s probably resembled “Well, excuse me” for quite some time.
And what’s remarkable about most catch phrases is that they are to do with tone, more than text.
Reading ahead, these catch phrases Hamlet mentions are just as banal.

It is definitely irritating when a clown disrupts your work with his audience pandering, no doubt. But villainous? I don’t know. A fool is just doing what a fool does best. We don’t berate the sun for its villainy when it beats down on us in the dead of summer. We can resent it, sure, complain – but it doesn’t make the sun a villain. It just makes it a particularly sunny sun.

With clowns and an audience, it’s the same. You can resent them, complain but rather than calling them names, it seems to me that it becomes necessary to build some structures to defend against excess clowning, in the same way we build shelter to protect us from the excess sun.

We were playing an auditorium full with over a thousand young people in it. I was playing Peter Quince with a group of very funny and delightfully anarchic mechanicals. For months, they’d been delighting audiences around the country with their antics. It fell to me to rein them in, to keep the show from going off the rails. I mostly managed it until this teeming auditorium. This time, I couldn’t make myself heard over the roars of a thousand people. I couldn’t pull it back. We tried to proceed but the farther we’d get, the more antics emerged and the louder and more unmanageable the audience became. I wanted to cry. I might have. And I felt like such a killjoy but I had in mind the “necessary question of the play” and while no one heard me say the lines, I said them anyway. And eventually the play proceeded.

Most clowns I know don’t speak at all. But certainly the ones that do, they’ll talk whenever they like if you give them the opportunity. That is part of the pleasure of them; They are anarchic and unpredictable. I wrote a play in which I wanted that sort of energy. I tried to write it into the character but it doesn’t really translate into words. In order to give it that clown feeling, I had to specify that the actor was welcome to stray from the text when he felt like it.

It’s tricky though, giving clowns free rein. In another play, I gave an actor space to improvise in a couple of key moments. I found, though, that he made something up one night and then just said that same thing over and over again afterwards. I ended up writing him a thing because, while what he’d made up was mildly amusing the first night, it ceased to be amusing with repetition.

But then, too, clowns often thrive in adversarial relationships. Tell a clown he shouldn’t say more than is set down for him and I can almost guarantee you that he will be improvising his balls off, all over your script. Tell him not to swear, there will be a mountain of swears by the end of the night.

In reading Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier, I found his portrait of where we’re at with digital technology and where we’re headed chilling. It activated all my reforming impulses.

The fact that Lanier has a very clear sense of how a do-over is possible, of how it might not have to be this way makes it all the stronger. I get skeptical, of course, wonder how such a grand change in something that developed so all at once, so altogether, so piece by piece. It feels like trying to rebuild the foundation of a house without wrecking the house on top.

How could such a change happen, given how hard monumental change can be. But hope springs up and I want to join a chorus of voices, to say with lots of others, “O, reform it altogether!”

And I especially appreciate the “and heard others praise” bit. Because this happens to me ALL THE TIME. I go to see some performance that everyone is raving about and then start to feel crazy because, what?! What is that they’re doing?!

And on the flip side – I will see performances that blow me away in tiny theatres that no one’s coming to and never will.

This can take a lifetime to learn. Laughs can feel like a warm shower of approbation. They are seductive. To make an audience erupt into laughter can feel like the accomplishment of a lifetime. An actor can fall into a trap of doing anything to keep that feeling going.

And yet – there is (hopefully) a bigger picture – something with more meaning than a simple laugh. To sacrifice a laugh for the bigger picture can, indeed, feel like a sacrifice. It may feel like: “No, no, don’t give me all your love, no, it’s fine – I have this other thing to accomplish.” But it’s true – and sacrificing a dumb laugh can lead to deeper laugh, a laugh with shades of knowing, a laugh of understanding or of grief. Or it can lead to tears or any manner of surprising things.
Learning to make theatre for that one ideal audience member, that one judicious one, leads to deeper, richer work. And even the unskillful might gain from the experience.

It is remarkable that so many centuries later this sense of purpose still feels insightful. Theatre artists tend to squabble over things. There are great differences in style, in methodology, in aesthetics, in intention. Ask 10 theatremakers what their art is for and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. But this one seems to unite them all. And a mirror is a useful metaphor. There can be much variety in a mirror.
Some seem to distort an image – make it longer or wider. Some make what it is seem absurd. Some make reality more beautiful. Some mirrors make everything terrifying or menacing. Some seem to be reflecting truth, nature just as it is (but of course that is an illusion – at the very least it is nature reversed.)

But all of it is a reflection of some nugget of life, all of it reveals as much as it distorts, and sometimes reveals more through distortion.
I’ve never met a theatre person who wasn’t somehow moved by this line. We can forget sometimes that our work has value and that there IS a purpose and that it is one full of meaning, rich in importance. That playing has a purpose is something we can forget and we are moved when we are reminded.

Especially with a line so connected to the past, so interested in the future. The way the line lives in a long line of forever “both at the first and now, was and is” the line is like a line leading from the very first player until this moment now, allowing us to remember that there were players at the first and that they lead straight to now, to the very age and body of our time.