Thanks to this week’s City Paper, I see that if I had unlimited resources, I could attend eleven plays this summer: As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, The Tempest, Macbeth, and Othello performed by Shenandoah Shakespeare; Pericles and Love’s Labour’s Lost performed by the The Shakespeare Theatre Company; A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival; Twelfth Night at the Publick Playhouse; and King Lear performed by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.

Sadly, I do not have unlimited resources, and can’t see them all. I’m particularly miffed that I’ll miss Richard III — the run ends June 10 and, barring a windfall, I have other financial concerns that come before tickets and a three-hour road trip — because that pursuivant scene nags me and I still haven’t written anything on it. I should block out a weekend and at least visit the Folger Shakespeare Library as a sightseeing trip if not a research one. I’m also unsure how to do scholarly research when I’m not affiliated with any university library and I’m several hundred miles away from my alma mater.

I’m definitely going to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I really want to make it to Lear, Twelfth Night is a possibility, and Macbeth runs through December 2 so there’s no reason I can’t make at least one performance. Everything else, we shall see.

If nothing else from this past weekend, I will never forget the experience of performing the “Tomorrow” speech. Not just standing there speaking memorized lines; just letting all the emotions flow through me and inform my voice, and being in that moment.

I’ve reread my first crack at interpreting the speech and I can see more clearly how this thing slides right into the scene. The first line, “She should have died hereafter”, is six iambic feet. Greenblatt and the other editors of my Norton Shakespeare stick the words at the end of the line, leaving a total pause of eight metrical feet between Seyton’s line “The Queen, my lord, is dead” and Macbeth’s first line. I was right about the pause, and it felt right on stage; I was not so right about delivering that first line quietly.

Macbeth has just found out, here, that his wife and partner has committed suicide. When I was up there letting this speech rip, I had in myself and in my voice despair and grief, at losing a loved one to suicide; guilt, that I should somehow have prevented it; anger, for all the injustices in my life, big or small; it was anything but quiet.

I can’t tell if it was overacting. All I can tell is that it changed slightly every time I performed it, but it was true to the moment. Performing this speech is not so much about the shoulds and the how-tos; it’s about letting the character’s emotions speak.

I’ve finished it now, and I am blown away. I could write pages and pages about this weekend — and I probably will, for myself. I’m still processing what I’ve learned.

The short version is that I got exactly what I wanted from this experience. I came in as a writer, wanting to know how actors did it. But I participated as an actor, and that participation and new perspective drastically changed my relationship to the text.

I do plan on writing here about the “Tomorrow” speech. I have a much better understanding of the speech, its context within the scene and the play, and how an actor would perform it. (Because I did perform it. From this stage.)

I intended to ask, at the end, how the speech fits in. The lines before and after it had been problematic for me because I didn’t know how you could make the transitions into and out of this major, well-known speech. I do now; I could probably do the whole scene. I’m not sure how to word it, but that knowledge is there.

I got into the intensive!! I called this morning and there was at least one opening. I threw together my application package, involving an embarrassing mental blank on my end — I had a lead role, but forgot the name of the play, and had to write a separate email to include it after I called around to find someone who remembered — but I’m all set and will be attending tonight!

It looks like we’ll be working heavily with a monologue, and I’ve chosen the full “Tomorrow” speech. The monologue didn’t have to be something we’d actually be cast in, it’s the speech I know the best, and one I’ve been struggling with how to perform. So it seems I’m about to find out, in excruciating detail.

I haven’t acted in anything for at least five years. I hope I don’t embarass myself in front of everyone else.

Why do I always find out about these things last-minute??

The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is hosting a weekend intensive Shakespeare & Company training. THIS WEEKEND.

It’s for actors, but I’m very interested in acting Shakespeare for the same reason I’m interested in seeing productions of the plays: interacting with the text is the best way to experience it and understand it, because it wasn’t written as literature. It was written as a play. To be acted. Not just read.

I’m not sure if the intensive is full — at a maximum of 15 participants, I’m sure it is — but I doubt I could gather the application materials and submit them in time to participate. And I further doubt that they’d let in a blogger whose acting credentials are limited to high school theatre, a college acting class, and a chorus part in Once Upon a Mattress.

Still, you never know if you don’t try. I’ll have to call tomorrow during business hours and see if there’s a space available.