October 25, 2008

Hauled myself through the Friday rain to see Triple Play at the Arts Center, an evening of new works Nathan got together, which included my The Beautiful Johanna. This was Nathan’s first attempt at producing. It was a staged reading, with as much action as holding a script would allow, and, through the magic that governs such thing, fully satisfying as an evening of theater. All the works were strong. Nathan’s writing shows enormous promise. Casting was perhaps not uniformly ideal, but when it was good it was very good. And I was happy with my child Johanna. If she were not my own and I didn’t fear to spoil her, I would say she was beautiful.

Invited the gang to the opening, but the ten thousandth pot luck at J & L’s was evidently more enticing.

The white petals of the cactus emerge from a base of rose pink. I had forgotten that.

Went downtown to see John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt at NC Stage. Asheville by night was full of music and laughter. I thought that if I compared it to Galway last week, the comparison could only be favorable to Asheville, a hard thing for me to admit, but a merry thing for me to live. I assumed that Doubt have been overpraised as some other recent Broadway hits had been, but that was not the case. It was smart and brave and splendidly written. As I watched, I thought that Shanley, had he been present, should be grateful to a cast which wrung every nuance out of his words, which never got in the way of the play, and could, all in all, hardly have been better. Rebecca Koon as the Sister Aloysius was perfect in every syllable. I usually think that if the directing is invisible, then it is good, and the directing in this show was very good indeed. I never once noticed a directorial choice, and that means the choices were right. Harmony of actor and director and script was especially poignant to me considering my recent disappointment in Chicago, when they seemed to be at war, or at least lost in a haze of mutual incomprehension. In some ways I am not the ideal audience for Doubt. I hated Sister Aloysius and her righteous dirty-mindedness so much that the play did not have for me the even-handedness that I think it was supposed to have. In the contest between the letter and the spirit, the spirit must always win. Even had her suspicions been correct, her trespass was greater than Father Flynn’s, as a sin against the Holy Ghost is worst than the breaking of a rule.

I have seen two evenings of theater on two nights, and I don’t know which I preferred. One had the virtues of professionalism. One had the virtues of amateurism. Luckily I don’t have to choose, but can have them both.

Smokey’s briefly afterward. It was boring, but I gave it less than an hour to prove itself. Smelling like an ashtray is all I have to show for it.