February 25, 2011

I collide into Fridays like an exhausted skier, spent and cold and dazed with the effort to get just that far. When I consider how my classes are going well and how I like my students, it comes down to the simple wear and tear of doing the same thing this many years. I have two sections of the same class this semester, and by the time I repeat the same material twice in twenty four hours, I’m nearly berserk– though it is interesting how often the same material ends up being quite different in the two presentations. Nobody’s fault, and not the worst situation in the world.

First Shakespeare acting class Tuesday night. MM reminds me of myself as a teacher. My own ideas on the subject have set pretty hard over the years, so my task will be to keep my mouth shut and do as I’m told. I think I signed up for this before I decided to go to Rome and study Italian, to have a new project to occupy my mind. It never rains but it pours.

Boeing Boeing at NC Stage. I’m not the world’s best audience for farce. What I see is minimal content–often trite, in fact inevitably trite–being put over by extraordinary exertions on the part of the actors. There was never a second when every member of the audience did not know what was going to happen next, and how it was going to happen, and in what ways the characters would have to cope. I know there’s pleasure in seeing what you know must happen, happen, but I think my pleasure in this is less than others’. Nevertheless, amid the real moment last night I was laughing my head off, and if it was because the actors were working so hard and with such skill, so be it. The performers were perfect. It was the first time I’d seen Maria on stage, and I was proud.

Drinks at Lab afterwards, a new place for me, really quite vast and impressive. The lovely young things thronging there were in need of leavening by mature gravity such as mine.

Thinking about what I wrote above. I know what is going to happen next in Hamlet. How is that different? Because some moments are and some writing is so complex it is a discovery each time. Whereas some moments are and some writing is so calculated to illicit a specific effect (such as laughter) that it cannot afford the ambiguity of discovery. Farce is like someone jumping out from behind a door and saying “boo!” In one instance you will jump, in the other you will laugh. Farce is like being tickled. You either laugh literally uncontrollably or, unaffected, wonder what the hell is going on.

DT sends a packet of Irish memorabilia from Charles’ papers, old postcards, Dublin literary magazine from 1927, 1949, 1951, a program from the Gate for Pinero’s The Magistrate from 1949, when it was managed by the Earl of Longford. I keep no souvenirs. My conviction that I’ll remember everything I need to remember is still firm, but I won’t have the frisson I had opening Charles’ ancient postcards and brown literary magazines. Survivors, unless they read what I have written, will have no idea that I ever left the house. From the advertisements on the program I recognize nothing, except Neary’s Hotel. Those photos of old Dublin– they look exactly like new Dublin except for the Nelson’s column is gone and the Spike is in its place. They make me sad. At this moment Dublin stands in mind as a beauty I courted who scorned me, not brutally, but with a little laugh that I should have thought there could be anything between us. Then there’s me sitting there thinking, “She wasn’t so beautiful after all, was she?”

White and lavender crocus bloom in the backyard.

Late night: Drove to Brevard to the American Legion Hall to see Brevard Little Theater’s Tea and Sympathy. It was nice to be the youngest person in the room again. The play is such an awful mix of sentimentality and expired topicality that almost nothing of it can be heard without a wince. I read somewhere that probably it could not be produced again, and whoever wrote that was right. The performance was classic “amateur.” Once I’d said that sentence to myself, I wondered what I meant. It was not bad, exactly, but every gesture, every phrase remembered that it was being done by an “actor” on a “stage.” The one actor who had some naturalness ruined it by being a show-off. But, there was a loyal following, sitting with their oxygen tanks and walkers on folding chairs in the American Legion hall–.