New York New York 3

November 8, 2014

Rose early, worked on my play, drank coffee from the Corsos attached to the hotel, then walked from Times Square to Washington Square through the cool cloudy light. Made a stop at Bryant Park, to honor the spot where I saw the hooded warbler, the spot where I bought a homeless woman a croissant and watched her divide it and share it with the birds. A man was shadow boxing in Washington Square. I called it the Winter Sun Dance, as it was more dance than boxing. The inscription on the arch is “Let us raise the standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.” I thought of TB, for he was with me the last time I was in Washington Square. I phoned him in St. Augustine, and heard about his recovery from years of debility because of allergies. Joyful. Walked to MOMA, but was disappointed because I could not lunch there, as is my custom. Spent some time at Columbus Circle, as I must. The pretty Park horses were sharing their feed buckets with the pigeons.

Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Golden, which is run like a little fascist demesne.  I have been in, I think, six of Albee’s plays, met and talked with him twice, and seeing this play was like taking up a most formal and arch portion of an old conversation. The set was glorious, and it is always a pleasure to see such fine actors– John Lithgow, Glenn Close, etc– working near the top of their game. But, what of the rest? The play resonates eighty years older than its actual age, strives for a gilded Restoration tone, and has in it not one moment of reality. My aesthetic allows for a play not to have much reality in it, but here we have not fantasy but a sort of forced twilight which is meant to look like reality, which, repeated relentlessly, is meant to bludgeon the audience into accepting (rather as the electorate does) repetition for truth. None of the assertions the play makes about life is very or necessarily true, but the characters are so articulate they lull you temporarily into the sense that great (rather than minor and idiosyncratic) truths are being revealed. The play’s emotional temperature (like that of Virginia Woolf) is a kind of fever raised by revelations and complications we accept only because we have paid our admission and the night will be ruined of we do not. The audience sees the rules Albee has laid out, and part of it is sweetly eager to follow them. The play is funny. One gives it that. How is it that nobody has pointed out that Albee is Shaw’s successor, the witty lecturer who does not leave to chance the receipt of his message, who allows nothing to be discovered because he cannot stand not to explain everything fully, exhaustively, who does not allow freedom of interpretation because of the horror that someone might not get only and completely what he meant. I enjoyed my evening of theater, even with these things passing through my mind. The play is in previews, and people leaving by irritated little clutches during both intermissions does not bode well for its success. The big muscley man in the seat beside me complained bitterly, but stayed. I was glad for him, for that unavoidable slab of muscle on one side kept me warm. He called the play “bullshit,” and it was, of a very high, articulate, and scentless variety.