The weight of myself

I'm humming a little. Softly. Just to myself. A tune I heard somewhere, can't remember where from, but it's lovely. It comes easily to my lips, and I don't usually sing. My lips are usually pressed together, bearing the weight of myself.

Did I like it? I think so. I was entertained. The writing and the story are compelling; I zipped through. I wish I knew Shakespeare better. 

Also, my big toe hurts. When I think about it, the pain in my toe, it throbs, like my mind can actively make it pulsate. I palpate the toe, but I can't find the focal point for the pain, not at the edge of the nail, not the pad, not in the bone, but the pain hangs on a thread that winds its way through my body to my brain. I'm sure the pain is a direct result of this book, like I metaphorically dropped it on my foot, and it's much bigger and heavier than I believed it to be.

All's Well, by Mona Awad, is weird. Like Bunny was weird. 

[I read Bunny almost exactly two years ago on a beach at Lake Tahoe, and any chance I could, while on a retreat with colleagues. I'd rather escape into the bullying clique-mindedness of campus life than engage in the Marketing department's labyrinth of in-groups, the obligatory assigned dinners, the feigned fun. "If you don't know everybody's name and understand what they do by the end of the week, then you're doing it wrong." Bunny was perfect.]

I never wrote about Bunny. It was too easy a read. Fluid and natural. There was nothing particularly quotable about it. It was funny and deep, and rich with insight into human character, but in a way that was easily processed; it never stopped me in my tracks. I actually mean this as high praise. It's so seamless, and entertaining and weird, you don't notice how good it is. 

I feel the same way about All's Well. I am also struck by the witchery, and trickster energy, that my summer consists of — the fiction I read is full of it, I am subconsciously choosing it, I want to be guided by it, to learn how to exorcise parts of my past, or transmute certain experiences, or embrace my goddess nature, shed the chrysalis.

Her boot tips rest at my head, stopping short  just of my temple. She could raise her boot and stomp on my face if she wanted to. Probably a small part of her does. Because that's what you do with the weak, and Grace comes from Puritan stock, a witch-burning ancestry. Women who never get colds. Women who carry on. Women with thick thighs who do not understand the snivelers, the wafflers, people who burn sage.

The plot has Miranda staging of one of Shakespeare's problem plays, All's Well That Ends Well, even while her students clearly want to perform Macbeth. Themes from both plays permeate Miranda's reality, and their characters cross over, but I can't help but wonder if her Shakespearean name isn't also pointing us to The Tempest, with its dreamlike and patriarchal elements. 

I felt a drop, I told Grace. Felt their anger in the filthy air. Felt the sword above my head. Felt my doom in the thickening night as we drove here. Three silhouettes looming in my side mirror, loping along the shoulder like wolves.

What defines Miranda is her pain, invisible as it is. And then the sudden absence of her pain. (Always the problem of having a body, wanting to inhabit it while detaching from it.)

Watch Mona Awad in conversation with Heather O'Neill.

Prospero's library

If my library were peopled with creatures rather than books, it would house polar bear memoirists, insurgent dogs, poetry-spurting robots, grieving elephants, musical dragons, literary rats (and cockroaches), dream-weaving spiders, and pulsating intelligences. Murderers, detectives, hackers, God's gardeners, librarians, artists, occultists, mothers, medieval scholars, and bureaucrats all live here.

A diagram of woe

Noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows them to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.

So says Felix's figment daughter Miranda of her father, who's staging The Tempest at a local correctional facility and casting himself as Prospero. Hag-Seed, like The Tempest which it retells, is about vengeance, that most noble of acts.

I'm an Atwood fan from way back — 30 years now. I'm more familiar with Atwood than I am with Shakespeare. Sure, I like Shakespeare as much as anyone does — I acknowledge his genius even if I don't always recognize it. But Atwood never fails to disappoint. Noble Atwood sprouting devourable fiction.

The reviews of Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold are quite boring in their consistent and unsurprising praise for her wit and overall skill. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to find fault with. That may not sound much like praise; more like the absence of criticism. It's a relatively compact, near-perfect novel.

So I'm not sure what I can offer you by way of review. I give you this.

You don't need to know anything about The Tempest to enjoy Atwood's Hag-Seed.
I don't know The Tempest. I always assumed it must be cool, based on it being quoted by Laurie Anderson in Blue Lagoon; oh, and by Eliot in The Wasteland. I did see Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, but, visually and aurally stunning as it was, it can't be said that I understood it. I suspect that knowledge of Shakespeare's original would give the reader an added layer or two of appreciation, but it's not a prerequisite for reading this book.

I now want to see The Tempest staged.
More specifically, I want to see Atwood's version of The Tempest staged, just as she outlines the direction in this novel. A cloak of the pelts of stuffed animals, heads and all, nightmarified Disney princess puppets, rap musical numbers. Sounds awesome. (A couple reviews nitpick that Atwood's rhymes are substandard. I didn't find them out of place.)

Atwood is a master of language.
One character is described as "a diagram of woe." I love that. Her passages may not be liltingly beautiful, but they are crafted to great effect.

There's a click. The door unlocks and he walks into the warmth, and that unique smell. Unfresh paint, faint mildew, unloved food eaten in boredom, and the smell of dejection, the shoulders slumping down, the head bowed, the body caving in upon itself. A meagre smell. Onion farts. Cold naked feet, damp towels, motherless years. The smell of misery, lying over everyone within like an enchantment. But for brief moments he knows he can unbind that spell.

Atwood is a skilled storyteller.
While reading Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, I kept thinking how much it felt like a Margaret Atwood novel, just missing some unpindownable something that would make it great and lasting. So it was interesting to read Atwood so shortly afterwards. Both novels cover the production of Shakespeare. I know it's not fair to compare them — these books set out to do very different things. But I keep trying to figure out, what is it in Station Eleven that reminds me so much of Atwood, and why it falls short of Atwood. Atwood's Hag-Seed is clearly focused and controlled. Maybe this: maybe Station Eleven is trying to be bigger than it needs to be; Hag-Seed is only as big as it needs to be and is careful not to let anything else in.

This book teaches me a new way of reading.
Hag-Seed is a lesson in how to read critically, and this evolves quite naturally out of the context, is never didactic. Felix teaches the prisoners how to read — really read — The Tempest: what do the words mean, what do they really mean, what do they say about the characters who speak them, what is the nature of these characters, human or otherwise, what makes them who they are, why do they do what they do. What happens to them when the play is done? Felix asks his actors to imagine their characters' lives after Shakespeare leaves off. What happens after can inform what happened before. I'm not overly interested in close reading, I read novels for fun, but I think the best works of literature inspire these questions anyway, leading readers to run away with their thoughts. Shakespeare does it. Atwood too.

Atwood on rewriting The Tempest in The Guardian:

The last three words Prospero says are "Set me free." But free from what? In what has he been imprisoned?

Too much shit is monotonous

The theatre class at the correctional facility has a rule about swearing: the prisoners must "limit" themselves to the curses used in the play at hand, in this case Shakespeare's Tempest.

Bent Pencil takes the floor and reads out, gravely and impressively, in his best board-meeting voice: "Born to be hanged, A pox o'your throat. Bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog. Whoreson. Insolent noisemaker. Wide-chapp'd rascal. Malignant thing. Blue-eyed hag. Freckled whelp hag-born. Thou earth. Thou tortoise. Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself. As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed, With raven's feather from unwholesome fen, Drop on you both. A south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o'er. Toads, beetles, bats light on you. Filth as thou art. Abhorr'ed slave. The red plague rid you. Hag-seed. All the infections that the sun sucks up, From bogs, fens, flats, fall on — add name here — and make him, By inch-meal a disease. Most scurvy monster. Most perfidious and drunken monster. Moon-calf. Pied ninny. Scurvy patch. A murrain on you. The devil take your fingers. The dropsy drown this fool. Demi-devil. Thing of darkness."

"Well done," says Felix. "That sounds fairly complete. I can't think of anything you've missed. Any questions or comments?"

"I been called worse," says PPod.

[...]

"I got one," says Shiv. "One question. Is 'shit' a curse word? Can we use it, or what?"

It's a fine point, think Felix. Technically, "shit" might not be considered a curse word as such, only a scatological expression, but he doesn't want to hear it all the time. Shit this, shitty that, you shit. He could let them vote on it, but what's the point of being in charge of this motley assemblage if he refuses to take charge? "'Shit' is offbounds," he says. "Adjust your cursing accordingly."

"'Shit' was okay last year," says Leggs. "So how come?"

"I changed my mind," says Felix. "I got tired of it. Too much shit is monotonous, and monotony is anti-Shakespeare."

—from Hag-Seed, by Margaret Atwood.

And I am cursing my family (most lovingly) for having descended on me this past week, leaving me no time to read.

What you know, you know

"Why did you strike his so soundly?"

"He needs that scholarly pride clouted out of him."

"Like the man you spoke of who angered you?"

There's a short silence. His shoulders rise and fall. "There are those who think that all of life's lessons can be reaped from reading. I despise them."

"Despise them?"

"What a man does with his brain is his concern, not mine. Just do not let him think he's a better man for it. [...]"

Although many professional reviewers are quibbling over the liberties David Snodin has taken with Shakespeare's Othello, I rather enjoyed his Iago, and I'm guessing my general ignorance of Shakespeare went a long way in this regard. I didn't notice what plot points were changed, nor did I have a strong sense of Iago's character before jumping in.

Of course, I knew the basics of Shakespeare's story, and read up on it a little after Snodin's novel had hooked me.

Snodin has written about his fascination with the character of Iago, and the more I know, the more entranced I become myself — enough so that I'll be checking out Othello on film soon.

Snodin's story picks up where Shakespeare's left off. Iago is imprisoned for murder in a remote corner of Cyprus, and by page 11 we learn he's escaped. Back in Venice, we learn of the domestic tragedy of Othello and experience its aftermath through Gentile Stornello, cousin of Shakespeare's ill-fated Desdemona. Gentile's a nerd and a weakling — a poet! — and he gets mixed up with — that is, beaten up by — one of the Malipiero bad boys. And he falls for his servant girl.

One of the Malipiero uncles is Chief Inquisitor of the Serene Republic of Venice. He has Gentile brought in, because he can. And he throws Gentile — who reminds him of his own deceased son — in with Iago — for whom there is still an official hunt going on. That is, he's got Iago, but he's not telling anyone yet, cuz that's not enough for him; he wants to know what makes Iago tick. So he lets him go. Malipiero uses Gentile to gleen what he can about Iago.

So the plot has some Shakespearean-like complexities at its core.

It's a cat-and-mouse story — the cat know exactly where the mouse is, and the mouse knows the cat is on its tail, but the cat waits for exactly the right moment to pounce, and the mouse plays to survive, and you're never really sure what the cat gets out of it. Is there really such a thrill in the hunt or is it simply playing, to the death — does it enjoy the game or is it merely acting according to its nature?

There are a lot of reasons I enjoyed Iago.

One. I'm loving historical Venice, its sounds and colours. This is directly related to my ongoing relationship with the Assassin's Creed video games, and reading this book was a reasonable substitute for the games, allowing me to immerse myself in that world through a different channel.

Two. It seems I may have my own personal Iago these days, whispering groundless suppositions in my Othello's ear. But by what motivation? Jealousy, cruelty, kindness, justice, amusement?

Three. I read this novel while watching people grieve. It served as a much-needed escape from funereal circumstances and as a reminder of some basic truths.

The loyalty and protection of those closest to you, I think, is what makes for true succor — a shield against the fears of the night and the perils of the world outside.

Mostly it made me wonder about our true natures. Do we always act as our selves, or can we be driven to deeds that are out of character? How? Which is our true self — the one in cool-headed repose or the one inflamed by passion? Do we betray our true selves under torture? People around me are saying things in their grief — I can't tell if it has muddied their contact with the world or if it has stripped bare something that is in their essence.

(With these questions I'm reminded of Louise Penny's A Trick of the Light, a completely different novel from this one, and a remarkably strong one in how it's holding up in my memory, but with a similar motivation — to dig at the roots of human nature.)

Reviews
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The New Republic
Washington Post
Winnipeg Free Press

I tend to agree with the reviewer of the Winnipeg Free Press piece:

It is a journey that ends, as it seems all post-Freudian accounts of evil must, with sexual trauma suffered in childhood.

This is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the novel, betraying as it does the most unsettling aspect of Shakespeare's play. Whereas Shakespeare's Othello reveals to us monstrosity disguised as mundanity, Snodin's Iago only manages to make the monstrous mundane.

From what I gather, if you know your Shakespeare, this book may disappoint you, but if you're like me, Iago may inspire you to approach its source.

Finding Shakespeare

Hamlet finally meets his maker in The Blast of War, Volume 2 of Kill Shakespeare (collecting issues 7–12).

The first volume, A Sea of Troubles, set the stage, bringing to life the premise that Shakespeare's creations have taken on a life of their own and are grappling with some metaphysical complexities. Are they bound by Shakespeare's quill (and what exactly is the nature of that bond), or is their will entirely free (and if so, where does that leave Shakespeare)? The plot is a question of resolving the balance of power — the bloodlustiness of Lady Macbeth and her demonic minions and the treachery of Richard III on the one hand, with Juliet, Othello, and Hamlet leading a kind of uprising against a meaningless existence on the other, essentially in defense of Shakespeare's honour.

This second volume see these factions do battle in an ultimate confrontation. But it's not all war. I was swept up in the love story: Romeo is alive after all. Will Juliet go back to him, or will she move forward with Hamlet?

Shakespeare turns out to be an alcoholic recluse wallowing in his own existential crisis. Hamlet has searched him out.

"Amazing. These people believe you their creator and yet thou art merely a drunkard. They deserve better. For this ale-soaked form deserves not my pity, nor even my scorn."

"Careful, Prince. I was not asked to be their — or your — maker. But know this: I most assuredly can unmake thee."

While the first volume stands for the novelty of its premise, I enjoyed the sequel even more for the strength of its story.

The video clip that follows features an interview with Kill Shakespeare's creators. It provides some insight on what went into its making, but it also gives you a taste of the story and the wonderful artwork.



There's some talk of adapting this work for film. Personally, I'd love to see this turned into a TV series: the Kill Shakespeare universe is wide open for countless potential adventures.

Reviews
Blogcritics
Clandestine Critic
Geeks of Doom
Grovel
PopMatters

************

I read this back in early December, but for various reasons haven't had the opportunity to post about it (or spend much time on the Internet at all) till now. It's a happy coincidence that since then, I've read David Snodin's Iago, another extrapolation of the life of a Shakespearean character beyond Bill's script (I'll write more about this novel later). It certainly complemented my reading of the comic, giving me a fuller appreciation of Iago — a character I know very little about (I've never read or seen Othello) — and how he fits among the villains in Shakespeare's world, and helped keep this comic book alive in my mind.

This to say: you don't need to know any Shakespeare at all to enjoy Kill Shakespeare, but (as with anything, I guess) the more you know, the richer it is.

Truth, beauty, genius

Erasmus Valentine had a fondness for women of a certain age, and that age was at least sixty. He loved their soft, stretched flesh, hanging off their arms like wings, and the look of surprise in their eyes when he made love to them. He loved their stiff gray hairs, which stuck straight out from their scalp and were often dyed a strange false shade of lavender or orange, and he loved their long beaklike noses. If he was particularly lucky, their cries of passion would even sound like squawks.

He was often successful in his amorous quests. Though sometime surprised, or confused, Valentine had loved many, many women of London, none younger than fifty-seven — and that one looked quited ancient for her age. But one bird had escaped his net, and it was the bird he wanted to catch more than any other: Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace herself. She was a different sort of bird. Ada had been famous for being wild and brilliant in her youth, and age hadn't tempered her with caution — as it often did — but with confidence. She still smoked cigars, gambled, and wrote tracts on the future of analytical engines with just as much fervor as — if not more than — she had when she was in her twenties. When her husband died thirty years ago in an accident involving the steam presses he made to shape wooden ceilings into cathedral-like patterns, she hadn't sought a new husband. Not out of grieving, but because she didn't see the need for one. She was independent. She laughed at bawdy jokes, and drank with the men after supper. And she had rejected all of Valentine's advances. But she was coming to Illyria today, and Valentine was determined to persevere.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace contributed to Charles Babbage's analytical engine. She is widely held to have been the first computer programmer.

Ada Lovelace also appears in All Men of Genius, first novel by Lev AC Rosen. But as should be clear from the excerpt above, it is not quite the same Ada Lovelace. This one is sixty-seven, a widow who smokes cigars and wins at poker.

But she is but a bit player in All Men of Genius.

This is steampunk. (And it's steampunk week at Tor.com.) Victorian London, horseless carriages that run on different principles than our own, mechanical prostheses, gears, a lot of clockwork, a kind of science that may resemble magic more than what has been borne out in our history.

Violet, age 17, wants to study science at Illyria College, but the school is (as the schools are in her day and age) male only. She applies under the name of her twin brother and gains entry. Now she has to go about in disguise.

All Men of Genius is said to be inspired by Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (or, What You Will) and Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. I read Twelfth Night for grade 13 English — I remember I made some clever comment about "Illyria" sounding like "delirium" — so I can attest to there being commonalities. Clearly, character names and plot devices have been liberally borrowed. I have not read Earnest — but, oh look, there it is on my shelf, can it be that I really haven't read it? — but an Internet review of the synopsis makes the similarities to this play clear as well.

This is a charming novel, about science, about girls doing science, and about beauty.

"What's so funny?"

"That all you should see in flowers is scientific principles," he said, "even when a man tried to show you their beauty."

"But that is their beauty," Violet said, pursing her lips. "Really, I don't know what it is with your gender, that they must divide science and beauty into separate fields. As if the stars and planets themselves are lovely, but to map the way they turn takes that away from them. In my opinion, the way a planet spins only adds to its beauty."

And it's about love, too. Love is bound to gum up the works.

Cross-dressing, mistaken identities, killer automata, invisible cats. The pacing is perfect. All Men of Genius is sweet and funny and full of joy.

Excerpt.

With a bare bodkin

Everything my daughter knows about Shakespeare she learned from watching Doctor Who. (And she's known it for a couple years already, since first that Shakespeare episode aired.)

She knows "To be or not to be," that he wrote comedies and tragedies, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," about the Globe Theatre, that he had a son Hamnet, who died, and that he wrote about witches. That may not sound like a lot, but it's enough to surprise grown-ups at brunch, and it's more than I knew at the age of 8 (it wasn't till grade 7 that I played the role of Polonius; although, there was that story we read in grade 2, about the girl who loved her father as much as meat loves salt, which sentiment was reason enough to disown her — oh, I loved that story). (Helena can also tell you about Charles Dickens, Vincent van Gogh, the destruction of Pompeii, and Madame de Pompadour, thank you, Doctor.)

This to say: I'm all for using popular culture as a vehicle to the classics. There's nothing so sacred about Shakespeare that a divide should be drawn to keep him unsullied. Let his blood mingle with the rest of our entertainments — let him be popular culture.

So I was thrilled to receive a copy of Kill Shakespeare, graphic novel, created and written by Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Cor, and drawn by Andy Belanger.



Think Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next world, only less tongue in cheek and populated exclusively by Shakespearean characters. The politics are of a more vicious time, and the characters' awareness that they are literary creations has a more metaphysically somber tone.

Kill Shakespeare, as you might divine by the title, involves a plot to kill Shakespeare.

As summed up in the foreword by Darwyn Cooke, "All of Shakespeare's 'creations' live in a kingdom ruled by their deity: the Bard himself. The good and evil forces within this kingdom are in a race to possess the Bard's mythical quill — the source of all power and life."

It starts off with a touch of Rosencrantz, a bit of Guildenstern (á la Tom Stoppard), and pirates! Then Hamlet's Act IV takes a different turn.

Before you know it, Hamlet agrees to do the bidding of Richard III, on the promise that his father be returned to life.

Oh, and, as the witches tell it, there's a prophecy about the Shadow King:

The father's gated shall open swing,
A welcome to the Shadow King.
The two shall clash and blood will pour,
And things that were shall be no more.

Soon enough, we encounter Falstaff (about which all I know is from the post-apocalyptic Mad Maxified version of Henry IV, part something, I saw staged, one high school field trip), and Juliet and Othello and Lady MacBeth, among others.

There's enough action, threats, blood, and double-crossing to equal any of Shakespeare's histories.

The artwork is expressive, but dark, almost unrelentingly so, like the pace, that I wish Hamlet might've dallied more with characters from the comedies. I suppose Shrewsbury is meant to reference Katherine, and there's a lovely Adriana, but if there were any further invocation of the Bard's lighter works meant to give respite, it was lost on me. (Also, I did have trouble keeping a couple of the characters straight, but then, I'm not a particularly practiced reader of comic books — or graphic novels, or whatever the preferred sensitive yet serious-while-unpretentious term of choice is these days.)

I'm not convinced the characters are true to the natures Shakespeare devised for them. I have to agree with Cooke in his encapsulation of Hamlet as "emo douche," and I'm not sure he'd really want his father back. And while Shakespeare's Juliet does show a great deal of strength and courage, I'm sceptical that she has it in her to rally the people behind her to rise up. (When I heard the people calling for Lady Capulet, I was sure they meant her mother.)

Also, I'm not entirely sure what the rules are: If you die in Act II or earlier, well, you're really dead, in this world too it seems. But if you don't die till the final scenes these new creators are OK with pretending those pages were never written. I mean: at what point are Shakespeare's characters plucked to populate this world? And what about Ophelia? But I guess Hamlet, at sea with R&G, beset by pirates, doesn't know about her yet.

So it may sound like I have a lot of little gripes with this work, but it's been a gripey kind of week, and I wouldn't take me too seriously on these points. The fact is: I ate it up, and I'm on the lookout for subsequent volumes.

It's original, and gives new life, and liveliness, to a set of dusty old names that not many people other than dead academics pay much attention to.

I can't wait till my daughter discovers this book on my shelf.

Official Kill Shakespeare website.

The creators of Kill Shakespeare are at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC on February 15. (Really, Ivonna, you should go.)

Monsterpiece Theater presents

Hamlet! Words, words, words:



It don't get classier than this. Me love Danish!

Full fathom five

A couple weeks ago we made an evening of Shakespeare in the park.

I understood nothing. I still have pretty much no idea what The Tempest is about.



The set was kind of beautiful in a minimalist kind of way: shades of sand. The acting, in my humble opinion, was fairly weak. In part this was brought into relief by the setting, not the usual crates-for-a-stage on a flat piece of land, but a steel and concrete amphitheatre on a man-made lake — voices simply don't carry well.

On top of this, most of the actors are bilingual, with noticeable accents. And the accents are varied, giving the play an uneven texture. I wonder if some of the cast doesn't perform more strongly in French.

These drawbacks impeded my understanding of the play. The fullest impression I have about The Tempest is what I picked up from John: the idea of God as castaway. Through this filter I managed to make some sense of the language and dynamics, to create in my own head a narrative that had some meaning for me.

The thing about an event is that the circumstances, context, and sideshows add so much colour to the main attraction. In that respect, it was a wonderful evening. We watched the ducks in the lake. We eavesdropped on, and even participated in, spontaneous conversations among strangers in line. A young man got off his bike and climbed a tree to swing from a high branch by his knees and monkey around a bit before getting back on his bike and riding off. We heard a Latin jazz band playing on the other side of the park.

Then the play started. (I was scolded by park personnel for taking pictures. As fate would have have it, the resulting pictures are blurry and unremarkable.)

We had popcorn.

We talked about how Lost might've sprang from a Tempest concept.

Everything Helena knows about Shakespeare she knows from Doctor Who. She recognized Sycorax.

During intermission, the cast popped out to beg for donations. Caliban pranced around Helena a bit — she played at being terrorized, but was thrilled. Not many theatre-goers have been tickled by Caliban.

So, for Shakespeare in the park, Helena stayed up late; she wanted to stay to the end. We did, and we loved it.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

It was Laurie Anderson I became acquainted with first. "Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Years later, I learned a few things from Peter Greenaway.

This summer, Repercussion Theatre presents Shakespeare's The Tempest.

In Montreal's parks, July 22 through August 17 (choose your language). See you there.

Monsterpiece Theater presents

The Taming of the Shoe



"To thine own self be shoe."