Little Sense

Tomorrow we are having a movie day in my class. I am showing the students The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch, the documentary about the theatre performer and playwright. I'm screening it because I am having them read Nicky Silver's Pterodactyls for Friday and I want to give them a notion of style. This way they can see some campy performance traditions and also learn about an important artist I don't have time to discuss properly in my class.

Today I rented the Max Reinhardt / William Dieterle film of A Midsummer Night's Dream from 1935 with Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney and James Cagney. But I found it, quite frankly, unwatchable. I shut it off after about an hour. I just couldn't handle it. It's a terrible, terrible film. It's drawn-out and overly long and there's lots of maniacal laughing that makes no sense. Cagney is funny as Bottom, but there is nothing else to recommend the movie and I couldn't bear it for more than an hour. You know how I feel about bad Shakespeare.

Speaking of bad Shakespeare. I had my first truly bad rehearsal of my own Midsummer production tonight. Of course both my roommates had to be in attendance. I am almost positive I can fix all of this evening's problems in the six rehearsals I have left before we open, but it was more than a tad embarrassing for them to come see a show this unpolished. Of course I start to wonder if I know what I'm doing at all, and worry if I really have enough ability to take a directing class with the professor here in the fall... and all other sort of ego-driven questions run through my brain. But a good shower and a Stella Artois (or two?) have cured me of that for now. And I will just worry about fixing the show.

Bergmanesque

Everyone always said that The Seventh Seal, Bergman's 1957 meditation on death (and the film that made him a star) was a film about a man playing chess with Death. Um, okay, so Max Von Sydow does play chess with Death, but the film isn't about a dance with death or anything like that. Von Sydow isn't even the star of the film.

Instead, The Seventh Seal is a very cool and intriguing meditation on how each of us deals with death, how we run from it, the different ways we try to stave it off. It's also filled with all kinds of atheist meditations about the alleged afterlife and asks moral questions about saving lives and causing deaths and the ludicrousness of religious fervor in the face of death. It's an intriguing, beautifully shot film with a great ending and some lovely poetic moments. Gunnar Björnstrand, the film's star (he plays Von Sydow's squire) is wonderful: skeptical, practical and filled with hate, both for his master and most of the people around him, and yet truly compassionate and generous. It's a wonderful role and the actor is great.

Truth be told, the bits with Death and the chessboard were all kind of silly, almost laughable. I couldn't help chuckling at the first scene with Death on the beach. All I could think of was Woody Allen's Love and Death. Allen loves Bergman and his spoof of The Seventh Seal is an ingenious one. At any rate, I quite liked the film, mostly because it wasn't at all what I was expecting.

P.S. I'm currently reading some Charles Busch plays (The Lady in Question, Psycho Beach Party, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom). This shit is hilarious.