Sabbatical Report

Sabbatical Report: A Narrative Account

Graham Paul
Spring Semester, 2006

I began planning for a yearlong sabbatical in the fall of 2004. At that time, I was developing a comparative study of contemporary U.S. and Eastern and Central European approaches to directing Shakespeare. The desire for such a project sprang from the fact that I seemed to be hamstrung in my own directorial approaches to Shakespeare. I felt that, if I could resolve certain issues in regard to the relationship between the Shakespeare’s text and the imaginative possibilities inherent in Shakespeare’s plays as performance events, I might be able to progress in my own development as a director and teacher. My understanding of the range of U.S. approaches to Shakespearean production was admittedly limited, and my understanding of European approaches was far more limited. However, I was tantalized by what I had learned of the differences between the two. I had previously attended a Salzburg Seminar entitled “Shakespeare Around the Globe,” during which I had gotten a strong sense of both the possibilities inherent in non-Anglophone Shakespearean production and the apparently paradoxical limitations of the Anglo-American tradition. I wanted to explore the possibilities.

To go back a bit further: For some time––in fact, as a result of my earlier sabbatical in 1995––we in the Theatre Department at Warren Wilson had described our program as “Shakespeare-centered.” Part of the reason was to give the program some kind of a focus, but the choice to focus on Shakespeare reflected our close relationship with the English Department as well as my own conviction that Shakespeare’s texts provided the most vibrant inspiration for creating theatre events which could deal with contemporary issues in a highly theatrical manner. At the same time, I had become frustrated with my attempts to explore some of the more exciting (to me, at least) contemporary performance issues by directing Shakespearean plays. My efforts seemed to me too often to be either timid or to employ unusual conventions more for the novelty than in order to accomplish a particular aim. I sensed that I would like to explore what some contemporary directors and critics refer to as a “confrontational” attitude toward the text rather than a more conventional “text-driven” approach (in which the director attempts to realize the concerns inherent in and supported by the text and to translate those for a contemporary audience). However, I realized that I didn’t really know how to go about it. I thought that if I could find models for the kind of approach I was groping toward, specifically Shakespearean models, I would be able to move forward.

I framed a series of questions concerning the question of “constraint”––what constraints, social, artistic, economic, and others, a director I might be interviewing was conscious of and how she or he dealt with them. Within that overall question, I framed other questions regarding the relationship of the director to Shakespeare’s text. I hoped to interview as many directors as possible after seeing their productions and possibly something of their rehearsal processes.

As it turned out, I was naive on more levels than I can even count.

Although I had developed what I thought was a credible proposal for an ACA Fellowship, including contacts I made with theatres and directors in the U.S. and Eastern and Central Europe (some old and many new), my proposal for funding the semester that Warren Wilson does not fund was turned down. I had not secured funding from other sources, so I was left with the decision to refuse the sabbatical or accept it for one semester only. I decided that a semester in the hand was worth two in the bush and took the one semester. The decision necessitated a radically revised plan: I decided that I had neither the time nor the funds for a truncated European study and that I would limit my study to U.S. approaches. I then reconsidered my reasons for designing the study in the first place. My choice, as I saw it, was either to a survey of the range of U.S. Shakespearean production, from the large, mainstream Shakespeare Festivals such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (with whom I had already been planning a residency of some weeks) to the more exploratory regional approaches such as those of Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts and Shenandoah Shakespeare in Virginia, to the more experimental approaches of various directors who, I hoped, would be mounting Shakespearean productions in the Spring of 2006. Finally, there were the “non-theatre” Shakespeares: prison workshops and park performances.

What, I asked myself, was I really after, given the reduced time and funds I faced? Strangely enough, I felt somewhat released by my reduced circumstances. Already I had worried that I might be taking on more than I could handle with a project of such scope; at the same time, I was becoming aware that perhaps the choice to focus on strictly Shakespearean productions, while giving shape to my study, wouldn’t really get at questions which were becoming of greater importance to me: Why produce Shakespeare at all? Why focus on a tradition and what has become a worldwide “industry” that seems, in this culture at least, to be a difficult means of creating a theatre of risk, danger, and immediacy? And weren’t those the the qualities I wanted for an enterprise which demanded so much effort? What, if anything, made doing theatre worth the effort?

I decided to touch some of the bases I had laid out, but not to touch them all or to be limited by them. I had already made some efforts, even before I knew my project was going to change: While attending a symposium at Davidson College in connection with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s residence there, I has spoken to one RSC director, who, when I asked, “Why do Shakespeare?” pointed out the obvious: “Well, that’s the question every production has to answer, isn’t it?” I also observed a workshop and keynote address by Cicely Berry, the foremost voice instructor in Anglo-American theatre, and I had the opportunity to ask her about American companies she admired. She mentioned only one that she worked with regularly: Theatre for a New Audience in New York. While I was quite interested in one of the two productions the RSC mounted at Davidson, Julius Caesar, I think I realized even then that the work of this world-renowned company, while admirable, wasn’t answering my questions. I also realized that I wanted to see new plays as much or more than Shakespeare; my focus on Shakespeare in the past had kept me from paying attention––beyond reading reviews and seeing the occasional play in Asheville––to contemporary playwriting.

I developed a long list of U.S. productions and workshops that I would try to get to. I decided to choose what seemed of the most immediate interest to me, whether or not it was Shakespeare. I couldn’t have made a wiser move: the non-Shakespeare productions I saw opened my eyes to more possibilities than would otherwise have been the case, and the Shakespeare-related work I saw allowed me to frame those original questions in a more productive context than simply “Shakespearean production.” Broadening my horizons also allowed me to include more of what I had seen before my actual sabbatical began into the frame of my study. For instance, during the previous summer and fall (2005), at the Spoleto USA Festival, Asheville’s own Stoneleaf Festival, and the Asheville Fringe Festival, I had been exposed to a number of productions and a workshop that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered part of this particular process. I included descriptions and reactions to these experiences in the weblog I now began keeping as part of my sabbatical activities: Contemporary Performances: A Sabbatical Blog (http://grahampaulblog.blogspot.com).

(By the way, it’s a good thing I made this blog the repository of my reactions to performances, books, theatrical experiences, and reading: As my sabbatical came to an end, the hard drive on my computer crashed. Of course, I had failed to back up my files ever since my sabbatical plans were truncated, and I lost everything that was stored on my computer, but not what was recorded on my blog.)

The most memorable non-Warren Wilson events of my pre-sabbatical period were these:
-- A performance at Spoleto of Mabou Mines’ DollHouse, a wonderfully risky production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, directed by Lee Bruer, who is now one of the elder statesmen of U.S. experimental theatre. One of the many things this experience taught me was that what seems outwardly to be a strange and excessive treatment of a classic can get at the heart of the material more effectively than might a more “respectful” and therefore more cautious approach.
-- A workshop in Asheville which combined two physical techniques, Grotowski and “Viewpoints” to great effectiveness. I subsequently interviewed Rebecca Holderness, who led the workshop, who recommended that I attend a workshop with Shakespeare & Company, advice I eventually followed.
-- A performance in Durham of Tiny Ninja Theatre Presents Hamlet, a one-man show by Dov Weinstein in which he presented a 75-minute Hamlet using an assortment of, yes, tiny plastic ninja figures, equally tiny video cameras and light sources, and his remarkable acting abilities. What I thought was going to be an extended spoof turned out to be one of the best productions of Shakespeare I’ve seen. I interviewed Mr. Weinstein after the performance, and one of the many memorable things he said was in answer to my question, “What would you never do in a production?” He said that, since his entire aim was simply to tell the story in the best way he could, he would never do violence to the story. That left me with something to think about in terms of “confronting” the text.

Once my actual sabbatical began, I was able to begin reading in earnest. I surveyed as much literature as I could regarding recent U.S. Shakespeare productions. But I also began reading Vacslav Havel, and his writings are what made the greatest impression. I plunged into Havel for a couple of reasons: I was embarrassed never to have read anything by this major Central European writer, thinker, and political revolutionary. Also, current political developments were finally beginning to shake me out of my artistic cocoon––fear will do that––and I suspected that Havel’s experiences under communism might, in some way, relate to what was happening to America in the post-9/11 period. Also, I wanted to read his plays.

Havel’s political writings, particularly his essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” affected me deeply. His idea of “living in the truth” made me think about my attitude toward political action, about the possibilities and limits of art under such circumstances, and about my own naiveté. I quickly realized that there were no simple analogies between Czechoslovakia under communism and America under Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, but Havel had some prescient things to say in the 70s about the West and where we find ourselves in the 21st Century. Havel’s plays are wonderful, and I’m glad to have read many of them; I may try to direct one at some point. All of his writing helps me to focus on the problematic question of the role of art, and of my art, in bringing about political change. This concern was one that continued to develop over the period of my sabbatical.

A few of the performances in Asheville I saw during this time (January-February, 2006) are worth mentioning because they seemed to be particularly relevant to the conversation I was having with myself. As part of the “Asheville Fringe Festival” I saw a multimedia performance by “Awk Theatre/Irene Moon and the Begonia Society” called Scientifically Speaking. The performer, a professional entomologist as well as a performance artist, combined a wonderfully strange acting style with the strangest “powerpoint” style presentation on insects imaginable. Watching it in a tiny nightclub venue, I began to remember why I like performance that upsets my expectations so much, and how much I value surprise when it is combined with a sophisticated sense of style as performed by an artist who knows exactly what she is doing.

I also saw two Hamlet productions worth noting at this time: One, by Aquila Theatre Company (performing at the Diana Wortham Theatre) was safe, uninspired, and singularly unimaginative, and served to re-confirm my bias against professional Shakespeare. The other, a high school production at the Asheville School called The Hamlet Experiment, was a not-very-successful attempt to re-imagine the play. Give the venue and the limited acting abilities of the students, I found it thought-provoking and admirable, though disappointing. The thoughts it provoked in me had most to do with directing choices that I recognized with painful clarity in my own work: attempts to be “different” without enough clear thinking behind them.

During this time, I started reading a book that would affect my thinking during this sabbatical period more than any other: Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, a study of ways in which English, African, and American Indian cultures influenced each other in the eighteenth century and in the present, focusing primarily on performance in London and New Orleans. Ideas in this book were to heavily influence a production idea I began working on in the latter part of my sabbatical. I also made an entirely non-sabbatical-related trip to New Orleans, the first time my wife and I had gone there to visit friends and family since Katrina. It was a disturbing experience, to say the least.

A period of travel followed. I attended one disastrous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. The director, Tina Landau, was an American director whose work I had been eager to see, particularly because of her close collaboration with another prominent American director in whom I have been very interested, Anne Bogart. Seeing Landau’s Dream was informative but depressing: It was an elaborate, glitzy, clunky production which leaned heavily toward Broadway slickness without any sense of irony or, apparently, intelligence. It didn’t even seem to be an experiment gone horribly wrong, from what I could tell. I left at intermission, which is an indication of the fact that I had decided by that time that, research or no research (and, by this time, “research” was becoming a usefully flexible term for me), I didn’t have to waste my time dutifully seeing schlock. Fortunately, later I was able to see Anne Bogart’s own production of Shakespeare’s Dream with her SITI Company actors, and that production provided a very interesting counterpoint.

The following night, I saw a production in New York which was, for me, one of those astounding evenings in the theatre which I will continue to think about for the rest of my life: The Wooster Group’s remounting their 1988 production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, with Kate Vaulk, one of the country’s most extraordinary actors and a white woman, playing O’Neill’s male, African-American protagonist. The production was as simple and spare (though fascinatingly layered) as Landau’s Dream had been elaborate. I had seen the Wooster Group perform in the very early eighties, and followed their work in the press, journals, and books subsequently, but I had not seen a performance for years: The Emperor Jones simultaneously knocked me sideways (perhaps it would be better to use Anne Bogart’s formulation of her response to great art: It stopped me in my tracks) and confirmed for me the fact that, in the right hands, certain theatrical principles articulated by Bertolt Brecht and developed by many others throughout the latter half of the twentieth century: Ideas of the power of de-familiarization, the virtues of simplicity and transparency and effortlessness, and what is possible by artists who deeply understand what they are doing. For me, the production was a perfect piece of theatre, and it reinvigorated my waning confidence in the power of the path I had chosen. Even if my reach constantly exceeded my grasp, it was good to know that there were those who could actually achieve what I dreamt of.

On my way from New York to Louisville, Kentucky, I had one of those serendipitous conversations that are so delightful: As I deplaned for a layover, a young woman who had been sitting behind me mentioned that she had been reading over my shoulder as I wrote an enthusiastic response to The Emperor Jones. She turned out to be a playwright and teacher, a friend of the Wooster Group and a former student and now colleague of Mac Wellman, long one of the leading experimental playwrights working today. We had an animated hour-long conversation about the current state of playwriting in America, and I left with my brain buzzing.

The final leg of this particular trip realized another long-deferred objective: I attended the Humana Festival of New Plays at Actors’ Theatre in Louisville. I saw seven plays in three days. All of them, good and bad, were worth seeing. I managed to accomplish another objective of mine (I sound like I was ticking off items from a list, but the experience was richer than that, believe me): I saw Anne Bogart’s SITI Company for the first time, in a new play by Charles Mee, Hotel Cassiopeia (and saw the same actors again some weeks later in Bogart’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). While I was conscious the much of what I was seeing was more “mainstream” than I would have chosen were they not part of a package, I was glad to gain some kind of a sense of contemporary American playwriting and production. I also managed to pick up two issues of a journal called Play (actually an anthology of new plays) edited by Mac Wellman. It was full of fascinating texts that, more than anything I saw at the Humana Festival, gave me a sense of the possibilities of avant-garde playwriting (for reactions to the individual plays themselves, please go to the other postings on this weblog).

I returned to Louisville the following week (April 3) to pay a visit to Curt Tofteland, Artistic Director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival but more to the point, director of “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” a long-running workshop/performance effort he has been conducting in Luther Luckett Correctional Complex. I accompanied Mr. Tofteland into the facility where I met a number of the inmates he works with and watched him conduct a workshop with them (they were between productions at the time). The workshop was a revelation in several ways. Tofteland used techniques if exploring the text closely related to those I would encounter later at Shakespeare & Company, in which the immediate personal connection between actor and text is of paramount importance, and he used them with people whose present circumstances and histories were stressful and violent. As I watched the inmates work on exercises and monologues (chosen because of particular relevance to their situation), and as I spoke with them afterward, I was struck with the seriousness of their intention to use the text to explore, communicate, and above all take responsibility for their current conditions and the experiences that had led them there. They appeared to me to be among the most honest actors I had yet encountered. They weren’t “acting” in the sense of creating an illusion when they worked on the texts, and they weren’t “acting” when they talked about the work and its importance to them. Later, in a longer conversation with Curt Tofteland, he told me that he began the work as an effort the find out whether theatre really had the power to transform lives, and that he was now convinced that it did have that power, at least for those who were doing it. I drove back to Asheville thinking hard about the fact that the most compelling Shakespeare I had seen was in a prison workshop where theatre itself was a means to an end––self-transformation––rather than an end it itself. (For a detailed description of the visit and workshop:

http://grahampaulblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/4406-visit-to-shakespeare-behind-bars.html)

I traveled again to the Northeast a few weeks after my trips to New York and Louisville to take part in a three-day workshop held by Shakespeare & Company. On the way from Asheville to Massachusetts, I stopped in Staunton, Virginia, home of Shenandoah Shakespeare, a theatre company I had been involved with to one degree or another over the past ten years. I had kept this company in mind from the beginning of my planning process, since I considered it one American company that was committed to exploring Shakespeare’s plays in a noncommercial manner. They have consistently pursued their goal, which is to present Shakespeare in a contemporary style but without technical support that would not have been available in the original Shakespearean playhouses––that is, without augmented sound and lighting, and with the audience and actors equally well-lit. Their current experiment was what they called their Actors’ Renaissance Season, two actor-centered productions created without benefit of a director. The project represented a continuation of their exploration in the application early theatrical techniques to contemporary stagings of Renaissance texts, in this case Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I was eager to see a production of ‘Tis Pity, and even more eager to see Shenandoah Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse, a reproduction Elizabethan/Jacobean indoor playhouse.
The theatre was spectacular in an intimate way, and a fabulous performing arena. The productions themselves weren’t groundbreaking or terribly risky, but they were a very refreshing change from the usual conventions of big American Shakespeare: professional but mostly young, enthusiastic actors performing in a way that focused on the link between performer and spectator and went a long way––in the best moments––toward realizing the possibilities of an authentically live, immediate event. Not as exciting nor as accomplished an event as the Wooster Group provided, but quite worthwhile, nonetheless. I also had a fascinating two-hour conversation with Jim Warren, Co-Artistic Director of Shenandoah Shakespeare about the development of the company, the workings of the Actors’ Renaissance Season, and the trick of creating a company whose work could be of scholarly as well as theatrical integrity while staying commercially viable in a small Virginia town. Fascinating.

I spent the next three days in a "weekend intensive" led by one of the main actor/teachers from Shakespeare & Company, one of the most respected Shakespearean theatre companies in the United States, at their theatre “campus” in Lenox, Massachusetts. I had been asked to memorize a speech from a Shakespeare play to work on, a piece of text which I felt had a personal meaning to me. Because of an experience the previous fall in which my wife, Amie, and I had participated in “Building Bridges,” a nine-week course in Asheville race relations which I had been thinking about ever since, I decided to explore my own feelings about racial difference by putting together some of Iago’s speeches from the first scene of Othello in which he tells Desdemona’s father that “even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.” I won’t describe the workshop in detail (such a description can be found here) except to say that I found it intensely fascinating, moving, useful, and problematic all at the same time. I have always had a difficult time when acting technique veers to close to what feels like “therapy”––an attitude I think is one part common sense to two parts inhibition––and yet I found this work, which relied on the teacher working at least partly as an emotional facilitator if not therapist, very effective. The goal, as in all good text-based acting, I think, was to find the source of the actor’s need to be saying just these words at this particular moment in time, and to work from there. In the hands of a gifted teacher such as the person (David Demke) leading the workshop, an emotional release didn’t become an end it itself; it became a way into the text. I found myself having that rarest of experiences (for me), and “acting breakthrough.” And, yes, an emotional breakthrough, too, of a sort, in which I understood the distinction between finding my own voice and “acting”.

The experience was directly connected to my initial sabbatical goal (or part of that goal): finding a way that a performance of Shakespeare’s text could liberate and could be “dangerous” in the way that freedom and liberation can be. Especially when viewed in connection with Curt Tofteler’s work with prisoners, this understanding seemed to be getting me closer to where I wanted to be. At the same time, however, I felt a kind of frustration: the actor’s personal was not what I was most interested in. But it was perhaps an important step along the way toward creating the kind of “actual” (as opposed to “virtual” or ersatz) theatre event I wanted to be able to experience and perhaps create.

I left Lenox and spent the next two days in South Hadley, Mass., where two friends worked in different capacities at Mt. Holyoke College. I stayed with Jenny Pyke and her husband, John, former Wilson students, and also visited with Roger Babb, an old college friend and theatre colleague from my experimental theatre days. Talking to Roger about performance theory and practice is always an intense experience for me, and this time was no exception. I also visited his directing class and spoke with his students as they presented and critiqued original site-specific performance pieces.

This visit marked a turning point in my sabbatical activies, though I wasn’t quite aware of it at the time. I had begun to think less and less about Shakespeare and more and more about “performance”. I also had begun to think more and more about a creating a production which would deal with a parallel interest of mine that I had been reading about, the construction of white identity. I was developing an idea for a performance that owed a good deal to Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead. Interestingly, my reading of this and other theatre and non-theatre-related texts was moving me out of Shakespeare’s time and into the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I had begun to look at Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne’s dramatic adaption, and plays of the time that reflected the encounters with African and Amerindian peoples in the early British Empire. Most of all, I had begun to imagine a kind of deconstructed (if it was permissible to use such a passé term anymore) Oroonoko which used the visit of four Iroquois indians to Queen Anne’s court as a context, an event I first learned about in Roach’s book. Now I began to work on such a piece in earnest.

I returned to Asheville, where these new ideas and the attendant reading, as well as a growing interest in performance used consciously as a vehicle for social change, began to consume most of my time and interest, but I wasn’t quite done with Shakespeare yet. I drove to Montgomery, Alabama, to see a performance of the SITI Company in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Anne Bogart, and I spoke with several of the actors after a post-performance discussion. The performance was remarkable in many ways––not least for the fact that the production was originally comissioned by the San Jose Repertory Theatre and now was being invited to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, two very “mainstream” regional theatres––and struck me as probably closer to standard approaches to Shakespeare anywhere but in the U.S. and maybe the U.K.; here, however, the choices seemed “avant-garde” (and, after all, Bogart’s company is seen as one of the leading experimental theatres in the U.S.).

I won’t describe the performance here, as I have quite a detailed description of it, and of my reactions to it, elsewhere (the May 14 post to my blog), but I will say that it raised new possibilities and problems for me in regard to acting and directing Shakespeare: In many ways, it realized the imaginative and very physical approach to Shakespeare I imagined I would see when I was planning to go to Eastern Europe, and it did so in an American theatre with work by an American company (though one with very strong roots in Suzuki’s contemporary Japanese training), which was something of a revelation. At the same time, my reaction to it was much less enthusiastic than my reaction to, say, the Wooster Group’s Emperor Jones. Did my sense that the performance was not “eventful” for me in the way I had hoped it would be arise from the fact that it was “Shakespeare” or was I just seeing acting that didn’t realize its possibilities? In other words, how much did the shortcomings I perceived––the lack of immediacy I felt while watching the performance––have to do with the material and its traditions, and how much were they the result of directing choices and acting technique? These are questions that I still haven’t resolved.
I could end this account of my sabbatical activities with this performance, which would make a neat package but wouldn’t reflect reality, because the focus of my interests were moving in new directions; as a result, my “sabbatical activities” continue still. However, I will briefly mention some further activities in bullet form (some of my research notes survived the loss of my hard drive and can be found on a second weblog I began in April of ‘06: Graham Paul’s “Oroonoko Project” (http://grahampaulwhitenessproject.blogspot.com).

1) Reading: As I have mentioned, much of my reading now was focused around the project I was planning and falls into three general categories: original and secondary material (including travel accounts, contemporary histories, and plays) about late seventeenth and early eighteenth century English colonialism in North and South America, the English slave trade in Africa, accounts of slave uprisings and other rebellions and Indian wars; a certain amount of reading (hardly exhaustive) in the field of white cultural studies, dealing with questions of the formation of white identity and its current characteristics; performance as a means of direct political and indirect action, including street performance, site-specific performance, and community-based theatre.

2) Conversations: Three examples of conversations (other than those I have mentioned already) that strongly influenced my thinking during this time come to mind. I met frequently with Ron Bashford, my sabbatical replacement as Theatre Chair, when I was in town, and I found these wide-ranging discussions on performance, directing, and acting extremely illuminating. I also met with Peter Carver, and Asheville director and teacher about his experiences in conducting prison workshops in theatre and playwriting (I had previously participated in a reading of a play written by one of the inmates he worked with). I also conducted email and live conversations with Warren Wilson colleagues Carol Howard and Philip Otterness about the project I was developing.

3) Workshops and conferences: I attended a few classes of a promising workshop in Suzuki actor training technique combined with Shakespearean acting held in Asheville before it died due to the conflicting schedules of the few of us attending; I hope to follow up with this teacher if possible. I also attended, for the first time, the Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting and Conference, a gathering of a number of community-based theatre companies and performers which occurs each year in the Asheville area. I have an extensive reflection on my participation in this conference on the August 13 posting to my sabbatical weblog; the three days of workshops, discussions, and performances I participated in and witnessed were fascinating and contributed heavily to my thinking about my own work as a teacher, director, and sometimes performer, and how it relates to my responsibilities as a member of the body politic. This is an area that seems to occupy (or preoccupy) more and more of my thinking these days. This conference was also absolutely critical to the planning for my First Year Seminar that was already well underway, and took me right up to the beginning of the Fall semester and the ostensible end of my sabbatical.

But, of course, there’s no clear end to this kind of thing; time just runs out.