July 19, 2015

    Two men delivered my grill, one skinny and very redneck, one fat and refined to a degree that, in his job, seemed a superfluity. It saw them together for five minutes and noted the ways in which they were comically failing to connect. They would make a great movie. I had worked the garden hard, so I washed off the day’s sweat and drove to Waynesville for Oklahoma at HART. Lightning had struck the building hours before (my deliverymen said they had come through terrible storms around Marion) and various things were awry, but the crowd was huge, old, happy with tiny cups of white wine in their hands. I went to see Oklahoma to honor the fact that it was my first big show back in Ellet High, and after fifty years I still remembered every single word. Also do I remember the people who played those parts back then, Ron Chase and Ann Hagerman, and Tim McCorkle and Jim Nielsen– I’m not sure it wasn’t them I heard through most of it. HART’s cast was good but shallow, which is to say that once you got beneath the leads things were iffy. The chorus women were good; their singing and acting was good. The chorus men were just horrible, but in an endearing guy way, sort of the way you’d expect a bunch of random guys on the frontier to be. Sometimes bad works better than almost good. The production was excellent. The Dream Ballet was handled better (or at least more plausibly) than I had ever seen it. Even a half decent Will can be expected to steal the show, and this one did. The theater was full (I only got a ticket because someone didn’t show). But did I enjoy it? No, and the reason has entirely to do with the genre. There is something hateful to me in the full-on Broadway musical, and I know it is genuine, visceral hatred because I can’t quite put my finger on what it is I hate.  Surely I do like pretty people strutting around singing, so it’s not that. The plot of Oklahoma, anyway, is not idiotic; many of the lines were witty. Maybe because it reduces human relations to predictable stimulus/response, like an ant touching the back of an aphid. But Kabuki does that. So does Sophocles. I don’t know. Maybe just because it takes time and resources from the kind of theater I truly prize.

E’s son died at 37. I cannot stand it if we are going to begin reading the obituaries of our children.