#shakespeareforeveryone

[kevinrfree]

Bow tie #2 this week. Opening night for #DivCo plays! So proud to be produced by @shakesexchange along with @ankimonkey2 @kchelena @nilangrams @krutt519 @la.espi @dmartintheneck @microwaveevan #heightenedlanguage #shakespeareforeveryone

[dflylover]

Harsh! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the sun and I am blinded from the west. Karen~ 2021 #shakespeareforeveryone https://www.instagram.com/p/CLXiE_3AL2L2CcGLbMlZxShTQN2kuXfyQPKIdc0/?igshid=uh170wvy7w4a

[kevinrfree]

NYC: SOME HEIGHTENED SH*T IS ABOUT TO GO ALL THE WAY DOWN. #Repost ・・・ Up next....#ShakespeareForEveryone! - These eight #qts have all been exploring heightened language in their own sensibilities since January as part of @shakesexchange's first #DiversityCohort. And now it's time to bring in some beautiful human actors, directors, stage managers, and producers to bring those words off the page and into your faces. The Shakespeare For Everyone Festival kicks off on the auld man's birthday, 4/23, and continues through mid May. The Diversity Cohort New Play Festival runs at @sfcny from 5/2-5/5. Check out nysx.org for tickets to all or part of the Festival. - Get ready, World. These artists are changing you, and I am honored to be counted among them. - #huzzah #divco #inclusion #heightenedlanguage #poetry #verse #nyctheatre #nycartists #playwrights #springforward #newwork #newplays #wordswordswords

[sonnetproject-blog]

The James Gordon Bennett Memorial, Sonnet 77

WHO is that up there?

“The green eyes pierce the night, arresting pedestrians who notice the mute blinking orbs above the bustle of Herald Square in Manhattan. But for the most part, the glowing specters go unnoticed by many….

It comes from the eyes of two stern-looking bronze owls perched atop a tall granite monument in the northern part of the park in Herald Square. They are among New York City’s more obscure architectural oddities. Lighting up every night from dusk until dawn, they can be seen blocks away, their blinks lasting approximately two seconds. But they are not modern additions.

The owls have glowed nightly, barring periodic electrical disruptions, since the monument was completed in 1940, and they were lighting up elsewhere even earlier than that.

If they appear mysterious to people now — recent hypotheses from passers-by included National Security Agency surveillance, Halloween decoration and pigeon deterrent — then some midcentury New Yorkers were probably downright frightened by them.

The eyes are made from thick, green-tinted glass. Green LEDs were installed behind them in a 2007 restoration. Before then, incandescent bulbs sat in the owls’ skulls and projected as green through the glass, Don Bussolini, a capital projects director for the 34th Street Partnership, said.

How these green-eyed owls first came to be is stranger than most would imagine.

The two owls were once part of a flock of 22 that roosted along the roofline of the old New York Herald newspaper building, for which the square was named. The owls lit up on the hour with the ringing of a clock bell that was part of the building.” –Alex Vadkul, The New York Times, 2013 [1]

“The building was designed by Stanford White (of the leading firm McKim, Mead & White, architects of this Museum) on commission from the newspaper’s flamboyant publisher, James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

Bennett also conceived the array of bronze roof sculptures, installed in 1895. The central figure group, commissioned in Paris from the French sculptor Antonin Jean Paul Carles (1851–1919), featured the Roman war goddess Minerva presiding over two hammer-wielding blacksmiths, who flank a large bell. The stately owls that edged the rest of the roofline were electrified so that their glass eyes glowed and blinked in time with the hammered toning of the hours. Bennett had a penchant for owls—the official emblem of the Herald—and collected both live and sculpted ones. Neither the designer nor the foundry responsible for these owls has yet been identified.

In 1939 (by which time the demolition of the Herald Building was nearly complete) Minerva, the bell-ringer group, and two of the four winged owls were installed in Herald Square as the James Gordon Bennett Memorial.” [2]

References

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/nyregion/with-a-birds-eye-view-of-herald-square-seeing-all-but-noticed-by-few.html?_r=0 2. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/126975/Standing_Owl_from_New_York_Herald_Building_NYC