June 21, 2015

Father’s Day. Finished re-writing my play Father’s Day last night. Spent the morning scanning and putting on Facebook pictures of my dad. Things started out so – remarkably. One more day of asking “what happened?” will not avail any more than did the last thousand.

One of my students remarks on FB:
Thanks, Dr. H. Happy Father's Day to you! You've certainly been a dad figure to many a lost university student

If that is the case, then all is well.

Painted yesterday, finishing a piece on particle board called Solstice. Everything has been timely of late.

Still reading my Albee bio in snippets between other tasks. My antipathy toward Albee– what my antipathy would be more purely if I hadn’t met him and understood what a puffed-up little piece he is–is that most of his plays are bad. Not even his fiercest partisans can, and stay within the bounds of discernment and experience, deny this. Those that aren’t bad aren’t particularly good, and what goodness they have arises from the pleasure, if that’s what it can be called, of watching a mind trying to beat its way out of a morass of self-involvement. Sometimes the play declares itself to have done so, but there he is in the next one, starting at the same place, or maybe–encouraged by brainless lionization– even deeper in. You must be interested in the tangled psyche of Edward Albee to enjoy his work, for nothing else is offered. Virginia Woolf, which I have heard called the greatest American play, is a tour de force for actors, but contains nothing truthful or genuine or challenging to anything but patience (I have performed the piece twice, and seen it twice again) despite its own testimony that it’s about “truth.” Albee allows his characters to be baffled by emotional or intellectual dilemmas that a six year old could navigate.  He wounds his characters so at the outset that we are meant to let them get away with all manner of idiocy. It’s like watching people on crutches and walkers trying to get up an endless staircase.  We are not allowed to bring up his complicated vacancy, because he so FAMOUS.  As far as I can see, he is famous because of being lucky in acquaintance. Truly terrible work of his made it immediately to Broadway because he had influential friends and was briefly wildly famous for a piece no one should have been famous for beyond a season. He did like Bronzino’s Gaze in Houston, and his plays are fun to play. I would act in another in a second, so long as I was not called upon to justify it. I concede all that.

Hysterical calling of jays in the rather sickly yellow morning light.