MeyerBros

So I’m taking a break from writing a paper comparing “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Romeo and Juliet.”

Suddenly, I got really really angry at Claudio. I mean come on! First he believes the guy that that he just beat in battle over his commander and friend. Then, he believes the same guy instead of the girl that he “loves.” He says he loves her and then runs away at the first test of that love. He also acts rashly on his stupidity and extreme emotions to publicly humiliate Hero. And then stupid Hero! She loves a guy who doesn’t even know enough to question the guy who just lied to him. How on earth does she keep loving him after he embarrasses her like that? How does she expect their marriage to work with that little trust? Is she stupid, or is love actually that strong?

So then, I started feeling really really sorry for Romeo (sorry about the whole emotional teenage girl thing). Juliet was completely out of reach for him, but he knew he had to try. He didn’t choose to love her, it just happened and he knew he would never recover. A day without her was like toast without butter. If he knew another way to stop the pain of not having her he would have acted on it and avoided the whole play, but the only remedy he knew was to find her and never let her go.

So then I had to either hope that Hero was like Romeo, or give up on her.

i’m working on and off on my follow-up to “sadomasochism” which i wrote in the spring of 2005. “sadomashochism” was a fairly straight-forward one-act explosion of love and pain and repression - written in that good-old psychological realism sort of way. when we performed it last fall, i began playing with it - cutting this and that and turning into more of a theatrical event with music and dance and spectacle and the works. i realized that to really get the feeling i wanted would require a full-out physical collage a la chuck mee jr. now i’m working on that.

i read an interview with chuck mee the other day (thanks michelle and project muse) in which he talks about joseph chaikin and ‘random emotion theory’. chaikin’s theory as stated by chuck mee is:

I think there are things that everyone feels at least once every 15 minutes: embarrassment, for example, or humiliation, from no-where, without apparent cause; sudden gr ief , anxiety, dread, distraction — as though a spirit or monster of some kind had passed overhead; regret, impatience, hatred, and unreasoning rage. It’s not the same for everyone. Some people I know feel none of those things, but instead, every 15 minutes they feel vengeful, jealous — they are immobilized by envy, a longing to possess something or someone, greed, lust, a wish to put something in their mouths.

chuck writes out of this emotional theory rather than the freudian psychological aproach that needs each feeling to be explained by the feeling or action before it. chaikin also uses it as a director, having actors cycle randomly through emotions as a scene progresses. both claim the result is amazingly realistic and powerful.

i’m sure that has something to do with another theory i’ve been mulling over as i work. my theory is that ‘young love’ is a self-perpetuating myth along the lines of ‘redemptive violence’. just as violence becomes our only option because we expect it to be, young love dies out over time because we expect it to. once you believe in a theory of young love, there is no good reason to attempt anything else. love will slowly degrade as you watch it with complete certainty that ‘this is just the way things are’. aha - here’s the connection: (more…)