In my last entry, you may remember that I alluded to “environmental” Shakespeare. This may have been the most bizarre experience I had in theatre. But also, as you’ll see, one of the most exhilarating, too.

There’s an arts colony that convenes every summer up in the Michigan woods, on the shore of a lake. Each year, the artists focus on a particular medium – sculpture, painting, etc. One summer they contacted “Harry” with an interesting proposition: we would select one of Shakespeare’s plays, and the artists would design the costumes, and also the sets for each scene, scatter them throughout the woods, map out a circuitous route between them, and we would perform the play over the course of a day, moving from set to set and having the audience follow us. The play would begin in the morning with breakfast at the main meeting house, and end there in the evening with a banquet. The ticket price would include a portable picnic lunch, sunscreen, bug spray, a map of the route, and the use of a lightweight folding camp chair. The stage manager, easily identifiable in Hawaiian shirt, cargo pants and pith helmet, would blow a whistle at intervals when a scene was about to start, and blow it again to signal the end of a scene, when everyone (actors and audience) would pick up and move to the next location.

The first play we chose was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I must say that this concept worked wonderfully for it – you had the “lovers,” the “fairies” and the “rustics/mechanicals/clowns,” all of them encountering each other and different obstacles in the woods. We didn’t get to walk the route ahead of time, so we were following the map with the audience, and saw the sets for the first time during the actual performance. Some of those sets were absolutely magical – incorporating giant handmade spider webs, fabric, glitter, wood, metals, gemstones, ceramics, etc. Everybody – actors and audience -- had to be pretty fit, and the stage manager carried a first aid kit along with her other gear, which came in handy when Puck sat on a hornet’s nest, Hippolyta sprained her ankle, and Mustardseed fell out of a tree. I played Hermia, and lost my footing on the edge of a steep dune during the lovers’ quarrel scene, cartwheeling about 100 feet down and landing with a big splash (and sand in every oriface) in the lake. Try swimming in an Elizabethan costume sometime (or on second thought, don’t try that at home). At one point, I played a scene in a moving rowboat, shouting my lines while the audience followed along on shore. I felt sorry for the scantily-clad fairies – they were getting eaten alive by mosquitoes that no bug spray would deter.

The scene where the lovers have the spell taken off and are awakened from their “sleep” took place in a dank clearing near the edge of the lake. Just as the scene was about to start, I felt something small and heavy fall with a wet “plop!” on my chest. I “awoke” to find a large tree frog perched on me, staring me straight in the eye from less than 6 inches away. With difficulty I restrained myself from screaming, and remember reflecting that actually, I had had worse looking dates.

We subsequently did “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It” in this way – I still think they were some of the best Shakespeare productions I had ever done, or seen.

Oh, I mentioned in an earlier entry about a method for getting over-plucked (and in my case, Nair-ed) eyebrows to grow back. I was leafing through a dusty book at my local library one rainy day – an unintentionally hilarious tome written by actress Joan Crawford called “My Way of Life.” This arrogant literary gem contained all kinds of helpful hints, including how to pack a suitcase, arrange furniture, and, if I remember correctly, why you shouldn’t use wire hangers. (!) The part that caught my attention was a page that had side-by-side glamour shots of Ms. Crawford from the early 1930s and the late 1940s. Her eyebrows looked strikingly different, and she wrote that she used “yellow Vaseline and castor oil mixed together and rubbed into the brows against the grain nightly.” This somehow stimulated the hair follicles and got the brows to grow back. Well, I thought, since nothing else had worked and I was sick of looking like a rabbit…I tried it, and wow! A veritable rain forest, in no time at all! Pretty soon I was looking like Brooke Shields (well, my brows were, anyway!).

Hmmm…wonder if it would work as a cure for baldness…