Omaha 3

May 24, 2015

Left campus with Lara, my director, at 10 AM yesterday, did not return till 11:30 PM. This event represented one of the things I loathe most in life, which is not to be in control of my own coming and going, to be stranded in another person’s schedule. That aside, it was a learning experience. Lara is one of the most committed theater people I have ever met, small and bristling energy, always with several projects at once, that one cannot quite unwind one from the other in the narrative. Not only is she directing the reading Washington Place, but she is stage-managing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Omaha Community Theater. At breakfast we had to stand beside our cooling food while some local criticized the Albee because the fights (which one wouldn’t have noticed, as it turns out) were not convincing, because he hadn’t choreographed them. He said that in so many words. Lara was patient. I got a tour of the Omaha CT, which she claimed is the largest in the US, and it certainly looked gigantic compared to anywhere I have worked. She gave me the million dollar tour, which to some degree was energy wasted, because I stopped retaining the flood of information pretty early on. She pointed out the myriad apparatuses and areas that I sail blindly by on the way to the stage to say my lines. She is the complete theater person and I– as I note whenever the issue comes up– am not. I create plays and characters, and the rest runs by magic, so far as I’m concerned. In directing my play she has employed that detail-oriented meticulousness, and I am grateful. It will be done as well as the actors will allow, and they are good enough. The boy playing Avi is so sweet and had such a beautiful voice he will carry that part. The take was too solemn and subdued, and I never quite got used to the accents (the Yiddish sounds like Norwegian to me), but all that could be a function of its not being performance level yet. Is the play itself any good? Must ask myself that later.

Walked across the highways to have a lonely meal at Fuddricker’s while Lara prepared for Virginia Woolf. Red neck Omaha is even red-neckier than red neck Asheville.

Their performance of Virginia Woolf was outstanding, the Martha the best one I have ever seen. Better is hard to imagine. Every note, every tone, every turn she hit right. No one was inept. Their Honey is my Yetta. I’ve played George twice now, and remembered while this George was speaking all my lines, all my blocking and onstage emotions, all the differences between this production and those.

But the play is–one cringes to say–really not very important for as long and as loud as it is. As Nick describes Martha, Albee swings wild and hard, and even when he connects it’s with nothing substantive. There are no real problems or dilemmas in the play, no real characters (well, Nick, maybe), only braying caricatures through which the playwright seeks to make vehemence seem like passion. It’s a play about nobody, whose brutal slog cannot end in catharsis because no real issue has ever been addressed. Albee may be the greatest of all playwrights who have nothing to say. Nor did he learn. My experience at A Delicate Balance in New York was the same, or worse, because I had actually bought the ticket. I think VW holds the stage first because an audience is typically well-disposed, and will accept something they are told is a masterpiece as one for as long as they can. Second, it has become, like Hamlet or much of Shaw’s work, a touchstone for actors, a rite of passage which delights us actors and delights audiences with the bravura touches of each new interpretation. Still, I will never have those three hours back. . . .

Howard was working in the living room when I got home. We had a long talk about theater, during which I was disadvantaged because his experience is many times over mine. He once helped Liza Minelli walk across a stage. His best friend is the lovely lad, Tony, I saw bravely beating the waves of On the Town under him. Howard said of Virginia Woolf that the problems those people have are so white than even most white people can’t relate. I liked that.

On the grounds of the Community Theater were at least a dozen rabbits.

I’m so far from my context that I almost forgot today is Pentecost.