Last night (Saturday), Mer and I went to Actors’ Summit to see our second play of the season, Medea. I knew almost nothing about Medea, except it was an ancient Greek tragedy (about 2400 years old). The lead role of Medea was being played by an Actors’ Summit regular who is a very good actress.

The story of Medea is pretty typical. Medea falls in love with Jason of Argonauts fame. She saves his life several times, betrays her father the king, kills her brother when he comes after her, and moves to Greece with Jason to be his wife. They have two sons together. Jason then marries the daughter of the Greek king so he can be king someday. This does not go over well with Medea. She raves so much the king fears for his daughter’s life and sentences her to exile, giving Medea one day to get ready. She uses that day to plot the death of the king, the king’s daughter, plots to kill her sons to hurt Jason, and arranges her own safe haven in Athens. It happens all the time.

While a tad on the extreme, the play is still performed after 2400 years because it does raise issues of faithfulness, revenge, hatred, justice, love, family, and more. The play was compelling. The language was a bit stilted in places (those Greeks had a thing for oratory and speeches, even in plays), but the leads in the play were excellent, so they were able to act through the stuffy language and make it seem almost normal. Usually the acting at Actors’ Summit is excellent, so I was a little surprised that one or two of the minor characters were acted fairly flatly. The lines were delivered, but they had the feel of almost being read instead of acted. Still, the major roles were excellent, and they pulled the play off well. Seeing Medea makes you want to be very, very nice to your wife.

Speaking of nice, we had a gift certificate to the Old Whedon Grille in Hudson. We had never eaten there before. It is a casual dining experience with TVs in the corners showing sports. The menu is extensive, and full of food that I like. Mer had a southwestern wrap, and I had cashew-crusted chicken. They both came with really good fries (I may have to take Sonotmu there, since he is the fries connoisseur). Dessert was chocolate lava cake. MMMmmmmm. It was a nice date night – dinner and a show! Just don’t scorn your date!

Measure for Measure and Arsenic and Old Lace were playing in repertory (both plays playing at the same time with the same actors). So, last weekend, on Saturday, Mer and I headed back up to Cleveland to see Arsenic. We knew the travel time better, so we did not have the hour wait until curtain time this time.

The staging for Arsenic was impressive. The curtain rose on the exterior of the Brewster house, and the whole house rotated at the start of the play so you could see the interior of the house, which included a full staircase. The entire play then took place inside the Brewster house, and the house was rotated at the very end of the play so the older Brewster ladies could motion for the audience to come into the house.

Arsenic is a wonderfully funny play. It is a play that is humorous no matter who plays it, as long as they are even just okay actors. The actors in the Great Lakes Theater company are exceptional, so they enhanced the play with great acting, and even added many sight gags to support the play. Mortimer (the lead) was played by the same actor that had played Angelo (the bad deputy) in Measure for Measure. One of the great things about repertory theater is getting to see actors do widely different roles back-to-back. Mortimer is a very very funny role, with a ton of energy required to play him well. It is about as different from Angelo as you can get. As good as the actor’s Angelo was, his Mortimer was brilliant. He played the straight man to the entire farce perfectly. He was stunningly active, being all over the stage all the time as he tried to keep his aunts from doing anything else.

Some of the wonderful sight gags they added to the play included:
– “Teddy” was bringing a body down to the cellar to bury the body in “Panama.” He decided it was easier to let gravity do the work, so he dropped the body down the (hidden to the audience) cellar stairs. We got to see Teddy’s head bounce up and down as he watched the body bounce down the stairs.
– One of the aunts bent over to pick up a throw pillow, and had a very hard (and funny) time getting back up. This was away from the main dialog, which was across the stage. It was still funny enough to have the audience laughing, even though the attention was supposed to be many feet away.
– Mortimer staggered all over the stage in shock when he discovered that the body in the window seat was not the same body that had been there a few hours ago. The shock was way over the top, which fit the play perfectly.
– Mortimer staggered all over the stage because his limbs had fallen asleep after he had been tied to a chair for several hours.
– The mean brother, Jonathan, has had his face altered, and now it looks like the guy that played Frankenstein. At one point, his companion lights a match, and Jonathan grunts and waves his arms at the flame – that was great.

The play had me laughing from beginning to end. If you have never seen the play, you can get the excellent movie from 1944 staring Cary Grant, and you should go get it now!

Last Christmas, Mer and I got a gift card to use at Playhouse Square in Cleveland. We mused on how to use it, with no real consensus until we found out that we could use it for the Great Lakes Theater Festival, which performs at Playhouse Square. The GLTF has a special 2-for-1 subscription package, where if you are a new or lapsed subscriber, you can buy one subscription and get one for free. This season is pretty great – Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, Miller’s The Crucible, and Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well. With a little bit of our anniversary funds thrown in, we found we could afford the Saturday matinee package for the four plays listed above.

So, two weeks ago (yes, I’m behind in blogging), we headed up to Cleveland to see Measure for Measure. We have not gone to the theater in Cleveland since moving to the new house, so we got there really early. We caught part of a talk about the play (a feature that happens an hour before curtain on Saturdays), where the speaker talked about how relevant Measure for Measure is today in an age where powerful men have been brought low by sexual scandals. It was not a deep talk, but it was a good overview.

Since we still had about 45 minutes until curtain, we had time to wander in the gift shop. Meredith got distracted by a book on Mamma Mia, so I wandered to the small gallery in the theater. This gallery never seems to be open on weekends, but you can look through the windows. They have a fair amount of sculpture, and my current favorite piece was back after it had been away for a few months. It is a larger-than-life sculpture of a woman playing the fiddle. I love this piece – it captures motion really well, and it just speaks the joy of music to me. It is called Melody by a sculptor named Tuan. If you are looking for a Christmas gift idea for me, consider Melody – it is only $79,000. I’d put her next to our piano.

Mer found me and we went to our seats. Briefly, Measure for Measure is the story of a city (Vienna) where the the Duke has become concerned that laws are being ignored, especially sexual laws. His solution is right out of modern boardrooms – he decides to leave and installs an upright and just man (Angelo) to start enforcing the laws. The Duke also reveals later that he is curious to see if Angelo can remain just with the temptation of power. It’s not a very charitable solution, but there it is. Angelo sentences a man (Claudio) to die for the crime of fornication (Claudio has gotten his lover pregnant). Claudio appeals to his sister (Isabella), who is entering a nunnery, to plead with Angelo for his (Claudio’s) life. Isabella does so, and in pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo (the powerful official) falls desperately in lust with Isabella. He proposes that if she sleeps with him, he will spare Claudio’s life. She refuses. Things are moved along and patched up by the Duke, who comes back to the city disguised as a friar. It is a comedy, so all ends in marriages. However, it is considered a “problem” comedy, because it is a very dark play, and some of the things the Duke does are bordering on cruel (not telling Isabella that her brother is still alive when she thinks he is dead, having Isabella briefly arrested for “slandering” Angelo, etc.).

The director decided to set Measure for Measure in a modern police state. The set was stark, with many steel bars showing. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, and the sets were changed by police guards, who often stayed on stage without lines. Angelo was dressed well in a suit, and was often behind or near a large desk. The “walls” of rooms could quickly become the bars of a cell, or the walls of a convent. It worked really well. Having the cameras everywhere was effective – when Angelo decides to offer his deal to Isabella, he goes to great pains to turn the cameras off. When Isabella says she will expose Angelo as a fraud, he asks her who would believe her. She points to the cameras, after which Angelo smiles as he turns a camera on and off. It exposed Isabella’s powerless situation really well.

The acting was first rate. Angelo was smooth and powerful. Isabella was strong in resolve, but realized she could not save her brother. The Duke was smart and scheming. It was a well-done production. My only slight gripe was right before the intermission. The police had been hauling prisoners around strapped upright to dollies. That worked really well. But right before intermission, while the Duke was musing over justice and the lives he can save, the police wheeled four prisoners on stage. Of the four, only one was under the death sentence. I thought wheeling all four on stage was heavy handed, and I think it would have been more effective to just have Claudio on stage. Small detail in an excellent production.

That was our afternoon – we got home about 4:30. We still had more going on that Saturday! Our friends Ray and Sara had extra tickets to go see the Summit Choral Society do an a cappella concert in Akron. We were told it was at a church downtown at 7:30, so we headed out about 7:00. We parked at a parking garage about 7:20 that was next to what I thought was the church. As we approched the church, there was a wedding streaming out, so we figured it was the wrong church (it was almost 7:30 now). We walked quickly (Mer was running at points) to try to find the street the church was on. We walked four or five blocks down the street, then went to another street and walked back to the car. We jumped in the car to drive around looking for the street. We went six or seven blocks, then drove back another way. We came to the same garage, and saw that it was on the street that we were looking for – the church that had the wedding in it was the right church after all. It was now 7:45, so we were a little surprised to see Ray and Sara standing on the steps. It turns out the concert started at 8:00. Ray and Sara had seen us walk by, but had not been able to stop us (they were still in their car). So, we had good exercise before the concert.

The concert itself was much fun. The choir was about 60 people strong, and they opened with some pieces I really like (a piece by American composer William Billings, and they did a wonderful job with “Magnum Mysterium” by Lauridsen). The concert had several arrangements of gospel songs, and they even threw in a PDQ Bach piece for fun. The choir had three brothers as special guests. These three brothers could really really sing – they all could sing different parts, and they sang their own arrangements of gospel songs and originals. The high tenor was getting higher than many of the sopranos in the choir. They were amazing.

The concert was much fun, and ran for about an hour and a half. I had a mild headache for much of the concert, so I did not enjoy it as much as I should have. Ray and Sara took us out to eat at Applebee’s after the concert. We had a good time visiting and laughing with them at the restaurant, and my headache went away with the food.

So, theater, music, and food! Not a bad way to spend a Saturday!

Meredith and I got together with our friends (and soon to be married!), Zach and Londa. We met in Kent, at the (aptly named) Kent Stage to see David Wilcox in concert again. The four of us saw Dave last year together, and Mer and I have seen Dave at least 5-6 times over the last 15 years. We are both big fans of Dave – his songs tend to start out about the ordinary or the small, and then you suddenly realize he has made a large or even universal application out of the song. A good example from last night was a song inspired by his wife’s leg healing after it broke; he decided to write a song about talking to the bone cells that were growing. He tried to explain to them how they were just small and he could not explain how they were part of a bigger, more complicated system. Then you suddenly realize that Dave is not singing to or about cells anymore….

Dave did two sets, lasting about two-and-a-half hours. He did almost all new stuff; he has an album about to come out. Some of his songs were so new he was still reading them off of sheets of paper. They were good, and I’m looking forward to the album (once we sell the house).

I love getting together with Zach and Londa – they have such joy, and it is fun to be around a couple so excited about each other. It reminds me that I’m very lucky to have a good ‘un like Mer. We bought the tickets for the concert with the last of our anniversary money (from August). Happy anniversary, honey!

Baseball on TV tonight is exciting – and I’m not talking about the Indians/Red Sox game. The REAL action was in Wii baseball tonight. I was playing in my sixth pro-level game. Prior to tonight, I had never scored a run against a pro team, so I was not expecting much. When I went down 0-3 after the second inning (Wii is a three-inning game), things looked really bad.

My lead-off runner got to first. Whoo hoo! Rally time! My next batter got out. My next batter got out. Things looked grim – two outs, down by three runs, man on first. I decided I was going to swing hard and low – the pros throw a lot of splitters, which I cannot hit, so I was committing to swinging low at the pitches. I hit the ball and actually hit a home run! My first runs in the pros! Now it was two out, 2-3. My next batter hits a home run! The crowd (me) goes nuts! My next batter hits a double! 3-3, man on second! Amazing! My next batter hit out. Bummer.

I can still play for the tie, if I can find some pitching. I’ve had TWO home runs hit off me tonight off the handle of the bat (I threw way inside and they still nailed it). Somehow I managed to get all three out – two flies and a strikeout. My very first tie in the pros! Note that my score is still not pro-level (you have to get to 1000 points to be a pro yourself; my current score is 877). A good baseball night!

In other sporting news, I also made a 23-yard chip shot out of a bunker in golf for a birdie. A two-sport athlete!

The last two weekends have been perfect weather for both me and Mer. I like things cool, and Mer likes things warm, but we have a ten-degree range where we both like the weather – the 70s (although I like the low 70s best). Two weeks ago, we took advantage of the beautiful weather to go walk on the towpath near Peninsula, Ohio, and last week we walked on the towpath closer to home. Both walks were very nice.

Peninsula is a very small town in the Valley, and is the closest to a New England town that I have seen in Ohio. It has the rolling hills (because it is in a valley), it has a cute main street, it has the towpath trail, it has a scenic railway, and it has the Cuyahoga River flowing through the town. We parked in the overflow lot for the trailhead (the main lot was full). We headed south on the towpath – I wanted to show Mer a pretty spot I had seen while running. The trail is almost entirely in shade – every now and then you can get to a spot without trees near a field or next to the river. We walked for about twenty minutes south and came to a lock on the old canal. I was thinking about turning around, but there was a side-trail that went to an old quarry. Mer asked if I wanted to go see it. Duh! It was an uphill climb! It had rocks! Of course I wanted to go see the quarry.

All the old quarries I had ever seen in Maine were holes in the ground, usually filled with water. This quarry was surprising to me – it was stone cut out of the side of the hill. We did get a good scramble up the side of the hill, and found a gentler way back down (the first picture above). The current quarry path used to be the railroad bed for the trains that would haul the stone. Neat.

After the quarry, we took our time going back to Peninsula. It was late enough that most of the towpath was free from bikes and runners, so we had it largely to ourselves. We did spend a little time at the trailhead looking at the water, and I enjoyed the pedestrian bridge (it is made out of metal and I think it is cool). It was a great way to end a Sunday.

Last Sunday we went a little closer to home. I wanted to take Meredith south on the trail that I had run on to show her a swampy area that I thought was pretty, plus had the advantage of having a cool wooden walkway to tromp around on. I assured her it was only about a ten-minute walk.

About ten minutes in, we had not come to the swampy area yet, but we did see a very confident cat chilling on a tree limb over the old canal. This cat had much confidence in his balance…

We did finally make it to the footbridge, after a mere 25 minutes or so (what can I say?). I was pleased that the goose that thought he owned the swamp was out in regal splendor. Twice before when I had run by, he had let me (and everyone else in the area) know that I was trespassing by announcing it loudly. He was just in his element.

We also saw Canadian geese on the water, and they took off from the water, which was fun to see. There were some ducks hanging around as well. The swampy area used to be a junk car lot, but beavers had dammed the area, so it flooded, which is much prettier than a junk car lot. We did not see any beavers, although they are still supposed to be around.

We wandered back to the car, again in a fairly leisurely fashion. That had made three weekends in a row of taking advantage of area parks, but it probably will end there for now – today it is in the 80s, and I’m hiding in my air conditioning.

Fall is here, so it must be theater season! As readers know, Mer and I have season tickets to Actors Summit Theater (we had the good fortune of buying the season tickets just before we decided to buy our new house, so the theater season could still be funded). Last Saturday evening, Mer and I got dressed up (hey, this IS our social life for now!) and went to see Richard Dresser’s Rounding Third, a comedy about Little League baseball. Richard Dresser wrote the play after having his son tell him that the son’s coach had devised a strategy where slower base runners would get “hurt” and fake an injury so that faster runners could be on base. It got a little more complicated in that Dresser coached for awhile as well and found himself wanting to win at all costs. So, he wrote a very funny play about it – a coach who wants to win no matter what, and a new assistant coach that wants the kids to “just have fun.”

The interaction worked really well. Yes, both coaches were stereotypes to a large degree, but they worked. Seeing the must-win coach seething pretty much every time the have-fun coach spoke was really funny. Oddly, both Meredith and I found ourselves more on the side of the must-win coach, which is funny, because we both thought at the start of the play that we would like the have-fun coach.

The play was not terribly deep, but it was very entertaining, and it did make you think about where on the win/fun scale people should be. It is only a two-man play, and the actors pulled it off very well. My only slight complaint was that the must-win coach used an awful lot of strong language, which was probably part of the character, but it was so frequent I wished it had been scaled back some – I think the idea could have been communicated with the same punch through body language. Still, on the whole, it was a fun evening.