The Brawl Crawl!

Occupy Verona's long cold-weather hiatus has finally come to an end!

That's right, friends! It is warming up in New York City, and so Occupy Verona's site-specific outdoor Shakespeare performances can begin again!

Before we jump back into a full production, however, some of the Occupy Verona crowd (including myself) embarked on a little experiment called, "The Brawl Crawl."

The concept was simple: Perform Shakespeare fight scenes IN bars all over the city, traveling from bar to bar for each scene. 

We had a solid line-up of scenes and a handful of bars in the West Village that agreed to house us as long as "everyone buys a beer."

We started with the opening brawl from Romeo and Juliet (Do you bite your thumb at us sir?) to a decent-sized audience. 

By the time we got to the second bar for my scene (The Taming of the Shrew with Marc Sauve) there were enough people for me to be worried that I might accidentally kick someone while doing my fight choreography.

Five bars and six scenes later, there were almost 80 people there, drinking beers and cheering on the scenes! 

Rest assured, the Brawl Crawl will happen again, and I will most likely be reprising my role as Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew! 

First Shakespeare Class...

Went quite well despite the fact that I was suffering from a migraine for the entire second half. The first class was just prepared monologues, to get a sense of our abilities and personalities.

Highlight of the night was when one guy (whose name I forgot) was doing his monologue, containing the words "Draw your sword," and the instructor (Seth) asked him to physically draw a sword. To which he replied, "Do you want me to get a sword? I brought some."

Seth: "Seriously?"

Yep. He had three.

Seth: "Do you carry these with you all the time?"

Guy: "Well I always have one in my car."

Seth: "Amazing."

He was also wearing a Monty Python T-shirt, and throughout the course of the evening there was at least one Hitchhiker's Guide reference.

I don't know why I didn't realize that a class containing both Shakespeare and sword fighting would attract total dorks. And I thought to myself, "Do I really belong with these people?"

And then I took a long hard look at myself watching my Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs and surfing the web for the pirated Les Mis trailer and I realized:

Yes. Yes I do.