'Much Ado' in Plymouth: Frolicking in Shakespeare's Garden

            They take the title, the first two words primarily, seriously. The players of the Bay Colony Shakespeare Company have much to do and do it well in their new production of Shakespeare's classic comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" currently on stage at the Spire theater in Plymouth. In the part of Benedick, actor Neil McGarry, looking for a place to hide so he can eavesdrop on other characters saying something of the greatest personal interest to Benedick, escapes into the audience, hopping up on the seating, climbing over the bench backs and sometimes the people in them. He scrambled on his hands and knees down an aisle, somehow missing the 'beverage' at my feet.

            Only moments before Benedick has been complaining of having to choke down a too heavy dish of "Lady Tongue" -- his term for witty nemesis Beatrice.

            "Much Ado" is the famous comedy (memorably filmed 25 years ago with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson) in which the two leads pretend to dislike one another and engage in battles of witty (often complex) insults because of a fixed public position on each side against marriage. Naturally -- because comedy is the world where change and growth is possible -- at the first indication that the other bears a hidden affection, both cave. Their friends provide these helpful hints in heavily staged gossip sessions over how each is secretly suffering from unrequited love. Only someone fooling himself could be fooled by so heavy-handed a ploy, but this is Shakespeare's way of saying we will choose to hear what our heart wishes, and our ego needs, to hear.

            There is comedy in this play, and then there is plain clowning. While the play's well-born characters are working out their issues, Shakespeare gives us one of his best 'common folk' clown character in the superbly uneducated Dogberry, the leader of the city 'watch' that fortuitously discovers the villainy of the piece. Actor Ross MacDonald (who plays Macbeth in the production of that play running concurrently with "Much Ado") here takes the role of the triumphantly muddle-headed Dogberry into the sort of contemporary, post-Python open-ended parody of everything the Brits do better than anyone, ad-libing ad hoc commentary between Dogberry's nonsensical pretensions of medieval civil authority and throwing in a few rants of his own. He stomps across the stage in a send-up of 21st century military pomp and bellowing, fed perhaps by his personal experience in the UK force that served in Afghanistan, and with able assistance from Erica Simpson's winning second-in-command reaches into the audience to pull a few likely suspects onto the stage.

            All the performances are winning. McGarry and young actress Poornima Kirby have great charisma in the leads. They share one of the Shakespeare's best love scenes, drawing on the tears provoked by the tragic near-death of the wrongly accused bride-to-be Hero. How would she address Hero's accuser, Beatrice is asked. Reply: "I would eat his heart in the marketplace." Benedick's responds, 'are you sure of Hero's innocence' and when she answers yes, his response is (in effect) you've got it, babe: "I am engaged," delivering the line with a deft understated perfection that shivers the spine. We see him challenge Claudio, heretofore his best friend, with the same rapier clarity of purpose a few moments later.

            The dead seriousness and dark tone of these scenes contrasts brilliantly with the gaiety and even silliness of the rest of the play. Comedies with a dark streak are a specialty of Shakespeare's ouevre. I don't know if there's been anything like them since.

            I'm grateful for the full cast's all-in engagement with this brilliant wordy piece. Audiences may have some difficulty catching on to the play's vivid, figurative Elizabethan speech-- filled with the vernacular of the times, quaint speech patterns, and the words Shakespeare invented on the fly -- but from the moment the action picks up and McGarry begins flying through the audience to overhear the inspired fiction that Beatrice secretly loves him, everyone in the theater Tuesday night was hooked on this play.

            Why not? For, as Benedick acknowledges at the play's happy end, "Man is a giddy thing."

To Hav and Hav Not: Jan Morris's Uncommon Novel on the Sum of All Travels

            Everybody has lived in Hav. The Greeks, the Arabs, Turks, Russians, Italians, French, Germans. Even the Chinese still operate a fishing pier left over from their furthest Western expansion. The English maintain an Agent, who naturally assumes that all information is classified. A secretive medieval heresy called the Cathars meet in underground quarters resembling catacombs. We don't understand why until author Jan Morris adds a brief sequel -- 20 years after her brilliant fiction "Last Letters from Hav" was published in 1985 -- depicting life in the sterile, colorless, dystopic "new" Hav.

            The old Hav's s indigenous people live in caves, though some of the men work at the harbor, and protect the bears. In the misty past, the legends of this hard to locate somewhere that is both east and west, Europe and Asia, present and past go back to the Myrmidons, the Ancient Greek warriors who fought with Achilles in the Trojan War. Does this mean that Hav is the successor to Troy?

            Greeks founded this place, one of her informants tell the novel's narrator, a travel writer who appears to be a stand-in for Morris, who is herself an astute, highly respected travel writer. But when she tracks down a surviving Greek community, its members are polite and colorless. "We're not Greeks any more," they confess to her.

            Arabs built this place, another local informant tells her in the confiding, but ultimately elusive manner of the city's troop of amateur historians. But then Crusaders took it over and built a castle. An Armenian trumpeter still climbs to its highest point each dawn to play a lament for its knights who fell defending the city from invaders, a notion that suggested to me a reprise of the fall of Constantinople.

            The twentieth century left its heavy fingerprints as well. Oh, there were Fascists in Hav, some say, and the local Germans opposed them. Mussolini however was welcomed by the Italian consulate. Others say, 'Communists were here' and White Russians. And every early 20th century figure you can think of, royalty, decadent rich, politician or intellectual put in an appearance. Freud visited Hav, as did T.E. Lawrence and Hemingway. Claims and counter-claims dispute an incognito visit by Hitler.  

            The city-state of Hav is governed by a tripartite commission established by the League of Nations, which made the German Wiemar Republic one of its protectors. Other survivors from the city's "old Europe," Ottoman and Middle Eastern zeitgeist include a pretender caliph, heir to the 1,300-year religious office at the head of Islam abolished by the Turks when Ataturk overthrew the Ottomans and established the modern Turkish state. The caliph is an urbane man careful about his dealings with the outside world because, he hints, he has enemies.

            Telephones and a little radio get through to this place that time forgot, but Hav presents as the last place on earth untouched by instantaneous communication, mass media, and modern transportation (also, interestingly, by American interests). No airports. You reach the city only by a train that travels a tunnel cut through mountain.

            My lasting impression, months after reading the book, is that Hav is the place where representatives of various versions of the Mediterranean past take Morris's narrator aside and say "Let me tell you what Hav was like when we were really the place to be..." Things were so much more -- interesting, provocative, promising, elegant, urbane, baroque -- back then.

            Hav is the objective correlative for the nostalgia that the earth's deeply rooted communities feel for more vital days. The narrator's informants tell her about the city's brilliant occasions, the parties thrown by celebrities of the Belle Epoque, the pre and post World War I periods (a time recently mocked up by West Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), but also its unique bizarre traditions such as the annual race over the city's rooftops and castle walls in which all hale young men must participate, even though some lose their lives.

            In the brief sequel ("Hav of the Myrmidons"), published in 2005, Morris's narrator returns to the new Hav created after a mysterious military "Intervention" placed the mysterious Cathars in charge. Everything old and charming has been destroyed and been replaced by a super-modern, sterile efficiency of gleaming towers and resort life for the 1 percent. The new people she meets are exemplified by the English tourists who love the new, sterile city because "it's exactly what we're used to" -- a devastating critique of the whole tourism project. The new Hav still has mysteries and hints of conspiracy but like (I suspect) most of the book's readers I so much preferred the older one.

(You can read Ursula Le Guin's brilliant intro to the current edition of "Hav" at:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/03/travel.travelbooks.

(A stimulating analysis of the book by Laleh Khalili recently got me thinking about "Hav" again: http://thegamming.org/2014/06/21/imaginary-cities/ )

The Garden of Raised Expectations: Here Comes Summer

             Even as the much anticipated three day holiday weekend approaches, it seems to me we're at the season's height already. Summer began officially a week ago, with the longest day. For two weeks in this best of all possible Junes, the weather has been superb, the plants growing, flowers opening. 

          And then today the temperature hits ninety. Considerable humidity as well. Do I imagine the snapping of some immortal fingers somewhere. A change is upon us.

            Suddenly everything needs water.We have to work a little harder to keep the garden looking fresh.

            Let me celebrate what we have been enjoying, before it changes

            When the air is dry, the temperature highs around eighty or high seventies, the plants of this climate are happy. Everybody is good. Nobody's depending on me for heroic measures. The June bloomers are blooming, emitting scent -- roses, lavendar. My yellow friends are all at the beginning of their golden cycle. Evening primrose, stella d'oro day lilies, a flowering chamomile, a low winding groundcover with yellow blossoms running rampant in late June.

            Two other mid-summers majors about to open. Orange native daylilies, the first of them today or yesterday; and Queen Anne's Lace, some of these quite tall this year. The first black-eyed susans opened yesterday also, another iconic summer flower.

            In first of these photos I took last Friday, all with the yellow bloomers mentioned above, an annual hibiscus and a few low roses  provide some contrasting dark red. 

           In the next grouping, it's the purple penstemon blooming, while everything else is standing tall. Among the others, the coreopsis directly behind the penstemon is about to spread its hundreds of tiny yellow suns.

           A close-up of some buttery yellow stella d'oro daylilies.  

           The lavender, in the next photo, is blooming at its height, the best it's looked in a couple of years. I wish it would stay that way all summer.

           The pink Knockout roses are planted in front of the house. Behind them you can see a second round of blue clematis growing against the porch. 

           Finally, a closeup of the clematis.

           Everything in season seems to be saying, 'Enjoy it now. This is as well as we can do.' And prepare to roll with the changes.

           

Nothing As Useless As an Old TV

            In the midst of a heart-stopping run of beautiful days -- true June blue -- we decide to replace our decades-old television with a flat screen TV. Apparently our son has been waiting for us to do this for years.  

            I will thoughtfully omit the technical details of this operation because I don't understand them. Needless to say, we would never have accomplished this transaction without our son's assistance. And naturally, in the American consumer way, we had to convince ourselves we were buying something new to save ourselves some money.

            When the new device was up and running,we put the old TV out on the curb for the city garbage pick-up, or anyone else so minded, to take it away. That was easier said than done. Old TVs, that is to say all TVs before the beginning of the flat screen era, are astonishingly heavy. It took both of us to carry it out the front door and down the stairs without breaking anything else we owned or any part of us. Once it hit the curb, we were never going to touch it again.

            We put it out on a Sunday. It was still there Wednesday morning when the garbage trucks began rolling through the streets. Evidently the single object that no one in Quincy can find a use for, even for parts, or for scrap, is a heavy old TV.

            We have a rich history of citizen-initiated curbstone recycling in this city. Any number of ridiculous old objects, worn-out appliances, failed purchases are put out on the street. And quickly disappear. Anne says, just put it out on the street. I say, no one will want it, the garbage truck won't even take it. She wins; I drag it out. We turn out backs: gone.

            Sometimes the delivery man bringing something new takes away something something old completely unrelated to his business. An over-sized barbecue grill went away like that. I think the reason is they can't stand having an empty truck.... A year ago I lugged an air conditioner, as old and heavy as you can imagine and even more junky, outdoors on trash night and even before I put it down on the pavement a car had stopped in the middle of the street and a man and women were getting out to pick up my junk and make it their junk, for some obscure financial benefit.

            "You know it doesn't work," I said.

            "We still want it," the woman replied, in a reassuring tone.

            But this time was different. The TV sat there, an increasingly embarrassed expression spreading over its empty screen in light of its conspicuous lack popularity with the city's junk gleaners.

            Then, absurdly, Tuesday night, the night garbage goes out around here for the Wednesday pickup, someone put an old, heavy, box TV on the curb of the opposite side of the street directly across from ours. The two discarded TVs, identical in size and shape, faced one another.

            This could only be explained to me as an episode in one of those "joke-on-the-unsuspecting-public" TV shows. The script writers set up some absurd, or physically impossible, action/scene/phenomenon in a public place captured by a hidden camera. You're waiting for a bus, say -- an ordinary, jaded, seen-it-all urban dweller -- when the bench begins talking (or emitting rude noises). A balloon follows a child down the street, repeatedly bumping him on the back of the head. A clown jumps out of hiding and chases the ice-cream man into a fast-food joint and all the counter help stops and stares while they have a food fight with ketchup squeeze bottles. Meanwhile the hidden camera captures the spectators' troubled reactions. The man at the bus stop pretends not to notice. A woman double-takes and makes a face, unable to get over her ill-concealed shock -- why are the clown and the ice cream man having a food fight why she's trying to drink her coffee? A young teenager rushes off to call 911.

            So, as the expression goes, I kept looking for the hidden camera.

            But no, no comic development takes place. Then I feared the next time I looked out the window the number of TVs would have doubled again, old sets lined up in front of every house on the street. I suspected the televisions might begin broadcasting clashing TV programs at high volume. It would be as bad as an airport.

            But nothing. The two unwanted technically obsolete entertainment devices -- mere carcasses of their former selves -- remained on opposite sides of the street, awaiting their fate.

            Then early the next morning one, but not both, of the TVs was gone. I notice the absence of the 'other' TV, the one across the street, before I've even had my coffee. Thank goodness, I think, but when I look for ours, it's still there, distressingly larger than life.

Now I'm sure it's a practical joke. Maybe I imagined the whole thing: the old TVs are trying to drive us crazy. Eventually I realize that quite a lot of garbage has been picked up on the opposite side of the street, but rather less on our side.The tension builds during the afternoon: are they still coming for us or is my useless consumer artifact being left behind because I omitted some bureaucratic nicety?

            Around four thirty p.m. the recycling truck finally reaches our side of the street. I watch as a sanitation engineer snaps the white elephant up like a pizza box and tosses it into what appears to be a specially created basin for old TVs. It seems a lot of these old entertainment units are hitting the street.

            Is there anything of value in an old TV? You can't prove it by me.