It may be the Ophelia adaptation I watched a week or so back, or maybe the role Hamlet plays in Station Eleven, but I've had a pining for Shakespeare live performances the past couple weeks, despite probably not having seen one on stage in the past twenty years. Plays, after all, are hard when you work evenings and have so little extra entertainment funds, especially in a city like Chicago, where great theatre is aplenty, but the ticket prices are sky high. I haven't been to a real play in at least a decade, all the odder since I was once SO into drama. Like REALLY into drama--high school stage through college. In high school, I acted through my senior year and went to an all-state theatre conference downstate. At RC, I instead spending my days painting sets, sewing costumes, and running lights with occasional forays into stage managing (something I was pretty good at and in demand, but it stressed me to a breaking point.) I even tried my hand working backstage at a couple community productions. But for a theatre student (I was a minor with more credits than I ever needed) it was everything in those years.
We would use every opportunity to see things live. There was a zero credit class that was just basically field trips to plays--mostly in the city. I got to see Gary Sinise play Stanley in Streetcar. John Malkovich in The Libertine. And yes, even Ethan Hawke in the Buried Child (all at Steppenwolf.) Musicals like Sunset Boulevard and Stomp. (RENT was still on the horizon--I've only seen the movie.) I once saw Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at the old Goodman locale, front row, and was convinced it was my favorite performance ever. Though, actually, my favorite performances were more local. Every fall, the community college did a Shakespeare, and they included Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and A Winter's Tale. One year, they did it outside, and I sat through an afternoon performance of Midsummer Night's Dream and, the best ever, an autumn nighttime rendering of Titus Andronicus (where every prop seems to be a dismembered body part, so it was fitting with the dark and smoke of the small fires and the feeling of being very Ren-Faire like.) When I was in 8th grade drama class we went to see Macbeth in Milwaukee and all I remember are copper & brass sets that just felt and smelled (in my head) like blood.
Tonight, my lesson assignment writing task was a history of drama, and I was surprised at how much I remembered and how I was able to spend less time researching than I have on some topics. I know I had at least two in-depth semesters of theatre history, several dramatic lit classes spread across undergrad and grad. I remember a surprising amount about the Greeks anyway, and I think my only bare spot was familiarity with the medieval era (I had some coursework in romances at DePaul, but not drama.)
I finished quickly, but it also set off a longing for more live theater. Actually any, but definitely more Shakespeare. It's actually possibly now more than ever as my evening schedule frees up. It's especially crazy, this terrible lack, since I've worked 20 years in a college with a decent theatre program I could probably get cheap tickets for and am, to boot, involved with an actor (we see many midnight movie screenings together and bonded early on over Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, but both of our schedules are shit for things earlier in the night.) Until lately, I didn't really miss it, so maybe it's a reclaiming, or maybe it's a lack I'm feeling of outside things that seem impossible because of covid.
What's crazy is that while I've often thought I might like to see more performances, I didn't feel it quite as accutely as I did tonight writing about it. I guess I turned more inward in my pursuits. Like I didn't realize how much I might miss it. I have no desire to DO theatre again, since I prefer my artistic exploits more individual than collective, but I'd definitely like to SEE more of it in the world when its safer and less germy. If, that is, there is any of it left to see.
