Burt Dow Deep Water Man!

With opening night just over a week away, the cast and crew of Burt Dow Deep Water Man are hard at work. Yesterday, I joined sculptor, Michael Stasiuk, who is creating amazing props for the performance, to help paint the puppets for the show.

Like much of the performance, the creation of the props is a truly collaborative effort between people from away, local students, volunteers, and staff. Students in a Deer Isle-Stonington Elementary School art class helped to make the puppets, designed by Michael Stasiuk. Under the direction of Mr. Stasiuk, a team of volunteers is helping to paint and decorate the giant sea-creatures that will share the stage with the human stars of Burt Dow Deep Water Man.

The puppets are being painted in the old Stonington Elementary School with a little help from the soothing guitar music sounding from the boom box. With some masking tape, several cans of paint, and a little help from Martha Stewart (or rather, her glitter), the amazing creatures are taking shape. Mr. Stasiuk mixed paints to capture some of the vibrant and often times clashing, yet miraculously working together colors, in the book by Robert McCloskey (the colors of the whales were described by one volunteer as “just like the colors I wore in the 80s!”).

We antiqued chickens and painted a giant octopus (just to name a few!), helped by the performance’s director and stage manager. After the puppets are initially primed in a solid color, Mr. Stasiuk and the volunteers are using paintbrushes and pieces of foam pillows to color and shade the props, sponging color on top of color, and sprinkling with glitter.

To see these fantastic props in person, buy your tickets to Burt Dow Deep Water Man! As someone who has been fortunate enough to catch a sneak-peek, let me tell you, the stuck-in-your-head-while-you-walk-around-the-house-singing tunes are not to be missed!

A Safe Place for All People

Judy Harrison's story in today's Bangor Daily News is a fine example of how newspapers and other media help us understand the arts as an integral part of community life. Harrison not only connects us with an artist -- Caitlin Shetterly of Portland -- in a clear-sighted exchange. But allows us to see the role of a performing arts organization in a community. The Stonington Opera House is where our Shakespeare work finds its home -- and that's a home for arts, artists, technicians, builders, vendors, volunteers, young people, scholars, vacationers and even critics (such as yours truly). And then there's you. It would be a mistake to say: "We do this ALL for you." I think that's inaccurate. We do it because, as Judy Harrison and Caitlin Shetterly know, the arts are a force that give us meaning -- individually and as a community.

Shakespeare in Stonington is coming soon. Our media team is gearing up this month to meet you here at the Shake Stonington blog site. But don't wait for us. Go see Shetterly's show tonight. And if you can't get to her show, find other arts or be an artist. Either way, your community needs you. Shetterly has it right: The local arts center is a place where we can "all come, experience, live, learn, enjoy, laugh and cry and be human together."

Appalachian hollows and original Shakespeare Dialect

First, a disclaimer: I grew up in a big Texas family who migrated west from Alabama and Georgia, so dipthonged vowels and otherwise languidly prolonged syllables are music to my ears. Second, the idea that the dialect imported to these shores with early British settlers and nurtured and preserved in Appalachian hollows is closer to Elizabethan English than contemporary standard British is not new. So when Jeffrey Frace suggested that he was thinking of this summer's production of Measure for Measure as 'southern gothic,' I was both intellectually and constitutionally interested. I am currently in New York for auditions and on Wednesday and Thursday we saw upwards of 100 actors interpret what a monologue in a southern gothic style, reminiscent of, say, Flannery O'Connor, might sound like. For the majority it meant dropped r's and a few dipthongs, and otherwise--Shakespeare as usual. But in a small handful, my stars, as my grandmother used to say, with a slightly u-ed tongue, something happened! Rhythms changed, inflections shifted, heat and musk and music arrived in the room. It was a whole new Shakespeare, to my ear--and yet it sounded entirely natural.

More to come on this subject, but there have been several recent experiments with David Crystals Original Pronunciation (OP), which sounds to me a bit like a deep Scottish brogue, but restores they say some of the mysterious unrhymed, to our ears, rhymes in the Bard. Hear a story on it at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4761275. Or check out his website at http://pronouncingshakespeare.com.

Cosmic energy

I bet you've had this experience: You start reading a book -- say Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" -- and all of a sudden, Jane Austen is everywhere! Scientists discover a new cause of death for the author. PBS goes on an Austen bender. And the Twitterati go hashtag wild with Austen chatter. You thought you were simply catching up on your reading, but actually you were whirling in cosmic coincidence (or a global marketing scheme).

For the last few weeks, I've been focusing my Shakespeare energy on "Measure for Measure." I'm in a class where the discussion is about "Hamlet," but the professor can't stop talking about M4M. And, wouldn't you know, productions of the play have popped up in London , New York and Oregon. (I saw the Theatre for a New Audience production at The Duke on 42nd Street. Favorite actor: Jefferson Mays as the Duke.)

And of course, cosmically speaking, one could easily be led to believe this is all pointing to the rightness of the Stonington Opera House show in August. The dramatic universe is on a roll!

So I'm thinking: OK, people. We're in a M4M moment. The zeitgeist has been named. Dust off your Riverside. Brush up your Shakespeare. The Duke is on his way. In the meantime? Keep an eye out for more M4M sightings.

Is February too early be thinking about Shakespeare in August?

By Alicia Anstead
I've been thinking lately about the way the performing arts, and plays in particular, linger in our thoughts long after the curtain goes down. Plays, after all, are completely ephemeral. They happen, and they're gone. Except they're not. Think of the plays you've been to that have stayed with you -- whether because of the play itself (themes of love or death, for instance) or the circumstances in which you saw the play (the friend you were with or the phase you were going through). The poet T. S. Eliot talks about measuring life in coffee spoons. But some of us measure our lives in plays. I do at least.

But that's about what happens during a play or after a play. What about everything that happens before a play? A few weeks ago, Linda Nelson and Judith Jerome announced that Measure for Measure, directed by longtime friend of OHA Jeffrey Frace, is the play for Shakespeare in Stonington this summer. (Mark the dates: August 19-29, 2010.)

I couldn't be happier, in part because the experience starts now. Or rather, it started for me as soon as I heard the news. Immediately I turned to my handy cell-phone app PlayShakespeare.com and downloaded the text. For three days during a conference in New York City, I breathlessly read the play on my phone while riding the train to and from the event. At one point, I was so engrossed I missed my stop and ended up several stations away from my own. Wow, do I love when that happens, even if I'm late for something else.

On this read through, I was struck by the utter strangeness of Measure for Measure. It's called a problem play, but it's more than a problem play. It's a testy exploration of justice, mercy, personal agency and, once again, marriage. (Remember all the messiness about marriage last summer with A Midsummer Night's Dream?! If not, re-visit the blog posts that explore: I do, I don't, I might, I couldn't possibly "aspects" of marriage.) M4M is set in Old Vienna, but the themes of premarital pregnancy, enforcing the letter of the law, a woman's right to her own body and the shiftiness of politicians are all very relevant in the 21st century. Alas.

Thus begins our journey. Seven months before the show, the art has started to work its magic. I'll be checking in from time to time between now and summer with reports, tips and teasers about the play, the production and other related news. In the meantime, I'll be thinking -- and I hope you will be too -- about this question: When does art begin? When does it end? And what happens in the space between?

This is the first of 2010's posts on ShakeStonington, OHA's blog devoted to all things Shakespeare, created and edited by OHA's critic-in-residence Alicia Anstead. You can subscribe directly to ShakeStonington, and be alerted to all future updates, by going to shakestonington.blogspot.com.

Is February too early to think about Shakespeare in August?

By Alicia Anstead

I've been thinking lately about the way the performing arts, and plays in particular, linger in our thoughts long after the curtain goes down. Plays, after all, are completely ephemeral. They happen, and they're gone. Except they're not. Think of the plays you've been to that have stayed with you -- whether because of the play itself (themes of love or death, for instance) or the circumstances in which you saw the play (the friend you were with or the phase you were going through). The poet T. S. Eliot talks about measuring life in coffee spoons. But some of us measure our lives in plays. I do at least.

But that's about what happens during a play or after a play. What about everything that happens before a play? A few weeks ago, Linda Nelson and Judith Jerome announced that Measure for Measure, directed by longtime friend of OHA Jeffrey Frace, is the play for Shakespeare in Stonington this summer. (Mark the dates: August 19-29, 2010.)

I couldn't be happier, in part because the experience starts now. Or rather, it started for me as soon as I heard the news. Immediately I turned to my handy cell-phone app PlayShakespeare.com and downloaded the text. For three days during a conference in New York City, I breathlessly read the play on my phone while riding the train to and from the event. At one point, I was so engrossed I missed my stop and ended up several stations away from my own. Wow, do I love when that happens, even if I'm late for something else.

On this read through, I was struck by the utter strangeness of Measure for Measure. It's called a problem play, but it's more than a problem play. It's a testy exploration of justice, mercy, personal agency and, once again, marriage. (Remember all the messiness about marriage last summer with A Midsummer Night's Dream?! If not, re-visit the blog posts that explore: I do, I don't, I might, I couldn't possibly "aspects" of marriage.) M4M is set in Old Vienna, but the themes of premarital pregnancy, enforcing the letter of the law, a woman's right to her own body and the shiftiness of politicians are all very relevant in the 21st century. Alas.

Thus begins our journey. Seven months before the show, the art has started to work its magic. I'll be checking in from time to time between now and summer with reports, tips and teasers about the play, the production and other related news. In the meantime, I'll be thinking -- and I hope you will be too -- about this question: When does art begin? When does it end? And what happens in the space between?

A Maine Island View of the Oscars

Wow. OK. 10 nominations for Best Picture? From my vantage point on a small island off the Maine coast: is such excess necessary?!

OK, here is this year's ballot, and here is the glory of running a theater that presents both live shows AND first-run movies: of the excessive number of 10 nominees, we will have shown more than half--that's right, at least SIX, more than the number of nominees there used to be--of the Best Picture nominees. So when you hit that ballot, even in rural Maine, you will have had a good shot of seeing the following nominees for Best Picture--and probably more:

The Blind Side (December 2009)
Inglourious Basterds (November 2009)
Precious (January 2010)
Up (June 2009)
Up in the Air (Feb 12-14, 2010)
Avatar (mid-to-late February, stay tuned for dates)

Is this a luxury of riches or . . . just a whole lot of films being produced?! I'll leave the judging to you. Complete a ballot and email it or mail it to us; the top FIVE (we're going to stick with the old scale!) most accurate ballots will win free movie passes to the Opera House. Happy Oscar-ing!