Monday, March 8, 2021

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are alive

A couple friends of ours mentioned in comments to B. that they'd be interested in a Zoom meeting to read plays aloud. I've acted with all three of them in Mythcon plays, so we set up a session which turned out to be today. I had an ideal suggestion for a four-hander: Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which can be cast with: 1) R; 2) G; 3) The Player; 4) narration and everybody else (other characters do occasionally interact with each other, but only in quotations from Hamlet).

We had great fun with this and got through about half the play in a roughly 90-minute session before people's voices started to give out. I think that, aside from any pre-existing conditions of throat problems, one tends to read louder in a Zoom session that one might when you're all gathered together in a living room. Still, it was a success and we intend to finish it up next week. This is another item from my wanted-to-do-it-for-decades list of things to do.

We discovered that one person's text was different from the others: some lines were cut and others added. Haven't had a chance to determine which is the older and which the newer version.

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