In the name of a god I don't believe in, we claim our bodies without apology
At least today it looks like spring, a harebell sky flooding sunlight across the crunchy, dirty sidewalk snow and the thin tree beside the fire hydrant that is maybe starting to bud. I can't believe March is almost over already. I feel like I'm bleeding time.
I had disquieting dreams, the kind that are still sticking in my emotions even after hours awake. In the first, I arrived at an audition for which I had been preparing for months to find that I was expected to perform a blowjob as part of it; when I objected, the director threw a physically violent tantrum, screaming in my face that I should have learned by now that I wasn't enough of a real woman to rape. In the second, I was sleeping on a bedroll in the basement of a religious relative's house; it was cluttered with broken furniture and half-taped boxes and choking with dust and mildew and something very bad had happened to everyone I loved—people in the house upstairs kept using words like godless and tragedy, though I was skeptical how sad they really were. I don't think it's too hard to guess the real-life aetiologies of either of these dreams. I just resent living in a country that so enthusiastically encourages them.
The weekend was busy. Saturday I got up early for the March for Our Lives and then I Patreon'd a politically relevant noir. I regret neither decision, but it did leave me somewhat flattened for Sunday: my mother and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I took my father to an early birthday matinée of Flat Earth Theatre's Antigone. Specifically Jean Anouilh's 1943 Antigone as rendered into English by Lewis Galantière in 1946, meaning it is even more intentionally concerned with youthful resistance to adult tyranny; the timing of this production directed by Lindsay Eagle is impeccable and so is most of the cast. You enter the black box theater of the Mosesian Center for the Arts through a Thebes built of cracked busts and crumpled newspaper, the wrecked monuments and propaganda of a recently concluded civil war. The lights are green and violet, acid and uneasy on the eye. Soldiers in uniforms that recall different wars of the twentieth century—including some of ours—stand at attention as you pass, not making eye contact with you. The Chorus are three travelers in in modern street clothes so raggedly worn and mended they look archaic; their leader is Deaf and they all speak a mix of English and ASL, following their maps and compasses across the centuries at the will of the gods who know this story must be told in every age. They pour a libation and begin their tale. Regine Vital is breathtaking in the title role, passionately intelligent and afraid and unyielding and terribly young; she doesn't look gamine at all, she's built like Octavia Spencer and her natural hair is grief-wild for most of the play, and she is without doubt the daughter of Oedipus who never stopped asking questions, even the ones with no good answers, even the ones he died of. Rachel Belleman's Ismene is pink and blonde and as full-figured and broad-cheeked as she is, so they look like sisters, one who has always been petted prettily, the other despaired of, dark, barefoot, and headstrong; Cody Sloan's Haemon is skinny, preppy, a little goofy, and the truth of him is the strength with which he wraps his arms around Antigone, never letting go in this world or the next. I wish George Page's Creon had been strong enough to match her. With his spectacles and his modest array of medals, he had the right dry irritation of realpolitik confronted with kids playing revolutionaries, but he was either not quite off book or having a bad afternoon because most of his energy was going into his lines, not the character's smoothly worded, failing defenses in face of Antigone's utter contemptuous rejection of the collusion and compromise of his kind of power, the shattering tragedy that will not, most dreadfully, change him. The guards with their berets and sidearms, their professional indifference and flashes of fear or sympathy? They go on playing cards. The production is running for one more weekend and I commend it to anyone within range. My mother said afterward, "Yesterday's marchers are this year's Antigone."
And after that we had breakfast all day with my parents at the Deluxe Town Diner and then came straight home and fell over on the couch for several hours, with or without cats. Their new scratching post has arrived. Hestia has already summited it. In the evening we watched Charley Varrick (1973) on TCM on the strength of Walter Matthau; here as in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1973) or Hopscotch (1980) he's an improbable but convincing action hero, not invulnerable but stubborn and always something up his sleeve. He could have played Odysseus.
I am off to the optometrist's.
I had disquieting dreams, the kind that are still sticking in my emotions even after hours awake. In the first, I arrived at an audition for which I had been preparing for months to find that I was expected to perform a blowjob as part of it; when I objected, the director threw a physically violent tantrum, screaming in my face that I should have learned by now that I wasn't enough of a real woman to rape. In the second, I was sleeping on a bedroll in the basement of a religious relative's house; it was cluttered with broken furniture and half-taped boxes and choking with dust and mildew and something very bad had happened to everyone I loved—people in the house upstairs kept using words like godless and tragedy, though I was skeptical how sad they really were. I don't think it's too hard to guess the real-life aetiologies of either of these dreams. I just resent living in a country that so enthusiastically encourages them.
The weekend was busy. Saturday I got up early for the March for Our Lives and then I Patreon'd a politically relevant noir. I regret neither decision, but it did leave me somewhat flattened for Sunday: my mother and
spatch and I took my father to an early birthday matinée of Flat Earth Theatre's Antigone. Specifically Jean Anouilh's 1943 Antigone as rendered into English by Lewis Galantière in 1946, meaning it is even more intentionally concerned with youthful resistance to adult tyranny; the timing of this production directed by Lindsay Eagle is impeccable and so is most of the cast. You enter the black box theater of the Mosesian Center for the Arts through a Thebes built of cracked busts and crumpled newspaper, the wrecked monuments and propaganda of a recently concluded civil war. The lights are green and violet, acid and uneasy on the eye. Soldiers in uniforms that recall different wars of the twentieth century—including some of ours—stand at attention as you pass, not making eye contact with you. The Chorus are three travelers in in modern street clothes so raggedly worn and mended they look archaic; their leader is Deaf and they all speak a mix of English and ASL, following their maps and compasses across the centuries at the will of the gods who know this story must be told in every age. They pour a libation and begin their tale. Regine Vital is breathtaking in the title role, passionately intelligent and afraid and unyielding and terribly young; she doesn't look gamine at all, she's built like Octavia Spencer and her natural hair is grief-wild for most of the play, and she is without doubt the daughter of Oedipus who never stopped asking questions, even the ones with no good answers, even the ones he died of. Rachel Belleman's Ismene is pink and blonde and as full-figured and broad-cheeked as she is, so they look like sisters, one who has always been petted prettily, the other despaired of, dark, barefoot, and headstrong; Cody Sloan's Haemon is skinny, preppy, a little goofy, and the truth of him is the strength with which he wraps his arms around Antigone, never letting go in this world or the next. I wish George Page's Creon had been strong enough to match her. With his spectacles and his modest array of medals, he had the right dry irritation of realpolitik confronted with kids playing revolutionaries, but he was either not quite off book or having a bad afternoon because most of his energy was going into his lines, not the character's smoothly worded, failing defenses in face of Antigone's utter contemptuous rejection of the collusion and compromise of his kind of power, the shattering tragedy that will not, most dreadfully, change him. The guards with their berets and sidearms, their professional indifference and flashes of fear or sympathy? They go on playing cards. The production is running for one more weekend and I commend it to anyone within range. My mother said afterward, "Yesterday's marchers are this year's Antigone."And after that we had breakfast all day with my parents at the Deluxe Town Diner and then came straight home and fell over on the couch for several hours, with or without cats. Their new scratching post has arrived. Hestia has already summited it. In the evening we watched Charley Varrick (1973) on TCM on the strength of Walter Matthau; here as in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1973) or Hopscotch (1980) he's an improbable but convincing action hero, not invulnerable but stubborn and always something up his sleeve. He could have played Odysseus.
I am off to the optometrist's.
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I am very sorry about those dreams.
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I have no idea what that is, but I clearly want to see it.
I am very sorry about those dreams.
Thank you. I just feel it's unnecessary to have nightmares when the world is bad enough.
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Augh. I'm so sorry. We need a better theme.
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It made me very happy!
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(My understanding is that, due to a series of unforeseen events, this Creon is in fact the production's third Creon and only had two weeks before the production to start learning his part. He and the directors are doing their best with a bad hand; I hope he gets strong enough to match Antigone in the middle by the last week of the run.)
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Please do! I'd like to read your take.
The chorus, especially, was absolutely stunning.
Yes. And very true to a classical Greek chorus, telling the story with their bodies as well as their voices.
(My understanding is that, due to a series of unforeseen events, this Creon is in fact the production's third Creon and only had two weeks before the production to start learning his part. He and the directors are doing their best with a bad hand; I hope he gets strong enough to match Antigone in the middle by the last week of the run.)
I had actually wondered if he was a late substitution precisely because it was so strange to see an ensemble so tight except for one performer, but I had no information: thanks! Yikes. He will do very well if he can get on top of his lines; he had the right affect, just not the security and therefore no leeway to respond and react as well as get through.
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*hugs*
I don't have a therapeutic stuffed animal I can hand you through the internet, dammit!
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Only very slight! You don't get through times like these without Euripides and Yiddish.
I don't have a therapeutic stuffed animal I can hand you through the internet, dammit!
The thought is appreciated. I will pick up this handy Autolycus instead.
*hugs*
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P.
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You're welcome! I had read it and seen a filmed version years ago, but never seen it staged in person. It is one of my father's favorite plays. He read it when high-school-aged and fell in love, just as hard as Haemon, with Antigone.
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It was. I think I heard about it for the first time last summer, when the company announced their upcoming season. Then I had to make sure my father didn't find out about it before we got there.
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This is a very poetic sentence. I just want to know how you get fire hydrants to bud, and what they produce when they do so.
Where was the production of Antigone? I haven't seen that on a stage in literally decades.
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Watertown. You can still catch it.
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Hey! I know that one! :o)
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The singer-songwriter of the band is non-binary/trans.