Finally rainless morning sent me to Columbus Circle to drink cappuccino under the eaves of the Park– one of my New York rituals. There was a Women Only Half Marathon, and sweaty women kept emerging from the park with carnations in their hand. Shared my table for a while with a pedicab driver. He demonstrated for me the face he watches for as possible clients– the slack jawed uncertain visage of the tourist. It was very funny. He was swaggering and smelly and happy and clearly the master of his universe. I recognized–when I prayed it over him–that the prayer I’ve prayed most in New York is “Lord, shield the joyful.”
I’m wearing the brown bead bracelet a Buddhist monk gave me in the cave under the Marriot. He wanted to give me a greater blessing than I was willing to take, and the memory of my suspicion and hard-heartedness tormented me through the morning.
Saturday matinee of Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. I literally could not fit my swollen legs in the space provided for them, so the ushers let me fetch a portable chair and position it in what in olden days was a box, so I had the best seat in the house without exactly paying for it. I’d come to the play with attitude–finding Durang dissatisfying in the past–but the first act was one of the most genuinely hilarious hours I’ve experienced in the theater. I was right about Durang, though, for Act II added nothing, and relied on bravura acting (David Hyde Pierce, Sigourney Weaver, Billy Magnussen) to carry things once the ideas were spent. But, carry them they did, and I would say, all in all, I had a good afternoon of theater. Talked with the usher, who adored the performances even after seeing them a million times. I can see adoring the performances. A budding playwright could learn (by contrary example) the lesson of how not to waste a sensational first act. Durang is, at base, incurably conventional and unabashedly sentimental. He also knows what signals to send the audience to bring them to is side.
A woman named EB sent a note to me at the theater: “Sometimes having seen a script gives you the idea that you know how you will respond to the actual performance. I was unprepared for the emotion evolved by last night’s show. Thank you profusely for the opportunity to read for it, and every good wish for tonight and the future. "
Stacey, my Josh Speed, wrote “I am just a timid Georgia boy” who can’t express his feelings in writing the way you do. It has been such a gift to say your words. Unlike my character Joshua, I would say this gift is “something perfect given by the world”– or shall I say “perfect given to the world by you.”
Don’t remember getting notes before.
The very odd sensation that was with me walking from the theater last night–through the driving rain up endless 8th Avenue-- was bewilderment. I was in a place without context, in which no previous experience could inform any onward action or understanding. I had no idea what to feel, what to think, what to plan. This was the point I had been building toward, and whatever comes after I have no way, presently, to comprehend. One wants to say it was a blankness, but it wasn’t exactly that.. It was like being thrown into a strange city without knowing the language. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I didn’t have anybody to ask. The sensation has stayed with me through the day, though mixed now with other things. I have written something perfectly achieved. I knew this watching last night. But that is an end point, a terminus. I might ask “What next?” but to do so would be disturbingly un-rhetorical. I have no idea. Bruce and Jack have control over where we go together, and they tell me nothing– not out of malice, but because they have so much else on their minds, such as the Tonys tomorrow night. And what would they do if their commitment were plain and total? People ask, “Is it going to open on Broadway?’” but they don’t understand that Broadway doesn’t do theater; it does amusements, as like to the theater as a Texas mega-church is to the manger at Bethlehem. And that isn’t even a complaint. Things are as they are. There are exceptions, but would Lincoln be one of them? Quality is almost–though not quite–irrelevant to the decisions which govern these things, and what has it going for it besides quality? Does somebody LOVE it? Is someone fanatical about it? It could have an off-Broadway run, but I’m not sure exactly what that entails, or if my producers do things like that. I am not anxious or resentful at any point. I am simply baffled. I’m like Alexander standing at the Hindu Kush wondering “What next?”
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