Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
A “talkback” is an opportunity to learn more about a theatrical performance that one has just seen. Typically for a talkback the director, designers, technical staff and actors gather on stage to talk about their shared creative process, and to answer questions from the audience. I knew the term from having grown up in a theatrical family – in the late 1990s one ambitious graduate student at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, determined that my father had directed over 1,000 stage productions. As a child watching him give notes on some of those shows, I got to see an entire community of artists come together to reach important shared goals, and then discuss the process along the way.
Although I never took to theatre as one of my professions, I do miss experiencing (by proxy) that sort of camaraderie and attention paid to serving an audience with professionalism, artistry, and flair. I also miss the conversations with actors, finding that, like authors, their minds are always perceiving and synthesizing information, and preparing to share new aesthetic discoveries.
Thus I was delighted when “Juliet” and “Mercutio” joined me at my public Sunday evening office hours last night, joined by the two artistic directors of the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble, one of them the director of the production of Romeo and Juliet that Jukie had enjoyed earlier in the day. If you are looking for my thumbnail review, I would say that the production is inventive, well-acted, full of expertly choreographed stage combat, and often unsettling, especially in the second half. If you have seen the play, you know that the final critical scenes take place in a crypt, and certain spooky auditory special effects and directing choices succeed in communicating love and loss with a funereal tone, perfect for October and Halloween! Also, Gabby Battista does a wonderful job playing the tragedy’s beautiful young heroine.
So at office hours I got to hear more about the production, and I got to share a couple hours’ worth of marketing ideas and recommended priorities and practices. Having taught classes for the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, and having taught classes more recently on content marketing, I had plenty to say. The Davis Shakespeare Ensemble folks thank me with repeated invitations to Jukie and me, both to the fantastic productions, and to the fundraisers, such as the Bard B-Q scheduled for October 23rd. But even more rewarding for me was the chance to contribute to such an important cultural resource with my quirky and nichey areas of expertise.
The author and thought-leader Seth Godin once wrote that we get paid in one of three ways: cash, referrals, and attention. With a daughter in college, I haven’t much cash to offer the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble, but I do offer this referral: I recommend that you check out the DSE Romeo and Juliet sometime in the coming four weeks of its fall run at the Veteran’s Memorial Theatre: This production is worth your attention.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature a question on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the actual play, rather than the adaptation with the spritely Leonardo DiCaprio. Expect also questions on prime numbers, chairs and cups, open doors to the frontier, names in the news, Albert Einstein, antennae, religious philosophers, northern cities, poll numbers, lakes, jailers, justice, domestic conflicts, Clint Eastwood, curved bands of wood, something that is puffed out, Chinese material culture, the British Radio 1 DJ Vernon Kay who likes both to rant and to sing, Australian exports, ancient paper, chemistry, Angelinos, people who are not as popular as Prince, Donald Trump, wide boulevards, Golden Globe nominees, new markets, tigers, and, as I’ve already said, Shakespeare. I haven’t yet written the tie-breaker, so I welcome your suggestions for tonight’s final question.
I hope to see you this evening. The temperatures will be cool, so plan to bring a jacket if you want to sit outside.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What proper name appears in the tagline of the film Apollo 13?
- Internet Culture. What multimedia mobile application company has released its first hardware product, called “Spectacles”?
- Newspaper Headlines. FARC is an anagram in Spanish for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of what country?
P.S. Thursday, October 6th is Poetry Night in Davis. We start at 8 and will feature Katherine Hastings and Susan Kelly-DeWitt at the John Natsoulas Gallery.
Katherine Hastings is the author of Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar (Spuyten Duyvil NYC, August 2016); Nighthawks; and Cloud Fire. Poet laureate emerita of Sonoma County, CA, her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, as well as The Book of Forms — A Handbook of Poetics (Lewis Putnam Turco, editor), University Press of New England. Hastings is the editor of Digging Our Poetic Roots — Poems from Sonoma County, and What Redwoods Know — Poems from California State Parks, published as a fundraiser for the California State Parks Foundation when 70 parks were faced with permanent closure. She hosts WordTemple on NPR affiliate KRCB FM and curates the long-running WordTemple Poetry Series in Sonoma County. For more information go to www.wordtemple.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of many books, most recently Spider Season from Cold River Press (2016). About this book, Jane Mead has said, “The poems in Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s Spider Season reflect our human desire to weave the inner and outer worlds into an ordered pattern: like the spider’s web, these poems are delicate, made of strong filament, and vulnerable—impermanence proves to be a force as strong as the desire for order. This book beautifully renders the process, rewards and disappointments of this universal human struggle.”
I hope you can join us Thursday night. And the Friday and Saturday mark the return of the Jazz Beat Festival to Davis. Check out http://www.natsoulas.com for details.