Limited Perspective

The things you get to say on stage can be fun for purely personal reasons, outside the context of the play.  I did a reading earlier this week of a ten-minute play called The Charitable Heart by Tony Barone . It is a reworking of The Gift of the Magi. I played a guy, Jim who must learn the lesson about love from the older guy who had seen it all before.  Jim has lost his job and is going broke. He laments he will not be able to take his wife, Louise on a vacation this year, like last year when they went to Mount Airy Lodge in the Poconos. When I was growing up back east, we got WOR channel 9 on cable out of New Jersey. They played this commercial where they would sing “beautiful Mount Airy Lodge” in a memorable manner. As I recall, the three syllables of “beautiful” were sung on the same low note, then “mount” lilted upward ever so slightly but it still didn’t prepare you for the way they went up high and full-blast on “airy” and then trailed off back down to the “lodge.” It w...

I kept thinking about reverence throughout the movie.   People just don’t have reverence for things anymore (if they ever did.) People have opinions and values but those are all self-centered, in important ways. If you revere something, that implies an obligation to it. People revere their religious faith and that impels them to act in certain ways. They willfully, happily agree to take on duties. It implies actions consistent with the thing revered.   In Dune you will see factions and groups who revere different things. Duke Leto of the House of Atreides reveres his family, both ancestors and expected descendants and therefore he takes certain actions consistent with that. It’s not that he’s good, necessarily, but he is drawn to act the way he does in service of the things he holds important.   The Fremen, the people of the planet Arrakis, revere the planet itself and act accordingly.   Then there is Baron Harkonnen, who reveres nothing. This is the contrast in the ...