Twelfth Night, or, What You Will

[ellenkushner]

Plays, plays, plays . . . .

Since moving to NYC, we've established an annual Twelfth Night Dinner & Playreading with my old gang from the last time I lived here some years ago - now dispersed some to academic positions in farflung flyover states, but reliably back here for the holidays . . . This year, we did Ben Jonson's THE ALCHEMIST, and it was a surpisingly great readaloud. We always cast gender-blind, and switch off parts with abandon so that everyone gets to be The Star (or the Bawd or....) for at least one act.

(But Ellen, I hear you say, Twelfth Night was yesterday, Jan. 6th, and you said you went to Delia's POE reading! Ah, well - this year we made it Erev Twelfth Night instead!)

So this is to encourage everyone who's ever wanted to be Beatrice or Benedick, or Cyrano or Jennet Jourdemayne or Lady Teazle or Septimus Hodge or the Prince of Denmark to waylay some friends with promises of punch, and do a playreading party before the month is out.

Which play would you choose, if you could be utterly selfish?

Comments

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

Hurray for Subtle and Face and the gang! Long live The Alchemist. It should see more productions. :)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Hearing the whole thing made me long to direct it.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

If I could be utterly selfish? Cymbeline. It's my favorite Shakespeare, and I can never find anyone who appreciates it like I do.

I tried valiantly to get a playreading together in college, but I could never convince enough people to read Shakespeare with me.

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

I think this sounds like a lovely idea, and I'd love to try to start one up around Reno. Only thing is, the college has a spottily-meeting "College of Blood and Rhetoric," and sure as I know myself the moment I got another group to gather, B&R would wake back up and make scheduling even more of a froth than it usually is.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Our group originally formed to do Shakespeare. I bet if you put out the word (and offered pie), you'd get would-be Shakespeareans coming out of the woodwork.

[crossbow1.livejournal.com]

The Taming of the Shrew. It's been vastly underrated.

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

What's the two person play that was done for screen with Alan Rickman and an actress whose name I cannot dredge out of my brain at the moment. Closetland, I think was the title. That would be one.

Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead would be another, and Endgame a third.

And then, just because it's like nothing else on this list, Noises Off!, because done correctly it makes me laugh until I can't breathe.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I am not sure I have the stamina for a full reading party (although I certainly have friends who do), but that reminds me of a party I went to in the spring, where one of the entertainments was reading selections from Shakespeare Pulp Fiction. I got tapped to do the Honey Bunny and Pumpkin Pie scene, and even remembered the shouting in the last line. We were all vastly amused.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, Richard III. Because Histories are awesome and underappreciated.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

I love Richard III. It's my favorite of the Histories. But I am predisposed to love anything with Richard III in it, so.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's such a brilliant play and the fact that I continue to love it and the Henry VIs despite having to write a dissertation chapter about them, I think, says a lot. ;)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Who would you like to play in that?

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Oh, with gender-blind casting, I'd love to play Richard. If normal casting, Queen Elizabeth.

(Can we tell I've thought about this far too much?) ;)

[margdean56.livejournal.com]

The Importance of Being Earnest is a fun one.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I absolutely second your recommendation! I've got a group of friends working our way through the complete works of Shakespeare on roughly a monthly basis (with insane themed feasts, often based on excruciating puns, to go with them, catered by my insane self). We just did Much Ado About Nothing, and are planning to do Cardenio next... Brilliant fun, especially as everyone keeps getting better and better...

(though the outrrrrrageous French accents, not to mention Welsh, Irish, Scottish and Cockney accents, in Henry V were a bit scary)

I don't think I could pick a favourite play ever to do, though. That's one of the reasons we are doing *all* of Shakespeare, after all. But anything of Stoppard's would be a delight, I think.

Catherine

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

That sounds like complete and utter fun!

We've read Stoppard's ARCADIA more than once - it's a joy to do.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

We plan to finish our Shakespeare cycle with back to back readings of Hamlet and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (same cast, naturally), which provides a nice lead in to Stoppard if we decide to go that route (there are several votes for doing the really bloody Jacobean plays, or for doing all of Shakespeare a second time...).

The real challenge for me as an organiser, of course, is my self-imposed determination to do the history plays in chronological order, maintaining the same people in the same parts throughout... which is not as easy as it sounds when you are also trying to make sure people are not in the same scenes as themselves, not to mention when characters succeed to their fathers' or uncles' titles offstage, requiring you to be alert to character names which now represent different people who were previously called something else, or characters who just change titles a lot... (John of Lancaster, I am looking at you).

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Three people can do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I tried it once, long ago ...

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, my RP group tonight broke off into a huge group discussion regarding Shakespeare's Sequels. I held out for A Midsummer's Night's Dream II: The Morning After, although there was a lot of enthusiasm for a MacBeth sequel. Except that we couldn't agree whether to call it Zombie MacBeth or simply MacDeath.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

lol!

[margdean56.livejournal.com]

I've sometimes toyed with the idea of doing A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Next Generation with the children of all the various couples (possibly including Oberon and Titania). YA fantasy probably, but you never know.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

omg, that's *adorable* - why not write it as a YA - or younger? Everyone's looking for good Middle Grade books these days....

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

Would have to be Lorca's El Publico, since he himself said it was unplayable onstage (he was wrong, but never lived to see it).

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Cool!

[oleander9999.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of either Arcadia or The Lady's Not For Burning! Earnest would be lots of fun, too! I used to be in an informal Shakespeare reading group, made up of work friends, and we did that gender-blind alternating. It was all about the poetry, the sound of the language, and it was revelatory.

That said, it would also be fun to read some of the more prosaic plays of American theatrical history. Something entirely ancient like Dream Girl or I Remember Mama or The Hasty Heart (yes, I read that volume of John Gassner's collected plays from the Forties to shreds when I was little!) It would be a bit like time travel to hear/inhabit plays from Broadway's past.

And, having just watched the DVD (at last released!) of the Boys in the Band, which I used to listen to the original Broadway cast speak so gloriously on the double LP, it would be amazing to get to try to bring those incredible characters and that ensemble to life.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes! Sounds like you need to gather up a group pronto, you have so many great ideas.

[bluestalking.livejournal.com]

The Witlings, by Frances Burney. Because everyone would like it, but nobody knows so. :(

[seanmoon.livejournal.com]

Probably Aphra Behn's The Rover. Maybe Fair Maid of the West, which I'm reading now.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Much love for The Rover....

[yaoi-in-exile.livejournal.com]

We just had to read Twelfth Night *and* the Alchemist in my Shakespeare/Jonson class! >3 (*Which* I managed an A in, muhaha.) What a coincidence. Now you know how I feel about Jonson, but Dol Common does rock pretty hard.

Being a child of a generation raised on cheap laughs, easy-to-predict plots, censorship galore and The Same Old Gags, I'd have to say, anything by Wilde. :3 Sounds like y'all're having fun!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

You may appreciate this description of Jonson & his limitations, by my old college prof:

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/american_imago/v065/65.2.mandelbaum.html

Congrats on that "A"!

[hardnottowander.livejournal.com]

I have always just had a real hankering to Lady Macbeth, as far as Shakespeare goes. It has long been an ambition of mine. I did Taming of the Shrew as part of a rhetoric class my freshman year in prep school, and the teacher had me and a particularly strong-willed boy switching off on the parts of Kate and Petruchio, in effort to prove the sexism in the play.

[krismcd59.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I was going to say Stoppard's Arcadia, but you beat me to it. Bartholomew Fair is too long, and too much of the humor is visual. So I'd say one of Middleton's -- A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is my favorite. I bet Noel Coward's oeuvre would be great to read aloud, too (love Hay Fever), and also Chris Durang's.

[oleander9999.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes to Hay Fever!!! And Present Laughter!

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Oh, you scary! We did "Hay Fever" 2 yrs ago, and it was a blast.

Wish you coulda been here for "Alchemist" - we were thinking of you!