Angst and acceptance

Day 11: Sunday, February 26

Sunday’s been our day off (that will change to Mondays once we get into the theatre), so it was going to be a two-show day.

After my usual quick breakfast of half a peanut butter sandwich (and let me say here that, for all of Trader Joe’s’s many virtues, really good peanut butter is not among them), I toddled along* down the block to the 7-11 for the Sunday Times (and I really need to start digging through this pile of papers, now that I’m getting some time**) then got ready to walk uptown to Second Stage Theatre for Tracy Letts’s Man From Nebraska. Since I’d never heard of it, I considered it a “new” play, even though it was written circa 2003.

My phone, however, picked that morning to really start acting annoying: not loading emails, crashing, neither opening apps nor updating them, so I was pretty preoccupied with that. In spite of my woes, I was able to listen to some podcasts while I walked. I stopped first at the Drama Book Shop, then over to the theatre where I picked up (and don’t tell anyone) my “senior rate” ticket. (Yes, I don’t officially qualify for it, but dammit, if they’re going to offer it unsolicited, I’m going to take the damn discount.)

I settled into my seat and was lucky enough to be next to a woman who made me long to have a Marshall McLuhan moment. This young lady was apparently a self-proclaimed expert on the New York theatre and was detailing, in a non-stop fashion, all the news and insider knowledge of the Rialto that she had gathered in her skull. Whether any of it was based in reality was beside the point; she was determined to disseminate it. I endured it to the point of finally being almost amused by it.

If only ...

As for the play, it was okay; a better production than the script, I’d say. Some good performances (Reed Birney in the title role; Annette O’Toole as his long-suffering wife), some odd characterizations (in a good way; characters kept doing what I didn’t expect them to), and a nice physical production made it passable. I’m not sure what it ultimately means (to echo Sam Beckett), and I disagree with its ending, but it was well-done enough to make it worthwhile. The thing that kept occurring to me was that the artistic director of the San Francisco company I’m most associated with had mentioned that it’s frequently a short-list play of his, so (given that the main character is a man of a certain age … ) I was looking at it with an eye of “could I play this?” Ultimately, I probably could, but (as I say) not being sure what the play’s about, it might be difficult. (This is, of course, not stopping me with Sam and Dede***.)

After the show, I had a few hours to kill and was craving a burger, so I consulted Yelp and found a nearby bar that was supposed to have a good one. I went in and the joint was virtually empty. The bartender joked about how I could sit anywhere (though it really wasn’t a joke), so I sat at the bar. The only other patron of note was a (very) drunken Irish guy who couldn’t quite understand the directions the barkeep was giving him on how to get to a nearby restaurant where he was about to have a blind date (I pity the woman he was going to meet). What was so complicated about “go out the door, take a left, then take a right” is beyond me, but it points to how inebriated this fellow was. We had a couple of seemingly pleasant exchanges (he was an amiable enough drunkard), and he eventually left for god-knows-where, and I was pretty much alone.

The bartender and I talked some (turns out she’s an actress tending bar in New York; I remarked how rare that job and waiting tables must be for actors here), I plugged the show (she took a photo of the Theatermania listing), and generally passed the time eating (what turned out to be, in fact, a pretty good burger), drinking (a decent Manhattan), and watching the Oscar pre-game show. The bar was having a (loud) party upstairs (which is probably why the main bar was deserted), and all the TVs were tuned to the red carpet nonsense. The most (only?) interesting thing for me was that the monitor directly in front of me was broken in a way that simulated almost exactly the green-and-orange/pink tones of two-strip Technicolor. Yellows were non-existent in this world, as were true blues, so it was fascinating for me to go back and forth. I tried to take photos of the phenomenon, but since my phone was on the blink, all I got was grey boxes.

Better photography than my own

Finally, it was time to walk down to 42^nd Street and the Signature Company, where I’d be seeing Wallace Shawn’s latest dystopian meditation, Evening at the Talk House. Being that it was a Sunday night, I was surprised to see how packed the place was with people waiting for two shows (the other was Everybody, Brandon Jacob-Jenkins’s updating of the morality play; I’d like to see it, but probably won’t get the chance) and schmoozing.

Once our theatre opened, it made for an odd experience. The setup was rectangular, with bleachers at either end, flanking a central playing area of a coffee table, a couch, and a couple of easy chairs. As we entered, we were greeted by two of the actors, more or less playing caterers who were holding trays of colored water, gummy worms, and marshmallows (none of which had anything to do with the play, as far as I could tell). That was fine in itself, but other members of the cast circulated throughout the theatre, in costume, but behaving as themselves; that is to say, making no pretense of acting like their characters, but interacting with friends and colleagues as they normally would. (This also happened in Sweeney Todd, but that won’t happen for a week from these events.)

The play was all right, if a little talky. The premise is of the “frog-in-a-pan-of-warm-water” genre; set in a near-future where incivility, inhumanity, and governmental oppression have so gradually taken hold that no one even noticed they were happening. The reviews were mostly raves, but I found it a little too preaching to the choir and self-consciously clever, and not as cautionary as it seemed to wanted to be. It wasn’t bad, by any means; I just didn’t find it as provocative as I might have hoped.

After that, it was home to bed, to prepare for the big week ahead of starting to block and work the show.

(*“It’s not that I can’t toddle along, it’s that I can’t guess I’ll toddle along” –Robert Benchley)

(**Somewhere, Pidge Meade rolls her eyes.)

(***It occurs to me that, to those who haven’t seen the play, Andre’s nickname might be mispronounced. It’s “day-day,” not “dee-dee.”)