The Merchant of What? Where?

I love Shakespeare, particularly his more raucous comedies. But I hadn't been to see live Shakespeare in years, due both to lack of time and to growing frustration with my inability to hear and understand the actors. When my mom suggested we attend the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's rave-reviewed Merchant of Venice, for my dad's birthday, I accepted with considerable enthusiasm, tinged with a bit of uncertainty as to how the CI would fare in this new setting.

And . . . it sucked. Not the play, which apparently was quite good, but the CI. I tried adjusting volume, sensitivity, and program, and nothing helped. I could tell that I was hearing more than I would have previously, because at one point I took the processor off and could barely hear a thing from the stage. But I couldn't understand much at all. There were one or two actors whose voices were particularly clear (Bassanio; the foiled suitors), and I could both hear and understand their words beautifully. The rest of them, though, might as well have been speaking Urdu (or Italian, for that matter), given how few of their lines I could comprehend.

The performance was lively and very physical, so I did my best to follow along without the benefit of the iambic pentameter to guide me. Unfortunately, the futile effort of trying to hear taxed my already fatigued brain, and I ended up dozing dozed through much of the first half, and nearly all of the second.

In short, the CI flunked the theatre test. Next up, the movies.