September 30, 2007

Brushed aside all the day’s duties, thinking I needed a day off, absolutely off. The result that I have worked hard, all but unflaggingly, since dawn– it is now after 9 at night–and am almost at the point where I should be.

Booked my flight to DC to take in the reading of The Loves of Mr. Lincoln.

Chall’s 23rd birthday party last night. When I was 23 I was shipwrecked, alone, confused, and terrified, in Baltimore. I’m glad that all things seem better for him. I painted him a scene out of Whitman for a present. At the party, a two year old named Jasper and I hit it off, playing with a yellow balloon and a big black dog. Whenever he laughed I laughed. Met Lucia’s brother, skinny and hesitant where she is voluptuous and direct. Mickey says Lucia hates me because I can write a play in a week. Whatever the reason, there is some wall between us, and I must speak to her before she acknowledges my presence in a room. I didn’t care. Jasper and I laughed and bounced our balloon, and when I left the party the moon hung crooked and bright, as though he too had been making merry overmuch.

Dug and cleared much on the south of the yard, put in iris and yellow canna and a long line of garlic that the people at the nursery had encouraged. Something must be said about the excellence of the blazing autumn air, the stainless blue, the temperature that felt like nothing, neither hot nor cold, perfection.

Worked on my lines for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. One suppresses fury as one turns the page and there are more lines, and another page, and more lines. Virginia Woolf is the campiest play ever written. It’s far campier than Ludlum, et al, who aimed consciously at camp. Albee’s unconscious camp possesses the added gloss of intended profundity, which, failing, becomes yet another, and more pungent, layer of camp. Not one situation is plausible, not one emotion is genuine from the first line to the last. If asked to explain why the play is so popular–I assume it is–I’d say that the reason is precisely its falseness. It’s a drag show, a melodrama where everybody-- the leading man, the leading woman, all the supporting actors-- thinks they’re Joan Crawford. Zingers can fly free, without the ballast of truth. With it one can go through the motions of tragedy, through a simulacrum of being moved, without ever engaging any real thing. It’s the hairy chested hairdresser in an evening dress and high heels howling on about how his man done him wrong. It’s certainly a famous play, but not, I think, a very good one, except insofar as sheer mass says something about a playwright’s determination. I would hate it less if I hadn’t met Albee. It is fun for an actor, though, for all the reasons cited above–it is sheer technique, complete bravura, to which actual characterization, actual feeling, may be detriments.

Victoria on the CD, bidding all to peace.