So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband; so love’s face
May still seem love to me, though altered new;
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place:
For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change.
In many’s looks, the false heart’s history
Is writ in moods, and frowns, and wrinkles strange.
But heaven in thy creation did decree
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell;
Whate’er thy thoughts, or thy heart’s workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence, but sweetness tell.
     How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,
     If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!

Analysis

Sonnet 93 has the poet satisfied with outward appearance, even when it conceals a lack of love.

Continuing a train of thought from the previous sonnet, Billy claims he will live like a deceived husband, assuming his lover’s faithfulness. On the outside it will look like love, even though you its a lie—his lover’s looks will stay the same, but their heart will be somewhere else. Many people express their unfaithfulness in their faces—in moody looks and frowns and strange wrinkles. But in the heavenly creation of the youth, it decided that his face would always express sweet love, whatever his thoughts or desires. In fact, it is much like Eve’s apple, which looked more sweet and virtuous than it was beneath the skin.

Will’s Wordplay

This sonnet, continuing from the previous one, directly addresses a question which was always of great interest to our boy Bill: ‘How can a person be other than they seem to be to the outward senses? What permits hypocrisy to be such a determining factor in human relationships?’ In the plays this drama is played out through the fictitious characters of a Macbeth, or an Iago, or Antonio (the usurping brother of Prospero in The Tempest). Here the reality is closer to home. Beware that boy’s cheatin’ heart, Bill!

The High Line, Manhattan

“The High Line design is a collaboration between James Corner Field Operations (Project Lead), Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf.

The Structure

Converting each section of the High Line from an out-of-use railroad trestle to a public landscape entailed not only years of planning, community input, and work by some of the city’s most inventive designers, but also more than two years of construction per section.

Planting Design

The High Line’s planting design is inspired by the self-seeded landscape that grew on the out-of-use elevated rail tracks during the 25 years after trains stopped running. The species of perennials, grasses, shrubs and trees were chosen for their hardiness, sustainability, and textural and color variation, with a focus on native species. Many of the species that originally grew on the High Line’s rail bed are incorporated into the park’s landscape.” [1]

Sustainability

“The High Line’s landscape was created in partnership with Netherlands-based planting designer Piet Oudolf. For inspiration, Oudolf looked to the existing landscape that grew on the High Line after the trains stopped running. The plant selection favors native, drought-tolerant, and low-maintenance species, cutting down on the resources that go into the landscape.

Site-specific Landscape

Varied conditions of light, shade, exposure, wind, and soil depth on the High Line in its out-of-use state led to an incredibly complex variety of growing conditions, or “microclimates.” The original, self-seeded landscape reflected this variation – where the High Line was narrow and sheltered by adjacent buildings, water was retained, soil was deeper, and vegetation was thicker, including several groves of tall shrubs and trees. Where the High Line was exposed to winds off the Hudson, the landscape was dominated by tough, drought-resistant grasses and wildflowers.

The current park landscape reflects the original microclimates of the High Line. By basing the planting design on naturally created plant communities, we create a well-adapted, site-specific landscape, cutting down on water and other resources needed to maintain it.

Local Sourcing

Whenever possible, we source materials from within a 100-mile radius. Almost half of the High Line’s plants are native species, and many were produced by local growers. Locally grown plants are better adapted to grow successfully in our climate, reducing the amount of plant failure and replacement costs. The High Line’s ecosystem provides food and shelter for a variety of wildlife species, including native pollinators.” [2]

Featured Artwork

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kobra painted a stunning mural on 25th Street at 10th Avenue in Chelsea. It takes its inspiration from Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic photo of a sailor kissing a nurse on VJ Day in Times Square. While the photo’s circumstances have been critiqued in recent years, specifically the issue of the nurse’s consent, the image has come to symbolize the triumph of love over war, emphasized in this mural by Kobra’s technicolor palette.

References

1. http://www.thehighline.org/about
2. http://www.thehighline.org/about/sustainable-practices

ACTOR – Nicole Golden

Nicole is an actor and voice artist living in NYC. She most recently portrayed St. Catherine in Woodshed Collective’s immersive theatre hit Empire Travel Agency. Other theatre credits include: Pericles (New York Shakespeare Exchange), 2.5 Minute Ride (Altered Stages), Cloud Nine (Bank Street), The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (Theatre at St. Clements), Enchanted April (Public Theatre, Maine), Young, Sexy & Talented (Fringe NYC), Why We Have a Body (Blue Heron Arts Center), All in the Timing (Mill Mountain Theatre, VA), Turandot (Alliance Theatre Company/Ku Na’uka Theatre Company, Japan), Hamlet and Accelerando (Actors Express, Atlanta), A Cheever Evening (Horizon Theatre Company, Atlanta), The Country Wife, The Comedy of Errors and The Bourgeois Gentleman (Georgia Shakespeare Festival). Her work as a producer includes the original short-play series Cherry Picking (The Wild Project), now in its 15th year, as well as Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven (Ohio Theatre) . National commercials and voice-overs. Nicole received her BFA in Acting from Florida State University, studies improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and is a graduate of Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s summer residency, the School at Steppenwolf.

DIRECTOR – Dexter Buell

Dexter Buell is a New York-based artist and teacher, with an MFA (1989) in sculpture from the Yale School of Art. Over the course of his 25-year career he has worked in three-dimensional form, time-based performance, photography and video and film. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and most recently, a SURDNA Foundation Fellowship to study and write in Berlin.

Buell grew up in Portland, Oregon in the 1970’s. With family ties on both coasts, he made numerous cross-country drives as an adolescent and later on his own. As a result, the landscape of the American West came to figure prominently in is work. He returns repeatedly to a preoccupation with nature and landscape, and the experience of the human will and desire within it. His early performance work challenged natural laws in an attempt to locate the limits of the physical self, pushing the boundaries of exhaustion through repetition and endurance: breathing, jumping, running in place, activities that verify the existence of the individual within larger schemata of nature.

His cinematic work emerged in the 1990’s as documents of these efforts. Actions were recorded on film and video and presented as artifacts of past events. These attendant production skills, along with the bread and butter of surviving as a contractor and mold-maker in New York City, provided the necessary qualifications for a second career as a teaching artist in the New York City Schools. Certified in 2004, he is now the chair of the Film and Media Studio and the Technical Director at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, where he teaches film production, studio art and technical theater.

The last decade has been a creative dormancy, a gathering of insight into narrative structure, screenwriting, and other performance and theatrical forms. This hiatus notwithstanding, he has completed two projects, Big Now, and The Lake (both 2012), that explore memory and loss through parallel editing and multi-track audio and visual projection. Big Now presents as a 6-channel audio work, with speakers surrounding a horizontal projection surface. Each speaker describes a different version of the death of a family friend in Berlin in 1989, during the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Google Images and iPhone Apps provide source imagery that become a mechanism of a personal geography and recollection in a layered and often incoherent babble of voice and image.

This investigation of personal loss continues in The Lake. This short experimental film is a testimonial of sorts, a record of parallel actions undertaken along side his wife during the break up of their marriage. It follows them through separate corners of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, in the early hours of the day, as they negotiate brambles, traffic, water, cold and glare to put their stories to rest. The two of them never meet on screen. Buells’ approach to Sonnet 93, takes up where the The Lake leaves off, and explores the gulf between the heart and face of intimacy.