In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were seduced by a piper, dressed in all kinds of colours, and lost at the calvary near the koppen.
I just read a fascinating Fortean Times article listing the various theories behind what actually happened in Hamelin lo those many years ago. Among the prime suspects:
The plague: “In mediæval representations, Death presented himself as a skeleton wearing a colourful pied attire, a jester who always laughs last.”
Lost, not dead: “Some say that the children were led into a cave, and that they came out again in Transylvania.”
They had “dancing mania(!)”: “A form of mass hysteria related to religious fervour.”
At any rate, Browning’s poem is engaging with a three-ring-circus of vocabulary and sounds that would make Dr. Seuss jealous. Evelyn’s adaptation, while trimming the text, keeps the rich language intact. Read sample pages from Evelyn’s script here.
Read the Fortean Times article here. Other theories are posted on Wikipedia.
If this is censorship, then I’ve been “censored” by NPR, The New York Times, Runner’s World, Saveur, etc. basically everybody who’s ever edited my material, and they ALL have.
There was a follow up to this situation, which you can read here.
Holy cow! I just realized that the Ten Minute Play Collection his play was taken from, is the same one I’m in! Ten Minute Plays Volume 6 from Actors Theatre of Louisville. My play Paper Thin is included (which you can also find in Theatrefolk’s Ten Minute Play Collection) That makes us distant third cousins, or neighbours once removed or something….
A huge number (somewhere between 100 and a zillion) of schools are back in session this week. And I’m sure a lot of you have some pretty heinous commutes to school. Why not use that time wisely to brush up on your Shakespeare?
There’s a growing number of free audio recordings of public domain plays out there. Shakespeare’s the most popular but I’ve also found some Chekov, Shaw, and Wilde.
The site that is the easiest to navigate and seems to have the best selection is booksshouldbefree.com. The recordings are pretty good quality and the reading, while not exactly Royal Shakespeare Company quality, is competent.
The venerable Project Gutenberg website also is branching out into offering free audio recordings of public domain works. If you want a really good laugh, be sure to check out thier computer-generated recording of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The computer even tries to do different voices for each character!
I read a small number of blogs on a regular basis. They range in a wide variety of topics: Exercise, to musicians, to vegans, to other theatre folks, to writers, to bakers, to New York City explorers, to Disney, to small business entrepreneurs, to yoga. I like the personal window into someone’s life that a blog offers. More often than not, I think what’s going on in the spaces in -between the words is just as interesting as the words themselves. Some people don’t know the extent of what they’re sharing. But that’s the writer in me, reading between the lines.
I’m a fickle reader and sometimes my interest trickles away as the person writing changes their interests or goes off in a new direction. There’s a New York food guy who was way more interesting to me when he was a struggling student unsure of his future, than he is now. His blog created a fair amount of success and comfort for him and success and comfort are less interesting than struggle.
On the other hand, I’m absolutely riveted to one particular blogger because I’m almost certain she’s on the train to crazy town. And I’m not even being flip. She’s got her ticket and the train is pulling away from the station. Granted, the window to her world is purposefully left wide open. She talks a lot about her person life, her work life, but I’m not sure she’s 100% sure of what’s she’s saying in the spaces between the words. There’s a panic that seems to weave it’s way through, up and down the page. It seems all very much ‘too much’ to be reading about someone’s intense personal struggle, intense personal floundering. There’s interesting struggle, and then there’s, well, crazy town struggle.
Blogs can be tricky tightrope. If you’re using them as a selling tool it’s important to be personable, to show there’s a human being behind the curtain. There’s nothing worse than a blog that fails to hide it’s ad-like nature. And if you’re using them as a platform to shout to the world, what’s the balance between boring and bombastic?
When is sharing your personal life too much on a blog?
When I write, you’re getting a pretty close picture of who I am. I write in a very casual style, which mirrors the way that I usually talk. My writing lingo is almost identical to my speaking lingo. (Yes I’m 40, have no grammar to speak of, and yes I call people ‘dude.’)
If I’m being honest, I would say that everything comes across as perhaps a little boring because, well, I am boring. In a nice ordinary way. It’s not a put down. My boring life acts as an excellent and exquisite counterpart to my wacked out brain. I’m not sure I could handle having both an over-active life and an over-active brain. (Insert full body shudder here)
And besides, any personal struggles I might be going through are kept underwraps for the most part because this is a professional blog. Things stay pretty much professional, in a casual dude like way. If something personal finds it’s way in it always has to do with something theatrical, or educational, or both. We’re rarely calling people out, naming names, going down to city hall, standing on soap boxes, roughing up the waters.
Having said that, I don’t think our blog is stuffy. I like that. I think I’ve achieved in showing that there’s a person behind the words. Theatrefolk is people (are people? English degree anyone? Oh right, I got one of those… somewhere….) with hearts and minds and foibles who keep on striving. That’s the goal.
It’s important to know exactly what you want out of your blog, what persona you want to present, who you want to reach, and what you want to tell them. The internet is not an emotionless void. There is always someone, somewhere reading what you write. Always.
Welcome to Spread the Love where we continue Christmas month this week with Cinderella’s Crunchy Christmas Cake! I love alliteration. Cinderella is celebrating her first Christmas at the castle, and she is determined to bake the Prince his favourite cake. But if her step-sisters have their way, Cinderella will be back working for them and completely forgetting all about her life at the castle. With the fairy godmother on vacation, who knows what’s going to happen? Craig what do you love about Cinderella’s Crunchy Christmas Cake?
Cinderella’s Crunchy Christmas Cake was written for middle schoolers and high schoolers to perform for the younger kids – say your local elementary schools. The play really focuses on that audience and there’s nothing kids love more than to be part of the play. And that’s why the play is filled with audience participation. The audience gets to sing songs, they get to bake a cake, they get to cast spells. They eat this cake up! Lindsay, what do you love about Cinderella’s Crunchy Christmas Cake?
As a writer I like taking something that is known and looking at it in a new light. That’s exactly what this play does. Everybody knows Cinderella, the fairy godmother, the step-sisters, they know who they are. And it’s fun for the audience and the actors to see these characters do something they’ve never done before. It’s great for audience to see something new and something known, the actors get to take the familiar off in a different direction. That’s it for Spread the Love.
We finalized our fall catalogue this week! It went to the printer on Friday and should be hitting the mail stream in a couple of weeks.
Making the catalogue used to be a laborious process, both with production and mailing.
The time needed to produce the catalogue has been reduced dramatically from when we started out. In the beginning, all of the copy and script details (such as cast breakdown and running times) were copied in by hand. There would always be some sort of misprint that slipped through the cracks that would leave us cringing over for months.
But a couple of years ago we got a bright idea. Our website and catalogue are both developed in-house so we looked for ways to make them optimize each other. Our website was coded to output all of the plays in a format that our publishing software (Adobe Indesign) could understand. A play title is marked as a title, the author is marked as the author, and so on. So the publishing software knows exactly how the information should be formatted. Doing it this way dramatically reduces the chance of transcription errors. When we spot an omission or mistake, we correct both the catalogue and the website so that it will never appear again. Even this last time around we found a couple of nagging mistakes that we were able to instantly correct.
Actually mailing the catalogue is a whole other story. At one point we stuffed the envelopes and sorted the entire bulk mailing by hand! This used to take us a few days and countless finger cuts. Now our volumes are high enough to hire a dedicated mail house to do all this automatically. I miss hauling carloads of catalogues to the post office (it was a very cathartic experience for me) but I don’t miss the paper cuts!
Anywho, we should have the new catalogue hot off the press in about two weeks and we want to make sure you get one! The catalogue is already available as a PDF download here. If you’d rather have a copy mailed to you, you can order one from the same page. I’ll double-check against our mailing list to make sure you don’t accidentally get a duplicate.
So here’s a question for you: can you be a great writer without tragedy in your life? I suppose the question applies to anyone in the arts – does a tragic life equal artistic greatness? And does it matter if the tragic life is beyond or within the artist’s control?
I had this conversation recently stemming from the fact that I have lived a pretty tragedy-free life. Sure there have been events and a couple of years of deep, dark, unhappiness. There has been moments of financial distress, which is similar but not the same as poverty. There has been unexpected death. There has been intense humiliation.
But tragedy? Not really. I’m a middle class gal who had a relatively comfortable, ignorant of ills, childhood. I have a university degree. A fantastically happy marriage. A work life I love. Yep, not a lot of tragedy.
So does that exclude me from the club of greatness? Some would suggest, and have, that yes indeed I will never be a great writer because of my lack of tragic bones. And I’m not a hundred percent sure I disagree. I’m not…. sure. What makes a writer, or a piece of writing great? Some of me says it’s a cop out to say that life makes a writer. We are born with our creativity, I believe that. Creativity isn’t something you can pick up like riding a bike. The ability to mold creativity into a career? That’s not a given and there are many cases of someone with less talent and more drive being more successful than someone in the opposite position.
What do you think? Who are the great writers and what have their lives been like?
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