Hello! In an attempt to ensure that the decostanza.com blog amounts to more than just a receptible for my EOY lists, I like to occasionally drop little midyear updates in here. It is entirely unclear to me how many people read these posts. I’m sure WordPress has a widget for that somewhere. It doesn’t greatly concern me. If someone had told me, years ago, that I would eventually have a years-running website and blog, I would certainly hope that next sentence out of their mouth would be something like “and sometimes you post funny little pictures and life updates.” So, here’s something to go in that category.
With the money in my pocket that teaching has afforded me, I’ve attempted to level up my traveling. Julia and I went to the San Francisco Bay in February, where we caught up with good old Nate.
Julia and I were in Maine last month, and tomorrow we’ll take a weekend trip to the Berkshires. She’s a much more accomplished traveler than I, but nevertheless I hope these domestic trips escalate into a overseas vacation sometime soon.
As far as art goes, in May I was grateful to direct a sold-out run of Kara Gordon‘s new play White Velvet for her production company Elegie. Expect photos on the Directing page soon. All of the wonderful promotional material, including the poster below, was done by Kara’s amazing partner Taylor.
I will return to the Stag & Lion Theatre Company this July and August for a production of As You Like It, in which I’ll play the cruel Oliver de Boys. Currently, Oliver seems to me a somewhat awkward role; neither big nor small, legitimately wicked, yet too ineffective to be taken seriously as a threat, and in the end fobbed off on poor Celia who loves him for reasons entirely obscure.
I kid, of course. Not every role Shakespeare wrote was pure gold, but with Oliver there’s nothing so irredeemably broken that a bit of imagination and fun can’t put right. Plus, as a special decostanza.com easter egg, I’ll give you a sneak peek at one of my scene partners…
Finally, in acting news that’s possibly even more exciting, I’ll be making my debut as an audiobook narrator later in the year. Those of you who remember my Spectral Citadel radio show know how central voice acting is to my practice as a performing artist, and though I’ve done a bit of voice acting since then (in student films, on WFMU, as a ghostly, disembodied voice in Philadelphia theatre) this book will be my largest-scale voice acting project since my radio days. I’m proud of it, and I look forward to sharing it with you.
Okay, so long for now. I’ll see you here again for the best of 2025 list.
Yours,
Matthew.