“Professional actors, like professional athletes, don’t whine about the aches and pains they endure on the field of battle. Well, we’re not professional actors. Featuring a litany of injuries, a raft of remedies, a special appearance by a brand-new fan, a podcast correction, and the dangers of performing a show that isn’t strenuous enough. (MP3. Length 19:53)
Podcast: Download (18.3MB)
Michelle Ephraim – a Professor of English and (with Caroline Bicks), the cohost of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast and the co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas – joins us this week to talk about her frank and funny new book, Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare. Michelle reveals she discovered Shakespeare surprisingly late; how “fun” is a a perfectly fine description of her sometimes fraught memoir; the shared curse of meeting hero Stephens; how Shakespeare became a source of both pain and solace in the wake of a parent’s death; how her relatively cushy job became surprisingly hazardous; and, finally, how Shakespeare – a dead European white man – became a very relatable force for inclusion. (Length 19:31)
Richard Schoch discusses Shakespeare’s House: A Window Onto His Life and Legacy, his wonderful new history of not only the building in Stratford-upon-Avon that William Shakespeare was born in, but how that building survived and became ground zero in the Shakespeare tourism industry. Schoch reveals how he discovered the dual focus of his book; how it took almost 200 years for people to realize the treasure that still stood in their midst; the shenanigans played by people who first depicted Shakespeare’s birthplace; the important distinctions between restoring a house and remaking it; the trick of hitting that sweet spot between writing an academic history and a popular one; and how the most important person in Shakespeare’s birthplace is not Shakespeare but the visitor. (Length 18:52)
Joel H. Morris discusses his debut novel All Our Yesterdays – no, not the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Original Series – which tells the compellingly plausible story of the events that lead up to William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Morris reveals his multiple inspirations, both literary and personal; how investigations into the actual historical couple Shakespeare based his play on informed his novel; the ways in which writing is a process of discovery; how he balanced the political and the personal, the natural and supernatural; how he summoned the courage to explore one of literature's most famous characters; and the wonderful inability to let go of characters that won’t let you go. (Length 22:56)
2 Comments
admin · December 1, 2010 at 8:39 am
Thanks Greg! We LOVE Texas audiences… and will hopefully be back soon!
Greg · November 29, 2010 at 9:20 am
I was hoping the Dallas shows would be closer to sold out than they were. I am glad to hear that it sounds like you guys were happy with the crowds that did attend. I know my wife was vocal at the Saturday night performance during the rugby/football scene. Reed did his best to put her in her place, but I’ve been dealing with the woman for 20 years and haven’t had any such luck.
Hope you guys make a return trip sometime soon.