A friend on Facebook recommended this poetry collection, Stage Left, because she knows the author, Mary Ethel Schmidt. I’m the last person to be a poetry critic. I don’t read much; a little Mary Oliver, poems by a friend who is an award-winning poet. However, when she said the collection was about the theater, it piqued my interest.
According to her biography on her publisher’s site, Mary Ethel Schmidt received her MFA in theatre from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, and spent the next thirty-two years in the profession. After getting an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University in 2023, she began to write about it. She turned that writing into poems.
I’ll just mention a couple points that I found interesting. In the last few years, during the Oscars, some of the actors will get up, talk a little about their background, and say I am an actor. The introductory poem, “Actor”, begins with “When the line between what is and what’s made up does not exist, you’ve got yourself an actor.”
There was a poem that made me do a little research, “Glover’s Son”, in which the subject is who wrote the plays credited to Shakespeare. While she admits it could very well have been Christopher Marlowe, who attended college, and the poem talks about how, as a spy, he could have been spirited away. But, I appreciate her last stanza. “But my money’s on the guy whose father was a glover, got through eighth grade, married, had kids, went to London, learned a trade, sent money home…” Her concluding line brings it all together, Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Although Schmidt has poems that are not related to Shakespeare, those that are were some of my favorites. I liked “Claudius’s Shoes”, Hamlet’s story from his uncle’s point of view. But, my favorite poem in the entire book was “Hamlet Pays a Visit”. “To be or not to be…” The characters in the Hundred Acre Wood try to convince Hamlet if he stays there, it’s “to be”.
There are other poems that directly reflect the actor’s point of view, or the playwright’s. They are all poems I enjoyed because of my love of theater. But, you can’t top it when Pooh, Owl, and the others try to convince Hamlet to stay. As Schmidt says, “I’ve always liked the guy and hope each time he’ll choose his future over his father’s unhappy past.”
Stage Left by Mary Ethel Schmidt. Dancing Girl Press & Studio, 2026. 46p.
FTC Full Disclosure – I bought a copy of the book.
