Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

  • Home
  • Steve Mentz
  • Humanities Commons
  • Public Writing
  • The sea! the sea!
  • The Bookfish
  • St. Johns

The Bookbinder at #Artsideas16

June 19, 2016 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

bookbinder-1_webAfter an ambitious, difficult, near-miss Friday night in Steel Hammer, it was a real pleasure to see The Bookbinder yesterday afternoon at the recently refurbished Yale Center for British Art. An inventive one-man-plus-one-book show that’s traveled all the way from New Zealand’s Trick of the Light Theatre Company to New Haven, The Bookbinder serves up its pleasures easily and generously. A mysterious book-binder needs an apprentice! An old woman arrives with an old and illegible book, a page of which our hero damages in the act of repair! A fantasy world inside the book into which our hero falls after burning the missing page so that his crime can’t be found out!

You can fill in the rest, maybe, if I tell you that it involves a voyage across a strange land, a nest of hungry eagle chicks and their soon returning mother, a girl who oddly resembles the old woman who brought the book to the store, a ship, a storm, and a desperate act of book-and-landscape repair involving a linen thread, a knife made from human bone, and the handkerchief that our hero’s gruff father gave him at the start of the story.

An elaborate pop-up book guides us through the story, supported by several dolls, some shadow puppets, and a few other props and light tricks. Ralph McCubbin Howell’s performance of a script that he co-wrote with director Hannah Smith is delightful, funny, and spooky.

The show left me thinking about how, in an age of digital media, we are rediscovering to the book as object and technological marvel — though really The Bookbinder’s interest in the craft of binding wasn’t all that technical. I also thought about the difference between the kind of socially contextualized critical perspectives that theater for adults wants to create — the raunchy high-spirits of Our Ladies, the graceful and forceful protest of Abraham.in.Motion, the inchoate rage and longing that suffused Steel Hammer — and the more abstract darkness, which perhaps really just emerges out of a child’s fear of the dark, of a play designed for younger audiences.

I value difficult and experimental work, but there’s something powerfully cleansing about a deep plunge into a child’s imagination. I spend lots of time in my own work historicizing and contextualizing the notion of being “lost in a book,” but sometimes that immersive experience really is what we most enjoy.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
Read Bio

Twitter Feed

Steve MentzFollow

Steve Mentz
Retweet on TwitterSteve Mentz Retweeted
aewaiwhyLei Mai Kahiki Hua 🦉@aewaiwhy·
14h

@stevermentz 🙏🏾 I ❤️ the work these scholars are doing. Hope these threads encourage folx to seek out their work & the videos when @acmrs_org puts them up in the #RaceB4Race archive. 🙌🏽

Reply on Twitter 1353402278254841856Retweet on Twitter 13534022782548418563Like on Twitter 13534022782548418566Twitter 1353402278254841856
Retweet on TwitterSteve Mentz Retweeted
TheatreforaNewATheatre for a New Audience@TheatreforaNewA·
22 Jan

Join us next week for An Exploration of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE with actor John Douglas Thompson in the role of Shylock and director Arin Arbus, joined by a diverse cast, as they explore one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays and its flawed central character.

Reply on Twitter 1352728169497976833Retweet on Twitter 13527281694979768332Like on Twitter 135272816949797683310Twitter 1352728169497976833
Load More...

Pages

  • OCEAN Publicity
  • #SAA 2020: Watery Thinking
  • Creating Nature: May 2019 at the Folger
  • Audio and Video Recordings
  • Oceanic New York
  • Public Writing
  • Published Work
  • #pluralizetheanthropocene

Recent Posts

  • Blue Humanities
  • Bookfish in 2020
  • Writing in 2020
  • Reads of 2020
  • Vineland Reread by Peter Coviello

Copyright © 2021 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in