Houston 3

March 7, 2010

Sunday morning, and the traffic on the highway below is sparse.

Met EE and learned a little of the structure of Wordsmyth Theater. We went to an opening at Archway Gallery somewhere in Montrose. They had hit on the brilliant idea of bussing kids in from somewhere, and the room was merry with teenagers taking photos and pointing at details. I followed two boys for a while to see what they were noticing. They were noticing anomalies or surprises, like the word “bird” stenciled on the painting of an egret, a tower of old band instruments serving as a fountain. The Archway is a collective, and the art competent and undistinguished, except for some exquisite antiquity-inspired pottery by a man named Kim.

When I meet people I usually try to compare them with people I know, but EE eluded this operation, being totally unlike anybody I know, and I think we would be friends if I were going to be more than a weekend in Houston. She began the Wordsmyth–well, I haven’t figured out exactly why, but I think, like me with Black Swan, in trying to grasp toward something she hoped would reveal itself in the process. She is a horrifying driver.

E and her friend Susan and I attended a play at the Midtown Arts Center. The producing agency was called Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company, and it seems like Houston theater companies vie with each other for colorful names: Infernal Bridegroom Productions, Catastrophic Theater, Theatre Collide The play was Flu Season by Will Eno. It was well acted and well produced. The play was about the making of a play, about the sad power of the playwright to create something out of nothing. Unfortunately, THIS play opted to stay put at “nothing.” Well written in an arty, second-string Absurdist way, it offered plies of knowing ironies (it is a solemn autumn full of golden light, or maybe not. . . whatever) which, like a pie in the face, were amusing only in the moment of commitment. It undercut whatever minimal (and exhausted) plot there was by having TWO choruses remind us that what we were seeing was a mere fiction of the omnipotent playwright, changeable at his whim. The play invited intellectual approval of its wit, while forbidding emotional involvement. The actors were good to watch, especially Bobby Haworth as the Epilogue, whose job it was to call into question everything the Prologue had just said. But I wondered if I was the only audience member who groaned inwardly when the fifteen minute intermission was announced, and it was not actually the end.

I have heard myself say there is no such thing as bad sex. I can almost say the same about a thing I like almost as well: there may be bad theater, but there have been very few nights when I would rather not have gone. Last night was not one of them. It still gets a “Pass.”

I wanted to say to the girl on the plane, “You don’t serve Christ by talking about him.” I wanted to say to the clever playwright, “You don’t serve drama by talking about it.”:

Took it into my head to exhaust The Galleria, to see every bit of it on a Sunday morning. It defeated me. I did get a chair massage. There were three strapping Chinese lads waiting, but I got grandma. Turned out that grandma beat the shit out of me, It was grand. They kept talking in Mandarin or whatever it was over my head. It’s strangely restful not to know what anyone is talking about.

EE said, “My father thinks that all art by women is, by definition, male-bashing. But he adds that mine is not as bad as some."