Perhaps You Know His Poetry...?

I'm still being followed by William Blake.

The show we just opened at work, I Have Before Me A Remarkable Document Given To Me By A Young Lady From Rwanda, has a Blake reference in it. It's unattributed -- just a throw-away, really. Actually, I may have been the one to spot it. "England's green & pleasant land," from Blake's "Jerusalem." (Funny thing was, I could recite the entire poem but wasn't certain of the title until I looked it up.)

But that isn't the real stalking bit.

Chaz, our stage manager for this show, has a fun habit of including a relevant quote on each performance's sign-in sheet. For last season's Huck Finn play, Splittin' the Raft, we got Twain quotes. For The Glass Menagerie, snippets of Tennessee Williams. It's a little tougher with this current show: the playwright doesn't have an extensive body of work, and daily descriptions of the Rwandan genocide would get quite wearing on top of the play itself. So, never one to miss a connection or pass up a good opportunity, Chaz took to using quotes from William Blake.

Within the first three performances of the show (I can't recall exactly which), this ended up on the sign-in sheet:

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

I can't tell whether this is inspiring or just plain creepy.