Three Filmmakers

John Ford
The Searchers

Nicholas Ray
Bigger Than Life

Hurt McDermott
Nightingale In A Music Box

Wistful, a short story

*                  *                *
It was to her everlasting, if rather mild, regret
that she gave her virginity to a man whom she
found rather unattractive.  It was not for money
or career advantage or because she felt
threatened in any serious way that the thing
fell in the way it did.

No:  when asked - by her own irritated
conscience; no one else could care
about such a trivial event so long ago -
how she could let such a  thing happen,
she could only answer,

Because he took control of the situation.
He was a true inside man.
*                  *                *

The Secret Diplomat

_ _        ________      _  _

He considered his wife beautiful - even after 11

years of marriage,  that is he still considered

her beautiful except on those social occasions
when she decided lipstick was called for.  
The amount of lipstick she used
struck him (the verb none too strong) as so
entirely excessive and the effect of this excess
as so obviously garish that he wondered how
she could ever fail to see how unattractive
her efforts made her look and how completely
her lack of discretion in front of the mirror
destroyed her beauty.


He said nothing,  because he did not
want to hurt her feelings, and he knew
beyond a doubt that  he could hurt
her quite effectively if he expressed 
exactly his thoughts.


 *      *     *

One night when he had drunk enough to
have honest thoughts,  but before his
mind and sensibility had been clouded into
a comfortable insensitivity, his wife excused
herself from the table during a riveting
table wide discussion at an important dinner
party and went into the bathroom.


She took the opportunity to refresh her make up
and lipstick, and as she came out of the bathroom,
he hardly recognized the gaudy stranger walking
towards him.    He touched his bow tie and
for the first time reflected that he could never
really know the sort of person who could
make such a gross mistake.  Not only her beauty
was suddenly called into question, but the whole
basis of their marriage.  He could no longer say 
with confidence he was capable of loving her.

He felt sorry for their children.

ARISTOPHANES' BIRDS RELEASED

Hurt McDermott's adaptation of Aristophanes' text is a delight, its breezily contemporary tone easily comprehended by academics and ignorami alike. Literary allusions ("You don't expect me to believe that someone could write an interesting play about The Clouds, do you?") abound, side-by-side with casual colloquialisms—"Trying to kill a bird with two stones, huh?"—and flat-out puns ("I'd forget my head if it weren't attached to the body politic."). - Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City Times

Lybrary.Com has just released my English Rendering of Aristophanes's
most contemporary and relevant comedy,  BIRDS. 

For anyone who wants to see what a play looks like when it arrives on a Literary Manager's Desk and goes into an actor's backpack, this is the edition for you.  Lybrary.Com has put this play out as a working copy for theaters who want to mount this version, and they have not reformatted it for general audiences. 

My version is quite different than any other English Translation in that
I came to feel one of the two main characters, Happy, ends up being
killed by the other.  I have found this in no other English version I know of.
Below I've posted my some remarks from the original program
which explain how I could differ so markedly from the Greek translators
on this point. 

Most ancient Greek plays are brought into English by 

Greek scholars.  The problem is that Greek scholars 

do not usually have the experience of making a

play come to life before an audience in the theater.

The problem is compounded by the fact that 

the authors mounted the plays themselves, so the

old texts have no stage directions.  In fact they do not 

even identify the speaker of each line.

Although Hurt McDermott is not a Greek scholar,

he is an award winning playwright and film director

who knows what it takes to bring a text to life.

In the 3 years he wrestled with BIRDS, he came to believe

that the play only made sense with the death of

one of the main characters - a death that is lacking in every

other currently available English translation. 

This death of one of the two main characters,

engineered through the machinations of the other,

injects the urgency and contemporary relevance

needed to make this timeless classic fully come alive again on stage.

 
http://www.lybrary.com/-p-70034.html
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