April 1, 2022

Signed horrific checks payable to the treasuries of the US and NC. As I wrote, the secretary told me how she had been hit hard by child support (which she was apparently paying) and how her daughter, visiting a while, had clogged the toilet upon her first use. 

Planted a hillock of Shasta daisy and a new patch of triphyllum. 

Did my first period of duty as the Resource Desk at All Souls. Had one call left over from yesterday, which had already been taken care of. Stuffed envelopes in the work room for a while. In any such place there will be chatterers and others who keep silence. The chatterers are by no means the slower workers. I keep silence. 

Went to the season opening gala at the Magnetic. It was lively and boisterous, and I was much better known than I knew. But for the most part, this generation of theater people is one, two generations removed from the generation which I dominated, when directors would call and I would tell them the part I’d do. Except in imagination, I do not miss that at all. These young actors are so good that if I, young again, fell among them, things might not be the same. I was uneasy. I crept into the corner in the whirl of so much energy. I remembered why I had declined long ago– even though I would always act–to become a “theater person.” Self-demonstration is foreign to me except on paper. Magnetic forms an alliance with Anam Cara, a cooperative which emphasizes what its founder calls “abstract, physical theater.” You give actors a task or an image and a few minutes in which to discover how to act it out. Fascinating, actually, and the results last night were impressive. I’m so script-oriented that I wonder what could be the use of that except as a party game or a way to make the realization of text more expressive. Preview of a Christmas show so gobsmackingly bad it eludes vocabulary to describe it, its badness temporarily disguised by antic and effortful acting. The effort of the acting becomes laughable– and therefore, in a way, pleasing–on its own.