Scene Partner Series, batch 1

heads-up:

It's official. Our very first beer is in the fermenter! Andrew and I (clever brewer name to be determined) are super excited to announce:

Wit Washer English Brown Ale by Gower and Fluellen

For our first beer, we chose the recipe kit for an English Brown Ale from Brooklyn Homebrew, and so to follow along with the English tradition, we went straight to the Bard. Sifting through some favorite drinking references, it was clear the Henry plays offered the most ale-centric language, so after investigating each, we were drawn to Gower’s words in Henry V, Act III scene 6:

“...and what a beard of the general’s cut and a horrid suit of the camp will do among foaming bottles and ale-washed wits is wonderful to be thought on.”

It is indeed, and the fooling and the trickery will commence in about 3½ weeks time, at which point Gower and Fluellen (and possibly Pistol) will present you with referenced scene in the comfort of somebody’s (or many-body’s) NYC apartment(s). Since it’s our first try, we’ve no idea how it’s going to taste or even if it will be drinkable. But, we’re gonna go for it anyway (and if it sucks, we’ll have plenty of back-up choices for washing your wits in, don’t worry).

For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of apartment art (or apt.art), I’ve had this desire to work on scenes, famous, infamous, huge, old, challenging scenes and try to figure out how to set them in apartments. But not just one apartment - I want them to travel to the apartment of whoever wants to see them. This way, the end product questions the audience’s understanding of the play as well as their own home (or at least a space that’s already familiar to them as a home-space). Also, the work for the actors becomes about how to create and set a scene for a type of space rather than a specific space, how to be both flexible and follow a set of landmarks so the scene isn’t a complete free-for-all. It’s a grand experiment, ripe for learning and I’m incredibly curious about what we’ll find out - about the scenes, the plays, the people we perform them for, ourselves and so many other things. Much more on this to follow.

So this is your heads-up: 3 weeks from Sunday our very first beer will be bottled and ready for drinking and we’ll have an excerpt from Henry V, scene III.6 ready for viewing. We think the two will make for a smashing good time.