A lot's been going on lately, which is a good thing. First of all, it's really fucking hot. No, I mean I can feel myself radiating heat after I come back from a run and have been reduced to waking up early just to run. I can honestly say I never thought I'd be one of those people. Really.
Shakespeare started a while back, but so far all I've seen is Love's Labour's Lost, which was a new one for me. Incredibly brief summary: Four men in Navarre have sworn off women to pursue their studies and establish an Academy at the court. The problem is that the king has forgotten that the Princess of France and her three ladies are en route to ask for a war funds. The four men fall in love, but the four ladies fail to take them seriously. Everything is ruined by the announcement that the Princess's father has died.
The production was set in Kennebunkport before America's entry to WWI. This worked well with the French envoy of ladies requesting a war loan and was cleverly used in a couple of important moments. For instance, when the four men discover they've all broken their oaths and decide to jointly pursue the ladies in earnest, they rip off their old school matching college football sweaters. But as to the play itself, I don't think it's held up so well as the other comedies. Harold Bloom claims it as one of his favorites, but it's so full of contemporary jokes and allusions that you're left lost too often. It doesn't help that one of the comic characters, Don Armado, requires an overblown Spanish accent, rendering his jokes even more difficult to follow. This production also gave the scholar Holofernes a little bit of a lisp, further exacerbating the problem. So not my favorite play.
On the writing front, I was told by my workshop last week that the story I gave them was a novel, which is actually how it started out. So not all bad, although I really wasn't looking to be working on a novel now. I've got another couple of days to put together my next piece for them, which most definitely is not a novel, although the world it's in could certainly support one. I do find myself creating quite a number of worlds that sit astride the scifi/fantasy border to varying degrees, and this one very much so does that with post-apocalyptic magic fun.
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