Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

Source of book: I own this

 

This is one of the cheap trade paperbacks I was given by a legal colleague when he downsized - and that format is perfect to take along on a backpacking trip. Light, small, and you don’t feel bad if you accidentally get it wet or abraded. 

A reminder that Vonnegut wasn't always a crusty old guy...

 

This book is a collection of short stories, mostly written in the 1950s. They are all over the place as far as style, from realistic vignettes based on Vonnegut’s experiences, including those as a salesman, to science fiction, to “meet-cute” love stories. 

 

The quality is, as might be expected since Vonnegut wrote them to pay his bills, a bit uneven. Some are pretty boilerplate plots, and some seem forced. But the best ones are truly excellent, so the collection itself, as a whole, is a good read. 

 

Vonnegut himself acknowledged that the stories were not always his finest work. In the brief (and hilarious) preface, he spells it out:

 

And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: “Here I am cleaning shit off practically everything” and “No pain.” The contents of this book are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise.

 

Because I mostly read this on a backpacking trip, I didn’t write down many notes. I did make some mental notes about the stories that I thought made the most impression on me. 

 

The opening one, “Where I Live,” is a rather fun picture of a small town near Cape Cod, with its slow pace and quirky institutions, as seen through the eyes of a travelling encyclopedia salesman. 

 

Another of the realistic stories, “Who Am I This Time?”, is my favorite of the “meet-cute” genre, and a unique spin on the idea. I particularly like it because it involves a local community theater - regular readers know I am a big fan of local theater and the devoted and passionate work they do on stage. 

 

Harry Nash is that guy, the one truly excellent actor in the troop, the one who gets tabbed to play the hardest parts, because he is so good at them. The problem is, he has zero personality off stage. He is painfully shy, antisocial, and the antithesis of how he is with a script. 

 

The title comes from his signature line, whenever asked to play a new part. Into this world comes the new telephone clerk, recently arrived to train people in using the automatic systems. Helene Shaw has never put down roots, and, while beautiful, seems devoid of personality. Even when reading lines.

 

But, under the spell of Harry, she discovers how to act, responding to his every nuance, and bringing down the house. 

 

The problem is, when the lights go off at the end of the show, Harry disappears, and Helene is never able to actually talk with him. 

 

She finds a creative solution, however: she brings scripts with her, and when the two of them are free, she insists he read passages with her. And thus begins a courtship. She provides him with the necessary romantic lines from the scripts, and she responds. It’s a match…a peculiar one…but it works. 

 

The title story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” is another one that fascinated me. This one is science fiction, imagining a future world where overpopulation is a huge problem. Rather than tackling this in a way that balanced human needs with the greater problem, humans have (as we too often do) picked a truly horrid approach. 

 

One prong is to encourage suicide, through “ethical suicide” centers run by attractive virgin women. The other is to mandate the use of so-called “ethical birth control.” 

 

How does that work, and what makes it “ethical”? 

 

The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.

 

As we find out, the pill was created by a man who was horrified during a zoo visit to see the monkeys doing sex things in plain view. By creating the pill, monkeys could be made “family-friendly.” 

 

The people who understood science said people had to quit reproducing so much, and the people who understood morals said society would collapse if people used sex for nothing but pleasure.

 

Hey, know any of those people? I do. That is, unfortunately, the lingering hangover of Augustine’s mommy and daddy issues, and the (usually) unspoken underlying basis for all kinds of sexual puritanism. There is deep suspicion about people having sex for pleasure alone - particularly women. 

 

The setup for the story is pretty good then, as is the idea of the “Poet” - an escaped convict - targeting the suicide women for kidnapping and eventual recruitment to his side. 

 

What is not so good is that he first rapes them, thus spoiling their eligibility for their prior job. And also, as the Poet explains, for much of history, most women had a similar and similarly unpleasant experience on their wedding night, which is not exactly wrong. So, a flawed story in that way, but still interesting. 

 

At the end, he leaves the women deflowered and without their “ethical birth control,” but with old-fashioned contraceptives (from our own time), and the cryptic encouragement to use it stating “Welcome to the monkey house.” 

 

There is one more line in the story that I think sums up how I feel about all the sexual baggage I was raised with as an evangelical. 

 

“If you go back through history, you’ll find that the people who have been most eager to rule, to make the laws, to enforce the laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on earth - those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything. But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women.” 

 

Another story I liked was “The Foster Portfolio.” It is about a man who inherits significant wealth from his grandfather, but doesn’t tell his wife. He wants to continue to keep living their modest, hardworking life. But he also has a secret that he can’t tell her. 

 

His “second job” isn’t waiting tables, as he tells her, but playing piano in a jazz club. He can’t confess this, because it is exactly what his dissipated deadbeat dad did, and he can’t have her think he is like his dad.

 

Whatever one thinks of the morality of his actions, it is hard to begrudge him this one guilty pleasure, that he knows his wife will take away from him if she knew. 

 

I’ll also briefly mention “New Dictionary,” which isn’t really a story, but more a brief musing on language and what becomes “official.” 

 

“Next Door” is a bit of a horror story, where parents leave their child behind to go to a movie they deem “inappropriate” for his age, only for him to be witness to an attempted murder by his next door neighbor’s mistress. 

 

“The Hyannis Port Story” is a political tale, about an “old money” man living next to President Kennedy. Who has a giant illuminated sign for Barry Goldwater that he trolls his neighbor for. But everything goes to hell when his son starts dating a Kennedy cousin.

 

I thought “The Barnhouse Effect” was a most intriguing science fiction story. It is about a professor who manages to learn a form of telekinesis, and is then recruited by the military. Instead of cooperating, he goes into hiding and uses his powers to destroy all of the world’s armaments, to the fury of politicians and generals everywhere. It’s quite imaginative, and certainly fits with Vonnegut’s pacifist stance. 

 

Another unique SciFi story is “The Euphio Question.” What if a device was invented that made people euphoric? Would it be ethical to sell it? And would it be ethical to use it to make obscene profits? Good questions raised in this one for sure. 

 

After I got back and finished the book, I ended up jotting down a few things from another philosophic SciFi story, “Unready to Wear.” In it, significant numbers of humans have learned to essentially separate their souls from their bodies, living mostly without them, but then borrowing unused bodies from a warehouse when they want to do human things. Meanwhile, the humans who have not figured out how to do this have created a totalitarian state hellbent on finally catching and exterminating the “amphibians” who do not need bodies.

 

Some of the lines from this story are quite interesting. 

 

Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics - job politics, social politics, government politics. 

 

And:

 

I guess there is a war on between them and us. But we never do anything about holding up our side of the war, except to keep our parade sites and our storage centers secret, and to get out of our bodies every time there’s an air raid, or the enemy fires a rocket, or something.

That just makes the enemy madder, because the raids and rockets and all cost plenty, and blowing up things nobody needs anyway is a poor return on the taxpayer’s money. 

 

I am kind of reminded of Trump and Kegsbreath’s illegal war against Iran, which mostly has cost us a crap-ton of money without accomplishing anything useful whatsoever. 

 

Ultimately, the point Vonnegut makes is that this end to the need for bodies has equaled the end of fear. And we don’t even need to get out of our bodies for that, really. 

 

“Now I understand you poor fish. You couldn’t get along without fear. That’s the only skill you’ve got - how to scare yourselves and other people into doing things. That’s the only fun you’ve got, watching people jump for fear of what you’ll do to their bodies or take away from their bodies.”

 

I want to mention “The Kid Nobody Could Handle,” even though overall it is one of the weaker stories. It has a line in it, though, and a general idea of supporting teachers and teachers of the arts in particular. So I will forgive it some weak plotting for that. 

 

The kind fat man was George M. Helmholtz, a man of forty, head of the music department at Lincoln High School, and director of the band. Life had treated him well. Each year he dreamed the same big dream. He dreamed of leading as fine a band as there was on the face of the earth. And each year the dream came true.

 

And how did his dreams come true? 

 

“Think of it this way,” said Helmholtz. “Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it.”

 

Honestly, that’s actually my core goal in life. It is what drives my passion for music, my love of books, my joy in the wilderness, my love for my family, my desire to see my students learn, and even what I do in my legal practice. I don’t always succeed, but I try to make the world more beautiful. 

 

Kurt Vonnegut certainly left the world a more beautiful place, and even in his “hack” work, brought a thoughtfulness to everything he wrote. 

 

This is a good collection, and worth checking out, even if Vonnegut wrote it to pay for his longer, better known works. 

 

***

 

Prior Vonnegut posts:

 

Breakfast of Champions

Jailbird

A Man Without a Country

Slaughterhouse Five

 

The Possessed (aka Demons) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Source of book: I own this

 

It has been quite some time since I read some Dostoevsky. Before I started this blog, actually. I first read The Brothers Karamazov in my late teens - and it remains my favorite of Dostoevsky’s books. In my 20s, I read Crime and Punishment, and my opinion of that book is that it is kind of a college-level text, like The Great Gatsby, with simplistic morality and the lack of the depth that other, better books have. I read Notes From Underground in my early 30s, and remember it as being interesting, and more focused than most of Dostoevsky’s books. 

 

I had been intending to read The Possessed for the last couple years, but it somehow ended up being put off again and again. Perhaps just the size of the book meant that I chose shorter ones. Recently, though, my brother (with whom I have had a lot of discussions about books over the years, and specifically about Dostoevsky) listened to it on audiobook, and wrote a few paragraphs about his impressions. I brought the book along on our most recent vacation together so I could read it and talk with him as I did so. 

 

While I didn’t finish the book on that trip, I did make significant progress. 

 

Having read it, I think it still falls short of the genius of The Brothers Karamazov, but does have some fascinating points. 

 

First, a bit about the title. In English, you can find it as both The Possessed (the title my Heritage Press edition has) or Demons. 

 

Acknowledging that translation is more an art than a science, it is still fascinating to see how the same word can be seen. “The Possessed” was the title that Constance Garnett used - her translation is the one I have, and has been the most well-known English translation for decades. 

 

However, scholars these days think that “Demons” is a better translation, because it reflects the meaning that the word is active - “those who are doing the possessing” - rather than passive - “those who have possession happening to them.” It is an interesting thought. 

 

I think it is helpful here as well to understand that Dostoevsky isn’t talking about invisible supernatural beings in this book. Rather, he is talking about the darkness in the souls of men, the nihilism both moral and political, that he saw as taking over Russia in the 1860s. 

 

This idea of demons being about ideas and human darkness is something I wrote about earlier this year. 

 

The book, like other giant Russian novels, has a complicated and meandering plot, with a bunch of loosely connected threads. 

 

I am not sure how much to summarize here, maybe a bit will help with the quotes I want to talk about. 

 

There are two central characters, in my view representing the political and moral nihilism that the author wishes to warn against. 

 

Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky is the son of a somewhat failed professor and intellectual, Stepan Trofimovich, who has, for the last few decades, been essentially retained by the wealthy Madame Stavrogin. He represents the political nihilism that Dostoevsky sees in the leftist movements of the time. 

 

And to be fair to the author, a lot of what he warns about in this book came to pass when the Soviets took over. 

 

Madame Stavrogin’s son, Nikolay, represents the moral nihilism. For a time, the two work together in a radical anarchist/communist type cell, but Nikolay ends up being a disappointment, because he is too caught up in his personal problems to commit to the revolution. 

 

And damn, does Stavrogin have problems. He married a developmentally disabled and likely mentally ill woman, Marya, on a lark, and has been paying off her alcoholic and violent brother, Lebyadkin, to keep quiet. 

 

But he has probably also seduced Liza, who has now abandoned him for Mavriky, a military officer. And he also has impregnated Marya, the estranged wife of Shatov, another member of the radical group. It is also believed (although we never learn if it is true) that he has seduced Darya, Shatov’s sister, who is Madame Stavrogin’s protege. When Madame Stavrogin tries to get Stepan to marry her, he thinks he is getting sloppy seconds, leading to a falling out with his benefactor. 

 

And one more thing: there is a chapter which was omitted from the original, because it was considered too scandalous to print. (It has been added back in modern editions.) It is the confession of Stavrogin to a priest of a sordid incident in his past, where he probably raped an 11 year old girl who then committed suicide while he failed to intervene. 

 

So, it’s…complicated.

 

Pyotr, on the other hand, is playing politics. He has come to influence Yulia, the wife of the new governor, Andrey. Neither of them fully realizes the danger, leading to catastrophe. 

 

As with any Dostoevsky book, it is not easy to separate his own views from those of his characters. I was left with a lot of questions. Was the author seriously trying to argue that his society’s biggest mistake was freeing the serfs? Did he really think that the “cure” for the political troubles of Russia stemming from decades of corruption and violent oppression of the poor was for everyone to return to the Russian Orthodox Church? Was he really advocating for ethnonationalism to Make Russia Great Again?

 

It is, as I said, hard to tell, because everything in this book comes from the mouths of the characters, all of whom are unreliable narrators (including then unnamed narrator of the book), and all of whom seem deeply morally flawed. 

 

Perhaps the better conclusion is that Dostoevsky is exploring the inner demons of all the characters - and arguing that these demons live in us all. 

 

The better arguments - the ones that Dostoevsky succeeds at better, particularly in retrospect, are worth noting. 

 

Political movements that lose their moral center - that embrace nihilism and “might makes right” - will always become oppressive, violent, and evil. The 20th Century certainly gave evidence of this truth. Likewise, the MAGA movement has proven to be a modern nihilistic behemoth, devoid of any core morality beyond “we hate those people.” 

 

Second, Stavrogin’s life is an excellent example of how a view of women as disposable toys leads to immense destruction of lives. Sadly, the author himself was often a misogynist pig, so I doubt there was much self-awareness here. Just saying.

 

The book was apparently loosely based on a number of real people, so the seemingly over-the-top and unrealistic characters may not be as out there as they appear. The philosophical arguments, while they feel strawmanned at times, don’t come out of the imagination, but out of real discussions of the era. The book often feels full of caricatures, but subsequent history seems to have proven that the book was rather prophetic.

 

I jotted down a bunch of random lines that I thought were interesting. Because of how rambling the book was, I won’t claim these are all particularly connected to each other or to the themes, but they were still interesting. 

 

Varvara Petrovna [Madam Stavrogin] was left a widow and put on deep mourning. She could not, it is true, deplore his death very deeply, since, for the last four years, she had been completely separated from him owing to incompatibility of temper, and was giving him an allowance. 

 

Kind of a reminder that one of the benefits for women of having their own money is the ability to separate from a problematic spouse. 

 

There are a lot of philosophical discussions in this book, of course, and they are quite fascinating. (In fact, I found them more interesting than the plot.) Here is one between the narrator and Kirillov, who is more of a philosophical nihilist - he intends to and eventually commits suicide for purely philosophical reasons. Perhaps Camus was influenced by this in one of his most famous - or infamous - ideas. 

 

“Man fears death because he loves life. That’s how I understand it,” I observed, “and that’s determined by nature.”

“That’s abject; and that’s where the deception comes in.” His eyes flashed. “Life is pain, life is terror, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and terror. Now man loves life because he loves pain and terror, and so they have done according. Life is given now for pain and terror, and that’s the deception.”

 

Another passage involves Lebyadkin, who is not only a violent drunk, but also a poet - a bad one who thinks he is good. Excerpts of his poem “The Cockroach” end up being read loudly, against everyone’s wishes, and Lebyadkin grows increasingly unhinged.

 

“Madam, I’m not mad yet! I shall be mad, no doubt I shall be, but I’m not so yet.” 

 

Stepan Trofimovich may be a bit of a buffoon in the book, and clearly the author has no love for academic sorts, but occasionally, he has what I think is a real insight. 

 

“My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it. Men have always done so. Perhaps there is something in it that passes our understanding.” 

 

And also:

 

“Do you understand that if you have the guillotine in the foreground of your programme and are so enthusiastic about it too, it’s simply because nothing’s easier than cutting off heads, and nothing’s harder than to have an idea.” 

 

One of the few truly humorous things in the book is the parody that Dostoevsky makes of Ivan Turgenev. You have to read the book completely to understand the depth of the satire, but a decent portion of the middle section of the book has to do with this literary takedown. Perhaps I need to read some Turgenev?

 

There are also a number of seemingly unrelated incidents in the book that I think the author is using to make his case that society has descended into nihilism. For example, an unknown person commits suicide, and all the women in the party going to visit Turgenev clamor to see the body. 

 

I remember one of them said aloud on the occasion: “Everything’s so boring, one can’t be squeamish over one’s amusements, as long as they’re interesting.” 

 

And another observation about the same scene:

 

In every misfortune of one’s neighbor there is always something cheering for an onlooker - whoever he may be. 

 

As Madame Stavrogin and Stepan’s relationship crumbles, she makes a fascinating observation that I have thought about a lot since - and also before reading this book. The problem with charity as a way of addressing inequality is that it maintains a hierarchy.

 

“You laugh ironically. And what used you to say to me about charity? Yet the enjoyment derived from charity is a haughty and immoral enjoyment. The rich man’s enjoyment in his weath, his power, and in the comparison of his importance with the poor. Charity corrupts giver and taker alike; and, what’s more, does not attain its object, as it only increases poverty.”

 

It is ironic, of course, that she is rich, and Stepan is dependent on her. But she is leaning in the right direction, if imperfectly, that inequality needs to be addressed not with charity, but with justice. That is, a more equitable distribution of wealth and income. 

 

One of the secondary characters in the book, but one who plays an important role at the end, is Madam Virginsky, the midwife. One of the contrasts in this book is between the way patriarchal society looks down on her, even while depending on her, and her true importance to the community.

 

Madame Virginsky was a midwife by profession, and by that very fact was on the lowest rung of the social ladder, lower even than the priest’s wife, in spite of her husband’s rank as an officer. 

 

Another secondary character is Shigalov, who is essentially the philosopher of the anarchist cell. He is made into a strawman, and his ideas a caricature. However, subsequent history showed that Stalin in particular seems to have taken the worst of Shigalov’s ideas entirely too literally. Here is a bit of a speech. Having concluded that everyone before him had come up with stupid ideas, he follows his to the unfortunately logical conclusion. 

 

“I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.”

 

And, unfortunately, he also concludes that 100 million Russians need to be killed before society can be rebuilt. That’s pretty close to the number Stalin killed. 

 

And, naturally, to the rule by a minority of the population. 

 

“Mr. Shigalov is too much devoted to his task and is also too modest. I know his book. He suggests as a final solution of the question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primaeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden. They’ll have to work, however.”

 

This is where the extreme left and extreme right for the horseshoe. When despotism becomes necessary to accomplish the goals, as Stephen Pinker noted, there is no level of murder that cannot be completely excused. When it is okay to kill for ideology, no one is safe.

 

(To be clear here: the US does not have an actual leftist party, and barely a leftist movement, let alone an extreme left. That is a myth pushed by the extreme right, which currently stands for ethnic cleansing and the elimination of dissent, as well as the rule by a small minority. It all sounds very….Stalinesque.) 

 

The formerly omitted chapter is, in my view, both one of the best in the book, and also the key to understanding its moral core. In addition, the priest, Tihon, is one of the few characters in the book that isn’t horrible. He seems a bit impotent, but he isn’t a bad person. 

 

The chapter also contains a number of interesting lines about God and morality which make it well worth reading. Definitely find a copy of the book with this included. This particular bit stood out to me.

 

“Is it possible to believe in the devil without believing in God?” asked Savrogin with a laugh.

“That’s quite possible. It’s done right and left.” Tihon lifted his eyes and smiled.

 

To a degree, this is where I find myself these days. No, I do not believe in a literal Satan - the word itself simply means “the adversary” or “the accuser” - it’s a title, and a metaphor. But I do find that the most compelling part of the historical theological superstructure of Christianity is the existence of evil as a real thing, not a human construct. 

 

It is easier to believe in the devil than in God, because we see pure evil reflected in humans far more commonly than pure good. All our heroes are flawed and human, while the Hitlers and Stephen Millers and Trumps of the world are all too abundant. 

 

After all this discussion, however, we get to the heart of Stavrogin’s problem. He is haunted by his role in the death of a child - which he correctly notes that Christ said was the worst of sins, causing a little one to stumble - to the degree that he is haunted by her apparition. 

 

He thinks that even if he can never be forgiven, he can at least make a confession and punish himself enough to assuage some of the guilt.

 

“Listen to me, Father Tihon: I want to forgive myself. That’s my chief object, that’s my whole aim! This is my entire confession, the whole truth; all the rest is a lie. I know that only then will the apparition vanish. That is why I seek measureless suffering. I seek it myself. So, do not frighten me, or I shall perish in my viciousness.”

 

Yet even here, Stavrogin is not being honest. He has intentionally omitted a page of his confession, the one where he admits whatever he did to the girl. He claims that he didn’t do anything to her, but it is obvious that he has. And, in the end, he never does actually release the confession and come clean. 

 The most haunting of the illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg in my copy of the book

From there on, things start to spiral. Pyotr decides to get Stavrogin out of his marital difficulties by having a convict murder Marya and Lebyadkin. The grand fete thrown by the governor turns into a debacle, with Lebyadkin disrupting the proceedings, the Turgenev character blithering, and Stepan embarrassing himself and everyone else. A fire starts in the town. And the anarchists start turning on each other. 

 

The unnamed narrator talks about the fact that the fete ended up drawing a number of undesirables, largely because of the false rumor that there was free food and booze. 

 

In every period of transition this riff-raff, which exists in every society, rises to the surface, and merely does its utmost to give expression to uneasiness and impatience. Moreover, this riff-raff almost always falls unconsciously under the control of the little group of “advanced people” who do act with a definite aim, and this little group can direct all this rabble as it pleases, if only it does not itself consist of absolute idiots, which, however, is sometimes the case.

 

One can see both possibilities present in the MAGA movement. There is a small group of people - the billionaire-predator class which is in fact acting with the definite aim of enriching themselves. But there is also Trump and his sycophants, which are, unfortunately, absolute idiots. As the Iran War debacle shows. 

 

As the fatal conclusion nears, Pyotr and Kirillov end up talking, with Pyotr trying to get Kirillov to follow through on his suicide plans, after taking the fall for a murder; and there are some interesting lines here. 

 

“No, you were right in what you said; let it be comfort. God is necessary and so must exist.”

“Well, that’s all right then.”

“But I know He doesn’t and can’t.”

“That’s more likely.”

“Surely you must understand that a man with two such ideas can’t go on living.” 

“Shoot yourself, you mean?”

“Surely you must understand that one might shoot oneself for that alone? You don’t understand that there may be a man, one man out of your thousands of millions, one man who won’t bear it and does not want to.”

 

Kirillov eventually comes to his point:

 

“I am bound to show my unbelief. I have no higher idea than disbelief in God. I have all the history of mankind on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself; that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I am the first one in the whole history of mankind who would not invent god. Let them know it once for all.”

 

This is Dostoevsky’s strawman version of atheism, of course. The existentialists came to a very contrary conclusion. And Camus himself argued that it took more courage to live than to die, and so was a more noble calling. Where Kirillov is correct is that the most profound argument against religion is the history of mankind. Nobody has done more to debunk religion than religious people - they themselves are the most profound argument in favor of atheism. 

 

The last chapter belongs mostly to Stepan, who flees his existing life to go…he isn’t even sure. As his life eventually ebbs away, he gives the last look at his philosophy - and perhaps that of the book itself. He talks about the parable of the demon possessed man (and yes, I believe it is a parable, not a historical event) and the swine. 

 

“You see, that’s exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. But a great idea and a great Will will encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils…and all those devils will come forth, all the impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface…and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine; and indeed maybe they have entered into them already! They are we, we and those…and I perhaps at the head of them, and we shall cast ourselves down, possessed and raving, from the rocks into the sea, and we shall all be drowned - and a good thing too, for that is all we are fit for.” 

 

The final speech of the dying man is what I will end this post with:

 

“The mere fact of the ever-present idea that there exists something infinitely more just and more happy than I am fills me through and through with tender ecstasy - and glorifies me - oh, whoever I may be, whatever I have done! What is far more essential for man than personal happiness is to know and to believe at every instant that there is somewhere a perfect and serene happiness for all men and for everything. The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and will die of despair. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential for man as the little planet on which he dwells.”

 

Decide for yourself whether Dostoevsky means this to be a final mockery of Stepan’s futile and ultimately meaningless life, or if he means it to be his own idea, that humans without a belief in the Eternal are destined to die of despair. 

 

What perhaps is true is that humans need hope, and need purpose. Whether that comes from a belief in something external, or if we make our own meaning in community with each other - the existentialist view - there is something in us that seeks to transcend, to find meaning. 

Utah Shakespeare Festival 2026

Since 2014, my wife has attended the Utah Shakespeare Festival, usually with a friend, on a week that the kids and I were camping somewhere. We have dropped by occasionally if we are camping in the area. Back in 2016, however, we joined her for a second trip to see the fall plays. (They used to have some in summer, some in fall, with a brief overlap if you did it right. At this time, they appear to be doing just one set of plays throughout the whole period.) 

That 2016 trip was a lot of fun, so we returned in 2021, and again in 2023, 2024, and 2025. These days, we are down to our youngest kid, as the older ones are in college, with their own lives. Time moves on. I have mentioned that my wife and I went to see a play (Comedy of Errors) for our first date over a quarter century ago, so we anticipate being that couple after the kids all move out. 

This year, due to schedule issues - a court case for me and the first day of school for our kid -  we were only able to see seven out of the eight total plays. Now that new artistic director John DiAntonio has settled in, he has decided that eight will be the ideal number of plays for a season. On the one hand, this is awesome, and it is great to see that the festival has bounced back from Covid and is selling tickets and making enough money to present a large slate. On the other, this does make fitting everything in difficult. Ideally, we will be able to see all the plays next year, but we will see. 

The one we skipped this year was Something Rotten, because we have seen it locally twice in the last few years, so other plays were a priority. 

As I noted in last year’s post, it has been a bit disappointing that in the last few years, USF has failed to continue its project of presenting plays by authors that are not white and male. I am pleased to see that this year, at least, we have a play by a Latina woman, even if the rest are all white guys. 

Next year includes a musical co-written by a woman, but that is it. I get that USF has to sell tickets, and this often means making decisions that make financial sense, but I do wish that there was a more consistent effort to feature voices that are not just white and male. 

The casting was, fortunately, as wonderfully diverse as ever, and the plays themselves both contained valuable messages and were presented in ways that brought these messages out. Even to do that is an act of resistance in our current hostile political environment. 

I also want to note that USF’s commitment to “complete the canon” - that is, to present all of the Shakespeare plays over time - has resulted in so many wonderful productions of the less known plays. This year was Troilus and Cressida, which was probably my favorite of the plays we saw. This brings me within three of completing my personal canon - I still have Titus Andronicus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and King John left to see live. 

Finally, before I dive into the individual plays, let me once again mention that for my wife and I, the festival is an entire experience, not just a series of stage performances. We attend the Cabaret, which is a fundraiser for young artists, held way too late at night, but still a lot of fun - in this case, after leaving for Utah at 4:30 AM, then seeing two shows. This week was a movie theme, which included scenes from the OG Star Wars movie performed using Shakespearian language - SciFi in iambic pentameter. It was lots of fun as usual.

Other events worth attending are the discussions the morning after the play, and the seminars for props, costumes, and actors. All of these are free of charge too. We did pay this year for the chance to see a set change at the indoor theater before shows, which included a discussion with the stage crew as well.

While the acting is always outstanding across the board at the USF - it’s a professional festival and no slight to the other performers - there were four actors that particularly stood out this year for their work in multiple plays. I’ll talk about them in the discussions of individual plays.

With that, I’ll jump into the individual plays, in the order we saw them. 

 

See How They Run

(Philip King)

Every year, the USF does a farce, usually by a British playwright. This year, we got See How They Run by Philip King, a post-war British farce. 

Something new I learned this year: one of the classic rules of farce is apparently that there be four doors. No more, no less. And this one met that requirement. 

Let’s see: the front door, the side door, the door to the servant’s quarters and kitchen, and the closet door. 

The play takes place entirely in the vicarage in a small English town. So yeah, that’s a classic setup. 

 Which are the REAL vicars? 

According to the festival dramaturg, the always-excellent Dr. Isabel Smith-Bernstein, a few things about the play were changed from the original. Early on, the escaped German prisoner was replaced by an escaped Soviet prisoner. Because a new war requires a new villain. 

For the American version (which is what we saw), the Vicar’s young wife is now an American actress, with all the attendant cultural jokes. 

And, for this particular production, a joke about a crow’s nest was replaced by a joke about the LDS General Assembly. 

(This was the answer to one of the seminar questions - and Dr. Smith-Bernstein noted that the fact nobody laughed was exactly why the joke had to be replaced.) 

The farce is based on, as is often the case, mistaken identity, disguises, and compromising situations. And, in this case, no fewer than four characters dressed as vicars, and one real vicar in his underpants. 

But the funniest part of the play was the character of Miss Skillon, the town busybody and gossip - and the mortal enemy of Penelope, the vicar’s wife. 

Played by Caitlin Wise, who is consistently amazing in whatever she is in, Miss Skillon required a breathtakingly physical performance and impeccable comedic timing. I honestly do not know how Wise bent her body the way she did, and how she managed to still be ambulatory after the many pratfalls and collisions she did in the few hours of the play. Not to mention the fact that she has significant roles in two other plays running simultaneously, and keeps it all up for several months. 

Just a quick glance at the last couple years of the USF in my posts will reveal the many roles she has filled, from Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew to Louise in Dear Jack, Dear Louise. She is currently (in my opinion) the best comic actor at the USF, particularly since Michael Dougherty moved on to other projects. I would see her in literally anything. She is one of the actors that I particularly enjoyed this year. 

  

The plot itself is, of course, silly. And like any farce, don’t think about it too much. Lots of running (see title), mistaken identities, slapstick, and one joke after another. 

The set for this one was pretty complicated, and everything had to be reinforced to withstand the physicality of the performances. The couch had to be able to hold five people, sitting on various places. The doors were slammed over and over and over (and in different ways - this was scripted by the director.) Rugs had to stay in place and not harm the actors. 

Learning about these various things at the props and sets seminars was really fun. 

Anyway, nothing deep or profound here, just a good old-fashioned over-the-top bit of fluff and nonsense. 

 

Troilus and Cressida

This play was the main attraction for me this year - it is almost never performed, and thus difficult to add to the canon. 

This really is a shame, because, done right, the play has a great anti-war message, and is filled with some of Shakespeare’s finest insults.

To begin with, though, do not confuse this play with the Iliad, even though it covers roughly the same period of the Trojan War. The title characters are essentially a new addition - Cressida doesn’t appear in the Iliad at all, and Troilus is a very minor character. 

But even more than that, Shakespeare isn’t here to praise the heroes of Homer’s epic, he is there to talk trash about them. To expose them as the anti-heroes he thinks they are. 

Okay, except perhaps for Hector, who comes off as the one marginally sane warrior one either side. 

For the USF production, the setting wasn’t a particular time, but the entire history of wars involving the United States, starting with the Revolutionary War (Nestor as the old guy hearkens back to that first war), and drawing imagery through at least Vietnam. 

 

The scenery is covered in faux newspaper clippings about the war and Helen and the rest of the mythology. There is rubble everywhere, and a damaged (but giant) angel of death statue presiding over the whole thing. 

The two sides are represented with colors: Troy in red, Greece in blue. Except Helen herself, who glams it up as a pinup girl, the incitement to war. (The second act opens with an actual vintage patriotic number, with just a few words changed, and Helen crooning and writhing on a baby grand piano.) 

Despite giving the play its title, Troilus and Cressida are actually fairly minor characters, in what is the minor plot of the play. Trojan prince Troilus falls in love with Cressida, or at least the idea of being in love, and enlists her uncle Pandarus to make the match. Which he does, including providing a place for the couple to make “the beast with two backs.” (Sorry, that’s from Othello, but it fits here…)  

Yes, in case you wondered, Pandarus is in fact the source of the word “pander.” Originally, the word meant more what Pandarus does in the play: procure sex for others. This usage lingers in the crime that pimps are typically charged with, “pandering.”

It was only later that our more modern meaning of “catering to” or “flattering” caught on. Or, perhaps, as the applicability shifted from sex to politics, it also shifted from the pimp to the prostitute. (Or, the White Stripes notwithstanding, maybe you can be a pimp and a prostitute too.)

Anyway, things go wrong late in the play when Cressida is traded to the Greeks in a prisoner exchange, and, as women often do when they are used as property, she becomes the concubine of one of the Greek officers, to Troilus’ horror, leaving him cynical about love by the end of the play.

The main plot is similar to that of the Iliad: Achilles and Agamemnon have a fight and Achilles goes and pouts in his tent, enjoying the company of his lover Patroclus. 

Left without their best fighter, they turn to their second best, the dimwitted lunk, Ajax, when the Trojans propose to resolve the war by single combat. 

That’s at least the basic outline. 

For Shakespeare, however, there will be a new twist. Members of both armies are doubting the war, wondering if it is worth it. So many dead bodies already, and many more to come. Hector actually comes out and asks if they shouldn’t just give Helen back. Ulysses, ever the schemer, tries to have it both ways. 

It is this doubt that leads Hector to propose the trial by combat, confining the risk to himself (he hopes), and saving further slaughter. 

Shakespeare then gets to poke a lot of fun at Ajax, who even in Homer, is the OG “himbo,” vain about his muscles, and more than a little dumb. He gets the two best insults in the play, from the jester character, Thercides, who is styled as a jaded war correspondent in the USF version:

E'en so; a great deal of your wit, too, lies in your

sinews, or else there be liars. Hector have a great

catch, if he knock out either of your brains: a'

were as good crack a fusty nut with no kernel. 

 

And, from Alexandra (Alexander in the original) to Cressida:

This man, lady, hath robbed many beasts

of their particular additions. He is as valiant as the

lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant, a

man into whom nature hath so crowded humors

that his valor is crushed into folly, his folly sauced

with discretion. There is no man hath a virtue that

he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint

but he carries some stain of it. He is melancholy

without cause and merry against the hair. He hath

the joints of everything, but everything so out of

joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and

no use, or purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight. 

 

Ajax was performed in this version by Lavour Addison, who has been at USF for a number of years, and can be a badass and plenty serious. But in this case, he uses his seriously built physique to strut and flex and do meathead stuff. Fortunately, that included his trademark flips and one-handed pushups. 

 

Ajax and Achilles 

In contrast to Ajax, there is the serious and sincere Hector, played by John Keabler. And also Achilles, who is played as a 1970s rock star by Walter Kmiec, who absolutely killed it as Macbeth last year. And man, I loved his version of Achilles. 

There are some significant changes to the way the events unfold in Shakespeare’s version. First, Hector doesn’t kill Patroclus, but only wounds him. It is left to Ulysses to do the dirty deed, which he does in order to accomplish his own political goals. 

Second, Achilles doesn’t kill Hector fair and square in combat as he did in the Iliad - the scandal in that version is his mistreatment of Hector’s body. In the Shakespeare version, Achilles takes his posse of thugs and ambushes Hector unarmed, and the thugs beat him to death. 

Yeah, as I said, Shakespeare intends to expose the “heroes” as the vicious brutes they are. 

I should also mention that Blake Henri, as Thersites, was the best part of this play. And honestly, he was fantastic in all three Shakespeare plays. He is the next of the four actors that I particularly enjoyed this year. 

In my opinion, Troilus and Cressida was the best play this year, with a clear artistic vision and message, superb acting, and sets and costumes that truly aided the storytelling. 

 

She Loves Me

(Joe Masteroff, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick)

This is my wife’s favorite musical of all time. We previously saw it locally, but she was looking forward to seeing it in a larger budget professional version this time. 

Since I already wrote about the plot extensively in my prior post, I won’t reiterate it here. 

I do have some comments, however, about this particular production. 

First, one of the things discussed in the seminar before the show was that She Loves Me is an example of a musical that is a play first, with the songs being built around the plot. This is in contrast to many other musicals, where the songs come first, and the plot has to be created to hold it all together. Not that one is better than the other, but plenty of great songs have ended up orphaned by the musicals they first appeared in. 

I am reminded of Andrea Long Chu’s observation regarding Richard Rodgers:

"In his earlier partnership with lyricist Lorenz Hart, Rodgers had written the melodies first, crafting sparkling tunes for forgettable plays, whereas with Hammerstein, the words had come first, requiring a more mature Rodgers to compose music with a clear dramatic purpose in mind. The former duo produced classic songs; only the latter produced classic musicals."

Don’t think for a moment, though, that the songs are an afterthought in She Loves Me. The songs are great, witty, and sophisticated. For me, as a classical musician, I love the score, because it is musically complex, based on klezmer music, and deliciously dramatic. 

The set was definitely one of the most interesting I have seen. The perfume shop is mostly built on a portable turntable, so we get both inside and outside scenes. Because the USF is a repertory theater, the whole thing has to be moveable, and the process of dismantling one set and assembling another needs to be done in a mere hour. Yes, that is crazy. And the backstage people at USF are total badasses in how they do this.

The cast in this musical was clearly chosen because of their ability to sing - and most sounded like they had trained in opera. Matt Koenig as Georg and Ali Ewoldt as Amalia were particularly strong, but really, not a single weak voice in the production. They could belt, but also handle the difficult and soft passages with delicacy. As a musician, I really enjoyed it all. 

 

I will note that I do not think I had heard Chris Mixon sing before, but he was quite good as Mr. Maraczek. I have mentioned that he is the ever-present good old boy at the USF, raffling off his homemade nuts and pickles at the fundraisers, and usually playing a variety of bit parts. This was definitely a less expected turn, but I always like to see him on stage. His love of theater is apparent in everything he does. 

 

Hamlet

Believe it or not, I had never seen a professional version of Hamlet on stage before. Yes, I have seen it at BC - and it was good for a student production. I also saw the Benedict Cumberbatch filmed version during the pandemic. But not a live professional version.

I went into this one with really high hopes - after all, Walter Kmiec as Hamlet and Kayland Jordan as Horatio? That’s a dream casting for sure. Add in John Keabler as Claudius and Mare Trevathan as Gertrude, and it should have been amazing.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The particular cuts and rearrangement of the play seemed to me to muddle the character arc, and everything felt mixed up and directionless. 

The core of the problem started with the removal of all plot points connected with Fortinbras. It is an understandable choice by itself, leaving (in theory) more time in which to include the “extra” monologues for Hamlet.

But by removing Fortinbras, there just wasn’t much action left for the second half of the play, so the director chose to move the most famous soliloquy to right before the final scene in Act 5. 

To me, this caused to serious problems. First, it ruined the character arc for Hamlet. Why is he getting cold feet and musing about whether he will take action? He’s already said that violence is the only way forward now that Claudius has tried to kill him, and all that remains is for him to fence with Laertes. It felt totally disconnected to the plot and character arc to be placed there.

Second, for those of us who know the play fairly well, we noticed the absence of the speech were it belongs. (Or, perhaps, in one of the places it was originally set.) It was clearly needed where it was placed: Hamlet’s trajectory of rushing into vows of action alternating with self-doubt and inaction requires insight into his thinking. Plus, once the scene went by without the speech, I ended up worried that it would be cut altogether - this has been done before, although I suspect even the sedate older crowd at the USF would have rioted. 

I really still am a bit sore about this, because there was so much to love about the production otherwise. 

As usual, the acting was superb. Kmiec and Jordan were perfect in their parts, with Jordan making much of the role, almost transforming the play into the tragedy of Horatio. 

Keabler managed to make the role of Claudius ambiguous and morally complicated. It is easy to miss that the Denmark of the play is more like a constitutional democracy than a true monarchy - Claudius is elected to succeed old Hamlet. 

Trevathan is so good in everything - I list her as one of the four most memorable actors this year, along with Kayland Jordan, Caitlin Wise, and Blake Henri. Like Keabler, she added depth and pathos to an otherwise unlikeable character. 

I will also mention that, although it was disappointing that Kathryn Tkel was ill, and was unable to play Ophelia, Brianna Miller was excellent filling in. 

Again, so much to love about it - it could have been great. But the script choices undermined the story, and left me disappointed, which is super rare for the USF.

 

The Book Club Play

(Karen Zacarias)

This was the sole female-written play of the festival, and was performed in the Anes Theater. I have a great fondness for the venue, as it is small enough that even the cheap seats give a great view of the actors’ faces. I have always loved intimate theater, and the actors who make such good use of it.

The Book Club Play is, unsurprisingly, about a book club. For those of us who are in at least one book club, this play feels very familiar indeed. Sure, the drama is a bit over-the-top, and the characters a bit more “out there” than the ones in The Literary Lush, but there are so many similarities. The characters don’t match exactly, but they have characteristics drawn from the sorts of people who are in book clubs. Like me - my fellow book clubbers probably were thinking “hey, I know a guy like that…)

There is the guy who is there because of the food. Who is also the guy who pretty much never reads the book, but sometimes watches the movie.

There is the host who takes the club a bit too seriously. The guy who is a total pedant and a bit of a book snob. The recently invited new member who doesn’t yet know all of the unwritten rules. 

The guy who is known for his creative suits. The literature professor who fell out of love with reading, before loosening up and learning to read popular literature. 

 

I really don’t want to reveal plot points, other than to say that there are plenty of awkward moments, moments of self-discovery, a coming out scene, and enough drama to, well, make a play about. 

I had fun watching this one, although, as my wife points out, the playwright has a bit of an addiction to tying up all the ends very neatly, even when a more open ending would have been a bit less trite. 

To me, the best part of this play was the great ensemble cast. With one exception, the six actors in this one were also together in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so the chemistry carried over between the plays, even though they played very different characters in each. 

I guess I might give a bit of a summary of the play. The club is a longstanding one, founded by Ana and Will, who both take literature a bit too seriously. Ana is married to Rob, who is there for the food and would rather watch the movie. Another longtime member is Ana’s friend Jen, who has a bit of a secret history involving a congressman. More recently, Lily has joined the club. She is Ana’s co-worker at the newspaper. 

The book club has just been selected by legendary documentary maker Lars Knudsen, and the cameras are rolling, making everyone more awkward.

Things get shaken up, however, when Lily invites literature professor Alex, without taking a vote first. Alex, fortunately, is good natured and firm enough to make himself at home anyway. But his presence, and his openness to popular books like Rob might read, turns the club upside down, and much drama ensues.

I’ll just mention a few things that I particularly noted. First, the idea of a jock sort of guy having an epiphany about life after reading The Age of Innocence is both hilarious and brilliant. It totally turns on its head the usual cliche about women and books like that about repressed women. 

Second, I think I may have been the only person at the seminars who has actually read Ulysses. It has a daunting reputation, of course, and I suspect that more people know of it than have any intention of reading it. Oh well. 

Third, it was very interesting to experience the coming-out scene. Utah’s crowds skew older (like most live theater and arts), white (because Utah), and fairly conservative. But the times they are a changin’: there was a near universal cheer when the character came out, and my wife and I have noted that the discussions at the seminars are not what they used to be a decade ago. 

We both think that in its own way, the USF has been part of this shift, by nudging people to think more deeply, to challenge the assumptions of white male supremacy, to consider our cultural baggage surrounding gender, roles, expressions, and sexuality. 

I haven’t read any of the other books they discussed, though. I do want to read Moby Dick, but probably will give Twilight and The Da Vinci Code a pass. 

 

Twelfth Night

I can’t really decide for sure if I prefer Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing as my favorite Shakespeare comedy. Maybe I love whichever one I am seeing next the best.

In any case, I never get tired of Twelfth Night, with its gender bending, homoeroticism, bawdy humor, and the delicious humiliation of a self-absorbed puritan. 

There are also so many great lines. 

It turns out that it has been a decade since I last saw it, which was a bit surprising. I guess I was due. 

This production was wonderful, and I don’t think I could improve on anything. 

The setting was the age of Mozart, complete with fancy costumes and a harpsichord. 

Caitlin Wise, as Viola, was as marvelous and endearing as she could be. Kayland Jordan was excellent as Olivia, and found the perfect balance between ice queen and unwitting lovebird. The two of them had great chemistry, making that relationship the core of the play. 

Lavour Addison was the hapless Orsino, besotted by Olivia and missing the disguised Viola’s love for him. 

And what about the humorous subplot? Well, Rodney Lizcano was lugubrious as Malvolio, and both his acting and the choices the director made really brought out the real problem with Malvolio. It isn’t just that he is a puritan - and as we know, after Shakespeare’s death, the puritans took over the country and outlawed the theater. The bigger problem is that Malvolio is an asshole. He mistreats and demeans his underlings, all while imagining that Olivia will marry below her rank. Self-delusional, grandiose, and mean to those who he sees as beneath him, it is fitting that the real author of his downfall is Maria, the target of his arrogance. 

 

In this production, Maria was intended to be played by Kathryn Tkel, who was ill. I’m sure she would have been great.

Instead, we got Mare Trevathan, which is kind of like having Johnny Bench as your backup catcher. She was as good a Maria as I have ever seen, and an utter pleasure to watch at all times. She also has over a thousand audiobooks to her credit, numerous stage and screen credits, and apparently is really good at all the things. Certainly, even in smaller rolls in other plays over the last few years, she is reliably excellent. 

Blake Henri was Sir Toby, and, as I noted, he was electric in every role he had in every play. Sir Andrew was played by another USF veteran, John Harrell. He wasn’t as broad or slapstick as I have seen this role be played, but instead relied on the humorous lines and a general sense of dissipation and lack of brains. 

Finally, Gabriel Elmore as Feste, in the best Feste costume ever, added a great deal of wit and insight.

Anyway, loved this play, and thought it was a great production. 

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

(David Catlin)

 

This is an interesting take on the story, combining both the backstory of how it was written, and the story itself. For those of us who have read Frankenstein, it was a relief to see that the story was told in a way true to the book (although obviously simplified to fit in the time allotted), with all of the more nuanced philosophical issues still at the forefront. 

After all, the book isn’t primarily a horror tale, but rather raises profound questions of science and ethics, the duty a creator owes to a creation, the trauma of loneliness, and the ultimate futility of revenge. 

The play opens with the young romantics at their villa in Italy: Mary Shelley, her lover and poet Percy Shelley, Mary’s stepsister Claire Claremont, Claire’s lover Lord Byron, and the oft-forgotten fifth member, Dr. John Polidori. 

I do want to mention Polidori because, unlike Percy and Byron, he actually did write something on the spooky theme, and in fact is credited with the first modern vampire story. (And, like Percy getting credit for Frankenstein, Byron initially got credit for The Vampyre.)

As the group sits around and discusses spooky stuff, Mary starts to tell her tale. The characters then morph into the characters in the story. Throughout the play, there is this shift back and forth between the real-life scenes and the monster story. 

It will probably be no surprise, of course, that Byron turns into the monster, or that Percy turns into Frankenstein. Polidori turns into Henry, but also a number of other characters. Claire covers a whole bunch of minor characters, while Mary becomes Elizabeth. 

Seeing this on a small stage was a lot of fun. The props from the boat to the gurney were all shrunk to fit through a very narrow passage on and off the stage, which made everything feel miniature. The actors made great use of the trapdoor on the stage, which doubled as the grave which eventually ate everyone - the epilogue to the play has Mary telling what will happen to each character, including herself, as a brain tumor eventually robs her of speech, leaving the play ending with a half a word and a fragment of a sentence. I thought it was highly effective.

 

As noted regarding The Book Club Play, the ensemble cast had great chemistry, and switched agilely from the realistic characters of the former to the more fantastic real and imaginary ones in Frankenstein. 

This was my favorite of the non-Shakespeare plays this year, in no small part because I loved Frankenstein, and this version was true in spirit to the original, not the lurid imitations that have followed. 

 

That is my summary of the Utah Shakespeare Festival for 2026. We are already looking forward to next year, and blocking off dates. I can certainly recommend the USF for high quality theater, and an immersive experience.