Everything feels all “No” today. I feel like there’s a Broadway song about worlds of NO and YES and I don’t want my mind to turn toward Broadway, but it’s hard to control the associations that pop up. Particularly while sitting in the middle of the theatre district.
Which, you know, doesn’t feel like MY theatre district, despite theatre being my passion, or vocation, or compulsion, or career, or curse, or cross, or love, or burden, or despair, or hope, or dream, or reality, or whatever it is to me.
This theatre district which I sit in the midst of, feels so far away from who I am or what I do or what I’m interested in. It doesn’t feel like it belongs to actors or writers or directors or designers or artists of any kind. It feels like it belongs to bankers who, after having made enough money, decide on a new vocation, or marketers who like to watch people sing and dance and figured they could sell that to. This isn’t my theatre. This isn’t my theatre district. The problem is, nowhere else is either. No.
Ophelia
For out o’doors he went without their helps And to the last bended their light on me.
Isn’t this how light works? With bending?
We see not the thing but the way light bends over it, on it, around it.
Light heads straight forward, then encounters you. It bends itself around your face, your neck, your torso, your arms, your pelvis, your legs, your feet, wherever I look, the light is bending around you, embracing you almost. I see you through the light, because of the light bending, bowing, turning to create a vision.
And, with his head over his shoulder turned, He seemed to find his way without his eyes;
When talking about evolution, eyes come up a lot.
They were a particular challenge to Darwin.
They are a particular challenge to those who would imitate what they do artificially. Nothing constructed can equal an eye and a brain.
When animals began, there were no eyes. We were all just fumbling along,
finding our way through the primordial soup towards the good and the bad.
Then slowly, we began to be able to catch light, to see shadows, to tell whether something was approaching from one side or the other.
Finding our way without our eyes required feeling, smelling, hearing
(hearing must have come before sight, mustn’t it? It comes first in the womb.)
Going toward nice things and away from the nasty.
That done, he lets me go.
After shaking her arm a little and nodding,
After sighing,
He lets her go.
He drops her hand,
Lets it fall back to her lap
Or perhaps her side
And then he goes
He gives up
Whatever he has hoped
She would understand
Whatever he has tried
To psychically send her
Has failed.
She has understood only
The movements of his body
Like an autistic child
Learning to understand despair
By articulating what the face does,
How the body moves
By the shapes.
At last, a little shaking of mine arm And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He raised a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being.
And still she does not say “What’s wrong?”
Her lover comes to her, clearly distressed, he sighs, like he’s going to die, a sigh
Like the end, a sigh to shake the foundations of the soul, and she just sits there?
Hamlet: You come to me sighing like that,
I’m going to ask you what’s going on.
I’m going to get down off my sewing chair
And take your head in my hands.
If you cannot tell me where that sigh came from,
What caused it or how you feel,
I will press you against my chest and hold you
Until you can speak again.
Life-threatening sighs will not pass
Unremarked upon if you come to me, Prince.
Come here. I’ll throw this sewing aside
So you can rest your head on my lap.
Long stayed he so.
I want to send Ophelia to a model mugging class.
I’d like for her to practice shouting, “No!” then kneeing someone in the groin and poking him in the eyes. I want her to know that she can move when a creepy guy sits down next to her. I want her to understand that if someone is staring at her, for longer than makes her comfortable, that she can walk away.
The self-defense movement took a great leap forward when it began to investigate why even highly trained martial artists lost their defenses in real life attacks. In the workshop I took, they told us that politeness, ladylike behavior and conciliatory gestures were the biggest open door to attackers. What got us into trouble was not going down dark alleys but not responding to our instincts when someone creepy showed up.
Women often do not move when a creepy man sits down next to us. (We don’t want to make the creepy man feel bad. So we stay.) We choose politeness over safety. We try to avoid conflict by agreeing with an aggressor. We try to nicely decline invitations rather than sharply turning them down. We smile when we say no. Even experts in self defense are liable to do these things and they are already sunk. This was a revelation to me when I learned it. Since I did, I get away from creepy people very quickly. And I will not stay and nod and smile at a person who might be dangerous. I have yet to NEED to shout “NO!” And gratefully, have not needed to knee someone in the groin or poke him in the eyes. But I’ve done it now, in practice, to a man in a giant suit that made him look like a Michelin man Beekeeper and having done it a few times in practice, I’m confident I could do it for real if I had to. I want this for Ophelia. If ever a girl needed some practice saying, “No!” It would be her. This play would have ended a whole lot differently for her if she had been able to say it, shout it or poke someone’s eyes with it.
Then goes he the length of all his arm, And with his other hand thus o’er his brow He falls to such perusal of my face As ‘a would draw it.
Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Cheeks.
Sketched in, they can be lines, shadows, shapes.
When you draw a face, you draw the light on it.
An image of a face might just be aesthetic
Or the features might tell a story-
One that explains a lie or a desire.
It is a wonder that lines, shadows and shapes
Can form themselves into duplicitousness
Or obedience or fear or suspicion or ecstasy.
A face, like water, gives away every object
That drops into it. Drop a pebble in a pond, watch it shift in circles, giving away where the pebble fell.
A face, too, will shift in response to a thought, a word, a feeling dropped into it.
He took me by the wrist and held me hard.
This is not an answer to the question of “What said he?” It is, in fact, what he did. And she does not say, “He didn’t say anything – he grabbed my wriest!” Which makes me wonder if, perhaps, Hamlet might have, in fact, said something to her that she doesn’t want to repeat to her father. What that might be, I don’t know – but a slight bit of caginess on Ophelia’s part might give her some depth. What if he said, “Ophelia. I need you to go tell your father that I’ve lost my mind. I’d very much like to take you to my bedchamber right now but your recent behavior would lead me to conclude that your dad’s got you under his thumb. I’ve got a lot going on right now, Ophelia. I think I may be seeing things. And it’s raised some questions about the morality of the people in this current administration. I’m not real sure who’s on my side. I don’t even know about you, fair Ophelia. Are you with me? Will you come with me or run and tell your father that I’m mad? I’ll stay here as long as you need to make your decision.”
My lord I do not know But truly I do fear it.
Does she fear it or hope it?
There is some frisson to the notion of driving someone mad with love for you. It supposes that you are so extraordinary, so necessary, so adorable, so like the sun in a galaxy, an atom in a molecule, carbon in a fossil, oxygen in the air – that the absence of you so disturbs the universe that someone MUST go mad without you.
And in this case, what has she done to disrupt the calm of Hamlet’s sea? She just stopped taking his calls, so to speak. She refused to accept his letters and wouldn’t let him come over. It doesn’t even sound like a break-up yet. It just seems like someone without much skill at communication or relationships expressing her displeasure. She could just be punishing him for a dumb thing he said. It’s not really the sort of thing that makes a person crazy. And, still, despite her refusal to let him come over – he manages to get into her closet in this disordered state. Seems to me if a person were going to go crazy with neglected love, he’d likely have to be crazy with love in the first place. And I’m sorry but it’s AWFULLY hard to see that passion in these two. Granted, we only see them together in the midst of a breakup. Despite the nice, good, obedient girl thing that Ophelia’s got going, I think she’s a bit egotistically blind. She doesn’t ASK a crazy looking Hamlet what’s wrong, she just assumes he’s crazy with love for her.
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loos’ed out of hell To speak of horrors – he comes before me.
Hamlet’s shirt is white, then, huh? Or maybe a light pink or cream? Or beige, I guess it could be beige. It sounds like it’s showing through that unbraced doublet of his (maybe a solemn black, that nighted color his Mom wanted him to cast off.) I’m wondering though, just exactly what his stockings are fouled with. Ophelia makes no mention of his shoes – so it’s not clear if he’s waded through a muddy puddle or spattered them with paint. It’s a weird thing to be fouled, I think. Like how did only his stockings get dirty? He’s not likely to have wiped his hands on them. There’s something about the word “fouled” that makes me go straight to excrement – but I don’t know how you’d get shit on your socks. Unless of course you’re doing it on purpose (which given Hamlet’s plan to put an antic disposition on, might be possible) But I’d think if you were going to try and mess yourself up, you’d do more than your stockings. This description of Ophelia’s is very vivid and very specific but why is it so vivid? Why is she speaking such a terribly long sentence in the middle of her distress? What’s up with those fouled stockings?
Oh wait. I just worked out how you could easily get shit on your stockings. If you were going about it, old school – squatting on the ground like in days of yore, if the wind was right (or wrong, as it were) you might end up with some fouled stockings. Yeah, so, that’s one possibility – though it does be-foul the dignity of the Prince of Denmark somewhat.
The Hamlet Project 