Plays | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Plays’ Category

Hunky Halloween Hamlet

October 15, 2024

From Tim Evanson, on Facebook this morning, his image for 16 days to Halloween:

(#1) Hunky Halloween Hamlet, let’s call him Hunklet, contemplating Peter Pumpkin (who really should have a grinning face carved in him) instead of Yorick’s grinning skull

The Shakespearean context (written as connected text rather than as poetic lines):

(#2) “Here hung those lips that I have kissed” — so Hamlet cries in iambs dread

(though I note that #1 could be read as God — or Zeus / Jupiter — surveying the Earth; everybody sing: “He’s got the whole world in His hands”)

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Posted in AI, Art, Holidays, Language and plants, Language and the body, Male art, Music, Plays, Poetic form, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

The cartoon glory that was Rome

September 4, 2024

In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!

Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die

I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.

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Posted in Gesture, History, Holidays, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Opposition, Plays, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Treading down the thorny path

March 16, 2021

Two evergreen topics in grammar and usage: so-called “split infinitives”, where some usage critics have insisted that they must always be avoided, however unnatural the results of this avoidance are; and modifier attachment, where jokes are often made about one of the potential attachments, however preposterous the interpretation associated with this attachment is.

The two topics are connected through their unthinking devotion to dogmas of grammatical correctness: avoid split infinitives, avoid potential ambiguity. A devotion that leads adherents down the thorny path of usage rectitude to using unnatural syntax and entertaining preposterous interpretations.

But first, the thorny path. The (tough) counterpart to the (easy) primrose path.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Formulaic language, Modification, Modifier attachment, Movies and tv, Peeving, Plays, Split infinitives, Stock expressions, Syntax, Usage advice, Usage attitudes | Leave a Comment »

Samuel Beckett’s sitcoms

April 23, 2018

A literary cartoon by Tom Gauld that came to me (unsourced, but I recognized the style) on Facebook today:

Hybrids between the plays of Samuel Beckett and American tv sitcoms.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Plays | Leave a Comment »

Shirtlessness and more: Bouguereau and Sargent

March 12, 2018

(This posting has reproductions of art works in which penises and female breasts are exposed. My belief is that these works — now on public display in mainstream art museums — fall under the Fine Art Exemption to the ban on such images on WordPress, Facebook, Google+, and elsewhere.)

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Annals of shirtlessness: French neo-Classicism”, whose centerpiece was Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil, featuring two shirtless, in fact naked, men in combat. The painter was heaviy focused on the female form, so his treatment of the male nude is of some interest. On Facebook, Corry Wyngaarden then supplied another Bouguereau example:

(#1) Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes (1862)

(with drapery cunningly concealing the man’s genitals, making the painting acceptable for exhibition at the Paris Salon; in intent, this is not a cock tease, but a modest cover-up). The Bouguereau Orestes led me immediately to John Singer Sargent’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1921). And from there to Sargent‘s treatment of male nudes, in a set of drawings and paintings kept secret during the painter’s lifetime — sexually explicit, homoerotic works.

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Phallicity, Plays, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »

Woolly Mammoth flips us the bird

June 16, 2017

A few days ago, Michael Palmer posted this logo, commenting “I was unaware that Arnold Zwicky was in the theatah”. It’s the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, with its logo in rainbow for Pride Month, and the woolly mammoth is my totem animal. Oh yes, and I’m gay, so it all fits.

(#1)

Then I recalled having written about the theatre company and one of its productions, with fuck in the title, so that it presented an issue for publicity and for publications reviewing the production — notably, the ostentatiously modest (no fuck for us, please, we’re a family newspaper) New York Times.

But apparently I never actually wrote the story up; memory is a fickle, fickle thing. In any case, the play is Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird, which had its world premiere at the Woolly Mammoth in 2013, and I’ll write about it now. Even better, the Times‘s handling of the situation when the show came to NYC last year is truly wonderful.

Now: some bits on the Woolly Mammoth, on experimental theatre companies, and on Posner’s play. Then on the play in the media, with the the NYT as the capper.

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Posted in Mammoths, Plays, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

Lili Darvas

May 31, 2016

(on actors, writers, and artists, with not much on language)

… and Billy Mumy and Ferenc Molnár and Edith Barakovich. It starts with some tv I watched yesterday: “Long Distance Call”, episode 58 of the American tv series The Twilight Zone (originally aired on 3/31/61), notably featuring Lili Darvas and Billy Mumy:

(#1)

The set-up, from Wikipedia:

A boy named Billy communicates with his father’s mother using a toy telephone that she gave him on his birthday before she died. His parents become concerned when Billy spends all his time having “pretend” phone conversations with his deceased grandmother. He says that she tells him she is lonely and misses him.

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Posted in Actors, Art, Movies and tv, Photography, Plays | Leave a Comment »