Omaha 4

May 25, 2015

Sweet Ireland votes for gay marriage, the first such plebiscite in the world. Bless it forever.

I keep feeling boredom loom like a cloud on the horizon (with the real clouds which I have not lifted since I arrived) but it never quite descends. One stretches out the moments, settles in for conversations longer than one could endure if one had all one’s resources at hand. Hobbling from site to site on my tortured heel adds a certain thickness to events as well. They food is exquisite and abundant. Saw three full-length plays yesterday. In conversation afterward I realized I liked them better than others did, and better before discussion than after. The first was about a gay marriage, witty and plotty, but little more than a Modern Family episode, if a good one. Then it was a lunch seminar on using the energy of your socio-political indignation to make plays. If the women actually meant or practiced what they were saying, then it was a seminar in how to write truly and especially bad theater. Then a seminar on using my socio-political indignation to make plays (I took these because my dramaturg taught them). The second play (to which I was again lured by the influence of my dramaturg) was an avant-garde feminist TV spoof, which I thought was wonderful for the first forty minutes, but when it hit hour two, was praying for the roof to cave in. Just fucking know when to stop. Interestingly, at the outset we were warned that the one comment which the playwright would not find helpful would be one involving possible cuts. We all resist what we know we need, trying to make it look like a choice rather than a flaw. This experience was complicated by the dressed-like-a-parrot harpy behind me who laughed piercingly, commented aloud, and generally tried to wrench the focus of the event onto herself. You fail to punch such people in the mouth because you think maybe, just maybe, it is some kind of genuine and heartfelt response, but it never really is. The third play, after supper, was outside on the wet lawn under the mottled gray and gray skies, and involved a baseball field. . . somewhere. . .with which both Cy Young and Willa Cather were involved. Or something like that. The sound system failed, and the poetry was impenetrable (imagine a wedding between John Greenleaf Whittier and Dylan Thomas) and one section got a laughing fit over the absurdity of it all. But it somehow managed to be a pleasant experience, watching the guys move out on the field, being surrounded by the curious, twittering martens, and, high, high overhead, buzzing nighthawks heading for the prairie.

Conversation late in the living room after. Politics. Art.