My friends, my co-workers, my fellow television watchers, we now live in a world where many people do not watch television live. TiVo and Netflix have changed our lives. There are many benefits to this new way of watching television. Many people give up cable, electing to save money and watch shows as they become available on Netflix, or if they can't wait that long, watching on Hulu or buying them individually on Amazon. TiVo allows you the flexibility of watching a show on your schedule. It also allows you to skip commercials, which is super-awesome. Even if I intend to watch a show or sporting event on the night it airs, I will let it run for 30 or 45 minutes specifically so I can skip the commercials. I honestly don't remember the last time I watched something live, as it was airing, with the commercials and everything. I think it may have been the Superbowl. This is just how I watch TV now. You can watch a three hour baseball game in two hours. Life is great.
But, this new way of watching television has given rise to at least one problem... spoilers. Because some people do still watch things live. And they get excited and they go to Facebook and Twitter and want to communicate with other people about what they have just seen. And then they are bombarded with a vitriolic chorus of, "Hey! No spoilers! I haven't seen that episode yet! Actually, I'm not even watching that show at all, but I think I might watch it in a few years when my Netflix queue is a bit more manageable!" And I just can't believe I've never ever seen this response, "Too bad, sucker. Watch it live next time."
Here's what I think about online spoilers, it is not the world's responsibility to make sure you don't find out what happened on Breaking Bad last night. If you don't want to be spoiled, watch it live. Or don't go on Facebook until you do watch it. Acknowledging that the world we live in now is one where many people don't watch things as they air, I do think maybe a 24 hour grace period could be in place, but anything more than that is just ridiculous. And even in that case, we have to acknowledge that would be a favor the world is paying us. The world has no obligation in this matter. If I find out the score of a baseball game I recorded before I get a chance to watch it, that's just the price I pay for the benefit of being able to watch that game on my schedule. If my friend goes on Facebook and starts talking about the next horrific thing Walt has done, that's the risk I take for the benefit of skipping commercials. If someone lets slip what happened on Downton Abbey last week, I don't really care because I don't watch that show anyway. Honestly, Facebook spoilers this weekend saved me from watching one baseball game and one football game that would have just been painful anyway.
So, let's try to be nice to each other and hold off on spoilers for a bit if we can, but let's also remember that if we see a spoiler, that's just too bad for us. Because the world doesn't owe you a spoiler free life. If your friend spoiled The Wire before you got all the way through it, too bad for you. Because seriously, that show was over like six years ago.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Monday, November 5, 2012
Please Vote for Love
If you live in the state of Maryland, in many cases, your vote doesn't count. It just doesn't. No matter how you or any of your friends vote, on Tuesday night we're going to see that Barack Obama is going to carry this state. No matter how many people stay home tomorrow, for whatever reason they choose, when they wake up on Wednesday morning, Ben Cardin is still going to be one of their senators. We already know who is going to win most of the elections and which Questions are going to pass. Most of them anyway. Except the most important one.
Question 6. We can debate all day and night about the merits of placing a minority group's individual rights up to a popular vote, but the fact remains that we are going to be voting on that very thing tomorrow. And I, for one, am glad to be given a chance to stand up for what is right.
Maryland is in a unique position here, folks (along with three other states). This question has come up for popular vote in many states before this one, and it will come up in many states after this one (barring action from our federal government to settle this thing once and for all). And it has never passed. Yes, same sex marriage is legal in many states, but each time it's come up for a popular vote it has been denied. Hate has won.
Now it is time for us to lead. We, the people of Maryland, have an awesome responsibility tomorrow. We can be the state that finally says, "Yes." We can be the state that does what is right. We can be the leaders in this fight. We can show the rest of the country what it means to say yes to love. We can show the rest of the country what it means to say yes to family. We can show the rest of the country that Maryland is a state that believes in freedom. We can show the rest of the country that the people of Maryland will not accept hate. Will not accept discrimination. We can do these things and we must.
I have two friends, Ed and Tony. They have been together for as long as I've known them (more than ten years). They have a beautiful little girl named Hayden. They are a loving and committed and beautiful family. On their Facebook page, Ed and Tony proclaim to the world that they are "In a domestic partnership". In a domestic partnership. Please excuse my foul language, but that is fucking unacceptable. They've been together longer than my wife and I have even known each other. They are committed to one another. They have a family. They intend to be with each other for the rest of their lives. And on Facebook they have to tell the world that they are in a domestic partnership. Like fucking roommates.
Enough is enough.
Don't stay home tomorrow. Don't stay home. Get out there and vote. Show this country what it looks like to be on the side of what's right. Show the world that Maryland knows how to treat its citizens. Be the leaders. Ed and Tony and Hayden need you. Please show them that you care. Let them tell the world that they are not domestic partners. They are married. Above all, let them live their lives with dignity. As they will you.
They need your vote. Every single vote matters. Every one. Get to the polls and do what's right. For the first time in the history of this country, let the world see a state whose population says yes to love.
Vote Yes on Question 6.
If this thing doesn't pass I am just going to snap.
Question 6. We can debate all day and night about the merits of placing a minority group's individual rights up to a popular vote, but the fact remains that we are going to be voting on that very thing tomorrow. And I, for one, am glad to be given a chance to stand up for what is right.
Maryland is in a unique position here, folks (along with three other states). This question has come up for popular vote in many states before this one, and it will come up in many states after this one (barring action from our federal government to settle this thing once and for all). And it has never passed. Yes, same sex marriage is legal in many states, but each time it's come up for a popular vote it has been denied. Hate has won.
Now it is time for us to lead. We, the people of Maryland, have an awesome responsibility tomorrow. We can be the state that finally says, "Yes." We can be the state that does what is right. We can be the leaders in this fight. We can show the rest of the country what it means to say yes to love. We can show the rest of the country what it means to say yes to family. We can show the rest of the country that Maryland is a state that believes in freedom. We can show the rest of the country that the people of Maryland will not accept hate. Will not accept discrimination. We can do these things and we must.
I have two friends, Ed and Tony. They have been together for as long as I've known them (more than ten years). They have a beautiful little girl named Hayden. They are a loving and committed and beautiful family. On their Facebook page, Ed and Tony proclaim to the world that they are "In a domestic partnership". In a domestic partnership. Please excuse my foul language, but that is fucking unacceptable. They've been together longer than my wife and I have even known each other. They are committed to one another. They have a family. They intend to be with each other for the rest of their lives. And on Facebook they have to tell the world that they are in a domestic partnership. Like fucking roommates.
Enough is enough.
Don't stay home tomorrow. Don't stay home. Get out there and vote. Show this country what it looks like to be on the side of what's right. Show the world that Maryland knows how to treat its citizens. Be the leaders. Ed and Tony and Hayden need you. Please show them that you care. Let them tell the world that they are not domestic partners. They are married. Above all, let them live their lives with dignity. As they will you.
They need your vote. Every single vote matters. Every one. Get to the polls and do what's right. For the first time in the history of this country, let the world see a state whose population says yes to love.
Vote Yes on Question 6.
If this thing doesn't pass I am just going to snap.
Monday, July 23, 2012
The Aftermath
The Penn State punishment was announced today. I honestly thought everyone in the world (with the exception of Joe Paterno's family) agreed that a strong punishment was necessary. I thought if there is one thing we can all agree is bad and should be punished it's molestation of children and the enabling of that molestation. But today on Facebook I've seen posts that indicate some people think the punishment is too severe and I am honestly dumbfounded.
One comment on a post I read said something like, "all the students at Penn State are being punished for the actions of one asshole". First of all, to call Jerry Sandusky an "asshole" is the largest understatement I can think of. He's not an asshole. He's a monster. He didn't cut someone off in traffic. This man cornered small children in a shower and forcibly shoved his cock into their assholes. I'm sorry to be vulgar, but let's be honest about what we're talking about here. These children looked up to him, trusted him, and he fucked them while they cried for help.
And we're not talking about the actions of one asshole either, or even one monster. We're talking about the actions of five monsters. The most powerful men at Penn State all knew what Jerry Sandusky was doing. They didn't report him to the authorities. They didn't try to stop him. On the contrary, for more than a decade they continued to put him in situations where he would be surrounded by children. They took the man they knew was raping children and they continually stuck him in a room with them. Those children had nobody to protect them. And when adults found out, when adults were finally clued in, they not only covered the whole mess up, they enabled its perpetuation.
All for the sake of their football program. To avoid bad publicity. It was more important to them to protect the integrity of their football program than it was to protect those children who had nobody else to protect them. I cannot imagine a more disgusting abuse of authority than this one. These children were terrorized for more than a decade so that Penn State could avoid bad publicity and continue to field a winning team. Well, if this was done to protect the football team, the only punishment that will have any teeth whatsoever is one that cripples this all important football program.
One argument I've heard against the severity of the punishment is that it punishes the current students and football players at Penn State rather than the men responsible. And it does, but not as strongly as some people seem to make out. And this very argument actually highlights the problem at hand. We're worried that the football program is so important that we'd rather protect it and the entertainment it provides (and dollars to the university) than punish an indescribably grave wrong.
And how severe a punishment are we actually talking about here? Yes, it's crippling to that program for a decade or more. Last year several football players at Ohio State were caught receiving free tattoos. They didn't have to pay for tattoos because they were Ohio State football players. And their university received a one year ban from post season play for that. Free tattoos. At Penn State University children were systematically raped for more than a decade. If free tattoos equals a year, what do you get for terrorizing children for 13? Four years. And an enormous fine. And you lose a ton of scholarships. And your coach has to vacate every win during that span and loses his title as winningest coach in NCAA history. They will be irrelevant for a long time to come. Seems about right to me.
And I just don't understand the argument that you can't lay down this punishment because people other than those guilty will be harmed by it. Of course they will. Sorry. When a father commits a crime and has to go to jail for it, do you honestly think the only person affected by that is the man? Do you think growing up without a father isn't doing irreparable harm to his children? Of course it is. But we can't refuse to send him to jail just because his children will also suffer. (And don't get off on a tangent about how our legal system is inherently flawed and we send too many people to jail. Of course it is, and of course we do, but that isn't the debate we're having today.)
And how severe is this punishment to the football players really? In most situations, a student athlete on scholarship is free to transfer at any time, but if they do they have to sit out for a full year before becoming eligible again. That has been waived for these football players. They can leave Penn State whenever they want with impunity. And we're talking about Division 1 athletes at a football powerhouse. Every single scholarship athlete on that football team is very good at what they do. Each one of them that seeks a scholarship elsewhere will be given one. I admit, it may not be at a school with a program at the level Penn State was when they signed, but they will have an opportunity to play Division 1 ball somewhere else. And those that choose to stay at Penn State and thus suffer from these restrictions, well, that's their choice.
And how severe is the punishment to the student body in general? I grew up rooting for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. And when I say rooting, I mean weeping after losses. I love Nebraska football. And I attended the University of Nebraska for one semester. I lived on the campus where my favorite football team played. If something like this had happened at Nebraska while I was there, I would have been devastated, inconsolable. But how would it have affected the quality of education I was receiving there? It wouldn't have. Was I at school to get an education or was I there to watch football games? I'll tell you what it would have affected; it would have affected the quality of my entertainment on 12 Saturdays a year.
I'm sorry, but the entertainment needs of some students in Pennsylvania are absolutely inconsequential compared to the need to send a message not just to those in charge at Penn State University, but to every college in America. We've known for decades that football (and basketball) programs at United States universities have become too powerful. But we didn't realize just where that would lead. We thought that the education of student athletes was suffering. We thought that actual education was taking a back seat to wins and losses. And we were right. But we never knew the endgame. We couldn't possibly have guessed that there are men in the world who think their school's ability to continue to recruit top level athletes had become more important than every human being's responsibility to care for children who are being attacked. Well now we know. And we have to send a message that this is not okay. That there is no football program in the world that is worth one child getting raped. Every time Jerry Sandusky shoved his cock into a little boy's asshole we were sending a message that we don't care about them as much as we care about sports. Today we sent a different message. And I am amazed that it's not a message that every adult in America can support. That football program and all the people who are affected by this decision are absolutely inconsequential. These children were surrounded by adults who thought football was the most important thing in the world. And if the NCAA didn't stand up and tell them it wasn't, they'd still be thinking it today. I love college football. I look forward to it every year more than you can ever know. But some things are more important. In fact, almost everything I can think of is more important. So if some students at Penn State University have to suffer the consequences of getting that much needed message out, well... so sorry.
UPDATE: I also wanted to write a quick word about an unforeseen (if relatively inconsequential) aspect of this tragedy. From now on, much like baseball fans after the steroids scandal, every fan of a major college athletics program has to ask themselves, "Could this have happened at my school?" "Could this be HAPPENING at my school?"
As I mentioned, I grew up in Nebraska cheering for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. We are fanatic. In Pennsylvania, sports fans have the Steelers. The Eagles. The Phillies. The Pirates. The 76ers. The Penguins. The Flyers. And that's just the professional sports. In Nebraska if we want to cheer for a professional team in ANY sport, we have to look outside the state. If we want to cheer for a college team of any importance at all, we have to look outside the state. We have Nebraska football. That's it. The first time Nebraska played for a National Championship during my lifetime, churches in the state cancelled services because they knew nobody would be there.
Tom Osborne is at least as beloved in Nebraska as Joe Paterno in Pennsylvania. They say the exact same things about him. A man of principle. A man who puts the "student" ahead of "athlete". A man who knows what is right and who acts on that. If you asked me a year ago if I believed officially sanctioned child molestation was happening under the watch of Tom Osborne I would have answered with an incredulous, "Are you crazy?" What would Penn State fans have answered to that question a year ago?
This places doubt in the minds of every fan of every college football program in the country. Or if it doesn't, it should. Because if it can happen under the watch of Joe Paterno, it can happen anywhere.
One comment on a post I read said something like, "all the students at Penn State are being punished for the actions of one asshole". First of all, to call Jerry Sandusky an "asshole" is the largest understatement I can think of. He's not an asshole. He's a monster. He didn't cut someone off in traffic. This man cornered small children in a shower and forcibly shoved his cock into their assholes. I'm sorry to be vulgar, but let's be honest about what we're talking about here. These children looked up to him, trusted him, and he fucked them while they cried for help.
And we're not talking about the actions of one asshole either, or even one monster. We're talking about the actions of five monsters. The most powerful men at Penn State all knew what Jerry Sandusky was doing. They didn't report him to the authorities. They didn't try to stop him. On the contrary, for more than a decade they continued to put him in situations where he would be surrounded by children. They took the man they knew was raping children and they continually stuck him in a room with them. Those children had nobody to protect them. And when adults found out, when adults were finally clued in, they not only covered the whole mess up, they enabled its perpetuation.
All for the sake of their football program. To avoid bad publicity. It was more important to them to protect the integrity of their football program than it was to protect those children who had nobody else to protect them. I cannot imagine a more disgusting abuse of authority than this one. These children were terrorized for more than a decade so that Penn State could avoid bad publicity and continue to field a winning team. Well, if this was done to protect the football team, the only punishment that will have any teeth whatsoever is one that cripples this all important football program.
One argument I've heard against the severity of the punishment is that it punishes the current students and football players at Penn State rather than the men responsible. And it does, but not as strongly as some people seem to make out. And this very argument actually highlights the problem at hand. We're worried that the football program is so important that we'd rather protect it and the entertainment it provides (and dollars to the university) than punish an indescribably grave wrong.
And how severe a punishment are we actually talking about here? Yes, it's crippling to that program for a decade or more. Last year several football players at Ohio State were caught receiving free tattoos. They didn't have to pay for tattoos because they were Ohio State football players. And their university received a one year ban from post season play for that. Free tattoos. At Penn State University children were systematically raped for more than a decade. If free tattoos equals a year, what do you get for terrorizing children for 13? Four years. And an enormous fine. And you lose a ton of scholarships. And your coach has to vacate every win during that span and loses his title as winningest coach in NCAA history. They will be irrelevant for a long time to come. Seems about right to me.
And I just don't understand the argument that you can't lay down this punishment because people other than those guilty will be harmed by it. Of course they will. Sorry. When a father commits a crime and has to go to jail for it, do you honestly think the only person affected by that is the man? Do you think growing up without a father isn't doing irreparable harm to his children? Of course it is. But we can't refuse to send him to jail just because his children will also suffer. (And don't get off on a tangent about how our legal system is inherently flawed and we send too many people to jail. Of course it is, and of course we do, but that isn't the debate we're having today.)
And how severe is this punishment to the football players really? In most situations, a student athlete on scholarship is free to transfer at any time, but if they do they have to sit out for a full year before becoming eligible again. That has been waived for these football players. They can leave Penn State whenever they want with impunity. And we're talking about Division 1 athletes at a football powerhouse. Every single scholarship athlete on that football team is very good at what they do. Each one of them that seeks a scholarship elsewhere will be given one. I admit, it may not be at a school with a program at the level Penn State was when they signed, but they will have an opportunity to play Division 1 ball somewhere else. And those that choose to stay at Penn State and thus suffer from these restrictions, well, that's their choice.
And how severe is the punishment to the student body in general? I grew up rooting for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. And when I say rooting, I mean weeping after losses. I love Nebraska football. And I attended the University of Nebraska for one semester. I lived on the campus where my favorite football team played. If something like this had happened at Nebraska while I was there, I would have been devastated, inconsolable. But how would it have affected the quality of education I was receiving there? It wouldn't have. Was I at school to get an education or was I there to watch football games? I'll tell you what it would have affected; it would have affected the quality of my entertainment on 12 Saturdays a year.
I'm sorry, but the entertainment needs of some students in Pennsylvania are absolutely inconsequential compared to the need to send a message not just to those in charge at Penn State University, but to every college in America. We've known for decades that football (and basketball) programs at United States universities have become too powerful. But we didn't realize just where that would lead. We thought that the education of student athletes was suffering. We thought that actual education was taking a back seat to wins and losses. And we were right. But we never knew the endgame. We couldn't possibly have guessed that there are men in the world who think their school's ability to continue to recruit top level athletes had become more important than every human being's responsibility to care for children who are being attacked. Well now we know. And we have to send a message that this is not okay. That there is no football program in the world that is worth one child getting raped. Every time Jerry Sandusky shoved his cock into a little boy's asshole we were sending a message that we don't care about them as much as we care about sports. Today we sent a different message. And I am amazed that it's not a message that every adult in America can support. That football program and all the people who are affected by this decision are absolutely inconsequential. These children were surrounded by adults who thought football was the most important thing in the world. And if the NCAA didn't stand up and tell them it wasn't, they'd still be thinking it today. I love college football. I look forward to it every year more than you can ever know. But some things are more important. In fact, almost everything I can think of is more important. So if some students at Penn State University have to suffer the consequences of getting that much needed message out, well... so sorry.
UPDATE: I also wanted to write a quick word about an unforeseen (if relatively inconsequential) aspect of this tragedy. From now on, much like baseball fans after the steroids scandal, every fan of a major college athletics program has to ask themselves, "Could this have happened at my school?" "Could this be HAPPENING at my school?"
As I mentioned, I grew up in Nebraska cheering for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. We are fanatic. In Pennsylvania, sports fans have the Steelers. The Eagles. The Phillies. The Pirates. The 76ers. The Penguins. The Flyers. And that's just the professional sports. In Nebraska if we want to cheer for a professional team in ANY sport, we have to look outside the state. If we want to cheer for a college team of any importance at all, we have to look outside the state. We have Nebraska football. That's it. The first time Nebraska played for a National Championship during my lifetime, churches in the state cancelled services because they knew nobody would be there.
Tom Osborne is at least as beloved in Nebraska as Joe Paterno in Pennsylvania. They say the exact same things about him. A man of principle. A man who puts the "student" ahead of "athlete". A man who knows what is right and who acts on that. If you asked me a year ago if I believed officially sanctioned child molestation was happening under the watch of Tom Osborne I would have answered with an incredulous, "Are you crazy?" What would Penn State fans have answered to that question a year ago?
This places doubt in the minds of every fan of every college football program in the country. Or if it doesn't, it should. Because if it can happen under the watch of Joe Paterno, it can happen anywhere.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Shakespeare in Translation
The four of you who might actually read this already know who I am, but just in case some high school kid googles "Shakespeare translation" and lands here and for some unknown reason doesn't flee immediately, I am the Director of Programming for the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. Today we had our first annual Artistic Retreat and it was a huge success. But, we did have one moment of contention and I wanted to get my thoughts about it down while it's still fresh and I figured some other people might like to read about it.
We had a panel called, "What Makes Shakespeare So Great?" That also happens to be our mission statement. We had several Shakespeare type people on the panel. Somewhere early on in the planning stages it occurred to me that if we only have a panel full of Shakespeare type people what we'll get is a bunch of someone saying something and then everyone else in the room nodding and smiling and then someone else saying something and everyone else in the room nodding and smiling. Not a very interesting panel. So I decided to ask my friend Gwydion Suilebhan to join the panel. For those of you who don't know Gwydion, he is a local playwright and blogger and all around theatre thinker. And he is a dear friend of mine (my second child is named Henry Gwydion Kilpatrick).
I asked Gwydion to join the panel because I knew he had a healthy respect and appreciation for Shakespeare but that he wouldn't always share the same opinion as everyone else in the room. For one thing, as a living playwright, he is one of those crazy charlatans who believes we do too much Shakespeare in this country to the exclusion of new playwrights who are alive and trying to make a living doing this. We've all been passed over for a job. Try being passed over time and again in favor of a dude who's been dead for 400 years. Probably starts to get old.
I asked Gwydion to join our panel telling him that I was worried about a panel with a room full of people nodding and smiling.
Gwydion immediately and excitedly agreed. But until we were in the moment I never thought about the flip side of that coin... I was asking my good friend to be the person who steps into a room full of nodding and smiling people and MAKE THEM STOP NODDING AND SMILING. And my dear, brave friend looked into that sea of nodding and smiling faces and damn it, he made them stop. As one the nodding ended and a room full of eyes focused their energy on the guy who had the audacity to say that the time is approaching when we will have to start translating Shakespeare for performance. For those of you who are not Shakespeare nerds, let me tell you... that is not a very popular opinion. I don't think I agree with Gwydion, but not for the reasons everyone else in the room vehemently and vocally disagreed with him, but boy do I admire the courage it must have taken to look out at those happy people and really piss them off. Thank you, Gwydion. And I'm sorry.
Gwydion eloquently stated his case and I will do a very poor job of trying to state it here because I haven't thought about it much other than to angrily dismiss the notion when it's come up before. But, I'll give it a try. Our language is a living language, more than almost any other language on the planet. It's constantly changing and adapting. The language being spoken 1,000 years ago is almost unrecognizable to us now and our language will be almost unrecognizable to English speakers 1,000 years from now, if any still exist. Shakespeare has already become difficult for people to understand on first reading and will only become more so until eventually we will need to find another poetic genius to step in and translate them for us. That's it in a nutshell. Gwydion, if I mangled it, I apologize.
And the arguments started flying at him. If the audience doesn't understand what's happening, that's the actor's fault, not Shakespeare's. 99% of the words we find in Shakespeare are still in use today. Yes, we have to translate Chaucer, but that was literally a different language. And many others that I have forgotten.
But I think I would use a different argument. It is undeniable that Shakespeare is difficult for us to understand. I've been reading Shakespeare closely for about 20 years now, not nearly as long as some of the people in the room, but still a pretty long time. I would call myself a savvy consumer of Shakespeare. Even so, I don't immediately understand every word as I read it. And when I'm watching it my understanding drops even further. If the acting is bad, the stuff is damn near incomprehensible.
I would argue that is not so much because the language has changed since Shakespeare died. It has, but I don't think that's why we have difficulty understanding it. I think we have difficulty understanding it because it's poetry. There was poetry written last year that I don't understand without hours of careful reading. This is the dense language of imagery. These plays are not written in the way that we communicate with each other today, and I would argue that they weren't written in the way people communicated with each other in Shakespeare's day. This is a master wordsmith intentionally packing every single line with as much imagery and intelligence and emotion that he could possibly muster. There is just too much there. If you can read Whitman and understand every word on the page without ever backing up, I take my hat off to you. I can't. It takes work. And when you're sitting in an audience listening to it, you don't have time to do that work in the moment without missing what's coming next.
I haven't really thought about this issue before because my reaction was so immediate and visceral that I didn't give it a chance to fester. I'm sure I'll be thinking about it much more in the coming days (because this is what Shakespeare nerds do). But I will say that we don't always understand everything that's being said on the Shakespearean stage. We just don't. We never will. But that's what makes it so great. If it wasn't so dense and full of nuance and beauty we would have stopped performing it hundreds of years ago. We don't always understand it. And I'm okay with that.
We had a panel called, "What Makes Shakespeare So Great?" That also happens to be our mission statement. We had several Shakespeare type people on the panel. Somewhere early on in the planning stages it occurred to me that if we only have a panel full of Shakespeare type people what we'll get is a bunch of someone saying something and then everyone else in the room nodding and smiling and then someone else saying something and everyone else in the room nodding and smiling. Not a very interesting panel. So I decided to ask my friend Gwydion Suilebhan to join the panel. For those of you who don't know Gwydion, he is a local playwright and blogger and all around theatre thinker. And he is a dear friend of mine (my second child is named Henry Gwydion Kilpatrick).
I asked Gwydion to join the panel because I knew he had a healthy respect and appreciation for Shakespeare but that he wouldn't always share the same opinion as everyone else in the room. For one thing, as a living playwright, he is one of those crazy charlatans who believes we do too much Shakespeare in this country to the exclusion of new playwrights who are alive and trying to make a living doing this. We've all been passed over for a job. Try being passed over time and again in favor of a dude who's been dead for 400 years. Probably starts to get old.
I asked Gwydion to join our panel telling him that I was worried about a panel with a room full of people nodding and smiling.
Gwydion immediately and excitedly agreed. But until we were in the moment I never thought about the flip side of that coin... I was asking my good friend to be the person who steps into a room full of nodding and smiling people and MAKE THEM STOP NODDING AND SMILING. And my dear, brave friend looked into that sea of nodding and smiling faces and damn it, he made them stop. As one the nodding ended and a room full of eyes focused their energy on the guy who had the audacity to say that the time is approaching when we will have to start translating Shakespeare for performance. For those of you who are not Shakespeare nerds, let me tell you... that is not a very popular opinion. I don't think I agree with Gwydion, but not for the reasons everyone else in the room vehemently and vocally disagreed with him, but boy do I admire the courage it must have taken to look out at those happy people and really piss them off. Thank you, Gwydion. And I'm sorry.Gwydion eloquently stated his case and I will do a very poor job of trying to state it here because I haven't thought about it much other than to angrily dismiss the notion when it's come up before. But, I'll give it a try. Our language is a living language, more than almost any other language on the planet. It's constantly changing and adapting. The language being spoken 1,000 years ago is almost unrecognizable to us now and our language will be almost unrecognizable to English speakers 1,000 years from now, if any still exist. Shakespeare has already become difficult for people to understand on first reading and will only become more so until eventually we will need to find another poetic genius to step in and translate them for us. That's it in a nutshell. Gwydion, if I mangled it, I apologize.
And the arguments started flying at him. If the audience doesn't understand what's happening, that's the actor's fault, not Shakespeare's. 99% of the words we find in Shakespeare are still in use today. Yes, we have to translate Chaucer, but that was literally a different language. And many others that I have forgotten.
But I think I would use a different argument. It is undeniable that Shakespeare is difficult for us to understand. I've been reading Shakespeare closely for about 20 years now, not nearly as long as some of the people in the room, but still a pretty long time. I would call myself a savvy consumer of Shakespeare. Even so, I don't immediately understand every word as I read it. And when I'm watching it my understanding drops even further. If the acting is bad, the stuff is damn near incomprehensible.
I would argue that is not so much because the language has changed since Shakespeare died. It has, but I don't think that's why we have difficulty understanding it. I think we have difficulty understanding it because it's poetry. There was poetry written last year that I don't understand without hours of careful reading. This is the dense language of imagery. These plays are not written in the way that we communicate with each other today, and I would argue that they weren't written in the way people communicated with each other in Shakespeare's day. This is a master wordsmith intentionally packing every single line with as much imagery and intelligence and emotion that he could possibly muster. There is just too much there. If you can read Whitman and understand every word on the page without ever backing up, I take my hat off to you. I can't. It takes work. And when you're sitting in an audience listening to it, you don't have time to do that work in the moment without missing what's coming next.
I haven't really thought about this issue before because my reaction was so immediate and visceral that I didn't give it a chance to fester. I'm sure I'll be thinking about it much more in the coming days (because this is what Shakespeare nerds do). But I will say that we don't always understand everything that's being said on the Shakespearean stage. We just don't. We never will. But that's what makes it so great. If it wasn't so dense and full of nuance and beauty we would have stopped performing it hundreds of years ago. We don't always understand it. And I'm okay with that.
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