Why I Won't Ever Visit OSF Again

On Saturday, May 11, we attended the Rogue Theater's production of Richard III, directed by Cynthia Meier, with Joseph McGrath in the title role. It was a challenging play for a small community troupe to undertake, even one that performs one Shakespeare play on a yearly basis. Overall, the acting was good, although some of the cast members were not comfortable speaking in blank verse. McGrath handled the part well but did not bring out the psychopathic charm of the character as convincingly as he could have. That was especially obvious when he courted Lady Anne, my test for a great Richard. If the actor playing the role seems visibly to mesmerize Anne, so that her surrender becomes credible--perhaps because she is subconsciously attracted to him to begin with--I'll suspend my disbelief. That takes immense skill on the part of both actors; they actually have to get inside each other's heads. McGrath seemed to browbeat Anne rather than seduce her. On the other hand, his asides to the audience were delivered winningly enough to create rapport, so it was by no means an inelegant performance. Reviewers liked the cabbages. Every time Richard succeeded in offing another of his victims, he brought out a red cabbage, set it on the block of wood that served as the throne, and chopped it in half, smirking as he did so. By the end of the play the floor was strewn with shredded cabbage. In order to reduce the script to manageable length, Meier cut passages that didn't advance the action, such as the long dialogue between Clarence and the two murderers, so this device was a substitute for on-stage execution. To me it was gimmicky, but it was the sole element that didn't work. All in all, this production was much more gripping than anything I've seen at OSF in quite a while. It was performed in Elizabethan costume and the set design replicated an Elizabethan stage. At OSF the play would probably have been set--where? Maybe in the Nixon White House. At any rate, there would have been enough distracting modern parallels drawn to keep an audience from really perceiving nuances of characterization. The straightforwardness of the Rogue version allowed me to assess the conception of Richard even while the play was going on; in other words, the dramatic tensions were foregrounded, something not often done at OSF. I was so intrigued by the production that I reread the whole "Wars of the Roses" tetralogy over the past week, viewed the first half of the 1993 BBC offering on YouTube along with clips from the Olivier and Loncraine films, and skimmed critical studies available on JSTOR as well as the psychoanalytic reading advanced by Janet Adelman in Suffocating Mothers (1992). When a theatrical experience sends me on a mini-research project, it has hit home. From now on, then, I've decided to take more advantage of the local stage scene and forego these out-of-town excursions. The Rogue has enough of a serious following to offer Shakespeare without reaching out to teenagers and tourists.

CAMWS 2013

The 109th annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Iowa City, April 17-20, was probably the most surreal professional meeting I've ever attended, although that was not the fault of the organizers. Let me begin by mentioning that we were flying home from Rome on Monday, April 15 and were waiting in the Atlanta airport for our flight to Tucson when I happened to walk past a monitor tuned to CNN on my way to the restroom. This was just after 3:00 p.m., so we learned of the Boston bombings while they were still breaking news and watched the initial reports as we ate an early dinner in an airport restaurant. After getting home, I had just one day to unpack, pack another suitcase (borrowed from Ron, as my cheap Italian suitcase fell apart after enduring the final flight--thank goodness for the cintura!) and put my presentation and materials in order before leaving for the conference on Wednesday. I had the weather report on while I picked out my meeting outfits, and that was how I found out that a huge snowstorm was bearing down on Denver, where I had to change planes for Cedar Rapids. So I scrapped my raincoat in favor of my Lands End winter jacket--good thing, as it was raining and cold in Iowa too. But I get ahead of myself. As the plane touched down in Denver, the snow started falling--lightly at first, but by the time I arrived at the next gate, thicker and faster. There was a whole gaggle of classicists at that gate, including the governing structure of CAMWS--Peter Knox, the current President, and Monica Cyrino, the President-Elect. It soon became clear that our plane was not going to leave on schedule. In fact, planes were being cancelled right and left, including the next flight to Cedar Rapids after ours. We kept being told, however, that first the plane was still on its way in and second that a crew had to be found--upshot was that two hours later we were the ONLY flight scheduled to leave from that terminal. Maybe the airline felt it could not get away with stranding the key members of the CAMWS executive committee. Be that as it may, we did finally get off the ground after waiting more than a half hour for de-icing. Miracle on top of that, the limo service was informed of the delay and picked us up without a problem. Arrived in Iowa City just in time for dinner and the welcoming reception to follow, so I didn't miss anything. Others were not so lucky. All through the meeting we kept hearing of people stuck in Chicago and unable to preside or deliver their papers. I myself had to stand in for a presider who could not make it and also read a presentation for an absent presenter. The paper was not e-mailed to me until a half hour before the session began, and I had to spend the break between sessions printing it out. The author crammed in all the references she had originally included on the handout, so the presentation ran a good twenty minutes--luckily, it was the last one in the session, but the audience was squirming by the time I finished reading it. Meanwhile back in Boston the hunt for the bombers was going on, and on Thursday night the climactic series of events began to unfold. I came back to my hotel room after the WCC reception, turned on the TV before going back down to dinner, and was mesmerized. Kept the television on and finally ordered room service. Friday, while Boston was closed down, conference attendees were following the news on their smartphones--as soon as a session ended, the electronic devices came on. Including mine. After lunch with Lily Panoussi, the sessions on the Iowa campus and the reception afterward, and even just before the banquet, I was checking whenever I could find Wi-Fi. I will say that I managed to forget about everything during the banquet itself, which was lively and stimulating, with Jim McKeown delighting the audience as master of ceremonies and Peter Knox giving an utterly deadpan riff on the APA's decision to change its name because "philological" no longer made sense to the general public. Since the banquet was now included for the first time in the registration fee, many more younger scholars were present: the energy in the room was palpable. When I finally decided to call it a night, I learned that the surviving suspect had been captured and the Boston nightmare was over. My own paper, delivered the next day, went well enough, and Jim May told me at the Consulares Luncheon that he agreed with it, which is good to hear if you're doing Cicero. In the afternoon I took advantage of a sunny day--the only one during my stay there--to walk around and see a bit of Iowa City. A local crafts store tempted me because they had some very unusual and clever pieces, but I really did not want to pack anything else home after bringing so much stuff back from Rome. In the evening I decided once again, after more television, to stay in and rest up for the flight back to Tucson, since the combination of conference and real-life drama had been unusually draining. It's not very often that reality becomes gripping enough to intrude on the closed world of an academic meeting, and I hope it doesn't happen again.