October 31, 2010

Must praise Halloween in New York. The dark, quite streets of Long island City were haunted by ghouls and princesses, and Times Square around midnight was carnival, joyous and absurd, everybody talking at the top of their lungs for delight. Ever corner was a theater and ever gaggle of black girls or team of white boys in borrowed uniforms was an act.

Somewhat unintentionally, yesterday was museum day. Started with the Met, where I wrote in the sunny hall of all the broken statues. Concentrated on portraits, and came away with the lingering mirth of Raeburn’s The Drummond Children. All those masterpieces. . . sometimes the abundance is nauseating; yesterday it was a field of flowers. On to the Guggenheim, which had by far the most satisfying show I’ve ever seen there, Classicism and Chaos, I think, gleaming with Marc, Kandinsky, Nolde, Leger, Kirchner, all the moderns who had not abandoned painting.

Went to the theater to see if I could exchange my A Life in the Theater tickets so I could see Cody. Under a sign saying Absolutely No Refunds or Exchanges they exchanged them, so off I went to the Irish Center on Jackson Avenue in Queens to see the play called Wake. How quiet the streets were there! You could cross one without looking. Ghosts and fairies walked to parties somewhere looking quite ghostly and isolated. The theater– an Irish social hall-- was all very casual, and the actors were clumped up in the main room getting ready, and I talked with beloved Cody for a time, hiked off and found an Irish bar, threw one down with a guy who was rooting for Texas in the World Series because they were the ones who had beaten the Yanks. The play was three hours long, it turned out. This becomes an issue because it was also not very good. The first 20 minutes were electrifying, because they were brave and poetic, and in fact the whole piece was brave and poetic, but the plot was a skein of threads dropped on a carpet, the structure was chaos, the playwright far, far too in love with her material to have thought it through. But what it also signified was the depth of acting talent in the city, for whatever else, the actors were every second committed, “on”, expressive, working to professional standards. Plus, they had memorized all those peaks after peaks of marshmallow. There was a lot of shouting when all the passions were meant to be on display, but that too was over-thought, and misdirected into a torment of crescendoes, each trying to top the last. I suppose real family quarrels go like that, but real family quarrels aren’t so damn literary. Plus, by that time I’d lost track of both characters and issues and didn’t know who was being petulant and who was being reasonable. Was proud of Cody out there, handsome and professional. He had one long aria when he was trying to marry a woman he didn’t love, for the sake of his dead friend who did love her, and it was virtuoso, and, beyond that, real.

Then it was Times Square on the first night of Halloween. I thought “somebody should write a play about this,” but then I realized that somebody was, right there as I was watching.