Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

11 October 2005

Good Morning, Son

Hello again, it's me.

Hard Times is going, surprisingly, for the amount of time we've been rehearsing. I finished blocking the whole thing today and not a minute to spare. We're halfway through the entirety of the rehearsal period.

Oh, and we have a poster! To wit:

[Grr. I can't load it right now 'cause photobucket is down, but, perhaps tomorrow.] For now, you can go here to see it.

I don't know. Not much going on. I'm still writing every morning, though it was frustrating to do so this morning and continues to be so occasionally. It is good to have a commitment in life that doesn't waver. I have so few.
Oh yeah, and after seeing 4.48 Psychosis on Friday, I have read two more of Ms. Sarah Kane's plays: Blasted and Phaedra's Love. Now, I really liked 4.48 Psychosis and perhaps I will like her other two plays, but I didn't particularly care for either Blasted or Phaedra's Love. Ms. Kane seems obsessed with a sort of unstageable, defiant brutalism. In Blasted, for instance, a man eats a baby after being fucked from behind by a soldier and having the barrel of a sniper rifle shoved up his ass onstage. The soldier also urinates all over the bed of a hotel room in the show as well as consuming two full breakfasts in the course of a few minutes. In Phaedra's Love, Hippolytus gets his genitals cut off by a mob of people and the genitals are then roasted on one of those little mini-barbecues. Then, after Theseus rapes and murders his step-daughter onstage, he slits his own throat and dies. Hippolytus is then gutted and his intestines are similarly removed and barbecued.
You get the idea. I know I am reducing what is supposed to be really interesting theatre to its bare unstageably ridiculous violence, but I can't help it. (It rather reminds me of Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking--a play I also think is mostly crap.) It all just seems so preposterous and I don't even understand what the point of all this brutality is.
Anyway, that's what I'm reading these days.

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