"They who can give up essential liberty...

...to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin

I am currently engaging in a bit of an experiment. Tucker Carlson launched the "conservative answer to the Huffington Post" a few days ago (a conservative answer to a progressive answer to a conservative aggragate blog? whatever) and, due to its vast superiority when it comes to layout and design, I have decided to give it a shot. Am I a conservative? Not at all, but my biggest problem with today's current political discourse is that there really is none. We retreat to our separate corners and we put our hands over our ears and we listen to only those who agree with us and that's...that's not how it's done. That's not how it should be done. And because of this, I've become increasingly uncomfortable getting my news from left-leaning sources. Am I getting the whole story? What's the other side say? And am I agreeing with what I'm reading because that's what I think, or that's what I'm being told to think?

Also, I feel it can only serve to strengthen/clarify your opinion if you form it in conflict with something. My favorite political discussions are those I have with my (reasonable, well-informed) conservative friends because while we neer change each other's minds, we do tend to wind up with a broader viewpoint and a deeper understanding.

So! Basically, that was a really long way of saying, I'm going to see where this Daily Caller thing takes me.

Day One was a little rough, in that I'd like to punch Eric Cantor in the face and there is some woman who is basically everything you hate about self-satisfied bloggers and Sarah Palin rolled into one, but the news stories...not so bad. Reasonable, even. Understandable, if nothing else.

Today, ignoring the lessons I learned yesterday, I once again ventured into the opinion column. After reading a poorly written, but relatively unoffensive call to parents to exert more diligence over their children's social lives, I clicked on a link for a post by Martha Zoller entitled A woman of a certain age vs. body scanners.

Now, let me preface this by saying, I hate the idea of body scanners. They make me markedly uncomfortable. I just think it's a step too far and, as Zoller points out, "Sources say the substance that was in his panties would not have been detectable by a full body scanner" (if I was a real journalist I would find information to substantiate this claim, but not being a real journalist, I'm inclined to give Zoller the benefit of the doubt when it comes to fact-checkable things). There has to be a point where you draw the line and say, no, no thanks, and, for me, that line is allowing a computer to strip search me. Again, I'm with Zoller here:

On top of that, it seems that TSA is telling a little white lie about whether these machines can store and send images. TSA says no, common sense says yes. If it can take a digital picture, it will show up somewhere and that scares me to death.

I'm not saying the TSA is lying, but it is well within the realm of possiblity that these images could be seen beyond that step through in the airport. And that's just not okay with me.

Zoller goes on:

So let’s look at the real problem with the boarding of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who I call “The Panty Bomber,” on an airplane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day. Sources say the substance that was in his panties would not have been detectable by a full body scanner. There are disputes as to whether he had luggage or a passport, but there is no dispute that he arrived at the airport, booked a one-way ticket, paid cash and checked no luggage.

Again, I'm kind of on board with this, and at this point, I'm feeling good. I'm thinking, look at me and Zoller! We're on the same page! We are coming together over the idea of privacy! The answer is not to increase Big Brother, but to pay attention to things like one-way tickets paid in cash and no checked luggage (I have read enough spy novels in my day to know these are suspicious things)! Now she's going to talk about how his name was flagged and his father told us he was a terrorist and how the system fell down but how the rational answer is not then put the system on steroids but to fix the system and maintain our freedom! Huzzah! Maybe she will even use that great Ben Franklin quote (see above)!

And then I kept reading:

If you throw in there the fact that he was Muslim and a male under 40, there were red flags all over this guy.

So because of political correctness, I have to continue being searched at the airport. I generally set off the alarms every time I go through. Not sure what does it but I get the full raise your legs, hold your arms out, wand up and down treatment almost every time I fly. I don’t really mind it since we know Rubenesque women of 50 are at very high risk to try to take a plane down. What really makes me angry is seeing an octogenarian being frisked right down to their waistbands. I dared to ask a TSA agent why search an 85 year old woman who is in a wheelchair and he said, “last week we found a gun on a 90 year old.” Do you believe that, I don’t?

...oh.

This the point where my head starts to hurt. Suddenly, we're not talking about privacy and liberty anymore, we're talking about racial profiling to cut down on inconvenience.

I am immediately reminded of Colin Powell, when he endorsed Obama:

I'm also troubled by - not what Senator McCain says - but what members of the Party say, and it is permitted to be said: such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian; has always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, "What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?" The answer's "No, that's not America." Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be President? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own Party drop the suggestion he's Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery. And she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star; showed that he died in Iraq; gave his date of birth, date of death. He was twenty years old. And then at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross. It didn't have a Star of David. It had a crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Karim Rashad Sultan Kahn. And he was an American. He was born in New Jersey, he was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11 and he waited until he could go serve his country and he gave his life.

According to Wikipedia (a sometimes dubious source, I know, but recall I am not a journalist), there are between 2.5 and 7 millions Muslims in the United States. I do not know the percentage of which are males under 40, and nor do I care. If we, as a country, decide it's okay to single out that demographic and label them as dangerous in our treatment of them, it affects everyone else as well. It creates a divide and draws a line in the sand and says "you are over there and we are over here." The GOP likes to point to American liberty as one of the reasons other cultures and countries take issue with us, as one of the reason we are superior, as something that makes America great and yet they seem to be so cavalier about revoking those rights to groups they take issue with.

And if we are going through with Zoller's suggestion, how do you recognize if someone is Muslim or not? You can't, not definitively and, as far as I know, there is no place on the passport for religion. So therefore Zoller's "Muslims under 40" is widened into "Arab-Americans under 40." Keep in mind, the Panty Bomber was Nigerian. So now its "Arab-Americans and Nigerians under 40." And it expands again. And again.

Zoller seems to accept the fact that, for an unknown reason, she sets off airport security and is stopped. As it should be. If I set something off, I should be stopped. If I pay for a one-way ticket with cash and no luggage, I should be stopped. This I do not argue with, because they are legitimately (in my mind) suspicious. A one-way ticket and no luggage indicates haste and no plan to return, which in turn indicates fleeing from something or creating a situation in which no return is possible. Cash, in conjunction with these things, indicates a desire to not be traced. Combined, very fishy.

I dared to ask a TSA agent why search an 85 year old woman who is in a wheelchair and he said, “last week we found a gun on a 90 year old.” Do you believe that, I don’t?

Well, yes. Yes, I do. You know why? Because in June of last year, an 88 year old man walked into the Holocaust Museum and opened fire. The old are just as capable of harm as the young. Hate doesn't know age, race or religion, and there is no way of looking at someone what is their minds.

Snark Attack

I'm trying to write a reasoned, well-structured and snob-free review of the production of King Lear I saw last night, and it's proving incredibly difficult, both to structure and to sanitize. To get it out of my system, I'm going to vent about it here, and then maybe a) I won't feel the need to be so cruel and b) I can have a starting point from which to edit my thoughts. Huzzah.

First, a confession. Well, two confessions. The first is that, while I firmly believe Shakespeare is meant to be performed, I vastly prefer reading the tragedies to seeing them. They are very, very difficult to perform in a way that sustains interest, or so I am led to believe by the productions I have seen. Second confession is that I have seen less Shakespeare than I should at this point in my Shakespeare-loving career, and as a result this is only the second Lear I've encountered. The first was the superb and all around sublime RSC production with Ian McKellen. That production proved that the play is capable of being performed in a compelling and nuanced fashion, but so that I don't come across as a total snob I'm going to try and refrain from referencing it in my thoughts on the STC's.

Ugh. Where to begin? This production was set in 1990's Yugoslavia, which immediately presents a difficulty since so much of the action of the play is driven by letters being intercepted or going astray. Lear's daughters can afford luscious fur coats but not land-line telephones? Questionable. A minor detail such as this could be forgiven in a stronger production, but when so many problems pile up it just gets added to a very long list.

My major complaint is that the production violated what should be the cardinal commandment of Shakespeare: Thou shalt not be boring. It draaaaaaaaagged through its three hours, devoid of any spark or energy that such a wonderfully complex play is capable of. I asked Gracie, if this was the way you were introduced to Shakespeare, would you want to see more? Her answer was "not really," and that cannot be excused from a company like the STC. You are placing yourself as a premiere company for Shakespeare performance,! You have a responsibility!

Furthermore (and I've ranted about this before), you are doing a straight-forward production. Okay, so you have lots of sex and violence and cars and white body bags (oh, we will get to those my friends). That doesn't mean you are being particularly creative, it just means you have a big budget and a poor editorial eye. It is my strongly held opinion that, if you are doing a traditional (in terms of story telling) production of any Shakespeare play, then you better damn well do a good job of it because you are not saying anything new. We already know that Lear is about war, and destruction and bad things happening to good, bad and generally neutral people. That can't be your "in." The "in" is making those things resonate in a way we haven't or didn't expect to feel, and this production did not do that. It rested on its body bags and oral sex and eye-frying and then gave itself a big ol' pat on the back for being cutting edge, without actually making any audience impact at all.

And it's Lear, for God's sake. It's all there for you! Sex, violence, madness, humor, disguises, war, betrayal, duplicity. Yes, it's a dense play and yes, it's one of the more difficult. In my mind, that doesn't give you a pass. I'm looking at YOU, Robert Falls. You decided to pick one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays, it was your job to live up to the material. You'll get no "A for efforts" from me.

And I'm not even sure what effort was put into this. Two years ago, I saw the Rupert Gould directed Tempest, which took place in the Arctic and featured a walrus, bear skins and Ariel as a trash-can-dwelling ice vampire. I did not like, but still respected Gould's vision because he had one, it was clear and he was committed. I may not have agreed with the world he created, but I saw where his choices came from and how they fit into his overall conception. Falls gets no such respect. His bloody Balkans setting may have been consistent, but his style was not. A choreographed dance after the storm scene? A random god-mic voice over for the last lines of the play? But it was a painfully overwrought 10-minute tribute to his props department's ability to make human figures out of bed sheets that broke me. Clearly wanting us to get the already obvious WAR IS BAD message, he broke what little momentum the second half had accumulated by having members of the ensemble stagger out and pile casualties around Glouscester. It. Took. Forever. And the booming Republican scare music only underlined how melodramatic and ridiculous the whole segment was. Just when I thought it had ended, and was getting over my disappointment that the figures were NOT positioned to spell out "Lear," two army nurses came out and began to, also exceedingly slowly, pitch the dummies into the large trap at the front of the stage. Memo to Falls: I GET IT.

Aaaaand another thing. Shocking moments aren't shocking if you don't give a fig about the people involved. You want to stuff Kent into tires, douse him with gasoline and light him on fire? Go right ahead. You want to pluck out Gloucester's eyes, fry them, and stuff them in his mouth? Eh, it probably won't taste good, but don't let that stop you. Oh, you want to rape your treacherous wife from behind? Okay, but use a condom; you don't know where she's been. To incite true horror or disgust or concern or any emotion about any of these things, you have to establish some kind of emotional connection. Otherwise it's just sadly obvious that you are trying to shock me as a bid for adding "edge" to your production.

The staging is clearly Falls' fault. The lack-luster performances...I don't know who to blame. I didn't feel anyone in the production committed to any kind of character narrative, so all interactions felt superficial at best, especially among the sisters. The moment with the most potential to be affecting was the deaths of Goneril and Regan, but it could have had a lot more punch if there had been a clearer relationship built up between them. As it stood, we only saw they were close at the beginning and not at the end, and that was pretty much the extent of any relationship. Points A and Z and nothing in between.

Keach's performance, I thought, only really got going when he lost his mind, and maybe that's because madness requires no real narrative and inherently prevents connection with those around you. Until the "reason not the need" scene, I felt like I was watching the Macy's Santa reciting Shakespeare quotes at an employee's holiday party. And he was the best! I enjoyed Jonno Roberts as Edmund as well, but that's because Edmund is a sexy part and I'm prone to like him, not because I thought the performance was particularly captivating.

*sigh* In general, the evening left me depressed. This is the best we can do? This? And everyone loves it? Loves it so much that they felt it had to be done again, as opposed to another production that might have said something about something?

And we wonder why Shakespeare is trouble.

In Which the Author Sounds Off About Modern Shakespeare Attitudes

A week ago I went into D.C. to sit on an open rehearsal for the Shakespeare Theater Company's production of King Lear, opening on Tuesday. I highly applaud the STC for giving the public access to their rehearsal process, as it is a wonderful window into the world of theater, and it turned out to be a highly enjoyable afternoon.

That said, I took strong issue to something said during the opening remarks. While welcoming the sizable crowd to the space and setting up what we would be seeing in terms of the play and the process, we were told that "this is King Lear like you've never seen it before."

It's an innocuous statement, one frequently bandied about and used to describe almost any Shakespeare production not involving corsets and starched ruffs, and that's why I take issue with it. This production of Lear has been highly lauded and much anticipated, and I'm sure it will turn out to be an evening of exciting performances and will in some way shed new light on the play, but to trumpet it as some kind of pinnacle of innovation is, in my mind, both misleading and detrimental.

If you are, say, the Tiny Ninja Theater, than, yes, you can rightfully proclaim a Lear like no other. But a production such as the STC's, wherein the cast is gender faithful, the staging (from all I could see) very close to presentational and the telling linear and loyal to the work should not be hailed as something mind-blowingly innovative. That it has energy, that it has life, that it is set in another country (Yugoslavia, it would seem) and in an era post-1616 is something that should be embraced and triumphed. But not, not as a brave new world. In all the productions I have seen, but two have been done in the period style, and they were both at The Globe, a space specifically designed to put one in the mind frame of the Bard's original staging.

I take issue with the STC not because they are the only ones, or because this production's claim to innovation is particularly offensive, but because they are just the most recent in a long-line of examples I have come across. In fact, I don't blame the STC at all. I blame the audiences.

I don't know when, exactly, Shakespeare became sacred. Originally written for the working classes of Elizabethan London, his plays were anachronistic, melodramatic, implausible and, in some instances, downright profane. That they also happened to be brilliant gives them sustained life even 400 some years later. But it's also this brilliance that has contributed to the bubble around them, as if they were delicate pieces of spun china instead of the kind of earthy pewter found in the taverns that populated the South Bank. As a result, audiences have developed this mindset of reverence, often couple with intimidation, in regards to the plays. They are, admittedly, sometimes difficult to understand the first time around, and as a result theatergoers have an over-heightened sense of self-satisfaction and expectation. "I am going to see Shakespeare," they say to themselves, "this makes me smart and cultured."

Well, yes, it does. But if that's your attitude than more often than not it comes with the view that Shakespeare should be in the same category as string quartets, books with few periods and restaurants that specialize in dishes covered in coulis or ganache. And that's just wrong.

During my time in England, I worked as an usher at a theater where the RSC was in residence. While none of the three plays were done "traditionally" (and keep in mind that even that is a misnomer, as even the most "traditional" companies these days are often co-ed), The Taming of the Shrew was the one that drew large criticism for its seeming liberties. Setting the oft-disposed Christopher Sly induction in a modern day strip club and then physicalizing the sexual puns within the play, the production outraged patrons who found it shocking and, according to one particularly livid man, pornographic. What upset me more than the reaction to the staging was the fact that behind these complaints lay a clear and obvious ignorance as to what the play was actually saying. There was no true understanding, or it would have been plain that the RSC was simply suiting the action to the word. The patrons who complain so loudly about seeing what Shakespeare wrote illustrated in a clear way are the same ones who go to the shows to ratchet up cultural brownie points and status, not out of any particular love of the plays themselves or support of their continuing place in modern theater.

Which brings us back to the main point. The problem is not that STC, or any company for that matter, shouldn't take pride in their production for being lively and vigorous and trying to see the play in a new light. It's that they feel the need to warn us, to prepare us, to make excuses for their lack of French hoods by promising we get even more credit for allowing them to present something in a exciting way. And that we, as an audience, hold them to those veiled apologies, making it more difficult for fresh and new takes to get the credit and attention they deserve.

If Shakespeare can't be toyed with, messed with, examined and explored and then exploded on-stage, then his plays become museum pieces; carbon copies of productions seen by each subsequent generation without the evolution his language so brilliantly provides for. The play might be the thing, but it's the production that's what brings it to life.

It's up to us to open our minds and make sure it's not D.O.A.