Weekly Margin 2023, W31: Malvolio, The Half-God of Rainfall

7/25/23: Malvolio

What: The Classic Theatre of Harlem presents Betty Shamieh's sequel to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, starring Allen Gilmore reprising his wonderful rendition of Malvolio from this company's celebrated production of Twelfth Night.

And? I've been hyped to see this production since I saw Allen Gilmore's wonderful Malvolio back in February. But this play was a pretty big letdown. Too much about it didn't work for me: from the too-smirking allusions to other Shakespeare works to the beyond squicky age difference in the central romance, I did not enjoy the script. Craft-wise, Shamieh knows how to build a Shakespearean style collection of characters with odd interconnections (hearkening to the chaotic revelations in Cymbeline), but the story itself did not work for me, nor did the muddied storytelling of directors Ian Belknap and Ty Jones. The cast does the best with the material they have (Gilmore especially still manages to shine), but it's still a disappointing evening  (also feeding into my pet peeve this past season of a production claiming to be ninety minutes but actually running closer to two hours).

Allen Gilmore and Kineta Kunutu as Malvolio and Volina. Photo by Richard
Termine.

7/27/23: The Half-God of Rainfall

What: NYTW presents Inua Ellams's new epic poem, a blending of mythologies of Yoruba and Ancient Greece to tell the story of a demigod born of the sexual assault by Zeus of a beautiful Yoruba woman. After Demi becomes a basketball star and incurs Zeus's jealousy, the gods demand punishment. But it is Demi's mother Modúpé who journeys to Olympus for a final vengeance.

And? This is why I love theater. Pieces like this, that tell new stories, or old stories with new lenses. Stories of gods that still aim to overthrow colonialist bullshit, I am here for it. Stories of women not just surviving their assault, but drawing strength from each other, strength enough to bring down the monster who tried to steal their bodies from them. Just, it's so good. This cast is so good (Lizan Mitchell is having a moment, y'all, between this and her work at The Public recently), the staging and rhythm, the physical language created by Beatrice Capote. My one (tiny) complaint is that the floor, made of a black glittering sand, creates a (specifically to me) unpleasant aural sensation when the actors cross it. But maybe it's not as bad if you're not in the second row?

Mister Fitzgerald and Kelley Curran as Demi and Perseus.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Weekly Margin 2023, W18: Eleanor and Alice

 4/24/23: Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts

What: Urban Stages presents an encore presentation of Ellen Abrams's play, spanning nearly sixty years in the friendship between cousins Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of Franklin Delano) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth (daughter of Teddy).

And? Not precisely a story, but a respectable character study, I suppose. Alice is renowned enough for her acerbic wit that a lot of her lines felt like they were lifted from reality, rather than organically part of a dialog. Both actors do good work crafting their individual characters' arcs over the years, emotionally and vocally, but I never quite feel they're in the same room as each other. Either one feels like she could exist in a one-person version of the same play and accomplish the same thing.

Trezana Beverley and Mary Bacon as Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt
Longworth. Photo by Russ Rowland.

So I wrote a book ...

This actually happened. And, as of two days ago, you can buy one of your very own. Holy crap, you guys. Holy crap. I'm kind of insanely proud of this.

cover design copyright 2012 by
Danielle Rose Fisher

The book has been several years in the making - I first wrote about putting together a book of short stories in June last year, but most of the pieces in the collection predate that intention. One piece even dates back to high school ("The Name of the Father," if you're curious), a handful to college, and the rest to the years between college and now. Only one piece is younger than my intention to put the book together in the first place - I went through about ten drafts with a placeholder page declaring:

I am the missing piece in this compilation! I plan to be something more lighthearted and prose-shaped but I have no idea what I am! It’s all very confusing.

Here and Now

I've got this book I wrote. And what I'm doing with it, it wouldn't have worked 100 years ago. Hell, it wouldn't have worked 10 years ago. Self-publication, vanity publication, was a sticky and expensive process at best, and there wasn't necessarily much respect accorded to any of it. I've talked about this before. Yes, there are Eragon-shaped exceptions, but for the most part, it hasn't been the most dignified way to get your work out there.

And then the kindle showed up. And the nook. And the other 5000 e-readers. And the landscape is changing drastically. E.L. James drastically. [editor's note: no, I have no intention to be E. L. James. I'm a much better proofreader than that.]

So I've got this book I wrote. It's a book of short pieces - some full-out short stories, some poetry, some flash fiction (a page or less) - and I'm very proud of it. But it's a book I don't think I'd be able to sell to the middlemen of publishing - agents and publishing houses. It's too strange a shape for that. And that's fine. I've got this book I wrote and I'm digitally self-publishing, and I'm so glad I live now, here, in this time and place. This is the time for self-publication.

Who needs a manual?

Harkening back to my post about being a Salesman, I've been thinking part of my problem with trying to sell myself as a product is not just that I don't particularly enjoy the game of trying to convince someone to do something they might not otherwise; it's also that I'm not terrifically good at asking for help. (This help can range from "hey random stranger in the grocery, can you help me reach this very high object? I must needs get my Kix on," to "I'm producing this play and my co-producer is not volunteering anything and I feel like I'm drowning and it's too much.") A corollary to this is of course that I'm not great at asking for favors, or in general submitting myself to anyone's attention.