Kindle Paperwhite

Let us assume that when I am not updating my Centennial blog on a regular basis, it means that instead of musing about writing, I am I the process of actually writing.

This is not actually true most days of the year, but let us assume it is so.

However, most recently, certainly this year, it has been so. My New Year’s Resolution has endured, I scribble for at least a half-hour each morning. That is far from the three hours of scribbling I would be doing if my sole profession were writing, but it is a half-hour daily more than what I used to attempt.

And when I say scribbling, I mean writing exercises, short meandering stories and complete nonsense. You should try it, and by that I mean every single day. That is in addition to the writing.

In calendar year 2014 I have now written the first drafts of three new works. Yes, I have. And it’s only August. A couple days ago I filled holes in The Great Globe Itself and have scheduled a reading for Wednesday. It is a mess, but truly my own, no one would mistake for anyone else’s. Leaps in time, historic references and lots of them, music, dance and a little magic. It’s what I do.

Unfortunately (perhaps) the homestretch occurred during vacation. You can’t choose when these things are going to come together. I needed to relax, some perspective, and enough time to read, write, and not write, without feeling too much pressure. But with the deadline fast approaching, a little pressure. There has to be a little pressure.

The unfortunately is because I spent a great deal of time in front of this screen, tapping away and re-reading when I should have been kayaking, swimming, fishing, playing D&D or just plain wandering around with my wife and children. These things did happen, just not in the quantities I would have preferred.

Waah. As I have to remind my son, there are children in Afghanistan who don’t even have screens.

The great good news was that I received as a belated birthday gift a Kindle Paperwhite from my brother and his family. My son objected. “But … you can’t play games on that!” That is correct, my son. Like my iPod nano, which still works and was a gift to me eight years ago, it does one thing, and does it very well.

Perhaps it is the novelty of the thing (a light, elegant thing, a pleasure to hold, so beautiful to look at) but I downloaded two books and read each of them in roughly two days each. Because screens. Even elegant, beautiful screens. But I can’t Minecraft on it, so I just keep reading. Because mellow, handheld, glowing screen. I love screeny screen screen.

Meanwhile, the reading fed the writing, sitting, staring at the sea, discovering how point A meets point G. The book reports come later, for now I have a 46-page script … with an extensive bibliography. Wish it luck.

Boy Camp 2014

Boy Camp, a mescla of high and low. The girls are camping in the Pennsylvania wilderness, getting their feminist on, while we sleep late and watch a lot of television. We look like we smell of beer, but there is no beer.

Last night, culture. It was opening night for the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo & Juliet, set this night in the Coventry Peace Park. Highlight of the evening were the rising of a half-dozen police vehicles which sped east along Euclid Heights Blvd. just as the deadly fight began Tybalt, Mercutio and Romeo.

“Mercutio, one of the ballsiest males in Shakespeare, is played for some elusive purpose, by a woman.”
- Jim Damico, The Free Times (1994)

 As intense as that was, it was hard to keep a straight face when, just as the Prince decreed, “Bear hence this body,” an ambulance flew down the street behind him.

(Side note: Calimoxo is an excellent drink to put into a travel coffee mug.)

After we went home and watched Red vs. Blue and MST3K: Gamera.

"Kenny!!!"

Saturday morning I made chicken & waffles, and then to School of Rock, where the boy kept time rather successfully, in spite of an injury to his right hand at a ball game last Tuesday. I wrote.

We took a visit to the garden center, and then he introduced me to Critical Hit Games across the street. Some day I am just going to drop him off there and let the geeks teach him how to play Dungeons & Dragons while the wife and I have drinks at Melt.

Just kidding. We don't like to go to Melt.

Spreading hardwood mulch was thwarted by a delightful summer downpour, but that’s cool, that’s why we have Minecraft videos.

"This is crap."

 Saturday evening things got a little crazy, as we made our annual pilgrimage to go bowlin’ in Solon. The boy was joined by two of his high octane companions, fortunately I had Dr. D. as company and got to engage in the first big-people conversation in 24 hours.

The good doctor inquired about my writing, after I had claimed to have drafted one page that morning. He asked, “When that happens, do you think, Euerka! I have written a page! Or is it more like, Ugh. Only one page.” What a great question!

In that morning’s case the latter, but this morning, as the boy played video games with a friend who had slept over, I wrote another page and thought, Eureka!

Photo: Brent Durken

Our final journey before the women returned was to attend Emily & Benjamin's wedding in St. Theodosius in Tremont. Such an iconic building, but I had never been inside. It's beautiful! The boy was very patient, though I regretted my ignorance that Orthodox services are spent largely standing. If I had known this, I would have chosen an aisle seat so the boy could see the proceedings, but he was very mature and patient.

As most in attendance were not Orthodox, the priest was explaining the service as we went. The boy, who remained attentive, whispered to me, "It's like he's giving us a tour of his process."  That's my son.

Shakespeare Garden

Last year, as part of the Cleveland One World Festival, Cleveland Shakespeare Festival presented an abridged version of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the British Garden, which is one of the 35 (and growing) plots which make up the Cleveland Cultural Gardens.

I missed the production, but I did see the photos, and was shocked, utterly shocked, the discover that there exists in Cleveland a bust of Shakespeare. How did I not know this???

You may well ask how I never knew there was even a British Garden, not to mention a Polish, Hebrew or Slovenian Garden. I had never seen these before. That explanation is simple, and also one I am not too proud of.

Many of us, especially those from the West Side, are familiar with the cultural gardens only in so much as we use MLK Jr. Blvd. as safe passage to get from I-90 to the orchestra or art museum and back. We see the gardens from our car windows, and they do look very nice.

When I first trained for a marathon in 2006, I chose to run down MLK to the lake, and this was pretty much the first time I had ever taken in the gardens on foot. One weekend morning eight years ago I chose the Italian garden as my turnaround, but instead of doubling back, took a little walk up the steps and was astonished at what I saw. This garden didn't exist merely in this valley, but extended up the hill and featured statues and fountains and beautiful foliage. My exploration, for the time being, stopped there, unfortunately.

In the past year or so, however, construction on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights and on Chester in Cleveland has been ridiculous, and like others I have been choosing to take Superior downtown (more on that soon.) Taking Superior to MLK, rather than say through University Circle, is a much faster way to get to Ohio City and Gordon Square, and so I discovered old East Boulevard, and all those gardens which do not include a face on MLK Blvd.

Photo dated 1926
Note original bust by Joseph Motto and Stephen Rebeck

The Shakespeare Garden (now the British Garden) was in fact the first of Cleveland's cultural gardens. Dedicated on April 14, 1916 as part of a global celebration of the 300th anniversary of the Bard's demise, there is in fact a gate announcing the British Garden on MLK Blvd., which leads up the hill to East Blvd. and then across the street.
From the Cleveland Cultural Gardens website:

At the entrance are gateposts of English design and the garden boundaries are defined with hedges.

The central flagstone walk is lined with multi-hued border plantings, and, together with other her-bordered paths, converging on a bust of Shakespeare flanked by trees.

A mulberry tree grows here from cutting sent by the late Sir Sidney Lee, famed Shakespearean critic, from the mulberry, Shakespeare himself planted at New Place, in Stratford.

The garden is adorned with oaks planted by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, and by Phyllis Neilson Terry, niece of Ellen Terry; a circular bed of roses (Shakespeare's favorite flower) sent by the Mayor of Verona, from the traditional tomb of Juliet; Birnam Wood sycamore maples transplanted from Scotland, and several other representative English forest trees.

Today, the Cleveland Cultural Gardens are flourishing. Several of the the older gardens (Italian, 1930 or Greek, 1940, to name two my wife and I strolled through last weekend) feature new, recently installed statuary and well-tended gardens and lawns. The upper level of the Italian Garden, in particular, presents a stunning fountain, the kind which should on a gorgeous day in any other city be surrounded by people reading, talking, eating, just enjoying themselves.

Recent additions, like the Croatian Garden (2011) proudly share this international stage, with a beautiful new waterfall feature and emotionally affecting statue of an "Immigrant Mother" by Joseph Turkaly.

Unfortunately, the British Garden feels entirely abandoned and is in sorry shape. The plantings are all overgrown, flagstones are missing from the weed-encumbered walk, and the pillars marking the entrance are either in partial collapse, or dangerously close to being so.

In less than two years, the Cleveland Cultural Garden will be celebrating its centennial, and the world will note the 400th anniversary of the death of the man whose signature marks the greatest plays in the English language. Hopefully by then his garden will be ready for the party.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (book)

WHAT IF ... The Original Marvel Bullpen Had Been A Socialist Collective ..?

The origins of the most indelible characters in DC Comics were created by artists and writers whose ideas were kept by the corporation, the enrich those who owned the company. These artists were paid for the work - the artwork, the pages - they produced. But the ideas remained the possession of the corporation, in perpetuity.

As long as you were an employee, you were paid a wage. Once you left, your characters - which in other industries we may compare to inventions, patented or copyrighted - remained behind. No residuals, no royalties, even the artwork itself was owned by the corporation for which it had been created. (See: Superman.)

So it was also with Marvel Comics. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber - they did not own The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Howard the Duck.

Only Stan Lee benefited from his initial contributions to the early works of Marvel, because he never left. As the years went by, his self-made legend grew and he was able to capitalize on this and make a fortune. I will not debate whether he was anything more than an editor (to his dying day Kirby insisted Lee never wrote a word) but he certainly made himself the Ronald McDonald of Marvel Comics.

By the 1980s, management at DC and Marvel had learned that by providing incentives (let us not call them royalties) for popular work, they could encourage artists to create comics that would have the broadest appeal. In the case of Marvel, this also translated into cross-title storylines which increased their bottom line exponentially.

That's Capitalism.

For a brief period of time, the lasting effects of the so-called Silver Age of 1970s comics (for which people of my generation were so emotionally connected to) coincided with the glut of multiples titles for one character or team and "event" comics, so that everyone on board at that time lived in security and in a couple of cases, great wealth.

That lasted one or two years. And by that time (some would argue long before) the comics were awful to read and look at, and the emperor was revealed to have no clothes.

Hey, wait a minute! These are comics!

We've been reading comics!

Imagine an alternate Marvel Universe, where the original Marvel Bullpen (if there ever was such a thing) was a profit-sharing collective, where success for one was success for all. Where funding went to training the best artists and writers and editors. Where there was a strong, paid internship program, vacations and great health care for emphysemic illustrators?

Well. We know Steve Ditko would have no part of it. And no doubt a model like that would never produce an artist-entrepreneur like Todd McFarlane, or any of the Marvel-inspired blockbusters of the last ten years. They'd just continue producing low-grade pulp superhero comics strictly for the people who like to read them.

But unlike the What If titles of the late 1970s and early 80s - which always ended in disaster, as if to prove the correctness of the canonical storyline - perhaps this alternate universe would have had a happier ending, at least for the artists instead of the publishers.

'Nuff said.

Source: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

View from the Old Globe Theatre

Standing at the site of the Midway, observing the Coast Guard station parking lot where the Old Globe Theatre once stood, adjacent to a still, man-made inlet on North Coast Harbor, it is not difficult to imagine why many recalled these Shakespeare performances carrying with them the stench of dead fish.

The Old Globe was at the entrance to The Midway, (which Press columnist Winsor French described, “as honky-tonk as Coney island”) across a watery inlet from several kiddie rides, and across the street from numerous attractions.

From the front door of the Old Globe, you might see:

• Pantheon De La Guerre, featuring relics from European wars both recent and not.
• The World a Million Year’s Ago, a collection of animated dinosaurs.
• Cliff Wilson's Snake Show, including Elmer, the twenty-eight foot, Borneo reticulated python.
• Mammy’s Cabin, providing “real Southern cooking” - and real Southern charm, as this and other establishments were called out by the Call & Post for refusing to serve blacks.
• Midget Circus, which warrants no further description.
• 13 Spook Street, a haunted castle.
• Strange As It Seems, like a freak show, but you, know, educational.

You also might see ... YOURSELF, on an electronic "television" screen! What will they think up next?

Sources:
Meet Me On Lake Erie, Dearie! by John Vacha (Kent State University Press)
CardCow.com

Finding the Old Globe Theatre

Cleveland Press, 1936

Regardless of the time I have spent read or researching about the Old Globe Theatre at the 1936 Great Lakes Exposition, I have never been able to successfully picture where it stood in space, nor what surrounded it. So I contacted historian John Vacha and he agreed to meet me for an informal walking tour.

John arrived more prepared for this journey than I was (though I did bring my copy of Meet Me On Lake Erie, Dearie for him to sign) as he provided a map he found in the Cleveland Press which was much easier to read and follow than others I have seen. We parked on Lakeshore and walked west towards East Ninth.

It has been a beautiful day for walking.

The Olde Globe Theatre

The Main Entrance, the most photogenic entrance, featuring seven grand pylons, was actually a couple blocks south, on the other side of the Public Hall, but that was not our destination. The Expo was divided by East Ninth, with the lion's share of exhibits north of the railroad tracks.

Where the Rock Halls stands was the Firestone exhibit, where now stands the Great Lakes Science Center was the Hall of Progress and Automotive Building. The football stadium stand where once stood, uh, the old football stadium. That was also not my site of interest.

Just north of North Marginal Drive, formerly called "Shore Drive" they had built a tunnel beneath East Ninth for folks to pass unimpeded from the western exhibits to the Midway to the east, and also an entrance north of that right off East Ninth. It is that entrance which would have been the easiest access to the Old Globe Theatre.

clevelandmap.com

With the exception of the creation of North Coast Harbor (see above) the land footprint is nearly the same as that of 78 years ago. Where now rests the World War II submarine, the USS Cod, there had been a World War One sub during the exposition. The Coast Guard had a station right there in 1936 - only several hundred yards to the north, where the Army Corps of Engineers now stands.

By mine and John's best estimate, the Old Globe Theatre, which presented forty-minute abridgements of several of Shakespeare's greatest plays (and also Henry VIII), the very play house where Sam Wanamaker, at the tender age of eighteen, first worked as a professional actor, performing the greatest roles of the canon (Second Citizen, Servant, Guard, Philostrate), inspiring him to one day recreate Shakespeare's Globe on old Bankside, was in fact located where now sits the Coast Guard station parking lot.

Just there, behind the young woman sitting at the water's edge (see her?) reading a book.

"What's she reading?" I asked.

I answered my own question at the same time John did: "Shakespeare."

To be continued.

Shakespeare's Audience (book)

A couple months ago I met with a professor of mine, it was the first time in over twenty years we had been in each other’s company. He looks the same, though he was much younger than I am now when he was my director, theater history professor, and curriculum advisor. His hair was thin then, and it is the same now, whereas mine is just gone.

Dr. William Faricy Condee is today Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. During my time as an undergraduate I spent sophomore year in his theater history class (for which I read absolutely nothing) and I took a course of his on theater architecture. I also like to brag that I am the only person at O.U. Ever to be directed by the good Doctor twice, as a sophomore in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and as a fifth-year in the world premiere of The Hanged Angels by W.R. Smiddie.

Condee's expertise is in theater space. He has written two books, Coal and Culture: The Opera House in Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2005) and Theatrical Space: A Guide for Directors and Designers (Scarecrow Press, 1995) in addition to numerous articles on the subject.

The architecture course I took was a summer course, so I and a classmate were the only actors in attendance, with a dozen or so “others” who were complete to fulfill liberals arts credits. Condee impressed we two to make a few points abut the relative importance of space. He chose a scene from a translation of the original Medea, and the "Gentlemen Caller" scene from The Glass Menagerie, and asked us to perform each in a small, windowless office in the basement of the T-Com Building, and by the light of a candle. The Tennessee Williams piece played quite well, but we were never loud enough the suit the Doctor for Euripides.

Then we took the class to Peden Stadium and we stood at the fifty-yard line and performed both scenes again.

One way to look at is is, you have to consider the space when choosing which production to mount. But the more basic observation, though not obvious to me at first, is that these plays were written for their intended spaces. Nobody wrote intimate plays in Ancient Greece (that we know of) because they were producing work for the “theatron”.

Currently I am tossing ideas around my head for a new play about The Globe playhouse, the theater for which Shakespeare wrote his plays. This is why I finally, at long last, got in touch with my mentor. That’s a lesson, kids. Stay in touch with your mentors.

On the date in question, last April, Condee had an hour to spare and I had a lot of really, uh, super questions prepared … like, what effect did the space have on Shakespeare’s work?

He said, “I have no idea.”

That was like, the best question I had.

However, the hour passed quickly, as I told stories from the past twenty years, to kind of justify my existence, and he gave me a bibliography. He strongly recommended Architecture, Actor and Audience (1993) by Ian Mackintosh, and also Shakespeare’s Audience (1941) by Alfred Harbage, among others. It was this second that I went through rather swiftly, for though it is an academic investigation into the demographics of the audience for the Globe theater, it is charmingly written, easy for the layman, full of facts but also colorful details.

I did begin the Mackintosh book, and now intend to finish it. The view from the Globe “tiring house” and stage is very different from that of its audience.

“Their builders succeeded in getting as many people as close as possible to the actor without jeopardizing the actor’s primary task of communicating with every spectator, however distant.” - Mackintosh, p. 10

Such was the feeling I had a couple weeks back, standing on the stage of the Hanna Theatre, upon the thrust stage. I was leading a small tour through the all the Playhouse Square theaters, and as is my wont, began in the massive 3,200-seat State Theatre and concluded in the intimate 550-seat Hanna.

Looking out, from the edge of the platform thrust (the only such professional stage in Cleveland) I had the sensation that the balcony was leaning towards me, a feeling at once emboldening and vertiginous.

LOWIN
Planted upon this scaffold,
A swaying sea of ragged heads at my feet,
I feel twenty hands high.
The eyes of merchants without number,
Men of means within the galleries,
So close that I could slap the wig off of a lord.
Slap it right off. Not only with my words --

FLETCHER
My words.

LOWIN
-- But with my mitts. That close.

David Hansen © 2014

Early estimates (dating from early last century) of the size of that crowd were based on modern fire codes or a basis of contemporary seating, one which includes seats. Those scholars suggested the Globe held around 500 as well. Since that time, we take into account the fact that those in the pit stood, fire codes did not exist, and that even the galleries were packed. A contemporary account suggest a number as high as 3,000 but was probably two-thirds or half that. That is still an awful lot of people in an intimate space.

One of the things I truly enjoyed about Harbage’s book is that it dispels certain points of conventional wisdom, and in doing so honors the Elizabethan people, and the reputation of Shakespeare himself.

When speaking of Shakespeare’s audience, the opinions of members of the clergy are often quoted, those who despair at the den of sin and vice represented by the theater. In this case, they are speaking specifically of the building itself, and not the content of the work.

Harbage’s careful examination of contemporary accounts provides no indication that more crimes took place in a public theater than anywhere else. If anything, it indicates the opposite. He could also find no indication that those who publicly warned against the attendance at the theater actually ever went there themselves.

Of the private theaters, they said nothing. When the working class were priced out of attendance, and only those who could afford could attend, apparently everything was copacetic within the hall. But Shakespeare did not write for those houses, he wrote for the Globe. And Shakespeare was and is the more popular playwright.

As Harbage puts it, “The difference between Shakespeare and (John) Fletcher is, in some inverse fashion, the difference between a penny and sixpence.”

The documentable fact is that Shakespeare was popular in his own time, and very popular. The conclusion based on the assumption that those in the higher (more expensive) galleries were erudite and intelligent and those in the pit a mob of cat-calling thugs is that that Shakespeare wrote part of his play for one class, and part for another.

But that would make as little sense then as it would today. The so-called “groundlings” were intelligent, they were trained professionals, craftsmen and apprentices, and most likely regular theatergoers. Listening to plays was something they (unlike you) did very often. They were self-trained in hearing, in listening and appreciating.

William Shakespeare was successful because he wrote everything he wrote for everyone.

To be continued.

"Shakespeare's Audience" by Alfred Harbage
Columbia University Press, 1941

"Architecture, Actor and Audience" by Ian Mackintosh
Routledge, 1993