Steve Mentz

Everyone knows that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s queerest comedies. It’s hard to tell any of the four young lovers apart, Hippolyta the captured Amazon Queen is clearly ripe for a feminist revision, and the affair between Bottom and Titania already spans class and species barriers – so surely heteronormativity isn’t much farther to go?

Nicholas Hynter’s “immersive” production at the Bridge Theater in London takes all these hints, doubles them, and redoubles that doubling. I’ve rarely seen a livelier production.

Queen Hippolyta, cross-cast as Titania and played with stately majesty by Susannah Fielding, arrjved first into the central staging area, which was an open pit, partly filled by a standing audience who were often shooed out of the way for entrances and exits. The Queen at first was inside a glass box. Silently watching the opening exchange between the Athenians, she clearly sympathized with Hermia, whose father was trying to block her choice in love. The Queen placed her hand on the glass – and everyone turned to look.

From that point on, the women – especially Hippolyta/Titania but also including the mechanical playwright Mistress Quince, are mostly in control of things.

The core textual inversion around which the production turns gives the changeling boy to Oberon – which means Titania comes up with the plan to dose him with the love juice. The Bottom-Oberon scenes, one of which includes a bubble bath, are deliciously queer.

The other big staging innovation was aerial acropatics, Puck, played brilliantly by David Moorst, along with the other faeries, played half of the show hanging upside down from slings that descended from the ceiling. Moorst, who also played the same role in the 2019 production of the same play at the Bridge, was an especially agile acrobat, and his nicely bitter northern accent gave some of his lines a sinister turn.

Bottom, played by Emmanuel Akwafo, was the star, as usual, and his glorious scene-chewing at the death of Pyramus – he mimed the on-screen deaths of Tony Montana, Harry Potter, Oz’s Wicked Witch, and a couple of others I didn’t catch – was only one highlight.

I was sitting in the first row above the pit, because the standing room was sold out when I bought my ticket.The people standing below me had the best views, and also got to join a dance party with the cast at the end. If you go, it’s worth it to stand!

When Hippolyta, on a hunting trip with Theseus, played by J.J. Feild, who was more fun as Oberon, muses about having hunted before with “Hercules and Cadmus,” I tend to read that line as damning her fiance Theseus with faint praise. He’s not a demi-god like those guys! In this Hippolyta-Titania powered production, the line read even more than it usually does as an assertion of power.

Back in the 1990s, one of my favorite pieces of experimental Shakespeare was the Donkey Show. Staged in a disco in Chelsea, with the parts of the mechanicals distributed to two guys named “Vinnie from Queens” who jostled in line with us before Mr. Oberon let us past the velvet rope into his dance club, it was also deeply immersive and took place partly on a dance floor. That show’s trick was replacing all of Shakespeare’s words with disco lip-synchs from the ’70s – Stayin’ Alive, I Will Survive, &c. This Bridge Dream kept Shakespeare’s words but captured that same anarchic spirit of celebration.

If you’re in London this summer – go see it!

The best part about the Globe’s Wild West production of the comedy of Romeo and Juliet was the line-dancing after the final curtain. They company had previewed the hoe-down during the Capulet ball, with Romeo and his buddies wearing masks, but the production was still feeling its way in its early moments. By the end, with blood on the costumes of the slain, having worked all the way through the nearly three hours traffic of our stage, everybody was in a good mood. Abdul Sessay’s Romeo was smiling, Lola Shalam’s Juliet kicking up her heels. After a production that put more into the comic notes than just about any Romeo and Juliet I’ve seen, this felt like the right closer.

It was a great ending to a mixed production.

Did the dancing and the comedy detract a bit from the tragic reach of the show? Yes – but I’ve seen a lot of all-tragic versions of this play, and I must say I enjoyed this alternative.

The Wild West setting, complete with sixguns and a banjo/fiddle band in the upper stage, was good fun, though perhaps there was a sense in which we were asked to remember that the myth of the American West always includes lots of violence, especially with guns. It did seem pointed that, though much of the stage combat involved knives, Romeo killed both Tybalt and Paris with a pistol. (Mercutio and Juliet are slain with knives.)

The best showman of the cast was probably Colm Gormley as Capulet, who clearly loved to play host and lead the dancing. Roman Asde’s Benvolio, who also voiced the Preface, was in some ways more engaging than Michael Elcock’s stage-hogging Mercutio. Perhaps a production that steered the tragic story toward comedy prefered the character named good well (Ben-volio) to the blazing Mercutio?

Sessay’s Romeo showed the lover as young and enthusiastic, and at times he appeared to give the sort of faux-Americana impression that Timothee Chalamet presents via the young waifish Bob Dylan. This Romeo seemed always to enjoy being in love, even as he smoothly shifted from Rosaline to Juliet.

Shalam’s Juliet had the best lines in the play, and although I enjoyed her energy, I’ve rarely heard a less powerful version of the “Come, night” soliloquy that opened the second act. She was much stronger as a dancer and when performing her artless enthusiasm for her newfound love – “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” she says as if discovering something, “The more I have, the more I give, for both / Are infinite.” It’s a good line.

The brutal final moments of this play would seem to be a challenge for this comic vision. The ghosts of Mercutio and Tybalt come out and sit onstage for the final tableau, and Paris and Romeo, after their deaths, each stand up and contribute to the action in their afterlives. The result is an affecting partial recreation of the group dance at the Capulet ball, this time with ghosts.

Even the very final minutes returned to dancing. After Juliet in her little girl voice reproached Reomeo for leaving her no poison, his shade stood up, smiled, and held out a knife. Juliet drew him close as if to start another dance, and the dagger came between them. It was a shrewd and powerful way to allow the lovers, who die seperately in the play, to bring themselves together. Their ghosts also returned to speak the closing lines about “Juliet and her Romeo.”

A lively play with some interesting ideas and new faces in the cast!

Almost all productions of Othello end up as a wrestling match between the two lead actors, and the eye-droppingly expensive Broadway production’s dueling Hollywood stars – Denzel Washington, lauded in the Playbill as “the most lauded stage and screen actor of his generation” as the Moor, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago – was no exception to this rule. But I’ve seldom seen the contest be so one-sided.

His is not the title role, but Iago drives the play, especially in the opening acts that transform love’s “virtue into pitch,” to borrow one of Iago’s many soliloquies. I wasn’t sure exactly what to think when Jake Gyllenhaal received a round of applause on his first appearance in 1.1 – but I guess everyone knew what made our seats so expensive? (Denzel would get similar applause when he entered in 1.2.) Gyllenhaal’s Iago was persuasive and charismatic. He did not quite hit the character’s more devilish notes – neither “I am not that I am” (1.1.64) nor his final “From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2.301) burned into our ears. His Iago was improviser as much as master-mind, and his repeated elaborations of the growing schemes built on the fundamental and pre-arranged compact between the star and the audience. “How am I then a villain,” he insinuates, with an innocent high-wattage smile, ” To counsel Cassio to this parallel course / Directly to his good?” (2.3.343-45). I can’t speak for everyone in the house, but I was persuaded. Iago’s words are, of course, perfectly true. But the words that follow this line snap into a different phase of meaning that Gyllenhaal only rarely touched: “Divinity of hell! / When devils will the blackest sins put on / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows / As I do now” (2.2.345-48). Gyllenhaal’s Iago is never really the devil. He lures and entices – his convincing Cassio to drink “but one cup” is a masterclass in seduction – but does not quite terrify.

In a somewhat comparable way, Washington’s Othello bathed in the audience’s love for the actor’s past achievements without showing the soldier’s fire beneath. Perhaps it was the angle provided by my nosebleed seats in the second balcony, but Denzel looked a bit frail, especially by comparison to his much younger fellow actors. It didn’t help that he sometimes mumbled through the longer speeches; the full majesty of Wilson Knight’s “Othello music” wasn’t in evidence. His body performed its familiar charisma, and especially in the opening acts he carried himself well, but I never quite felt the excess – the “more” – of his Moor. (I feel somewhat similarly about Washington’s performance as Macbeth in the 2021 Joel Coen film – maybe Denzell is too likeable to play the tyrant?) The murder scene in Othello, which I walk into any performance of this play dreading, was oddly unthreatening – he put his lovely wife Desdemona, played by Molly Osborne, in a headlock and she kicked her legs for a while, but no great struggle permeated the theater. Part of the reason everyone in the play, especially the Venetian state, loves and needs Othello is his capacity for violence, which they at least hope they can control. Washington’s version of the general hid that violence not wisely but too well.

Othello’s violance can be a tricky thing to play, since Shakespeare and Iago prime the audience to read it in racist terms, and to the extent that the play works on us, it aligns us with Iago’s anti-Blackness. The Black actress Kimber Elayne Sprawl, who played Iago’s wife Emilia, rose as a powerful counterpoint in her major parts in the Willow scene and the final scene. The force of her denunciation of Othello – “Thou hast not half that power to do me harm / As I have to be hurt. O gull, O dolt, / As ignorant as dirt!” (5.2.158-60) – made me wonder if the production feared its own capacity to make us despise Othello, who is, As Emilia’s husband reminds us, a fool who “will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are” (1.3.400-01). Or perhaps the opposite is true – everyone loves Denzel from the jump, so it’s almost impossible, even to the end, not to sympathize with the man who smothers his innocent wife. I noticed that the gift shop was selling t-shirts with Othello’s self-excusing line, “one that loved not wisely but too well” (5.2.342). Do we really believe that about Othello?

The revelatory performance of the night, however, was not from either of the stars, and not even from the strong supporting presences of Kimber Sprawl’s Emilia, Molly Osborne’s Desdemona, or Anthony Michael Lopez’s smarmy Roderigo. I’ve never seen an actor play Cassio with as much persuasive force as Andrew Burnap. A “proper man” (1.3.391) indeed! Making Cassio so much more compelling than usual had some interesting consequences, including making Bianca, who dotes on Cassio, more plausible, and also making the drunken drinking scene (2.3) – here played by men dressed as U.S. marines – into something like a compelling representation of masculine harmony. Why isn’t it OK for the soldiers, who have been delivered from war by the sea-storm, to have one other gaudy night in Cyprus?

It might also be that I enjoyed that stage moment because it showed Iago and his fellow soldiers assembling a (briefly) happy community, which of course Iago immediately tears to pieces. Or possibly I’m just sympathetic to Jake Gyllenhaal, who I coincidentally met when he was in middle school. In the early 1990s, before going back to grad school, I taught English at Harvard-Westlake high school in Los Angeles. Jake’s sister Maggie was in my Creative Writing class. I was a faculty chaperone for a ski trip one winter, and I ended up sharing a condo with a then-7th grader who his friends called “Jake the Flake.” I told him that his sister was in my class, and he looked at me suspiciously and said, “Do you know her poem, ‘Killer Soup’?” I said that I did, though I don’t now remember anything about it beyond the title. But I seem to have passed the test.

One truth of mega-stars is that their visible presences make them feel familiar, even if you didn’t have a few conversations with their pre-teen selves. Othello on Broadway, with its packed houses and extravagant prices, represents a marriage of star culture and Shakespeare. Maybe, like the marriage in the play, there are some challenges that come with that?

A quick run-down of the books I read in 2024 – counting down from the current month of December.

Total of 94 books, down from last year’s quite absurd total of 126 (!). A bit of an early summer lull? But some good ones this year!

I also published two books in ’24 – Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature, co-edited with Nic Helms, came out in March from Amsterdam University Press, and Sailing without Ahab: Eco-Poetic Travels from Fordham University Press in April!

December (9)

Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Dylan: A Biography by Dennis McDougal

To the RIver: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans by Tamara Shafer, Viv Bozalek, and Nike Romano

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald

Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdom

November (9)

The Sea Close By by Albert Camus

Ghost Species by James Bradley

Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby

The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith

Swimming a Long Way Together by Vanessa Daws

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janella Shane

The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber

Our Own Worst Enemy by Tom Nichols

Eat Like a Fish by Bren Smith

October (8)

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes

Department of Speculation by Jenny Offil

Slippery Beast by Ellen Ruppel Shell

The Message by Ta-Nahesi Coates

Living on Earth by Peter Godfrey-Smith

We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (graphic novel version)

Playground by Richard Powers

September (4)

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt

Survival is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Every Day I Write the Book by Amitava Kumar

August (8)

On Revision by William Germano

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? by Pierre Bayard

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

Big Fiction by Dan Synkin

Literature for a Changing Planet by Martin Puchner

Hell by Timothy Morton

July (5)

Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr

The Language of Climate Politics by Genevieve Guenther

Deep Water by James Bradley

Sweat by Bill Hayes

Democracy or Else by Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor

June (3)

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

The English Experience by Julie Schumacher

Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster

May (9)

Environmental Humanities on the Brink by Vincent Bruyere

This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Say More by Jen Psaki

A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje

In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks

The Disenchanted Earth by Richard Seymour

The North Water by Ian McGuire

The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim by Gabriel Brownstein

April (9)

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

Rendered Obsolete by Jamie Jones

A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick

Knife by Salmon Rushdie

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbens

Jump the Clock by Erica Hunt

The Invention of Prehistory by Stefanos Geroulanos

Sailing Alone by Richard King

Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise

March (7)

Changes in the Land by William Cronin

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

Selected Poems of Christopher Logue

The Truce by Hunter Walker and Luppe Luppen

Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Super-infinite by Katherine Randell

Tides by David Georg Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts

February (5)

The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby

Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh

We That Are Young by Preti Taneja

The Adventures of Amina a-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Courtly History by Stephanie Hershinow

War Music by Christopher Logue

January (10)

Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle

Still Waters by Curt Stager

Red Road by Clan Mother Shoran Waupatukuay Piper

Surviving in a Ruthless World by Terry Gans

On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Penock

Memorial by Alice Oswald

A History of Water by Edward Wilson-Lee

Drunk by Edward Slingerland

Mixing up the Medicine by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

“What do humans want from their machines?” crooned the always-amazing Ethan Lipton, who my grad students and I went to see Tuesday night (11/12) at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn.

The show or as he called it, the “demonstration,” “We Are Your Robots” introduced a quartet of humanoid robots who look quite a bit like Ethan and his three-piece orchestra. These machines want to know what we, the human audience, wants from them, the robot performers. They also want to know what I also want to know – what is the future of humans and our machines?

Compared with the deeply personal stories of “No Place to Go” and “The Outer Space,” as well as the gloriously goofy Western “Tumacho,” this latest offering from Lipton was less narrative and more philosophy of mind. Did I expect to hear the refrain of Thomas Nagel – “What is it like to be a bat?” – set to music? I did not – but I have to say I loved it. Maybe philosophy should always be presented in catchy jazz-swing tunes? With cameos by Daniel Dennett, Mozart, panpsychism, David Chalmers’s “hard question of consciousness,” and quite a few amazing guitar, bass, and saxophone riffs?

What do you want to keep?, Lipton asked us. Your iphone or your glasses? Your glasses or your knife and fork? Maybe we’ve been living with robots for longer than we like to remember.

We humans are, or maybe we need to admit that we are, “collaborators in our own evolution,” and the trick is not to do the job too badly. One refrain in the show is Noam Chomsky’s dour pronouncement that, from a certain point of view, humans resembles a species built in order to destroy itself. In Lipton’s songs, that dark vision of p(doom) (i.e, the percentage chance that our coming AI overlords will wipe out humanity) hovered just off stage for most of the evening, as the orchestra’s glorious music sounded out a more hopeful, messier, and more emotionally rich entanglement. What if the truth is that we love our machines?

I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who’s not already made it out during opening week – I’ll be back with a family crew in December, after taking students yesterday – so I won’t talk in too much detail about my favorite songs, including an unexpected and quite moving duet. As usual, the band was extraordinary – listening to Vito Dieterle’s saxophone always takes me all the way back to my middle school woodwind days, and Ethan’s gentle, speculative voice sneaks itself inside your imagination. If this is what the robots will be, maybe it won’t be so bad? Or maybe we’re already with them?

I was wondering, as I was chatting about Chat-GPT and other language-spewing robots with my students before going into the show last night, if Ethan’s signature blend of wit and sentiment would make me love our robots? Or understand them better?

Get to Theatre for a New Audience before the Robots vanish on December 8th!

“Fame,” says Borges, who somehow seems to have managed to see Sir Kenneth’s New York production of King Lear, “is a form of incomprehension.” I’ve rarely seen a famous actor so unconnected to the other players than in this production. See better, Lear! There are other people on stage who can help you!

Branagh’s essentially solo performance had a few interesting moments, though most of them were too histrionic for my taste. His variations on the five “nevers” over Cordelia’s dead body were technically interesting, and they reminded me a bit of his performance of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech at the Park Avenue Armory in 2014. He played the king’s madness as a loss of language, especially in the “Sa sa sa” nonsense syllables he speaks while running away from Cordelia’s men. But too many of the most powerful lines – the rage against the storm, the curse on Goneril, the “great stage of fools” – were simply too hammed up, too much played over the heads of his fellow actors toward the back row where I was sitting. The conceit of the casting appears to have been Sir Kenneth plus a fresh crop of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) grads. (Branagh is a RADA alum.) But those actors couldn’t reach him, or he didn’t allow himself to be reached.

I was happy to experience the space – the new-ish Shed at the northern end of the HIgh Line near all the fancy new shops at Hudson Yards. Hovering above the stage was a massive donut-shaped fixture, with a cloudy sky projected onto it and a black hole at its core – not subtle, but visually arresting. The actors ran up and down the aisles, which I admit I always enjoy. It’s good to be sharing space! There was some complicated, and probably expensive, business with a diagonal piece of the stage that angled up to reveal the hovel beneath it – but the production didn’t do much to make the storm visceral in any way.

The cast that Branagh mostly ignored was, alas, not all that strong. Dylan Corbett-Bader’s Edmund did very little with one of the best roles in Shakespeare, and Doug Colling’s Edgar wasn’t much better. The daughters were better than the sons and sons-in-law. I’m coming around to thinking that Goneril is one of the most compelling roles in the play, and Deborah Alli did a solid job, especially when canoodling with Edmund. The best acting of the night came from Jessica Revell, who played both Cordelia and the Fool. As Cordelia she did a nice job sticking it to her narcissistic old man in the opening scene – perhaps there’s something in the world right now that makes me want to see a young woman stand up to a cranky old man? – and her Fool was lively, musical, and came closer than anyone else on stage to getting Branagh to pay attention. “Take heed, sirrah,” the King intoned as the Fool teased, “the whip” (1.4). For a moment it was as if Lear realized there were other people who mattered in his kingdom!

I’ve seen a lot of Lears over the years, including a lot of what I think of as “big man” productions, with star actors such as Ian McKellan, Derek Jacobi, Stacy Keach, Glenda Jackson, and Anthony Sher. Some of these productions were quite good, though usually not as consistently powerful as experimental versions like Colombari’s fantastic ten-actors-playing-the-King production this past summer, or the Chinese opera one-man show by Wu Hsing-Kuo. I remain concinved that the storm scenes at the play’s center are perhaps English literature’s most painful evocations of what it’s like to live in a hostile environment – a question that I fear will be increasingly on our minds as the Anthropocene plays itself into the future. But not every production can be a great one, I suppose!

Very expensive tickets still available through December 15th!

As I gear up to host Karin Coonrod and the Compagnia de’ Colombari at St. John’s for Whitman on Walls! in less than two weeks, I made a quick run down to Cobble Hill on Sunday 10/13 to see the last performance of the company’s staging of the Flannery O’Connor story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” at St. Paul’s Church. As with the other Colombari productions I’ve seen – The Tempest at LaMaMa, Merchant of Venice at the Yale Law School, King Lear last summer – the signature force of the staging comes in a sometimes overwhelming dramatic intensity. In this production, especially, the undersong was a bitter and in some ways complicit comedy – we laugh because we recognize human hypocrisy, and because laughing hides our deeper and uncomfortable connections.

Coonrod writes in the Director’s Note that she, like me, first read O’Connor in a college lit class. She’s been developing theatrical versions of a few of the stories since the first days of Colombari, twenty years ago at the University of Iowa. Conrood calls O’Conner “the American Dante,” and emphasizes the writer’s staying power as we approach the centenary of her birth in 2025.

“Everything That Rises,” the title story of O’Connor’s second (and final) collection of short stories, published posthumously in 1965, narrates a series of encounters on a city bus, in which Julian, a frustrated recent college graduate and aspiring writer, is embarrassed by the racist attitudes and behavior of his mother. The comic byplay between Julian, his mother, and the other riders of the bus, including a Black woman and her child as well as a tall Black man in a suit reading a newspaper, skewers both Julian’s progressive pretensions and his mother’s once-genteel patronizing. When his mother attempts to give the boy a shiny penny and gets slapped by the boy’s irate mother – the two mothers wear the same garish purple hat, in case we miss their symbolic connection as mothers raising sons in a dangerous and changing world – Julian’s mother falls down by the side of the road, presumably having a stroke and certainly retreating into the past that she has long since lost.

The final lines of O’Connor’s story draw Julian back toward his suffering, perhaps dying, mother, despite his revulsion at her racism and blindness to the world. He calls her “Darling, sweetheart” and “Mamma, Mamma!” but fails to catch her attention. At the story’s end, O’Conner brings the two into uneasy communion through failure: “The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.”

Like Dante, O’Connor treats the spiritual as more material than the world of physical reality. The title’s imperative – “must converge!” – refers on some level to the social project of racial integration in the American South, which Julian’s mother fears and rejects. “They should rise,” she says, “but on their own side of the fence.” But the “everything that rises” that matters for O’Connor is less about the physical integration of the bus, or Julian’s social and professional prospects, than it is a religious maxim, an inescapable truth. The word “must,” as I read O’Connor’s title, entrains all of us into a human “world of guilt and sorrow.” To rise in this world does not mean to achieve success but to recognize suffering.

Colombari’s staging, which scrupulously followed the requirements of the O’Connor estate in speaking every word of the story, including every the “he said” and “she said,” emphasized the bitter comedy of the mother’s efforts to engage the young boy on the bus, and also Julian’s failure to communicate with the Black businessman. The kicker in O’Connor’s stories, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies, tends to be brutal. As with Colombari’s King Lear this past June, I found something gloriously human in this show’s presentation of hypocrisy, jealousy, small acts of empathy, and an overflowing of pain.

The films Colombari will present of “Song of Myself” won’t hit all these tragic notes. But I am looking forward to something like the same intensity on the St. John’s campus in less than two weeks.

After our first swimming season of Operation Clean Short Beach / Stop Poo-lution, we have some tentative positive results. We are happy to report that there were zero beach closures due to excessive bacteria during the summer swim season. During the weekly testing by East Shore Health Department, only one bacteria count was above the limit, and that number went down below the limit the next day, so the beach stayed open. (Probably that high count came after a substantial rainfall – my personal practice is that I don’t swim for one full high-tide cycle after a heavy rain, to avoid those brief spikes.)

Having no closures is not entirely out of line from past summers; we had zero closures in 2022, compared with two in 2023. But this past year was at least on the better side of normal!

We are planning to do some more detailed testing on the samples we have taken over the summer, and there should be more data to report. But so far, we can say that it’s possible – but not yet scientifically certain – that our campaign is having a modest but meaningful positive impact.

Keep picking up your bags! And tell your neighbors about how we can keep Short Beach Clean!

We are thrilled to announce that the Blue Humanities Book Series, with Bloomsbury Publishing, is now accepting queries and proposals. Send us your watery books!

This project has been in the works for a while now, in collaboration with my amazing co-editor Serpil Oppermann of Cappadocia University and Ben Doyle from Bloomsbury. I think I first broached the topic with Ben at a particularly excellent craft brewery in Portland at ASLE in 2023.

We’re still working on the landing page, but here’s the full description of the series:

The Blue Humanities is a book series about humans and water, in all the forms that both of these assume and create. Re-examining relations between human and watery spaces, the books in this series explore waterscapes in dialogue with landscapes from cultural, social, historical, theoretical, literary, symbolic, aesthetic, and ethical perspectives. These books will engage with the multivalent meanings of salt and freshwaters and the compounded changes that waterscapes are undergoing today. The series will present new research on postmodernist, hydrofeminist, new materialist, posthumanist, postcolonial, and new historiographic approaches to the poetics of water. Since the Blue Humanities is transdisciplinary and methodologically diverse, interacting with marine and freshwater sciences, the series will contribute significantly to the future direction and reorientations of broader discourses in environmental studies.

The Blue Humanities emerged in the early twenty-first century as part of larger efforts to reimagine environmental thinking for the Anthropocene. This book series aims to support many kinds of diversity, from the cultures, methods, and geographies of its authors to the kinds of water each project explores. We encourage proposals that engage non-Western and non-canonical sources, as well as projects that reimagine the familiar in new ways. We particularly encourage creative-critical approaches, including collaborations between academic discourses and the arts, sciences, political activism, public humanities, and other modes of thinking. We are interested in monographs, collaborative books, and essay collections, including reconceived versions of those traditional forms.

Please reach out with queries or proposals to either or both editors (Steve Mentz and Serpil Oppermann) or to our Bloomsbury editor Ben Doyle.

Soon we hope to announce the members of our Editorial Board – stay tuned!

Please reach out with queries or proposals for the series, and circulate this information widely! We are so excited to talk with many of the great people who are thinking about water, humans, worlds, and cultures!

The royal “we” unifies the nation, the land and its people, into the symbolic body of the monarch. This weekend at the University Theater in New Haven, Karin Coonrod’s Compagnia de’ Colombari is staging the most innovative version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy of monarchy that I’ve seen in a long time. See better, Lear, the play commands. But what if everywhere we look we see many things?

The production’s brilliant and generative coup de theatre – ten Kings in ten paper crowns all playing the title role – mounted to a takeover of the entire space of the theater, with actors playing Lear speaking from all three aisles, in front of the stage, and along several rows of blocked-off seats. No King spoke more than two or three lines at the start, so that when Tony Torn open-facedly importuned his daughters, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1), he quickly passed the next lines (“Where nature doth with merit challenge”) to another King, even before we in our seats had time to register the audacity and greed of the question. The King needed something, wanted something, but as his lines ping-ponged around the theater, as we absorbed the selfishness of the love test, we watched that royal “we,” the King as community, voicing itself into disorderly being. It made thrilling theater.

One of the consequences of pluralizing the monumental title role of the play was to slip the King out of our moral grasp. When he’s just one man, even a big star like Ian McKellen or Derek Jacobi, it hard not to blame Lear for cluelessness and cruelty. When he’s all around us and speaking in ten voices, the distributed King becomes both a part of community and trapped by collectivity, locked inside his “fixed purpose laid with iron rails,” to borrow from a maritime monomaniac who is himself modeled on King Lear. All the paper-crowned Lears in this production together produced a collective that each King’s titanic ego could not help being bound into.

As I perhaps over-enthusiastically said after the show to my friend & fellow Shakespearean Mike Shea, the opening scene in King Lear is the best scene in all of English drama – and I don’t think I’ve seen a more exciting performance of that scene than this one.

The “nothing” that the Kings and Cordelia batted back and forth at the opening seemed in this articulation to represent some kind of escape. If Cordelia could hold to her bond – “Love, and be silent” – could she avoid the rhetorical dance of hypocrisy and manipulation, in which it would be in any case impossible to match her ruthless sisters? Seldom has a trip from England to France seemed so good!

All the actors in Colombari’s cast were excellent,and they worked together with generosity and visible pleasure. I was especially appreciative of Tony Torn’s evocative mixture of Oswald and the King, not only because he and his partner, my St. John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown, joined us for dinner before the show. I’ll hear his plaintive “love us the most” whenever I think about this line. Abigail Killeen’s Goneril/Lear absorbed the brutality of her father’s wrath, in which he cursed her “organs of increase” and her future progeny, with heartbreaking silence. Jo Mei’s sharp-edged Regan/Lear digested her husband Cornwall’s part, meaning that she got to extract the “vile jelly” of Gloucester’s eyes in the latter half of the action. Julian Elijah Martinez’s crowd-pleasing Edmund had everyone ready to to take the bastard’s part. Paul Pryce’s wonderfully physical Kent/Lear brought comic and moral force – and like almost everyone I talked with after the show, I was entranced by Luka Papenfusscline’s musical Fool/Lear. Their ethereal voice made the Fool into Lear’s self-reflection and internal choral experiment, a way to think and sing through the crisis of personality that befell the King who misplaced his kingdom.

The spatial takeover, in which the actors occupied the seats and the aisles, climaxed at the play’s raging center, when the Kings walked alone into the storm, and as a chorus intonde together the great speech that I interpret as Shakespeare’s proleptic imagination of what it’s like to live inside the disorderly environment of the Anthropocene:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man! (3.2)

(For more on the storm and the Anthropocene, come to my Ideas Panel with Tara Bradway and David Sterling Brown, on the Green Tuesday June 18 at noon!)

After the storm, the curtain finally opened and the remainder of the play’s action took place on the stage, or, in the case of the mock-trial of Goneril and Regan, on the front apron. There was some great stuff in these later acts, including the blinding of Gloucester and the Dover Cliff meta-theater. In some ways, however, by placing all the actors back on the same horizontal plane, distant from the audience, rather than distributing voices and bodies amongst our seats, the action felt slightly removed. Even the on-stage deaths, each one removing one more Lear from the chorus, were somehow less immediate than the preceding whirligig of immersion. The death of Oswald, slain in combat by knightly Edgar as the true brother began the campaign that would lead to his defeat of his false brother Edmund, provided real pathos, thanks again to Tony Torn’s wonderfully emotive work. But when Oswald slumped down into death, I missed his contributions to the chorus of kings. Torn would get up and lend his voice to the final scene, but as Lear, not Oswald. Part of the genius of Coonrod’s gambit was to suggest that when he and all the other actors had previously voiced Lear’s lines, they did so both as an actor playing Lear and also through their other roles, in Torn’s case as Oswald, the abused child of the kingdom.

I love an intermissionless fast Shakespeare, and I have no complaints about necessary cuts, even though Cornwall and Albany are both interesting figures. But two-plus a bit hours is a long time to sit rapt, and there were moments in the second half when I drifted. I wondered a bit if letting just one Lear – Tom Neils, who also played the King of France – hold center stage for so long dulled the palate just a bit. I was starting to miss the community of kings!

They all reunited for the end, whispering together the painful “howls” and “nevers” which consign Cordelia’s body, “dead as earth,” to rest. The best and most re-orienting moments in this production, which I’m excited to see two more times over its short weekend run, featured all the Kings together, either parceling out lines one to the next (1.1) or chorusing them together (5.3).

Some questions remain too painful to answer. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,” the Kings croon at Cordelia’s lifeless form, “And thou no breath at all?” (5.3)

Get to the University Theater before it closes on Sunday night!