25
MONDAY
Bee-loud glades, dew-dabbled dreamers, and world-troubling seamen aside, William Butler Yeats was a poet just as concerned with the well-composed image as the well-turned phrase. Which makes sense, given that the son, brother, and father of painters briefly studied art, hung out with a bunch of now-forgotten Anglophone Symbolists, and titled his most important piece of prose A Vision. Fittingly, in tonight’s “original multimedia program,” “Yeats’ Gallery,” actor Sam McCready and author Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux combine dramatic readings of Yeats’ “best-loved poems” with a Pre-Raphaelite-heavy slide show and a lecture on the poet’s connections to visual art. Sure, the whole thing sounds a bit like a freshman-level lecture on late Romanticism, but what hell: Yeats sounds gorgeous read aloud, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted some damn sexy pictures, and long before McCready and Loizeaux make it to “Leda and the Swan” or “The Second Coming,” they’re taking on Yeats’ best-titled work ever: “Alternative Song for the Severed Head in ‘The King of the Great Clock Tower.’”At 7:30 p.m. at the Folger Shakespeare Library,
201 East Capitol St. SE. $35. (202) 544-7077. (Leonard Roberge)