Uncle Brian and Lady Macbeth

So I got to meet my Uncle Brian Dennehy last night after watching him hit the boards in DESIRE Under the Elms (I write it that way because the ads for it really stress DESIRE and almost whisper the Under the Elms part).

OK, so he's not really my uncle. You caught me in another lie on the way to my truth. Whatever.

Either way, Uncle Brian was putting on his socks when we got to go into his dressing room, and he was listening to some Bill Evans jazz on his portable which had him reminiscing about seeing Evans at the Village Vanguard.

Uncle Brian was looking tired, and how couldn't he. DESIRE Under the Elms is a son of a bitch of a play, Eugene O'Neill and lots of shouting, treachery, torment, love triangle, sex, deception, maybe some actual love, infanticide, and is this case, all those rocks on the stage.

That it the set looks like the bottom of an unglamorous aquarium, with brown gray boulders abounding, piled like the walls of a fallen castle, dangling from the ceiling even, with a cabin on ropes coming up and down from the catwalks, too.

Uncle Brian isn't fucking sure what's up with the fucking set. That's his buddy, director Robert Falls' decision. And all the fucking nudity, what's the fucking big deal, and why the fuck even have it.

Yeah, he swears a lot. Big fucking deal. He was nice enough to meet with me, a no-name writer at a craptacular publication, and a buddy of mine. And he told my buddy, who took a back-hurting tumble on an ice patch by his apartment building earlier in the day, that he better not fuck with that and get to a doctor come Monday if not sooner.'

We talked about how Wall Street has pretty much fucked up the country, with that asshole Maddoff bilking folks of money that they might still have liability issues about, taking from nonprofits like the Innocence Project, which helps free people who are wrongly on Death Row, to Broadway and other theater where there's less and less backing for mounting productions.

And how the play was cut to just under 2 hours and how you can always cut O'Neill. (And in these times, you gotta, right? Who has the patience and attention span anymore. Hell, you're probably bored reading this already!)


DESIRE was supposed to go to Broadway, but on this night at least Uncle Brian had his doubts. Hey, Broadway is Disneyland now, and even his buddy Angela Lansbury is having a hard time getting a production of Blythe Spirit going. Whose got the money to see it?

The female lead in DESIRE, Carla Gugino is hot and has a career heating up with Watchmen about to open and her one of the stars - she's leaving the cast to promote her films.


And Uncle Brian, like me and way too fucking many of us, was wondering what might be next for us all for work.

Didn't help that dumbass me said the "M" word, mentioning I had seen M-beth at Chicago Shakespeare the prior weekend. That is BAD LUCK to say M-beth in a theater, but I forgot. But Uncle Brian forgave me, luck's been bad enough can't get much worse.

And he was heading over to meet up with a buddy of his in the Scottish play, anyway.


There's nudity amidst the blood there, too, With Lady Macbeth baring her boobies and having them fondled by Macbeth. We see her ass later in the play. Oddly, when she gets into a bathtub, she has panties on. But what do I know? Maybe Scots wear them into water.

The gore in this Macbeth was almost to Tarantino levels, but the production could have been even more over the top for my tastes.

In DESIRE, there was nudity, but oddly, it was male nudity - butt shots, and a burly bearish guy going around for about 15 minutes without his shirt and with boobies almost as big as Lady M's. Hey, women and gay guys in the audience need eye candy too.

Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to get people talking about your play, even if it means putting Macbeth in a modern setting with an Obama lookalike in the cast, and video and DESIRE having a Bob Dylan song. And to me it seemed organic for these plays to do this.

More organic was seeing Macbeth spray the front row with spittle as he enunciated like a good Elizabethean actor. And seeing a woman sitting next to me fall asleep. Or here the old dude smack his gums like he was a dog eating peanut butter during the whole second act of M-beth.

I don't know what that tangent has to do with anything. After all, this is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Wait, that makes me, and M-beth, sound like Anne Coulter.

And now I am officially rambling.