Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
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Preview of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is online
My preview of Globe Theatre‘s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is online now at the LeaderPost. An excerpt:
For audiences, it’s not physical vocabulary but Shakespeare’s 400-year-old verbal vocabulary that may intimidate. But Geoffrey Whynot, who plays Theseus and Oberon, points out that “in real life we don’t necessarily hear every word someone speaks. I think if the actors are clear on what they’re saying, what the relationships and the journeys are, even if the audience hears a word that’s archaic, they will understand it contextually, and they will still hear the emotional life of the line.”
There’s a lot of “emotional life” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “The point of it is love,” Whynot says: characters develop an understanding of love and rediscover its power.
“And it is funny,” he adds.
“It’s so funny,” (artistic director Ruth) Smillie agrees.
And she also agrees it’s about love: “Romeo and Juliet without the swords and death,” she calls it.
“It takes the same premise, star-crossed lovers, and through fairy magic and fairy mishap it all comes right in the end. Through the night the metaphor is that these young lovers are actually able to see each other as individual people, whereas before it was all about lust and honour and all the rest of it.”
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/10/preview-of-a-midsummer-nights-dream-is-online/