I’m very pleased to share with you that I have a double-headed Charles Williams adventure coming up!
First, Acacia Theatre Company in Milwaukee is putting on CW’s The House by the Stable March 1st through 17th, and they’ve asked me to come out there to join their talk-back post-show panel! Acacia is “an independent, non-profit, interdenominational Christian theatre company,” and their past shows include such awesome plays as Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain, Babette’s Feast, The Great Divorce, Shadowlands, An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen in an adaptation by Arthur Miller, GODSPELL, Marlowe’s Faustus, and more.
Acacia Theatre actor Jason Will contacted me a while back to request a consultation on The House by the Stable. Although it is “surprisingly intelligible” for a Williams work (C.S. Lewis’s words), it’s still (obviously) strange. We talked about the characters as archetypes, Medieval miracle plays as models, and more. Later, Jason invited me out there to join the Q-&-A sessions, and I’m honored to be a little part of this production. I’m hoping to be able to offer a pre-show lecture, too, if there’s interest.
Second, I’m planning to spend two weeks at The Marion E. Wade Center in March, right after the visit to Acacia, finishing up the research for The Oddest Inkling book. Although it’s not a scholarly book, I do want to make sure that I’ve got the whole picture of CW’s works. I’m weak on the later stuff, so I need to spend some time digging into his last writings. I’d like to read all of the Raymond Hunt notebooks, if possible. And of course I still need to figure out exactly what unpublished poems (if any) are in the archives there. Even if I spend the whole two weeks just writing the book, without opening any archival materials at all, that will be a good use of time.
I love the Wade Center, Laura the Archivist, Marj the Associate Director, David & Crystal the Co-Directors, everyone else there, the place itself, and every minute I get to spend there. The only problem is that I get so many more ideas of books and articles to write that my list is now several lifetimes long. (My current notion is to write something comparing All Hallows’ Eve, Terror of Light, and The Devil and the Lady, or Frontiers of Hell, which all share more or less the same basic premise). Ah, well. That’s a good problem to have.
If you would like to support the financial cost of the Wade Center research trip, you can do so on my patronage page. Thank you!!! <3
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