05.04.16

A Most Pitiful Ambition

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:12 am by Administrator

“…let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”
HAMLET, Act 3, Scene 2
One always seems so intellectual when one quotes Shakespeare.  But I have quoted him in front of audiences for about 38 years now and have very little intellect to speak of.

After The Long Silence

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:10 am by Administrator

Just barely survived the Spring Semester at my university; was hit by a fatigue and faintness, shortly after the fourteen weeks of classes began.  I was directing Pinter’s BETRAYAL at another college, having recently finished a fight choreography job at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company.  But suddenly I was tired, self-conscious as a professor and self-doubting as an administrator.  I couldn’t be responsible for myself, let alone others.  Perhaps a major factor was the absence of acting in my life, during those months.  I had to turn down an offer of a wonderful role, in a musical, at one of my favorite theatres; I was barely able to keep my focus on the usual overload of courses which I was teaching.

I am not used to being unhealthy, unhappy, and unenergetic.  The absence of our sons in our daily lives, since they’ve moved from home across the U.S., has been a source of much sadness and grief for me.  The waterworks are easily turned on by merely the thought of the subject.  Let alone when I dare to walk into one of the empty bedrooms in the house.  I’ve been a father for so many decades, nearly as many as my childless days.  As I live this last year of my fifties, it can appear that my best days are behind me — until I remember I have six years of teaching before I can retire, and far more years of acting before I’d ever consider retiring from the stage.