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Thursday, June 19, 2014

Theater

I guess my background in the theater is stronger than I thought. I remember my theater course as an undergraduate and I think we went through the basics, like Ibsen's naturalism, Strindberg, Beckett, all that jazz. Albee and Ionescu came to talk in Davis when I was in school. Senior year I took graduate course on Spanish theater. I know I read Eliot's plays in high school, and Yeats. My dad had a complete set of the Greek tragedians. I re-read them in my 30s too. I've taught Lorca and Valle-Inclán, seen productions of Buero Vallejo in Spain.

I could say I haven't forgotten anything, but there's stuff I've forgotten and rushes back to me, and other things I don't even know I've forgotten, because you can't prove a negative.

I remember specific things I learned in a class in 1978. How can that even be? A specific question I had about a monologue from Godot, and what the professor said. I remember we disagreed about whether the monologue was a critique of language or not, but I can't remember which side of the debate I was on.

3 comments:

Vance Maverick said...

How about theatergoing? Have you ever habitually gone to plays, the way you've listened to music?

Jonathan said...

Never habitually. I don't like going to plays because I think I could direct them better and have low tolerance for bad acting. I did see a lot of the Lorca put on during the transition period in Spain. Lorca's niece acted in one of these.

I took some acting classes once...

Vance Maverick said...

I understand about the bad acting. I think I've kept away from the theater for a different reason -- because it was a habit of my parents. In adulthood I've gone only rarely, but usually surprised myself by enjoying it, despite lame writing, bad acting, and associations (not to be disentangled) with middlebrow culture and my family. Obvious effects are not to be sneered at.