February 8, 2009

Watched the moon rise over the HART parking lot, tremendous, covering, it seemed, half the sky.

J is beginning to interpret his lines with real power. In such a case, one is happy to give him what he needs.
What an odd play Titus is. Shakespeare is already at his full rhetorical powers, though that fact that ideas possessing an equality of brilliance in the mind might not so on the actual stage seems not yet to have struck him. Lavinia carrying the hand in her mouth is sublime as an idea, but it is horrific and offensive (yet devoid of pathos) embodied on stage. Shooting the arrows at the gods is a superb conception, but clownish and awkward in any possible staging. Nor, after the murder of Mutius, is it possible to have sympathy for the main character. Titus seems to have no emotion but the most abstract of them all, a sense of honor. The only people whom one can possibly not hate are Marcus, because he is such a naive and perpetually astonished old fool, and Aaron, because his wickedness is absurd and therefore delicious. Perhaps the play’s pleasure is meant to be varying levels of satisfaction at seeing characters whom one hates with varying levels of vehemence get their comeuppance one by one. Almost every line says “this is the greatest poet who ever wrote.” Almost every line says, “this boy has no idea what he’s doing.” But, he learned.

I was in Waynesville to audition for Proof and, as it turned out, Hamlet. I would not have gone had Adam not asked me to. The possibility of being on stage with him allowed me to accept the idea of another month or so of driving west with the sun in my eyes, driving home at night amid the semi’s and construction barriers, thinking the sad thoughts one things alone on the highway at night.

There was a smell on the road as if someone had hit a skunk with a truck load of horseradish.