jaeleslie

Last Thursday morning I drove out to American Players Theatre (playinthewoods.com) to watch this season's production of The Tempest, with the usual September-matinee crowd that arrived mostly in nine yellow school busses. I always find it a remarkable thing when storms or nightfall can be evoked by little more than words on a brilliant September midday while I'm getting a sunburn.

I thought The Tempest would show some relevance to the September 11 date, and indeed it mustered more wisdom than I heard on the radio that day. The comfort of fiction, of fantasy, is that at the end of the play the ship that was wracked and split and wept over lies whole again in a harbor of the isle, with its mariners all safe below hatches, every one. Out here in the real world, no such luck.

The drive to the outdoor theatre about an hour west of here was through sundrenched haze rising off drought-stricken but sturdily ripening fields. I drove straight west to Pine Bluff (unincorporated) and then north on County P, which curves for the very best views over ridgelines through the prettiest country you could lay eyes on. Green soybeans fields were making good progress toward yellow, and the corn ripening to brown. I indulged the right Romantic rapture I've been trained up in, that looks on every landscape like a painting. Since then we've had four gentle inches of the rain we've been needing so badly, and the clouds have cleared off again for more lovely turn of the season weather. I only describe it because we are driving out again this Friday, for Shaw's Pygmalion.