My friend got a rejection notice for his play that proclaimed it theatrical, powerful and compelling. The quality of the piece was obvious to this theatre. However, they chose not to produce it.

We laughed for a long time about this because generally the work that they DO produce is shallow, dull and lame. We imagined a rejection notice that was explicit about that.

“Your work was powerful, theatrical and compelling. We regret to inform you that that is not what we do here.

When you create a less interesting, less compelling piece of work, please let us know, as that will fit much more easily into our season.

Your work was excellent but that’s not what we do. Regards,
Theatre Company of Mediocre Works.”

Whatever happened to caviar? In the 80s, it was all we talked we about. There was a high symbolic vibration around the stuff. As kids, we were all convinced it was disgusting. Ew! Fish eggs?! So gross! People really eat that?! Oh – just rich people? Why do rich people eat it? Why are they so weird?

Caviar was the ultimate sign of wealth – expensive and silly.

But it was the 80s and more people aspired to wealth in a caviar way so it may be that caviar had slipped down the slide of downward mobility as more people became upwardly mobile. You never hear about caviar anymore. It either became more commonplace and something rarer replaced it. (What would that be?) Or the rich stopped talking about it.

Or the internationalization of culture kicked in. . .after all, we started actually eating sushi in America instead of making fun of it. We had more direct lines to Russia, where the caviar came from. The world has shifted and caviar dreams are less rarified than they were then. Caviar seems to have gone a bit out of fashion.

It is a constant mystery to me that quality is not always recognized or taken up, that good works are not embraced by the masses. How is it that shows like Real Housewives prevail while shows like The Hour or Firefly or Arrested Development get cancelled for lack of viewers? I don’t understand.

It happens so often, I am often confused when things of quality actually succeed. I fully expected Nashville to get cancelled after a season. I never expected Brief Encounter to run on Broadway. War Horse ran about 5 more years than I thought it would. But Mamma Mia! is still running. And one of the most brilliant musicals I’ve ever heard has yet to be produced.

This is an interesting distinction – the difference between speaking a speech and acting it. It seems to be the difference between recitation and performance. In today’s world, it might be the difference between a reading and a show. In this case, however, the Player keeps the text in his memory instead of the page.

I am impressed with this mostly due to the sheer amount of text the First Player has kept in his mind after only one (possible) performance. I still recall bits of speeches I learned years ago but generally those were reinforced with dozens of performances. The ones I learned and performed once vanish quickly.

For example, I learned Hamlet’s soliloquy, the one that will come at the end of this scene in response to the speech the Player speaks for him. I spent a great deal of time learning it and practicing it and it had exactly one performance. I thought I’d never forget it. But a handful of years later I can only call to mind the same lines I knew before I learned it. Gertrude’s speech about Ophelia, however, I could probably pull off, because I performed it a hundred times.

I acted that Hamlet soliloquy, too. . .I don’t think it could qualify as a speech simply spoken. I know I ended up on my knees. That is definitely past the bounds of speaking a speech and into the acting territory.

The chaplain seemed to be shouting. He stood inches away from us but he shouted, with some fervor, about the Everlasting and redemption and being united in Him or something to that effect. I found it hard to pay attention to his speech. Everything around him was so much more eloquent.

The greenness of the grass.
The white stones lined up like soldiers up and down the hills.
The band standing at attention.
The horses’ hooves clicking along the road to the sound of drums.
Hands moving in perfect synchronicity.
Guns firing puffs of smoke into the air.
A flag pulled like rigging.
A pair of boots turned the wrong way round the horse.
A box much like the ones my grandfather’s cigars used to rest in – full of ashes.
A lone man with a bugle.
Dozens of legs walking in unison away from the scene.

Even, he himself, after the speech was over and he knelt down to deliver the triangle of the flag, was more eloquent.

In addition to working with the actual masks, we explored the masks as types, bare-faced. S was playing the Trickster, his focus on his left eyebrow. There were three of us in a group. S said things to T while I observed. Or maybe I was meant to be doing something else but all I recall doing was observing. In this character, S was meant to be doing something to T. Was it to make her blush? Was that his goal? Well, that’s what he achieved when he said, full of salaciousness, “I bet you taste great.”

It made me extremely uncomfortable, too. It was a moment of great success, acting-wise but definitely a little too close to home life-wise. I think every woman has had some trickster say something inappropriate to her that made her both horrified and intrigued. Or at least just horrified.

Anyway, I just imagined S’s trickster saying this line and T blushing.

Is it Hamlet’s fault that actors have to audition with speeches now? Here is a precedent for bringing an actor in a room and saying, “Okay, talk by yourself for a long time!”

I hate monologues. I hate them as a director, as an actor and as a producer. Watching someone present a long speech in a small room with no real audience to speak of has never told me anything I really need to know about a performer. As a performer, the monologue is nothing like anything else I do on stage – even giving monologues. A speech for speech’s sake is an absurdity in a world where people say things for a reason.

That said, the speeches in this play, the one that Hamlet is about to speak and the one that the First Player continues, are maybe some of my favorite bits of language. It’s got stuff like “Coagulate gore” and “Who, ah, woe, had seen the mobléd queen” which I’m guessing is all an homage to Homer who, now that I think about it, is probably the real originator of one guy standing up and saying long speeches in the Western canon.

Is the idea here that French falconers send their birds flying at absolutely everything? That they are quick to react and always ready to go?
I’m struck that it’s the falconer’s and not the falcons that are flying at anything they see.
So – he as the audience, as the patron to this performance, will send forth his falcon, the performers, with a great sense of readiness? Does he have an itchy trigger finger for shows?
He cannot hold back receiving a performance? This seems the most logical as the very next line is a request for a speech. And we, either a royal we, or a Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Polonius we. Royal we seems more likely however.

I was thinking about masters and mastery and how few true masters I’ve seen at work and then I wondered how one became a master of something and then I realized that’s what a Master’s degree is for. That Master’s degree I have is meant to indicate that I am a Master of Directing which, at which particular moment in my development, seems comical. It is also comical how many people I know with these degrees that are meant to signal mastery and in fact just signal a great deal of student debt and some interesting connections. It seems to me that the real way to be a Master of Arts, of Theatre, of the sort that Hamlet might welcome you to Elsinore with, is to do a lot of it, to apprentice to a master early on and rise up the ranks at a company until one has mastered many roles.

Or like Bunraku Masters who are true Masters of their art, haven risen up from the feet to the arm to the head and arm.
We have so many more amateurs in these arts these days. Like Fran Lebowitz said about too much democracy in Art and not enough in government. Everyone can be an actor! Everyone can write! And the true masters of the form can’t become masters really as they are drowned out in the chorus of mediocrity.

There’s something about this line that feels JUST out of reach of my understanding. The gold ring, I think I get. If it’s not good gold, it’d crack if you make a ring out of it. And Hamlet’s hoping this kid’s voice hasn’t changed yet – that he’s not cracking when he speaks. But what about the ring? His voice cracks in the ring?

All I can think about is how ring was sometimes euphemism for the vagina – in which case, (case, ha! Case is also a euphemism!) is the idea that if this kid’s lost his virginity, it would make his voice change? Or as he’s getting busy, his voice changes? I’d think one’s voice change would precede the ability to wear the ring, as it were. But whatever it is, it’s all a bit of a stretch.

Potential thesis: What does the literature of the time tell us about boys’ puberty? How do other writers talk about it? What was thought to happen when?