Short entry this week, and none next, as I’m flying back to Pennsylvania to see Elizabeth’s performance in The Clean House at Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.

This week, a lot of pedestrian work. Finished casting and gluing ten ears onto our five Ariel heads; recast our Miranda (the live actress, that is); started sculpting the final heads, Ferdinand and Miranda; progressing on learning lines & studying Prospero.

And becoming acutely conscious of that essential ingredient of creativity: a wife to cook the food, do the laundry, feed the cats, and provide the human proximity that prevents me going stir-crazy.

More miscellaneous thoughts, from reading, surfing the Web, talking and sometimes thinking:

• A production used Prospero’s robe as a tool of magical effect, involving it in the storm, the binding of Ferdinand, etc. Interesting idea. Possibly the puppet Prospero has a fixed robe, while the human Prospero has a removable one. The puppet’s is white, the human’s black.

• Thinking about dancing flames as a model for Ariel’s movement. Something radically non-human. But then at the key moment of, “I would, sir, were I human,” there’s a softening to something recognizably human. One production had him reaching for Prospero’s hand at this moment. That doesn’t seem right, but something like that.

• Gielgud played Prospero four times, and never in any of these did he look at Ariel. The intention was to underline Ariel’s disembodiment as a spirit. My instinct, though, is that Prospero must, in order to control him, hold Ariel in is sight always. But it’s not a casual look; it has great force behind it. But may also try not looking, so long as there’s the sense that Prospero is maintaining very intense focus on his own inner vision of Ariel.

• The Spirit/puppeteers can emerge visibly during the storm scene. At the moments of extreme fury they are visibly dashing the puppets about; when it calms enough for us to hear the dialogue segments, the Spirits disappear behind the puppets.

• I should look at William Blake’s art in relation to Ariel and to the color palette of the design.

• Is there a point to some visible representation of Sycorax? A Berlin production had Caliban carrying her mummified remains. I don’t see that, but we need to feel something of that lingering presence.

• Talking to the actors playing Ferdinand and Miranda, I realize how huge the impact is on them of each new event. For Miranda: the trauma of seeing men die in the storm; the revelation of her history and identity; the tearing open of old wounds with Caliban; the stunning first vision of a young man; her first challenge of her father’s authority; the betrothal; the masque vision—and through it all, seeing her father in a state utterly unlike she’s ever seen him. For Ferdinand: the storm; the apparent loss of his father; the magical survival; the enchanted unreality of the music and the island; the vision of Miranda; the sudden bondage and enslavement; the betrothal; the masque; the resurrection. Some critics have seen them as Shakespeare’s least rounded lovers, but the key is their astonishment, their discovery of one new world after another. We have to take them seriously, and if we do it’s amazing they even survive this roller-coaster ride.

Enough for this week. I need to do another round of sculpting, send some email to East Coast friends, make up a miniature script to take along for line study, fold my laundry.

[Next entry: May 12]

Peace & joy—
Conrad