Now first three chapters of Inside the Other Box (there was Another Box) are out there:
All posts by drJ
An new chapter 2 of live mystery: Inside the other box there was another box
Community Theater: Last weekend of Jekyll and Hyde
With Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde concluding its two-week run this weekend (Oct. 30 to Nov. 1), a few thoughts about community theater in general and this show in particular. (I’ve been both blogging and writing articles about the production as it’s developed. If you’re curious about the process of thinking that went into developing an entirely new adaptation and production of the piece you may want to take a look at them: Blog entries and Essays).
I have been and remain a lifetime proponent of “amateur” artistic efforts as well as of the value of a sense of community (see “Creativity and the Adult Amateur” and “Dreaming of Community”). Putting my perspective as simply as possible: High-quality amateur work, whether in theater, dance, painting, performance art, etc. etc., can be utterly enchanting and mind-opening to its audience as well as a major source of creative expression. Likewise, an intense and valid community experience, that is, one that provides a shared intimacy, compassion, and commitment without being contaminated by ulterior or destructive motives can deeply enrich the lives of all involved.
The adjectives in these definitions are not accidental: When amateur work is not high-quality, evincing a lack of care and workmanship, indifference to the quality of the creative effort, it is worse than useless: it can be boring and painful. Similarly, when “community” amounts to little more than “hooray for our side” or a broad but very thin social interconnectedness, it is meaningless at best and, at worst, a deceptive substitute for soul-satisfying shared experience.
When one approaches a new effort that combines amateur creative effort with a community spirit, sometimes one is shocked by both sides of the equation. I have found myself awed by the creativity and by the shared sense of commitment. Yet, I’ve also been amazed at the gaps in the mutual commitment to each other and to one’s audience that sometimes pop up. I’m not painting myself as a paragon of virtues here, I’ve been guilty many times of being less than a good partner in a shared project. But it would be ridiculously pollyanna-ish not to mention that this occurs all too frequently and that it’s a reason why some people will studiously avoid non-profession work of any kind — not that seasoned professionals don’t sometimes bring so little new excitement that their work is often a dreary repetition of past success.
But at its best, amateur or mixed professional/non-professional (in community theater, Actors Equity and non-Equity members often perform together), can be thrilling. It is not for me to say whether our current production of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fulfills that aspiration. I can only say that we have tried to do something different here. We’ve taken a story known to some extent by everyone in western culture and given it several new twists. We’ve drawn attention away from a myopic focus on Jekyll/Hyde and shifted it to those perplexed and dismayed. We’ve reversed the classic detective whodunit paradigm (Robert Louis Stevenson’s story is frequently credited with being one the first of the detective genre): Here everyone in the theater except the “detective” (in this case, Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer) knows that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. The play is retold from the lawyer’s (Mr. Utterson) perspective: And that makes it all the more of a nightmare.
Stevenson’s story actually began as a nightmare that was so vivid to him that he wrote the story in three feverish days. (After a friend critiqued it, Stevenson threw the original story in the fire, and re-wrote the current version in three more feverish days!) We — the director, stage manager, scenic designer and cast — have worked as a group to think through all the alternatives of how we could tell the story most effectively. Simplicity and transparency are hallmarks of what we’ve come up with, making maximum use of the black box theater that is the Hooker-Dunham using a single but imposing set piece: the door through which all pass and are, in one way or another, transformed. We’ve done our best to keep a sense of humor alive as well, knowing that we must compete with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird’s brilliant renditions of the Jekyll and Hyde tale.
As the director, Josh Moyse, tells us in his program notes, this is an invented play, in part theater, in part performance art, that is our little troupe’s first venture at the material, but very possibly not our last. Personally, I’m very proud to have been involved in the project and proud to host it at the Hooker-Dunham, a wonderful space in which to experiment. As I write this, it’s 1 PM with a 7:30 curtain beginning our second/final weekend. Hope you’ve had or will have the opportunity to share in the experience.
Community Theater: Opening Night of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Holy crap.
There are few things that compare with the pleasure and terror of opening nights. Will one’s mind go blank in the middle of a line? Will anyone show up to see the show? Will they laugh at the parts the ensemble thinks funny and be properly scared by the more thrilling moments? It’s like being on the roller coaster as it heads up and up and still more up before reaching its crest and letting loose. Nothing for it but to hold the safety bar and hope you enjoy the ride! Except there is no safety bar.
Jekyll and Hyde, which we opened last night, somehow makes me think of President Jimmy Carter. Remember his peanut-grower’s smiling face? He usually smiled. Carter is infamous for saying something to the effect of “I lusted in my heart.” The actual quote is “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” per the Top Ten Unfortunate Political One-Liners of Time Magazine, but “I lusted in my heart,” sums it all up well enough. Carter’s only problem was the he was President of the US (admittedly a pretty bad problem to have!), ‘cause everybody lusts in their heart sometimes.
So Dr. Jekyll’s problem is not so unique, even if his “scientific” solution of devising a potion to separate his “good” and “bad” sides is a bit extreme. Like most myths, the difference between Jekyll/Hyde and us “normal” people is only a matter of degree. By exaggerating a “normal” condition, J&H brings that condition into focus. This is why I love the line, toward the end of the play where my character, Mr. Utterson, says, “It is the curse of mankind that these incongruous personas are bound together in an agonized womb of consciousness.” Anyone who has any insight into themselves at all recognizes that there are aspects of our personality that are incompatible with each other.
Don’t we all struggle to reconcile “incongruous” aspects of ourselves? The wish to be brave and daring and the pull to hide in the corner? Lust and moral rectitude? Hatred and benevolence? And doesn’t most of humanity share with Dr. Jekyll the curiosity that drives us to tinker with the very building blocks of nature? Most of us are openly fascinated with the unraveling of the genetic code. Most of us are similarly fascinated with the unlocking of the enormous power inside the atom even as we may decry it’s use against people and the dangers of trying to supply our energy needs through such potentially catastrophic means.
So it is a great pleasure for me to play the role of the Everyman in this dramatization of what is a natural human conundrum. How can we reconcile conscience with licentiousness? Not easily, is the short answer. To our peril if we try to find a way around our inner contradictions is the moral. But it strikes me that Dr. Jekyll, even to the end, regrets most that he didn’t quite get the formula right, that he is doomed only because his potion was not quite correct.
Like Dr. Jekyll, is humanity still tinkering with the formula? Trying to find ways to have it all for ourselves and still hold our head hight in moral superiority? Seems to me there’s an awful lot of that going on all over the globe. And we all fear catastrophe may lie around the corner.
Read ore on how this production of Jekyll and Hyde evolved…
Theater Jitters
Anyone involved in any theatrical venture has a point in time, if not several, when they get the jitters.
There is a great scene in Day for Night, a Truffaut film, where Truffaut himself plays the role of the director of a film within the film. Toward the end of the movie, after all hell has repeatedly broken out in the course of making the film within the film, Truffaut’s character is being interviewed. Asked about what the process is like, he says something like this: “When you start making a film you think it will be the greatest ever made. Soon thereafter, as everything begins to fall apart, you despair that you will never be able to finish the film at all and that it will never be released. Toward the very end, you begin to see that you may actually be able to cobble together enough footage to at least finish the film. Then, in the final days, you begin to see how, just possibly, the film will actually turn out to be good.”
I think every actor, stage manager, set designer, director (and I’m sure a very similar process happens in virtually all creative endeavors) goes through the awful moment where it seems that nothing is going to work out as planned and that, far from being a brilliant display of wonderful talent, the play is going to be a complete disaster. Perhaps it will never even see the light of day. Perhaps it shouldn’t ever see the light of day. The sets don’t come together, the lighting and special effects don’t work, the actors don’t know their lines, advance reservations are pitiful. One begins to wonder why one ever thought this would work.
Of course, what makes the jitters intensify is the realization that sometimes one’s worst fears do come to pass. There’s often a point after that initial horrible feeling that nothing is going to work where still more things begin to fall apart: a key actor or technical person gets hurt or sick or disappears; a key rehearsal can’t be run because of a leaky pipe in the theater; a crucial set piece is broken during a run-through.
Live creative artistry is literally like riding an old-fashioned roller-coaster ride. The whole long process building up to the first public showing is like the slow cranking up as the roller-coaster is pulled up the long incline up. You can’t quite believe that you’re so high up and there’s still what looks like an infinite upward slope before the thing will let loose. And there’s no getting off. You’re on the ride and it’s going up and soon will come down like a hurricane. Nothing to do now but hang on.
Roller-coasters, though, do tend to stay on their tracks. That’s the fun of it: all of the terror but little if any (hopefully) real danger. Not so true of theater. I’ve seen seasoned professionals go completely blank in front of a full house. Set pieces can and do fall apart and crash to the ground. I saw a performance of Porgy and Bess where an understudy had to play Porgy’s part in the second act because the lead actor broke his leg coming off stage in act one.
So jitters though they may be, they can’t be easily dismissed. Contrary to the show biz trope, “The show must go on!” there isn’t any guarantee that it does have to go on.
So if local/community theater has the advantages of not needing thousands of advance sales to be viable, of not having to deal with the egos and personal foibles of big stars, and of not relying on massively complex staging and million dollar pre-promotion, it also has only so much room for error. People are likely to be more tolerant of minor glitches, but there are limits to that even in the smallest theater setting. The audience is coming to see a show. They want to experience what a troupe actually does, not just what it aspires to do.
A week before opening is when these jitters usually begin to peak. Suddenly, there’s no sense of unlimited time to fix whatever isn’t working, to be confident that actors will learn their lines and the technical folks will make everything happen as planned that doesn’t seem to have happened correctly thus far. Now it’s all got to come together and, nine times out of ten, maybe 99 out of 100, it doesn’t come together yet. Time suddenly becomes painfully finite. If it takes an extra hour to get a set piece or a costume together, if an actor is delayed getting to the theater, there’s no way to get that time back. Sometimes sleep is sacrificed. But that too is a finite commodity and sleep-deprivation is rarely an ideal state for optimal performance.
So that’s where we are now with the production we’re putting together of Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde. A unique conception: Taking the original Robert Louis Stevenson story and Stevenson’s evocative prose and using modern stagecraft to upset audience expectations and make the performance scary, theatrically jarring, philosophically meaningful, and simply fun and funny in parts. All put together on a tiny, minimalistic stage. Classic black box theater.
If you’re in the Brattleboro, VT, area this coming weekend (the show opens Friday, October 24 @ 7:30, continues the next day, Sat. Oct. 25 and then Thursday, Friday, Saturday Oct. 30, 31 and November 1; all seats $10.) come see what we’ve done. Jittery as I am, I’m still hopeful, like Truffaut, that it will actually turn out to be quite good.
If you’re interested in some of the thought process that went into the production, take a peak at the essays I’ve included here, including a new one: Monsters from the Id.
In Praise of “Small Theater”
One of the more exciting possibilities for small, local theater productions — often called “community theater” although the name is often inaccurate and somewhat demeaning — is to tackle themes that are particularly challenging. This includes many of the “canon” of significant works of drama. “Well worn” as these may be, they became classics because of their enduring power. While reprised occasionally on Broadway, usually in limited runs with big name stars, they provide fertile territory for theatrical exploration in the more intimate context of regional theaters. Other fascinating, less familiar or entirely original, material is available to small theater performances. Concept works and original stagings of more well-known material — all are fertile ground for small, local theater.
Much local theater, of course, does not attempt to take on challenging material. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment for entertainment’s sake, for filling houses with patrons enjoying an evening out, away from world and personal troubles and the din of television commercial monotony. There’s nothin’ wrong either with a troupe of actors having a ball with a traditional song-and-dance or farcical silliness. There’s no substitute for sheer unadulterated fun. God knows we all need it in these trying times.
Many small local theaters are wonderful venues, though, for a different kind of theater: theater that, in one way or another, challenges their audience. In recent times, our area (southeastern Vermont) has been graced by some outstanding work that is, by no means, “easy” from either an actor/director or audience perspective. Whether it was the reprise of the achingly painful Death of a Salesman, the gender-bending interpretation of Jean Genet’s classic, The Maids, the family-from-hell tortuous drama, August, Osage County, or the complex, mind-twisting Copenhagen, among many other wonderfully-enacted serious and comedic works, local audiences were treated this past year alone to innumerable fascinating and demanding theatrical performances. Sometimes, these challenging works attracted full houses, sometimes only the few and the brave, but all gave their audiences something to think and feel about, something meaningful.
Sometimes I think “small theater” should be movement like “slow food.” I wish we could get away from judging our artistic worth by the size of our audience. Everything today is market-rated. I remember when I started writing the book that forms the main body of this website and began seeking a publisher. I realized my personal goals and any publishing house’s were completely out of sync. I felt that if a hundred people took my work seriously enough to read it, that would be a significant accomplishment. Publishers needed press runs in the thousands to even consider a work. The internet changes the game, but it’s still difficult not to look at website statistics as the ultimate measure of value. Certainly they do give some sense of the interest one’s work attracts. And since audience size is also tied to whether a theater can be a going concern, it’s both natural and appropriate to be concerned with it. But equating the number of patrons with value reduces the artistic process to a commodity, an extremely deleterious consequence in the realm of creativity.
Small theater has the opportunity of inverting the equation and judging success by the quality of the work rather than the size of its audience. How many times have I heard people remember a performance from many years previous with the words “I was six feet away” from the performance? In our local area, I think of how wonderful and memorable it is to hear music played in an intimate setting — jazz at Wendy’s house concerts, at the Vermont Jazz Center or the Open Music Collective; chamber music performances at Yellow Barn, Next Stage, or at our local little old schoolhouse — rank right up there with performances I’ve seen at Lincoln Center in New York.
There is a chance, in small theater, to try things that don’t appeal to everyone, that may disturb or unsettle, that may even leave some audience members wondering “what the heck was that?” There is chance to experiment, to “stretch out” as an actor or director. And it is a chance for an audience to experience something entirely different from what anything they’ve seen before.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde, continued
(Continuing to blog the development of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Josh Moyse, opening on Friday, Oct. 24 and running through Saturday, Nov. 1 at the Hooker-Dunham Theater, 139 Main St., Brattleboro, VT)
From the multitude of possibilities of where one might take re-telling the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there comes a point when you have to make some choices. We, the actors, have been deeply enmeshed in this process, though ultimately Josh Moyse, the director, is both determining the script and the staging of the piece.
I say “determining the script” because he isn’t writing it from scratch, but is using the text of the original Robert Louis Stevenson novella as the primary source of the dialogue and much of the imagery. This rendition of the tale is quite unlike any of the film versions of Jekyll/Hyde and completely unlike the musical version. The films introduce characters not found in the novella: a virginal “good girl” whom Dr. Jekyll intends to marry before he goes off the rails and a down and dirty barmaid whom Mr. Hyde abuses. The films needed love themes so necessary for Hollywood, but quite irrelevant to the core of the tale.
By following the Stevenson story and using his archaic-sounding vocabulary and syntax, the tale is necessarily set in the Victorian era. Because that era is so associated in our minds with an exaggerated dichotomy between the moral and immoral, it is fitting for this tale, but the setting is ultimately irrelevant: the “issues” raised by the novella are as relevant today as they were a hundred and thirty years ago.
Though our production uses the novella as a starting point, where we have gone from there is the product of long conversations between the director and cast. Some characters from the original story have been dropped and some given more prominence. In our version, unexpected interludes, interspersed between sequences of dialogue drawn from the original novella, disrupt the audience’s expectations of a chronological sequence.
We are trying, as I see it, to do a few things: To give the audience a sense of the terror that unrestrained evil evokes, but also a taste of the humor inherent in the over-exaggeration of dichotomized good and evil. Yet what we are going for is not parody of the Robert Louis Stevenson story so much as satirizing the idea that good and evil can always be so easily distinguished. We are also striving to evoke the sense of claustrophobia and shadow that are essential to a good nightmare.
The core of the story is the tragedy that Dr. Jekyll’s proving the validity of his theories destroys himself. Dr. Jekyll asserts that all people contain within themselves both good and evil, that life involves a continuous struggle to act humanely rather than meanly, cruelly. But horror is the consequence of trying to enjoy the fruits of both morality and immorality. Death is the price Dr. Jekyll must pay for toying with the balance between the two, for trying to find ways in which to be both morally superior and to allow himself license to do whatever he wants.
But The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not only about the horror unleashed by toying with human nature, nor is it, at least as we conceive it and portray it, only the condemnation of the dark side of ourselves. It is also a critique of the whole notion of moral superiority. Jekyll tempts fate not only because his Mr. Hyde alter ego acts immorally, but also because he tries to elevate himself above others in his Dr. Jekyll persona. It thus condemns moralism just as much as immorality.
One does not have to believe in Hindu reincarnation, nor in some kind of “final judgment,” nor even that bad acts create bad karma and thus we must pay in this life for our misdeed, to grasp the psychological truth that we suffer consequences for our actions. The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde makes the consequences literal: When Dr. Jekyll as Mr. Hyde cannot transform himself back to his “good” self, he destroys himself. This is psychologically valid: When we act inhumanly, unless we are such psychopaths that we have rid ourselves of all human emotions, we pay the consequences, whether we are conscious of our guilt or not.
In melodrama, all of this must play out literally: Dr. Jekyll, trapped by his potion in the persona of the evil Mr. Hyde, destroys himself. In real life, we usually pay more subtly. It isn’t that we can’t formulate the potion that will relieve us of our responsibility for our actions, it is our own mind — or soul if you prefer that metaphor — that will not allow us, whether consciously or unconsciously, to escape from our responsibility for our actions. And this is true whether the action is to moralistically condemn others as our moral inferiors or it is to abuse our fellow human beings.
In this sense, Jekyll and Hyde, for all its dramatic exaggeration of good and evil, makes a simple yet psychologically valid existential point: We choose our lives by our actions. We can never escape the consequences of those actions, because we know what we’ve done, what we’ve chosen to do.
This a very crucial point to me in this age in which denial of responsibility is so prevalent. Everything wrong in the world is either someone else’s fault, viz. the demonization of “them” and near deification of oneself,, If something clearly is one’s own fault, then it’s our genes or a chemical imbalance, or a lousy childhood, or “stress” or trauma we’ve endured that causes us to act destructively.
Meanwhile, while we contemplate these complex moral, psychological, existential, ethical questions, we should enjoy the roller coaster ride. When we look at our reflection in our bathroom mirror as though it were one of those shape-contorting mirrors of an amusement park “fun house,” we should remember to laugh heartily at ourselves.
For more on exploring how to portray The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, check out these articles.
Inside the other box there was another box
(A short story in progress)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Black Box Theater: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(link to initial entry on this thread)
One of the most alluring possibilities in using a black box theater like the Hooker-Dunham is creating a production from the ground up. It’s “minimalistic” set-up, a small stage framed by either thick black drapes or, if the drapes are open, stone slabs and bricks. As I write, we’re trying to do that, starting from the Robert Louis Stevenson novella (yes, the author of the Disney-ized, i.e. sanitized Treasure Island!.).
Josh Moyse is developing an entirely new rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I say “rendition” rather than “adaptation.” We are paying great heed to the iconic story of the doctor who took a potion that transformed him into all that was evil inside of him, all that was instinctual, and all that was vile, despicable.
Most people cannot think of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without conjuring up images of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, or Heckle and Jeckle. It is engrained in the cultural heritage of many cultures and is, perhaps, universal: The divide that sometimes can feel so deeply embedded in our nature between the will to be good and beneficial to others and the will do whatever the heck on wants. If that includes doing harm to others (and what else is that axe raised over your head in anticipation there for?) a line is crossed that no one can abide.
Theater has the wonderful ability, not unlike a really good roller-coaster ride or anything else that’s scary at first but you’re really glad you did it, to allow us to feel fear and see evil and, at the same moment, to feel safe. The homicidal maniac on the stage is not going to come and actually attack us in our seats.
So here is a simple space in which to build a world of claustrophobic nightmare. Because that’s what Jekyll and Hyde is, a nightmare, in which the truth is horrible to behold). (Hyde complains: “Why does it always have to be Jekyll and Hyde? Why can’t it be, at least some of the time, Hyde and Jekyll. I know, it sounds like a law firm, but it still would be more fair.”) A nightmare. Jekyll goes too far and terrible things happen. Man crosses a boundary he should not cross.
(It occurs to me that this is not unlike the central question of Copenhagen, that just finished a wonderful four-week run at ATP in West Chesterfield. In our infinite quest to know but also in our fear of other humans and desire to be able to destroy them before they destroy us, we have delved inside the atom, and found a way to unlock its energy.)
Dr. Jekyll is toying with the laws of the universe. He is Edward Teller ( “father” of the hydrogen bomb). He is Faust Robert Johnson at the crossroads, making his pact with the devil. Or Robespierre, chopping off the head of the king, and so, according to some psycho-historians, killing God and kill Father. He is poor Oedipus — except that Oedipus had no idea what he was doing while Dr. Jekyll is trying to do what actually happens.
The point is that working with the novella means exploring some very interesting terrain.
Here are some ideas that have crossed my mind. (Whether any of them will seep into our production remains to be seen.)
The tragedy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
An imagining of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Another scenario of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Final imagining and alternatives
Angst
“So, what’s the use of worrying, it never was worthwhile?
Pack up your trouble in your old kit bag!
And smile, goddamn you, smile!”
“What, me worry?”
— Alfred E. Newman (unrelated to Albert Einstein)
Guilty with an explanation, your honor
The gnawing pain of guilt is an essential if awful part of each person’s life. We often say the phrase, “you shouldn’t feel guilty about that,” or its complement: “Why don’t you / they feel guilty about that?” There are aspects of guilt that everyone experiences that are rarely fully explored outside of novels, theater and other artistic creations.
But it is a fact that we, i.e. more or less everyone, feel guilty about some things we ”should not feel guilty for” and that we don’t feel as guilty as we “should” for some others. Our mechanisms for understanding ourselves are faulty. We condemn ourselves for things that we should stand up straight and acknowledge our responsibility without guilt, perhaps even with pride. And there are things we’ve thought or done that require our guilt, require us to feel remorse, require us to accept the pain of our more than fallibility, our complicity, our willing choice to do wrong to another or to ourselves.
Religion and law act as though the question of what we should feel guilt or, alternatively, should absolve ourselves are clearly delineated right or wrong, sacrament or sin, but psychologically its rarely simple. Unnecessary guilt hounds; necessary self-reckoning is evaded.
Randy Newman said it better.
Summer of the Puppy
A summer of many things, many changes, but it has definitely been The Summer of the Puppy.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A local director has been talking to me recently about a Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde project for this fall at the Hooker-Dunham. He isn’t interested in a conventional melodrama, but in using Jekyll and Hyde as a jumping off point for exploration.
The beauty part of Jekyll/Hyde is of course its greatest challenge: it is utterly familiar to everyone. We’re not in the realm of work, as was Jean Genet’s The Maids production we did last year, known primarily by theater aficionados, but a world that’s, if anything, utterly familiar to everyone. When I asked my sons to tell we the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, they all knew instantly. When I asked them where they learned the story, they certainly hadn’t read Robert Louis Stephenson’s (yes, the author of Treasure Island) novella. When pressed, they remembered Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny cartoons, but the impression was indelible.
I have no idea, at this point, of the specific direction the director wants to take the production, but the concept started me thinking. So I’ve decided to share my thoughts here just as a way of starting a conversation, and, possibly, being of interest to others in other settings who might be looking for an interesting project. Jekyll and Hyde has the great advantage, from a community theater perspective, of being in the public domain, removing the hurdle of getting rights and, very often, being bound to copyright restrictions about how one puts the show together.
Everyone knows the basic story: Dr. Jekyll (people are often confused on who’s the “evil” one; Jekyll, despite his “beastly” name, is the doctor-scientist, while Mr. Hyde is his hideous “other self.” The “correct” pronunciation is apparently JEE-kyl, btw.) endeavors to separate good and evil parts of himself into separate beings. He develops and drinks a potion that turns him into the horrifying Mr. Hyde. The same potion transforms him back to Dr. Jekyll. In typical morality play fashion, catastrophe ensues and ultimately Jekyll/Hyde must die.
But, since every re-telling of Jekyll and Hyde is different, we can go anywhere we want with the story. So while the audience knows everything, ideally it begins to realize that it knows nothing, that this re-telling of story is in our hands now. That opens some very exciting possibilities. I’ve started sketching out some imagined scenes. Regardless of where we go with this “production,” the process is fascinating.
More to come…
Canine Music Appreciation
A friend of mine from work had us over to play music one afternoon. He had a couple of young, big, strong, and, to me, scary lookin’ dogs. The kind of dogs people used to say “there’s only a problem if they sense your fear.” Yeh, they sense my fear! I’m scared shitless, for chrissake. The dog knows this and therefore it’s going to eat me. So is this supposed to be able to stop being afraid? I know the dog isn’t going to buy any kind of “act” I put on to show I’m unafraid. No, the animal surely can sense the fear seeping out of all my pores.
I said nothing.
So the man says to me that the dogs really wouldn’t bother anybody unless “like, to defend me.” Makes sense, but I wasn’t sure exactly where the dogs would draw that line. He tells me the younger dog’s a rottweiler / pit bull mix, kind of like a “pit bull on steroids.” I decided it would be advisable not to get into any arguments with the host.
I ‘m sitting on a couch a starting to play the flute. The rottweiler-pit bull is coming over toward me. He was young but he was plenty big.
As I played he flute he came over right close to me and started to HOWL. I wan’t sure how he’d react if I stopped playing. Maybe that would get him really pissed off. I played and he howled. It was quite a concert.
But I survived.
Now I have a puppy. She’s a soft black and white furry thing. Very lovable. But when I play my sax or flute, she goes completely bongos.
I guess dogs are just very frank about what they think of my talents.
Continuing idle pursuits…
Today’s (Friday, Aug. 8) NY Times crossword puzzle is top notch. Clues that you have no idea of but would kind of like to. A clever “resolution” once you get toward the end of the two long acrosses. A couple surprises in the some of the answers. Worth working one’s way through if you’re into crosswords.