Equivocation

Bill Cain’s play is an accomplished piece of, shall we call it, imagined history. We know that William Shakespeare (however he really spelled his name) spun his plays (especially this histories) to suit the times: the last of the Tudors, the first of the English Stuarts, the unresolved religious conflicts. Cain asks, what if Shakespeare were more directly involved in contemporary political events than the annals of 400 years have revealed? What if a royal commission, objectified on stage by a red sack of money that is tossed from player to player like someone’s still-beating heart, overlay a complex political conspiracy and counter-conspiracy? His answer is an intriguing piece of theater with a wide sweep of echoes and allusions, ranging from The Parallax View by Alan Pakula, to The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, to Shakespeare’s own Murder of Gonzago and Porter scene.

Indeed, the script is full of nuggets that tickle the fancies of the Shakespearean aficionados among us. It’s a little surprising that this production, a remount of the 2009 Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere, is presented on Maine Avenue rather than father north along Seventh Street. The ensemble cast has had the time to fine-tune some wonderful characterizations, first among them Jonathan Haugen’s gimpy-legged government official, Robert Cecil. A powerful man, used to getting his way, Cecil can silence objections with nothing more than a “sst.” Richard Elmore’s irascible Richard Burbage and John Tufts’ comic turn as James VI/I are also quite fine.

As the play slips back and forth through flashback and theatrical “reconstruction” of the same events, one of the characters directly asks us, “A ‘true history.’ How could there be anything true about a play?” Cain’s answer may lie in my favorite definition of a myth: not a word of it is true, and every word of it is true. Perhaps the same can be said both of Cain’s piece and the historical record of the events that sparked it, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

  • Equivocation, by Bill Cain, directed by Bill Rauch, Arena Stage Kreeger Theatre, Washington

Urban extremophile

Daniel Mosquin points to an exceptionally well-written piece by Adam Rogers for Wired: it tells the story of James Scott and a mysterious black mold that beset the neighborhood around a distillery. The fungus, a barrel-shaped beastie now named Baudoinia compniacensis has been known to science since the 19th century, but much of Scott’s task was isolating and culturing the organism and giving it a proper scientific name. Props to Rogers for explaining how binomial nomenclature works.

Skronk

Via Greater Greater Washington, a lovely podcast episode by Sam Greenspan and Roman Mars about the music of Metro escalators in need of lubrication.

… if you’re going to be subjected to some kind of sensory experience, of which you have no control every single day, then it’s to your benefit… Why not try to enjoy something? Because there’s enough things in life to be stressed out about.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2011

The Texas festival put lots of birds on my life list, while the California jaunt introduced me to some stunning water features.

2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list.

There’s a hole in that

Laura A. Tyson et al. report an artificial nest cavity design that European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) don’t seem to like, or at least the starlings at their northern Ohio field test site. The team tested PVC tubes with a diameter of 10 cm, mounted horizontally and capped at each end, the opening restricted to 5 cm. Bluebirds, swallows, and wrens like the plastic boxes just fine, but no starlings used any of the 100 structures in two years of testing.

Good seats still available

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin, property, and/or effort in 2011. Please join me in supporting their work.

First

Isabel Wilkerson revisits this year’s obituaries from 750 newspapers across the country. It was a year of “the first African-American to…” O the strides made in humble mundanity.

Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.

The year in review, 2011

Getting a bit of an early start on this post. Hey, Christmas is coming!

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 2 January: Bands of showers, clouds, and a little sunshine passed over us on Sugarloaf Mountain, on an ANS hike led by Cathy Stragar.
  • 2 February: Passive clauses are explained, defended by Geoffrey K. Pullum.
  • 1 March: “There was a certain coherency in [John Maynard] Keynes’s (the intellectual godfather of the IMF) conception of the [International Monetary] Fund and its role. “
  • 2 April: My term project, an analysis of the Comprehensive Plan for Fairfax County’s Area II, has been submitted for my class.
  • 1 May: When I hear on the radio the voice of an artist that I haven’t heard in a long time, it’s rarely happy news.
  • 4 June: Benjamin R. Freed covers Capital Talent Agency, Roger Yoerges and Jeremy Skidmore’s nascent representation outfit for local professional actors.
  • 1 July: Director Michael Kahn and his cast give a cool, clean, faithful reading of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of memory and friendship.
  • 1 August: Plays at this year’s CATF are dominated by grim themes of black-white race relations, with the concomitant issues of money, power, and social class.
  • 6 September: Metro map designers are floating the possibility that the line won’t be silver after all.
  • 2 October: My first of two walks under the auspices of WalkingTown DC was a quick spin through Fort Totten led by Mary Pat Rowan, with an emphasis on the woody plants of this semi-preserved area.
  • 2 November: Two treasuries of Washington photography…
  • 4 December: This ratty old building, window glazing missing from the upper stories, most recently was put to temporary uses like political campaign offices.

The year in review, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.