Review:  "By Heart"

By: Tiago Rodrigues 

At Brooklyn Academy of Music-BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Pl. (Now closed)

By Bina Sharif

Any one who is interested in literature or any other soul who wants to be interested, this show is a must

for them.

Not only it will feed your appetite for amazing words, sentences, poems, sonnets ever written by the    greats such as Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, F. Scott Fitzerald but you will instantly learn one of the greatest Sonnet written by Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 during the show.

The stage has ten empty chairs and quiet a few books on wooden crates in the center of the stage.

If you had no idea about the show, you would think that there are ten actors participating in it, but no, it's a solo.

Tiago Rodrigues charmingly invites ten audience members to join him. I thought he was just kidding in the beginning because he has that ability as if he is just cracking jokes to warm up the audience, but it wasn't a joke and audience members eagerly rushed to participate and whoever couldn't get there on time looked very disappointed. 

He wants them to memorize the whole sonnet line by line. He coaches them like an Orchestra conducter

with grand gestures of his hands, arms and wrists. He takes deep breaths to indicate that they must repeat the line again and again till they get it. Some audience members were very sharp as if they knew the sonnet already and some had a little difficulty but Tiago had lots of patience and persistent in his

pursuit of making them learn and memorize. It was a great pleasure to watch. I really wanted to be one of those ten volunteers but a bit nervous as well,  in case I would have had difficulty during the process, but what a great challange it would have been.  In between the lines of the Sonnet, Tiago would take breaks and improvise and indulge with the audience with great sense of humor and ease.

He is an amazing story teller and tells us about his grandmother Candida who was a serious reader all her life. Her house was full of books but one day she told him to take all the books away because she was having lots of trouble wth her eye sight and asked him to get him one last book which she wanted to memorize.  She was rapidly becoming blind.

Tiago had been writing letters to George steiner earlier and he decides to write him the second letter,

to take his suggestion for choosing  that last book for his grandmother whom he loved so much. She wanted to memorize that last book by heart. Then he quotes a great statement by George Steiner, that what we memorize and hold it in our memory become the, "decoration for the house of our interior." Just for that, the slow learning of the sonnet, line- by -line, word- by- word was worth every minute.

Tiago Rodrigues has presented, "By heart" in Portugal, Canda, Spain and France. He has been recently appointed as director of the Avignon Festival In France.

He teaches us Shakespeare while dressed in a pair of comfortable jeans and a T-shirt completely relaxed

because he has inherited the wealth of memorizing the greatest words and sentences ever written by

amazing writers and scholars. He has a gift of a superb charmer with the immaculate knowledge of

 literature. I throughly enjoyed this amazing show.

Bina Sharif

Editor/publisher: artsinternational.blogspot.com

Member of American Theater Critics Association: ATCA