August 23, 2014

Rose late, the world already a kind of silver.

DJ and my student Sam and I attended NC Stage’s Pericles last night. I’d seen it decades ago in Cambridge, and remembered it being strange and magical. That it is strange and magical continues to be the case. The production was energetic and, as ever, skillfully acted. The same director ruined certain others of essays into Shakespeare by importing, in an arbitrary way, his own whimsey. In this work that was exactly the right tactic. Fear that you might remain unengaged disappeared in minutes. Yet the show never quite decided what kind of magical world it was presenting, and austere beauty alternated with contemporary references and– I used the world before–whimsy, at times an incongruous and self-referencing silliness-- a mish-mash that comes from not quite trusting either the text or your own original vision. But at no point did I find this affecting my enjoyment, only my judgment. I could hear and understand every word; I appreciated that. For some reason I remember the stage as colorless, as though the show meant to be in black and white, but I don’t trust my memory fully on this. Sam was mesmerized and happy, and that was the salvation of everything, indeed if anything needed to be saved. He kept thanking us for letting him tag along, when we should have thanked him for sweet and merry company.

I kept blessing yesterday for being Friday, when it seemed like Saturday, and I have a whole full day of weekend I wasn’t expecting.