Synetic’s Macbeth: a theatrical exploration of Shakespearean sense

In Shakespeare’s time, controversy raged about the values of words, images, and actions. Is God’s word meant to be proclaimed in liturgy, or is God most effectively encountered in personal reading of scripture? Can images and physical gestures support communication with God? Authorities across the sixteenth century suppressed physical practices of worship, white-washed interiors of churches, and burned books, images, and persons in fierce struggles over sensuous forms.

Recent years have seen an upsurge in debate about whether Shakespeare wrote for theatrical performance or sought to author literary works. Many persons who attend Shakespeare’s plays leave exhausted from struggling after words that can be heard but not fully grasped, a vortex of language that touches down in many different places across a vast range of experience. When Shakespeare’s words are fixed on the page, they can be read slowly, savored, contemplated, and studied. That Shakespeare wrote for readers makes good sense to many modern theater-goers.

But words, whether in performance or written, fail to bound Shakespeare’s art. After Romeo and Juliet flirt in a dialogue that plays with the outlawed devotional practices of pilgrims and takes the literary form of a sonnet, Romeo kisses Juliet. Then Juliet calls forth laughter after what was surely a passionate kiss, “You kiss by th’book.” At the end of The Tempest, Prospero implores the play-goers, “release me from my bands / With the help of your good hands. / Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails….”

Shakespeare’s art is best expressed in events such as Shakespeare in Washington, a DC-wide festival that runs from January to June of 2007. The festival includes theater, music, dance, films, and art exhibits. It leads into the opening of the new Harmon Center for the Arts. Gesture in Shakespeare is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-gesture.

Synetic Theater, a company based in the Washington, DC area, has pioneered wordless performances of Shakespeare’s work. Synetic’s first such production, Hamlet…the rest is silence was a critical and popular success. It will be performed again at the Kennedy Center from March 31 to June 17, 2007 as part of Shakespeare in Washington. Synetic Theater is also contributing to this festival a new wordless production of Macbeth. Synetic’s Macbeth is at the Rosslyn Spectrum in Arlington, Virginia, from January 12 to February 25, 2007. Not only is Synetic’s Macbeth spectacularly pleasing entertainment, it also profoundly explores Shakespearean art.

In ynetic’s Macbeth, the witches are major figures. Played brilliantly by Philip Fletcher, Meghan Grady, and Katherine E. Hill, they look like characters one might find dancing at a gothic party in Hell. They crawl out of stage-bottom holes spewing corrupted air and double with a bishop, a rabbi, and an imam in the world-cracking beginning of the play. Macbeth’s first words, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” are realized in the witches reappearing and disappearing throughout the play. They show that Macbeth’s personal problems are also problems of the structure of the world.

This wordless production poignantly communicates Macbeth’s combination of personal and worldly effects. Verbal dialogue ordinarily absorbs much of the weight of revealing persons to each other and the audience. In this production, the actors communicate solely through actions, gestures, facial expressions, and acts of the eyes. While words might be imagined to come from somewhere within, gestures, facial expressions, and acts of the eyes are readily understood as material actions like the actions of the rest of the world. Dispensing with words helps to bring together the actors and Macbeth the play-world.

The effect is exquisite in Macbeth’s relationship to Lady Macbeth. George and Martha’s living room death-match in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the cosmic necessity of a Greek tragedy like the Oresteia both play out through Irakli Kavsadze’s and Irina Tiskurishvili’s superb acting. They’re just an ordinary couple who enjoy a drink together, sexually taunt each other, and desperately need each other. But their relational problems lead to the murder of the King of Scotland and murders of many other truly beloved, real persons. In an artful production choice, Macbeth’s victims appear to Macbeth at the end of the play like the Erinyes of Greek tragedy, like a self-curse that Macbeth cannot subsequently dispel.

The wordless production may have enabled some spectacular staging. Ben Cunis as Macduff displays impressive fighting skills in vanquishing Macbeth. That fight could be in a conventional production, or in a Hollywood action film in which the action figure is actually a good actor. Military personnel swarming in chaotic, beautiful patterns about the darkened stage, with flashlight-tipped guns shooting light darts around the intimate, frozen Rosselyn Spectrum theater, probably also could be transferred to a conventional production. In the comic highlight of the evening, Courtney Pauroso in the role of the porter puts on an impressively expressive drunken soldier act. Words from the drunk might detract from the art of that acting.

The hugely successful banquet scene probably depends on wordlessness. Macbeth’s unwilled turning inside out and the Lady’s desperate swerving to maintain the form of the event produces moments in which horror and comedy meet. The silent ghost of Banquo stands in every host’s fear of conversational topics not to be discussed at a convivial evening. Appropriate for a banquet is conventional social conversation. The guests can hardly make social conversation in unison, but they convincingly gesture that way. Towards the end of the debacle, the guests in unison stick their figures over the table, nervously strum them, and emerge from under the table. That is a great moment in wordless Shakespearean play.

The pleasure of attending this play does not depend on theatrical sophistication or any level of prior knowledge of the plot and characters. The Macbeths’ ambition, fears, and their unraveling in carnage are clearly communicated within this production. Shakespeare connoisseurs might hear in their heads specific phrases at certain points in the action, such as Lady Macbeth’s call for sexual negation: “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty.” A reviewer who described a three-hour production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as “that rare example of a long night’s journey you only wish could go on longer” surely would enjoy attending this production many times. If you are just looking to see an action movie, or to feel like you do at a horror film, you can get much of those effects from this production, and much more.

The Synethic Theater’s production shows unforgettably the unheroic tragedy of Macbeth. At its center is a pedestrian domestic drama (except, perhaps, for the erotic sadism that the Macbeths prominently display). Macbeth, like a middle-manager scheming to become acting chief executive officer of a major corporation, imagines his ambition to encompass the globe. While Macbeth’s actions are preternaturally ruthless, they also are like the actions of ordinary life: contingent, done without a coherent, well-thought-out plan. For Macbeth, a tragic ordering of the cosmos is a matter of hearsay: “It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood.” The world of Macbeth has no more sure balance than the particularities of an ordinary person’s psyche.

Synetic Theater’s Macbeth is a profound exploration of Shakespeare’s work. It’s a play not to be missed.

Synetic Theater presents Macbeth, January 12 – February 25, 2007, at the Rosslyn Spectrum, Arlington, Virginia. Directed by Paata Tsikurishvili, adapted by Nathan Weinberger and Paata Tsikurishvili. Performances Thurdays through Saturdays, 8 pm, Sundays, 3 pm. Tickets $30-$35, $5 off for seniors and students, $15 student “rush” tickets; free parking available. See www.synetictheater.org for more information.

unsocial non-networks

Most blog posts did not include any links. A recent study selected 44,362 blogs in a way biased toward finding linked posts. Among all 2.2 million posts in those blogs in August and September of 2005, 98% of the posts had no incoming or outgoing links.[1] This isn’t a matter of A-List bloggers exclusivity or blogger masses languishing at the bottom of an influence hierarchy. Most blog post don’t even have any outgoing links.

Most bloggers probably blog in a room by themselves, sitting down, typing on a keyboard. Much blogging seems to be about self-expression, like writing in a diary back in the days of secret, personal histories, or about news reporting, like that in traditional media, but with much smaller audiences.

Humans in physical proximity are naturally social. Silence is awkward. Not making eye contact raises suspicion. Persons with nothing in common and no reason to communicate will nonetheless communicate when in physical proximity without a strong alternative focus of attention. Only persons united in an intimate connection are likely to feel comfortable being together in silence when communicating is an authorized possibility. In physical proximity, self-expression and monologues without regard for communication tends to be interpreted as offensive.

Alternative circumstances of communication evoke remarkably little of this natural human sociality. Communicative circumstances are important. Blogging is not like being in a room with other people, even though other persons’ blogs are readily available to a person blogging. Bloggers forlornly lamenting that no one links to them should realize that this does not mean that no one would talk to them.

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[1] Jure Leskovec, Mary McGlohon, Christos Faloutsos, Natalie Glance, and Matthew Hurst (2007), “Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs: Patterns and a model,” Paper to be presented at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2007), Minneapolis, MI, USA, Apr. 26-28, 2007 (pdf). Blogs were selected through link traversal (see Sec. 4.1 of paper). For share of isolated posts, see Sec. 5.3.

systematized personal recommendations

User-to-user recommendations within a large online retailer’s recommendation system generated a very small share of sales. With keen business sense (see Netflix) and with praiseworthy regard for the common intellectual good, this retailer allowed some experts to analyze freely a large database of its users’ recommendations and to publish publicly their analysis. The database includes all recommendations that the online retailer’s users made for books, music, and movies from June, 2001 to May 2003.

The online retailer’s recommendation system worked as follows:

Each time a person purchases a book, music, or a movie [DVD or video] he or she is given the option of sending emails recommending the item to friends. The first person to purchase the same item through a referral link in the email gets a 10% discount. When this happens the sender of the recommendation receives a 10% credit on their purchase. [1]

The database includes persons who purchased and made a recommendation, and persons who received a recommendation. The database does not include persons who made a purchase but neither made a recommendation to another person nor received a recommendation from another person.

Purchases that generate recommendations generated few recommendations. Persons who purchased a book and recommended that book made on average 2.0 recommendations per purchased book.[2] Notice that this statistic by definition can be no less than 1: purchases that produced zero recommendations were not recorded in the dataset. To estimate the average number of recommendations per purchase, one needs an estimate of purchases that did not produce a recommendation.

Only a small share of purchases generated a recommendation. Persons who received a recommendation and then purchased the recommended book forwarded the recommendation to another person in about 24% of such purchases.[3] Imitation and concern for social norms have a pervasive and powerful effect on human behavior. The share of purchases in which a person who did not receive a recommendation for a book, but nonetheless purchased it and recommended it is surely less than 24%. That implies that the total number of books purchased per year was higher that 6.1 million, probably much higher. Two plausible figures are 100 million and 30 million.[4] These figures imply shares of purchases that generated a recommendation at 1.4% and 4.9%, respectively.

The overall ratio of recommendations to purchases is much lower than 2. Suppose that the retailer was selling 100 million books per year (the results are qualitatively the same if the retailer was selling only 30 million books per year). Given 2.0 recommendations per book purchase for purchases that produced a recommendation, the overall ratio of recommendations to purchases is 0.028. Making a recommendation created the possibility of a 10% credit for the recommender and a 10% discount for the receiver. Nonetheless, relatively few recommendations were made.

The share of purchases that resulted from user recommendations is miniscule. If the retailer was selling 100 million books per year, then less than a tenth of one percent (0.04%) of purchases followed from users’ recommendations. User social networking through a systematized recommendation system wasn’t a major driver of sales.

Nonetheless, the user recommendation system may have net positive value to the retailer. About 43,000 book purchases per year can plausibly be attributed to user recommendation of books through the retailers’ system.[5] Suppose that the average book price was $30 and the average gross margin was 60%. Then the user recommendation system generated a gross margin of about $800,000 per year. That might be sufficient to make it a profitable feature.

Recommendation systems have major effects on sales. One unsourced report indicated that “35 percent of [Amazon’s] product sales result from recommendations.” Greg Linden, who should know, stated (see comments), “Personalization was responsible for well more than 20% of sales when I left Amazon in 2002.” Automated recommendations probably account for most of the sales through recommendations.

A trade-off between communicative control and potential social effects is an important aspect of social networking. Commentary on the recommendation analysis has largely neglected this issue (for relevant discussion, see here, here, and here, for starters). Being personally responsibility for an online retailer sending a specific purchase offer to a social connection has some social meaning that a potential sender might prefer not to evaluate, and in any case the user cannot change the message sent. The social diffusion of given names, and business successes that arose through social networking, such as Hotmail, Google, MySpace, Youtube, and others, depended on more loosely structured forms of communication.

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[1] See Leskovec, Jurij, Lada A. Adamic, and Bernardo A. Huberman, “The Dynamics of Viral Marketing,” p. 3.

[2] See Leskovec, Jure, Ajit Singh, and Jon Kleinberg, “Patterns of Influence in a Recommendation Network (pdf), Table 1. The total number of book purchases was 2,859,096 over the 711 day period.

[3] Leskovec et. al., “Dynamics of Viral Marketing,” p. 8, Table 3.

[4] See Brynjolfsson, Erik, Michael D. Smith, and Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, “”Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers” (pdf), Management Science, v. 49 n. 11 (Nov. 2003) p. 1587, and Sandoval, Greg, “Amazon Losing Ground in Core Area: Books,” CNet News.com (Nov. 5, 2001).

[5] Leskovec et. al., “Patterns of Influence,” Table 1 (figure annualized).

Carnival of the Bureaucrats #6

This month’s Carnival of the Bureaucrats celebrates the rules of golf. Every year golf’s regulatory bodies receive thousands of requests to clarify rules. Golf’s rule-making cycle takes four years, much longer than typical rule-making cycles at one of the world’s leading regulatory agencies. However, official decisions on interpretations of golf rules are published every two years. The most recent decision order contained more than 1,200 individual decisions. These decisions do not discuss opposing arguments, contain no analysis of relevant empirical evidence, and provide no reasons for the rulings issued.

The regulatory environment for innovative communication services on golf courses appears grim. Wireless services vitally important to the most disadvantaged golfers have been forbidden:

14-3/14 Electronic Instrument Used to Find Ball

Q. A transmitter has been embedded in a golf ball. When used with a special radio receiver, a player may find such a ball readily because the transmitter emits a signal that grows louder as the receiver moves closer to the ball. Is the use of such a ball and receiver permissible?

A. No. Use of such a ball in conjunction with the receiver is a breach of Rule 14-3. However, use of such a ball without the receiver is permissible, provided the ball conforms to the Rules and its use is in accordance with any conditions of competition that may have been adopted (e.g., the List of Conforming Golf Balls Condition). (revised decision)

In addition, communication regulation favors the growth of non-golf related communication. Under Decision 14-3/16, golfers may use a mobile phone “for matters unrelated to golf (e.g., to call home).” More important uses of communication devices are harshly suppressed:

14-3/16 Use of Electronic Devices

…examples of uses of an electronic device during a stipulated round that are a breach of Rule 14-3, for which the penalty is disqualification, include:

· Using the device (e.g., a television or radio) to watch or listen to a broadcast of the competition being played;

· Using the device to ask for or give advice in breach of Rule 8-1 (e.g., calling a swing coach at home); or

· Using the device to access information on advice-related matters that were not published prior to the start of his round (e.g., analysis of strokes made during that round). (revised decision)

The only possible explanation for these rules is that the titans of the golf industry have not been spending enough quality time with golf industry regulators.

You might consider watching a video of prior British Open play (available soon on a variety of mobile devices) while waiting for the duffers in front of you to clear the fairway. Watching a very good golf swing is likely to activate your nervous system in a way that makes it more likely that you will execute a good golf swing immediately after watching it (more evidence). Doing this would apparently not contravene the prohibition on asking for advice from a prohibited source (see Rules of Golf, Rule 8-1).

On the other hand, under the Rules of Golf, Rule 14-3, a player “must not use any artificial device or unusual equipment: (a) That might assist him in making a stroke or in his play;…” In the near future, mobile video may not involve unusual equipment, and in modern life watching Internet videos is as natural as breathing. However, Rule 14-3 states:

The United States Golf Association (USGA) reserves the right, at any time, to change the Rules relating to artificial devices and unusual equipment and make or change the interpretations relating to these Rules.

All statutory law and administrative regulation is subject to change. The crucial questions concern the political structures (institutions? interests? mentalities?) and legal processes (notice? comments? written, public reasons?) by which such change is effected. Analyzing the possibility for changes in rules is a critical, and often neglected, aspect of regulatory analysis.

While golfing, during lulls in watching golf videos on your mobile devices (if permitted under the relevant regulations), you may now be able to use a laser rangefinder to determine the yardage to the hole and associated hazards. Given widespread regulatory uncertainty, you also need to study these regulations carefully:

14-3/0.5 Local Rule Permitting Use of Distance Measuring Device

Q. May a Committee, by Local Rule, permit the use of distance measuring devices?

A. Yes. A Committee may establish a Local Rule allowing players to use devices that measure distance only. However, the use of devices that gauge or measure other conditions that might affect a player’s play (e.g. wind or gradient) is not permitted.

Using a rangefinder that includes a slope function is illegal. Somebody should tell Patrick.

Personal blog note: My favorite golfer is my distant relative Natalie Gulbis. The bureaucrats working at Ellis Island weren’t too concerned about accurately recording names! 🙂

Additional entries in this month’s carnival:

Tracy Coenen remarks, “The government is raiding our pocketbooks again!” Her FRAUDfiles Blog reports, “another tax increase is being discussed in Wisconsin,” and asks, “When has a tax increase ever put more money in people’s pockets?” Suppose a tax increase goes to support hard-working government bureaucrats who make government regulations better. If the cost of the government bureaucrats’ salaries is less than the value they create for people by making better regulations, then increasing taxes has in effect put more money in people’s pockets!

Consider some numbers. Suppose the total budget of a regulatory agency is $300 million, and that the regulatory agency regulates an industry with total revenue about $1,000,000 million. Particularly for an industry in which regulation is pervasive and highly significant, the performance of the regulator can easily be much more important than the direct tax cost of the regulator.

David Maister considers, “What’s a professional firm?” He remarks, “Should bureaucrats be called professionals?” Of course they should. Most bureaucrats are in fact professional bureaucrats. But I would not consider professional those bureaucrats who engage in conduct unbecoming of a bureaucrat.

That’s all for this month’s Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.