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I had thought parents’ night at Starbuck’s kindergarten was for the kids to show us their artwork, which hung around the walls. They’d made enough fruit salad earlier in the day to fill a gigantic punch bowl, and the bananas had gone black. There were also six baby carrots and six celery sticks. It was long after dinner, nearly the kids’ bedtime, and none of the parents touched the food. The kids served themselves neat, perfect portions and stood eating them from paper plates, like small faculty members at an honors banquet.

In reality, the event was for parents to meet other parents. Montessori is big on socialization, and the teacher told us the kids had been practicing all week to introduce us. Every child was to make one social introduction: “Mother, Father, I’d like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Churm, Starbuck’s father and mother. Mrs. Churm is in international education. Mr. Churm, apparently, is some sort of online diarist. Mr. and Mrs. Churm, these are my parents. They’re rich.”

No one made a single introduction, and we chatted with the couple next to us. At the end of 45 minutes, the teacher asked the kids to sit in a circle. She asked if everything went as planned. The kids all nodded yes. We parents all smiled indulgently, affectionately. The teacher smiled and praised us.

One of the first lessons of the classroom is that not collaborating is to be made to stay longer. Having relearned our lesson on reaching common goals, we happily went home and slept well.

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Inner Station (AP)

Author Roy Kesey flew from Beijing, China, this week to read from the book Birthday Zoo, by Deborah Lee Rose and Lynn Musinger. The audience at Hinterland University was large, appreciative, and enthusiastic.

Here, Mr. Kesey imitates the tapir who tidies up after the titular party. Following the reading, there were waffles and cold glasses of milk.

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Next week, there will likely be a three-day strike by service workers on the Hinterland campus, and I don’t know yet how many of my classes might be affected. (Evidently, even the union’s members will be given only 48 hours notice of an action.) The union has asked everyone not to cross picket lines, and the graduate student organization e-mailed all of us to ask for our cooperation. The grad organization acknowledged it’s unlikely departments will cancel teaching and research responsibilities in case of strike, but it hopes “alternative forms of support” might be found.

The union will do something quite smart: Instead of picketing individual buildings (a tactic that sometimes alienates users of those buildings), they’ll picket the entire campus. The perimeter they’ve chosen is five miles or more in length, and they can’t possibly hold it with their limited manpower, but they don’t need to; anyone who steps foot on campus those three days will be crossing their line.

I come from an old union family, which I’ve written about elsewhere, and I can’t recall ever crossing a picket line. (I still have memories of going with my mom down to the factory in my town and seeing strikers throwing rocks at semis driving through picket lines to pick up product for market. “Scabs!” the crowd shouted, and thud-thud-thud went the rocks.) In addition, I sent ethnography students into service workplaces around campus last year, and some of the stories they brought back make me even more sympathetic to union members’ requests.

So I’ll do everything I can do to support the strike. But if administration demands that no instructor cancel classes, I am personally unprotected.

If there was ever a group that needed organization, it’s adjuncts. A number of attempts have been made here, but the most recent fizzled when a professional organizer said that some percentage of all faculty would have to support unionization for us to be represented, and tenure-path faculty wouldn’t support it.

I wonder if students would come to class at the Thai restaurant down from our house….

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I think I was supposed to be Count Vronsky from Anna Karenina. I don’t remember who the cat went as. Philip Roth, I think.

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Doesn’t have to be the Chancellor. Could be. Drives a Beemer. Big smile, pants are too tight at the waist, too long at the heels. Afraid to go to the optometrist for a checkup, has noticed each of his eyes sees a different quality of light. His right one sees warm tones, happy days; his left sees cold, bluish. Found an alumni donor in Hong Kong who’s got five mil for the endowment if presented an acrylic trophy at a dinner. Remember to get the trophy laser-etched with a picture of the donor’s college. Remember to make the evil eye smile at the reception.

Doesn’t matter. Imagine Ron Jeremy, who passes on the street in London at Christmas, on his way to Trafalgar to see the sights. He’s alone. Shows up that night on BBC 2 and says rather sadly in interview that his industry is “just bubbies.” Seems like an average guy. Has a master’s in special ed from Queen’s College. Sidesteps the question about auto-fellatio to talk about his love for his father.

Pick anybody. Margaret Thatcher, then. Wakes, breaks her fast, performs her ablutions. Instead of a proper lunch, nibbles Ritz dinosaurs and string cheese and watches a little CNN. Nice hot cuppa. (Milk, not lemon.) Wonders what advances have been made in ice cream since she left J. Lyons all those years ago. All in all, crystallography was better then meeting with Reagan.

Easy enough.

Now: all these students on this campus. Thousands, tens of thousands. Can imagination stretch that far? (The task makes dull.) Schoolwork, the job, responsibilities to family, chorus practice, a nose raw from tissues. (Livening up.) Bridesmaid dress didn’t fit. Girlfriend stared back at him with unnerving eyes that never blinked, her head tilted back so. (On to something.) Waking in a darkened room to the glint of silver from hairbrush, mirror bevel, perfume bottle, dark lamp. Mother’s hand, laid gently on the back of the neck, feels like fire. The most unknowable the bulk of their days.

None of it important. Also, really really important.

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Two weeks ago we went to see The Tempest at the University of Illinois’ Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. It was one of the most amazing aesthetic experiences I’ve ever had. Two previous posts on this can be found here and here.

I must admit I’ve never before gone twice to the same production of a play. I could blame cost, time, or the difficulties of getting to the theater, but it seems more likely that something from my past is stuck in me, like a broken elevator in the tower of self. A certain American mindset thinks live theater is an extravagance anyway, and to see more than one performance of the same production would be like gorging yourself on a second hot-fudge sundae after church while wearing furs and sitting on a beggar. Who has no ice-cream.

(My mother-in-law, whom we asked to baby-sit, couldn’t understand why we would want to see The Tempest two nights in a row either. She’s a Scot. So let’s blame Protestantism, then.)

Recent Nobel laureate Doris Lessing wrote in a 1992 op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is ‘about’ something or other.… That a work of the imagination has to be ‘really’ about some problem is… an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.”

The Tempest has been interpreted as really being about imperialism, or the play’s own processes, or that it’s Shakespeare’s farewell to the troops. As we again took our seats onstage on our rusty oilcans, Mrs. Churm and I agreed we were simply excited to be embarking on another human drama.

A little closer attention to the playbill, this time. Gregory Thompson, director, and the cast had every credential an occasional Shakespeare-goer might long for: Royal Shakespeare, Royal Court, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Bard College, Bath, BBC TV and radio, several motion pictures, etc. AandBC Theatre Company began to tour The Tempest in 1999, at Canterbury and Lincoln’s Inn, then took it to Prague, Poland, Russia, Romania, Trinidad, Hong Kong…and Wisconsin and Illinois. David Fielder (Prospero) was the only actor to have been with the show since the start, and he said that cast change had been “a blessing,” because it let him reinvent himself continuously in response to the rest of the ensemble. Nine of 12 players were new this time around, and they had only 12 days to prepare for opening. (Mr. Fielder has been a working actor for 35 years, been in 200 plays, and he worked with Beckett in Paris. He’s also on the board at Shared Experience.)

The second night got off to a slower start. Prospero’s voice was thick, and the ensemble strained to do their Ariel lifts and move to their next positions. They were panting almost immediately. I wondered if there had been a raucous cast party the night before, but decided against it, since I had not been invited. The enormous nylon balloon tethered to the floor fit the lunar fantasy, but I noticed for the first time that it glared a little and wished the light inside could be made warmer to indicate day (or forgiveness) and colder for night (and Caliban’s rage).

But I quickly fell into the action, which took place among us, next to us, above, behind and violently through us, the audience. One minute, Prospero was sitting next to me; next I heard his voice far overhead and looked up at him in the wings of the space, and wondered how he could have gotten up there so quickly.

As I said before, Ariel, the sprite that serves Prospero, was played by 10 people at once, and it caused a lot of noise and motion. They spoke sometimes as Greek chorus, sometimes as individuals. When Prospero summoned them to disperse the buffoons plotting against him, their combined fury was so great, and there was such a great frenzy among us, that I said—much too loudly—a line from the movie Night at the Museum: “Better run, Dum-Dum!” I never do this. The Churms are not theater-talkers.

The same cast members also became the harpy in the play, one person on another’s shoulders and the others linking arms. Together they swayed and made a grabbing motion, shouting, hissing, and snarling at us, since the character they were angry with was behind us somewhere. Who could turn around to look at him? Amy Finegan (the only American cast member) had composed powerful Gregorian-sounding chants for the ensemble, as well as a cappella solos and harmonies, and when Peter Kenney soared from his normal range to harmonize with her in falsetto, it was mind-blowing.

The crowd was bigger and livelier on the second night. The mean age of the audience had dropped by 40 years, and more light was reflected from more upturned faces. Three high school girls giggled and made faces and stuck out their tongues at Lord Stephano (Peter Kenney), after he did a spit-take and got one of them wet. Mr. Kenney obviously noticed their antics and came back to speak a few of his more threatening lines in their faces. When that didn’t fix the disruption, he spoke to them at intermission. After the break, the rest of the cast seemed to spend a lot of time around the girls, and they got jostled and looked scared. By the last half-hour, though, the presence of the play itself had broken through their need for adolescent show, and they seemed concerned with the characters and engaged with the drama. (I remembered being jostled and struck the previous night; how didst I offend thee, Caliban?)

Shakespeare’s lyricism is often made of hard nouns and action verbs. And amidst those blessings of union, there’s thuggery. (It’s odd, feeling so deeply for Caliban, who follows a dolt just because a new master is better than the old. With Caliban [the excellent Jem Wall] I felt eager and then impatient for Stephano to kill Prospero. But when Stephano, finally drunk enough to be murderous, made his face competent, I only feared for Prospero. This all happened four feet away.)

This production made the most of Shakespeare’s physicality. During the course of the play, Caliban licked an audience member’s foot and rubbed his sweaty, grimy cheek with the back of someone else’s hand. Alonso, King of Naples (Richard Heap) breathed hard on the top of my head. A vaporous spit-take by Caliban caught an older man in jacket and tie—professor emeritus?—full in the face. (He grimaced the rest of the play.) Prospero split a thumbnail climbing up the biggest folding ladder in the world then came down and ran around the island of us at top speed, yelling incantations.

Director Gregory Thompson described his unusual staging as practical process, not sudden insight. Originally the play was to take place in front of a small audience on the stage. Then, it was decided to move actors around the perimeter of the audience, and only after that had been tried did they see that acting among the audience was easier and more effective.

It also kept everyone within the island of light under the balloon. Thompson liked the idea of “shared light” for actors and audience, as it was in the Globe Theatre, because one consequence of technology in the theater, he said, has been to distance us—audience at a distance from the stage, actors at emotional distance from audience due to bright lights in their eyes. His innovation was to overcome the problems of technology by using technology in a new way. (The balloon was made for European police to use at accident scenes.)

Similarly, the rusty can-seats came about in small steps. The parent company of Guinness sponsored a theatrical event and left behind several dozen big containers painted black to look like their beer cans, for promotional purposes. Thompson added cork tops and used them as seats, with the idea that they would look like tree stumps on the island. But that looked too grim, he thought, and with some paint made them into “oil cans” washed up after the shipwreck.

Most of us won’t stand in the mud with the rabble and the chickens to watch a play down at the Globe anymore, and not every play should allow us as far in as this one did—there’s something to be said for convention sometimes. But there are some experiences you can’t get any other way. Film versions of Shakespeare can be very good, but the technology’s limitations—flatness, graininess, our sudden awareness that the film was made in another context and with a different time’s technologies—are distracting and limiting. Reading the plays, hearing a teacher talk about them, or reading critical essays about them are also other things, often diminishments.

This may be a test of art; it resists possession. Even the form I value most—writing—is an event in the mind that begins to lose detail the moment our eyes move beyond a sentence. We’re left with an emotional tone but already have forgotten how the writer scattered the words—corn, wine, oil—through a paragraph where we would register the chord. We re-read to check memory against the text’s reality, to make the experience more immediate.

There seems to be a movement on to take back drama from the giant auditoriums, from dinner theaters with clattering cups and dessert service, to make things more immediate. Black-box minimalism is one attempt, of course, as are recent productions in old houses and forest preserves, the actors racing from room to room, or clearing to glade, to deliver lines as the audience moves through the spaces. In our hunger for meaningful theater, we even find potato farming dramatic.

Middle-class Americans in the nineteenth century loved Shakespeare as they would a contemporary, which is nearly puzzling to us now. (It was also the era of the Chautauqua, and the lecture tours that kept Twain solvent.) They knew the language is not gushing and purple; it’s hard and glittering, and direct experience with it returns us to our common world.

For me, the experience of this production was “about” that thing most ethereal, the poetic imagination, becoming hard reality. (Prospero uses magic to produce the hardest of results—a return to Milan, to power, and the advantageous marriage of his daughter.) In an age where our wars and our fools get equal attention, and the fools running our wars believe in irreality, Shakespeare abides.

And now for the bad news: There are no more performances in this tour. (Send complaints about me stringing you along to: Doug Lederman, Editor, Inside Higher Ed.) I kept asking Mr. Thompson in various ways about this, disbelieving, until I think he found me amusing. But bewitchments end, and we must ship for Naples and get on with the marriage and running the country. Let’s hope AandBC returns to our American island, soon, for a wider run, but not for more than a hundred people at a time.

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Thoreau said “some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day.” Call it reactionary (Rory will, though he’ll recant privately) to regret the loss of old tropes, but I often see young writers whose work suffers because they have no metaphors with which to think.

Many haven’t had much direct contact with the natural world. They’ve never seen a snake eat another snake, or a grackle pull strips of red muscle from the wren under its foot. They’ve never raised a crop through a tedious season, or been forced to keep swimming because to stop would mean death.

Protected by technologies, they’ve never known inescapable cold or heat; supported by affluence, they’ve never known real hunger or thirst. Many have only worked fast food or retail, occupations short on specialized processes and tools. They ride in cars sealed against breeze (who can take a 75 mile-per-hour breeze?) and road noise; they run on treadmills in the corner of a gym, iPods turned up loud so they can’t hear their own panting, or the thump of blood.

Last week in writing workshop I had three students like this. The first had written a story about kids fooling around near a “mansion.” There were few details—a problem in itself—but what was there was false. I felt it, because the neighborhood didn’t sound right for a mansion, whatever that might mean. During Socratic questioning, I revealed that the writer meant, simply, a Victorian house, though he’d never heard the term. How big was it? I asked. How old? Was it frame or brick? Did it have gingerbread?

He didn’t understand. I explained how my neighborhood was a mix of various styles, built over 150 years. I did a bit on post-and-beam versus balloon frames in our area, and how the former required craftsmanship that the latter didn’t, which meant expense back then to build it and, paradoxically, less demand for it now, and…ah, yes, we do need to continue class. I suggested he at least walk around Inner Station to try to find the words he’d need to describe the neighborhood he had in mind. Fictional characters, like the living, have a hard time living in abstractions.

The second student desperately needed the details for two characters cooking a meal together. “I don’t how people make food,” he said, looking surprised and rueful at his own admission. “Come to my house and I’ll show you how to cook a meal,” I said. The class laughed because they thought I was playing the fool. I often play the fool, but I meant it. Cooking has taught me more ways to think about writing than all the how-to books combined.

The third student had (what I consider) a problem in his writing common to many young men in my classes—a fetish for cartoonish, melodramatic violence. It boasted a pornography of rich details about shattering the kneecaps of a guy stretched across a table, yet didn’t consider human pain as a topic, let alone take up the emotions involved in revenge. As I do sometimes when I get frustrated with this tendency, I recounted how young men in love with the idea of violence stood in lines around the block to enlist for the Great War. In London, Paris, Berlin, no one wanted to miss the grand adventure. It would be a lark, and they’d be home in a few months with tales to tell their children someday. Several million dead later—nearly a generation of potential leaders, scientists, artists, teachers, parents, wiped out—those young men didn’t regard it merrily. And I didn’t say this, but I cannot imagine anyone who’s known pain—anyone human, that is—writing lovingly about torture. Our bodies are our first metaphors.

Everybody in the academy wants to talk about The Other. Want to talk about Hegel. Want to talk about Sartre. I want to talk about the carrot.

I don’t mean those slick little buggers the size of my pinky fingers, those carrots bred for the lathe that planes them smooth and skinless. They’re oversweet and tender, and I eat them by the pound while I’m blogging. I made the mistake recently of putting them in a stew, where they blanched and grew spongy.

I mean real carrots, which teach you about hierarchies of force, most of them beyond your control. A real carrot—I’m eating one now—is shocking. It’s what it is: A texture all its own, flavor that’s not-quite-earth and not-quite-woods, with the strong aroma of anise. Like a real tomato, so hard to find in stores now, it’s food for those who want to taste life.

This is probably why our society has been sold on the idea of paying a 5000% markup on bottles of water. Most of them taste like something, from Nestle’s Ice Mountain with its aftertaste of vomit, to Aquafina, which tastes like it was pumped from a cold well through cast iron (and actually makes me nostalgic).

This is what we know, so it’s how we think.

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I’m in Chicago, since Crazy Larry finally got me a comp ticket to the play he’s in. It’s a good deal. For 30 bucks, I disrupted my family’s life, drove several hours, got a hotel room, and will have bought dinner, drinks, breakfast and lunch tomorrow, and two tanks of gas.

Before the show, we went to the Scottish pub where Mrs. Churm and I had our first date. It looked exactly the same as it did 14 years ago, and we ate well, and I drank a cold pint, thinking about the path from that night to now.

Our waiter was a comical-looking young man who introduced himself as Caruso and said he’s been in the States for a year. When he found out Crazy Larry is an actor, he said he’s an actor himself, in Mexico, and his best friend back home is Christine, the famous telenovela actress. Larry asked if he acted here, and he said no, but he might take some classes.

He said he came here to learn English and maybe go to school. “Are you going to school?” Larry asked. “No,” Caruso said. “Are you planning to go?” “No,” he said. He said he might move to Miami, where they love Mexican actors and many many production studios would like to hire him.

When Larry told him I teach English, he said he also plans to write a book on the illegal immigrant experience. It’ll blow the whole scene wide open. I asked if he knew that community, and he said no, he doesn’t like the Mexican community, and he tries to stay away from all that, because they’re bad.

He confided to us that he’s gay—“Oh, really?” Larry and I said in unison—but that he doesn’t like the gay Latin community either, because they’re not nice to each other. Larry had to leave first, to help move props, and I chatted with Caruso a little more as the dinner crowd came in. He told me to bring my family to the pub one day, and I promised I would. I walked up the street, enjoying being back in the city. The din and taillights were a comfort, and a big gust blew scraps of trash around like flower petals.

A riddle, I thought: What is an actor who doesn’t act, a student who doesn’t matriculate, a writer who doesn’t write? I passed lighted shops and bars with no one in them but their proprietors, who were reading or staring at TVs, and often looked up hopefully. A woman sat near the big window at the front of a nail salon and pulled her hair back into a ponytail in a surprisingly intimate gesture. I was thoroughly enjoying my night of live theater.

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My friend Chip wants to be my life coach. He said those words. When I asked what he meant, he said he has the objectivity to help me make important decisions—mostly writing- and career-related—that will “get you where you want to be.”

I rarely put good advice to use, let alone that of a guy who orders three entrees when he goes to IHOP so he can be sure he’s not missing out on something.

Today he wanted to discuss why, if half-a-million unique visitors came to my blog last month as I claimed, few readers left comments. I repeated some things that a couple of big-time bloggers told me about their readers, such as how nobody left comments unless they were asked to talk about their own lives. I said my own feeling was that, because my blog is the Sunday magazine of Inside Higher Ed—human-interest stories, kittens playing with string, first-prize pumpkins—readers don’t need or want interactive, and that’s fine.

But Chip realized I don’t have an e-mail address listed and went nuts. “Are you a moron?” he cried. “How could you do that in this day and age?”

“What?” I said. “If someone wants to talk to me, they can leave a comment. Or write the editors. Besides, lots of people write me…. My e-mail is up at McSweeney’s, and I’ve put it in several blog posts. And I have a MySpace page, which I wrote about in my blog, like, six months ago. Or so.” I was starting to feel uncertain.

“People don’t want to leave you comments in some public space. They want to feel like they have a personal connection with you. And they’re not going to dig through your archives looking for the address. Oh my god; I’ve never heard of such a thing!” He began to sob.

If he’s correct, I apologize. It hadn’t occurred to me. I’ll put my e-mail address at the end of this post for now, and we’ll try to get it up more prominently soon. I’d love to hear more from you. Write me to say Chip was right or wrong; write me to say hi. Write me and tell me about your life, if you want, and I’ll tell you about my hopes, dreams, desires, and the extra head that seems to be growing out of my spine.

If you tell me Chip was right, I might have to consider him for the life coach position, and he knows it. He’s been telling me to visit some big-cat rescue farm he heard about—no doubt hoping I’ll be mauled in usefully comical ways—and to write an article about it, and your support is just the thing he needs to press his case. It’s for my own good.

Please write to: OChurm@aol.com

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Last Thursday I was already worn out by early afternoon, and when I had let my last class go, I listened to Mrs. Churm’s message in disbelief. If I remembered, she said, we had theater tickets, and not in town, but at the University of Illinois’ Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. I hadn’t remembered.

Not getting out much is a vicious circle, and eventually the prospect of having to partake of night life begins to sound—to tired parents who often fall asleep themselves while putting small children to bed at eight o’clock—like more work. Then again, we told ourselves, who didn’t have a long day? Even Starbuck and Wolfie’s babysitter was beat from two midterms and a paper. We would make it.

So Mrs. Churm and I left campus early, got dinner for the boys ahead of time, laid out pajamas on their beds, found some games and a desperation video for the babysitter, and hoped for the best, since we wouldn’t be back until the middle of the night. The drive to the University of Illinois wasn’t exactly relaxing (the place is surrounded by a hundred miles of corn and soybeans), and by the time we got to the arts center, there wasn’t much time for the civilized drink we’d imagined. I had to gulp a fine four-dollar scotch.

As we stood in the lobby, waiting to enter the Tryon Festival Theater, Mrs. Churm asked if I remembered too that the audience would sit onstage—on oil cans, she’d heard—for the two-and-a-half hours of the play, while the players performed among us.

I said it was a rotten trick that she never told me these things ahead of time; she knew I had a bad back from serving our country and just liked to see me suffer. She replied hotly that I thought that just because I was blogger I didn’t have to keep “unimportant things” in my “delicate brain,” such as “what [she] told me three hours ago, and so on.” We got a quickee divorce from a judge standing behind us in line, then were re-married, and when the velvet rope dropped, we marched arm-in-arm down the aisle, as full of hope as little children.

We’ve seen some goofy productions of Shakespeare over the years, ones that tried too hard to be innovative: One of the Richards set in an unidentified but weirdly gorgeous fascist realm, for instance (could Hitler’s costume designer still be alive? I wondered), or Romeo and Juliet set during the American Civil War. (Enter Southern general: “Ah say, O brother Montague, gimme thy hand, Suh. This here is muh daughter’s jointure, for no more kin ah dee-mand.”)

The Tempest, you’ll remember, is a comedy/romance. The deposed Duke of Milan, Prospero, has been marooned with his daughter, Miranda, on an island. Over the last dozen years, Prospero read much—there was no cable access—and became a sorcerer. When his enemies (including the brother who usurped him) sail by, he raises a storm and sinks their ship. The crew sleeps in suspended animation under the sea, while those who plotted against him are washed ashore, where he can deal with them. Eventually all are reconciled, Miranda falls in love with the King of Naples’ son, and everyone is bound for home to live happily ever after.

The first thing we saw as we came down toward the stage, through the hundreds of plush auditorium-style seats we wouldn’t be using, was the white balloon, about eight feet in diameter, tethered to the center of the stage. It glowed intensely from within and was perfectly round, like a moon. It loomed over several dozen short seats that looked like dappled birch logs set on end. The costumed actors walked around and wouldn’t let us sit down “until the bell rang.”

Gregory Thompson, the young director, jumped on a plank bench and said that we, the audience, would serve as Prospero’s island and were islands to ourselves. He’s a smart-looking Brit with a dry sense of humor, and he took his time pointing to various seats (they were indeed rusty 10-gallon cans with cork circles on top), saying, “That’s a good seat. That’s a good one too. Here…is an excellent seat.” Then he asked if there were questions and rang a ship’s bell. The crowd was older but raced to be directly under the balloon.

We sat, closely enough to touch each other, under the artificial moon, with all the ropes and pulleys and stacked chairs and soundboards and lighting computers visible around us in the bay wings. The space was maybe five stories high, and the ceiling way up there was catwalk, with something more above it. The ensemble would use the entire space, including the backstage galleries 20 feet above us, the empty seating in the auditorium, and the balconies; they even left through the theater doors and spoke lines outside. Most of all, they were among us.

It’s a living theater I’ve never experienced before. The lights got cut off just before the play’s start, and the sounds of crashing seas and shouting sailors filled the air. When the moon’s cold glare—the only source of light—came on again, everyone was in oilskins and swayed and teetered and yelled from the plank benches in our midst, while other cast members held long poles, which they picked up at our feet, to simulate the ship’s rails. The boatswain ran through us, pushing and blowing a whistle. It was dizzying. Magically, the scene melted away, and Prospero (David Fielder, the only cast member who’s been with the production from the start) began that marvelous and obvious exposition, which always makes me wonder how Shakespeare gets away with it.

Over the course of the play, the actors jostled old ladies, hid between us, did spit-takes that sprayed over the audience, picked up a child (the son of Krannert Center Director Mike Ross, I believe) and carried him around, and Lord Stephano (the wonderful Peter Kenney) picked up a girl’s coat and wore it like a stole. They used us, picking up a man’s arm to look at his wristwatch when the line was about time’s passage, or rubbing someone’s bald head when the discussion was the “barren patches” on the island. I caught a serious elbow in the back from the feral (yet dignified) Caliban (Jem Wall), and a slap upside the back of my head by Amy Finegan, playing, at the time, the ship’s master. I suspect much of this was on purpose. (If I were one of them and saw a big guy taking Churmish interest, I’d also see how far I could push him to involvement.)

Tom McGovern, as Antonio, Prospero’s usurping brother, spent a lot of time near me. With his high collar and epaulets, and his sharp, haughty face, he looked like a smaller bird of prey, a kestrel hawk. I flatter myself—don’t I always?—that he stayed close because I was so into it, not because he was blocked to be there, and that he was feeding on my energy. At one point, frozen by sorcery, he had to stand for a long period, immobile but emoting. Most of the audience was looking at Prospero instead, so I turned and looked up at him—he was so close I had to look way up, despite his short stature—and a tear rolled down his cheek. It was heartbreaking. (Mr. McGovern could play a very convincing Napoleon, by the way.)

Other than the staging (and the balloon), the most obvious difference in this production was the Ariel decision. Ariel is the airy spirit who serves Prospero by spying on his enemies and pulling tricks. In this production, the single part was played simultaneously by 10 people. They all knew the lines and the Folio punctuation, allowing them to speak singly, in pairs, or in unison without assignment. “Do you love me, Master?” three of them call to Prospero; “Do you love me?” another adds a beat later, then the rest, irregularly, “Love me, Master...Do you love me?..Love me?” They popped up in force with breathy exhalations like a wind gust, and dropped out of sight, disappearing among us. The effect was beautiful and terrifying.

Mr. Thompson said that with only two weeks before performances, he couldn’t find the right person to play Ariel, since she/he/it needed to be “airy,” and so on. He considered casting Amy Finegan, the only American in the cast, in the part, but found his way instead to the idea of a multi-bodied Ariel, which could be everywhere and nowhere at once. (Ms. Finegan is lithe, not airy. She reminds me of Tilda Swinton, to the extent that both can play female characters with a genuine, even chilling, sense of threat.)

One of the most powerful points in the play—not the one I’d expected to react to—is in Act IV. The goddess Iris has called the nymphs “to celebrate a contract of true love.” Iris says:

You sun-burn’d sicklemen, of August weary,
Come hither from the furrow, and be merry:
Make holiday: your rye-straw hats put on,
And these fresh nymphs encounter every one
In country footing.

The stage directions say, “Enter certain Reapers, properly habited; they join with the Nymphs in a graceful dance….”

The cast was dressed mostly alike in black pants and white shirts. They filed into the island of the audience, making their blowing noise in unison, which now became the sharp exhale of exertion. They were making a big gesture with their arms that I didn’t get at first. It looked like the two-handed karate chop Elvis used to do onstage. As they fanned out and advanced through us, I realized their hands were holding invisible scythes. They were harvesting us, reaping us like stalks of wheat, and I, with recent deaths in my family, wept.

At the end, we were under Prospero’s spell so deeply ourselves that even when we heard the characteristic Shakespearian wrap-up that pleaded for the audience’s favor, we just sat there. (Most people in the room probably knew the play better than I do.) We sat watching, after the last line, as Prospero pressed his palms together in supplication to the big moon over our heads. We sat there. And sat, while Prospero looked up at the moon. Finally, there was a single soft clap, then another, and big applause. Mr. Fielder turned and looked down at someone and wiped his brow in relief and laughed pretty hard.

I could hardly get off my oil can, but someone from Krannert announced a “talkback” afterward with cast and director, and Mrs. Churm and I had to stay. A UIUC theater professor said that as familiar as he was with the play, and with Shakespeare in general, it was the first time he’d heard it.

I agree wholeheartedly. In a darkened auditorium, on plush seats, with distance and often poor acoustics, it’s easy to drop out, then come back. “Blood will have blood,” Macbeth says, and you think about how to finish that letter you’ve been writing. “Dear Jimmy,” you scheme. “I’m sorry for wrecking your car….” Sometime later, you come to from your dream within a dream and hear, “Of all men else I have avoided thee,” and realize you’ve missed the third act. This wasn’t possible Thursday night. (You also couldn’t have left if you wanted to.) An extraordinary night.

The performance, intermission, and talkback lasted more than three hours. It was very late indeed by the time we got back home, and the boys woke at their usual time, so we had little sleep. I sat down Friday morning with a cup of coffee and began to type with one hand, since I needed to hold myself up as I slumped sideways in the chair with the other, due to crippling back spasms. Mrs. Churm had a lesser migraine from a stiff neck. But I told her that if the next night’s performance hadn’t been sold out for weeks, if there were a babysitter available, and a nurse and a driver to get me back to the University of Illinois; if they’d let me lie on the stage instead of sit on a tin can, I’d go see it again.

Thing is, I’m not a fan of No and Can’t. With the Krannert Center’s help, I found tickets, and we went Friday night too.

To be continued….

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