(no subject)

On the recommendation of skygiants, I went to see the Arden Theater Company's "Equivocation" with nathanielperson last week.

"Equivocation" is a sort of alternate history play in which Robert Cecil commissions Shakespeare to create a propaganda play about the Gunpowder Plot. The resulting drama focuses on conversations between Shakespeare and his troupe as they try to figure out the mechanics of staging the play, as well as conversations with alleged conspirators in the plot and conversations with Cecil and King James I to wrestle toward the human motivations behind the story.

Equivocation in the title is, naturally, a somewhat multivalent theme. It's a callback to the bawdy porter scene from Macbeth, as well to a theological treatise the Catholic priest and possible Gunpowder Plot conspirator Henry Garnet wrote on the subject of the doctrine of the same name- which is the question of how a religious believer can use careful language to satisfy persecutors without betraying religious conviction. From these places, it leads to the play's central political question: how can one create art that represents truth, but also satisfies political needs? It additionally leads to the central emotional thread: How can one lead a life where one is honest with those we love, without hurting them and letting them hurt us?

As these stories unfold: the story of Shakespeare and Richard Burbage loving each other more than they love their families, but not trusting that the other cares as much as they do... the story of Shakespeare and his daughter Judith circling each other uneasily, uncertain how to speak about the death of Hamnet and how it has shattered their family... the story of Richard Sharpe and Richard Burbage struggling with each other for respect and artistic primacy in the company... as these stories unfold, Cecil's presence fades into the background. He is a memorable villain, but he does not get much of a meaningful story arc. The other characters lives matter much more to the story than the story's ostensible plot.

The acting was stupendous. The actors all served multiple roles, doublings between members of the King's Men and the various roles they played that spoke both to the actor as mimic of reality and to the thematic resonances between the actors' storylines and the Gunpowder plot trial storylines.

And I loved the use of backstage as a staging ground to litigate the way stories work. The play's best line is Shakespeare's telling Cecil that the story of the gunpowder treason has no plot, to which Cecil replies "It's treason to say there was no plot," before realizing that Shakespeare is talking about narrative plot. The idea behind this joke, that stories are things with rules that are not the same rules as the rules of reality, even stories influence how we view reality, was really powerfully developed.

My only complaint was the show's humor, which largely centered around tame metajokes about Shakespeare's legacy that drew laughter from a small handful of theater geeks in the audience disproportionate to how funny the jokes actually were. The laughter felt to me like the theater geeks were saying, "Look at me, I get this joke that the rest of the audience probably doesn't get, and I find that validating." Except that I got most of the jokes because of my knowledge of Shakespeare despite not being a theater geek, and didn't laugh because I was in this weird null zone of getting in-jokes for a group I'm not part of.

(no subject)

Um... Star Wars. The usual disclaimer that I'm an asshole who doesn't cut-tag spoilers applies. The other usual disclaimer is that it's not really all that likely that I'll talk all that specifically about the major twists in the story, because that's not usually where my focus is in talking about fiction.



I saw it last night with a bunch of friends, and I have to say that even if the movie had been terrible, that's how I'd want to see it, the excitement and enthusiasm of opening night and the joy of sharing it with friends. The Star Wars movies are for me such a powerfully communal fannish experience... my first experiences with online fandom were Star Wars play by post rpgs as a teenager and online yahoogroup fan clubs talking obsessively about the minutiae of the EU. I love the movies, especially Episodes IV and V, but I love playing in the worlds of Star Wars with my friends more than I love watching the movies. The excitement in the room when the opening crawl was palpable and was better than the actual crawl itself by miles.

The movie wasn't terrible, though. It was actually quite good. The new characters, particularly Rey and Finn, slotted seamlessly into the world of the classic trilogy and felt like real people immediately. The plot moved nicely without the annoying lags that mar Episodes II and III, the visual vocabulary of the movie FELT like Star Wars. Han and Leia and Chewie and Threepio were used marvelously, with the relationship between Han and Ben representing one of the best emotional arcs in any Star Wars film despite how little we knew about its details. These weren't cameos, this was a completion of stories that also passed the torch.

The first appearance of the Falcon on Jakku and the chase scene that followed was a wonderful action scene, and the final duel between Kylo Ren and Rey was a phenomenal piece of action storytelling. The scene at Maz Kanata's was far too short, but it was full of detail and depth and fun. BB88 was adorable and the Finn/Poe bond was nice and I really liked the ups and downs of the Rey/Finn relationship.

But... there are buts. This was an unsatisfying movie, one much more preoccupied with asking questions and setting up new characters and story-lines than with giving the kind of complete narrative that A New Hope managed. We know virtually nothing about Rey's backstory, a lack that doesn't impair the movie until the ending, where her final meeting with Luke is incomprehensible and will remain so until the sequel. We barely got the time to form any attachment to Poe, so the interludes in the final battle where we see his X-wings are nowhere near as tense and memorable as the X-wing vs. TIE duels of A New Hope because we just don't care that much about Poe, compared to Han and Chewie and Rey and Finn and R2 and even to some degree Kylo Ren, who are all chewing up story like mad in the parallel sequences.

And the factional politics were particularly muddled. In A New Hope, you don't know anything about the Empire or the Alliance, but you have a sense of their relation: The Empire is big, vast, impersonal, and evil. The Rebels are tiny, underfunded, scrappy, and fighting for freedom. But in The Force Awakens there is The Republic, the First Order, and the Resistance, three factions whose relation to each other is confusing and ambiguous and we get no sense of scale. Is the First Order more powerful than the Republic? Is the Republic more powerful than the First Order, but for some reason unwilling to resist the First Order's advances? Is the Resistance small and scrappy, or is it well trained and powerfully funded, capable of beating back the First Order unless the First Order deploys an amoral and unethical superweapon? I don't need to know the names of politicians and laws, but without this sense of the scope of the relationships between the factions, it was hard to fully appreciate the movie's war storylines.

And thirdly, watching in 3D was a huge mistake. This was not bad 3D, the kind that makes you sick, or that looks silly and cartoonish. But it did make the foreground pop significantly, grabbing the eye's attention almost unavoidably, and this is not how I want to watch a Star Wars movie. The composition of a shot in most scenes in a Star Wars film is full of background easter eggs and jokes and stories that add to the depth of the sense of world. I want as deep a field of view as possible, and I'm not going to get that until I rewatch the film in 2D. And again. And again. :P

But most importantly, HAN! AND CHEWIE! AND LEIA! AND LUKE! AND THREEPIO! AND R2! AND NIEN NUNB! It was like family coming home again, and I had a blast despite these reservations.