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Some in rags, some in gemstone halters
I am back in town. I have been since Sunday, actually, but I've sort of been hibernating. It's been nice.
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muchabstracted tapped me for one of those favorite-character memes. I haven't done a meme in ages, so knock yourself out below the cut-tag.
Comment and I give you four fandoms. You repost and list your favorite character from each, with explanation.
1. Slings & Arrows, Oliver Welles. Even before he was hit by a pig truck and came back as a bitchy, bewildered ghost in an unfortunate suit, I had gravitated toward him; I am not quite sure why, except that he got many of the best lines and he was complicated. One of the structural conceits of Slings & Arrows is that each season's action draws from and comments on its central play—Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear—but one of the show's virtues is that they're never simple transpositions. So in the first season, Geoffrey looks like Hamlet, with his old director's ghost hanging over his shoulder, but in fact he's Ophelia; he's the one who ran mad and committed suicide. Ellen is the one who put on an antic disposition and played for years in a poisoned court. Where this leaves Oliver is a curious blend of Claudius and Gertrude, the incestuous surrogate father with Yorick's skull and some of the Player King's conscience-catching skill, otherwise known as a practiced hand on the guilt-trip—he is a sympathetic character, but not an innocent one. He's hurt, very badly, people he claimed to love. He wasn't a good director when he died. And though the show turns on his postmortem efforts to restore amends, it's not as though he's a disinterested party; he still messes reflexively with Geoffrey's head, isn't good at straight answers, and he really hates being a ghost. Nonetheless, by the third season I found that I cared more about whether he would achieve his requiem aeternam than whether Geoffrey and Ellen would work their rocky relationship out. Lots of stories have ghosts, but few of them are as three-dimensioned and difficult as the people they haunt. I remain sad that I could not, the season I discovered Slings & Arrows, figure out a way to see Stephen Ouimette at the Stratford Festival.
2. Avatar: The Last Airbender, Uncle Iroh. It's hard for me even to tease out the reasons I love this character so much, because the man was a catalogue of awesome (and voiced by Mako), but I think it's not insignificant that while one of the show's ongoing reveals is the extent to which the mellow, seemingly self-indulgent ex-general is in fact several different kinds of stupendous badass, they invalidate none of his funnier, quirkier aspects. His tea fetish is precisely as real as his one-man-army firebending and his knowledge of the spirit world; the missing pai sho tile is a bit of subterfuge, but the tsungi horn really is for music night. He flirts shamelessly with everyone from bounty hunters to immigration clerks and he's the only person in the world who can redirect lightning. He breaks himself out of prison like apocalypse passing and he accidentally poisons himself attempting to field-collect a rare tea. He gives career advice to a would-be mugger. He may have been someone quite different in the past, when his son was alive and he was the darling of the Fire Nation's armies, the Dragon of the West. Some of his moments of greatest awesome are the quietest.1
Leaves from the vine falling so slow
Like fragile tiny shells drifting in the foam
Little soldier boy, come marching home
Brave soldier boy comes marching home
3. The Iliad . . . Yikes. Come back and ask me about the Odyssey; I am not sure that I have favorite characters from the Iliad. Andromache, perhaps. She knows the costs of war.
4. The Lady's not for Burning, Thomas Mendip. Yes, I know my profile quotes Jennet Jourdemayne, but it is Thomas whose particular mix of reluctant romanticism and real death-wish fascinated me when I was thirteen and does still; he has some of the most beautiful and some of the most bitter passages in the play. Bruised and sardonic, conjuring with English as if it were one of Jennet's alleged spells, he's the wry scene-stealer given center stage and then confounded with an equal leading lady.
Into Pandora's box with all the ills.
But not if that little hell-cat Hope's
Already in possession. I've hoped enough.
I gave the best years of my life to that girl,
But I'm walking out with Damnation now, and she's
A flame who's got finality.
The genius of the character is that he's not less cynical than he believes. He's not converted by love so much as his sense of humor cannot resist the aptness with which a woman under sentence of death for witchcraft and a man who's spent all day trying to talk himself into his grave should find themselves drawn irresistibly together; their romance is a volta on the steps of the gallows and the third partner is Death. I love you, but the world's not changed. Do the last scene right and the audience should barely be able to breathe, caught between tears and smiling. I suppose this is more of a shout-out to the play than to one of its protagonists, but I am nonetheless very fond of him.2
1. By way of contrast, this is as good a place as any to admit that I have also a wholly undeserved fondness for Captain/Commander/Admiral Zhao. Yes, I've read the fancomic.
2. I did not know until a few nights ago that Decca had released a recording of the original cast with John Gielgud and Pamela Brown; I found out from the back cover of a 1959 LP that double-featured Agnes Moorehead in Sorry, Wrong Number and James Mason reading Edgar Allan Poe. Chances are I'll never hear it, but I once discovered Richard Burton's Hamlet in a bin of dollar records at a used book store. I can hold out hope.
The same conversation also informed me that Theatre@First's production of The Lady's Not for Burning will be focused around Appalachian folk music, which almost makes me want to see if I can audition as a folksinger. And the Underground Railway Theatre is doing Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code, which I have been waiting to see on stage since high school. I just need not to go broke before this spring. At least I've already bought my opera subscription.
muchabstracted tapped me for one of those favorite-character memes. I haven't done a meme in ages, so knock yourself out below the cut-tag.Comment and I give you four fandoms. You repost and list your favorite character from each, with explanation.
1. Slings & Arrows, Oliver Welles. Even before he was hit by a pig truck and came back as a bitchy, bewildered ghost in an unfortunate suit, I had gravitated toward him; I am not quite sure why, except that he got many of the best lines and he was complicated. One of the structural conceits of Slings & Arrows is that each season's action draws from and comments on its central play—Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear—but one of the show's virtues is that they're never simple transpositions. So in the first season, Geoffrey looks like Hamlet, with his old director's ghost hanging over his shoulder, but in fact he's Ophelia; he's the one who ran mad and committed suicide. Ellen is the one who put on an antic disposition and played for years in a poisoned court. Where this leaves Oliver is a curious blend of Claudius and Gertrude, the incestuous surrogate father with Yorick's skull and some of the Player King's conscience-catching skill, otherwise known as a practiced hand on the guilt-trip—he is a sympathetic character, but not an innocent one. He's hurt, very badly, people he claimed to love. He wasn't a good director when he died. And though the show turns on his postmortem efforts to restore amends, it's not as though he's a disinterested party; he still messes reflexively with Geoffrey's head, isn't good at straight answers, and he really hates being a ghost. Nonetheless, by the third season I found that I cared more about whether he would achieve his requiem aeternam than whether Geoffrey and Ellen would work their rocky relationship out. Lots of stories have ghosts, but few of them are as three-dimensioned and difficult as the people they haunt. I remain sad that I could not, the season I discovered Slings & Arrows, figure out a way to see Stephen Ouimette at the Stratford Festival.
2. Avatar: The Last Airbender, Uncle Iroh. It's hard for me even to tease out the reasons I love this character so much, because the man was a catalogue of awesome (and voiced by Mako), but I think it's not insignificant that while one of the show's ongoing reveals is the extent to which the mellow, seemingly self-indulgent ex-general is in fact several different kinds of stupendous badass, they invalidate none of his funnier, quirkier aspects. His tea fetish is precisely as real as his one-man-army firebending and his knowledge of the spirit world; the missing pai sho tile is a bit of subterfuge, but the tsungi horn really is for music night. He flirts shamelessly with everyone from bounty hunters to immigration clerks and he's the only person in the world who can redirect lightning. He breaks himself out of prison like apocalypse passing and he accidentally poisons himself attempting to field-collect a rare tea. He gives career advice to a would-be mugger. He may have been someone quite different in the past, when his son was alive and he was the darling of the Fire Nation's armies, the Dragon of the West. Some of his moments of greatest awesome are the quietest.1
Leaves from the vine falling so slow
Like fragile tiny shells drifting in the foam
Little soldier boy, come marching home
Brave soldier boy comes marching home
3. The Iliad . . . Yikes. Come back and ask me about the Odyssey; I am not sure that I have favorite characters from the Iliad. Andromache, perhaps. She knows the costs of war.
4. The Lady's not for Burning, Thomas Mendip. Yes, I know my profile quotes Jennet Jourdemayne, but it is Thomas whose particular mix of reluctant romanticism and real death-wish fascinated me when I was thirteen and does still; he has some of the most beautiful and some of the most bitter passages in the play. Bruised and sardonic, conjuring with English as if it were one of Jennet's alleged spells, he's the wry scene-stealer given center stage and then confounded with an equal leading lady.
Into Pandora's box with all the ills.
But not if that little hell-cat Hope's
Already in possession. I've hoped enough.
I gave the best years of my life to that girl,
But I'm walking out with Damnation now, and she's
A flame who's got finality.
The genius of the character is that he's not less cynical than he believes. He's not converted by love so much as his sense of humor cannot resist the aptness with which a woman under sentence of death for witchcraft and a man who's spent all day trying to talk himself into his grave should find themselves drawn irresistibly together; their romance is a volta on the steps of the gallows and the third partner is Death. I love you, but the world's not changed. Do the last scene right and the audience should barely be able to breathe, caught between tears and smiling. I suppose this is more of a shout-out to the play than to one of its protagonists, but I am nonetheless very fond of him.2
1. By way of contrast, this is as good a place as any to admit that I have also a wholly undeserved fondness for Captain/Commander/Admiral Zhao. Yes, I've read the fancomic.
2. I did not know until a few nights ago that Decca had released a recording of the original cast with John Gielgud and Pamela Brown; I found out from the back cover of a 1959 LP that double-featured Agnes Moorehead in Sorry, Wrong Number and James Mason reading Edgar Allan Poe. Chances are I'll never hear it, but I once discovered Richard Burton's Hamlet in a bin of dollar records at a used book store. I can hold out hope.
The same conversation also informed me that Theatre@First's production of The Lady's Not for Burning will be focused around Appalachian folk music, which almost makes me want to see if I can audition as a folksinger. And the Underground Railway Theatre is doing Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code, which I have been waiting to see on stage since high school. I just need not to go broke before this spring. At least I've already bought my opera subscription.