When you buy tickets to see a Shakespeare play, you have to expect two things: an audience full of people who want you to think they're smart enough to understand it, and a stage full of actors with impossible amounts of uncontrolled bodily fluids.
Over Spring Break, I was in Chicago for a night with my family. Two tickets to Othello"" were available at the half-priced ticket booth, which my brother Bryce and I decided on mainly because it was the only play we'd heard of.
The truth is, I like Shakespeare. I always have. I liked looking like a know-it-all in my high school English classes when I was smart enough to buy a copy of ""Julius Caesar"" translated into modern English. I liked reading the SparkNotes synopsis and trying to figure out how much of Shakespeare's version I could understand once I knew the plot. It was almost like a writer's version of a logic puzzle.
And yeah, pretentiousness fits in there somewhere, too.
But I was not prepared for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. First of all, my seat was located directly in front of a pole. Not only could I not see, I was forced to straddle a long phallic object like a horny panda through much of Othello's marital troubles.
Yet, the worst of it was the father-son duo sitting next to us. They would take turns laughing with that obnoxious, nasally laugh you only use when you want someone to notice that you're laughing because you got the joke and no one else did.
Shakespeare may have made his jokes, but they were never a laugh-out-loud matter. Only pompous imbeciles laugh out loud during Shakespeare.
During intermission, Bryce and I decided something had to be done. We staked our claim on two front-row seats while the rest of the audience was in the lobby and exchanged phrases such as ""hence he doth"" and ""oh yander lingers thee"" when people looked at us as if we didn't belong there.
But then the play started up again and karma paid its dues.
""I feel ... wet,"" I whispered to my brother. ""Like it's raining in here.""
""I think it's coming from the stage,"" he replied.
We both tilted our heads forward to get a better look at Othello and Desdemona, who seemed enraged about something and were yelling a lot. The answer to our soggy mystery became clear: They were spitting.
But it wasn't just an occasional drip or even a lateral stream. These people were hurling gallons of saliva at each other in gushes that measured at least two feet in diameter.
At one point, Othello had a string of drool bouncing off his chin that seemed vigorous enough to lasso around Desdemona's neck and hang her in a vengeful fit of salivating rage. But it didn't. He just took the traditional Shakespearean approach and smothered her to death with his bare hands.
After the show, I felt as if I'd passionately made out with every member of the cast. Plus, the surprise shower had made my bangs curl, completely undoing my pre-show hair straightening efforts.
My brother and I grew impatient waiting in line for a taxi with fellow Shakespeare audience members. We were cold and drenched in other people's spit.
""Kiera, let's just go across the street and flag the taxi down there to avoid this line,"" my brother suggested.
I thought about this for a moment. Everyone else seemed as freezing and some as wet as we were. It wouldn't be fair. They were here first.
""OK,"" I said with a shrug.
As Bryce and I hopped in the next taxi before it reached the line of people at the more distant curb, I wondered why, if these people were supposedly among the intellectual elite who understood Shakespeare, none of them thought of crossing the street.
Maybe they ""get"" Shakespeare, and maybe 90 percent of them didn't have DNA samples from six strangers, but we were the first ones to end our evening in a nice warm cab. That's right.
If thou hath movith thee soul to respondith, e-mailith Kiera at wiatrak@wisc.edu.
