August 5, 2017

Calm morning outside (after tempestuous rains) though something was going on within, for I woke breathless, agitated, and disoriented. Whatever struggle I had in dreams did not follow me out. I think the illness still affects me in ways I am failing to interpret coherently.

Harvested quantities of eggplant, began to think of ways to cook them all. Is there eggplant fudge?

Theater at the Magnetic last night. It made an odd juxtaposition with the theater I saw in Galway and Dublin, and the effort to define the differences is filling up the dark of the morning. All the theater in Ireland was excellent even when the plays were not themselves very good. The works that were not very good were still Of A Piece, everywhere the same quality, everywhere informed by the same recognizable imaginative energy-- their second-rateness an overall second-rateness, a statement achieved, a gesture fluid and complete if not transcendent. In the excellent pieces, the gesture was transcendent. “Wholeness” seemed to be the basic quality from the worst to the best. The play I saw last night– called Six Knots– was not bad, but neither was it whole. Sometimes it sailed ahead, sometimes it jerked and wobbled like a kid on training wheels. Once I lit upon this truth, I realized that was what ails most original work that does not quite succeed in Asheville, at the Magnetic and elsewhere. The limbs are not pulled together into a single body. The play was likeable–the end twist was especially satisfying– but it rambled across the stage like a hedgehog, all bristles and protuberances, sometimes flashing with wit, sometimes going a page or so without a single line that needed to be kept. Some of this may be the fact that it was still in previews. Some of it may be that the Magnetic’s generous custom is to allow works on stage when the playwright thinks they’re ready, not when they actually are. Most of it was uncertainty in the writing. Why? Is playwriting taught in some significantly different way in Ireland than it is here? I realized that if the playwright came to me for help, I would go through the piece with him, marking the lines that sag or fail to contribute, the implication being that a lovely design is just marred here and there by accidents his ear did not catch. But would that be the truth? Are lines almost automatically impeccable when the inspiration is impeccable? I will probably teach playwriting at the university one more time. I have one more time to get it right. In addition, I seem to hit shows, invariably, on the night of the Cackling Showboat, the one in the first row who shrieks piercingly, indiscriminately, often prematurely at EVERYTHING, thus commandeering the experience of the entire audience, and making it little more than a referendum on–for or against–her own. I heard her conversation afterwards, and apparently it’s quite conscious. She noted with indignation that she was getting corrective glances from her neighbors. ANYWAY, the local theater experience is especially challenging, partially because one feels responsible, in a way; partially because it is not always possible to tell what people meant, and, if they fail, whether their available resources failed or they simply meant the wrong thing. Perhaps I should have stopped the playwright last night and said, “At three or four moments, this is masterful.,” hoping he might get the full point.

Here I’ve worked myself into a lather and the cafés aren’t even open.

On this date in 1998, Ellen and I and David Wingate and a Honey whose name I have forgotten opened Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the green door. Oh, our ambitions then! The energy I seemed to have!

The day has become supremely bright and cool and clear. One wants simply to sit in a chair and stare.