November 5, 2011

Went to the doctor yesterday to get various things checked, She gave me script for blood pressure medicine that won’t make me cough all day long. She also gave me a flu shot, which almost instantly gave me the flu–or, as they say, “flu-like symptoms”– which ended the progress of the day. They’re still with me. Moving about the house like I’m 90. You wonder what the point of medicine is that 1) gives you the disease it’s supposed to guard against, which is 2) one that you haven’t gotten on your own in five years. Wonder if I can use this to get out of rehearsal this morning.

Dragged myself in the evening to the Reuter center for the first reading of SART’s Scriptfest. Glad I did, for several reasons, none of which, alas, was the script. Saw old friends and was assured by WC that they had not forgotten my money, but have been working diligently to scrape it together. Didn’t know whether to feel justified or greedy. The musical (we didn’t hear the music) involved the hanging of the circus elephant Mary for killing somebody in Tennessee a number of years back. The playwright was a good writer, which disguised until about forty minutes into the first act that the play was dismal. When the playwright began to speak I recognized instantly the main reason for its flaws: it had gone through several development processes. This is almost always a disaster and almost always dilutes the vision of the playwright without educating it. Someone had said he needed African-American characters, which he added without giving them a reason to be there, which is worse than not having them at all. Someone said he had to punch up the rather thin story with something sensational, so there is a totally gratuitous rape and two totally gratuitous murders–events which make us think for a moment that something is going on, but there’s really not. The character of Red (the one killed by the elephant) was pleasing, but probably because Chris A read it so well. There was a scene where a number of old townsmen were chatting, which was screamingly funny. He should drop the elephant scenario– sensational without being really interesting–or, like “Snakes on a Plane,” expressed and exhausted in a single instant-- and start with those men. I crumpled up my comment sheet and threw it away, thinking it would have been too harsh. The playwright had driven all the way from Orlando.

Late afternoon: rehearsal despite of the ague, then planting what I think will be the last of my upcoming garden, emptying a great crate just received from the nursery, containing four Japanese-named tree peonies, two kinds of fox-tail lilies, two kinds of day lilies (one of them reputedly black), and regular showy lilies in white and pink. It’s hard to imagine a square foot of land now without its tenant. Simmering on the stove is self-invented lentil soup with cabbage and onion. Not really hungry, so maybe it will open tomorrow’s gustatory adventures.