Ray Bacchetti, a retired vice president of Stanford University who lives in Palo Alto, Calif., has seen all of August Wilson’s 10-work cycle about the African-American experience, several of the individual entries more than once. Elsewhere the completist in training would be wise to follow the work of an author whose canon is well established and relatively small. It’s relatively easy in New York, where obscure revivals and single-author marathon seasons are common. Palmer, who noted that he had seen the original Broadway cast of every Sondheim musical since “Company” in 1970, except the short-lived “Merrily We Roll Along.”īeing a theater completist takes time, money and, crucially, access. “It’s not like you’ll die if you never see ‘Evening Primrose,’ but there are some good songs in it,” said Mr. Steve Palmer, a 59-year-old music sales representative in Chicago and a devotee of Stephen Sondheim’s work, suggested that only a true completist had seen as he has, on a bootleg version the original 1966 television broadcast of “Evening Primrose,” a musical set in a department store. The other is that his plays just keep showing up.” “At some point you have to draw the line,” said Thomas Keith, a consulting editor for New Directions Publishing and a Tennessee Williams scholar. Castleberry, though he himself has seen at least 50 different Foote works. “There’s no way anyone could ever see all of them,” said Mr. He said that with 60 or so full-length and one-act plays by Foote, who died last year and whose “Orphans’ Home Cycle” is now running Off Broadway, a fan with a real shot at completism would be as impossible to locate as the Texas frontier of Foote’s youth. Marion Castleberry, a professor of theater at Baylor University, is writing a biography of the playwright Horton Foote. “I feel that he gets me.”įor others it’s a life’s work. “I feel like I am him, and he is me,” she said. Madden, 61, said traveling to productions of her favorite playwright is really a quest to make a connection. That number includes “The Palooka,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” and other lesser-known works among Williams’s 109 full-length and one-act plays. Helen Madden, a medical librarian in Farmington, Conn., said she had seen performances of about 45 Tennessee Williams plays in New York, Hartford and New Orleans (at a literary festival there named after Williams). Marion Castleberry is close to seeing all of Horton Foote’s plays. “How many times do you see ‘Timon of Athens’?”
“One of the big challenges is that some of his plays are never produced,” said Georgianna Ziegler, the head of reference for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. What about “Edward III,” whose authorship is still debated? (The Royal Shakespeare Company, where the Monachs saw the work, includes it in its list of complete Shakespeare plays.) One challenge upon entering the world of Shakespeare completists is how messy defining “complete” can be. Monach came across news of the Guerrilla “Kinsmen” during a search on Google, she booked a trip to New York, knowing that with this production, they would finally be able to say that they had seen all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays.
#Who did kingsmen work for shakespeer professional#
The Monachs have attended about 80 professional productions of Shakespeare’s work, not including readings, although this was their first trip abroad in their quest. Monach toasted the production and officially checked off the last title in a pocket guide bought in 1989 after a performance of “As You Like It” in Stratford-upon-Avon. The couple, who are in their early 60s, are members of a tiny subset of theater fans, devotees intent on seeing every single work by their favorite writer Shakespeare in the Monachs’ case, but Tennessee Williams, Stephen Sondheim and others are subjects for these so-called completists, too.Īt a post-show party at the tiny Medicine Show Theater on West 52nd Street in Manhattan last week, Mr. “We’re not that kind of driven people, what in England we call ‘trainspotters.’ We just enjoy Shakespeare so much.” Monach said during an interview in his hotel room. With this production of “Kinsmen” a rarely staged play attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher the Monachs completed their quest to see every full-length play in the Shakespeare canon.
#Who did kingsmen work for shakespeer free#
Others were friends of the cast or crew, or were there for the free Trader Joe’s sauvignon blanc.īut Jim and Jane Monach, visiting from Sheffield, England, had a more high-minded reason: to place a checkmark in a slim, slightly tattered red book, something it took them 20 years to do. Some were lured by the play’s tale of two Theban soldiers. Theatergoers had various reasons to attend the recent opening night of “The Two Noble Kinsmen” by a small New York company called the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project.
0 kommentar(er)
