On Sunday afternoon I saw a new production of a play called “Mortal Terror” at Suffolk University in collaboration with our own Boston Playwrights Theatre (also starring new faculty member Michael Hammond!). Written by Robert Brustein (who founded the A.R.T), “Mortal Terror” is the second in a trilogy of newly conceived plays about the life of Shakespeare as he was writing his own plays. Set in 1605, King James urges Shakespeare to write a piece of work, which later becomes ‘MacBeth’, that will validate the king’s right to the throne. Although a wonderfully innovative and exciting premise, to me the show lacked a strong drive to push these characters along the story. I was not highly disappointed but I was left with a feeling of its… potential.
The show struck a new cord in me as I was reading Charles Mee’s preface to Divine Fire called “The Culture Writes Us” in tandem with a positive Boston Globe article on the production. Mee notes that he believes all artists take in what culture gives them and transforms it in their own unique manner while Brustein talks about the overwhelming inspiration of seeing Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V in 1944. This artistic thread of inspiration and transformation is very exciting to a young artist like myself. To be an audience member of a play which was written by a playwright who was inspired by an actor in a film which was presumably directed by someone who was transformed by reading a play by William Shakespeare who very well may have been inspired to write that very play by a King, a friend or a older poet ..is a pretty exciting linage to be a pivotal part of. Mee describes a “tension between what has been made and what can be re-made (which) lives in the very essence of the work – that our common human project of making life on earth, making a society, making a bareable or wonderful civilization, is alive in every particle of the work.” This very blog is just a inspired transformation of my thoughts from a play and a short essay and therefore continues the thread of the drama.
