Ten Most Visited Posts from 2020

David

I blog about lots of things. And this blog is almost eleven years old. I like to keep track of what people who follow the blog like to read, and how people find the site who have never visited it before.

I have hidden certain posts for the time being, those which aren’t very interesting and yet seem to drive traffic to the site. The one on Chef Boyardee, for example, receives hundred of clocks a year. And the death of Eliot Ness. If that’s why you came here, you might never return.

This is a list of the most popular posts written in the year 2020.

10. On Revision

Final notes before first rehearsal for a new play script. Revision is good!

9. Culver City Public Theatre present “Sherlock Holmes Meets the Bully of Baker Street”

A fascinating, pandemic-era return to a script originally written and performed for live audiences of thousands in schools and libraries, now packaged for safely viewing at a distance.

8. Assessment 

From time to time I have provided a self-assessment, where I am in my work. What has been happening in general. How is my mental and physical health. These often drop when I have been away from the blog for a bit.

Zelda

At this point I was taking a vacation, and reflecting on three hundred days of consecutive writing (I am currently on Day 465) and what had transpired since then, the death of my mother, the pandemic, and even good things, like a show I had written that was about to virtually “open.”

7. Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

Each April I read one full-length play from those posted at New Play Exchange. This was one of my favorites, written by Kimberly Belflower, and has been receiving a great deal of deserved attention. The title of this play was actually the inspiration for my most recent full-length; the working title was “John Bender is the Villain,” but I have since changed that. 

It's now titled "Goatfucker".  

6. Fosse, Verdon and all that jazz. 

The recent passing of producer and choreographer Ann Reinking brought me back to this one, an examination of how to break down the “great man” theory of history.

5. Ben Is Dead (magazine)

A nostalgic look at an artifact about nostalgia. Many thanks to the folks at BID for pushing this one up the charts.

4. “Love’s” in the time of COVID-19

A document of the last live, public performance of a play I saw in a theater, the night of Friday, March 13. This melancholy celebration was only appropriate.  

Virginia

3. Enola Holmes (film)

This one gained traction no doubt because the film had just dropped and folks were interested in that. But it generated a great conversation about adaptation, woman-centered narrative, and modern themes presented in period drama.

2. My mother’s hands.

A brief reflection, written the morning after my mother died.

1. A few bits of wisdom.

A letter from my grandfather to my college-aged mother, posted a few hours before my mother died. It is only just that this was the most visited and shared post of the year. It’s a good letter.

"Love's" in the time of COVID-19

Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, in my corrupted blood.
- LEAR II.iv

In the midst of life we are in death, et cetera.
- The Smiths, Sweet & Tender Hooligan

Woke this morning to discover "King Lear” is trending on Twitter.

Scott Crim & Jane Plishka
"Love's Labour's Lost"
(Rubber City Theatre, 2020)

The theaters closed due to an outbreak very early in Shakespeare’s career, in 1592. That was very early in his career, when he was collaborating with Marlowe and writing his epic poems.

Outbreaks continued over the following years, and when the Globe Theatre was closed in 1603 Shakespeare was the height of his abilities. It is speculated that he wrote King Lear at that time.

The very idea that theaters would cease operation due to an outbreak of contagious infection (let alone, professional sports teams) was to my understanding a thing from the past, not something that could possibly happen in my lifetime.

And yet, here we are. Closer to home, the company that I work for, Great Lakes Theater, took the difficult and unprecedented step of cancelling an entire production. The company was hard at work on a production of my favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, due to open the last weekend in March.

As Ohio Governor DeWine decreed, all public events with an audience of more than one hundred persons must be suspended, GLT and companies across the city joined theaters across the nation in closing.

Orders, thought meet by his Majesty, and his Privy Council, to be executed throughout the counties of this realm, in such towns, villages, and other places, as are, or may be hereafter infected with the plague, for the stay of further increase of the same.

Also, an advice set down by the best learned in physic within this realm, containing sundry good rules and easy medicines, without charge to the meaner sort of people, as well for the preservation of his good subjects from the plague before infection, as for the curing and ordering of them after they shall be infected.

- James I, “Order for Plague” (1603)

Theaters closed due to an outbreak of plague. - March 2020

As with all the rest, Akron’s Rubber City Theatre suspended performances for their production of Love’s Labour’s Lost after opening just last weekend. The show, directed by my dear friend Kelly Elliott (she who directed last summer’s Henry V for CSF) had already received an excellent notice from Cleveland Scene, which said it was “engaging” and “exuberant.”

As a farewell they decided in short order to stage one last, closed performance last night with an invitation-only audience of company members and a few friends who have a reputation for laughing loudly and in all the right places. My wife and I were glad to be part of that number.



Following the performance we learned over one hundred people were watching it live. As of this morning, the event shared by local media outlets, views have gone into the thousands. Even Terry Teachout, critic for the Wall Street Journal tuned in.

Sitting in the audience, I was reminded of Love’s Labour’s Lost as produced by Great Lakes Theater in early 2016. It was also an engaging and exuberant performance. Shakespeare's script is quite the farce; the first half can be quite dense and you have to keep up with a remarkably self-indulgent amount of word play on the playwright’s part, but when you stick with it the pay-off in the second half is so pleasurable.

The "Nine Worthies" scene in the Rubber City production rose to a joyfully riotous argument, the Great Lakes production four years ago to something like a wildly playful bacchanal. But as is the case in all productions, the fun, the games, the play within the play, are suddenly broken by the announcement that the King of France, father to the female romantic lead Katherine, has died.

A very real and heartbreaking moment in the midst of a very silly play. I found the sentiment quite timely.

The theaters have closed, as they have many times before. They will reopen, too.

Rubber City Theatre presents "Love's Labour's Lost" (2020)
Photo: Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

UPDATE: The postponed Great Lakes Theater production of "Much Ado About Nothing" opened March 25, 2022.

Sources:
Order for Plague, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Boys Will Be Boys, But They Learn a Lesson Too in Rubber City Theatre's Joyful 'Love's Labour's Lost' by Elaine Cicora, Cleveland Scene (3/10/2020)

UPDATE: What We Miss When Broadway Goes Dark by Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal (3/18/2020)

Summer of Shakespeare

Robert Hawkes (Lear) and Jeffery Allen (The Fool)
"King Lear" at Beck Center for the Arts
Photo by Andy Dudik

The folks I work with in the school residency program at Great Lakes Theater are some of my very favorite people in the world, and it is a point of pride to mention that former actor-teachers have gone on to not only become successful, professional theater actors, directors, and technicians, but also occupy positions of responsibility at virtually every professional theater company in Cleveland.

There is a lot of Shakespeare going on around Northeast Ohio this summer, and it is delightful to note how many actor-teachers, past and present are company members.

Beck Center for the Arts opened King Lear last night, featuring former actor-teachers Jeffery Allen (The Fool), Shaun Patrick O’Neill (Oswald), myself (Kent) and recent hire Tyler Collins (King of France).

Opening June 21, the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival presents an all-female production of Henry V, directed by former actor-teacher Kelly Elliott, and featuring present actor-teachers Kimberly Seabright Martin (Montjoy, others) and Adrionna Powell Lawrence (Dauphin, others).

Kim and Adri are also performing as Rosalind and Celia (respectively) in As You Like It at French Creek Theatre in Sheffield Village, which opens August 16, directed by former actor-teacher Brian McNally.

Later in the Cleve Shakes season, former actor-teacher Khaki Hermann plays Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.

Hamlet opens at the Ohio Shakespeare Festival, opening June 28 featuring former actor-teachers Trevor Buda (Horatio) and DeLee Cooper (Ophelia swing).

Chennelle Bryant-Harris and Kelsey Tomlinson
"Tame" at Rubber City Theatre

There is even a current actor-teacher, Adam Graber, who is traveling to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival to assume the role of Curtis in the production of The Taming of the Shrew which was first produced at sister company Great Lakes Theater in March.

And speaking of Shrew, that scrappy little Akron theater, Rubber City, received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to commission a new work inspired by Shakespeare’s famously misogynistic comedy, interpreted “through the lives of LGBTQ+ characters.”

This new work, Tame, features former actor-teacher and present GLT Educational Assistant Chennelle Bryant-Harris in the Petruchio inspired-character, here named Porter.

Rubber City Theatre presents Tame by Josy Jones and directed by Dane CT Leasure, opening this Thursday, June 7 at 243 Furnace Street in Akron.

Happy PRIDE!