Now is the sun come up from the south

[sovay]

I sang tonight for the first time in public in almost exactly a year. I would have appreciated knowing that I was expected to lead off with the "Anchor Song," since as it was I sat down and took off my coat and was promptly requested to open the song circle accompanied by Benjamin Newman and his guitar, but fortunately I can almost literally do that song in my sleep and later on I had a chance at "Soldier, Soldier," which I had actually brought for the purpose. Other singers including teenybuffalo and ashnistrike did "A Pilgrim's Way," "The Land," "Rimini," "Troopin'," "A Tree Song," "Philadelphia," "The Hyænas," "Hymn of Breaking Strain," and "A Smuggler's Song." A young man I had not heard before did a very good "Danny Deever" and graciously took my request for "Back to the Army Again." I suspect I'm leaving something out, possibly a Leslie Fish setting I didn't know—my Kipling familiarity is almost strictly Peter Bellamy. I closed with "Recessional."

I was not in my best voice. I didn't expect to be: I've been running a throatsore fever since Thursday and talking all weekend in an Arctic-dry hotel. The panel immediately preceding "Songs of Rudyard Kipling" was both in an unmiked room and ran over time; I had no time to warm up and I felt rushed as soon as I came in. ("Canonicity in Theatre" was a genial mess; it did not know whether it was about theater fandom or actual theater, which are two different things, and the moderator did not decide either way. It was fun and it just kind of sprawled.) And I am not sure it mattered. I used to be able to sing—and sing well—short of everything but total loss of voice. Then some things were changed very terribly in my body, against my choice and desire, and everything became much less secure. I've spent half this last year working to change that. It does not feel safe to be hopeful, but I know these were bad circumstances and I do not think I sounded bad. I do not know that my voice will ever feel like my voice again to me, but it did not feel like not mine. It worked. And I enjoyed myself. I think that's important, too.

Just before my panels started, I found the novelization of The Robots of Death (1977) in the dealer's room and although it is a rather skeletal adaptation of a very rich script, it was also three dollars and so now I own it. I read it on the Red Line back from South Station, where I appreciate that I only had to deal with a smell of burning plastic from Porter to Davis. spatch was getting off work at the Somerville Theatre and because it is fifteen degrees Fahrenheit we took a taxi home.

My last two panels tomorrow are readings. After that, sleep.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

"Canonicity in theatre" -- now there's a topic relevant to my interests... :)

[sovay]

"Canonicity in theatre" -- now there's a topic relevant to my interests...

You would have been great on this panel. (You could have moderated the hell out of it, too.)

[desireearmfeldt]

Thanks! :)

Hm, I think if I were to be in a discussion/asked to talk about that topic, I'd have a serious case of "how do I know what I think until I hear what I say?" Which would be fascinating! :)

(I definitely have an ongoing different-ends-of-the-spectrum conversation with a couple of T@F folks about when/whether/how a director ought to cut or alter a script, in which I am generally pretty far towards the "canon/the text is sacred!" end, but...on the other hand, I also believe that performing theatre is inherently a transformative work...)

[sovay]

I think if I were to be in a discussion/asked to talk about that topic, I'd have a serious case of "how do I know what I think until I hear what I say?"

That might be thematically appropriate: as I pointed out on the panel, I frequently don't know what I think of as canonical until I see a production that's doing it wrong.

when/whether/how a director ought to cut or alter a script, in which I am generally pretty far towards the "canon/the text is sacred!" end, but...on the other hand, I also believe that performing theatre is inherently a transformative work...

So how has this balance worked out in productions of yours in the past?

[desireearmfeldt]

As far as I recall, all the shows I've directed have stuck as closely to the text as I could get to come out of the actors' mouths, with a couple of minor word-edits of the type "text is describing physical attributes of character/scenery/etc, so I edited it to match the physical reality of our production."

With one exception that was still a minor word-edit, but for a different reason: Lanford Wilson's Ludlow Fair contains a couple of not-relevant-to-the-plot offhanded uses of derogatory slang that is way less acceptable in mainstream culture (or, at least, the culture of the audience we were performing for) than it was in the 60s when he wrote it. It would have shocked and offended where it was not intended to do so, and there was no good reason to keep the offensive language. So I changed it, but boy, I felt kind of weird doing so. :)

I have sometimes had actors portray characters whose gender presentation didn't match the actors', but have always kept the character's gender presentation, rather than editing the character to match the actor's own presentation. There exist roles for which I'd choose to change the character's gender, though -- I just haven't yet directed a show for which I felt that was the right choice.

I don't tend to be a crazy-artistic-vision/reinterpretation kind of director; I'm pretty literal-minded. But I consider that a kind of transformation that is within the director's prerogative; it's simply not usually to my taste.

I also have never directed Shakespeare, for which I feel a different set of rules apply, not so much for any logical reason as because of the weight of tradition. :)

However, even for Shakespeare, where I feel that both cutting and radically transforming are fair game, I still draw the line at adding text or radically altering the storyline -- like, that period in history where people were performing Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending? That's wrong. Perfectly okay to write a take-off/retelling/homage/mashup of R&J and do whatever you darn well please, but if you're claiming to be directing R&J by William Shakespeare, you need to do it with his plot and with his words (even if not all of them).

Which...really, this is why I end up so firmly in the "use the text the author wrote!" camp. Because, once you say it's okay to edit somewhat, there's really no bright line you can draw about how much editing is okay to do while still claiming it's X play by Y author. I believe it's the author's job to write the play and the director's job to work with the author's text.

(That said, I also subscribe to the belief that it's okay to ignore stage notes, except the ones that are plot critical, and it's generally obvious which those are. Which is exactly me making the kind of judgement about the text that I just claimed directors shouldn't get to make, but, I suppose, on the other hand, stage notes are the author trying to horn in on the director's territory and tell them how to do their job, so maybe that's why I feel differently about them? Also, stage notes in published scripts are notoriously often just the record of what the original Broadway version looked like and not actually intended to be set in stone. Also, also, some playwrights don't seem to understand what a useful or feasible stage note looks like. I just read an essay by Sarah Ruhl about the writer's side of this particular coin...but I still don't agree with her. :) )

[alexxkay]

When I directed a Jacobean (non-Shakespeare) play, I made some fairly significant text changes. One category, replacing now-obscure vocabulary, I still am sure was a good idea (though I would make different specific choices today). The other, replacing a bunch of topical jokes with topical jokes that would read as such to my (SCA) audience, I regularly go back and forth on...

[desireearmfeldt]

One Gilbert & Sullivan show I was in, the director said at the beginning of rehearsal period, "Now, I know some people do modern rewrites of the patter songs, but we're not going to be doing that." At some point, just for fun, one of the cast members wrote a version with replacements for all the topical references etc., and got the baritone to sing it in rehearsal as a surprise joke. After which, the director said, "When I said I didn't approve of rewrites, I meant I didn't approve of *bad* rewrites..." and the new version stayed in the show. :)

[alexxkay]

Kudos to that dorector for being able to change their mind!