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[personal profile] ellenkushner
All those within the sound of my voice: RUN AND GET TICKETS TO ANTONY & CLEOPATRA at Theatre for a New Audience!! It's playing on 42nd St through May 2, and there are still TDF tix (if you're a member) up through April 27th. Best of all, if you're under 25, tix are only $10! I haven't seen Shakespeare this good in a long time - and this play is so rarely performed, it's a real treat. The acting is wonderful - they do things with the old lines that really let them breathe and speak afresh - and the director is a goddam genius. Plus he's added some magic: the God (who is also the Soothsayer) walks through the stage from time to time, and stirs the waters of a small pool in the middle with his staff. It's a tragedy, sure, but they're all so over the top that there's nothing for them but death, so I maintained my composure -- until the very end, when ol' Darko threw in an image that utterly dropped me. The Enobarbus was a joy - I loved that actor as LeBret in Kevin Kline's recent Cyrano, too - and Octavius Caesar was young, gorgeous, and properly nerveless and chilling. ([livejournal.com profile] deliasherman will probably blog and say something more intelligent about all this soon.)

And I'd forgotten that some of my favorite lines came from the last act: The bright day is done, and we are for the dark . . . and of course, I wish you joy o' th' worm! . . . And I'd forgotten that in IV, iii the God leaves Antony, leaves Alexandria - just as he does in the beautiful poem by Cavafy (here are a couple more translations - the best, I think, may be in the 2001 translation of all his work by Theoharis C. Theoharis, still too much in copyright to be posted here). The story supposedly came from Plutarch - and most of Shakespeare's details certainly did!

Leonard Cohen turned The God Abandons Anthony into an exquisite song called "Alexandra Leaving" - listen to it if you get the chance.

Date: 2008-04-11 02:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] krismcd59.livejournal.com
I've taught A&C twice this semester, to undergrads and grads -- it's about to supplant Lear as my Favorite Shakespeare Play. Shakespeare really didn't create a more sympathetic and detailed character study than this -- I always want to know about the boy who Shakespeare wrote the part for; in Donne's words, what a miracle [s]he was! Robert Nye wrote a delightful, bawdy, touching novel called "The Late Mr. Shakespeare," narrated by that boy actor, nicknamed Pickleherring, in his later years. Not to be missed.

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