Watching great actors at the Stratford festival in Canada, I realized something very important: the art is not only in the details (as the saying goes), but also in the journey. In our own lives, we don’t have the time to slow down and examine our own journeys- often its hard to tell how we got from point A to point B. But in great theater, each character’s journey is easy to see- from puritan to whore (Win Littlewit in Bartholemew Fair by Jonson*) or from betrayed acolyte to leader of a city (Antony in Julius Caesar**). And it is thrilling and cathartic to be able to imagine that events occur in a linear progression, or that one action dictates another. The fun is in seeing how long the journey can stretch out (in the words of Stephen Daldry: “have a longer journey”).

Taken to an extreme, every prop that is dealt with also necessitates a journey- from picking up a notebook, to opening its pages, to reading, to discovering, to holding, to closing, to putting down (etc). One of my most indelible theatrical memories is watching Martha Henry in Stratford’s production of Ghosts drop a stack of papers upon a discovery. The papers became her interior life, and dropping them became part of her journey.

This is a topic for another blog post (how do different characters hold things), but I’d like to also put on the “MUST SEE” list: Jonathan Goad’s performance as Antony in JULIUS CAESAR, and the inventive (and ‘art.party-esque’) Antoni Cimolino’s production of BARTHOLEMEW FAIR at the Stratford Festival.

Oh, and we’ve got a show tomorrow!

Party on,

m