From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
???Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
???To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Analysis
Sonnet 1 bids the subject, a handsome young man, to create an heir so that he might taste immortality.

Shakespeare begins by exalting the young man’s physical beauty, before changing to a tone of contempt for his lack of a desire for an heir.Then, the sonnet shifts from a tone of admiration to a critical tone. Bill accuses the young man of being betrothed to himself, leaving nothing behind where there could be “abundance”, thus becoming his own enemy. It is a crime against man and nature to just simply eat away at “the world’s due” without reproducing. He calls the young man new, young, beautiful, and vital and implies that perhaps there were others before, but they are dead. He deems his beloved a worthless sinner for not procreating, though he still loves them. The man is selfish with his beauty, refusing to let the world see it in bloom, so Bill ends by saying his beloved may be a “bud”, but wouldn’t he rather be a flower to the world? To not bloom is to make waste. The ominous couplet serves as a prophetic threat of an empty death without offspring to carry on the beloved’s legacy.

Will’s Wordplay
Shakespeare’s pun on the word “tender” (to mean both youth and beauty as well as currency to alleviate a debt) further illustrates the beloved’s need to reproduce in order to pay off his debt of chastity.

“But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes”, is not only complimenting his handsome subject, but is also scolding him for his chastity. Will then goes on to give the imagery of a candle eating itself, (“Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel”), an image of gluttony

Shakespeare describes the selfishness of the beloved, contrasting allusions to a famine in the second quatrain with allusions to gluttony by saying that the beloved is “eat[ing] the world’s due” by dying without offspring.

The word “buriest” suggests the youth digging his own grave and the end to his beauty.

Scholar’s Corner
Helen Vendler comments on the overall significance of this sonnet:

“When God saw his creatures, he commanded them to increase and multiply. Shakespeare, in this first sonnet of the sequence, suggests we have internalized the paradisal command in an aestheticized form: From fairest creatures we desire increase. The sonnet begins, so to speak, in the desire for an Eden where beauty’s rose will never die; but the fall quickly arrives with decease. Unless the young man pities the world, and consents to his own increase, even a successively self-renewing Eden is unavailable”.[1]

Notes
1) ^Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1997. Print, pg. 46

Chelsea Piers

Chelsea Piers is a series of piers on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City in the Chelsea neighborhood, on the northern edge of Greenwich Village and the Meatpacking District. They were a passenger ship terminal in the early 1900s that was used by the RMS Lusitania and was the destination of the RMS Titanic. The piers are currently used by the Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment Complex. Pier 59 is home to the Chelsea Brewing Company the only micro-brewery in Manhattan. The new complex includes film and television production facilities, including those for CBS Sports Network and Food Network, a health club, a day spa, the city’s largest training center for gymnastics, two basketball courts, playing fields for indoor lacrosse and soccer, batting cages, a rock climbing wall and dance studios. In addition there is an AMF Bowling center, a golf club with multi-story driving range, and two full sized ice rinks for skating. The complex also includes a marina for mooring private boats.

Chelsea Piers circa 1950

Chelsea Piers is part of Hudson River Park, a waterside park on the Hudson River in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Bicycle and pedestrian paths, span the park north to south, opening up the waterfront for recreational use. It is a joint New York State and New York City collaboration and is a 550-acre park, the biggest in Manhattan after Central Park. The park arose as part of the West Side Highway replacement project in the wake of the abandoned Westway plan.

History
Historically, the term Chelsea Piers referred to the luxury liner berths on Manhattan’s west side from 1910 to the 1930s. Most of the major trans-Atlantic liners of the day docked at the piers. With luxury liners becoming bigger and bigger, New York City was looking for a new luxury liner dock in the early 1900s. The Army, which controlled the location and size of piers, refused to let any piers extend beyond the existing pierhead line of the North River (the navigation name for the Hudson River south of 30th Street). Ship lines were reluctant to build north of 23rd Street because infrastructure was already in place, including the High Line Rail line and a train station near the river at 23rd Street.[2]

New York City solved the problem in an unusual way — it actually took away a block of land that was once part of Manhattan. The land was the 1837 landfill that extended Manhattan to 13th Avenue. The controversial decision included condemning many businesses. The new piers were designed by the architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore, which has also designed Grand Central Terminal. Under contracts let by the New York City Department of Dock and Ferries, the Chelsea Section Improvement, as it was officially called, replaced a hodgepodge of run-down waterfront structures with a row of grand buildings embellished with pink granite facades and formed the docking points for the rival Cunard Line and White Star Line.

After New York moved its luxury liner piers to the New York Cruise Terminal between West 46th and West 54th Street in 1935 to accommodate bigger ships such as the RMS Queen Mary and the SS Normandie, the pier became a cargo terminal. During World War II the piers were used to deploy troops. [1]

In July 1936, the Chelsea Piers were the point of departure for Jesse Owens and the United States Olympic team as they left for the Summer Games in Berlin, Germany.

The piers had a catastrophic fire in 1947 that destroyed some of the south piers. New construction resulted in new cargo piers used by the United States Lines and Grace line.

In the 1980s, plans circulated to replace the West Side Elevated Highway with an at grade highway going along the West Side south of 42nd Street. The plan called for the highway to run over demolished piers. Pier 54 was actually demolished in 1991 although the archway entrance (along with the White Star and Cunard signage) was retained. The plan (dubbed the Westway) was abandoned after court cases said the new highway would jeopardize striped bass.

Construction of Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex began on July 12, 1994 in ceremonies attended by New York Governor Mario Cuomo, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger. Chelsea Piers Connecticut, the first expansion project of Chelsea Piers, was built in Stamford, Connecticut. The facility opened in July 2012.

Lusitania and Titanic Disasters
While every trans-Atlantic ship of the era visited the piers, the two most memorable moments for the pier were with the Lusitania and Titanic. The RMS Lusitania left her Cunard Pier 54 before being torpedoed and becoming the rallying cry for American involvement in World War I. The RMS Titanic was destined for the White Star pier 59 when she sank. Survivors were rescued on Cunard’s RMS Carpathia. The Carpathia dropped off the Titanic’s lifeboats at Pier 59 before going back south to Pier 54 where she unloaded the passengers and survivors. Thousands of people assembled at the dock to greet the ship.

Sonnet Project
Chelsea Piers was the featured location for Sonnet 1, performed by Artistic Director Ross Williams, directed by Melinda Hall. The video was released on April 26, 2013.

References

1. http://www.glts.org/articles/nyc_memorials/

Ross Williams cut his teeth in the world of theater when he played a ferret and the rear end of a horse in The Wind in the Willows at the local community theater, Fantasy Playhouse in Huntsville, Alabama where he grew up. At Grissom HS he acted in, and directed many shows under the tutelage of Gail Rodenhauser and Sandra Hayes. His directorial debut was a one-act version of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde which, while it likely lacked the acerbic edge that only a jaded sense of irony can bring about, was well-received by those audiences that were lucky enough to score tickets and find themselves in that darkened, institutional auditorium.

Following high school Ross attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas where he studied Acting and Directing. He then went on to get an MFA in performance at the Cleveland Play House Graduate Actor Training Program through Case Western Reserve University. While at Case, Ross discovered his great love of Shakespeare.

Since moving to NYC, Ross has acted, directed and taught with many of the small Shakespearean companies in the city. His most notable performing gig took him to Toronto, Ontario where he originated the role of Gimli the battle-axe wielding dwarf in the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings musical extravaganza directed by Matthew Warchus.

Ross founded New York Shakespeare Exchange in 2009 as a vehicle for engaging new audiences with classical theater.

Melinda Hall (Willful Pictures) is a writer, director, producer and actor for both stage and film. She produces the Annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam which takes place at the Bandshell in Central Park. It’s a free event where all 154 Sonnets are read aloud by 154 people of all ages.

For the Shakespeare Week at the New York Public Library 2013, Ms. Hall was honored to give a talk on the style of Directing for Shakespeare for the stage.

Her current film project: HOW SHAKESPEARE CHANGED MY LIFE interviews people who tell of a pivotal moment when Shakespeare literally changed their lives. The film stars: Sir Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Earle Hyman, Michael Kahn, Stacy Keach, F. Murray Abraham and other notable artists. Clips are available on Vimeo.

Recently, she directed Sonnet #1 for the New York Shakespeare Exchange’s Sonnet Project which was shot on location at the Hudson River Park, NYC and features Ross Williams.

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
     This were to be new made when thou art old,
     And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Analysis
Sonnet 2 is a procreation sonnet that emphasizes the ruin of age, and how the beauty of the subject’s youth could be preserved in a child.

Shakespeare’s beloved is clearly handsome, and much desired. But he stresses that beauty will not last, and that it is selfish and foolish for the young man not to prepare for the loss of his youth. He will become like a “tattered weed” unless he reproduces. People will ask where his beauty has gone; the only way he can truly prepare is to have a son who can carry on his name and wonderful qualities, including his unsurpassed beauty. Therefore when the man described is old, his heir will be young, his debt to society paid, and his beauty renewed.

Will’s Wordplay
The beginning of this sonnet is a military metaphor. Here, the young man’s enemy is time, and he is depicted wearing his own youthfulness as proudly as one would wear a uniform,or “livery”.

The “tatter’d weed” evokes an aging garment (the youth’s livery in the above line).

Thriftless: unprofitable.

“Shall sum my count and make my old excuse” means that the youth’s heir will settle his debt to society and justify his aging.

Isham Park, Manhattan
You may not have even heard of this little gem, but Isham Park is a 20-acre historic park located in the Inwood section of Manhattan in New York City. The park was created through a gift of the Isham family in 1912-1916 and later expanded by New York City in 1925 and 1927.

Its western border once extended to the Harlem River but after the development of Inwood Hill Park and reconfiguration of area streets the boundary became, for all practical purposes, Seaman Avenue. Isham Park has its southern boundary at Isham Street. For part of its length Broadway is the eastern boundary, but from about West 214 Street Park Terrace East is the boundary. The park’s northern end is at the equivalent of West 214 Street, which here is a long flight of stairs. There are two apartment buildings between these stairs and West 215 Street. The park is cut in two by Park Terrace West.[1]

The Isham mansion, which originally came with the park gift, was torn down in the 1940s due to its deteriorating condition.[1]

Isham Park is noted at its southern end for some exposed marble outcroppings which date from the Cambrian period. This is a popular location for college geology classes to visit. There is a public garden in the northeastern corner. Much of the rest of the park has trees and brush growing in a rather wild manner.

The Park is popular with families with small children who appreciate the park’s rolling topography and quiet nature. Ball games and other sports are discouraged in Isham Park and the park serves as a serene, more passive neighbor to the many facilities of Inwood Hill Park.

References
1. “Isham Park – Historical Sign”. New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Retrieved 2010-07-19.

ACTOR – Cheryl Blaylock
Cheryl Blaylock’s award-winning documentary feature, In Vienna They Put You in Jail: The Max Birnach Story is distributed by Cinema Guild www.cinemaguild.com. Her company, Kalamazoo Gal Pictures, has produced documentaries, tributes, promos and weddings. Cheryl has worked extensively in film and television as a puppeteer, her favorite characters include Frederica in Blue’s Room (spinoff of Blue’s Clues), Eureeka in Eureeka’s Castle and many characters on Sesame Street. She recently coached and co-directed Avenue Q at the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre. With the Jim Henson Company, she designed, built and performed the Muppets, winning an Emmy for her work on Sesame Street. She has acted on stage, television and film in various projects from drama to commercials to cartoon voices. Sonnet #2 marks her first venture into Shakespeare’s canon. She is represented by Abrams Artists Agency.

DIRECTOR- Cheryl Blaylock
Cheryl Blaylock’s award-winning documentary feature, In Vienna They Put You in Jail: The Max Birnach Story is distributed by Cinema Guild www.cinemaguild.com. Her company, Kalamazoo Gal Pictures, has produced documentaries, tributes, promos and weddings. Cheryl has worked extensively in film and television as a puppeteer, her favorite characters include Frederica in Blue’s Room (spinoff of Blue’s Clues), Eureeka in Eureeka’s Castle and many characters on Sesame Street. She recently coached and co-directed Avenue Q at the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre. With the Jim Henson Company, she designed, built and performed the Muppets, winning an Emmy for her work on Sesame Street. She has acted on stage, television and film in various projects from drama to commercials to cartoon voices. Sonnet #2 marks her first venture into Shakespeare’s canon. She is represented by Abrams Artists Agency.

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,
Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire and child and happy mother
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
     Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
     Sings this to thee: ‘thou single wilt prove none.

Analysis
Sonnet 8 is another procreation sonnet urging the young man to whom it is addressed to marry and have children. A comparison is made between the harmony of different instruments in an orchestra, voices in unison, and a harmonious relationship between a family.

A lesson is drawn from the young man’s apparent sadness listening to music. Music itself is concord and harmony, similar to that the happy household of father, child and mother, as if they were separate strings in music which reverberate mutually. Will compares the harmony of different instruments in an orchestra, voices in unison (although on “one note” an octave apart) and a harmonious relationship between a family. The music, which he hears, angers him as it makes him feel worthless living a single life. He will become nothing having not had children.

Will’s Wordplay
“concord” and “unions married” here mean musical harmony, but their application to romantic relationships is not lost on the Bard.
“thou single wilt prove none” is an allusion to the common saying “one is no number”, and also tells the youth he will amount to nothing.

Scholar’s Corner
As Blick points out, this sonnet, which in its numbering invokes the union or unison of the octave, is associated with sonnet 128 by the vocative naming of the addressee as “music”, but in sonnet 128 harmony in unions/unison is to be achieved by the “kiss”, not marriage. Here, it is the young man’s singleness that prevents a unison. [1]

References
1. Blick, Fred. (1999). Shakespeare’s Musical Sonnets: Numbers 8, 128 and Pythagoras The Upstart Crow, A Shakespeare Journal, Clemson University Press, Clemson.

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park
The site of several movie shoots, John Lennon’s eulogy, a Martin Luther King speech, and a Grateful Dead concert, Central Park’s Naumburg Bandshell is a pop culture icon that’s given a home to an eclectic bunch.

History
“Next time you walk past the Naumburg Bandshell on the concert ground, you might hear a musician playing today’s hits. But in 1862 when a cast-iron bandstand was erected on the spot on which the Beethoven statue stands today, the very straight-laced commissioners would not have approved of popular music. They wanted the public to hear only refined, classical music like that of Beethoven himself.

By the 1890s, marches by John Philip Sousa, choral and folk music were added to the repertoire — but it took until the 1920s for park-goers to enjoy what we know today as popular music. Such greats as Irving Berlin, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington entertained at the Bandshell, as well as Victor Herbert, whose statue is just a few steps away from Beethoven. Those two statues, as well as the other 49 statues in the Park, are given a cleaning every summer by the Central Park Conservancy.

The Conservancy is also responsible for recreating those beautiful and unique wooden benches surrounding the trees. When the Park was first opened in the 1860s, the elms were newly planted and their roots were still quite shallow. On sunny concert days, thousands of park-goers would jam into the small area and huddle under the fragile trees for shade. Park designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were concerned about the survival of the young trees, so they designed these benches to also act as fences, protecting both the elms as well as the Sunday-best clothes that people always wore to come to Central Park.”[1]

Sonnet Project
The Naumburg Bandshell was the featured location for Sonnet 8, performed by Michelle Beck, directed by Emily Ernst and Daniel Burity. The video was released on May 15, 2013

References
1. http://www.centralparknyc.org/visit/things-to-see/south-end/naumburg-bandshell.html

MICHELLE BECK – Actor

Michelle Beck began her career as an actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in The Winter’s Tale and Cyrano de Bergerac. She appeared in the film Spinning into Butter, followed by Ophelia in Hamlet at the Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Michael Kahn. Michelle went on to work with the director Daniel Fish as Marianne in his Tartuffe at the McCarter Theater and Yale Repertory Theater and in 2008, Beck appeared as Viola in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Twelfth Night, and was then cast in The Bridge Project under the direction of Sam Mendes. Other recent Shakespeare includes: Much Ado About Nothing at Theatre for a New Audience, and Richard III and Love’s Labor’s Lost at The Public Theater. Upcoming: A Kid Like Jake at Lincoln Center. BFA Acting, Suny Purchase.

EMILY ERNST – Co-Director
Emily Ernst was born in Lincoln, Nebraska where she trained as a classical pianist for eleven years. In 2008, she earned a BFA in Acting from SMU (Greer Garson Award) and began her career as an actor doing rep theatre in Michigan. After a summer working with installation artists, acrobats and directors at Friches Théâtre Urbain in Paris, she discovered an interest in directing and education. In 2009, she taught Shakespeare at the Manhattan Country School, and traveled to Hartford to develop curriculum, assistant direct, and lead post-show discussions for an adaptation of Warriors Don’t Cry (Bushnell Theatre). In 2011, Emily directed her first play in Baltimore and assisted Kara-Lynn Vaeni on the Russian opera, Eugene Onegin (Opera Slavica). She returned the following year to assist again on the main stage while also staging the company’s scenes program, featuring scenes in Czech and Russian from four separate operas. She now works full time at an Off-Broadway Shakespeare Company, Theatre for a New Audience, where she coordinates the intern program and in 2012, assisted Arin Arbus on The Taming of the Shrew.

DANIEL BURITY – Co-Director
Daniel Burity is an award-winning Brazilian filmmaker from Salvador, Bahia. He graduated with a degree in Communications from Hélio Rocha College and studied Digital Cinema at the School of Visual Arts, in New York. Daniel began his career working in television at age 22, where he directed, wrote and edited cultural programming. Since 2007, he has worked as a director, editor, producer, and videographer based in New York City. His series, Apple Sounds, about independent musicians in New York City, won the Press Award in For Lauderdale, Florida, and was praised highly by director Michel Gondry. Daniel is also known for his work in music videos, and as editor of the feature documentary Bel Borba Aqui, which played in cinemas across the United States.

For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lovest is most evident;
For thou art so possess’d with murderous hate
That ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire.
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
     Make thee another self, for love of me,
     That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

Analysis
Sonnet 10 gets personal. The poet uses a rather harsh tone to admonish the beloved for his refusal to fall in love and have children.– “Do it for me”

For the first time, Billy mentions a personal relationship between himself and the youth. He stresses the young man’s charm, states that he is much loved. He makes two statements, firstly, that he wishes to have an opportunity to change his opinion of the youth as implying that his (Billy’s) better opinion is of some value; secondly he attempts the persuasive argument of ‘for love of me’ in order to produce a change– he asks the young man to have a child to please him! Sounds a little desperate to me…

Will’s Wordplay
“that beauteous roof” refers both to the young man’s body (in which his beauty is housed) and his family (or house).
“another self” refers to a child. Clone yourself a mini-me, hot stuff!
“in thine or thee” means in your children or yourself.

Pier 49 Pile Field, Hudson River Park
Hudson River Park is a waterside park on the Hudson River that extends from 59th Street south to Battery Park in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Bicycle and pedestrian paths, including the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, span the park north to south, opening up the waterfront for recreational use. The park includes tennis and soccer fields, batting cages, children’s playground, dog run, recreational piers, and many other features.

It is a joint New York State and New York City collaboration and is a 550-acre park, the biggest in Manhattan after Central Park. The park arose as part of the West Side Highway replacement project in the wake of the abandoned Westway plan.

Hudson River Park is well known for the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex, which holds a variety of athletic spaces. Chelsea Piers sports a batting cage, bowling lanes, playing fields, a driving range, an ice skating rink, rock climbing facilities, and gymnastics space, among other exercise and fitness related spaces. Along with these indoor recreational facilities, Chelsea Piers offers boating activities and several restaurants on premises.

Looking out over the Hudson towards New Jersey is the Pier 49 pile field. What remains is a scenic overlook. On November 30, 2008, the 20th Anniversary of World AIDS Day, it was dedicated as New York City’s first permanent memorial to people who have died from AIDS. The Hudson River Park Trust provided the beautifully landscaped knoll for the memorial — a 42-foot-long curved stone bench situated on a granite path cut into the lawn near Bank Street. The path is complemented by a balcony that juts out over the river where Pier 49 once stood. The old pilings, still visible above the water, are a poignant metaphor for the lives lost to AIDS. The memorial is intended to be used as a place for people to sit and contemplate those who have been lost.

“This monument is a symbol of the profound effect AIDS has had on New York City and our country,” said Lawrence Swehla, board member of the AIDS Monument Committee (AMC). “The site is dedicated to all of those whose lives have been forever changed by AIDS,” he added. [1]

Sonnet Project
The Pier 49 pile field was the featured location for Sonnet 10, performed by Kelli Ruttle, directed by Jesse Gebryel. The video was released on July 1, 2013.

References
1. http://www.hudsonriverpark.org/assets/content/general/PR11.30.08.pdf

ACTOR – Kelli Ruttle
At the age of nine years old, I became obsessed with Bette Midler. I was raised with a slightly strict form of etiquette; “no elbows on the table”, “in public, children are to be seen and not heard”, stuff like that. So perhaps I took one wide-eyed look at the sequins, the songs, the comedic timing, and thought ‘That looks like the most fun that anyone could have. Ever.’ Whether that’s what actually started my love affair with the performing arts, I’m not 100% sure. But it’s the earliest domino that I can remember.

The next of the dominos to fall were 1) wearing out my “Live at Last” cassette tape from repetitive lip-synching (um, you’re WELCOME Mom and Dad!) and 2) memorizing word for word the likes of For the Boys and Hocus Pocus. Then came high school plays, a Bachelor of Theatre Arts from San Diego State, and an intense summer study at the British American Drama Academy. That was where my fascination with and appreciation for Shakespeare really began. I tasted Juliet and Ophelia for the first time. We had Q&A’s with Fiona Shaw, Derek Jacobi, and Brian Cox (to name just a few). And… AND…. it was the summer I saw Harriet Walter’s Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Let me repeat the key points of that last sentence in case your mind happened to wander for a moment: Harriet Walter. Beatrice. Much Ado. WHAT… a Master Class.

After college, I spent six years in Southern California performing at a number of West Coast theatres and booking the odd TV/Film gig. But after a stint at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, I returned to Los Angeles realizing that theatre was the main avenue I wanted to focus on, and that led me to start looking into graduate schools. I completed the Cleveland Play House’s M.F.A. Acting program and moved to the city of New York, where I now reside… and where I saw Bette Midler’s one-woman show I’ll Eat You Last. Twice.

Sometimes I can’t believe this ride! I’ve spoken words written by Noël Coward, Anton Chekhov, Molière, and Caryl Churchill. I’ve lived in Russia, fair Verona, Bohemia, and British Colonial Africa. I’ve dressed like a man to teach my lover how to woo, brought the statue of my friend and mistress back to life, and professed poetic declarations of love from a balcony. I was in the audience at BADA when Derek Jacobi was asked “What made you want to be an actor?” To which he replied, “I didn’t ‘want’ to be. I had to be.” It’s true. And I can’t explain where this need to put on someone else’s shoes and be their advocate comes from, nor would I want to spend much time trying to. I theorize, though, that on one side of the scale, it’s a sense of compassion, love, and empathy. And on the other side… it’s a shy girl’s sequins just dying to come out.

Love and shout-outs to Jesse Gebryel, James Arden, and Katelin Wilcox; very talented souls I was thrilled to share this latest adventure with. And to NY Shakespeare Exchange for making it possible, and for all that they do! XOXO

http://www.kelliruttle.com

DIRECTOR – Jesse Gebryel
Jesse Gebryel, Director- Jesse Gebryel is a screenwriter, director, and sunset chaser living in Sunnyside, NY. When he’s not traveling the world at lightning speed producing video for IBM, he uses his spare time to write and direct films. 
Twitter: @jessegebryel


PRODUCER – James Arden

James Arden, Producer- James Arden has worked in front of the camera for 15+ years with HBO,NBC,WB, BBC and FOX. He’s taking time to work on the other side and is proud to participate in the Sonnet project.

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
     And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
     Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Analysis

Sonnet 12 uses images of clock, a withering flower, a barren tree and autumn to remind the subject of their mortality, encouraging him to have a child before its too late.

The significance of the placing of this sonnet here (12 hours of the day) is not lost on us. The slow and swift passage of time which brings all things to an end is described with such significant and devastating effect that mortality almost stares us in the face as we read it. The overall effect is sombre, and the concluding couplet, with its brave stand against time, confined to a single line in the poem, gives the impression that nothing will be saved, and that the reality of what the poet has been urging all along is as slight as breath and water.

Will’s Wordplay

The exact meaning of”hideous” here is likely derived from the Old French hisde meaning dread. This gives us a balance in brave/day and hideous/night.

“Sable” is darkest brown. Note the extensive color imagery — violet, sable, green, silver, white.

One of the most striking metaphors in the sonnets: The harvested crops, carried on the bier, wrapped tightly with protruding pale hulls, are personified as the body of an old man, carried on a cart or wagon to church, wrapped tightly in his shroud, with his protruding white beard.

Scholar’s Corner

Helen Vendler proposes the poem holds two models of time: one of gradual decay, and one of an aggressive emblem-figure of Time with his scythe. These ideas call up two approaches of Death: one sad and innocent in which everything slowly wastes away, growing barren and aged, and one in which the reaper actively cuts them down and takes them away as if life had been murdered.[1]

References

1. Vendler, H. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Salem Press 1998 p96-100

Korean War Veterans Memorial, Battery Park

“This monument in Battery Park north of Castle Clinton, honors military personnel who served in the Korean Conflict (1950–1953). The memorial, dedicated in 1991, was designed by Welsh-born artist Mac Adams (b. 1943) and is notable as one of the first Korean War memorials erected in the United States.

The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, the dividing line between North and South Korea, and invaded South Korea. Within a month, the North Koreans had pushed the South Korean army and supporting U.S. forces to the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula. In response, the United Nations authorized an army, under the command of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), to repulse the North Koreans and re-establish the boundary between the North and South at the 38th parallel. In mid-September, MacArthur staged a daring amphibious landing at the Inchon Peninsula and attacked the North Koreans from behind. The U.N. troops had soon pushed the North Korean army back across the 38th parallel, and were advancing on the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China.

Fearing invasion, Chinese forces next became involved in the conflict. In November, the Chinese attacked the U.N. forces near the Yalu River, and quickly succeeded in driving them back into South Korea. The U.N. forces then counterattacked and managed to re-establish a battle line near the 38th parallel. In April 1951, President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) relieved General MacArthur of his command, rejecting MacArthur’s aggressive policies which Truman believed would instigate a major war with China and the Soviet Union. Fighting would continue in Korea for the next two years, although little ground was ultimately exchanged. Finally, on July 27, 1953, both sides signed an armistice, which ended hostilities and restored the 38th parallel as the dividing line between North and South Korea.

In 1987, the Korean War Veterans Memorial Committee was formed to raise money to build a monument to commemorate the soldiers of the “forgotten war.” Mac Adams’ winning design, selected from a group of over 100 entries, features a 15-foot-high black granite stele with the shape of a Korean War soldier cut out of the center. Also known as “The Universal Soldier,” the figure forms a silhouette that allows viewers to see through the monument to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. This literal void reinforces the figurative theme of absence and loss, and serves as a metaphor for death. The artist was inspired in his concept by Jon Silkin’s poem, “A Space in the Air,” which has the lines: “He left behind him. A hole cut out of the air. And I missed him suddenly, missed him without scarcely knowing why it was so…”. Adams also designed the piece to function as a sundial on the anniversary of the war’s conclusion, July 27, in which light would shine through the aperture upon the paving (illuminating the panel to Greece with a torch-like silhouette), though over time the growing tree canopy has obscured this effect.

One of the three tiers in the base of the monument is decorated with mosaic flags of countries that participated in the U.N.-sponsored mission. The plaza’s paving blocks are inscribed with the number of dead, wounded, and missing in action from each of the 22 countries that participated in the war. Korean War veterans are also commemorated in New York with the Brooklyn Korean War Veterans Plaza in Cadman Plaza, the Korean War Veterans Parkway (which was known as the Richmond Parkway until it was renamed in April 1997 by the New York State Legislature), and Queens Korean War Veterans Memorial in Kissena Park.” [1]

References

1. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/battery-park/monuments/1930

ACTOR – Brooke Haney

Brooke is a New York based actor who has worked Internationally in the Phillipines and Regionally in Seattle, Boston, Orlando, and Kentucky. She has a passion for classical text and new play development. Favorite roles include: Grace in Cut the Shit with The Representatives, Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and Celia in As You Like It with Barefoot Shakes, Mary Bennet and Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice at Orlando Shakespeare Theater (where she has performed for four seasons); Hermione in Winter’s Tale with Last Leaf Productions (three seasons) ; Claire in the World Premiere of Debbie Lamedman’s Triangle Logic; Kate Percy in 1 Henry 4 at Lexington Shakespeare; and Dee Dee in the site-specific production of Third and Oak: The Laundromat at the All-Brite Laundromat in Boston. Brooke is an Adjunct Professor of Acting at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the Adaptor/Actor of Kiss Me or Cut Off My Head which was workshopped in the Phillippines, at Sarah Lawrence College, at Most Wanted Fine Arts Gallery in Pittsburgh and had it’s World Premiere in NYC at Soho Photo Gallery, directed by Tracy Bersley. She is the Artistic Producer, Director of Apprentice Program and a writer/actor for Daughters of Troy. Brooke is an Adjunct Professor of Acting at Marymount Manhattan College. Proud member of AEA, SAG/AFTRA.
www.brookemhaney.com

DIRECTOR – Joshua Johnson

Bio COMING SOON.

But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?
And fortify your self in your decay
With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?
Now stand you on the top of happy hours,
And many maiden gardens, yet unset,
With virtuous wish would bear you living flowers,
Much liker than your painted counterfeit:
So should the lines of life that life repair,
Which this, Time’s pencil, or my pupil pen,
Neither in inward worth nor outward fair,
Can make you live your self in eyes of men.
     To give away yourself, keeps yourself still,
     And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill.

Analysis

Sonnet 16 is a direct continuation of the sonnet before it. In it, Shakespeare asks the young man why he does not actively fight against time and age by having a child.

Will asks the youth why he relies on a poet to preserve his image, when anything an artist creates pales in comparison to the real thing. A poem is a sorry weapon against Time’s war machine. The best plan, he suggests, is to create a child. He should begin preparing for the battle now, while he is in good standing, and many women would be glad to help. In the end, only that which the young man creates himself can help him live forever.

Will’s Wordplay

“Give away yourself” is a reference to marriage.

“maiden gardens” are the many virtuous women who would be happy to “bear your living flowers”.

Bowery Graffiti Wall, The Bowery, Manhattan

“Keith Haring first splashed this wall in 1982, and it’s been a destination ever since. In 2008, it went somewhat legit when late real-estate man Tony Goldman took over the location, invited Os Gêmeos, Shepard Fairey, Lady Aiko and more to rotate murals. Crash’s massive Popeye mural, which went up in March [2013], succeeded the mixed-media collage of Tats Cru’s How and Nosm. While something of a serious artistic showcase, this wall is also steeped in street ethos.” — Kenny Herzog, Time Out New York [1]

References

1. http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/street-art-top-ten-spots-to-see-street-art-and-graffiti-in-nyc

ACTOR – Devon Glover

Bio Coming Soon

DIRECTOR – Robert Manning, Jr.

Robert is a graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA Professional Acting Training Program.

Director: Robert owns his own production company with business partner, Scott Fernstrom and writes/directs theatre and film. Recent films include: Reunion, Stuck, Reticence…

As an actor – Television: The Blacklist, Person of Interest, Alpha House, Southland, The Unit, Criminal Minds… Films – Frogtown, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone… 2008 NAACP Theatre Award Nomination – Best Lead Actor, 2010 NAACP Best Supporting Actor nomination, 2012 NAACP Best Ensemble win for Pasadena Playhouse’s production of Blues for an Alabama Sky. Broadway – Magic/Bird.

As a director, www.alphaandomegafilms.com

As an actor, please visit www.robertmanningjr.com

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
     But were some child of yours alive that time,
     You should live twice, in it, and in my rhyme.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 17 is the last of the procreation sonnets, and the poet’s ast thought is to question his own descriptions of the beloved, believing that future generations will believe them to be exaggerations if he does not make a copy of himself (a child)

Billy insists that his comparisons, even though they are strongly worded, are not exaggerations. He even goes as far as to say that his verse is so pale in comparison that it hides half of the youth’s beauty, and they do not do him justice. Without an heir to this great beauty, there will be nothing in the world once the man is gone to prove that Bill was not a liar. The sonnet ends with the notion that should the young man have a child, he shall live both in the child and in the proven veracity of poet’s rhyme.
 
Will’s Wordplay
“deserts” here is that which the young man deserves. Nobody will believe how much you earned all this praise!
“shows not half your parts” is Willy getting critical of how few of the young man’s positive qualities even the most florid language can cover.

New York Public Library, Manhattan
Read up at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library.

“Often referred to as the “main branch,” the Beaux-Arts landmark building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street houses outstanding research collections in the humanities and social sciences as well as a circulating children’s collection. The non-circulating graduate-level collections were initially formed from the consolidation of the Astor and Lenox Libraries, and have evolved into one of the world’s preeminent public resources for the study of human thought, action, and experience — from anthropology and archaeology, to religion, sports, world history, and literature.

The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is renowned for the extraordinary comprehensiveness of its historical collections as well as its commitment to providing free and equal access to its resources and facilities. It houses some 15 million items, among them priceless medieval manuscripts, ancient Japanese scrolls, contemporary novels and poetry, as well as baseball cards, dime novels, and comic books. For over a century, librarians in what are now 15 public service and special collections units have sought out authoritative, popular, and ephemeral materials in the humanities, with an emphasis on literature, art, and history.

These remarkable collections are vast, diverse, and not easily characterized. They range from priceless ancient rarities in the Rare Books and the Manuscripts and Archives divisions to current newspapers from all over the world. More than 1,200 languages and dialects, ancient and modern, are represented in the collections. The uses of the collections are as varied as the items themselves.”[1]
 
History
“The origins of this institution date back to the time when New York was emerging as one of the world’s most important cities. By the second half of the 19th century, New York had already surpassed Paris in population and was quickly catching up with London, the world’s most populous city. Fortunately, this burgeoning and somewhat brash metropolis counted among its citizens men who foresaw that if New York was indeed to become one of the world’s great centers of urban culture, it must also have a great library. Prominent among them was one-time governor Samuel J. Tilden, who upon his death bequeathed the bulk of his fortune — about $2.4 million — to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York.”

At the time of Tilden’s death, New York already had two libraries of considerable importance -the Astor and Lenox libraries- but neither could be termed a truly public institution in the sense that Tilden seems to have envisioned. The Astor Library was created through the generosity of John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant who at his death was the wealthiest man in America. In his will he pledged $400,000 for the establishment of a reference library in New York. The Astor Library opened its doors in 1849, in the building that is now the home of The New York Shakespeare Festival’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. Although the books did not circulate and hours were limited, it was a major resource for reference and research.

New York’s other principal library during this time was founded by James Lenox and consisted primarily of his personal collection of rare books (which included the first Gutenberg Bible to come to the New World), manuscripts, and Americana. Located on the site of the present Frick Collection, the Lenox Library was intended primarily for bibliophiles and scholars. While use was free of charge, tickets of admission were required.

By 1892, both the Astor and Lenox libraries were experiencing financial difficulties. The combination of dwindling endowments and expanding collections had compelled their trustees to reconsider their mission. At this juncture, John Bigelow, a New York attorney and Tilden trustee, devised a bold plan whereby the resources of the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trust would be combined to form a new entity to be known as The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Bigelow’s plan, signed and agreed upon on May 23, 1895, was hailed as an unprecedented example of private philanthropy for the public good.

The site chosen for the home of the new Public Library was the Croton Reservoir, a popular strolling place that occupied a two-block section of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets. Dr. John Shaw Billings, one of the most brilliant librarians of his day, was named director.

Billings knew exactly what he wanted. His design, briefly sketched on a scrap of paper, became the early blueprint for the majestic structure that has become the landmark building, known for the lions without and the learning within. Billings’s plan called for an enormous reading room topping seven floors of stacks and the most rapid delivery system in the world to get the Library’s resources as swiftly as possible into the hands of those who requested them.

Following an open competition among scores of the city’s most prominent architects, the relatively unknown firm of Carrère & Hastings was selected to design and construct the new library. The result, regarded as the apogee of Beaux-Arts design, was the largest marble structure ever attempted in the United States. Before construction could begin, however, some 500 workers had to spend two years dismantling the reservoir and preparing the site. The cornerstone was finally laid in place on November 10, 1902.

In the meantime, the Library had established its circulating department after consolidating with The New York Free Circulating Library in February 1901. A month later, steel baron Andrew Carnegie offered $5.2 million to construct a system of branch libraries throughout New York City, provided the City would supply the sites and fund the libraries’ maintenance and operations. Later that year The New York Public Library contracted with the City of New York to operate 39 Carnegie branches in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island. Thus, from the earliest days of The New York Public Library, a tradition of partnership with the city and outreach to the community was established, which continues to this day.

Meanwhile, on Fifth Avenue, work progressed slowly but steadily on the monumental Library which would eventually cost $9 million to complete. During the summer of 1905, the huge columns were put into place and work on the roof was begun. By the end of 1906, the roof was finished and the designers commenced five years of interior work. In 1910, 75 miles of shelves were installed to house the immense collections.

More than one million books were set in place for the official dedication of the Library on May 23, 1911 – 16 years to the day since the historic agreement creating the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations had been signed. The ceremony was presided over by President William Howard Taft and was attended by Governor John Alden Dix and Mayor William J. Gaynor.

The following morning, New York’s very public Public Library officially opened its doors. The response was overwhelming. Between 30,000 and 50,000 visitors streamed through the building the first day it was open. One of the very first items called for was N. IA. Grot’s Nravstvennye idealy nashego vremeni (Ethical Ideas of Our Time) a study of Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoi. The reader filed his slip at 9:08 a.m. and received his book six minutes later! Almost overnight, The New York Public Library became a vital part of the intellectual fabric of American life. Among its earliest beneficiaries were recently arrived immigrants, for whom the Library provided contact with the literature and history of their new country as well as the heritage that these people brought with them.

To help millions of users — from all walks of life and corners of the earth — find materials, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building maintains extensive catalog and bibliographic resources. Full advantage is being taken of computers and other information technologies to facilitate search and retrieval. In addition — and of equal if not greater importance — the Library maintains a staff of librarians whose expertise, helpfulness, and patience continue to be among the Library’s proudest traditions.”[2]
 
References
1.http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/about
2.http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/36/node/65791

ACTOR – Carey Van Driest
Carey is originally from the frozen tundra of Wisconsin. In addition to icy climates, she has also lived in the warm Southern hills of Nashville, Tennessee, the cow-town of Fort Worth, Texas and the valley of the Alps of Geneva, Switzerland. She can now technically call herself a New Yorker now after living in the city that never sleeps longer than she’s lived anywhere else. With no actual planning on her part to achieve such a list, she can also say she has traveled to Russia, Greece, Turkey, Germany, France, Scotland, Amsterdam, Italy, Belgium, England, Denmark, Austria, Mexico, Canada, and all over the 50 United States. Next up, she wants to head to the Southern Hemisphere and visit Argentina and the Dominican Republic, followed by Morocco, Australia and Indonesia. She likes talking in third person about where she’s lived and traveled because it makes her feel worldy.

Professionally, she spends most of her time creating characters for TV, Stage and Film. She recently appeared in House of Cards as a reporter dogging Bob Birch and as Maria in Lend Me A Tenor at Cape May Stage. She was a featured actress is the short film, A Family Dinner, which screened at the Short Film Corner at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and has won several awards in the Film Festival Circuit around the world. She is the voice of a Howler Monkey named Avelina in the upcoming animated feature film Ribbit (2014), starring Sean Astin as Ribbit and Tim Curry as Terence.

Tours: Annie (Grace Farrell). New York: Reckless (Rachel), The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest (Sonnet Repertory Theatre), The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man. Selected Regional: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Mae) and Much Ado About Nothing at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival and others. Her voiceover work for international documentaries, national commercials and radio can be heard at www.careyvandriest.com. Fluent French Speaker, Animation and Commercial Voiceover Guru, Badass Chick, Shakespeare Afficionado, Carole King Wannabe, Novice Burlesque Dancer and Proud Member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA.

DIRECTOR – Marco Ricci
A graduate of Northwestern University, Marco received the Kodak Gold Award and the Sony Production Award for his thesis film Chicago Minutes.

His short film, Pishadoo, was well received on the festival circuit and was purchased by Canal Plus Europe, Sundance Channel, Atom Films and United Airlines. The film earned production awards at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and the Williamsburg Film Festival.

Marco’s last short film, Hyper, was chosen for the Centerpiece of the New York Film Festival. It was honored as the Best Short Short at the prestigious Aspen Shortsfest and was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, among others. Hyper is being distributed by Apollo Cinema and has been seen on Atom Films, RAI Television, and the Independent Film Channel.

His first feature, The Wedding Bros. made it’s world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The film, a comedy about two adversarial brothers who set out to make it big with the King Of Long Island Wedding Videos, is being distributed by Universal Prictures/ScreenMedia and has been shown on Cinemax, BBC and RAI.

Marco recently directed a PBS documentary, The Reconstruction of Asa Carter. The film recounts the life story of Native-American writer Forrest Carter, author of The Outlaw Josey Wales, who was in actuality a prominent member of the KKK. It made it’s world premiere at the Sidewalk Film Festival and it’s television premiere in the Spring of 2012.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
     Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
     My love shall in my verse ever live young.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 19 treats the theme of redemption of time through art– for there immortality lies.

Billy directly addresses Time, and lists all of the conventional damage Time does which is customary and known to all, killing sweetness and beauty everywhere. It can even do its worst against the youth, the poet’s love. But the youth will survive in eternal youth and beauty because of the verses made to celebrate him, and the poet’s love for him.
 
Will’s Wordplay
To “fleet” is to fly by

Bear and Faun Statue, Morningside Park
Officially titled The 1914 Alfred L. Seligman Fountain, “this striking bronze sculpture by Edgar Walter (1877-1938) is also known as Bear and Faun. It was dedicated in 1914 in memory of Alfred L. Seligman (1864-1910), vice-president of the National Highways Protective Association. Ironically, Mr. Seligman was killed in an automobile accident in 1910.

For his years of public service in a relatively brief lifespan, friends of Seligman commissioned this sculpture at a cost of $2,000, and gave it to the City as a gift to its children. At the dedication ceremony on May 17, 1914 Parks Commissioner Cabot Ward and Frederic R. Coudert, president of the National Highways Protective Association, delivered addresses.

In his speech, turning over the work of art to the City, Coudert commented, “Alfred Lincoln Seligman sought not for fame, but in his comparatively short life he devoted much of his time to the young people of the City, in offering them opportunity for instruction in the art of music. It is because of his attitude toward the children and his work for their safety, health and happiness that this monument to his memory is peculiarly appropriate.”

About seven feet in height, the fountain depicts a bear overhanging a grotto in which a small faun (half man, half goat) plays on the pipes. The picturesque fountain, with a drinking apparatus for humans, and a basin for dogs to drink from, is situated at the foot of a staircase on the eastern edge of the park near the 114th Street entrance.” [1]
 
Sonnet Project
The Bear and Faun Statue was the featured location for Sonnet 19, performed by Annie Paul, directed by Becky Lane. The video was released on June 13, 2013.
 
References
1. http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/morningsidepark/monuments/1424

ANNIE PAUL
Annie has most recently worked on two projects produced by Shakespeare Exchange in NYC. She was a featured performer in their ShakesBEER Pub Crawl and also filmed a sonnet for their exciting new Sonnet Project. Annie also just finished shooting three episodes of The Chanticleer, produced in Ithaca by Nice Girl Films. Other NYC credits include: Pride from the Door (world premiere staged reading), As You Like It, at Soho Rep & The Wonder, at Theatre Row (both produced by The Queen’s Company), Bus Stop, Twelfth Night, and Love, Lust & the Green Eyed Monster. Some favorite regional credits include: Wait Until Dark at The Human Race Theatre, Big Love, As You Like It, Heartbreak House, and Pride and Prejudice at The Cleveland Play House, and Playboy of the Western World at American Players Theatre. TV credits include: Boardwalk Empire and The Unusuals. Annie is also a company member at The National Comedy Theatre in New York City and a is member of AEA & SAG/AFTRA.

BECKY LANE – Director
Becky Lane is an independent filmmaker and founder of Nice Girl Films, a small woman-centered production company with footprints in both Ithaca, NY and New York City. Her short films, Hens & Chicks, Poker Face and Happy Hour have collectively screened at over 80 film festivals worldwide, garnering great acclaim and awards, including Best Short Film Audience Award in Rochester, Barcelona, London, and Durham. Prior to this, Lane concentrated on digital media, spearheading the development of award-winning, socially conscious web sites and Internet video for institutions such as Cornell University and the Women’s Sports Foundation founded by Billie Jean King. While Lane initially trained as an actor, it soon became apparent that her interests, skills and versatility were a perfect match for directing. She is currently developing a feature-length film for production in 2013. Lane holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. As a sociologist and filmmaker, Lane’s distinctive projects entertain while exploring provocative cultural complexities
 
ELISSA BAKER – Assistant Director
This marks Elissa Baker’s debut into the cinematic arts. She graduated from the University of Illinois. Prior to college she was involved in small theater productions in Iowa. She is thrilled to focus on creating art through cinema while teaching her son that life is compelling, fascinating and full of joy and opportunity. Elissa has traveled to New York City to work as an assistant director and is currently working with Becky Lane and Nice Girl Films to market and produce a web series. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son.
 
NONI KORF – Editor/Animator
Noni Korf has been working in film since she started out with a single-8 camera making stop-motion animations in grade school. She’s continued working in photography, film, and video, graduating from Cornell with a self-designed media arts degree. Her love for image-making and interest in all aspects of film and video production led her to work in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York City as a production manager for industrial films, television commercials, news features, and music videos. She loves being behind the camera; her work can be seen this year in the award-winning documentary, My Mother’s Journey, by Sam and Kirsten Hampton. As an editor, her credits include work on documentaries, experimental films, music videos, and now, with this year’s Hens and Chicks, narrative short-fiction. She lives and works in New York.

A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
     But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
     Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 20 compares the fair youth’s appearance to that of a woman, and says its a pity for a male admirer to be unable to partner him

Will’s subject is “the master-mistress of [his] passion”. He has the grace and beauty of a woman but is devoid of the guile and pretense that comes with women; those wily women with eyes ‘false in rolling’, who change their moods and affections like chameleons. Despite all his womanly charms, he has “one thing” like a man, meaning he was made to partner a woman, making the love of the admirer sadly moot.
 
Will’s Wordplay
“with Nature’s own hand painted” means the subject is a natural beauty, with no need of cosmetics

The “one thing” the subject has that women do not is male genetalia. Real subtle, Billy-boy.
 
Scholar’s Corner
The modern reader may read sonnet 20 and question whether or not Shakespeare’s sexuality is reflected in this sonnet. When looking at the sexual connotations in this sonnet it is important to reflect on what homoerotism meant during the time that Shakespeare was writing. Casey Charles discusses the idea that there was no official identity for a gay person at this time. There were words that identified what we would consider to be homosexual behaviour, but the idea of a “gay culture” or “gay identity” did not exist.Charles goes on to say that early modern laws against sodomy had very few transgressors, which means that either people did not commit these crimes of homosexuality or these acts were more socially acceptable than the modern reader would think. Shakespeare’s awareness of the possible homoeroticism in Sonnet 20 does not necessarily illuminate whether or not he himself was actually practicing homosexual behavior.[1]
 
References
Charles, Casey. “Was Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and the politics of pedagogy.” College Literature 25.3 (1998): 35-52. EBSCOhost. Web. 10 Nov. 2009

Gay Liberation, Christopher Park
In the 1970s, Christopher Street became the “Main Street” of gay New York. Large numbers of gay men would promenade its length at seemingly all hours. Gay bars and stores selling leather fetish clothing and artistic decorative items flourished at that time. This changed dramatically with the loss of many gay men during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The apparent center of gay life subsequently shifted north of 14th Street to Chelsea. This new area, however, was never as vibrant as the old West Village. While some gay bars remain on Christopher Street, it has largely lost its gay character and is not unlike other quiet thoroughfares in the Village.

Christopher Street is the site of the Stonewall Inn, the bar whose patrons started the 1969 Stonewall riots that are widely seen as the birth of the gay liberation movement. The Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee formed to commemorate the first anniversary of that event, the beginning of the international tradition of a late-June event to celebrate gay pride.The annual gay pride festivals in Berlin, Cologne, and other German cities are known as Christopher Street Day or “CSD”.

Since 1992, Christopher Park (at the intersection of Christopher, Grove, and W 4 Sreets) has been decorated with the sculpture Gay Liberation by George Segal to commemorate the gay rights traditions of the place.
 
About the Sculptures
“Located at 51-53 Christopher Street, Stonewall Inn was formerly two adjacent two-story stable houses erected in 1843 and 1846. After numerous alterations, the two buildings were joined into a restaurant by the 1930s. By the 1950s the place was known as Stonewall Inn Restaurant. In 1966, it closed for renovations, and reopened in the following year as a private club known as Stonewall Inn – a bar and dance hall which, like numerous local establishments, catered to the homosexual community of Greenwich Village.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn and a melee ensued in which 13 people were arrested. Word of the raid and the resistance to it soon spread, and the next day hundreds gathered to protest the crackdown and advocate the legalization of gay bars. Further protests erupted in early July, and on July 27, a group of activists organized the first gay and lesbian march, from Washington Square to Stonewall. The events of that summer and their aftermath are often credited as the flashpoint for the gay rights movement in the United States.
A decade later, Peter Putnam (1927–1987), a wealthy arts patron from Louisiana and trustee of the Mildred Andrews Fund, commissioned the Gay Liberation monument. With Putnam as its steward, the Fund had commissioned other contemporary sculptures, notably George Segal’s Kent State Memorial and Richard Hunt’s Harlem Hybrid. Though Segal was not the first artist approached, he accepted the commission, which stipulated only that the work “had to be loving and caring, and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people . . . and it had to have equal representation of men and women.”

George Segal was an important and influential American artist in the late 20th century. Born and raised in New York City, he settled in 1940 on a farm in South Brunswick, New Jersey… Some of his more noteworthy pieces include The Holocaust (1982) in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, The Commuters (1982) in New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, and his three tableaux for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC. (1995). Segal’s conception for Gay Liberation is typical of his work. Four figures – two standing males and two seated females – are positioned on the northern boundary of the park, in natural, easy poses. Using a process in which bronze casts are made from plaster moulds from the human models, Segal tempers the realistic surfaces with an unearthly white-painted finish. The result is specific, evocative, and understated, showing the public comfort and freedom to which the gay liberation movement aspired.

Though the work had received all of its community and design approvals by 1982, public opposition and a planned renovation of Christopher Park (completed in 1985) sidelined the project for years. In the meantime, a second cast of the piece was installed on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. On June 23, 1992, Mayor David N. Dinkins and Parks Commissioner Betsy Gotbaum helped unveil the monument in Christopher Park. The initial opposition and rancor which had greeted the project had subsided; the advent of AIDS, which had devastated the gay community in particular, added another poignant dimension to the monument and its mute figures’ impact. In March 2000, Stonewall Inn was designated a National Historic Landmark. Today, Segal’s sculpture is a popular pilgrimage site for tourists and local residents alike.”
 
Sonnet Project
Gay Liberation in Christopher Park was the featured location for Sonnet 20, performed by Eric Percival, directed by Guy Patton. The video was released on May 30, 2013.
 
References
http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/christopherpark/monuments/575

ERIC PERCIVAL
Eric started his acting career at a young age, forcing his dad to replay scenes from Superman II and Return of the Jedi over and over again in their backyard in Ridgefield, CT. His mother wisely decided to give his dad a break by signing Eric up for a local children’s theater group called Spotlight Theater Workshop, where he spent many years joyfully receiving his introduction to a wealth of wonderful roles from Petruchio to Don Quixote, from Beelzebub to P.T. Barnum.

His appetite whetted, Eric had no choice but to continue his pursuit of acting full force as a Theatre and Philosophy double major at Connecticut College, where he spent a semester immersed in acting at the National Theatre Institute under the tutelage of Richard Digby Day. Following college, he traveled to London to complete his training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), where he mastered the classics (and acquired proficiency in a variety of UK accents amongst a nation of native speakers). During his time overseas, Eric enjoyed the privilege of performing Shakespeare for audiences throughout London, Germany, and Holland.

Back in NYC, Eric has acted on many Manhattan stages, winning Best Actor awards for performances in the Midtown International Theater Festival (MITF), and the Planet Connections Festivity. Favorite shows include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the T. Schreiber Studio (in the delicious role of Rosencrantz), Hamlet Bound and Unbound in MITF (as a crazed actor who takes a play hostage and forces the cast to perform Hamlet with him at gunpoint), and Island; or To Be or Not To Be (his debut performance with New York Shakespeare Exchange, in which he originated the role of King John).

Eric is thrilled to continue his work with NYSX as a part of the terrific Sonnet Project. For more information on his current projects, see his website at www.ericpercival.com.

GUY PATTON – Director
Writer/Director/Actor Guy Patton studied at the prestigious Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in NY, eventually becoming a member of several of the theatre’s in-house sketch comedy teams, including the longest-running UCB sketch ensemble, Stone Cold Fox. A veteran broadcaster, Guy presently works as an executive producer for Cumulus Media Networks, and has written comedy for the Onion News Network and MTV. He was the head writer and director of the much-beloved Hipster Show with Andy Rocco, and he created and hosted the surrealist variety show Salvador Dali’s Danza Macabre for the UCB stage. Guy’s comedy videos have appeared on College Humor, UCB Comedy and Channel 101 NY, and have garnered over a million views. He recently wrapped post-production on his first feature film, the surprisingly unfunny action thriller Pearl, a teaser trailer for which can be viewed at www.pearlfilm.com. Guy graduated from the University of North Florida (go “Ospreys???”), where he studied literature and even got to play Hotspur in Henry IV. He lives in Jersey City, NJ.

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O! therefore, love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain,
Thou gav’st me thine not to give back again.

Analysis

Sonnet 22 is a romantic image of the literal exchange of lovers’ hearts, and how the effect of each lover’s health therefore touches the well-being of the other.

Bill equates his feeling of youthfulness with the beloved’s youth and beauty, but once he sees his lover age or come to harm, he will feel mortality. He attributes this to the exchange of their hearts. He begs his love to take care of themselves, as Bill does for his lover’s sake, as a mother takes care of her baby. Finally, he warns his subject not to expect a return of their own heart, since such exchanges are for keeps.

Will’s Wordplay

A “glass” or looking glass is a mirror.

“time’s furroughs” are wrinkles in your brow

The “seemly raiment of my heart” is the beloved’s beauty Will’s heart is clothed in.

Merchant’s House Museum, Manhattan

Considered one of the finest surviving examples of architecture from the period, the Merchant’s House has been recognized as a National Historic Landmark (one of only 2,400) and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In New York City, it has been awarded landmark status not only for its 1832 late-Federal brick exterior but also for its Greek revival interior rooms.

Of note, the House was among the first 20 buildings designated in 1965 under the City’s new landmarks law. It is the only historic house museum in the Greenwich Village/Soho/NoHo neighborhoods and celebrated 75 years as a museum in 2011.

The Museum’s collection of over 3,000 items comprises the possessions of the Tredwells, the wealthy merchant-class family who lived in the House from 1835 to 1933. The collection includes furniture, decorative arts, clothing, photographs and books, household items, and personal items. Highlights include a suite of 12 mahogany side chairs attributed to renowned furniture maker Duncan Phyfe, a pair of matching six-globe gas chandeliers, and 40 dresses and numerous fashion accessories that belonged to the Tredwell women.[1]

The Museum is open weekly Thursday through Monday and offers regularly scheduled performances, lectures, presentations and other events all designed to heighten the Museum visitor’s experience and shed light on the many facets of life in New York City in the 19th Century. Visit the Museum website – www.merchantshouse.org – for further info, a calendar of upcoming events, and updates about the House, the Museum, and life in Antebellum New York.

And, if you’d like to learn more about the museum and see some of what you’ll engage with during a visit, you can watch a great documentary that was created as part of the Blueprint NYC series. Link to the film HERE.

Ghosts!

Some say the Tredwells, who lived in this house for nearly 100 years, are still here. Gertrude Tredwell, in particular, is thought to be watching over her family home. Born in an upstairs bedroom in 1840, Gertrude never married and lived her entire life here until she died, at the age of 93, in 1933. She was the last member of the Tredwell family to occupy the house before it became a museum, in 1936.

Since the 1930s, tales of strange and unexplainable happenings have surrounded the Merchant’s House. Staff, volunteers, visitors, neighbors, even passersby, have reported seeing, hearing, and smelling things that weren’t there.

In 2007, the Museum decided to mount its own investigation with the help of Historic Paranormal Investigations, a NYC-based group. The evidence is mounting that, indeed, something is here. [2]

References

1. http://merchantshouse.org/about/
2. http://merchantshouse.org/ghosts/

ACTOR – Lynn Cohen

Broadway: Orpheus Descending (Peter Hall, director); Ivanov (with Kevin Kline). Off-Broadway: I Remember Mama (Transport Group; Lucille Lortel nomination); Uncle Vanya (Andre Gregory, director); Macbeth (Public/NYSF; with Liev Schreiber); Tina Howe’s Chasing Manet, Donald Margulies’ The Model Apartment (Primary Stages); Marsha Norman’s Getting Out (Lucille Lortel); Hamlet (Public, with Kevin Kline); Street Scene (New York City Opera, Jack O’Brien, director); Paradise Island (The New Group); Don Juan Comes Back from the Wars (Manhattan Theatre Club).
Regional: Long Wharf Theatre; Hartford Stage; Actors Theatre of Louisville (4 Humana Festivals of New Plays); Williamstown Theatre Festival: Guthrie Theatre; Yale Rep; A.R.T. Cambridge: O’Neill Playwrights Center; Sundance Theatre Lab; Orlando Shakespeare Festival. Film and TV: Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street; Steven Spielberg’s Munich; Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery and Deconstructing Harry; Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York; Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe; Eagle Eye; Cradle Will Rock; The Hunger Games: Catching Fire; Tom McCarthy’s Station Agent; Michael Patrick King’s Sex and the City I and II; Hello Lonesome; They Came Together; Damages; Nurse Jackie; Sex and the City; Law and Order (all three); Bored to Death; and more. Upcoming films and TV: The Cobbler (with Adam Sandler and Dustin Hoffman); Gabriel; Getting On (HBO); The Affair (Showtime); Lynn is a recipient of the Bowden Award from New Dramatists, The Lily Award for women in the theatre, a Fox Fellowship and the Richard Seff Award from Actors Equity.

FEATURING – Ronald Cohen

NY Theatre: A Winter’s Tale (Hang a Tale theatre company); Artist Descending a Staircase, Henry IV Part One, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Boomerang Theatre Company); The Recruiting Officer (New York Classical Theatre); Twelfth Night (Kings County Shakespeare); Pirandello’s Henry IV (CSC First Look); Martin Sherman’s Messiah (Workshop Theatre Company). Regional: Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park; Cape May Stage; Kansas City Circle Theatre; New Theatre, Overland Park, KS.; Orlando (FL) Shakespeare; Lake Lucille, NY, Chekhov Project; Company of Fools, Hailey, ID. Film and TV: Not Waving But Drowning: Strangers When We Meet; Where Is Joel Baum?; Ablution; Landings; Sex and the City.

DIRECTOR – Alex Harvey

Alex Harvey is a director, writer, filmmaker, musician, teacher and event producer based out of Brooklyn.
Regional theatre directing credits include O Lovely Glowworm for American Conservatory Theater, Underneath the Lintel at the Alley Theatre, regional premieres of Will Eno’s Oh, The Humanity, Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade for Stages Repertory and I Am My Own Wife for Stages Repertory Theatre in co- production with Stage West Des Moines, a five-person staging of Macbeth for the Mirror Repertory Company in New York and his own radical adaptation of The Mock-Tempest for Shakespeare Santa Cruz. His 2013 production of Waiting For Waiting For Godot won Best of the NY Fringe and was extended twice in the Fringe Encores program. He has developed work and lead workshops at NYTW, Steppenwolf, Lincoln Center, Long Wharf and the Edinburgh Fringe. And has taught as a guest lecturerer at UCSD and UC Berkeley. Alex works at the Graduate Acting and Design programs at NYU Tisch as a director and mentor to the MFA candidates. For NYU/MFA he wrote and directed The Humans Are in Trouble, Careless Marjory and an adaptation of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. For NYU he also created a loose adaptation of Sheridan’s The Rivals. With renowned composer John Gromada and author Michael Pollan, Alex remade Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, into an opera which has been developed at American Conservatory Theater, The Orchard Project and UC Berkeley, where Alex and Gromada were artists-in-residence at the Arts Research Center. Alex is the Associate Artistic director of the Lake Lucille Project – an event theatre collective that, since its inception in 2003, has produced the complete works of Chekhov in site-specific immersive stagings on the shores of Lake Lucille in New City, New York. For writer/producer Beau Willimon Alex directed a site-specific Balm in Gilead in June of 2011 in a warehouse in Industry City, Brooklyn.
As a music/event producer he conceptualized and co-composed a live scoring interactive performance of Buster Keaton’s The Balloonatic for The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival as well as a multidisciplinary evening of music and music hall for the New York John Hartford Festival at Little Field in Brooklyn. His old time Jazz collective The 5000 Jazz Assassins are currently partnered with the Bourne Music Company to develop a series of new master recordings of previously unrecorded songs from the 20s and 30s to be made available for commercial license in 2015. Alex has recorded on many albums and can be heard around town playing a variety of instruments with Michael Cerveris’ Loose Cattle. He can also be seen playing his mandolin nationally on Geico’s “Happier Than” television campaign.

Recently Alex has entered the world of directing for tv and film. In 2013 he served as apprentice director on Boardwalk Empire’s fourth season under master director Allen Coulter. He is currently co-directing Lake Lucille Project’s hybrid narrative/documentary, A Seagull. And he is also currently in pre-production development for his cinematic adaptation of Walden which shoots in Colorado in 2015.

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY – Miklos Buk, HSC

Miklos Buk is a cinematographer living and working in New York City. He was a DP on feature films such as John Harkrider’s Mitchellville (2nd Camera, 35mm, 2003), Tony Spiridakis’ Noise (2nd. Camera, 16mm, 2004), and George Pinter’s The Dump (35mm/DV, 1998), also Pearl Gluck’s The Divan. Before moving to New York he’d been the DP on several shorts including Ambulance (16mm, Film Academy of Budapest, 1996), which won awards at the Bologna Short Film Festival and Milan Film Festival. Since 2000 Miklos has been living and working in New York. He has been involved in several projects with Michel Gondry, Brian Mertes, Joan Stein, Don Coppola and Jon Schumacher. He graduated at The American Film Institute Conservatory with MFA. Also he was trained and received an BA at the Academy of Theater and Motion Picture Arts in Budapest, Hungary, 1995 – 2000, and was selected to be part of the Kodak Master Class of Worldwide DP Students in 1997 in Budapest.

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burthen of mine own love’s might.
O! let my looks be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
     O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
     To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Analysis

Sonnet 23 is an apology for being unable to accurately express love in words, and a request for actions to be understood in their place.

Having committed himself a bit more than he intended, Willy is now stuck explaining why at times he is tongue-tied in his love’s company. It is, he says, mainly due to the sheer size of his love, the hugeness of it becoming a burden almost too large to carry. He is like an actor who cannot remember his lines, or a wild beast in a fury thrashing around, achieving nothing for all his efforts. He asks his love come to the rescue by understanding what his looks say, how they speak of the love buried within, even more so than that other guy, who is so glib with his tongue. Although love is blind, he has the ability to hear with his eyes.

Will’s Wordplay

An “unperfect actor” is one who is underrehearsed and can’t remember their lines. This is a counter to the “perfect ceremony” he would like to recite.

“presagers” are prophets

New Amsterdam Theatre

Glimmers of the Follies, sounds of the Serengeti, and a Genie’s laughter– all of these have graced the stage of the New Amsterdam Theater, in the heart of Times Square. It was built in 1902–1903 and was designed by the architecture firm of Henry Hertz and Hugh Tallant;bthe Roof Garden, where more risqué productions were presented, and which is no longer extant, was added in 1904, designed by the same firm.

From 1913 to 1927, the theatre was the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, whose producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., maintained an office in the building, and operated a nightclub on the roof [1] George White’s Scandals and Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre were subsequent tenants. It was used as a movie theatre beginning in 1937, closed in 1985, and was leased by The Walt Disney Company and renovated by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in 1995–97 to be the flagship for Disney Theatrical Productions presentations on Broadway [2].

Both the Beaux-Arts exterior and the Art Nouveau interior of the building are New York City landmarks, having been designated in 1979 [3]. In addition, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Along with the Lyceum Theatre, also built in 1903, the New Amsterdam is the oldest surviving Broadway venue.

Construction and Original Run

“The New Amsterdam was built in 1903 by the partnership of impresarios A.L. Erlanger and Marcus Klaw and designed in the Art Nouveau style by architects Herts and Tallant. At the time of construction, it was the largest theatre in New York with a seating capacity of 1,702. Along with the Lyceum Theatre, also built in 1903, it is the oldest surviving Broadway venue.

The New Amsterdam opened in November 1903 with a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For many years, it hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, showcasing such talents as Olive Thomas, Fanny Brice and the Eaton siblings. A racier sister show of the Follies, the Midnight Frolics, played in the New Amsterdam’s roof garden theatre. The New Amsterdam was the scene of Marilyn Miller’s greatest triumphs in the musicals Sally (1920) and Sunny, which opened in September 1925 co-starring Clifton Webb as Harold Wendell-Wendell and ran for three seasons [1]. But the theatre also hosted serious productions, and in June 1927 Basil Rathbone appeared there as Cassius in Julius Caesar.”[3]

Restoration

“The Great Depression took its toll on the theatre business, and in 1936 the New Amsterdam closed. It reopened on a limited basis in 1937 but soon was converted to a movie theatre. The Nederlander Organization purchased the landmark property in 1982, but it would not be on the road to rehabilitation for another eight years. In 1990, after a court battle, the State and City of New York assumed ownership of the New Amsterdam and many other theatres on 42nd Street. Disney Theatrical Productions signed a 99 year lease for the property in 1993. The theatre, which had recently been used as a filming location for the movie Vanya on 42nd Street, was in shambles; it would take several years and millions of dollars, to restore it to its original usage and grandeur. The roof garden remained closed when it was discovered that it could not be brought up to modern building codes.

The New Amsterdam was officially reopened on April 2, 1997. In November 1997, after the premiere of the film Hercules and a limited engagement of a concert version of King David, Disney’s stage version of The Lion King opened. In June 2006, The Lion King relocated two blocks uptown to the Minskoff Theatre, where it is currently playing in its 18th year. Mary Poppins began previews at the New Amsterdam Theatre on October 16, 2006 and opened on November 16, 2006.” [3]

The New Amsterdam is currently home to Disney’s stage adaptation of Aladdin, which opened in 2014 following an interior renovation.

References

1. Alexander, Cathy. “New Amsterdam Theatre” in Jackson, Kenneth T. (ed.), (2010) The Encyclopedia of New York City (2nd edition). New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11465-2, pp.888-89.
2. New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; Postal, Matthew A. (ed. and text); Dolkart, Andrew S. (text). (2009) Guide to New York City Landmarks (4th ed.) New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-28963-1, p. 88
3. http://www.newamsterdamtheatre.net/history.htm

ACTOR – Joanna Gleason

Joanna Gleason won the Best Actress Tony (Stephen Sondheim’s “Into The Woods”) along with Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. Other Broadway and Off-Broadway credits, nominations and awards include: “Sons Of The Prophet”, “Something You Did”, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” Happiness”, “Social Security”, “Joe Egg”, “The Real Thing”, “I Love My Wife”, “Nick And Nora”, “The Normal Heart”, “Something You Did”, “Love Letters”, ”It’s Only A Play”,”Eelymosynary,” “A Hell Of A Town.” Films include: Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” “Heartburn” for Mike Nichols, “The Skeleton Twins” “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, “Boogie Nights” “The Wedding Planner,” “Last Vegas”. T.V. includes recurring roles on “The West Wing” and “Friends”,”The Good Wife” “Tracy Ullman” “Blue Bloods”
Joanna lives with Chris Sarandon on Tiny Farm, She is the author of the forthcoming novel, “Rancho Mirage”. She can tango.

DIRECTOR – Marco Ricci

A graduate of Northwestern University, Marco won the 2014 American Advertising Award for Branded Entertainment. The award was given in recognition of a series of short films he directed for the renowned shoe company Lucchese Boots. Marco’s feature directing credits include the documentary, The Reconstruction of Asa Carter. The film recounts the life story of famed Native-American writer Forrest Carter, author of The Outlaw Josey Wales, who was in actuality a prominent member of the KKK. It made its world premiere at the Sidewalk Film Festival before airing nationally on PBS. On the narrative side, he wrote and directed, The Wedding Bros. Starring Jon Polito, Dan Fogler, Brendan Sexton and Zoe Lister Jones, the film is a comedic story about two adversarial brothers who set out to make it big with the King Of Long Island Wedding Videos. It made its premiere at the SXSW Film festival and is being distributed by Universal Pictures/ScreenMedia. His feature writing credits include Finding Cody, one of the first interactive feature films. It stars pop sensation Cody Simpson and was produced by Warner Music.

His editing credits include the feature documentary Beyond the Hedges, which was nominated for a regional Emmy.
Marco’s last short film, Hyper, was chosen for the Centerpiece of the New York Film Festival, where it opened for P.T. Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. It was honored as the Best Short Short at the prestigious Aspen Shortsfest and was
screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Seattle International Film Festival, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, among others. Hyper is being distributed by Apollo Cinema and has been seen on Atom
Films, RAI Television, and the Independent Film Channel. Marco’s other shorts have won numerous awards and have been shown on Canal Plus Europe, The Sundance Channel, and United Airlines.

Marco recently directed two national commercials for Empire Beauty School. He is currently in production on two feature documentaries. TX13 follows the 2014 congressional campaigns of the Democratic candidate for Congress in the most
Republican District in the country and the Republican candidate in the most Democratic district. Luchador tells the story of four female wrestlers at Taft HS in the South Bronx. It follows their journey from the high hopes of the first day of practice through the uncertainty of graduation.

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled,
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective that is best painter’s art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
     Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,
     They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Analysis

Sonnet 24 is a giant artistic metaphor to say that affection is more than skin deep.

Like a painter, Willy has painted his lover’s image on his heart, and framing the artwork with his body. Only through the painter’s eye may the beloved see the image that has been created, and the beloved’s eyes are the window for Will to see his own heart. One pair of eyes drew the lover, the other pair of eyes are windows the sun delights to shine through to illuminate the heart-painting. Yet eyes, unfortunately, can draw only what they see, not the deep love invested in those objects.
 

Will’s Wordplay

“Windows glazed with thine eyes” is comparing the shine of the subjects eyes to glass. (Glaziers are glass workers)

The Plaza at 101 Park Ave., Manhattan

101 Park Avenue is a 629-foot tall skyscraper in New York City, New York. It was completed in 1979 to 1982 and has 49 floors. Eli Attia Architects designed the building, which is the 64th tallest in New York.

It was used as the facade of the fictional “Pemrose Building” in the 1987 film The Secret of My Success,[1] as well as the fictional “Clamp Tower” in the 1990 film Gremlins 2. The building is shown as the site of George Costanza’s office in an episode of Seinfeld, as well as Dudley Moore’s character’s office in the film Crazy People. It is also featured as a crash site in the 2012 film The Avengers.

Its most notable office tenant is Morgan Stanley. The plaza below features greenery and a fountain.

References

1. The Secret of My Success Movie Filming Locations – The 80s Movies Rewind

ACTOR – Colin Ryan

Colin Ryan Broadway: Waiting for Godot (u/s Pozzo/Lucky), No Man’s Land (u/s Briggs/Foster) New York: Macbeth (Macbeth), Othello (Iago), This Lime Tree Bower (Frank), Bill & Lenny (Shatner), Protest (Staněk), Troilus & Cressida (Achilles), Brecht on Brecht. Regional: A Streetcar Named Desire (Stanley), The Malcontent (Malevole), Pride & Prejudice (Wickham), Disney’s Beauty & the Beast (Gaston), US Premiere of A Laughing Matter (David Garrick), She Stoops to Conquer (Tony Lumpkin), Complete Works…(Abridged), The Winter’s Tale (Autolycus), Romeo & Juliet (Mercutio/Capulet), Twelfth Night (Orsino). MFA from The Academy for Classical Acting. Colin lives in Hoboken with his wife, Elizabeth, and a large brown bear.

colinryan.info

DIRECTOR – Hazen Cuyler

Hazen is Co-Founder of The Greenhouse Ensemble in NYC and is published in three plays. Recent acting credits: Master Harold… and the boys at (Aurora Theatre); In The Next Room or the vibrator play (Performance Network Theatre); Theory of Mind (Wharton Center). Upcoming One-man show: It’s Like Love (written by Gina Femia).

Producer/Director/Creative Consultant: Sonnet 24 (NYC Shakespeare Exchange); Extracurricular (Greenhouse Ensemble); Under Neon Lights (Reel Hand Prod.); Glucosamine+Chondroitin international infomercial (Greenhouse Ensemble); OMG Wild! (Cinema World Studios); The SHoW (MSU Telecasters). Upcoming: Untitled Greenhouse Ensemble Theatrical Production.

He studies with Jack Garfein, Austin Pendleton, Aleksey Burago and Michael Ostrow.

Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled:
     Then happy I, that love and am beloved,
Where I may not remove nor be removed.

Analysis
Sonnet 25 compares the joys of fickleness of fate, flowers, and courtly favors with the steadfastness found in the joy brought by the beloved.

While those who have been favored by fortune boast about it; Shakespeare is hindered by it but, happy for the gift of his subject’s love and regard. Like marigolds that survive only as long as the sun shines on them, royal favorites live only as long as that favor continues. A great soldier loses his hard-won reputation with the loss of just one battle. But Shakespeare is fortunate because the pleasure his beloved brings him cannot be removed by any means.

Will’s Wordplay
“proud titles” refers directly to aristocratic titles or high government posts.

Studio 54
This was once THE place to spot Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and all the other “beautiful people”in this town, where everyone was famous for 15 minutes. It was a world renowned nightclub from 1977 until 1981 when it was sold by founders and creators Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The most famous nightclub of all time, it was a sophisticated, groundbreaking multi-media visual extravaganza. Located at 254 West 54th Street in Manhattan, New York City, the space was originally the Gallo Opera House, opening in 1927, after which it changed names several times, eventually becoming CBS radio and television Studio 52 in 1943.

CBS used the theater for radio broadcasts. From the 1940s to the mid-1970s, CBS used the location as a radio and TV stage that housed such shows as What’s My Line?, The $64,000 Question, Password, To Tell the Truth, The Jack Benny Show, and Captain Kangaroo.[1] The soap opera Love of Life was produced there until 1975. In 1976, CBS moved most of its broadcast functions to the Ed Sullivan Theater and the CBS Broadcast Center.

Nightclub Era
When CBS began marketing the building in 1976, various interests in the art and fashion world expressed interest in seeing it converted into a nightclub. In 1977, Studio 54 was transformed into a nightclub by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, with Jack Dushey as a financial backer. They operated the company as Broadway Catering Corp. It took only six weeks to transform the theater into a nightclub and cost $400,000.[2]

Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz, two well-known Broadway theatrical set-designers, helped convert the theater into a dance floor and created moveable, theatrical sets and lights using the original theatrical fly rails, which allowed for a constantly changing environment. Within a month of opening, the New York State Liquor Authority raided Studio 54 for selling liquor without a license, and closed it. Prior to the raid, the nightclub had been using daily “caterers’ permits”, which enabled the nightclub to serve alcohol but were intended for weddings or political events. [3] The owners of the nightclub said the incident was a “misunderstanding”. The next night the club reopened, serving no liquor.

Event planner Robert Isabell had four tons of glitter dumped in a four-inch layer on the floor of Studio 54 for a New Year’s Eve party, which owner Ian Schrager described as like “standing on stardust” and left glitter that could be found months later in their clothing and homes. [4]

In December 1978 Rubell was quoted in the New York newspapers as saying the Studio 54 had made $7 million in its first year and that “only the Mafia made more money.” Shortly thereafter the nightclub was raided and Rubell and Schrager were arrested for skimming $2.5 million.

Studio 54 closed with a final party on February 4, 1980, with Diana Ross performing. Schrager and Rubell were found guilty of tax evasion and spent 13 months in prison. It was the first time anyone had ever been prosecuted for a one-year tax evasion.

1980s
In 1981, Rubell and Schrager sold the building, but opted to keep a lease. Later that year, the building was sold to Mark Fleischman with Rubell and Schrager staying on as consultants for 6 months afterward. [5] Studio 54 reopened on September 12, 1981 with Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Cary Grant, Lauren Hutton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Gina Lollobrigida, and Brooke Shields in attendance. Emerging artists Madonna, Wham!, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Menudo, and Run-DMC would perform at the club, before going on to future success.

KISS held a concert at the club in 1982 that was broadcast via satellite to the Sanremo Festival in Italy. During 1985, heavy metal groups Slayer, Venom and Exodus filmed a video at Studio 54 called Ultimate Revenge for Disco. In the 80’s many legendary freestyle music artists performed at the club such as Noel Pagan, Nocera, Coro, Tony Moran, India, TKA, Black Riot, Fascination, Sweet Sensation, Pajama Party, Johnny O, Hanson & Davis and many others.

From 1988 until early 1993 Studio 54’s name was changed to The Ritz (prev located on 11th St & 3rd Ave from 1980-87). The club then became a concert venue for New Wave, Punk, & Eurodisco artists. New owners CAT Entertainment Corp hosted occasional rock concerts, and was otherwise a public venue available for rent. In 1993 CAT Entertainment was acquired by Cabaret Royale Corporation, a nightclub operator based in Dallas. A renovation earlier abandoned because of a lack of funds was completed, and resurrected both the nightclub and the Studio 54 trademark, which had never been properly registered by any of the prior owners. [6] It was operated as “Cabaret Royale at Studio 54” until early 1995.

During 1994 Allied Partners bought the building and restored much of the architectural detail that had been covered. The nightclub reopened with a live concert by disco stars Gloria Gaynor, Vicki Sue Robinson, and Sister Sledge. The building again went into bankruptcy in 1996 and Allied announced plans to demolish it and replace it with Cyberdrome, a virtual reality gaming venue, however, the project was never completed.

During 1998 the collapse of a construction hoist blocked access to the Henry Miller Theatre on 43rd Street, where the successful revival of the Broadway musical Cabaret was playing. To keep the show accessible, the Roundabout Theater Company agreed to move the performance to Studio 54. Roundabout later bought the building in 2003 from Allied for $22.5 million, and Cabaret played until 2004. [7]

The second floor of the theater is used as a nightclub on weeks when plays are not being staged; when it does so it operates under the name Upstairs at Studio 54. The club is operated by Josh Hadar who was one of the Allied partners. It was also briefly owned by Noel Ashman.A separate restaurant and nightclub, called 54 Below, operates in the basement.

Sonnet Project
Studio 54 was the featured location for Sonnet 25, performed by Carmen Meyers, directed by Alexis Holloway. The video was released on June 24, 2013.

References
1. Studio 54 roundabouttheatre.org
2. A WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter. “Operators of Studio 54 In New York Indicted On Skimming Receipts. ” Wall Street Journal [New York, N.Y.] 29 June 1979, 22.
3. New York Times. May 22, 1977 “Liquor Authority Head Stops Discotheque’s Music.”
4. Weber, Bruce. “Robert Isabell, Who Turned Events Into Wondrous Occasions, Dies at 57”, The New York Times, July 10, 2009.
5. Reality News; Studio 54 New York Times – August 31, 1981
6. NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: MIDTOWN; A Stripped-Down Studio 54 For the Post-Disco Era December 19, 1993
7. COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE: REGIONAL MARKET — Manhattan; As ‘Cabaret’ Nears End, Cabaret Still Has a Place New York Times – October 1, 2003

ACTOR – Carmen Meyers
Carmen Meyers is originally from Tempe, Arizona, and holds a Bachelors Degree from Arizona State University and a Masters Degree in Acting from Indiana University. Other training includes: graduate of the Southwest Shakespeare Conservatory two year program in Phoenix, Arizona, and The Shakespeare Theatre Conservatory in Washington D.C., where she had the opportunity to work with Catherine Weidner and Michael Kahn.

This is her third project with NY Shakespeare Exchange appearing in King John as Queen Eleanor, and Two Plays One Conversation: Romeo and Juliet/Spring’s Awakening as Mrs. Gabor. Carmen moved to New York City in the summer of 2008 with her husband. Recent New York credits include Manhattan Theatre Source Estrogenius Festival, Broadville as Ramona, eXit Productions, Wonderland In Alice as the Empress. Carmen’s favorite roles include: Playhouse on the Square (Memphis, TN) The Graduate (Mrs. Robinson, *Ostrander Nominated), Bloomington Playwrights Project (Bloomington, IN), Fatal Attraction (Glenn Close), Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) Death of a Salesman (Linda), Betty’s Summer Vacation (Mrs. Seizmagraff), Frozen (Nancy), Summer Music Theatre Festival (Macomb, IL) Mame (Mame), and Indianapolis Children’s Museum (Indianapolis, IN) in the role of Charlotte from her favorite children’s book Charlotte’s Web. Future roles in her bucket list include: Gertrude in Hamlet, Cleopatra in Anthony and Cleopatra, Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Clytemnestra in The Oresteia, Christine in Mourning Becomes Electra, and the Witch in Into the Woods.

Carmen recently became a full-time instructor and Bronx Community College in the Communications Arts and Sciences Department and will begin her PhD in Theatre Performance OR Higher Education in the fall of 2014. On a personal level, she’s been happily married to Ben Gougeon for 4 years. Carmen has a beautiful daughter, Chantel, who is 23 and going to school in Indiana. Her biggest challenge is to balance her love for teaching with her love for acting. She believes in work that fills her soul and challenges her mind, usually work that scares the shit out of her.

DIRECTOR – Alexis Holloway
I am a New York based writer and director, originally from San Antonio, Texas. I love writing comedy, working collaboratively, and trying new things. My most recent short film, Apartment 6E, which I co-wrote and produced with my husband, Grega Rupret, was recently screened at the Anthology Film Archives.

Apartment 6E tells the story of an unemployed man who goes to great lengths to feel important again. The trailer is available for viewing at: http://alexisholloway.eu/AlexisHolloway/Apt_6E.html. Other short comedies include: Attraction, The Perfect Goodnight Kiss, A Phone Call, and The Vagina Conspiracy. Outside of narrative film, I have experience field producing both documentary film and reality programming. I have a BA in Film Production and Women Studies from Burlington College.

For further information, please go to: http://alexisholloway.eu/AlexisHolloway/intro.html

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY – Mark Sasahara

How can I then return in happy plight,
That am debarred the benefit of rest?
When day’s oppression is not eas’d by night,
But day by night and night by day oppressed,
And each, though enemies to either’s reign,
Do in consent shake hands to torture me,
The one by toil, the other to complain
How far I toil, still farther off from thee.
I tell the day, to please him thou art bright,
And dost him grace when clouds do blot the heaven:
So flatter I the swart-complexion’d night,
When sparkling stars twire not thou gild’st the even.
     But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,
     And night doth nightly make grief’s length seem stronger.

Analysis

Sonnet 28 reflects on the opposition of day and night, and how both find ways to make the speaker sad for not being with the one he loves.

Shakespeare is removed from his beloved, and he sees a conspiracy between night and day: they wish to torment him with a day of toil and a night of restlessness. He tries to quiet both by telling them that his beloved youth makes them more glorious by just existing. But this has no effect and he is forced to continually reflect on his own sorrows, as during the day he cannot be with the youth for all his working, and at night cannot sleep for continually thinking of him.

Will’s Wordplay

“do in consent shake hands to torture me” creates an image of the day and night making a bargain, conspiratorially. Perhaps the man in the moon and the face of the sun shook on it?

“twire” is to twinkle

Castle Clinton, Battery Park, Manhattan

“Castle Clinton National Monument has seen many changes in the growth and culture of New York City. The structure was one of the New York Harbor forts built just before the War of 1812. Later it became a great entertainment complex, then an important immigrant processing station, and then an aquarium. There is no better example of historic adaptive reuse then Castle Clinton National Monument. Saved from complete destruction, the National Park Service carried out a restoration campaign, completed in 1975, that restored the structure to its original fortress configuration.

The United States declared War on Great Britain on June 12, 1812. The declaration was the result of long simmering disputes with Great Britain. The central dispute surrounded the impressment of American soldiers by the British… During the Battle of Bladensburg (August 24, 1814), the British marched into Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public buildings. President James Madison had to flee into the countryside. The British then turned to attack Baltimore but met stiffer resistance and were forced to retire after the American defense of Fort McHenry, which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the words of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

…Acknowledging increasing tensions with the British, American harbor cities began building forts for protection. New York City was no exception. Four forts were built to defend the harbor; Castle Williams on Governor’s Island, Fort Wood on Bedloe’s Island (known today as Liberty Island), Fort Gibson on Ellis Island and Southwest Battery on Manhattan Island.

Southwest Battery was constructed on the rocks off the tip of Manhattan between 1808 and 1811. The fort was fully armed with 28 cannons. Each cannon could shoot a 32 pound cannonball a distance of 1.5 miles. On March 27, 1812, General Joseph Bloomfield was appointed to the command of all the fortifications in New York City and harbor. He established his headquarters at Southwest Battery.

The four forts in the harbor kept the British Navy at bay and Southwest Battery never had occasion to fire upon the enemy.In 1817, the fort was renamed Castle Clinton in honor of Dewitt Clinton, Mayor and later Governor of New York.

In 1823 the fort was deeded to New York City. The following summer a new restaurant and entertainment center opened at the site, renamed Castle Garden. A roof was added in the 1840s, and Castle Garden served as an opera house and theater until 1854. Many new inventions were demonstrated there, including the telegraph, Colt revolving rifles, steam-powered fire engines, and underwater electronic explosives.

Opera singer Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” made her American debut here in 1850. She was brought to America by none other than P.T. Barnum, famous for his American Museum full of “freaks,” and later the famous circus which bears his name today.

On August 3, 1855, Castle Garden opened as an immigrant landing depot. The creation of Castle Garden, the official immigrant processing center in the nation, represented a country at a crossroads, signaling a change in American immigration policy, and in the ways through which immigrants became Americans.

During the next 34 years, over 8 million people entered the United States through Castle Garden. Two out of every three immigrants to the United States in this period passed through the Castle Garden. It was closed on April 18, 1890.

With the Federal government taking control of immigration and the opening of Ellis Island, Castle Garden’s time as an immigration center ends. The building was remodeled once again and reopened as the New York City Aquarium on December 10, 1896. The exotic fish and Beluga whale made the aquarium one of the city’s most popular attractions. With over 30,000 visitors on opening day the aquarium averaged over 5,000 people per day. The New York City Aquarium was relocated to Coney Island in 1941.

Saved from demolition in 1946, the Castle was restored to its original design by the National Park Service. The site reopened in 1975 as Castle Clinton National Monument.

Today the site houses the ticket office for the Statue of Liberty. Castle Clinton receives an annual visitation over 3 million making it one of the most visited National Park Service sites in the country. The fort originally built to keep people out now welcomes visitors from all over the world.” [1]

References

1. http://www.nps.gov/cacl/historyculture/index.htm

ACTOR – David Blatt

David Blatt is an actor and writer, hailing from New York City. On stage some favorite roles include, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet (SBST), The Maquis de Sade in MARAT/SADE (EgoPo), Ben Israel in New Jerusalem (Lantern), Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew (Greenwoods) & Macbeth in Macbeth (Delaware Shakespeare Festival). He is the star of the comedy web series The Adventures of Shakespeare & Watson: Detectives of Mystery, and has appeared on screen in several independent films, including Drop Dead Gorgeous (Winner First Glance Film Fest 2012), and on television in Fatal Attractions (Animal Planet) and The Conquest of America (The History Channel). His writing has appeared in the magazine, Lovers & Other Strangers, and for a short time he covered fights at The Great Western Forum for The USA Boxing News. Training: M.F.A. Temple University, B.A. University of California at Berkeley.

DIRECTOR – Christopher Piazza

Christopher Piazza is a Brooklyn based director, writer and director of photography. He’s the director/co-writer of the comedy web series The Adventures of Shakespeare & Watson: Detectives of Mystery. He is also the director and creator of the music web series All Axis Music and Panopticon360. As a director of photography, he has shot commercials (DirecTV, Chobani), television shows (Househunters International, The Artist’s Den) and well over 100 concerts for artists such as Beyonce, Eminem, Robert Plant, the Bonnaroo music festival and many more.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
     For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
     That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Analysis

Sonnet 29 sees a very depressed and outcast speaker wishing he could change his fates, but feeling much more favored when he thinks of his lover.

Billy has fallen on hard times in this sonnet, crying out to heaven to no effect. Nothing can change his fate and change the way others see him. But he finds solace in thoughts of his beloved, and it lifts his heart like birdsong. He feels so wealthy in love that he would not change his fate for that of a king’s.

Will’s Wordplay

“bootless” means useless. Will was fond of this one, and used it 17 times in the play Othello alone!

His wish to be “featured” like another is not necessarily a plea for attention, but a wish to posess the attractive features of a handsomer bloke.

Scholar’s Corner

The feeling of uselessness, outcasting, and disgrace in this poem is thought to be related to the 1592 closing of London playhouses as result of an outbreak of the plague, causing Shakespeare and other actors to live with small wages, and be looked upon as filthy by town society.[1]

References

1. Holden, Anthony. William Shakespeare: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.

Old Town Bar, Union Square, Manhattan

“A true New York classic: Ancient mariners sit side by side with sports nuts, frat boys, and hip preppies (a scene from The Last Days of Disco was filmed here) who struggle valiantly not to use their cell phones. Everyone’s come for the perfectly sized, house-made burgers—not too big but not too small—which are also some of the city’s tastiest. And if you sit downstairs, keep your eyes on the end of the bar to see your order arrive from the upstairs kitchen via dumbwaiter. A post-work mob scene has been sidling up to Old Town’s mahogany bar since 1892.”[1]

References

1. http://nymag.com/listings/bar/old_town_bar/

ACTOR – Tom Degnan

Tom is thrilled and honored to be a part of The Sonnet Project presented by the New York Shakespeare Exchange. Theatre: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Brick), Much Ado About Nothing (Don John) at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Pride and Prejudice (Charles Bingley) at the Cleveland Play House, Anna Christie (Matt Burke), You Can’t Take It With You (Boris Kholenkov), A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Oberon) at the Monomoy Theatre. TV: Madam Secretary, Blue Bloods, Person of Interest, The Following, White Collar, The Good Wife, One Life to Live, As the World Turns, Magic City. Film: To Whom it May Concern (with Wilmer Valderrama and Dawn Olivieri), and Handsome Harry (with Steve Buscemi, Aidan Quinn, Jamey Sheridan). He’s a proud graduate of the CWRU/CPH MFA program, and the bassist in the band Reserved for Rondee.

DIRECTOR – John Hayden

John is a Director, Actor, Writer and Omelette Maker. Love to the NYC Shakespeare Sonnet movement and the amazing cast and crew of #29.
www.johnpatrickhayden.com

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
     But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
     All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

Analysis

Sonnet 30 is a maudlin reflection on sad memories reconciled by the realization of the gift he has in his friend.

When Will quietly and remembers the past, he feels down about all the things missed out on, and time wasted. He cries for friends who are dead, for hurts in loves that are long over, and other losses. Then he mourns the things he’s done mourning, feeling the pain anew. But when he thinks on his dear friend, while doing all of this, all is restored.
 

Will’s Wordplay

The sonnet begins by using courtroom metaphors: “session”, “summon up” (as a witness), and “cancell’d” (as a debt).

“love’s long since cancell’d woe” is the sorrow once felt over the loss of close friends; loss that has dulled over the years but now returns as Billy thinks of the past.

“The Sphere”, Battery Park, Manhattan

A marvel, and proof of the resilience of art, The Sphere is a large metallic sculpture by German sculptor Fritz Koenig, displayed in Battery Park. It once stood in the middle of Austin J. Tobin Plaza, the area between the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. After being recovered from the rubble of the Twin Towers after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the artwork faced an uncertain fate, and it was dismantled into its components. Although it remained structurally intact, it had been visibly damaged by debris from the airliners that were crashed into the buildings and from the collapsing skyscrapers themselves.

Six months after the attacks, following a documentary film about the sculpture, it was relocated to Battery Park on a temporary basis—without any repairs—and formally rededicated with an eternal flame as a memorial to the victims of 9/11. It has become a major tourist attraction, due partly to the fact that it survived the attacks with only dents and holes.

The Sphere is 25 feet high and cast in 52 bronze segments. Koenig considered it his “biggest child”. It was put together in Bremen, Germany and shipped as a whole to Lower Manhattan. The artwork was meant to symbolize world peace through world trade, and was set to rotate once every 24 hours. Its base was a popular lunch spot for workers in the trade center on days with good weather.

ACTOR – Alan Cox

Alan most recently appeared in Hannah Eidinow’s production of Playing with Grown Ups at the Brits Off- Broadway festival at 59E59, where he previously performed the critically acclaimed Cornelius by J. B. Priestley. His work in this neglected classic, which started at London’s Finborough Theatre, was described as “monumental” by The Guardian and “Wonderful!” and “Virtuosic” by The New York Times. His other theatre work includes seasons at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Chichester Festival Theatre. He made his West End debut in Strange Interlude, and recent appearances include The Creeper and The Importance of Being Earnest. Off- West-End he appeared in the London premieres of Longing, The Earthly Paradise, The Flu Season, The Rubenstein Kiss and Passion Play. His film credits include The Dictator, Contagion, August, The Auteur Theory, Mrs. Dalloway, An Awfully Big Adventure and Young Sherlock Holmes. A long list of television credits include starring opposite Laurence Olivier in John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father in 1982 and as Alan Bennett in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore dramatisation Not Only But Always.

DIRECTOR – Brendan Averett

Brendan Averett started acting as a senior in high school after his father suggested he take a drama class as an elective – perhaps to get Brendan to do something constructive with his silliness. This small breakfast table suggestion changed his life forever. After graduating from high school, two years of studying biology at San Jose State University and doing theatre on the side, he abandoned his childhood dream of becoming a genetic engineer and moved to Los Angeles to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena.

After graduating in 1993 and stage managing a couple of shows, Brendan continued his study by attending the British-American Drama Academy’s “Midsummer in Oxford” conservatory program. Upon returning, he landed his first acting job playing Pistol in Henry V. Since then, he has performed in 39 plays – almost half of which have been productions of Shakespeare.

He is the 2003 Fellow for the Chicago Associates of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, attended the festival’s conservatory program and went on to perform for two seasons there. He has performed at many theaters across the nation including Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum in Los Angeles, The Goodman, as well as The Court Theatre in Chicago, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Saint Louis Repertory, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Yale Repertory and The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park. He performed in Julie Taymor’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Ionesco’s The Killer, directed by Darko Tresnjak, for the inaugural season at Theatre for a New Audience’s new space – the Polonsky Shakespeare Center

Brendan also directed Sonnet 141 and starred in Sonnet 148. He is an Associate Producer on the Sonnet Project.

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead;
And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give,
That due of many now is thine alone:
     Their images I loved, I view in thee,
     And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.

Analysis

Sonnet 31 somewhat morbidly likens the subject to a mass grave and subsequent resurrection of all the speaker’s past loves, through which the speaker feels he has attained a new lease on life.

The lover possesses all the loves of people that Willy supposed dead. Instead, love reigns and lives large within the new love. He likens his lover to a grave where buried love is resurrected; the trophies of past love find new life in this subject. Among these images of past loves, Willy sees the parts of himself he gave so freely.

Will’s Wordplay

Capital L Love may refer to Cupid or Eros, the physical manifestation of love, literally reigning over a land within the poem’s subject.

Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, Manhattan

One of the most famous Central Park landmarks, an important location in everything from Angels in America to Gossip Girl to Doctor Who, is Bethesda Fountain. It is the central feature on the lower level of Bethesda Terrace, constructed in 1859-64.

The pool is centered by a fountain sculpture designed by Emma Stebbins in 1868 and unveiled in 1873.Stebbins was the first woman to receive a public commission for a major work of art in New York City. The bronze, eight-foot statue depicts a female winged angel touching down upon the top of the fountain, where water spouts and cascades into an upper basin and into the surrounding pool. It was the only statue in the park called for in the original design. Beneath her are four four-foot cherubs representing Temperance, Purity, Health, and Peace. Also called the Angel of the Waters, the statue refers to the Gospel of John, Chapter 5 where there is a description of an angel blessing the Pool of Bethesda, giving it healing powers. In Central Park the referent is the Croton Aqueduct opened in 1842, providing the city for the first time with a dependable supply of pure water: thus the angel carries a lily in one hand, representing purity, and with the other hand she blesses the water below.[1]

The base of the fountain was designed by the architect of all the original built features of Central Park, Calvert Vaux, with sculptural details, as usual, by Jacob Wrey Mould. In Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1858 Greensward Plan, the terrace at the end of the Mall overlooking the naturalistic landscape of the Lake was simply called The Water Terrace, but after the unveiling of the angel, its name was changed to Bethesda Terrace. The panels of carving in the abstracted organic style propounded by Owen Jones, a mentor of the sculptor Jacob Wrey Mould are organized by an iconographical program of themes: the Seasons, the Times of Day, the Ages of Mankind.[2] Considerable latitude was offered the carvers executing the work, following Ruskinian principles.

Bethesda Terrace became a site for an outdoor luncheon restaurant at the end of the 1960s, then became a congregating spot for the Hair generation before devolving into a drug-trafficking venue in the 1970s. The fountain, which had been dry for decades, was restored in its initial campaign, 1980–81, by the Central Park Conservancy as the centerpiece of its plan to renovate the Park. The Terrace was restored in the following season, its stonework disassembled, cleaned, deteriorated surfaces removed, restored and patched and reset.

Resodding, and fifty new trees, 3,500 shrubs and 3,000 ground cover plants specified by Philip Winslow followed in 1986, most of which, having matured into dense blocks, were removed in 2008, to make way for plants native to the United States. The Minton encaustic tiles of the ceiling of the arcade between the flanking stairs, designed by Mould, were removed in 1987, cleaned, restored, completed with additional new tiles and reinstalled in 2007. Following an illustration in an 1891 book by the Superintendent of Planting in Central Park, Calvert Vaux’s assistant and partner, Samuel Parsons, today in summer, the lower basin once again has water lilies, lotus and papyrus, grown in removable pots.

References

1. http://www.nycgovparks.org/news/daily-plant?id=15031
2. Commissioners of the Central Park Reports (New-York Historical Society), noted in Murphy and Ottavino 1986:26.

ACTOR – Eleanor Handley

Eleanor Handley Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Eleanor moved to NYC after receiving a scholarship to complete her MFA at the New School for Drama. Since graduating she has performed extensively with the Hudson Valley and Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festivals, most memorably as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, and Regan in King Lear. Also for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, she appeared as Maria in Twelfth Night, filmed for broadcast by PBS. Last fall she starred in Jericho at 59E59 (NY Times Critic’s Pick) and has also appeared on the New York Stage opposite Austin Pendleton and Dominic Chianese. Her television appearances include As the World Turns (CBS), Royal Pains (USA) and most recently she played ‘Sheila Evans’ in Unforgettable (CBS).

DIRECTOR – Ebrahim Ghaeini

Ebrahim Ghaeini is a young filmmaker located in Salt Lake City, UT. He graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in film studies. Throughout high school he was involved with the theater program and was involved in numerous shakespearean plays. His favorite role was Posthumus in Cymbeline, and Titus in Titus Andronicus. Since, he has formed a production company, Blooming Studios, and has worked on numerous projects across the nation. Personally having directed 2 full length features and a few short films he is very excited and honored to direct his first short film influenced by William Shakespeare in New York City.
link: www.bloomingstudios.org

If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bett’ring of the time,
And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O! then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage:
     But since he died and poets better prove,
     Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love’.

Analysis

Sonnet 32 explores themes on the length of life, and life as a house

Shakespeare looks into the future and reflects that the young man will probably outlive him. He bids the young man to remember the him not only because of the strength of his writing, but also because the love that has been shown to the young man far surpasses any love shown by another poet. He thinks the young man has a more vibrant and youthful soul than he. He also compares his soul to that of a large beautiful house with an owner that struggles inside.If that is to be the case, then he adjures the youth to remember him not so much for his poetic prowess, but for the fact that he outdid all his rivals in the love which he bears to him, the glorious youth, and that outvies all claim to poetic excellence.
 

Will’s Wordplay

A “churl” was a boorish ignorant fellow. Death sucks!

A “dearer birth” is a more valuable, more precious output, creation, child. Poems were considered to be the poet’s children.

“Red Cube”, 140 Broadway, Manhattan

“Isamu Noguchi’s Red Cube in Lower Manhattan was installed in 1968. The diagonal lines of red painted steel stand in contrast to the stark horizontal and vertical lines of the adjacent Marine Midland Building (by architect Gordon Bunshaft). The cylindrical hole running upward through the piece, as well as the cube’s topmost point, draw the viewer’s eye skyward.” [1]

References

1. http://www.nyc-arts.org/organizations/2378/red-cube

ACTOR – Julie DeLaurier

Julie DeLaurier – Broadway: Taxi Tales; Television: Kate & Allie (plus a few commercials); Radio: series narrator for NPR’s New American Radio; New media: Days of the Commune (Brecht), dir. by Zoe Beloff (see at: daysofthecommune.com); Off and off-off B’way includes several shows at Interart Theatre and C&L Collective; Regional: New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, Tucson Invisible Theatre; Kansas City Theatre Workshop.

DeLaurier cut her teeth as a child with several apprenticeships at Missouri Repertory Theatre (now KC Rep); trained formally at Circle in the Square Theatre School (NYC) under, among others, Nikos Psachorapoulos, Lynne Meadow, Anthony Holland, Edward Berkeley, Marthe Schlamme, Ken Frankel. Also studied with Uta Hagen, Terry Schreiber, Ada Brown Mather, Gloria Maddox.

Took about twenty years off to raise two marvelous boys (while working a full-time office job). Boys to men now – Mama’s back on the boards.

Honored to be a part of this excellent project. Bravo, New York Shakespeare Exchange!

DIRECTOR – Peter Haas

PETER HAAS is a Brooklyn-based director and editor whose first celluloid love was “Godzilla.” Since age 9, he’s been chasing monsters and men, camera in hand. His documentary “Under the Bus” premiered on Free Speech TV in 2013, and his surreal animated short “Saturday Night Subway Ride” was shown at the Queens World Film Festival in 2012. His film “PatriotNet” was the first science fiction film completed for a senior thesis at Keene State College. Among his projects slated for release in 2014 is the short documentary “Peter Pan Bakery.”

His chief inspirations are classic German Expressionist cinema, the free-wheeling creativity of Terry Gilliam, and the fog-shrouded forests of his New Hampshire birthplace. Through his films, Peter strives to unlock the experience of “ecstatic cinema” — a viewing experience that challenges, delights, and sweeps up the audience in equal measures.

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?
‘Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak,
That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:
The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence’s cross.
     Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
     And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 34 compares broken promises from a lover to an unexpected cloudburst. Apologies might be too little too late, but

Shakespeare accuses his beloved offering him warmth and love, causing him to be unprepared for the lack of it. He compares this to leaving your house without a coat on an unexpectedly cool day. It is not enough that his beloved returns like sunshine breaking through the clouds to apologize, drying his tears, because no one can speak well of a remedy that heals the wound but does not remove the disgrace of having been wounded. Two wrongs don’t make a right; although you repent, he still feels injured, and an offender’s guilt offers little solace to the person who must bear the burden of the offense. However, his beloved’s tears are as precious as pearls, so valuable that they redeem all your his ill deeds.
 
Will’s Wordplay
“the rain on my storm-beaten face” is an illusion to tears. Just picture Shakespeare all puffy from crying…

A “salve” is a healing ointment. Apologies were meant to be a balm to Bill’s sadness, but alas!

Rockefeller Center, Manhattan
You won’t find Liz Lemon here anymore, but in Rockefeller Center you will find a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st streets in New York City. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning the area between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. [1]

Rockefeller Center represents a turning point in the history of architectural sculpture: it is among the last major building projects in the United States to incorporate a program of integrated public art. Sculptor Lee Lawrie contributed the largest number of individual pieces – twelve – including the statue of Atlas facing Fifth Avenue and the conspicuous friezes above the main entrance to the RCA Building.

Paul Manship’s highly recognizable bronze gilded statue of the Greek legend of the Titan Prometheus recumbent, bringing fire to mankind, features prominently in the sunken plaza at the front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Some sources cite it as the fourth-most familiar statue in the United States, behind the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty. The model for Prometheus was Leonardo (Leon) Nole, and the inscription from Aeschylus, on the granite wall behind, reads:

“Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.”

A large number of other artists contributed work at the Center, including Isamu Noguchi, whose gleaming stainless steel bas-relief, News, over the main entrance to 50 Rockefeller Plaza (the Associated Press Building) was a standout. At the time it was the largest metal bas-relief in the world. Other artists included Carl Milles, Hildreth Meiere, Margaret Bourke-White, Dean Cornwell, and Leo Friedlander.

In 1932, the Mexican socialist artist Diego Rivera (whose sponsor was Museum of Modern Art and whose patron at the time was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), was commissioned by their son Nelson Rockefeller to create a color fresco for the 1,071-square-foot wall in the lobby of the then RCA Building. This was after Nelson had been unable to secure the commissioning of either Matisse or Picasso. Previously Rivera had painted a controversial fresco in Detroit entitled Detroit Industry, commissioned by Abby and John’s friend, Edsel Ford, who later became a MoMA trustee. Thus it came as no real surprise when his Man at the Crossroads became controversial, as it contained Moscow May Day scenes and a clear portrait of Lenin, not apparent in initial sketches. After Nelson issued a written warning to Rivera to replace the offending figure with an anonymous face, Rivera refused (after offering to counterbalance Lenin with a portrait of Lincoln), and so he was paid off and the mural papered over at the instigation of Nelson, who was to become the Center’s flamboyant president. Nine months later, after all attempts to save the fresco were explored – including relocating it to Abby’s Museum of Modern Art – it was destroyed as a last option. [2]

Rivera’s fresco in the Center was replaced with a stunning, larger mural by the Spanish Catalan artist Josep Maria Sert, titled American Progress, depicting a vast allegorical scene of men constructing modern America. It contains the figures of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it is wrapped around the west wall of the Grand Lobby at 30 Rock.[3]
 
Sonnet Project
Rockefeller Center was the featured location for Sonnet 34, performed by (name?), directed by (name?). The video was released on (date?)
 
References
1. “Rockefeller Center”. National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. September 18, 2007
2.The Diego Rivera fresco incident – see Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New York: Random House, 1993. (pp.352–65); Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958, New York: Doubleday, 1996. (pp.105–11)
3. The Sert fresco – see Roussel, The Art of Rockefeller Center, op. cit., (pp.94–107)

MADELINE FENDRICK – Actor
Madeline is chuffed to be working on this project. Madeline is a Midwesterner by upbringing, and his been splitting her time after graduation from UW- LaCrosse in New York, Wisconsin, and Alaska. Representative roles are Isabella (Measure for Measure), Dromio S. (Comedy of Errors), Helena (Midsummer), Amina (Balkan Women) and Feste (Twelfth Night). Apart from acting, she gets lost on mountains, wrote her first novel in November and is currently a Resident Artist at Think Coffee performing music twice a month with her partner, Brian Peck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjSFFlA64fQ&feature=share&list=UU2f3egjHDbcN-WvYElnPB_g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZp8iWNXBk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFQGpV2Jhkg

NOAH SCHECHTER – Director
Noah is a director, writer, and from Baltimore, Maryland. Most recently he appeared in New Saloon’s William Shakespeare’s Mom and assistant directed Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (Ars Nova). He performs with the improv team Jimmy Fedora and has trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Noah is a graduate of Williams College where he created and directed M@cb#!h, an original clown piece inspired by Shakespeare’s Scottish play. While at Williams Noah also performed with the improv team Combo Za and wrote and directed for the Sketch Comedy Team D.H.S. Noah has trained at Shakespeare&Company in Lennox, Ma and studied martial arts for over seven years. Noah is currently devising a new clown piece inspired by Moby Dick, and several other pieces for the stage and screen.

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,
Thy adverse party is thy advocate,
And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence:
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
     That I an accessary needs must be,
     To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

 
Analysis
Sonnet 35 begs its subject, who has committed some kind of wrong, not to feel sorry, and argues so well in the injurers offense that the injured is hurting himself

Here, William beseeches his love not to apologize for what he did; everything in nature is flawed or subject to imperfection. All people commit errors; as Will is failing in this effort to make his subject feel better, thus corrupting himself by forgiving you. To forgive a sensual fault, he uses his common sense. Though he has been wronged, he defends the culprit, and as a result, argues against his own interests. Indeed, his feelings of love and hate are so confused that he may as well be an accomplice to his own abuser.

 
Will’s Wordplay
A canker refers to a type of worm that eats sweet plants; a pest that robs the world of nice things.
A “sensual fault” can either involve one of the five senses or be a sin of lust.
The latter half of the sonnet introduces legal terminology, a break from the biblical and theological language of sin and redemption.

Hare Krishna Elm Tree, Tompkins Square Park
One of Tompkins Square Park’s most prominent features is its collection of American Elm trees. It is rare today to find such a collection of American elms, since many of the mature elms planted across the country have been killed by Dutch Elm Disease. This incurable disease swept across the United States in the 1930s and remain a threat to the park’s collection of elms. Despite having lost at least 34 of the trees, Tompkins Square Park still hosts a large assemblage of elms, which continue to this day to enchant park patrons. American elm trees are known for their towering canopies, which provide abundant shade throughout the spring, summer, and fall.

One elm in particular, located next to the semi-circular arrangement of benches in the park’s center, is important to adherents of the Hare Krishna religion. After coming to the United States in September, 1965, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), the Indian spiritual leader, founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York. He worked from a storefront on nearby Second Avenue that he used as the Society’s American headquarters. Prabhupada and his disciples gathered in Tompkins Square Park in the fall of 1966 to introduce the East Village to the group’s distinctive 16-word mantra:

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare

On October 9, 1966, Prabhupada and his followers sat beneath this tree and held the first outdoor chanting session outside of India. Participants chanted for two hours as they danced and played cymbals, tambourines, and other percussive instruments. Prabhupada’s diverse group that day included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The event is seen as the founding of the Hare Krishna religion in the United States, and the tree is treated by Krishna adherents as a significant religious site.[1]

 
Sonnet Project
The Hare Krishna Elm was the featured location for Sonnet 35, performed by Tom White, directed by Jason Bruffy. The video was released on August 14, 2013.

 
References
1. http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/tompkinssquarepark/highlights/10823

ACTOR – Tom White
Tom began studying acting at age 8 when his mother enrolled him in youth acting classes. He quickly learned not to hold papers in front of his mouth while speaking and also not to leave his hands folded in front of his crotch. He still finds both lessons incredibly valuable. More recent work includes: NYC Off-Broadway: Spring at the Willowbrook Inn(World Premiere – Fresh Fruit Festival). Regional Credits: Bike America (World Premiere – Alliance Theater); Emma (World Premiere), Inherit the Wind, Angels in America, Arcadia, Autobahn, All’s Well That Ends Well (Cleveland Playhouse/CPH MFA); The Merry Wives of Windsor, You Can’t Take It With You (Great Lakes Theater Festival); Dream/Home (World Premiere), Matt and Ben, This is Our Youth, The Death of Frank , Heaven and Hell (Dobama Theater). Television: “The Good Wife” (CBS), “Gossip Girl” (CW). Tom was also one of the core artists in Hendrick’s Gin one-of-a-kind happening “Voyage to the Unusual” that toured the country. He will appear in the NYC premiere of Bike America at Ma-Yi Theater Company this Fall. Tom continues to study improvisation with the Upright Citizens Brigade and holds an MFA from the Case Western Reserve University / Cleveland Playhouse Acting Program.

DIRECTOR – Jason Bruffy
Jason Bruffy is a NY based director and producer for Theatre and Film. Most recently he has completed directing the debut music video of pop artist Ginn Doll (Boyfriend for the Night). Bruffy has worked Off-Broadway as Associate Producer of Soho Rep (Obie Award winning Born Bad) and Ensemble Studio Theatre. Bruffy served as Producing Artistic Director of both Know Theatre of Cincinnati for 7 years as well as the Salt Lake Acting Company. He is also the founder of the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, now in its 11 season. Other companies include: The Claque (NYC), 45^th St Theatre (NYC), Interact Theatre (PA), Orlando Shakespeare Theatre (FL), Florida Studio Theatre, Spoleto Festival USA (SC), Cincinnati Opera (OH), Cincinnati Shakespeare Company (OH), and Wayside Theatre (VA). Bruffy is also the founding producer of the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, entering into its tenth season as the largest performing arts festival in Ohio.

Bruffy’s notable directing credits include: Collapse by Allyson Moore, Militant Language: A Play with Sand by Sean Christopher Lewis (Rolling-World Premiere), The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis (2^nd US Prod), See What I Wanna See by Michael John LaChiusa (2^nd US Prod), 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, Streamers by David Rabe and a multi-media production of Hamlet. Bruffy has developed work with writers including Mark Holman (Tony Award, Urinetown), Sean Christopher Lewis (Smith Prize), and Mark Brown. Beyond the stage Bruffy has directed music videos for artists Ginn Doll and Clarence Bucaro, as well work as a director, editor and AD on numerous short film and web media projects. Jason Bruffy is co-Producer of BS&B Meida and a proud Member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC). www.jasonbruffy.com

Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spite,
Which though it alter not love’s sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love’s delight.
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
     But do not so, I love thee in such sort,
     As thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

Analysis

Sonnet 36 is a break-up! The two parties are still very much in love, but must part, and should try to avoid each other in public, lest things get awkward, but will always speak highly and kindly of one another.

Willy reveals that he and his love must be parted, even though they are still so in love as to be one. While their loves are joined, their lives remain separate, and while this doesn’t diminish the effect that their feelings have on them, it prevents them from being together as they would like. Will apologizes if he never speaks to his beloved again, and asks that he may receive the same treatment, because they would be transferring shame onto each other if they did. However, his love should not be afraid of any other shame, for Willy will always speak fondly of him in his absence.

Will’s Wordplay

“Without thy help, by me be borne alone” is suggestive of a pregnant girl being abandoned to bear her child without help and in utter misery. Willy, what did you do?

South Street Seaport, Manhattan

Smell that fish? The South Street Seaport is a historic area in Manhattan, centered where Fulton Street meets the East River, and adjacent to the Financial District. The Seaport is a designated historic district, and is distinct from the neighboring Financial District.

It features some of the oldest architecture in downtown Manhattan, and includes the largest concentration of restored early 19th-century commercial buildings in the city. This includes renovated original mercantile buildings, renovated sailing ships, the former Fulton Fish Market, and modern tourist malls featuring food, shopping, and nightlife, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The first pier in the area appeared in 1625, when the Dutch West India Company founded an outpost here. With the influx of the first settlers, the area was quickly developed. One of the first and busiest streets in the area was today’s Pearl Street, so named for a variety of coastal pearl shells. Due to its location, Pearl Street quickly gained popularity among traders.The East River was eventually narrowed. By the second half of the 17th century, the pier was extended to Water Street, then to Front Street, and by the beginning of the 19th century, to South Street. The pier was well reputed, as it was protected from westerly winds and ice of the Hudson River.

In 1728, the Schermerhorn Family established trade with the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Subsequently, rice and indigo came from Charleston. At the time, the port was also the focal point of delivery of goods from England. In 1776, during the American Revolutionary War, the British occupied the port, adversely affecting port trade for eight years. In 1783, many traders returned to England, and most port enterprises collapsed. The port quickly recovered from the post-war crisis. From 1797 until the middle of 19th century, New York had the country’s largest system of maritime trade. From 1815 to 1860 the port was called the Port of New York.

The South Street Seaport Museum was founded in 1967 by Peter and Norma Stanford. When originally opened as a museum, the focus of the Seaport Museum conservation was to be an educational historic site, with shops mostly operating as reproductions of working environments found during the Seaport’s heyday.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy heavily damaged the Seaport; tidal floods (seven feet deep in places) inundated much of the Seaport causing extensive damage that forced an end to plans to restore the Museum’s fortunes by merging it into the Museum of the City of New York. Many of the businesses closed, and the remaining businesses suffered from a severe drop in business after the storm. The South Street Seaport Museum re-opened in December 2012. The Howard Hughes Corporation, the Seaport’s owner, announced that it would tear down the Seaport’s most prominent shopping area, Pier 17, starting in the fall of 2013, and is replacing it with a new structure.

The Seaport itself operates primarily as a mall and tourism center, built on Pier 17 on the East River. Visitors may choose from among many shops and a food court. Decks outside allow views of the East River, Brooklyn Bridge, and Brooklyn Heights. At the entrance to the Seaport is the Titanic Memorial lighthouse.

The port has 6 ships docked here permanently or semi-permanently, four of which have historical status.

ACTOR – Andrea Schirmer

Andrea Schirmer is a New York based Film and TV actor.

Andrea has known she wanted to act since taking the stage in her 1st grade class play (she took on the challenging role as the “May Basket” in the original play “The Seasons”).

Today, Andrea studies at the Barrow Group. She has been recognized for her roles in various independent and awarding winning films. She can currently be seen on the TV shows “Momsters” and “The Perfect Murder”.

Andrea is thrilled to be part of the Sonnet Project.

FEATURING – Brent Dixon

Brent Dixon grew up in Tampa, Florida. He went to the University of Florida, where he studied Philosophy and was part of the Florida Players Theater Company. He then moved to New York City, following graduation, and joined the Flea Theater, where he was a company member. He loved working on the sonnet project and is excited to see its release.

DIRECTOR – Cristina Wolf

Cristina Wolf is freelance camera operator, camera assistant and avid film photographer working in New York City. In 2010, she relocated to London to obtain a maters degree in filmmaking from the London Film School. Prior to moving abroad, she has managed to work on myriad of projects from shooting documentaries in Central America, to shooting A-list talent in press junkets to working on narrative films, commercials and fashion shoots. In 2008, she also completed the cinematography certificate program at New York University. Prior to making the making the switch the camera department, Cristina freelanced as a studio photo assistant as well as worked as production coordinator and production manager for A&E Television Networks and for MTV News here in New York.

As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;
For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts, do crowned sit,
I make my love engrafted to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,
Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give
That I in thy abundance am sufficed,
And by a part of all thy glory live.
     Look what is best, that best I wish in thee:
     This wish I have; then ten times happy me!

Analysis

Sonnet 37 sees the speaker down on his luck again,but he takes vicarious delight and pride in the achievements of his lover, which reflect well on him.

William is crippled by bad fortune but, as an aged father takes delight in the youthful actions of his son, he takes comfort in his beloved’s worth and faithfulness. Beauty, noble birth, wealth, intelligence, or all of these, or all of these and more– he attaches my love to it, and in doing so is no longer poor, crippled, and despised. The mere shadow of this person, present in Will in the form of love, provides such solid reality that he is complete with it. He wishes the best for his love and if this wish is granted, then he will bask in this reflected glory, his decrepitude forgotten.

Will’s Wordplay

All the listed worth of the beloved (beauty, wealth and wit) might be taken as the traditional inheritance of the aristocrat, whether real or imagined. In Shakespeare’s day, as in almost any age before the 20th century, there was a widespread belief that upper class people were naturally better in every respect and that genetic excellence was theirs by inheritance.

Washington Square Park, Manhattan

Known throughout the 20th Century as a bohemian sanctuary, Washington Square Park is one of the best-known of New York City’s public parks. At 9.75 acres, it is a landmark in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village, as well as a meeting place and center for cultural activity. The Park is an open space, dominated by Washington Arch (1892), with a tradition of celebrating nonconformity. The Park’s fountain area has long been one of the city’s popular spots for residents and tourists.

History

In the early 17th century, a Native American village known as Sapokanikan or “Tobacco Field” was nearby. They also owned the land known now as Washington Square Park before the Dutch attacked and drove them out. By the mid-17th century, the land was used as farm land by the Dutch. The Dutch gave the land to slaves, thus freeing them, with the intention of using them as a human ‘buffer zone’ between the attacks of the Native Americans and the white colonial settlements. The tract was in the possession of African Americans from 1643 to 1664. The area was then called “The Land of the Blacks.”

It remained farmland until April 1797, when the Common Council of New York purchased the fields to the east of the Minetta Creek for a new potter’s field, or public burial ground. It was used mainly for burying unknown or indigent people when they died. But when New York (which did not include this area yet) went through yellow fever epidemics in the early 19th century, most of those who died from yellow fever were also buried here, safely away from town, as a hygienic measure.The cemetery was closed in 1825. To this day, the remains of more than 20,000 bodies rest under Washington Square.

A legend in many tourist guides says that the large elm at the northwest corner of the park, Hangman’s Elm, was the old hanging tree, but the tree was on the wrong side of the former Minetta Creek, where it stood in the back garden of a private house.

In 1826 the City bought the land west of the Minetta, the square was laid out and leveled, and it was turned into the Washington Military Parade Ground. The streets surrounding the square became one of the city’s most desirable residential areas in the 1830s. The protected row of Greek Revival style houses on the north side of the park remain from that time.

In 1849 and 1850, the parade ground was reworked into the first park on the site. More paths were added and a new fence was built around it. In 1871, it came under the control of the newly formed New York City Department of Parks, and it was re-designed again, with curving rather than straight secondary paths.

The Arch

In 1889, to celebrate the centennial of George Washington’s inauguration as president of the United States, a large plaster and wood Memorial Arch was erected over Fifth Avenue just north of the park. The temporary plaster and wood arch was so popular that in 1892 a permanent Tuckahoe marble arch, designed by the New York architect Stanford White, was erected, standing 77 ft. White modeled the arch after the 1806 Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In 1918 two statues of George Washington were added to the north side.

ACTOR – John Moss

John Moss, this summer, played Kellerman in Life Without Parole for the New York International Fringe Festival, and last year, played Neil in the New York premiere of Jane Anderson’s The Quality of Life for Project Rushmore. Off Bway: The Tragedy of MacBeth at the McGinn/Cazale, Mamet’s Edmond (Preacher), Hereafter (Jason), DiMaggio (Casey Stengel, Walter Winchell, Henry Kissinger) Richard III (Edward IV), Our Town (Mr. Webb), King Lear (Albany) Regional: Bellomy in The Fantasticks for Pennsylvania Centre Stage, Arthur Freed in What a Glorious Feeling at the Adirondack Theatre Festival, Teddy in Arsenic and Old Lace at NC’s Turnage Theatre. Hank Williams: Lost Highway (Fred Rose), Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile (Sagot) Showboat (Capt. Andy) Camelot (Pellinore) at The Depot Theatre. Film: It Could Happen to You, Revolutionary Road, No Looking Back. TV: Law and Order, The Dana Carvey Show. Graduate Temple University (Alumni Award).

DIRECTOR – Matthew Schuman

Matt Schuman is a New York City based writer and director. His short comedy, “Me Time,” played in over a dozen film festivals internationally and took home the award for Outstanding First Time Director at the 2010 DC Shorts Fest. His music videos have appeared on MTV, VH1, and FUSE and include “The Only One Lonely” by Val Emmich, winner of the 2008 Independent Music Award for Best Music Video. His most recent projects include the web series “Conversations Between Two People Who Have Known Each Other For A Long Time,” which can be seen on FunnyOrDie.com, and two feature films currently in development.

COLLABORATING PRODUCER – Adam Macbeth

Producing credits include Tongal Video winner, “Say Hello!” for Hello Products and the short film, “Topography Of A Hotel.”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY – David Park

davidparkdp.com

STEADI-CAM OPERATOR – Korey Robinson

https://vimeo.com/user27177440

How can my muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O! give thy self the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thy self dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
     If my slight muse do please these curious days,
     The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

 
Analysis
Sonnet 38 again praises the fair young man for his inspiring beauty, an almost superhuman force, and suggests the young man take all the credit for the poetry written about him.

Bill asks how he can look for poetic inspiration elsewhere when there is such a grand example of it before him in the handsome young man? The problem is that he is almost too beautiful to be described on mere paper. He asks the youth to credit only himself if he sees anything valuable in poor Billy’s writing, since it was he who inspired it, and he could inspire even the talentless to write something majestic. It is suggested that we canonize the young man to the position of Tenth Muse, more valuable than the 9 in mythology, because anyone inspired by him will write words of eternal value, and should by rights take all the credit.

 
Will’s Wordplay
The Muses were ancient Greek goddesses of artistic inspiration, and Willy suggests that the young man take his place amongst the 9 women as a more powerful tenth.

“argument” is a synonym for ‘subject’ or ‘theme’.

“dumb” has a dual meaning here, both unable to speak, and thick/unintelligent.

Sylvette Sculpture
A cubist beauty, Sylvette is the title of the portrait of a young woman with the pony tail painted by Pablo Picasso. The model for the painting was (Lydia) Sylvette David, also known by her married name Lydia Corbett, a French woman who worked in a pottery studio not far from his studio in Vallauris, in the spring 1953. Sylvette inspired 40 works by Picasso. His grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004 that Sylvette was also the subject of the monumental Chicago Picasso, which had been a matter of curiosity since it was unveiled. She was said to have been an inspiration for actress Brigitte Bardot and the Roger Vadim film And God Created Woman.

The sculpture that adorns the courtyard of NYU’s Silver Towers apartment buildings on Bleecker Street is an enlargement of a sculpture by Picasso. Norweigan sculptor Carl Nesjär executed the construction of the 60-ton concrete Bust of Sylvette in 1967.[1]

 
Sonnet Project
The Sylvette sculpture was the featured location for Sonnet 38, performed by Anthony Manna, directed by Padmini Devi. The video was released on July 25, 2013.

 
References
1.http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/arch/175/pages/bust.htm

ACTOR – Anthony Manna
Anthony Manna made his New York debut in the 2004 Keen Company production of The Hasty Heart. Since then, he’s appeared in several Off and Off-Off Broadway productions, including Timon of Athens (Public Theatre), Girls Just Wanna Have Fund$ (Women’s Project), Fucking Ibsen Takes Time (SoHo Playhouse, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival), Mangella (Project: Theatre), Mickey Mouse is Dead (59E59 Theatre and Edinburgh Festival Fringe), and Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare NYC).

Regionally, he has appeared in Black Snow and You Never Can Tell at Yale Repertory Theatre. He also spent three summers as a company member at Hope Summer Repertory Theatre, where he appeared in productions of Man of La Mancha, Footloose, Charley’s Aunt, Guys and Dolls, The Game of Love and Chance, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, and Once Upon a Mattress.

He received his undergraduate training from the University of Evansville and an MFA from Yale School of Drama.

DIRECTOR – Padmini Devi
Padmini is passionate about storytelling’s power to heal and transform the world we live in. She was a NYC Teaching Fellow and has worked for several award-winning after school media programs. Most recently, her energy has been focused on Producing and Assistant Directing independent films. “Hank & Asha” world-premiered to a warm reception at the 2013 Slamdance Film Festival, winning the Audience Award. It went on to win “Best Producers” at the Brooklyn Film Festival. “Plato’s Reality Machine” and “Dark Mountain” have wrapped post-production and are now in the festival submission process. For her, the world of independent filmmaking is an uncharted ocean where one swims amongst the muses, the octopuses, the sharks and the coral reefs. She believes in the power of imagination to transform our life experiences into meaningful tales that shed light on the human condition, inspiring a world where peace and justice can blossom. She holds her BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley, MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California, and EdM in Urban Adolescence Education from Long Island University.

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.
Then, if for my love, thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest;
But yet be blam’d, if thou thy self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty:
And yet, love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury.
     Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
     Kill me with spites yet we must not be foes.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 40 sees the poet’s loved one, likely the fair youth, has stolen his mistress, but the poet forgives him.

Willy asks his beloved why he would seduce another whom he loves? Doing so produces no gains of love on their part. All that he possesses was already theirs. If, instead of loving him, they love the person he loves, he can’t really assign blame, because it is merely an extension of love. He forgives the subject, even though they steal the little that he has, and even though it is well known that an injury inflicted by a supposed lover is far worse than an insult from an enemy. But everything bad is made to look good on his beloved, and even if with these wrongs against him prove deadly, he will not be their enemy.
 
Will’s Wordplay
“wilful taste” refers to the youth’s sexual experience, wanton use and enjoyment. The suggestion is that the youth’s better part declines to take advantage of the situation, but his lustful nature dominates and encourages him to seize the opportunity.

“love knows” echoes the more common phrases ‘God knows’, ‘heaven knows’.

LOVE Sculpture
Let me count the ways… LOVE is a sculpture by American artist Robert Indiana. It consists of the letters LO (with the O canted sideways) over the letters VE. The image was originally designed as a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964.

The original three-dimensional version of LOVE is made of COR-TEN steel and has been on exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 1970. The LOVE design has been reproduced in a variety of formats. Likewise, the sculpture has been recreated in multiple versions and a variety of colors, and is now on display around the world– the one in New York City resides at the corner of 55th St and 6th Avenue. While it was first made in English, versions of the sculpture exist in Hebrew, Chinese, Italian and Spanish.
 
Sonnet Project
The LOVE sculpture was the featured location for Sonnet 40, performed by Bridget Crawford, directed by Bruce “Master B” Baek. The video was released on July 10, 2013.

ACTOR – Bridget Crawford
Bridget Crawford is a New York-based actor. Favorite roles include Helena in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ophelia in Hamlet and Miranda in The Tempest. When not speaking in verse, Bridget can be found scatting her way around town as the lead singer in the vintage swing band, Gin Fizz.
 
Tereza D. Kim (Messenger)
Kim is a Brazilian-born American theatre and film actress. She is a student at City University of New York’s Queensborough Community College and majoring in Theatre and Performing Arts also has varied background in Music and Dance. Tereza’s acting credits include, Words, Words, Words (Katharina from The Taming of the Shrew/Puck from A Midsummer Nights Dream) QCC, End of The Argument (Sarah) KCACTF, Loose Ends (Assistant Director) The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, Little Shop of Horrors (Chiffon/Dance Captain) QCC, Low Life (KeeKee) The Dream Hunter, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Titania) QCC and Marisol (Woman with Furs) QCC. She has received such awards like KCACTF Region 1 Irene Ryan Nominee Alternate for Words, Words, Words, KCACTF Region 2 Irene Ryan Nominee for Little Shop Of Horrors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

DIRECTOR – Bruce “Master B” Baek
Bruce “Master B” Baek is an American theatre director, film director, producer and actor. He has directed theatre productions and films such as Dejavu (1997), 3/14 (1998), Second Chance (2001), Three Women dating Henry (2005), Loose Ends (2011), Echoes (NYC Theatre Directors’ Project 2012), Killers and Other Family (2012). Bruce also played a lead role in Salsa (Oliver) during the 2nd annual Venezuelans in NYC festival in 2011. His institutional film, Green Print was nominated and awarded with a gold medal at 2010 Service Industry Advertising Award (SIAA). Bruce enrolled in graduate film program at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University where he studied film directing under the world-class directors like Spike Lee, William Railey, Boris Frumin. He is also an alumnus of the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theater & Film Institute where he received a full scholarship to study the Strasberg’s ‘method’ acting and intensely trained by teachers like Anna Strasberg, Irma Sandrey, Paul Calderon, Robert Ellermann, Ted Zurkowski, Geoffery Horne. He was nominated and received the Presidential Excellence Award in teaching from New York Institute of Technology where he served as an assistant professor of film studies & productions. Bruce is a full member of Stage Directors and Choreographers society (SDC) and operating his own NYC based motion picture and theatre production company, NeverEnds Films & Entertainment, LLC (www.neverendsfilms.com)
 
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY – Paul Demonte
Paul Demonte is an American filmmaker and an editor. He credits his grandparents for creating his love for film with the classic black and white “pictures” always playing on TV.  Paul’s true passion came when he started video editing in 2005. He received both BA and MA in Communication Arts from New York Institute of Technology-Manhattan. During his college years he worked on two international documentaries shooting in Beijing, China and Paris, France. In 2010, Paul started his independent production company, The Dog Ate It Productions (www.thedogateitproductions.com) and has worked on numerous projects ranging from New York City museum and union promos, to short films and documentaries.

Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,
When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
Thy beauty, and thy years full well befits,
For still temptation follows where thou art.
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos, what woman’s son
Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?
Ay me! but yet thou mightst my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth:
     Hers by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
     Thine by thy beauty being false to me.

 
Analysis
Sonnet 41 justifies a crime of unfaithfulness by blaming the subject’s beauty as the culprit, but the poet is reproachful, suggesting that the young man might still have shown a little respect.

Billy’s lover’s crime has been justified with a list of extenuating circumstances showing that the youth himself was hardly responsible for the deed. It was his rare youth and his beauty which were responsible, for they are always open to attack from preying women. Yet even so, Bill thinks the young man might have restrained himself, for it has caused both the young man and the mistress to break their vows to him – a two-fold crime which is doubly heinous.

 
Will’s Wordplay
It is interesting to see that this sonnet ends on a note of accusation, a comparatively rare event, for reconciliation or self effacement are the usual outcomes of those situations where fault has been found. Here the accusation of troth-breaking is more specific and hurtful, a potential cause of a permanent divorce of the loving relationship.

Temperance Fountain,Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan
A temperance fountain was a fountain that was set up, usually by a private benefactor, to encourage people not to drink beer by the provision of safe and free water. Beer was the main alternative to water, and generally safer. The temperance societies had no real alternative as tea and coffee were too expensive, so drinking fountains were very attractive.

Dating to 1888, this neo-classical fountain was the gift of the wealthy San Francisco dentist, businessman, and temperance crusader Henry D. Cogswell. The California Gold Rush of 1849 lured Cogswell to San Francisco. There his prosperous dental practice and real estate investments permitted him to retire in 1856 with a fortune estimated at $2,000,000. He engaged himself in public philanthropy, helping to advance the anti-alcohol or “temperance” movement.

Cogswell’s most lasting legacy was the 50 monuments he sponsored nationwide between 1878 and the 1890s. Most were versions of the temperance fountain. Several of the fountains, such as this in Tompkins Square Park, were covered by a stone canopy or baldachin supported by four Doric columns. The four stone entablatures are emblazoned with the words Faith, Hope, Charity, and Temperance.

The erection of the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park resulted from Cogswell’s affiliation with the Moderation Society, which was formed in 1877 to address health conditions on the Lower East Side, and to distribute free ice-water fountains to encourage citizens to drink water instead of alcoholic beverages. The figure of Hebe, the mythical water carrier, atop the pyramidal stone pediment was originally fabricated in zinc by the J. L. Mott Iron Works in Mott Haven in the Bronx.

Though the four ornamental luminaires with red, white and blue tinted glass, which once flanked the fountain, long ago vanished, this monument has withstood the vagaries of time better than most. In 1992, the fountain underwent extensive restoration, and the Hebe statue was replaced with a more durable bronze replica.

 
Sonnet Project
The Tompkins Square Park Temperance Fountain was the featured location for Sonnet 41, performed by Johnny Sparks, directed by Matthew Kohn. The video was released on June 5, 2013.

 
References
1.http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/tompkinssquarepark/monuments/1558

ACTOR-Johnny Sparks
Johnny owes about 3/4 of his resume to William Shakespeare. Starting over two decades ago he’s played Puck, Flute and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Claudius as well as the title role in Hamlet and Posthumous, Cloten and Iachimo in Cymbeline just to name a few. He has yet to tackle King Lear but when Ross hears the pitch for his site-specific, one man musical version set in Bushwick he’s confident it’ll be a lock. Training: SMU, Yale.

DIRECTOR – Matthew Kohn
http://thegracecourtpicturecompany.com/

Kohn’s main work is The Manute Bol Sudan Reconciliation Film Project, a five-year epic documentary about a cutting edge group of Muslims and Christians working to build 41 schools and foster reconciliation between the war-torn nations of Sudan and South Sudan. The film features the first African NBA player, Manute Bol, and many people who worked with him and were inspired by him after his death.

Kohn’s first feature documentary is the acclaimed CALL IT DEMOCRACY (callitdemocracy.com), the only film about the history of the Electoral College in Presidential Elections. He followed with Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism, a commission by Metropolis magazine for their 25th Anniversary. The film explores an effort to save Riverside High, a late 1950s example of environmentally sound architecture designed by Paul Rudolph. He recently completed You Decide, a series of short PSAs about cancer awareness for the National Institute of Health and is an associate producer of Charlie Victor Romeo, premiering at Sundance 2013. Matt is on the board of difrent, an NGO with a clear mission: to be the world’s leading source for music and culture for social change, featuring artists and organizations who are making a better world.

Kohn’s short fiction films include Sea Level Inferno, SinCine winner Rosa X-Rays Joe and Freedom Isn’t Free featuring Alexandria Wailes, and I think I know You. Kohn’s next fiction project is the feature film version of his script, Jimmy Three. It’s the story of a Polish journalist in Greenpoint Brooklyn who is coping with the impending death of his terminally ill artist wife.

For more than two years, Matt hosted Speakeasy Cinema, a monthly screening salon which invited new and accomplished filmmakers to screen secret, provocative films. He graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in Politics, with studies in film and feminist theory. In addition to his personal films, Kohn has worked in the film industry as a line producer, producer, editor and most recently short film and documentary cinematographer.

That thou hast her it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her, because thou know’st I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
     But here’s the joy; my friend and I are one;
     Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

Analysis

Sonnet 42 bemoans the poet’s loss of his best friend to his girlfriend and vice versa, but consoles himself in their gain of each other, and that she must see something of him in the man she’s left him for.

Shakespeare’s main complaint is not that the young man that you has taken his mistress, even though he loved her dearly; The loss that touches him more closely is that she has stolen the young man. He excuses his loving offenders, knowing that they love each other because he loves them both. To lose either of them means they will gain each other. They cause him this burden for his own sake. But there is one consolation in this thought: he and the young man are one; therefore she loves him.

Will’s Wordplay

The use of the term “loving offenders” in line 5 can have two meanings: that the offenders (the fair lord and the mistress) are in love; but it can also mean that they seem to enjoy their offense.

The exaltation “Sweet flattery!” at the end of the sonnet indicates sarcasm, since “flattery” usually indicates dishonest beauty.

Merchant Marine Memorial, Battery Park, Manhattan

Commissioned by the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, Inc., this memorial was conceived in 1976. In 1988, after an extensive competition, the artist Marisol Escobar (b. 1930), known as Marisol, was chosen to develop her design. Situated off-shore from the north end of Battery Park and just south of Pier A, the monument stands on a rebuilt stone breakwater in the harbor. The bronze figural group and boat are based on an actual historical event; during World War II, a Nazi U-boat attacked a merchant marine vessel, and while the mariners clung to their sinking vessel, the Germans photographed their victims. Marisol developed a series of studio sketches from this photograph, then fashioned a clay maquette as her winning design proposal for the monument. The work was dedicated on October 8, 1991.

Marisol was born in Paris, and spent most of her childhood in Venezuela. After studying art in Paris and Los Angeles she moved to Greenwich Village in the 1950s, where she was first influenced by abstract expressionism, and then developed a reputation for her highly stylized boxy sculptured figures. She was inspired by pre-Columbian and American folk art, as well as the growing pop-art movement, and by the 1960s, her style had evolved into satirical assemblages which commented on American society. Her diverse work defies simplistic classification, as she has explored particular themes and aesthetic criteria as they related to specific commissions.

In 1967, Marisol exhibited a piece entitled Three Figures in the group outdoor exhibition in the city’s parks entitled Sculpture in Environment. That work was minimalist and geometric. Since then, Marisol has exhibited in numerous public settings, often employing traditional figurative techniques, as in her designs for an unrealized monument to the Brooklyn Bridge’s engineers, the Roeblings, and in the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial.

The American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial Inc., chaired by the president of the AFL-CIO, Lane Kirkland, sought to commemorate the thousands of merchant ships and crews pressed into military service since the Revolutionary War. In World War II alone it is estimated that 700 American merchant ships were lost, and 6,600 mariners gave their lives in this global conflict.

Marisol has captured an unsettling realism, drawn from the faded photograph, but also dependent on the ebb and flow of the harbor’s tides. One figure, struggling beside the boat, is submerged each tidal cycle, a technical motif that compounds the work’s emotional dynamic. Though specific in its imagery, the monument honors the thousands of merchant mariners who have died at sea in the course of our nation’s history. [1]

References

1. http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/battery-park/highlights/9745

ACTOR – Adam Patterson

Adam Patterson: NYC: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 12th Night (New Place Players), Island (New York Shakespeare Exchange), Eurydice (Otherside Productions), The Country Wife (Odyssey Productions). Other Credits: Tartuffe, To Kill a Mockingbird, and (Three Man) Tempest (Burning Coal Theatre), Elephants and Gold (Berkshire Fringe), Titus Andronicus, and The Crucible (Bare Theatre), Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing (Plimoth Players). Adam was raised in Raleigh, NC and holds a BFA in acting from Emerson College in Boston, MA. He is a founding member of Manhattan’s New Place Players.
http://newplaceplayersnyc.com/
http://adam-patterson.net/

DIRECTOR – Gillian Fritzsche

Gillian is a writer/director who works in both film and theatre. She is wife to the talented Ryan Fritzsche and mommy to the spunky and smart Olivia. She is currently in post-production on a comedic short film called “Jerry & Diane.” Gillian also enjoys helping out as a First AD or Line Producer when necessary.

Inspired at a young age by her passion for directing both theatre and film, Gillian began in her teens, as a director and actor in community theatre in her hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. She also self-produced a variety of short video projects in high school and college. After completing a Bachelors degree in theatre and film performance and production, Gillian worked as a costume designer at the St. Lawrence Stage Company. Perceiving a need to understand business, Gillian paused to earn a Masters of Business Administration (with a focus in marketing), and transitioned into managing the acclaimed Pacific Theatre in Vancouver, British Columbia. While there, she drew upon her undergraduate experience as a first assistant director, and reentered the independent film industry in this position on short independent projects in her spare time. Gillian maintained her position at Pacific Theatre until she reunited and fell in love with her college friend, Ryan. After getting engaged, she moved to Los Angeles (where he lived) and they married.

After several years there as a First AD, UPM, and Production Coordinator, Gillian was asked to join the feature comedy, “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Dreams of Duncan Christopher” as a Producer and Line Producer. Concurrently, she re-embraced a passion for writing, and wrote her first feature screenplays. After completion of principal photography on “Duncan Christopher” and after working on a few work-for-hire screenplay projects, Gillian also re-engaged with her desire to direct, and began to write a short film called ”Sonny” with the intent to direct it as well. Sonny was nominated at the ATTIC Film Festival 2013 for the Best Screenplay Award.

Projects that Gillian has directed and many that she has worked on have gone on to win awards. Favourite film projects include “Secret Millionaires” (for which she was Cinematographer and Consulting Producer) and the award-winning “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Dreams of Duncan Christopher” (which she co-produced) and “The Hitchhiker” (on which she served as First AD).

Favourite theatre projects that she has directed include “The View from the Q” written by Sharifa Williams which won Best of the Fest in Week 2 at the Players Theatre’s Short Play & Music Festival 2013 in New York City; “Less Ado About Nothing”, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” which was staged as part of the Stone’s Throw Productions at Pacific Theatre in 2006; and “The Most Massive Woman Wins”, a one-act play about eating disorders which was part of a showcase in 2001 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Gillian currently lives in New York City. Together with her family and their rambunctious kitty-cat, she enjoys the parks, the coffee, and the views of New Jersey.

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
     All days are nights to see till I see thee,
     And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Analysis

Sonnet 43 sees the poet and his lover apart, and uses imagery of bright nights and dark days to describe dreams of his love.

All day Willy is forced to look on what he doesn’t do not care about, but at night, he closes his eyes and dreams of his beloved, and that is when he sees best. For even the shadow of his lover brightens a dream, and a much brighter presence in reality makes things even more delightful. His joy would be proportionally greater, since seeing his love in dreams is so wonderful, to see them in life would be too good to be true! Until they are reunited, days are as dark as night because of his love’s absence, and nights as bright as day with sweet dreams.
 

Will’s Wordplay

The contrast is between shadow and substance, corresponding roughly to the distinction between body and soul.

Billy uses the word “form” as both noun and verb in quick succession. How wondrously would your form, the real you, from which your shadow is derived, create (or form) a lovely display.

Bethesda Arcade Terrace Arches, Central Park, Manhattan

Bethesda Terrace Arcade is the arched, interior walkway in the center of the park that links the Mall to Bethesda Fountain and the Central Park Lake. Created in the 1860s, the Arcade features a stunning tiled ceiling and was designed by Jacob Wrey Mould. [1]

Bethesda Terrace Arcade was created in the 1860s as a part of the Park’s main architectural feature. A grand staircase connects the Mall to the subterranean arcade.

It was conceived to be an ornate interior that would act as a distinct counterpart to the open terrace and Lake. The highlight of the arcade is the magnificent Minton Tile ceiling designed by British-born architect and designer, Jacob Wrey Mould, who also conceived of the decorative carvings throughout the Terrace.

Installed in 1869, there are more than 15,000 colorful, patterned encaustic tiles, made by England’s famed Minton Tile Company. Encaustic tiles, originally created to cover floors, are made of individual colored clays pressed and fired into the tile to form the design. Bethesda arcade is the only place in the world where these Minton tiles are used for a ceiling. The niches that flank the walls of the arcade are covered with trompe l’oeil paintings that resemble the colored stone inlay design that was never completed. Over the decades, the 50-ton ceiling deteriorated. In the 1980s, the tiles were placed in storage. Thanks to charitable donation, Central Park Conservancy was finally able to restore the ceiling and the arcade in 2000. [2]

In Popular Culture

The lower passage and fountain appear in the 2nd episode of season 1 of White Collar.
It also appears in the video for The Lonely Island song “I Just Had Sex” Featuring Akon

References

1. http://www.centralpark.com/guide/attractions/bethesda-terrace/bethesda-terrace-arcade.html
2. http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/minton-tiles-at-bethesda.html

ACTOR – Joe Vincent

Broadway: Max (Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll), 2008 Off-Broadway: Flamingo Court with Jamie Farr, 2008. Utah Shakespeare Festival: Henry Saunders (Lend Me a Tenor: The Musical), Malachi Stack (The Matchmaker) Other Theatres: a combined thirty-one seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Old Globe (San Diego); California, Alabama, Orlando, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Utah Shakespeare festivals
Television/Film: Eddie Murphy’s Metro, Warner Bros. Enos; television movies, Inherit the Wind and Girl of the Limberlost
Other Credits: has performed in thirty-three of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, and more than forty major musical theatre roles; also personally leads tours to Shakespeare’s Italy
Awards: nominated for eight Bay Area Theatre Critic Circle, Dramalogue, and Dean Goodman excellence awards; won four times, in two categories.

DIRECTOR – Okke Rutte

Okke Rutte is an internationally recognized filmmaker. For the past decade, Okke has partnered with artists, actors, musicians, fashion designers, and major brands to create short films, videos and commercials for use across Europe and in the States. A native of the Netherlands, Okke relocated to New York City in early 2011, making the city that never sleeps his permanent home. Most recently, Okke co-wrote, produced, and directed the short film In Motion. He earned his BFA in Filmmaking from Middlesex University (London, England). www.oruproductions.com

Assistant Director- Elitza Daskalova

Elitza Daskalova is an actress, writer & avid traveler based in New York City. Elitza has appeared as a performer in the New York International Fringe Festival, Women in Theatre Conference, and at various off- off Broadway venues throughout the city. She recently co-wrote the short film In Motion. Elitza holds a BFA in Acting from Marymount Manhattan College. www.elitzadaskalova.com

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes,
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To ‘cide this title is impannelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye’s moiety, and the dear heart’s part:
     As thus: mine eye’s due is thine outward part,
     And my heart’s right, thine inward love of heart.

Analysis

Sonnet 46 wrestles with the age-old question: which is it, outer beauty or inner?

Will’s heart wants one thing, emotional love, while his eye wants to drink in physical beauty. While the eye fixates on the physical appearance of his beloved, the heart would prefer not to see the physical at all, and instead focus on pure emotion. The young man resides inside Willy’s heart, unseen. The eyes disagree with the heart, arguing that they are capable of detecting of the beauty of a person. The jury’s final decision is to divide the lover– the eyes can have the physical beauty, the heart the inner beauty
 

Will’s Wordplay

The dichotomy of eyes and heart in love’s realm was traditional. The eye was believed to hold the image, but the heart was responsible for feeling and emotion.

To “impanel”, or empanel, is to set up a body of jurors.

New York County Supreme Courthouse, Manhattan

The New York State Supreme Court Building, originally known as the New York County Courthouse, at 60 Centre Street on Foley Square in the Civic Center district of Manhattan, New York City houses the Civil and Appellate Terms of the New York State Supreme Court for the state’s First Judicial District, which is coextensive with Manhattan, as well as the offices of the New York County Clerk.

The granite-faced hexagonal building was designed by Guy Lowell of Boston in classical Roman style and was built between 1913 and 1927, completion having been delayed by World War I. It replaced the former New York County Courthouse on Chambers Street, popularly known as the Tweed Courthouse. Both the interior and exterior are New York City Landmarks.

The building’s mass and scale give it the appearance of a temple. A broad set of steps sweeps up from Foley Square to a massive Corinthian colonnade covering most of the front of the courthouse, topped by an elaborate 140-foot-long triangular pediment of thirteen figures carved in bas relief from granite. The pediment and acroteria by Frederick Warren Allen include three statues: “Law”, “Truth” and “Equity”. A frieze bears the inscription “The True Administration of Justice is the Firmest Pillar of Good Government”, a 1789 quotation attributed to George Washington.

The rotunda contains the oft-reproduced and recently restored mural Law Through the Ages.[5] Attilio Pusterla painted a number of murals in the rotunda in the 1930s under sponsorship from the Federal Art Project of the Works Project Administration The mural is divided into six sections, each depicting a pair of figures from historical cultures important to the history of law: Assyrian and Egyptian, Hebraic and Persian, Greek and Roman, Byzantine and Frankish, English and early colonial, with the final section portraying George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Above the seated figures are portraits of six lawgivers: Hammurabi, Moses, Solon, Justinian, Blackstone and John Marshall.

Along Foley Square, the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse sits next to the New York State Supreme Court Building. On the far right can be seen part of the Municipal Building on Park Row

The courthouse was designated a New York City Landmark on February 1, 1966. and the interior on March 24, 1981.

ACTOR – Sydney Lucas

Sydney Lucas made her Off-Broadway debut in Fun Home (Public Theater) at the age of 10 receiving a 2014 Lucielle Lortel nomination. Other credits include Verdi’s Macbeth (Metropolitan Opera); Workshops: Amelie, Iowa, Once Around the Moon, Table. Film: Squirrels to the Nuts, Skeleton Twins,Girl Most Likely, Fool’s Day. TV: How & Why (Pilot, series regular), Royal Pains, Would You Fall For That?, Late Show with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, 2012 & 2013 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Sesame Street. Commercials: Campbell’s, IBM, Kindle Fire, Chuck E. Cheese. Voiceover/Radio: Tide, Little Tykes, Sesame Street, Team Umizoomi, Lalaloopsy Land and more.
www.sydneylucas.net

DIRECTOR – Lorielle Mallue

Lorielle is the Director of Conservatory Training and a faculty member at the Atlantic Acting School, the sister institution of the Atlantic Theater Company. Credits include: SELF: BY ALISON CARSEN (writer/director/actor, Student Emmy, UCLA Directors Spotlight Award), THE WONDER PETS! (writer), I Never Saw Another Butterfly… (producer/director), Lovers (VTA Best Actress Award). Current projects: THIS AMERICAN DEATH (producer), WHAT IF, RIGHT NOW…? Based on the short story “Victory Lap” by George Saunders (producer/writer/director). In LA she worked for six years for Jodie Foster and her Paramount Pictures financed company, Egg Pictures (Meg LeFauve, president) on multiple features (including THE DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTAR BOYS) and as story editor for projects Egg was developing. She also served as an assistant to Ms. Foster on FLIGHT PLAN and INSIDE MAN. BFA (NYU-Atlantic), MFA (UCLA), Ed.M. (Harvard), FIND Producing Lab Fellow, and 2012 NYLA – Bessie Lab participant.

Thus can my love excuse the slow offence
Of my dull bearer when from thee I speed:
From where thou art why should I haste me thence?
Till I return, of posting is no need.
O! what excuse will my poor beast then find,
When swift extremity can seem but slow?
Then should I spur, though mounted on the wind,
In winged speed no motion shall I know,
Then can no horse with my desire keep pace.
Therefore desire, (of perfect’st love being made)
Shall neigh, no dull flesh, in his fiery race;
But love, for love, thus shall excuse my jade-
     Since from thee going, he went wilful-slow,
     Towards thee I’ll run, and give him leave to go.

Analysis

Sonnet 51 sees the speaker on a journey away from his love on a slow horse, and dreaming of the day he will swiftly return.

Will asks his love if the horse can be forgiven for taking its sweet time. After all, it only parts the two of them. But should it behave similarly on the way back, what will its excuse be then? Then, he shall want to move like the wind, to fly, to go faster than any horse can go, on the fiery wings of desire. Therefore, he will travel on love, and let the horse go where it pleases.

Will’s Wordplay

“Dull bearer” and “poor beast” give the impression of an incredibly lackluster and broken down steed.

Will gives life to his desire, like a spirited stallion in a turbulent race, expressing its energy and eagerness to reach the goal. Not like the ordinary piece of dull horse flesh he’s been traveling with.

Roosevelt Island Tramway

Recognizable to many as the setting for the climactic battle in Sam Raimi’s Spider-man (2002), The Roosevelt Island Tramway is an aerial tramway that spans the East River and connects Roosevelt Island to Manhattan. Prior to the completion of the Mississippi Aerial River Transit in May 1984 and the Portland Aerial Tram in December 2006, it was the only commuter aerial tramway in North America.[1]

Over 26 million passengers have used the tram since it began operation in 1976. Each cabin has a capacity of up to 110 people and makes approximately 115 trips per day. The tram moves at about 17.9 mph and travels 3,100 feet in 3 minutes. At its peak it climbs to 250 feet above the East River as it follows its route on the north side of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, providing views of the East Side of midtown Manhattan. Two cabins make the run at fifteen-minute intervals from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. (3:30 a.m. on weekends) and continuously during rush hours. It is one of the few forms of mass transit in New York City not run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but uses the system’s MetroCard.

Roosevelt Island had been connected to Manhattan by a trolley line that crossed over the Queensboro Bridge from its opening in 1909. Trolleys to and from Queens stopped in the middle of the bridge to meet an elevator, which then took passengers down to the island. As the only connection to the rest of the city from the island, the trolley remained in service until April 7, 1957, long after most other trolley service had been dismantled in the city, and was the last trolley line in New York State. [2] At that time, a bridge to Queens was completed, requiring a roundabout trip to reach Manhattan.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Roosevelt Island was redeveloped to accommodate low- to mid-income housing projects, necessitating the construction of a new public transit connection to the city. The trolley tracks had deteriorated beyond repair and the planned subway connection to the island had not yet been completed. In 1971 The Urban Development Corporation retained Lev Zetlin Associates to select and design a transit connection to Roosevelt Island. James A O’Kon PE led the LZA team in carrying out a feasibility study and design. Three alternate modes were studied: a ferry, an elevator from the bridge, and the aerial tramway. The tramway was selected and the system was designed for bidding. Von Roll was selected to supply and erect the tram and its equipment. It was opened in July 1976 as a temporary solution for the island’s commuting needs. As the subway project fell further behind schedule, the “tram” became more popular and was converted into a permanent facility. The subway connection to the island was finally completed in 1989.

The tram was the last holdout for the use of tokens in the New York City transit system. Initially, it used a special token, which was later replaced by the standard variety for subways and buses. Although tokens were phased out in favor of the MetroCard by 2003, the tram did not start to accept MetroCards until March 1, 2004. The fare is the same as that on the subways.

During the 2005 New York City transit strike, the tramway was one of the few intra-city public transportation systems still in operation. On April 18, 2006, at about 5:22 p.m. EDT, the two trams were stuck over the East River for seven hours because of mechanical problems, trapping 69 people. Rescue baskets capable of holding up to 15 people were sent up to the stranded cable cars at 10:55 p.m., with children and elderly going first, and each rescue taking about 20 minutes. These baskets also carried supplies to the trams, such as blankets, baby formula, and food, for the remaining passengers. [3]

The April 2006 incident was the second time in eight months that the tram system lost power. On September 2, 2005, more than 80 people were trapped on the tram for over 90 minutes. After that incident, state inspectors cited the Roosevelt Island Tramway for not having an operational diesel backup, or Motor-generator system. The State Department of Labor said the system did not pass electrical inspection and could not run when the April 18 power outage took place.

The tramway suspended operations after the April 2006 incident, reopening on September 1, 2006. The tram’s backup electrical systems were refurbished, and “in case of an emergency, each car now is equipped with blankets, water, food, and a toilet with a privacy curtain. Car attendants will carry cell phones with their radios.” [4]

Renovation

On March 1, 2010, the tramway was closed as part of a $25 million project to upgrade and modernize the system. With the help of the French company Poma, all components were replaced except for the three tower bases. [5] Among the improvements, the new tram cables and cars are now allowed to operate independently of each other in a “dual-haul” system. Prior to this, the cars had to travel at the same time, which presented maintenance and emergency response issues. [6] The old cabins may be preserved on Roosevelt Island and/or a museum. The tramway reopened November 30, 2010, at 11 a.m.The project was completed in nine months, two months longer than originally planned.

References

1. Cohen, Billie (January 15, 2008). “Roosevelt Island Tram”. The New York Times.
2. Phillips, McCandlish (April 7, 1957). “City’s Last Trolley at End of Line; Buses Will Replace 49-Year Route on Queensboro Span”. The New York Times. p. 1.
3. AP News, April 18, 2006, 10:44 p.m. (ET)
4. AP News, September 1, 2006, 6:52AM (ET)
5. Blaustein, Michael; Namako, Tom (February 26, 2010). “Hangin’ on for a tramway revamp: Roosevelt ride closing for rehab”. New York Post.
6. Kilgannon, Corey (February 28, 2010). “Open & Shut: Chronicle of a Changing City”. The New York Times.

ACTOR – Brian Vaughan

Brian has worked previously with NY Shakespeare Exchange in Pericles (Pericles). Recent regional credits include: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Demetrius), Macbeth (Lennox/Young Siward), Taming of the Shrew (Hortensio), and Of Mice and Men (Slim). Brian worships Mark Rylance and is very likely in love with him. Brian is a graduate of the Boston University School of Theatre.

DIRECTOR – Adam Bradley

Adam Bradley is an all-terrain artist: actor, writer, producer, director, and teacher, who has worked and taught all over the world. He has performed in New York, Toronto, Prague, Vancouver, and Edmonton; has had plays produced in Prague and Toronto, has shot short films in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Prague, and has directed theatre in Toronto. He has written four full-length plays, one short play, and has written, directed, and/or produced seven short films. He has also written five feature-length screenplays, three of which are in development, one of which – Cubicle Warriors – will be released theatrically by Main Street Films in early 2014, and one of which – Yesterday Last Year – was shot in 9 days on a budget of $4,500 and is currently in post-production.

His experience working behind the camera, combined with his understanding of the actors’ craft and his willingness to do whatever it takes to get things done, give him a fantastic foundation as an up-and-coming producer. He and his wife Amelia have created a production company, Well-Drawn Dog Productions, whose motto is: “A well-drawn dog is better than a badly-drawn lion,” and which is devoted to telling good stories on modest budgets. Adam and Amelia have set themselves the extraordinarily ambitious goal of producing one short film a month during of 2014, and they’re currently looking for collaborators (contact adam@welldrawndog.com if you’re interested in more information.)

So am I as the rich, whose blessed key,
Can bring him to his sweet up-locked treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey,
For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.
Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since, seldom coming in the long year set,
Like stones of worth they thinly placed are,
Or captain jewels in the carcanet.
So is the time that keeps you as my chest,
Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,
To make some special instant special-blest,
By new unfolding his imprisoned pride.
     Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,
     Being had, to triumph, being lacked, to hope.

Analysis

Sonnet 52 sees the beloved as a commodity to be squirreled away, enjoyed sparingly, and envied by friends

Billy compares himself to a miser hoarding treasure. His beloved youth is like a jewel, a stored treasure, a rich garment, a rare feast day, but his rarity means that he is hidden away in chests and locked boxes. The special days when the youth is seen become even more special occasions for their presence, like a favored garment worn on a holiday. The youth is blessed with such great worth that those who are with him feel triumphant, and those who are not hope to be.

Will’s Wordplay

The sexual meaning of “being had” makes interpretation of this line rather difficult. The other half of the line makes it nearly bragging! 

Sugarhouse Prison Window, Police Plaza, Tribeca

You can almost hear the tin cup clinking against the bars… Sugar houses in New York City were used as prisons by occupying British forces during the American Revolutionary War. Out of 2,600 prisoners of war captured during the Battle of Fort Washington in November 1776, 1,900 would die in the following months at makeshift prisons throughout the city.[1] At least 17,500 are estimated to have perished under substandard conditions of such sugar houses and British prison ships over the course of the war, more than double that of casualties from battle.[2]

During the 18th century, a large part of commerce in New York City was trade with the British West Indies. Destined for refineries, sugar and molasses imported from Jamaica and Sint Eustatius were stored in warehouses built by merchant families, such as the Livingstons, Rhinelanders, Roosevelts, and the Van Cortlands.[2]
 

Rhinelander’s Sugar House

The sugar house on the corner of Rose (now William) Street and Duane Street in Lower Manhattan was a five-story brick warehouse. Built in 1763 by William Rhinelander, the structure originally stored molasses and sugar next to his own residence.[3] When the building fell into disrepair during the early 19th century, locals believed it to be haunted by ghosts of the Revolutionary War prisoners.

However, Brooklyn history professor Edwin G. Burrows believes this sugar house was not used as a prison and that the legend may have originated from local historian Charles I. Bushnell. The old warehouse was replaced by the Rhinelander building, which retained part of the original wall from 1892 to 1968, and continued to receive reports of ghostly sightings in a window. The site is now occupied by the headquarters of the New York City Police Department, near which one of the original barred windows was retained. A section of wall with another window was moved to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.[3]

References

1. http://www.accessgenealogy.com/scripts/data/database.cgi?file=Data&report=SingleArticle&ArticleID=0011982
2. Wilson, James Grant (1892). “The Memorial History of the City of New-York: From Its First Settlement to the Year 1892”. New York History Company. p. 454.
3. http://www.thevirtualdimemuseum.com/2010/03/rhinelander-sugar-house.html

ACTOR – JC Vasquez

JC Vasquez: some credits include King John – New York Shakespeare Exchange, Romeo and Juliet (Romeo) – Actor’s Shakespeare Company, Macbeth Lab – Actor’s Shakespeare Company, Surrender (Drama Desk nomination) – Ohio Theatre, 3! – PS122, West Side Story – Boheme Opera, Sic (Samuel French Festival winner), Playing with Faun – Lucille Lortel. MFA: Actors Studio/New School for Drama.

DIRECTOR – Charlie Kessler

Charlie is an award-winning filmmaker and graduate of New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts. His short films have been showcased in numerous film festivals all over the country, including his most recent film, Montauk, which received a short film prize at the Hamptons Film Festival. He is thrilled to be part of the Sonnet Project!

O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
     And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
     When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 54 espouses that truest beauty is the kind to leave something after it is gone, in this case the poetry inspired by the beloved.

Bill opines how much more beautiful beauty is when it is true. The rose is pretty but we make it seem even prettier based on its smell. Canker blooms (wild roses) have the same color as the perfumed roses. But this is all for show, they live unnoticed and disrespected and die alone. Roses do not have this fate, after they die you can still smell them. But Bill assures the youth that while his beauty and bloom will die with him, Bill’s words will linger like perfume after.
 
Will’s Wordplay
This poem is a comparison between two flowers that are representations of the youth’s beauty. Shakespeare compares these flowers, which vary greatly in their appearance, although they are essentially the same kind of flower, it is obvious that the “canker-blooms” or wild roses are less desirable than that the other.

Canker buds are also referred to as “unwooed”, like an undesirable woman.Although the wind plays wantonly with them,it is not serious wooing with the intention of marriage, and therefore they are left on the shelf. Poor wild roses…
 
Scholar’s Corner
Katharine Duncan Jones gives us the botanical business: “There is an additional problem about Shakespeare’s contrast between ‘The rose’ and ‘The canker blooms’. It is strongly implied that the latter have no scent, and cannot be distilled into rose-water: for their virtue only is their show… Yet it is clear that some wild roses, especially the sweet briar or eglantine, had a sweet, though not powerful, fragrance, and could be culled for distillation and conservation when better, red, roses were not available: their ‘virtues’ were identical”. [1]
 
References
1. Katherine Duncan-Jones. “Deep-dyed canker blooms: botanical reference in Shakespeare’s Sonnet,” The Review of English Studies 46.n184 (Nov 1995): pp521(5).54.

Sakura Park, Manhattan
Enjoy the cherry blossoms in Sakura Park. Located between Riverside Church and International House, the Park owes its name to the more than 2000 cherry trees delivered to parks in New York City from Japan in 1912 as a gift from the Committee of Japanese Residents of New York.

This 18-day celebration, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s innovative demonstration of the steam-powered boat on the Hudson River and the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery and exploration of that river, took place throughout the state of New York.  However, the steamer that carried the original delivery of cherry trees from Japan was lost at sea.  A new shipment of trees arrived in New York City in 1912, and they were planted in Riverside and Sakura Parks at that time.

Land for Sakura Park was purchased from John D. Rockefeller by the City of New York as an easterly extension of Riverside Park in 1896.  Also known as Claremont Park, this land directly east of Grant’s Tomb featured rolling terrain with a curvilinear path system and benches facing the Hudson.  With a donation from Mr. Rockefeller, the City hired the firm of Olmsted Brothers as landscape architects to redesign the park in 1932.

The two year process included grading the site and laying formal paths to create rectangular plots of grass and shrubs, enclosed by hedges and fencing.  A massive buttressed retaining wall, whose design reproduced that of the wall surrounding Kenilworth Abbey in England, was built on the eastern border of the park along Claremont Avenue. The park was reopened to the public on May 25, 1934.

A monument to General Daniel Butterfield (1831-1901) was erected in 1918 in the southeast corner of Sakura Park. Sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who also designed Mount Rushmore, the bronze Butterfield monument depicts the Civil War hero standing on a rock with his arms crossed and hat cocked.  Butterfield, a Union soldier who rose to the rank of major-general and chief of staff of the Army of the Potomac, is best known for composing Taps, the melancholy bugle call performed during military funerals and memorial ceremonies.

A stone Japanese tori, or lantern, was donated to Sakura Park by the City of Tokyo and officially dedicated on ctober 10, 1960 with Crown Prince Akihito, now Emperor of Japan, and Princess Michiko in attendance.  A common fixture in traditional Japanese gardens, this tori was made from the native rock of Japan.  Its inscription read: “Presented by the citizens of the Metropolis of Tokyo to the citizens of the City of New York in celebration of the Tokyo-New York sister-city affiliation inaugurated on February 29th, 1960.”  In 1987, the Crown Prince and Princess personally rededicated the ten-foot tall lantern in a ceremony hosted by Mayor Edward I. Koch and Parks Commissioner Stern.

In 1981 the architectural firm of Quennell Rothschild Associates was engaged to renovate Sakura Park.  The capital reconstruction included the installment of a play area for toddlers and plantings of linden trees, barberry shrubs, and several varieties of Japanese cherry trees.  A pavilion, which is used as a performance space by the Manhattan School of Music, was also added to the park.

At the 1986 ribbon-cutting ceremony, Japanese Consul Hideo Nomoto stated: “In Japan, the sakura is a symbol of renewal and bright promise.  The appearance of their fragile blossoms each spring strikes a resonant note in all Japanese.  New Yorkers can enjoy cherry trees once again in Sakura Park, an island of calm on the hectic island of Manhattan.”[1]
 
Sonnet Project
Sakura Park was the featured location for Sonnet 54, performed by (name?), directed by (name?). The video was released on (date?)
 
References
1.   http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/sakurapark/history

ACTOR – Gabrielle Beans
Gabrielle (Gabby) Beans is a rising Senior double majoring in Neuroscience and Theater at Columbia University. The daughter of a physician and a military man, she has lead a rather nomadic existence having lived throughout the US and in Germany. Now however, she’s feeling strangely attached to the city and balks at the thought of moving away after graduation. She recently returned from Skidmore campus in gorgeous Saratoga Springs where she participated in the SITI Company Summer Intensive. Though acting has always been one of her passions, the joy of acting Shakespeare has been a more recent development. It is for this reason that Gabrielle is so excited to be part of the Sonnet Project, playing her part in helping others to access such rich and profound language!

DIRECTOR – Charlie Gillette
Charlie Gillette just graduated from Columbia University with a degree in film studies. She was a member of the King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe all four years of college and is honored to be a part of the Sonnet Project. The next year will be full of changes and adventures as she prepares for the next stages in her career and life. Charlie hopes to continue acting and making films in New York City and of course bringing Shakespeare to everyone.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
     So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
     You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 55 promises the beloved that absolutely nothing time or man can do will impede his immortality in verse and the hearts of those who remember.

Shakespeare makes some very big promises here. His words will outlive stone monuments, the young man flattered more than by statues that can be harmed by time and war. No war or fire can eradicate a memento that lives on; thus he will live past death, still a subject of admiration until the end of all time. To live in words and in those who love him is the strongest form of immortality.
 
Will’s Wordplay
“upswept stone” is stone left uncared for.Those in cathedrals and churches would generally be kept clean and polished. But older monuments in churchyards gradually would be forgotten and fall to ruin, as the living memory of its builders and inhabitants died out.
“sluttish” was used in Shakespeare’s time to refer to both men and women of questionable morals or slovenly habits, and here it refers to time’s tendency toward chaos and disorder.
“living record” being more immortal than monuments means that you live as long as someone who loves you lives.
 
Scholar’s Corner
Ernest Fontana focuses on the epithet “sluttish time.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives “sluttish” two definitions: 1) dirty, careless, slovenly (which can refer to objects and persons of both sexes) and 2) lewd, morally loose, and whorish. According to Fontana, Shakespeare intended the second meaning, personifying and assigning gender to time, making the difference between the young man sonnets and the dark lady sonnets all the more obvious. Shakespeare had used the word “slut” nearly a year before he wrote sonnet 55 when he wrote Timon of Athens. In the play, Timon associates the word “slut” with “whore” and venereal disease. Associating “sluttish” with venereal disease makes Shakespeare’s use of the word “besmeared” more specific. Fontana states: “The effect of time, personified as a whore, on the hypothetical stone statue of the young man, is identified in metaphor with the effect of syphilis on the body—the statue will be besmeared, that is, covered, with metaphoric blains, lesions, and scars.” (Female) time destroys whereas the male voice of the sonnet is “generative and vivifying.” [1]
 
References
1. Fontana, E. “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55.” The Explicator v. 45 (Spring 1987) p. 6-8. EBSCO Host Database

9/11 Memorial
This is a spot in the city and the nation which has experienced great tragedy, and it is now a place of even greater remembrance…The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks upon the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. area on Tuesday September 11, 2001.

Four passenger airliners were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists so they could be flown into buildings in suicide attacks. Two of those planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within two hours, both towers collapsed with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the WTC complex, as well as major damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense), leading to a partial collapse in its western side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was targeted at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. In total, almost 3,000 people died in the attacks, including the 227 civilians and 19 hijackers aboard the four planes.
 
About the Memorial
“The National September 11 Memorial is a tribute of remembrance and honor to the nearly 3,000 people killed in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center site, near Shanksville, Pa., and at the Pentagon, as well as the six people killed in the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993.

The Memorial’s twin reflecting pools are each nearly an acre in size and feature the largest manmade waterfalls in the North America. The pools sit within the footprints where the Twin Towers once stood. Architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker created the Memorial design selected from a global design competition that included more than 5,200 entries from 63 nations.

The names of every person who died in the 2001 and 1993 attacks are inscribed into bronze panels edging the Memorial pools, a powerful reminder of the largest loss of life resulting from a foreign attack on American soil and the greatest single loss of rescue personnel in American history.” [1]
 
Sonnet Project
The 9/11Memorial was the featured location for Sonnet 55, performed by Amanda Holston, directed by Estefania Fadul. The video was released on June 28, 2013.
 
References
1. http://www.911memorial.org/about-memorial

ACTOR – Amanda Holston
Amanda is thrilled to be part of the NY Shakespeare Exchange team. Producing, acting, and coaching for The Sonnet Project has been a wonderful creative outlet for her growing passion for Shakespeare’s works. Amanda began her affair with the Bard during her undergraduate studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she played Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. While pursuing her graduate degree at Brooklyn College, Shakespeare’s language was a strong undercurrent of the training, adding fuel to the fire. Amanda is honored to be part of a company that is casting the Sonnets into the hands of all who wish to experience Shakespeare through a new lens.

www.AmandaHolston.com

DIRECTOR – Estefania Fadul
Estefania Fadul is a New York City-based director and producer. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Pleiades Productions, a theatre company through which she most recently directed Well by Lisa Kron. Other stage credits include Selvish by Carlyn Flint, Garden of Ashes by Jan O’Connor (Looking Glass NYC Writer/Director Forum; winner ‘Best Directorial Debut’), Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (Experimental Theatre of Vassar College), and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (Experimental Theatre of Vassar College senior thesis project), for which she was awarded the Molly Thacher Kazan Prize for distinction in the theatre arts. In 2010, Estefania wrote, directed, produced, and edited her first short film BEAUTY MARK, which had its premiere screening at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Short Film Corner. She has assistant directed on various NY-area productions, including for Tony-nominee Sheryl Kaller (Powerhouse/NYSAF and LCT3), Elise Thoron (Public Theater), and Michael Barakiva. She is a proud graduate of Vassar College, where she was a co-founder and member of Idlewild All-female Theatre Ensemble. www.estefaniafadul.com. www.pleiadesproductions.org

That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O! let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison’d absence of your liberty;
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
     I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
     Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 58 sees the poet an emotionally enslaved lover, the object of his affections behaving wantonly while he quietly suffers, unquestioning.

Willy prays that the god of love who emotionally enslaved him to the youth also keeps him from ever getting too controlling. He doesn’t want to ask the young man to account for his time. As the youth’s servant he has no choice but to accept his decisions and suffer patiently, waiting for his time to receive attentions. But this does Willy no injury. The youth has the power not only to decide for himself, but also to pardon himself for crimes in love. And even though waiting is hell for Willy, he remains patient with the young man’s actions, good or bad.
 
Will’s Wordplay
“At your hand” refers to hand writing; directly from you, from your hand.

The meaning of “imprison’d absence of your liberty” is approximately ‘the self imprisonment that falls on me due to your absence, and as a result of your enjoyment of your own liberty’. Imprisonment calls up the opposite idea of liberty; the pain and suffering is caused by the loved one’s absence and infidelity and metaphorically imprisons the poet in the dark world of his own tortured reflections. Liberty also carries the idea of wantonness and libertinism.

White Horse Tavern, Manhattan
What does it take to get some service around here? The White Horse Tavern earned its place in history when Dylan Thomas supposedly died waiting for a drink.

“Whether or not you have the Great American Novel in your head, you can still get blasted at this nostalgic high temple of the Alcoholic Artist. The scene today is characterized less by sailors, workers and bohemian writers (like Dylan Thomas, a regular back in the day, whose portrait hangs in the bar’s middle room) than by a mix of locals, NYU students and tourists, but the surroundings haven’t changed much. After a dozen whiskies or so (legend has it that Dylan’s record was eighteen), you might even indulge the fantasy that you can afford to write poetry, live here in the West Village and still have money left over to drink. (Oh, by the way, those eighteen drams killed Thomas several days later.)” — Andrew Yamato, NY Mag [1]
 
Literary Clientele
The White Horse is perhaps most famous as the place where Dylan Thomas drank heavily, returned to the Chelsea Hotel, became ill, and died a few days later of unrelated causes. Other famous patrons include James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Richard Farina, Norman Mailer, Jim Morrison, Delmore Schwartz, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mary Travers.

Another of the White Horse’s famous patrons is Jack Kerouac, who was bounced from the establishment more than once. Because of this someone scrawled on the bathroom wall: “JACK GO HOME!” At that time, Kerouac was staying in an apartment in the building located on the northwest corner of West 11th St.

About the same time, the White Horse was a gathering-place for labor members and organizers and socialists, as well. The Catholic Workers hung out here and the idea for the Village Voice was discussed here. The Village Voice original offices were within blocks of the White Horse. Much of the content was discussed here by the editors, a practice we at NYSX believe would be much approved by W. Shakespeare.
References
1. New York Magazine – White Horse Tavern

ACTOR – Mary Ann Walsh
Recent NYC credits: The Unauthorized Biography of Dr. Irma King (TheatreRow), Cradle To Gravy (TheatreRow), Second Skin(Vineyard Theater), Stained Glasseds (Dixon Place Theater),The Drafts Year Long Reading Series (Horse Trade Theater), Any May Now (Nico’s Spoon Theater), Julius Caesar, Dancing At Lughnasa, Top Girls, The Thugs (Brooklyn College), Hayfever (NY Center Stage), Conquest of the Universe (Peculiar Works/Ohio Theater), Eula Mae’s Beauty, Bait and Tackle (The Duplex Theater), The Frogs (American Globe Theater), Dipteracon The Flies (LaMama Theater), Better and Worse (Peculiar Works/Judson).

Film/TV/Web: includes Baby Showers, The Sonnet Project, Hustler, Tea Party, Mo Goes To College, The Replacements, Ladder 49, Swimmers, National Treasure, Enemy of the State, Scrubs, Law and Order, Homicide.

Improv shows: with She’s Like the Wind at Upright Citizens Brigade, RAFFI, 78th Street Theater, The Pit, and numerous locations around NYC, Joe Loves Hobos at Under St. Marks, and Improv Nite at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater

Selected regional credits: Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding, Rumplestilkin’s Daughter, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Rudolph the Red Hosed Reindeer, Much Ado About Nothing, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Insect Play, Jeffery, Our Miss Brooks, The Reindeer Eight, Betty’s Summer Vacation, The Foreigner, Hamlet

Training: MFA from Brooklyn College and Proud member, AEA, SAG/AFTRA

DIRECTOR – Olivier Bertin
Olivier Bertin is a New York City-based film director and writer. Born and raised in France, he started out by working in post-production for France-based companies such as Arte and CMC, focusing on translation and subtitling work.

After moving to New York in 2008, he continued work in subtitling on feature films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest or Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job.

In 2012, he co-founded the INN Films with producer Rachel Spurrier. His most recent film credits include two features: L’Absinthe (2013) and A Woman In New York (2012), as well as a variety of short films, which he wrote and directed.

He is currently writing a feature film screenplay as well as a play.
FEATURED EXTRAS –
Matt Nared:
Matt is currently studying with David vadim. An actor for almost 4 years, he appeared in Off-Broadway shows in such venues as the TriBeCa Performing Arts Center and in various films such as A Woman In New York (2012) or Queens Film Festival gem Just Another Part Of Me (2013).

Evan Hall:
Evan Hall has been working in both theater and film since the age of 12 when he starred as Oliver in the musical Oliver! Since then, he has attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and now studies at the Maggie Flanigan Meisner Studio in New York City. Evan has been featured in a variety of short films and stage productions. His latest film work include the lead in L’Absinthe (2013) and In Searching (2014).

Is it thy will, thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake:
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:
     For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
     From me far off, with others all too near.
 
Analysis
Sonnet 61 describes a sleepless night where the poet cannot stop thinking about the far-off beloved, and whose company he might be keeping.

Will asks the young man if he intended for him up all night with thoughts of his pretty face. Did he want sleep interrupted for the poet, tantalized by mocking shadows of beauty? The youth must be sending his spirit out to pry into Will’s idle hours, to learn the shameful thoughts he has and make the youth jealous by them. But no, the youth doesn’t love him that much. Its the other way around. Will’s own feelings prevent him from sleeping, he stays awake like a watchman for the youth. But the youth is far away and all too close to Wills rivals.
 
Will’s Wordplay
The alluded shameful behavior and idle hours imply time ill spent. It evokes a common proverb, both now and in Willy’s day: the devil finds work for idle hands. Wonder what he could be doing…

Little Red Lighthouse
This little guy jumps right out of the pages of childhood! The Little Red Lighthouse, officially Jeffrey’s Hook Light is a small lighthouse on the Hudson River. It was made famous by the 1942 children’s book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by Hildegarde Swift, illustrated by Lynd Ward. The lighthouse stands on Jeffrey’s Hook, a small point of land that supports the base of the eastern pier of the George Washington Bridge, which connects the Washington Heights neighborhood in Manhattan to Fort Lee, New Jersey. The shoreline north and south of the lighthouse makes up Fort Washington Park.
 
History
A 10 candle-power light was first hung on a pole at the water’s edge here in 1889 to warn the increasing Hudson River traffic away from Jeffrey’s Hook at night. The current structure was built as the North Hook Beacon at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, where it stood until 1917. It was reconstructed here in 1921 as part of a project to improve Hudson River navigational aids, and was in operation until 1947. When the George Washington Bridge was completed in 1931, however, the lighthouse was considered obsolete, as the bridge pier was illuminated.

The story of the 1942 children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, by Hildegarde Swift, centers on the fears of the lighthouse that it was now irrelevant, but the bridge reassures it that it is still needed to help keep river traffic safe.

The proposed dismantling of the lighthouse in 1951 resulted in a public outcry, largely from fans of Swift’s book, leading to the preservation of the lighthouse by the City of New York Department of Parks & Recreation. The lighthouse is now a New York City Landmark and was relighted by the city in 2002. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse in 1979.
 
Sonnet Project
The Little Red Lighthouse was the featured location for Sonnet 61, performed by Adam Donshik, directed by Jonathan Jacobson. The video was released on July 5, 2013

ACTOR – Adam Donshik
Adam Donshik was born in New York City but raised in the suburbs of Connecticut. From an early age he found himself surrounded by the arts: from playing the piano, violin and saxophone to performing in school plays. It wasn’t until high school, and the avoidance of mandatory sports, that Adam found his great love of acting.

When high school ended Adam was discouraged by his theatre director from actually studying acting at the collegiate level and, instead, chose to pursue the ever-fascinating study of Cognitive Neuropsychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Two years into the degree Adam wised up and auditioned for Carnegie’s prestigious College of Fine Arts. Four years later (six in total) Adam graduated with a BFA in Acting and a minor in Psychology. In addition to the degree, Adam also squeezed in two summers of training with Shakespeare & Co. in Lennox, MA and one summer in Oxford, England at the British American Drama Academy working with actors like Fiona Shaw, Derek Jacobi and Alan Rickman.

After graduating Adam moved to Los Angeles and immediately began studying at the Beverly Hills Playhouse with Milton Katselas. For twelve years Adam worked, studied and helped run the school. In that time he had the rare fortune to work closely with Katselas and to be directed in a one-man show by him.

Adam’s love of theatre once again resulted in a career-changing move when, in 2010, he auditioned for and was accepted into the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at the George Washington University. He spent a year exploring and performing classical texts and working with prominent Artistic Director Michael Kahn and faculty including Gary Logan, Ellen O’Brien and Ed Gero. He graduated with his MFA in May 2011 and in 2012 Adam’s love for classical theatre lead him to co-found Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre with two of his classmates.

Adam has worked in all media: Television (“Deception,” “Jericho,” “CSI,” “Lie To Me”), Film (First Daughter, We Were One – for which he won best actor at the Elevate Film Festival), Theatre (Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Tenth Man, Henry V, Falling) and many national commercials. Please check out his resume for a more complete list of his work.

In addition to his acting accomplishments, Adam has recorded an album of original songs, designed numerous websites, edited 3 short films, directed plays and written the plays Pink Dot and (serial). In 2006, Pink Dot was adapted into the short film Game Day which was directed by Stephen Furst.

DIRECTOR – Jonathan Jacobson
A graduate of NYU’s Tisch Film School, Jonathan has been working professionally in New York’s film & television industry for close to twenty-years. He’s currently a staff producer/director at IKA Collective, where he creates book trailers and promotional videos for clients such as Google, Showtime, and Penguin Books. On the “non-professional side” he makes short films, writes screenplays, and is involved with various organizations creating live theater and general mayhem. Currently, his favorite two movies are “Local Hero” and “Real Genius.”
 
CAMERA – Konner Smith
Konner Smith was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana where he picked up the family VHS camcorder at a young age and has been creating stories ever since. After studying Telecommunications and Film Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, he received the opportunity to intern at CONAN at Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood, California. Following an amazing experience at CONAN, Konner returned to Indianapolis where he worked with 12 Stars Media Productions as a videographer and editor creating content for such companies as Simon Malls, Farm Bureau Insurance, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and Eli Lilly. He recently moved to New York City where he has worked on a number of projects including music videos, commercials, web series, and short films.

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopp’d with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
     ‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
     Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

Analysis

Sonnet 62 explores themes of self-love and seeing the love in yourself– is there really a difference?

Billy admits he is extremely vain person, proud both of his outward form and personality. This sin, furthermore, is so deeply rooted that he believes it can’t ever be removed. However, upon seeing his face in the mirror, it disgusts him. Surely loving such a face would be a sin. In fact, the thing Billy truly loves about himself is his possession of the youth; his beauty is derived from the part of the young man he possesses.
 

Will’s Wordplay

“chopped with tanned antiquity” describes Billy’s face as scarred, wrinkled (like tanned leather).

“painting my age” could also refer either to gilding an aged countenance with associations to a younger handsomer man, to verbal descriptions, (word paintings), or to the use of cosmetics. The entire couplet may be paraphrased: “I praise myself, because in doing so I praise you, as if painting myself in colors borrowed from you”’.

Alma Mater Statue, Columbia University

Alma Mater is the name given to a sculpture of the goddess Athena by Daniel Chester French on the outdoor steps leading to Low Memorial Library on the campus of Columbia University in New York City. Installed in 1904 and donated in memory of alumnus Robert Goelet of the Class of 1860 by his wife, Harriette W. Goelet, Alma Mater has become a symbol of the university and a repository of its lore.

An owl is hidden in the folds of Alma Mater’s cloak near her left leg, a symbol of knowledge and learning, and college superstition has it that the first member of the incoming class to find the owl will become class valedictorian. The legend at another time was that any Columbia student who found the owl on his first try would marry a girl from Barnard.

In the 1960s and 70s, the radical leftist group the Weather Underground planned to blow up the statue, but these plans were shelved after the group managed to blow much of itself up inside a Greenwich Village rowhouse instead. [1]

References

1. Richman, Michael, Daniel Chester French: An American Sculptor (The Preservation Press, 1976, reprinted 1983), pp. 90–96: discussion of the commission, creation and installation of the sculpture.

ACTOR – Michael Markham

Michael Markham is a Actor/Filmmaker based out of New York City. As an actor his favorite roles in New York include Platonov in The Spectacular Demise of Platonov at Shapiro Theater; Giant in Giants at HERE; and The Singing Soldier in Mother Courage and Her Children at The New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. He is a current member of Lunar Energy Productions and the New York Madness Acting Company.

Film and television include Law and Order; Unearthed, which has played at The Tallahassee and Macon Film Festivals; Game Theory at the Festivus and Bare Bones Film Festivals; and Blind Date, which aired on BET.

Regionally he has performed in A Little Night Music, Hamlet, the title role in Julius Caesar, and The Ibsen Project: A Lonely Light.

He is an award winning filmmaker having directed and produced numerous short films through his production company KiteMonkey Productions including, Pinecone, Jake’s Dilemma, Lies, and the upcoming, Fumes.

Michael grew up in Montpelier, VT but has lived in 7 different states throughout his life. He currently resides in Central Harlem with his wife, Karen, daugher, Claire, and their 2 cats. He graduated from the Julliard School Drama Division, and has a Bachelor’s of Arts in Acting from Washington University in St. Louis.

Michael is also an avid photographer, and supporter of arts education through an organization called ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty). Look them up at www.asteponline.org Through ASTEP Michael has taught drama to kids in camps from Bronxville, to Florida, to South Africa. His photography has been seen at 1359 Broadway in the summer of 2010 and on the side of 410 West 40th St. in October of 2011.

DIRECTOR – Michael Markham

Michael Markham is a Actor/Filmmaker based out of New York City. As an actor his favorite roles in New York include Platonov in The Spectacular Demise of Platonov at Shapiro Theater; Giant in Giants at HERE; and The Singing Soldier in Mother Courage and Her Children at The New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. He is a current member of Lunar Energy Productions and the New York Madness Acting Company.

Film and television include Law and Order; Unearthed, which has played at The Tallahassee and Macon Film Festivals; Game Theory at the Festivus and Bare Bones Film Festivals; and Blind Date, which aired on BET.

Regionally he has performed in A Little Night Music, Hamlet, the title role in Julius Caesar, and The Ibsen Project: A Lonely Light.

He is an award winning filmmaker having directed and produced numerous short films through his production company KiteMonkey Productions including, Pinecone, Jake’s Dilemma, Lies, and the upcoming, Fumes.

Michael grew up in Montpelier, VT but has lived in 7 different states throughout his life. He currently resides in Central Harlem with his wife, Karen, daugher, Claire, and their 2 cats. He graduated from the Julliard School Drama Division, and has a Bachelor’s of Arts in Acting from Washington University in St. Louis.

Michael is also an avid photographer, and supporter of arts education through an organization called ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty). Look them up at www.asteponline.org Through ASTEP Michael has taught drama to kids in camps from Bronxville, to Florida, to South Africa. His photography has been seen at 1359 Broadway in the summer of 2010 and on the side of 410 West 40th St. in October of 2011.

MAKE-UP ARTIST – Chelsea Paige

Chelsea Paige MUA is a NY Metro Special FX -Hair- Makeup Artist. Recent grad of Makeup Designory, she has a love for film and projecting characters to help stories be told to their fullest extent. Chelsea works in all areas of makeup and loves each one equally. She hopes to keep working with film and build herself as an artist in every possible way she can.

DP – Robert Manning Jr.

Robert is a graduate of the University of Washington’s Professional Acting Training Program, MFA. Television: Southland, The Unit, Criminal Minds. Film: Frogtown, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Theatre – Broadway: Magic/Bird. Regional: Sterling in Two Trains Running, Cassio in Othello, Banquo in Macbeth. 2008 NAACP Theatre Award Nomination: Defiance – Pasadena Playhouse. 2010 NAACP Theatre Award Nomination: Battle Hymn – Ford Theatre. 2012 NAACP Theatre Award Win: Blues for an Alabama Sky – Pasadena Playhouse. Robert recently completed the original production of How I Learned to Become a Superhero. For more information and full credits, please visit robertmanningjr.com.

GAFFER – Brian Kazmarck

Brian Kazmarck is an award-winning film director whose films have played both in the United States and internationally. His latest short film, The Portland Empire, played at the 2012 Cannes Short Corner and was sold to Shorts International U.K. He most recently completed his debut feature, Terminal Legacy, which premiered at the 2012 Big Apple Film Festival. He is the owner of Open Fire Films, LLC.

CREW – Meredith Witte

Meredith Witte is a creative producer based in NYC. Originally from Texas, she’s spent the last 10 years producing TV commercials and content for clients like Walmart, Expedia, Comcast, Exxon, Sprint, and Google. When not helping Michael with passion projects, she enjoys pilates and horseback riding.

CREW – Matthew Minnicino

Matthew Isaac Minnicino hails from the small town of Leesburg, Virginia, a sort of Mecca for Civil War Trivia fiends. He is currently playing the role of a Graduate Student at Columbia University under the tutelage of Charles L. Mee and Kelly Stuart. From a little hole in upper Manhattan, he writes plays and makes theatre happen sometimes. His plays include Troy is Burning (a goat song), Persephone, Friend of the People, Marvellous. Matt, masquerading as a professional Colleague-Worth-Having, has been working with Northern Virginia’s Empty Chair Theatre since 2008 as actor and Literary Associate, and co-founded Washington D.C.’s Idly Bent Theatre Company with Anne Haney in 2012, for which he acts as Literary Manager and Playwright-at-Large. Matt can fit into a television set.

Against my love shall be as I am now,
With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn;
When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travelled on to age’s steepy night;
And all those beauties whereof now he’s king
Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age’s cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life:
     His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
     And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Analysis

Sonnet 63 pits the immortality of words against Time’s never ending destruction.

Will wonders about when the young man will be crushed and worn out by time. When the youth is marred and wrinkled and has reached the evening of his life, and all his beauty has fled, Will hopes that his lines have fortified the memory of his love, keeping him fresh and relevant.
 

Will’s Wordplay

Like Sonnet 2, this poem makes use of cutting and crushing imagery to depict the effects of time in creating wrinkles on the face. The prevailing metaphors in this sonnet compare youthful beauty to riches, similar to Sonnet 4, and old age and death to night, similar to Sonnet 12.

Since there is no specific addressee (no you or thou) one may perhaps more accurately say that the poem celebrates the Fair Youth than that it is is specifically addressed to him.

Unlike the many procreation sonnets in the Fair Youth sequence, the resolution found here is in the immortality granted by the writing of the poem (“these black lines”).

Blackness and beauty seem to be opposites. Blackness is akin to the night of death, set against the brightness of his “youthful morn”. The preserving blackness of ink contrasts with the greenness and vitality it preserves.

Greywacke Arch, Central Park, Manhattan

Greywacke Arch was designed by Calvert Vaux and completed in 1862.

An “exuberent spirit animates the Greywacke Arch, a little jewel of Victorian park architecture tucked away in the gently undulating ground northeast of the Ramble, where it permits pedestrians to walk beneath the east drive.” Its Saracenic pointed arch, is “composed of alternating voussoirs of brownstone and greywacke,” [1] a grayish sandstone found in the Hudson River Valley. Greywacke Arch is the only arch in Central Park that gets its name from the material with which it is built. [2]

“The polychromatic theme carries into the vault, which Vaux lined with red and white brick.” Jacob Wrey Mould, Vaux’s close assistant, designed the railing above the arch in 1871 that, “in its diagonal lines and bobbing circles, nicely complements the stonework.” [1]

“Greywacke links Parkgoers to the Great Lawn under the East Drive by a path beginning at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street, just south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Conservancy restored the deteriorated bridge in 1985.” [2]

The Greywacke Arch was used as a film location in Woody Allen’s Anything Else (2003) and You Don’t Mess With Zohan (2008) featuring Adam Sandler. [4]

References

1. Kowsky, Francis R. Country, Park and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux, Oxford University Press, USA, 1998, pg. 108.
2. http://forgotten-ny.com/2001/07/bridges-of-central-park-part-1/
3. http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/greywacke-arch.html
4. http://www.onthesetofnewyork.com/

ACTOR – Austin Pendleton

Austin Pendleton is an actor, director, playwright, and teacher of acting. His most recent acting appearances in New York have been in Choir Boy at MTC, Playing Sinatra at Theatre for the New City, and Seagull69 at Mississippi Mud. As a director he has worked at CSC (Ivanov, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and, next season, Hamlet), Mississippi Mud (many productions), and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where he is member of the Ensemble. He apprenticed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, under the guidance of NIkos Psacharopoulos. He has appeared in about 200 movies, as well as much TV, notably Oz, Homicide, Law and Order, and Person of Interest. He has written three plays, all published, all produced in New York and around the country: Booth, Uncle Bob, and Orson’s Shadow, as well as the libretto for A Minister’s Wife, first done at Writers’ Theatre in Chicago and then at Lincoln Center in New York. He teaches acting at HB Studio in New York.

DIRECTOR – Josh Barrett

Josh Barrett is a producer, director, actor and writer. His debut film This Is Where We Live premiered in the Narrative Competition at the SXSW Film Festival, and has garnered several awards including the Emerging Director Award at the St. Louis Film Festival. He received his MFA at NYU’s Graduate Acting Program where he was the recipient of the Dean’s Fellowship. He has appeared in various films, televisions shows and commercials, including a series regular on HBO’s Generation Kill. His writing has been featured at New York’s Flea Theater and he was a contributing writer for the play columbinus, which has been produced off-Broadway and several times regionally. Josh currently is a digital producer for VH1. He is honored to have been given the opportunity to contribute to The Sonnet Project.

 
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
     This thought is as a death which cannot choose
     But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Analysis

Sonnet 64 details the ravages of Time and reminds us that all things, even love, can be taken from us.

Shakespeare has seen Time’s hand deface splendid monuments to men from ages past, tear down lofty towers, oceans encroach upon the land and vice versa, all things constantly changing and decaying. This destruction has taught him that all things will be lost, including his beloved. . This thought feels like death, and makes he weeps in fear of his loss.
 

Will’s Wordplay

“Fell” as used here means savage or fierce.

“Store” is surplus. The land wins an increasing store of territory from the ocean, with some losses. Then it receives further losses, with some gains 

Cemetery, Trinity Church, Financial District, Manhattan

Final resting place of luminaries from every century, from John Jacob Astor to Jerry Orbach, Trinity Church Cemetery consists of three separate burial grounds associated with Trinity Church in Manhattan.

The first was established in the Churchyard located at 74 Trinity Place at Wall Street and Broadway. In 1842, the church, running out of space in its churchyard, established Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in Upper Manhattan between Broadway and Riverside Drive, at the Chapel of the Intercession (now The Church of the Intercession, New York), formerly the location of John James Audubon’s estate. A third burial place is the Churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel.

The burial grounds have been the final resting place for many historic figures since the Churchyard cemetery opened in 1697. A non-denominational cemetery, it is listed in the United States National Register of Historic Places and is the only remaining active cemetery in Manhattan. There are two bronze plaques at the Church of the Intercession cemetery commemorating the Battle of Fort Washington, which included some of the fiercest fighting of the Revolutionary War.

ACTOR – Julian Elfer

British born actor Julian Elfer graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA), after which he honed his craft under the supervision of British Director Frank Hauser, founder of the Oxford playhouse in England.
As a working actor in NYC, Julian is the winner of the 2009 New York Innovative Theatre Award for best Actor in a Lead Role for his portrayal of Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Most recently he starred in World of Fuh, a short film written and directed by Cady McClain.
New York stage credits include the role of Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead directed by Cat Parker, Moon in Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (Gloria Maddox Theatre), Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow (Midlantic Theatre Company), Asher in Off Broadway’s long running show A Perfect Crime, Poor Ophelia (New York Directors’ Guild) and Coriolanus (Shakespeare NYC) to name a few. Julian is a founding member of Articulate Theatre in NYC. Many Thanks to NY Shakespeare Exchange for this great project!

www.JulianElfer.com

DIRECTOR – Jeff Barry

Jeff Barry is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama where he received the Oliver Thorndike Award in acting.

He is currently editing his directorial debut, the independent film Bridesburg, which follows the lives of two working class siblings and their desperate attempt to free themselves from their circumstances. The play, written by Victor Kaufold, was originally produced in 2012 by Miscreant Theatre Company. In addition to his directorial duties Mr. Barry wrote the screenplay and produced the feature along with starring in the production. Doug Strassler of the New York Press said Barry “demonstrates keen insight into wounded male pride as matt eventually looses his meager job.”

Mr. Barry’s film How We Got Away With It, which he wrote, produced and starred in, has just been finished and is currently starting its festival run throughout the country. The film also stars McCaleb Burnett (Annapolis, Men Who Stare At Goats) and Cassandra Freeman (Kinyarwanda, Inside Man). Rounding out his duties, Mr. Barry also served as the Stunt Coordinator and the Second Unit Director on the film.

In 2010 he was cast by John Wells in The Company Men, working alongside Ben Affleck, which had its premiere at the 26th Annual Sundance Film Festival.

Mr. Barry is proud to work often in the theatre. Some of his favorite roles are Daunceney in Les Liasons Dangerouseses alongside Michael T. Weiss. Frank Rizzo of Variety called Mr. Barry “A standout.” He also received rave reviews as Happy in Death of a Salesman, with AltDaily also referring to his work as a “standout performance.” Other film & TV credits include: Date Night with Steve Carell and Tiny Fey, The Last Harbor, the short films Carter and Liberty, and Upright Citizens Brigade and Guiding Light.

Mr. Barry is the co-founder and artistic director of NYC based Miscreant Theatre, which the New York Post has cited as “gripping and raw theater.”

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
     O! none, unless this miracle have might,
     That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Analysis

Sonnet 65 bemoans the ravages of time on beauty, and our impotence to stop it.

Bill admits that no earthly force or material is strong enough to resist mortality, so how can beauty possibly hope to resist death? It is as delicate as a flower. How could the young man’s fragile beauty hope to hold out against the assaults of time when stone and steel are strong are mangled in its clutches? Bill wants to shield this beauty and hide it from time, but how? Sadly, no one, save the written word!
 

Scholar’s Corner

Shakespearean scholar Helen Vendler characterizes Sonnet 65 as a “defective key word” sonnet. Often, Shakespeare will use a particular word prominently in each quatrain, prompting the reader to look for it in the couplet and note any change in usage. Here, however, he repeats the words “hold” and “strong”, but omits them in the couplet, thus rendering them “defective.” Vendler claims that these key words are replaced by “miracle” and “black ink” respectively in the quatrain, citing as evidence the shift of focus from organic to inorganic, which parallels the same shift occurring more broadly from the octave to the sestet.[1]
 

References

1. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. 

Berlin Wall, Urban Plaza, Manhattan

The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off (by land) West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin. [1] The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area (later known as the “death strip”) that contained anti-vehicle trenches, “fakir beds” and other defenses. The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period.

The Berlin Wall was officially referred to as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall) by GDR authorities, implying that neighbouring West Germany had not been fully de-Nazified. The West Berlin city government sometimes referred to it as the “Wall of Shame”—a term coined by mayor Willy Brandt—while condemning the Wall’s restriction on freedom of movement. Along with the separate and much longer Inner German border (IGB) that demarcated the border between East and West Germany, both borders came to symbolize the “Iron Curtain” that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

In 1989, a series of radical political changes occurred in the Eastern Bloc, associated with the liberalization of the Eastern Bloc’s authoritarian systems and the erosion of political power in the pro-Soviet governments in nearby Poland and Hungary. After several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed onto the wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, a euphoric public and souvenir hunters chipped away parts of the wall; the governments later used industrial equipment to remove most of the rest. The physical Wall itself was primarily destroyed in 1990. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.
 

In New York

At least three segments of the wall are located in New York City. One can be found between Gateway Plaza and the North Cove marina in the World Financial Center near the World Trade Center site. A second segment can be found in the gardens at the United Nations headquarters, among the sculptures.

A third segment exists in Urban Plaza on 53rd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Thierry Noir and Kiddy Citny are the two painters, their work created in September 1985 along the Waldemarstrasse in Berlin Kreuzberg. [2] This graffiti among others along Waldemarstreet were well documented in 1985 through ten poster photos made by photographers Liselotte and Armin Orgel-Köhne.
 

References

1. Video: Berlin, 1961/08/31 (1961). Universal Newsreel. 1961. Retrieved 20 February 2012.
2. “Photo Essay 11/5/99 – The Wall: Where Is It Now? Page 2”. Time.
3. Berlin – Seite für Seite. Literaturauswahl zur 750-Jahr-Feier. A bibliography about Berlin, with 10 photos showing the Berlin wall segments along Waldemarstreet. Edition: Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek / Berliner Zentralbibliothek. Berlin, 1986. 52 pages, ISBN 3-925516-04-2

ACTOR – John Fennessy

From the late 60s through the early 80s John was virtually a fixture on Broadway. He was a member of the original company of Grease and also appeared in and/or staged managed, among others, Fiddler on the Roof, Over Here! (Starring The Andrews Sisters), the legendary Frankenstein, Got tu Go Disco, and Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Currently he is serving as Producer/Creative Consultant for the new musical, Mr. Douglass, 

based on the life of Frederick Douglass.

He has trained at New York University, The American Academy of Dramatic Art and HB Studios. In the world of Business Theater and Corporate Events his reputation and list of accomplishments is considered nothing short of legendary.In fact, John has helmed well over a thousand Industrials (Business Theater) and Special Events as Director, Production Stage Manager and Executive Presentation/Speech Coach.

He directed Time Magazine’s 75th Anniversary Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall and the live theatrical elements for Super Bowl XXXVI featuring U2. He also directed The Coca-Cola Centennial; the largest and most complex business-theater production ever mounted. 

He trained as a director with the CBS daytime drama, The Guiding Light, and has directed dozens of musicals and plays including Legends In Our Time starring Hal Holbrook and Cliff Robertson.

As Executive Speaker Coach he has shaped senior management presentations for a wide range of companies in a variety of industries. They include Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Ford, General Motors, Subaru, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Smith-Klein, Forest Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson as well as a number of government focused associations in Washington, DC.

By creating a fusion of the disciplines of Theater and Corporate Communications, John has completely redefined the processes of preparing and delivering public presentations. He reveals each speaker’s own true voice and brings out the authenticity, integrity and command that audiences need. He understands the difference between the “page and the stage” and crafts the written words into conversation. Throughout his career, he has been considered by virtually every client with whom he’s worked in these areas as the single most effective and dynamic person they’d ever encountered.

DIRECTOR – Melissa Balan

Melissa Balan is an independent filmmaker based out of Brooklyn, NY. Obsessed with storytelling from a young age, she was heavily involved in theater and creative writing throughout childhood, before developing a love of cinema in her early teens. Originally from metro-Detroit Michigan, she relocated east in 2008 and is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Film and Television Production.

Passionate about culture, travel, and storytelling, she writes, produces, shoots, directs and edits various video content, from web series to music videos to narrative films. Her work has been showcased at the Blackbear Film Festival, the East Coast Student Film Festival, and the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. Her most recent short film, Brothers in Arms, was awarded the prestigious George Heinneman/King Family Foundation Production Award, distributed through New York University.

Her latest film, Sanskriti, is a feature-length documentary shot in five countries around the globe and is currently in production, slated to be finished in late 2014.

She is an avid fan of guitars, outer space, and cat videos, and is currently working as a freelancer in New York City.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
     Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
     Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Analysis
Sonnet 66 laments how false people are, deeming the world not worth living in.

Will is tired and wishes for the quiet of death. The world presents him only with deserving people begging, worthless people with wealth, sacred vows broken, rewards and honors bestowed on the wrong people, chaste women turned into whores, and a host of other examples of good enslaved by evil. Will would happily embrace death to escape them, by dying, he leaves his beloved alone.

Will’s Wordplay
The resemblance of the word strumpet to trumpet hints at the possibility of public shaming of the innocent.

Unlike most of the sonnets, which have a “turn” in mood or thought at line 9, (the beginning of the third quatrain) the mood of Sonnet 66 does not change until the final line of the poem. This stresses the fact that his lover is helping him merely survive.

Times Square, Manhattan
The Crossroads of the World! Times Square is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world’s busiest pedestrian intersections [1], and a major center of the world’s entertainment industry. It resides at the junction of Broadway (now converted into a pedestrian plaza) and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets. According to Travel + Leisure magazine’s October 2011 survey, Times Square is the world’s most visited tourist attraction, hosting over 39 million visitors annually. Approximately 300,000 people pass through Times Square daily.[3]

Formerly Longacre Square, Times Square was renamed in April 1904 after The New York Times moved its headquarters to the newly erected Times Building – now called One Times Square – site of the annual ball drop on New Year’s Eve. [4]

The northern triangle of Times Square is technically Duffy Square, dedicated in 1937 to Chaplain Francis P. Duffy of New York City’s “Fighting 69th” Infantry Regiment; a memorial to Duffy is located there, along with a statue of George M. Cohan, and the TKTS discount theater tickets booth. The stepped red roof of the TKTS booth also provides seating for various events. The Duffy Statue and the square were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.[5]
Early 20th Century
In 1904, New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs moved the newspaper’s operations to a new skyscraper on 42nd Street at Longacre Square. Ochs persuaded Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. to construct a subway station there, and the area was renamed “Times Square” on April 8, 1904. Just three weeks later, the first electrified advertisement appeared on the side of a bank at the corner of 46th Street and Broadway.[6]

The New York Times, according to Nolan, moved to more spacious offices west of the square in 1913. The old Times Building was later named the Allied Chemical Building, now known simply as One Times Square.

In 1913, the Lincoln Highway Association, headed by entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, chose the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway, at the southeast corner of Times Square, to be the Eastern Terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across the United States, which originally spanned 3,389 miles coast-to-coast through 13 states to its Western Terminus in Lincoln Park in San Francisco, California.[7]

Celebrities such as Irving Berlin, Fred Astaire, and Charlie Chaplin were closely associated with Times Square in the 1910s and 1920s. During this period, the area was nicknamed The Tenderloin because it was supposedly the most desirable location in Manhattan. However, it was during this period that the area was besieged by crime and corruption, in the form of gambling and prostitution; one case that garnered huge attention was the arrest and subsequent execution of police officer Charles Becker.[8]

The general atmosphere changed with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Times Square acquired a reputation as a dangerous neighborhood in the following decades. Into the early 1990s, the seediness of the area, especially due its go-go bars, sex shops, and adult theaters, became an infamous symbol of the city’s decline.

Gentrification
In the 1980s, a commercial building boom began in the western parts of the Midtown as part of a long-term development plan developed under Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins. In the mid-1990s, Rudolph Giuliani led an effort to clean up the area, increasing security, closing pornographic theaters, pressuring undesirables to relocate, and opening more tourist-friendly attractions and upscale establishments. Advocates of the remodeling claim that the neighborhood is safer and cleaner. Detractors have countered that the changes have homogenized or “Disneyfied” the character of Times Square and have unfairly targeted lower-income New Yorkers from nearby neighborhoods such as Hell’s Kitchen.

In 1990, the state of New York took possession of six of the nine historic theaters on 42nd Street, and the New 42nd Street non-profit organization was appointed to oversee their restoration and maintenance. The theaters underwent renovation for Broadway shows, conversion for commercial purposes, or demolition.

In 1992, the Times Square Alliance (formerly the Times Square Business Improvement District, or “BID” for short), a coalition of city government and local businesses dedicated to improving the quality of commerce and cleanliness in the district, started operations in the area. [9] Times Square now boasts attractions such as ABC’s Times Square Studios, where Good Morning America is broadcast live, an elaborate Toys “Я” Us store, as well as several chain restaurants and a number of multiplex movie theaters. It has also attracted a number of large financial, publishing, and media firms to set up headquarters in the area. A larger presence of police has improved the safety of the area.

References
1. “The Most Jivin’ Streetscapes in the World”. Luigi Di Serio. 2010. Retrieved January 21, 2012.
2. Joshua Pramis (October 2011). “World’s Most-Visited Tourist Attractions No. 1: Times Square, New York City”. Copyright © 1997 – 2011 American Express Publishing Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Retrieved January 21, 2012.
3. Owen, David (January 21, 2013). “The Psychology of Space – Can a Norwegian firm solve the problems of Times Square?”. The New Yorker. Retrieved February 18, 2013.
4. VR Macbeth (November 17, 2005). “Times Square: Part of New York City History”. (C) 1980 – 2010 TimesSquare.com A Dataware Corporation Company. Retrieved January 22, 2012.
5. Harris, Stephen L. Duffy’s War: Fr. Francis Duffy, Wild Bill Donovan, and the Irish Fighting 69th in World War I, Potomac Books, 2006
6. “Times Square – New York, New York – Scenic at Night on”. Waymarking.com. Retrieved April 21, 2010.
7. www.Cruise-IN.com (July 7, 1919). “The Lincoln Highway: Main Street across America”. Cruise-in.com. Retrieved April 21, 2010.
8. “Killer Cop: Charles Becker – Crime Library on”. Trutv.com. July 15, 1912. Retrieved April 21, 2010.
9. Times Square Alliance

ACTOR – Michael Shattner
Michael Shattner is a 2013 IT Award Nominee for his performance as Sir Pompey Martext in Kevin Brewer’s Island with NY Shakespeare Exchange. Most recently, he appeared as Gower, Antiochus, Simonides and Bolt in NYSX’s Pericles, for which he also composed and performed his own original music on the cello. Favorite past roles include: Queen Margaret (Henry VI Parts 1, 2 & 3), Nicia (The Mandrake), Touchstone (As You Like It), Stefano (The Tempest), Neal Tilden (The 1940s Radio Hour), Carl (Lonely Planet), Adam (The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged)), and the title role in Scapino. An avid cellist, Michael is a founding member of the anarchy String Quartet. He plays in the New Amsterdam and Queer Urban orchestras, and in the pit for various musicals around NYC.

Marcarthur Baralla
Since he was a small child, Marcarthur’s imagination has been full of stories – perhaps the fact that he grew up near an
enchanted forest – or so he believed – piqued his taste for fantasy fiction. After high school, Marcarthur moved from his small
village in Burgundy, France to Paris, where he studied business for two years before moving to San Francisco to finish his
degree.

It was there that he realized his true passion for film. With no money, Marcarthur worked his way through the College of San
Francisco to earn his Associates degree in Film Production, focusing on directing and cinematography. Since another two years of school was financially unfeasible, Marcarthur went to work on film sets to gain experience to compliment his educational background.

Marcarthur has been working in the film industry for eight years. He created a production company – Defendshee Productions- in 2005, under which he has produced and directed music videos, commercials, short and feature films, as well as documentaries.

Today, Marcarthur resides in Brooklyn, where he is focused on directing a number of projects. He is currently finishing a
documentary about wine (one of his other passions), finishing the first in a trilogy of books for kids and working on his
writing.

Marcarthur is highly regarded as a meticulous director and producer who able to manage all aspects of filmmaking. His work has been seen around the world in film festivals and on TV.

Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another’s green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
     And him as for a map doth Nature store,
     To show false Art what beauty was of yore.

Analysis

Sonnet 68 lauds the beloved for his natural beauty– others steal theirs from the dead.

Bill continues where Sonnet 67 left off, deciding that the youth’s face is the incarnation of how things were in the old days, when beautiful people lived and died among us often. This was before false beauties were created, or anyone dared attempt them. But now the golden locks of corpses are cut off and made to live a second life as a wig– dead beauty. The old-fashioned beauty of the youth uses no ornament: it is the real thing in all its honesty, nothing borrowing or stolen. Nature preserves him as a map, to show cosmetics what beauty used to be.

Scholar’s Corner

This sonnet mentions wigs being made from hair removed from corpses. Presumably barbers would have supplied some for a less macabre product. Sir Walter Raleigh’s has this to say on wigs and makeup:

“True golden hair was held in the highest estimation, but naturally all shades of auburn and red were favoured in a court whose Queen set the fashion by her own Tudor tresses, supplementing them as they faded with various wigs of these tints… Women of fashion incurred much censure from the pulpit and scorn from the satirist for the general practice of dyeing their hair and wearing wigs. Face-painting was common among women and at court, and evidently was carried much farther than ever before… other writers of the time see in it a token of a depraved mind, and imply that the use of face-paint is incompatible with moral behaviour.”

References
1. Raleigh,Walter. Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age, Oxford University Press, 1916, ISBN 9780198212522.

Gandhi Statue, Union Square Park, Manhattan

“This bronze sculpture depicting Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) was sculpted by Kantilal B. Patel (born 1925). After its dedication on October 2, 1986, the 117th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, the sculpture joined monuments to Washington, Lafayette, and Lincoln in Union Square Park as a quartet of works devoted to defenders of freedom. Noted civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) was the keynote speaker at the dedication.

The monument, donated by the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation and underwritten by Mohan B. Murjani of Murjani International, Ltd., was installed at Union Square because of the tradition of protest associated with the park. The champion of nonviolent protest and Indian independence from Britain, arguably one of the most important figures of the 20th century, is seen here grasping a staff in his right hand, looking towards a point on the horizon, and walking forward. Clad in sandals and a cotton dhoti, Gandhi’s dress illustrates his Hindu asceticism as well as his support for Indian industries. After its installation the monument became an instant pilgrimage site, with an annual ceremony taking place on Gandhi’s birthday, October 2.

In 2001, Parks conserved the statue after it had been removed temporarily to facilitate the construction of a water main beneath the site. In 2002, the piece was reset on a more naturalistic stone base and the landscaped area around the monument, known as Gandhi Gardens, was expanded and improved.” [1]

References

1. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/union-square-park/highlights/12380

ACTOR – Elizabeth Neptune

Elizabeth Neptune is thrilled to be working with New York Shakespeare Exchange on the Sonnet Project having previously performed in NYSX’s Hamlet, Island, King John, Romeo and Juliet and several ShakesBEERS around the city. Elizabeth is a founding member of the Ateh Theater Group where she has performed in The Learned Ladies (co-produced with Cake Productions), Weekend at an English Country State (2011 IT Award Nomination/Best Featured Actress), Mr. A’s Amazing Maze Plays, The Girl Detective, Long Distance, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Elizabeth is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she studied at the Atlantic Theater Company and Classical Studio.

DIRECTOR – Alex Basco Koch

Koch has designed projections for over a hundred plays, musicals, films and immersive art events. Koch created two nights of music videos to play alongside the Magnetic Fields’ new tour 50 Song Memoir and released a dozen of the works as official music videos. In film; creative lead for feature film title sequences, DoP and producing, directing and editing work for narrative shorts and music videos. In 2016 Koch’s projection design work was featured in two films premiering at the Sundance film festival, Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You, directed by Academy Award nominated filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady; and Miles Ahead, directed by and starring Don Cheadle.

Koch’s work as director can be seen in the short film Who Knows? mixing projection, puppetry and live action, and a number of music videos for artists including Randy Newman and the Magnetic Fields. His work as a film producer and editor has been seen at the Tribeca Film Festival among others. He has worked as director of photography and editor for a series of shorts, My America Too, with director Kwame Kwei-Armah premiering at Centerstage in Baltimore in 2016.
Besides the above (and mostly a long time ago) Koch worked as an Aquarium Guide in Boston (and fed the penguins several times), was a Locations P.A. at “Law & Order: Criminal Intent“, drove across the country six (or seven?) times (meandering a bit), lived in a yert for a summer in Bonny Doon, got lost in the Atacama, worked as an art handler (mostly without incident), and spent nine weeks backpacking across the Hawaiian islands with neither money nor towel.

www.alexbascokoch.com