October 21, 2007

The electricity went out in this part of the city during the night. I was awakened by something, perhaps the extreme silence of the umber darkness, no flash of little lights from my computer, no clock glowing away from my bedstand, no humming refrigerator, no seep of illumination from the street or Caroline’s kitchen. It was disturbing.

Memorizing lines for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. We are meant to be off book tomorrow, which is probably a laugh. Albee hates actors. He fills the script with non-sequitors, which must be recalled (or not) by brute memorization, like a composer who habitually makes the singer start on a note which has not appeared in the last thousand chords. And the stage directions!-- there is not one case when the little commandments Albee gives the actor in parenthesis is not the second best choice, or even flat wrong. The revised version is worse than the original, though blessedly a little shorter. I can’t blame Albee for this, but the sound of certain words– puff, poof, paunch, toots, tot– are physically abhorrent to me, nails on chalkboards, and the script is peppered with them. I did want badly to do the play, though. Part of it is nostalgia for Ellen and David Wingate long ago. Part of it was a comment by Angie F-M which was reported to me after Athena: "I didn’t know David was able to create a characterization like that." No," thought I– "well you ain’t seen nothing yet." Praying at this moment that I don’t live to regret it, that I don’t screw up in some memorable and in-his-place-putting way.

One PM. Too much church. Came home and planted the other anemone, the Greek windflower