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?

Is this why people have an unconscious prejudice for tall people?
Evidence points to an overwhelming advantage to being tall. Perhaps people thought of the distance from heaven as a real thing, that someone whose head reaches further into space must be closer to God, closer to the angels, closer to knowledge, Growing up meaning literally growing up. Getting closer to closer to perfection.

When I was in middle school, I remember watching one of my fellow students do something stupid and thinking, “It’s possible that she’ll never grow out of that. It’s possible that we won’t age into perfection.” Until then, I had believed that growing up meant learning it all, getting closer and closer to perfection with age. But in a flash, I could see how that 11 year old girl was not all that different from the 7 year old girl I’d known and how she might still be the same at 31.

Growing up means literally growing up for a while and then it means something else entirely.

What must it have been like to be one of the boys in the company? To grow up the butt of jokes, to be called young lady by Princes, to have extraordinary text written for you but know that everything you learn now must be cast aside when your voice changes? Did the boys in the company become men in the company when they grew up? Did they “Graduate” from Juliet to Hotspur? Or were they cast off to join other professions? What was the career trajectory? Were little boys brought in to be the boys in Macbeth or Winter’s Tale or trained to be girls right from the start?

Maybe from boy to fairy to teenage girl? And once the transformation began did it continue off stage?
Did boy players behave and dress as girls offstage, too? Hamlet would appear be greeting a boy as a girl here (that, is, assuming that Shakespeare is meaning for us to see the gender of the player who is actually playing the character and not expecting us to imagine that Danish players are co-ed when English players were not.) So curious.

R is a part of the Bear community. Before I met him, I would have thought the Bear Community would have involved either grizzlies, teddies or koalas but R introduced all of us to his fellow Bears through stories and photographs. What became clear in his presentation was how significant his beard was to him. We came to understand that his beard was his identity and marked him as a Bear. He did such an extraordinary job imparting the significance of his beard and his community that when it became clear that he was about to shave his beard off in front of us, we all gasped.
If you’d asked us half an hour before how we’d feel if R shaved his beard, most of us would likely have shrugged, beard, no beard, what’s the big deal?

But now we understood what the big deal was and R handed out false beards to all of us which we solemnly wore (despite how ridiculous we all looked) as we watched him take a razor to his entire identity.

It is remarkable how a man can change so completely the face he presents to the world simply by how he grooms (or doesn’t groom) his facial hair. What must it be like to grow more and more unfamiliar to yourself, day by day, as your face is covered with hair? And then to find a new version of yourself below it when you share it again?

Maybe this is why women get plastic surgery, not on cultural over-valuation of feminine beauty and youth, of course but for beard envy, because we cannot hide half our faces from ourselves with ourselves, and then reveal them again.