Bullfrog

September 2, 2011

Here is the most blessed thing. I knew something was living in the water garden with the gold and the scarlet waterlilies, for there was movement in the water when I passed. I didn’t know what it was until I crept quietly to the window just now. It’s a large bullfrog. He’s perched on the rim now like a lord on the battlement of his castle. I’m not going to try to imagine how it got in there, or how he negotiated the high, slippery walls of the tank. I’m just going to whisper “welcome,” and accept him as the guardian spirit of the garden. May he eat a thousand times his weight in mosquitos. I can’t even explain why this makes the ruin of a hundred “important” things well.

Cast as Dr. Gibbs in Theater UNCA’s Our Town. It may be a sweet experience. Apropos of other casting choices, I am reminded that alternative casting is generally a bad idea. Race is less of a problem than gender, and still less of a problem as time passes, but I think it’s pretty much always a bad (or desperate) choice to alter the gender of a character. Color is just color, but for as long as we have been a species we have been alert to the differences between male and female, noting them, missing them if absent, uncomfortable when they are mixed or blurred. A female Hamlet is always a female Hamlet and not Hamlet. I watched an otherwise fine version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sunk by a female Guildenstern. Even a great actress in a great role (I’m thinking of Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero at the Globe) is to some degree, unavoidably, a raree show. A role which can be played equally well by a man or by a woman is probably badly written. Community Theater’s thin resources create dozens of female soldiers and conspirators, and there’s probably never a case where they pass unnoticed, just the character rather than a female version of the character. Renaissance playwrights who expected boys to be playing women wrote for boys playing women, and expected their audience to understand that. What is needed to give women experience in great roles is to write more great roles for women, not steal them from the men, which keeps them from being great in any case. I am still haunted by a local all-female Lear, and that may have been twenty years ago. The horror remains fresh.