Twelfth Night (or What You Will)

March 31, 2017 by Deidre Brill in Comedies

I firmly believe in exposing my kids to theatre. And testing the waters with a little free Shakespeare? Culture + my personal interests + FREE = yes please. It’s not Shakespeare in the Park season, but there is a group in my region that tours slimmed-down, hour-long versions of Shakespeare ( with a 5 person cast, no less!) each fall/winter around local libraries and community centers. [The world would be a better place if everyone had access to this.] I’ve certainly dragged my daughter to her fair share of theatre, including the Bard. This month, I tried an experiment that had failure written all over it: I invited my kid’s Daisy Scout troop to attend as well. That’s right – 12 first-graders, many with parents and siblings in tow, actually took me up on this event. I was utterly surprised to find that this simple outing would push me out of my safety zone, just by sharing an interest with some casual acquaintances. As a result, I feel like I'm the one who ended up in the fun-land that is Illyria.

Love's Labour's Lost

June 06, 2016 by Deidre Brill in Comedies

Why This Play?:

I wanted to try something new for this reading. First, some backstory: about 10 years ago, I was living in Los Angeles and my parents were out in Scottsdale, AZ. It’s a roughly 6-hour drive between the two cities, so I would road trip out on occasion to visit them. During that period, I amassed a number of audio books on CD to help pass the solo drive. One I picked up on the cheap happened to be the Arkangel dramatic reading of Love’s Labour’s Lost. I listened to it once on a desert drive, tucked it away in my car, and promptly forgot about it for a decade. [I solemnly swear I’ve cleaned out my car multiple times in that decade, I just always kept hold of it in case I had another long solo drive.] I stumbled upon it again in recent months, and I’ve been saving it for this blog post.

For this reading, I unearthed my old 2007 Macbook, popped in the CD, and followed along with my written copy. What a fantastic way for the language in this one to come alive! LLL is infamous for being heavy on the Elizabethan wordplay, and this really helped with my understanding far more than footnotes could. I may have to dig up more of these at my local library! This play is about what happens when four men desist their contact with women, but women happen into their lives anyway. There’s a stupid, cliché adage that love only comes when you cease to look for it. The thing is... that's actually what happened that led me to my husband.

Sonnet 55

February 13, 2016 by Deidre Brill in Sonnets

Some Twitter pals and I got involved in a fun little online project this week. Lovely online antique book retailer, Buzz Bookstore, hosted a fun project. He's collected 154 volunteers, just everyday people (not necessarily scholars or actors), to create short videos performing/reading one of the 154 total Shakespearean sonnets: the Buzz 154 Project. Sounded like fun, so I made contact and was assigned a fun little ditty about the power of poetry to make one immortal. Be sure to check out the whole project! My little performance is here:

Huzzah for poetry! Enjoy!

Much Ado About Nothing

September 08, 2015 by Deidre Brill in Comedies

Why This Play?:

Time and again, this play makes an appearance when I need to shake up my life. Seriously, it magically worms its way onto my path, gives me a kick in the ass, and points me onto the proper bend in the road I didn’t previously notice. Much Ado’s characters, its humor and love, its theme of redemption/forgiveness in the face of darkness always manages to pull me out of a funk; to kick my ass into gear again.

“...for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey”

— Robert Greene, "A Groat's Worth of Wit"

Act 1 -- The Whys and Wherefores of this Blog

July 29, 2015 by Deidre Brill

I am about to endeavor a relatively pretentious project. One that’s not exactly creative in its conception – it’s been done (hell, even blogged about) before, by many others far more learned than I. I don’t exactly expect an audience, as the subject of this project doesn’t interest many people I know. So why write about it? Well, for a long time now, then only writing I got to do centered on emails regarding benefits packages and performance reviews. Now I’m just looking for a subject to help get my juices flowing, mostly, but also to actually have something concrete to show, a project with an ending that I can actually reach. Perhaps I’m just looking to commit to something semi-creative.

Adult life certainly is all about commitments, right? Mine isn’t any exception. Marriage to my all-around solid and sexy best friend. The decision to release our insanely intelligent and charming spawn into the world. Laying down a huge chunk of life savings in order to lay claim to a massive loan that we inchingly pay back while we reside in a house that we (but mostly the bank) own. Purchasing West Elm furnishings from non-refundable sales. Doggedly pursuing two separate careers that were always more stressful than fulfilling or interesting.

I am a project lover. I have great amounts of enthusiasm for a great many things. I have copious lists of things I wanted to write about, explore, plan, or learn. And for the past five years or so, there have been a great many things that have been shelved. Life – all those beautiful commitments – they take up a lot of time. But it’s time to stop making excuses for myself, and to actually attempt…something. Something that has interested me for a very long time, and something that can have a concrete beginning, middle, and end. Which leads us back to the aforementioned “pretentious project.”

I’mma read Shakespeare, y’all. The whole canon within a year. Any masochists out there can follow me chronicling the entire experience here. Feel free to comment, engage, share, or just dabble. My self-imposed guidelines for the reading and writing can be found under The Rules.