Malibu morning picture of the day - Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Dear family, friends, and gentle readers,

Here is the Tuesday picture.

The smog trapped in the inversion is just waiting there to return ...

It's expected to be clear, sunny, and extremely hot again, ranging from 90s to low 100s. It hardly cooled of at all last night, but I gotta tell you, sleeping in a hammock makes all the difference. So, I will be foregoing my 2-mile exercise walk at noon today, thank you...

This last weekend I went to go see a production of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. I always make a point to get out and see his plays that are seldom produced--this being one of the early comedies. The ones you see ALL the time are Midsummer Night, As You Like It, Much Ado. 

Of course, when you attend these more obscure plays, it becomes clear why contemporary producers avoid them; there are jokes and lines that we would consider racist, anti-Semitic, and/or sexist today. So, do you rewrite the Bard and offend the purists or be true to the 17th-century social context and offend patrons and donors? An interesting dilemma.

The manservants talking in brospeak..

One of the lines that got the most gasps was the scene where the two manservants of the two "Gentlemen" were having a buddy-to-buddy guy talk, and one of them was going down the list of his girlfriend's best attributes, and one of the attribute was that she was "silent." The gag among guys that their girlfriends "never shut up" has been around for a long time. Anyone who has supervised a mixed group or classroom will attest to this general garrulous vs. taciturn divide between the sexes, and on which this joke was based. We live now with the current ideal that there are absolutely no differences between the sexes, and so it was very interesting to hear this collective reaction, especially from an older, and probably highly educated audience.

Valentine, Sylvia, Julia, Proteus

The engine of the plot is basically that the one gentleman Proteus decides he likes his best friend's girlfriend (Sylvia) more than his own, and he connives to get rid of him. Sylvia sees Proteus for the jerk that he is from the start and rebuffs him at every turn, and at the climax he decided he will take her the "hard way" by force (they are alone in the woods at night).

It's interesting because the success of his bad deeds, shifts the story away from being a comedy and more toward a drama, so you wind up with this really odd feeling of being twisted as the play wraps up. It's not terribly satisfying. He seems to get back to his old girlfriend Julia, but it's like "Ew! Girl! He burned you bad once. Run!" Winter's Tale has kind of this same type of tone shift.



As you can see, the cast of leads is mulitracial. The actor who played Proteus the cad is the white male actor on the right. Since both female leads are persons of color, this created a visual meta-level of betrayal against his black "friend" Valentine, an oppression-aggression against the black woman Sylvia, and his easy dismissal of his Asian chick-girlfriend Julia. This was a very cunning choice of casting by the director to create a visual parable of our 21st-century anxieties. The ideal of total equality does NOT exist--and not just between men and women--and hence our uneasiness and lack of full resolution at play's end.

This theatre company in San Diego always does an excellent job with their Shakespeare plays. They're especially wonderful because if there's a song in the play, they will either find and perform the song, or write music to the words. There were no songs this time (too bad) but a great and thoughtful entertainment.

Yeah, yeah, at the price of a theatre pass I could have gone to see Guardians of the Galaxy a few times instead, but how often do you get to see this play?

That's it for now.

Love,
Pops