{"id":158,"date":"2010-09-26T22:12:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T05:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrewjwahlquist.com\/manwhowasthursday\/?p=158"},"modified":"2010-09-26T22:24:42","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T05:24:42","slug":"fearing-the-marquis-de-st-eustache","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/?p=158","title":{"rendered":"Fearing the Marquis de St. Eustache"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now if you’ve been following the project, you may have noticed that the part of the French Marquis is played by a woman– the\u00a0inimitable Lisa Wolpe<\/a>. \u00a0Among many things, Lisa is the artistic director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, and has made her mark locally by playing some of Shakespeare’s most powerful men as if she were a man. \u00a0It all stems from a very studied technique in which she is able to embody the\u00a0essence\u00a0of the male persona. \u00a0I won’t begin to describe her approach, my wife gave me an overview and I quickly knew it was out of my realm of comprehension.<\/p>\n

I wanted to bring one aspect into Chesterton’s narrative and themes that I felt he left out. \u00a0Each tyrant on the high council of anarchy, the Council of Days, represents an aspect of life in this world that strikes fear into the heart of the Christian everyman. \u00a0As I elaborated in the post about Dr. Bull and the Professor<\/a>, a couple of these aspects include science, accidents of nature, unexplainable miracles, or even death itself. \u00a0The sword fight between the Marquis and Gabriel is very clearly his battle with the fear of death, or put more nobly: martyrdom.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

However, I saw an opportunity with the Marquis for another long-time fear of man. \u00a0The book describes the Frenchman as the only man who looks like he belongs in his fashionable clothes. \u00a0So I chose to explore our fear of femininity. \u00a0There are several aspects that play out in society. \u00a0Most obvious is when a man displays feminine qualities, whether that man is homosexual or not. \u00a0Also throughout history is men’s fear of the strong woman, or the woman in power. \u00a0Many men, and even conservative women have problems with female leadership. \u00a0Then I would even go so far to say that some men and women fear female femininity in its natural state in women. \u00a0This evidences itself in different ways, such as the medical system’s attempt to take birth out of the hands of women (an institution which historically has always been the sole domain of femininity). \u00a0Also society’s angst and battles over feminine sexuality.<\/p>\n

Now you might guess what tweaks I made to the story to fit this in there. \u00a0I didn’t change any scenes or make much of a change to the lines of\u00a0dialog, just a simple act of gender-bending that I won’t specifically outline. \u00a0But remember what happens thematically to each of these “fears of man”: \u00a0they turn out not to be the enemy, but an ally after all.<\/p>\n

We had a lot of fun recording with Lisa. \u00a0Unfortunately, time didn’t allow for everyone to get in a room together to do some of the bigger, explosive scenes that she is in, but even with having only her and Jacob Sidney as Gabriel in the room, we got some great stuff on tape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By now if you’ve been following the project, you may have noticed that the part of the French Marquis is played by a woman– the\u00a0inimitable Lisa Wolpe. \u00a0Among many things, Lisa is the artistic director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, and has made her mark locally by playing some of Shakespeare’s most powerful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adapting-the-book","category-behind-the-scenes","category-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163,"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manwhowasthursday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}