Macbeth Hath Murdered Sleep!

If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

When I was at Berkeley, one of the undergrads decided he wanted to do a production of the Scottish Play. (The one named after the character who is mentioned in this post’s title; the play is supposedly cursed, so you are never to mention it by its title.) He assembled a group of people that he knew and did a reading of it on the Durham Studio Theatre stage,

I remember this vividly for two reasons. One, everyone was using their BEST ShakeSPEARean acCENTS (occasionally putting the emPHASis on the wrong sylLABle), but my friend Mike Foster and I spoke in contemporary American English, and kept getting pitying looks from the others; we sounded natural to us and they sounded, at times, ridiculous, but they seemed to be thinking, “What are they doing? They don’t get it.” (How many times over the years have I, as an academic theatre director, repeated the sentence: “And no British accents here!”)

Two, they were going to need money to stage the production, so I suggested that they find a local sponsor, namely Peet’s Coffee. I could hear the radio commercials:

MACBETH ACTOR (IN BAD SHAKESPEAREAN ACCENT): Macbeth hath murdered sleep!

Announcer: William Shakespeare’s Scottish Play. Brought to you by Peet’s Coffee!

Alas, the production never happened, so I never found out if I would be cast and then be told, “Use a Shakespearean accent!”

And why do we need sleep anyway (he said, switching gears so quickly his brain makes a grinding noise)? That seems to be a design flaw, leaving us vulnerable to predators and the like. While I have often said that sleep is my favored drug (with caffeine coming in second), I could happily do without it if physiology didn’t require it.

That time would be filled with writing, listening to new music (I’ve had the latest Within Temptation release in my iTunes for weeks and haven’t heard a note yet), and reading, which I do too little of these days. In other words, all the things I try to cram into the tiny free time spaces I have during the day, expanded into a wonderfully productive time.

Pass the coffee!