Sunday, November 2, 2003

NO, KIDS, NO!!!

I missed Halloween! And I'm the holiday guy! Ack! Oh well, to make up for it, I'll post the next play in the 'Complete Works'. Happy now? (Blackout. Lights come back up to reveal DANIEL alone onstage. The narrator's chair has been struck.) DANIEL: Ladies and gentlemen, in preparing this unprecedented 'Coplete Works' show, we have encountered this one problem: how to make these 400-year-old plays accessible to a modern audience. One popular trend is to take Shakespeare's transpose them into modern settings. We have seen evidence of this with Shakespeare's plays set in such unusual locations as the lunar landscape, Nazi concentration camps, and Cleveland, Ohio. In this vein, Jess has traced the roots of Shakespeare's symbolismin the context of a pre-Nietzchean society through the totality of a jejune circular relationship of form, contrastedwith a complete otherness of metaphysical cosmologies, and the ethical mores entrenched in the collective subconscious of an agrarian race. [I usually wouldn't do this, but I feel it needed to say that the editor of this book said to "not bother reading that sentence over and over again. It's covering a costume change and is absolutely meaningless."] so we now present Shakespeare's first tragedy, 'Titus Andronicus,' as a cooking show. (JESS enters as TITUS ANDRONICUS, wearing an apron and carrying a large butcher's knife. He is somewhat reminiscent of Julia Child.) J/TITUS: Good evening, everyone! Good evening, gore-mets, and welcome to 'Roman Meals.' I'm your host, Titus Androgynous. Now, when you've had a long day--your left hand chopped off, your sons murdered, your daughter raped, her tongue cut out, and both her hands chopped off--well, the las tthing you want to do is cook. Unless, of course, you cook the rapist and serve him to his mother at a dinner party! My daughter Lavinia and I will show you how. (ADAM enters as LAVINIA, clutching a large mixing bowl held between her stumps, pushing DANIEL as the RAPIST in front of her.) Good evening, Lavinia! A/LAVINIA: Ood ebeie, mubba. J/TITUS: And how are we feeling today? A/LAVINIA: Ot so ood, mubba. I ot my ongue tsopped off. J/TITUS: I know it's a [urinater], isn't it? But we'll get our revenge, won't we? "Now hark, villian. I will grind your bones to dust, and of your blood and it I'll make a paste; And of the past a coffin I will rear And make a pasty of your shameful head. Come, Lavinia, receive the blood." First of all, we want to make a nice, clean incision from carotid artery to jugular vein (slicing RAPIST'S throat), like so. RAPIST:Aaaaargh! A/LAVINIA: Yecch. That's weally gwoss, mubba. J/TITUS: Be sure to use a big bowl for this because the human body has about four quarts of blood in it! "And when that he is dead," which should be... (LAVINIA has dragged the RAPST'S body to the doorway, where we see the butcher's knife rise and fall. RAPIST'S body convulses once, and then is dragged away.) ...right about now, "let me go grind his bones to powder small And with this hateful liquor temper it; And in that paste let his vile head be baked..." At about 350 degrees. And 40 minutes later, you have the loveliest human head pie... (LAVINIA re-enters with a truly disgusting pie, prepared earlier.) ...fit to serve a king (pulling a severed hand from the pie), with ladyfingers for dessert! Now, who will be the first to try this delicious taste treat? (TITUS and LAVINIA offer the pie to a COUPLE in the audience.) "Welcome, gracious lord. Welcome, dread queen. Will't please you eat? Will't please you feed?" It's finger-lickin' good! (JESS and ADAM are excited by the clever line. They try to give each other a high-five, but since neither has a hand, it is a miserable failure.) Well, we're just about out of time, everyone. Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to watch next week, when our guest chef, Timon of Athens, will teach us how to make ratatouille out of our special guests, the Merry Wives of Windsdor! Until then... J/TITUS AND A/LAVINIA: Bone appétit! I should probably also say that the editor mentioned that "bone appétit" "is widely acknowledgedby modern scholars to be absolutely the worst joke in the entire show," just to kind of explain that one. -Today's Holidays- ~Israel: Balfour Declaration Day ~Mexico/Portugal: Dia de Muertos/Day of the Dead ~North & South Dakota: Admission Day ~Venezuela: Memorial Day

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