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Jul. 3rd, 2016 05:09 pmThis weekend I've mostly spent watching tennis, happy to have some of it to watch today and eagerly anticipating a 4th of July that allows me to be at home for the Super Monday at Wimbledon. I've associated the holiday with Wimbledon already, but will even more so now that it happens before the amount of matches happening thin out to final rounds. Yesterday Sam Querry's win over Djokovic, despite multiple rain delays, was a huge thrill that had me singing and tweeting about the world turned upside down, and today Tsonga & Isner's five-setter was another quality watch. Watching Coco V win today was fun too.
I did have to take a break from it yesterday, though, to go with my mom to the Folger and see Aaron Posner's District Merchants which adapts the story of The Merchant of Venice to 1870s DC. It turns Antonio into Antoine, a freeborn black making money off Reconstruction, Bassiano in Benjamin Bassiano, the son of a slave and her master pale enough to pass who has a huge emotional conflict over his decision to marry Portia with her initially thinking him white, Portia herself into a regular crossdresser who rails that she has to dress as a boy to study law and certainly shows herself to be a brilliant lawyer in the trial scene, but struggles with her own racism, Nessa and Lancelot into black servants who have their own views of their employers, Shylock into a sympathetic figure driven to be how he is by how the world has treated him, but a tyrannical father, Jessica into a proud Jewish woman who nonetheless runs off with a gentile out of sheer desperation to escape him, and Lorenzo into a louse unaware of his white male privilege, who does nonetheless care for Jessica, and ultimately it's him who converts rather than her! It was the kind of play that is determined to make you think about everything, hitting hard on issues that still affect us today, with maybe a few too many speeches, but it successfully redeemed the original story, and worked especially well with a DC audience. It's just ended its premiere run, and I hope it gets put on again.
Heartbroken over Joshua Farris' retirement, which has put a dampener on my excitement over the Grand Prix. Was it only a year ago he and Jason Brown were supposed to be the next great two and the next rivalry? Jason's commemoration on Instragram was both heartbreaking and heartwarming.
I did have to take a break from it yesterday, though, to go with my mom to the Folger and see Aaron Posner's District Merchants which adapts the story of The Merchant of Venice to 1870s DC. It turns Antonio into Antoine, a freeborn black making money off Reconstruction, Bassiano in Benjamin Bassiano, the son of a slave and her master pale enough to pass who has a huge emotional conflict over his decision to marry Portia with her initially thinking him white, Portia herself into a regular crossdresser who rails that she has to dress as a boy to study law and certainly shows herself to be a brilliant lawyer in the trial scene, but struggles with her own racism, Nessa and Lancelot into black servants who have their own views of their employers, Shylock into a sympathetic figure driven to be how he is by how the world has treated him, but a tyrannical father, Jessica into a proud Jewish woman who nonetheless runs off with a gentile out of sheer desperation to escape him, and Lorenzo into a louse unaware of his white male privilege, who does nonetheless care for Jessica, and ultimately it's him who converts rather than her! It was the kind of play that is determined to make you think about everything, hitting hard on issues that still affect us today, with maybe a few too many speeches, but it successfully redeemed the original story, and worked especially well with a DC audience. It's just ended its premiere run, and I hope it gets put on again.
Heartbroken over Joshua Farris' retirement, which has put a dampener on my excitement over the Grand Prix. Was it only a year ago he and Jason Brown were supposed to be the next great two and the next rivalry? Jason's commemoration on Instragram was both heartbreaking and heartwarming.
