The Hollow runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through June 1st. But I’ve already started work on my next project: From June 28th through August 3rd of this year, I’ll be appearing with Shakespeare & Company as Bolingbrooke in Richard II and as Oliver du Boys in As You Like It. (The company is also producing Servant of Two Masters.)

These shows run in repertory, and this’ll be my first experience with that. I’m looking forward to it. I’m also looking forward to taking a large bite out of Shakespeare. Working with his words and his characters is a pure joy.

Lucas Gerstner is playing the title role in Richard II and Orlando in As You Like It.

Lucas and I first worked together earlier this year in Henry V at Theater in the Round: He played the Duke of Orleans and I played the Constable of France.

We’re currently working together on The Hollow: I’m playing Inspector Colquhoun and he plays Edward Angkatell — one of the suspects.

As Lucas puts it, our theatrical career together seems to be deteriorating: We started out on the same team. Then I suspected him of murder. Now I’m trying to kill him. Twice.

I figured that it could only go uphill from here. But then I realized there was always the chance that I could end up directing him in a production of Sartre’s No Exit and literally send him to hell.

I should have posted this last week, but Theatre in the Round’s production of Henry V, in which I portray the Constable of France, opened on the 8th. It runs through March 2nd.

You should come and see it. One out of two parents and all of my girlfriends think my performance is amazing. (The other parent is coming next weekend. I’m pretty confident he’ll like me, too.)

If you’re looking for slightly less biased reviews, you can find them at the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press. (But they don’t mention me at all, so I dunno how much faith you should put in such rags.)

I’ve been absent for a bit being morose and unproductive, but I’ve got some excellent news: I have been cast as the Constable of France in Theatre in the Round‘s production of Henry V. The show opens on February 8th and runs through March 2nd. This will be the first piece of fresh theater I’ve done in 6 years.

… and when I actually say that out loud, it sounds absolutely insane.

So I hope to see ya all there in February. I’ll drop another reminder on the site when the time draws on apace.

As the result of random conversational tangents, I found myself wandering through the Lost Play of Shakespeare as described on Wikipedia. This random intellectual sampling has reminded me of why I find so much of the scholarship surrounding Elizabethan theater so amusing.

For example, here’s a quote from the discussion of The Puritan:

The play clearly dates from the year 1606. The text contains an allusion to an almanac that specifies July 15 as a Tuesday, which was true only of 1606 in the first decade of the 17th century.

Stop for a moment and think about the bare thread of logic which is being employed here. Consider that other possibilities include: The author had an out of date almanac. The author made a mistake. The author just didn’t care and referred to July 15th as a Tuesday because he needed it to be a Tuesday or because “Tuesday” fit the scansion and “Saturday” didn’t.

Now, in this particular case, there is supplementary evidence which clearly suggests that the play was written at some point during the first decade of the 17th century (and no later than 1607 when it was published). My point is that, when trying to date the composition and performance of Elizabethan plays, scholars are working in a near-vacuum when it comes to reliable information. Thus they scramble for any potential tidbit of correlation like a desperate man trying to find a wisp of oxygen.

This is probably made all the worse because the field of Shakespearean scholarship has been so thoroughly masticated over the last four centuries that there is little room for fresh insight. In such an environment, the need to secure tenure creates a tendency for over-reaching convolutions and the resulting navel-gazing simply makes matters worse.

Here’s another example, this time from a discussion on the authorship of Sir Thomas More:

Consider one example of what attracted attention to the style of Hand D.

First, from Sir Thomas More, Addition IIc, 84-7:

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Next, from Coriolanus, I,i,184-8:

What’s the matter?
What in these several places of the city
You cry against the noble Senate, who
(Under the gods) keep you in awe, which else
Would feed on one another?

These are two passages with completely different subjects, contents, and structure (one is a question and the other is a statement). But they have five words in common, and thus they are offered as “evidence” that Shakespeare must have written it. Using this type of “logic” one can demonstrate quite aptly that J.R.R. Tolkien is responsible for The Sword of Shannara, The Dark is Rising, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

It’s also entertaining to watch scholars try to “prove” authorship by comparing plot structures. As if the similarities between Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs, and The Hard Way demonstrate that all buddy cop films were written by the same guy.

In general, when Shakespearean scholars say things like “clearly” or “obviously” what they really mean is “I have no evidence that this is true, and it’s not even particularly logical to think it the most likely explanation, but I’m hoping that you won’t notice”.

But this is likely to get me started on Hamlet. And we should be here all night if that were the case.