Tight Dresses

July 9, 2008
Second rehearsal of As You Like It, and an impression completely revised. Orlando and Rosalind are pretty and witty and flirty, and the whole piece seems wonderfully cast. The director is going for a high-energy romp which, however one might quibble with details, will certainly work in the space. I was happy being there and smiling when I left.

A noise in the backyard brought me to the window. The noise was a big red thrasher bathing in the birdbath. It looked so monstrous wet and fluffed up–like an exploding reddish mop–that I almost didn’t know what it was.

During my Tolkien hour at the river, I looked up in time to see three lightning-white egrets flapping single file downstream. The French Broad was high and muddy brown, clearly roiled by the rain, but I was surprised by how little rain it took to trouble the waters. I got through only one chapter–which included a flood, now that I think of it–before the rains came back in force. I rejoice in the summer rains, which are tapering, but have not yet ceased to this moment.

My sister had dad’s home movies put onto DVDs. It is amazing they didn’t crumble into dust long ago. It was grievous watching them. I’m only about 1/10 through. I remembered every moment captured in them with unforgiving clarity. I spent most of my life being embarrassed, or hiding from embarrassment. I remembered that, but not why. Maybe the movies will show the moment it started, and the reason. I want to grouse that my sister appears ten minutes for my every one, but at least part of that time I spent running and hiding. I don’t know exactly what emotion it is, but it feels like the blade of a dull knife to see my dad young and venturesome and quite handsome, my mother nothing short of beautiful, with a figure that I didn’t remember as quite so sensational. She knew it. She wore tight dresses. There are my grandmother and my grandfather, who were born before the last century. There is Diane as a baby herself, now mother of cousin Michael who is fighting death in Ohio. There are the animals in the zoo, the sled rides down Malaysia Street, the puppies jumping around on the day they first came home. I can stand it only for brief stretches.

Night. Went to NC Stage to see Plays from the L’l Nashville by Asheville playwright, Waylon Wood. The level of acting was very high. Carla especially was convincing and moving as the drunk-with-a-secret, a part which could have been chaotic without her imaginative strength and control of presentation. I thought it was the best work she’s done. I might have said the same to the rest of the cast had I known their work and could make comparisons. It used to be that you saw the same people in every production; now the faces are new all the time, and that is very well. The play itself, a melding together of one-acts all set in a bar, has moments of brilliance. It also had moments that are not brilliant, though I would say there was never a moment when the seriousness and talent of the playwright was not evident. A fault of the script is that it is four five good plays that never got written, but remained as excellent character sketches, to be basted together for this event with all the seams showing. Mr Wood could write for ten years on those four or five different inspirations and bring his ideas to individual perfection. Now it’s like too many good raconteurs at the same party. It also was very badly paced. Every good moment was taxed by longueurs that even Chekkov could not sustain. One normally blames the director for this, but I think not in this case. In the talk-back afterward the playwright declared that he LOVED the slowness and HATED theater where they were all the time worried about pace. To me that’s like the director of an opera saying, "Oh, I hate when people are all the time obsessed about staying on pitch." Wood said, "Theater is all about choice. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, walk out of the theater." Did he mean that? If I had not been sitting with the parents of one of the actors, I would have gone at intermission-- not that I didn’t respect the play, but that I sensed it didn’t respect me, like a droning and self-delighted monologist you meet in bars like the one portrayed. Pace–basically the avoidance of boringness-- is one of the ways a production acknowledges that it has an audience, that the audience is part of the experience. The writer who doesn’t care about boring his audience will not have one.

I’m beginning to think that only second rate artists believe that their art, whatever it is, "is all about choice." Some aspects of art are imperative, unavoidable, objective–or else you are just skating on the surface.