the tempest

I saw the most wonderful production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest on Tuesday night at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. At the close, I was on my feet, applauding and shouting, "Bravo!" This isn’t one of Shakespeare’s plays that I have seen numerous times, so I didn’t always know what was about to happen next. I could simply sit and be transported into the story. The acting was superb as were the costumes and the staging. It was just a perfect night.

With me were my good Shakespeare buddy (we’ve been going together to the Festival for over a decade) and my #1 daughter and her husband who were celebrating their anniversary. We all walked out of the amphitheater saying how great it was.

As a kid, I wanted to be an actress. I did a little bit of theater and seven years of dance, and I must confess, I do love being on the stage. But when writing came along, acting went out the window. There just wasn’t time to write, work my day job, and be a mom to my kids plus participate in the theater. Ah, but there is always time to attend the theater, especially when we are privileged in Boise to have one of the best theater companies around.

My heroine in Speak to Me of Love (Tyndale, August 2003) is a Shakespearean actress in the late 1800’s. Throughout the book, she thinks of lines from various Shakespeare plays when they are applicable to the situation. I had great fun creating that book but especially that character.

Our English language is littered with phrases from Shakespeare, and most of us never know it unless we study his plays. I remember when I went to see Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, and I was amazed at how many phrases from that play that people use every day. I told my writer friend that Shakespeare wrote a lot of clichés. (That was tongue in cheek, of course. Our usage has made them clichés.)

Well, I’d best get to work, hopefully writing something that doesn’t contain clichés.

-rlh-