Primrose Road

Note: Very early in this review, I "give away" this production's ending. I've waited until the after the last performance (June 29th) to post my review, but I'm giving fair warning because I know how much Internetters viciously eschew "spoilers." (Yes, spoilerphobics, I *am* making fun of you.)

For the most part, there was little if anything that was utterly new-and-exciting about this Shakespeare in the Park production directed by Oskar Eustis.. (Then again, it is difficult-to-impossible to do anything new-and-exciting with Hamlet.) The Wooster Group's production at the Public last fall was, in my view, far more thought-provoking. Here at the Delacorte, we saw an early-to-mid-twentieth century military-based monarchy in which the older generation often wore military costumes from the previous century. Eustis, who told a Playbill interviewer that the character Hamlet faces "a nation run by a corrupt leadership at a time of generalized paranoia," seemed to want remind audiences that Hamlet is not simply Shakespeare's most character-driven play but also an important political drama.

The decision to give the production a dual focus -- Hamlet as grieving son and Hamlet as potential political figure -- likely contributed to the three-and-a-half-hour runtime. (Perhaps Eustis also did not want to cut any of onetime-Hamlet Sam Waterston's lines as Polonius.) The politics of Hamlet were most strikingly highlighted in the blocking of the play's very last line: Fortinbras' command, "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." In the playtext (though not in the First Quarto, which omits Fortinbras' last line altogether), the stage direction indicates that the soldiers should shoot a "peal of ordnance."

Here, one of Fortinbras' soldiers shoots Horatio, the character who is supposed to survive his friend Hamlet and tell his story.

This Fortinbras is not Hamlet's double; he is not the young man who also lost a father but chose to take action rather than brood. When he commands his soldier to shoot Horatio (has this possibility ever been addressed in the academic literature, I wonder?), it becomes clear that in this production, Hamlet's dying command to "give [his] voice" to Fortinbras is a mistake on Hamlet's part. In 4.4, when the Norwegian Captain tells Hamlet about Fortinbras' invasion of Poland, we hear bombs and realize that we are witnessing an air raid. Perhaps at this point, Hamlet -- quite confused, as his subsequent "what is a man" soliloquy suggests -- mistakenly decides that he needs to be more like Fortinbras.

I'm basically in full agreement with the New York Times' assessment of the Polonius family: Sam Waterston played a Polonius who was far more complicated than the doddering old man and protective father types that his character does indeed encompass. Often foolish and sometimes sadly lost in his own mind, Polonius loves his children but doesn't know how to help them. After a "get thee to a nunnery" scene in which Hamlet doesn't know that Ophelia's lying (it's refreshing to see it staged this way after a string of movie adaptations in which Hamlet's anger is definitively triggered by her lie) but continues to feign madness and anger in order to push her away, Ophelia reaches up to her father, who is way up on the "ramparts"; all he can do is reach back down. Later, when Ophelia's sanity is almost entirely gone, she reaches up to heaven in the same way, unable to connect with her out-of-reach father.

Lauren Ambrose played Ophelia's mad scenes with a surprising, intelligent aesthetic beauty. She could have easily gone with a sort of chemical-psychological-realism here, given that she spent some years with the mental-illness-fest television show Six Feet Under, but managed to play a sorrowful, regretful Ophelia rather than an uncomfortably terrifying Ophelia. I only wish that, because of the sometimes-political nature of this production, Ambrose and Eustis would have seen Ophelia as more of an astute political commentator. (After all, if she understands what Hamlet means when he tells her that all who are married "but one" will die, then she is the only character who knows that Hamlet is planning to kill Claudius.)

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Hamlet as a realistically grief-stricken thirty-year-old man (realism actually worked for his character much better than it would have worked for Ophelia's) who has a sense of humor and regularly makes a variety of groaning noises to express a range of emotions (and not only when he's feigning madness). This Hamlet is a good man who makes some awful decisions under the pressures forced on him by his mother, uncle, and dead father. I wondered, then, why the director made the decision to go the Zefferelli route with the scene in Gertrude's bedroom (i.e. suggesting that Hamlet might have raped his mother had Polonius not stirred behind the arras) when he'd otherwise sketched out a Hamlet who is not crazy or sexually problematized but rather simply overwhelmingly saddened by grief. This simplistically Freudian route offers, for me, very little payoff.

Stuhlbarg seems to have a very good sense of rhythm and how the Shakespearean line works. This became especially clear when the actor had to handle two unexpected situations, an overhead helicopter and a coughing fit. After Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he could be bounded in a nutshell, a helicopter passed over us; instead of trying to finish the line over the sound of the helicopter, Stuhlbarg instead paused and followed the helicopter with his eyes, eliciting laughter from the audience. Of course, the crazed "oh-my-god-it's-a-flying-machine" look was an easy way out, but the break itself seemed to be exactly on rhythm, as if the iambic pentameter beat had kept going on regardless of the pause in speech. Later (I believe during the "what is a man" soliloquy), he handled a slight coughing fit well, even keeping his coughing on rhythm to some degree.

(NB: the above observations on rhythm may simply be the result of the fact that I'm currently working on a dissertation chapter about blank verse ...)

With the exception of the giant moths flying at our heads (perhaps the reason for Stuhlbarg's coughing?), the 5 1/2 hours of sitting on woodchips while waiting for tickets, and the 3 1/2 hours of sitting on rather uncomfortable seats, Shakespeare in the Park offered a lovely night and an entertaining -- and occasionally surprising -- Hamlet.

On May 17th, I received a postcard from something called "The National Scholars Honor Society" inviting me to apply for membership via http://www.magnacumlaude.org. Listen closely and you'll hear the scam sirens:



The fact that they give out a handful of $5000 scholarships is what probably keeps them on the right side of legal, but technical legality doesn't mean it's not a scam (i.e. Poetry.com, PublishAmerica, and blogosphere favorite DirectBuy). Naturally, I decided to apply for membership, since I was "cordially invited," after all.

The online application requested my address and phone number, the name of my college/university (shouldn't they already know that?), my "current scholastic level" (fascinating how the application is identical for undergrads and grad students), and an optional section for "personal information," including "awards, honors, memberships, personal attributes, accomplishments, experiences." It said that the section was optional but would be used for "initial evaluation," so of course, I left it blank.

This morning, I received a -- what do you know? -- letter of acceptance from the National Honor Society! (Incidentally, or perhaps not, I also received a notice that I am being "considered for inclusion" in the Cambridge Who's Who Among Executive and Professional Women.) The National Honor Society writes:

It is my honor and privilege to extend congratulations on your acceptance into The National Scholars Honor Society. Our membership of over 90,000 university scholars and students welcomes you.

Hmm, this doesn't sound like an uberselect group, does it?

And naturally, the next step is for me to "complete my membership" with a Visa, Mastercard, or Discover; their "lifetime membership fee" is $85.00.

College students and their parents should be aware that "The National Scholars Honor Society" most likely operates along the same lines as publishing scams: every student is accepted, and every student must pay a membership fee. (Yes, most legitimate honor societies do charge a yearly fee, but they don't send unsolicited application requests and have a much more rigorous application process than an online form that asks for your name, address, email, and the name of your school.) I'd warn students and parents to avoid any unsolicited invitations to join honors societies or be listed in a directory, and of course, to be wary of "scholarship search services" that charge exorbitant fees merely to do what you could do with Google and a printer.

According to Oprahdoctor Michael Roizen (an MD who, like Mehmet Oz, seems a bit too friendly towards alternative medicine), my "RealAge" is 24.9, younger than my real age, because I take my medications as directed, wear my seatbelt, don't talk on my cell phone while driving, eat fruit, and ... because my parents are still married. While Roizen's test can be a useful tool for encouraging people to start exercising, eat better, and quit smoking, I am not pleased with the implications that the children of divorce, those who do not attend a place of worship at least once a week, and those who don't buy into the vitamin supplement business are somehow in worse health than others.

The site recommends that I manage my allergies better, get a larger car (!!!!!), take vitamin E and omega-3 supplements, and get a dog.

In the test-prep classes I teach during the summer, we advise students to avoid the "1/2 right, 1/2 wrong" answer trap ... I think we may also need to advise Internetters and TV-watchers against the "1/2 good medical advice, 1/2 woo" answer trap as well.

I am waiting on line. Please keep your fingers crossed that I can get through five hours without needing to make use of restroom facilities.

You know you've got issues when you're willing to sacrifice your bladder for Hamlet.

Yesterday, as a result of boredom and a yearly-doctor-checkup day off of work (him, not me; I'm a dirty hippie grad student who is teaching evenings and weekends this summer), el SigOther and I went to see Don't Mess With the Zohan, a movie which included both an allegorical look at British colonization of the Middle East and Adam Sandler catching a fish with his ass.

When we left the movie theater, there was a bright green flyer on my windshield for a service called "New York Trackers," which purports to help suspicious spouses and girlfriends/boyfriends catch their other halves in the act of cheating. Here is the first paragraph of the flyer, reprinted here as written (for your enjoyment):

Being unfaithful or having an affair, whatever you call it; it is likely to be one of the most painful And devastating things that can happen to you. Not knowing if your spouse is cheating on you or Not is equally as painful. Let us find the truth with out spending hundreds or thousands on private Investigators. Let us help you at New York Trackers; here we are able to get you the truth with out Costing you a fortune:

One service is offered is GPS vehicle tracking, where a car can be "equipped" with a tracking device. Also,

we have software that can run totally in stealth; that is, it is virtually undetectable to the user it will NOT show up in the task manager ... These programs monitor Keystroke's, Emails Sent and Received, Internet Chat Conversations, Website Activity, Screenshot Capturing and much more.

All legality issues aside, style and usage DO function in advertising, kiddies.

+1 for using an unlisted phone number, though.

Reading Timothy Steele's All The Fun's In How You Say A Thing, I'm convinced that what's makes English verse so captivating is not its "naturalness" but rather the near-total disjunction between meter and meaning in English, which occurs because ever since 1066 or so, English meaning has been conveyed more by word order than declension (as in Latin and German) or synthesis/agglutination.

Whenever I read about someone buying into publishing or multilevel marketing scams or the like, my first question is how could (s)he not have known? With the plethora of information out there on *this very Internet* about such scams, a simple Google search could have allowed him or her to avoid a bad decision. But it may be more complicated: this is merely speculation based on personal experience, but I wonder if the problem is not that many of us ignore the information, but that we simply don't seek out the information in the first place.

In 2002, several family members (including one who does very good work in a field that is based in real medicine but unfortunately also saturated with alternative theories of medicine) recommended that I visit a chiropractor. Months earlier, I'd had two operations on my jaw after I'd contracted a rare jaw infection (apparently so rare that it was the diagnosis on an episode of House ;)); after the procedures and some other fun stuff, I developed tingling and numbness around my jaw, and bad pain in my left shoulder and neck. As a first-year master's degree student who was still kind of into Wicca (yes, please feel free to beat me up in the schoolyard after class), I was uncomfortable with the neurologist who electrocuted me (ok, a bit of an exaggeration), stuck a giant needle in my arm and twisted it around (really, but it's an actual nerve test) and suggested I have steroids injected into my head (ok, so I may be remembering that slightly wrong). I didn't like taking painkillers and muscle relaxers, because I am -- as my father has aptly described me -- the world's worst junkie, where everything makes me drowsy and nonfunctional. So I saw the chiropractor as a valid alternative.

I remember one day after my first two weeks of seeing the chiropractor (three adjustments a week were recommended at first!), I was sitting in Shakespeare and Gender class -- it was summer and we were all reading Twelfth Night in tank tops and shorts -- I felt an excruciating pain in my shoulder. In my mind, I didn't connect the pain to the chiropractic treatments, but simply believed it was pain that was already there, and that the chiropractic treatments would soon heal it.

Indeed, weeks later, I did start to feel better. Today, I can chalk this up to (1) the placebo effect and (2) the fact that my brain was finally starting to tell my body that the area around my jaw wasn't injured anymore, but at the time, I assumed it was because of the chiropractor, and continued to visit the chiropractor for years, thinking my monthly visits to his office were allowing me to "maintain" my condition. As I think back on it now, I did have quite a few days where I had pain, and yet never once connected it to the possibility that chiropractic care is based on a theory of imaginary subluxations in the spine.

Late last month, I visited my general practitioner because of unusually bad neck and shoulder pain (I try to avoid the meds, but was a week away from a 12-hour train ride to Toronto) and he pointed out, following a nerve test, that I most likely still had pinched nerves, despite various chiropractic claims. I told the nurse performing the test about my chiropractor visits (and about the fact that my student insurance won't allow neurologist visits), and she said, quite rightly as I realize now, that having your spine moved back and forth for six years *can't* be too good for you.

I find it fascinating that there is (and has been for years) plenty of information out there about research that shows that chiropractic is only beneficial as a form of physical therapy for lower back pain, it to a large degree disregards important components of the germ theory of medicine, and quite frighteningly, that neck adjustments can cause stroke. Though I've spent an average of two hours a day on the Internet since 1996, I somehow managed to never encounter this widely available information. I wasn't ignoring what was right in front of me; I simply was (perhaps somehow by choice) not encountering what should have been right in front of me.

Please accept my apologies for breaking the No Blogging About Pain Law of the Internet (which I made up just now, but it's an excellent law). It's interesting, though, that people -- myself included -- can miss the obvious when the obvious challenges their favorite placebos or scams.

According to Wired (which incidentally this month also declared THE END OF THEORY!!!111!!5!!#1!!), there's a game/SIM called Zero Hour: America's Medic which is being used to train paramedics in disaster response. Basically, paramedics get immersed in one of three situations: an unusual flu breaks out at an apartment building, a possibly radioactive bomb explodes at a baseball stadium, and finally (here I'll quote the item) "a freight train has derailed at a downtown station during rush hour, spewing lethal chemicals into the air." Other people realize what's kind of funny about that last one, right?

Meanwhile, I do like the idea of computers that can think better than humans do, because they can serve to remind us humanpeople that thinking isn't supernatural or preternatural.

I am, as always, fascinated by the number of people who apparently find Primrose Road via searches for the phrase "Saturn in the eighth house." And I'm pretty impressed that someone got here simply by searching on the word "Jews." But one search term this month by far takes the cake:

"romantic hilarity"

We've discovered a new genre.

I suspect that the dumbening (the "b" is pronounced) is beginning.

This afternoon I typed up the day-by-day breakdowns for my fall semester Freshman Comp and Intro to Fiction courses. The Intro to Fiction is still just an outline, but the Freshman Comp is, for the most part, finished. I figured that with this out of the way, I could spend some notdissertating time the summer outlining lectures for the two (50 student!!!) Into to Fictions.

My day-by-day breakdowns incorporated Thanksgiving Break, Columbus Day, the extra day I'm taking off so that I can visit a friend in the Netherlands Thanksgiving week, the extra day I've added to the syllabus for make-up week, etc. Then, I logged in to the faculty website to check on final exam dates. Apparently, the three Monday/Wednesday classes I thought I was teaching actually meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Let this be a lesson, kiddies: never do anything ten weeks in advance.