August 1, 2008

Glen says that AYLI is his least favorite Shakespeare, and Touchstone is his least favorite character. There is so much to like in AYLI, so many radiant moments, that it is difficult to understand why the whole piece isn’t better than it is, why the needlessly–often unintelligibly-- intricate wit, why the more than ordinarily absurd plot turns, why the pages of yak which, for a contemporary audience, anyway, are almost impossible to present without longueurs. Touchstone is submerged in counter-productive verbal mannerisms. Did Shakespeare’s contemporaries actually "get" Touchstone? The part is difficult to play because he is not a "fool" nor a jester, nor fully the courtier he claims to be. He is, I think, a country boy who made good at court through the application of wit. The court being rather dim, nobody called him on it when the wit flagged or zoomed off into the mist. He is the oxymoron of the analytical lover. Does he love Audrey? Certainly not– but he means to. He thinks it right that he does. He is going to work at his relationship almost in the modern sense, having come to it not smitten but determined. He is iridescent, and iridescent is impossible to play without an influx of the arbitrary, or the wilful. But he is also a kind of scientist, weighing the matter of love to see if the true can be sifted from the feigned. He and Duke Senior are the only fully sane people in the play, and they never meet until the end, where they do acknowledge a mutual affinity. I have settled on the image of the high-spirited, autodidact, somewhat over-observant, over-ingenious teenager as a workable compromise between what is in the lines and the sort of manic velocity our director craves. Mephistophilis, whom I play in the next opus, is a piece of cake beside him. I think maybe Touchstone is a bit of Shakespeare’s acknowledgment of how he himself appeared to his contemporaries– a racing mind, an antic affect, sometimes irritating, sometimes unintelligible, sometimes thunderous profound.

Nick is a hugely attractive young man, but not quite under control as an actor. As, at this point, he need not be. "Corin" notes that acting with him "is like being on the stage with Tigger."

When I dipped minnows out of the Beaver Lake pond for my second water garden, I dipped a dragonfly nymph along with them. This morning on the rim of the barrel is the nymph, head down in the sunshine, gaining strength to break out and take to the air. It is a lovely thing. I saw a dobson fly at the café, fumbling around for a while on the patio before righting itself and taking flight.