Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ellen mclaughlin

The Bed You Sleep In (1993)

#the bed you sleep in #jon jost #Tom blair #Ellen mclaughlin #brad shelton #Thomas morris #talks

Ellen McLaughlin, in 1993, at a costume fitting for “Angels in America.”

#angels in america #nytimes #1993 #Ellen McLaughlin

In “King Lear,” veteran actor Ellen McLaughlin has found both a “marvelous” role and a vehicle to help audiences consider how people care fo

Shakespeare, she believes, is looking at “what is man when you strip the human of all attachments, all possessions, all identity. He loses his kingdom. He destroys his family. He loses his identity and he loses his mind.

“And there’s this truth that he finds out,” Ms. McLaughlin continues, “once he has lost everything – which is: What are we at essence? And what do we really want? What do we really need? What is it that he has been seeking and never understood – and that of course is love.

“And he’s redeemed by love.”

#shakespeare #william shakespeare #ellen mclaughlin #lear #king lear

“Open to the light. Enough. No more. Where is the darkness? Let it swallow me whole.

— Euripides (trans. by Ellen McLaughlin), The Greek Plays

#oedipus #the greek plays #ellen mclaughlin #lit #poetry #greek literature #greek lit #euripides #quote #light #darkness

2pm Performance today, at the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul! IPHIGENIA & OTHER DAUGHTERS is getting people talking! Hope to see you there! Presented by Theatre Unbound and directed by Amber Bjork.

Photo Credit Theresa Burgess

theatre: Iphigenia (Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Ellen McLaughlin)

Now I am something made of stone. Handsome, bleached and perpetual.

#*#edit*#theatre aes*#iph*#theatre #iphigenia and other daughters #ellen mclaughlin

Colorado Shakespeare Festival explores quintessential patriarch's dance with dementia through the vessel of a woman in Boulder

“It’s as big a play as Shakespeare ever wrote, which is saying quite a lot,” she said. “This is the part I've spent my entire professional life preparing to do. It's why you become an actor – to embody people like this. I’m sure anybody who’s ever gotten a shot at it, from Anthony Hopkins to Laurence Olivier, has felt the same way. You’re old enough by the time you get to do it to appreciate how hard it is, and what an extraordinary opportunity it is.”

...When McLaughlin met Howarth, “it turned out we had the exact same idea of how to do this, which is no, you don't change the gender; no, you don't change the pronouns,” McLaughlin said. “This is not going to be about what happens when women get power. This is a play about patriarchy. It's about fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons. It was very clear: I'm playing a king.”

...McLaughlin, who grew up around theater, remembers seeing a life-changing 1968 staging of “King Lear” at Arena Stage in Washington D.C. – at all of age 11. And “life-changing” not for all the right reasons. “Really, the blinding of Gloucester still remains one of the worst things that's ever happened to me,” she said with a laugh. But she was entranced by the play – all the beauty and the bleakness of it. She didn’t even clock at the time that Lear and Cordelia were both played by great Black actors, she said, because – why not? “It really just comes down to the actor,” she said. “How good are you?”

#shakespeare #william shakespeare #king lear #women #casting #lear #Colorado Shakespeare Festival #colorado #ellen mclaughlin #theater #theatre #actors

What Does a Modern Shakespeare Look Like? Loren Noveck discusses the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate the entire corpus of Shakespeare into contemporary modern English.

In talking about Troilus and Cressida, its translator, Lillian Groag, notes that the “vulgarity” and the “venom” became shocking to an audience when they really understood, for example, that Thersites was “telling the audience to go get VD.”

McLaughlin mentioned that one particular choice she made in a brothel scene in Pericles caused great discomfort to the actor playing the role. Where the original has the Bawd and Bolt discuss the need to “get [Marina] ravished or be rid of her,” McLaughlin uses “raped.” The actor balked at delivering the line, though he had no issue with standing over a cowering woman and unbuckling his pants—as long as a different term was used to describe his action. She said to him, “Maybe you should look at the fact that you are comfortable doing the thing but not saying the word.”