Blogologues: Social Media Goes Thespian

Brave and funny are a powerful combination. It takes courage to create something new and perspective to make people laugh. Blogologues snares you with both of these qualities in a completely contemporary format. You can’t not laugh… but while you are laughing you feel like maybe you understand something you didn’t before… about the wild variety of the internet… which is a reflection of the world itself, which apparently is rife with funny, crystal clear moments.

Blogologues is a staged performance which proudly blurts out right from the start that all of its material comes VERBATIM from the internet. As such, Blogologues is a mini-tutorial on how actors can bring words to life. Lively Productions, the company behind all the theatrics, could not be more aptly named.

Blogologues is the brainchild of Yale graduates Allison Goldberg and Jen Jamula.

I walked up three flights of stairs and waited in a narrow hallway for the performance to begin, but it's clear to me that Blogolgues is going bigger places. Get aboard for one of its monthly, thematic shows so you can say you were there back then, and that you had the incredible insight to recognize yet another way the evolving media mix expresses our modern world.

Cain by Jose Saramago

I read books because of the insights they give and the flashes of beauty they reveal. God marks Cain as a murderer and condemns him to “walk the earth.” Jose Saramago’s novel takes us on that walk. Having committed the ultimate crime, Cain shuns violence, entering into an extended argument with God, whose exacting vengeance he witnesses in biblical stories we all know so well. Along the way, he meets Lillith, who has to be one of literature’s most self-aware women. Without delusions, they live through a gentle, erotic relationship that could only be called love. “The body’s sublime memory,” Saramago writes. At a moment of doubt, she tells him: “No one is just one person… you, for example, are both cain and abel.”

Cain walks through time continually encountering what he calls “another present.” But these other presents are jumbled, like time in the movie Pulp Fiction. He sees Abraham a second time and asks after his son, Isaac, met previously. But Abraham says he only has a son named Ishmael.

I kept thinking of a quote I now realize I mis-heard. In Pulp Fiction, Vincent (John Travolta) asks Jules (Samuel Jackson) what he plans to do now that his revelation has made him decide to leave the life.

"Basically I'm just gonna walk the earth. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu - walk from place to place.”