October 29, 2023

Downtown adventure last night. Stopped at Sovereign Remedies for a drink, met Taylor and Melissa from North Georgia, here celebrating their 10th anniversary. He works IT for the Arch Diocese of Atlanta, and said if he hadn’t gone into IT, he would have been an English professor. The first poem that ever struck him was “the one about the cold figs,” which we figured out was Williams’ plums in the refrigerator. Turns out I’m 16 years older than Taylor’s father. On then to NCS, where I saw A Case for the Existence of God. Expectably well acted and flawlessly produced, and likeable until the very last scene, which is one of the most offensive acts of pandering ever seen on stage. Tragedy turned into TV sit-come in a gratuitous last stroke, which some producer must have insisted Mr Hunter tack on. Even the actors looked embarrassed. In any case, Ben and Angela was better in script and in production at every point. Why should not old men be mad? Stopped at the hotel for a drink on the trek back to my car, where an extraordinarily beautiful couple from Charleston watched the World Series on TV. Moon in glory over little Asheville. 

Reserved a room for a November vacation at the beach. 

W sits near the back in church with a beatific look on his face. Does he want to return to choir after being cast out? Is he simply worshiping as he might without comment from me? A complicated personality, a serpent and a dove at once. 

 

October 28, 2023

Massive labor in the garden: digging, mulching, the planting of daffodils, lupine, crocus. I must have gone mad ordering, for forgotten boxes of bulbs arrive every few days. 

 

October 27, 2023

Lunch with SS. The perils of the Bohemian life. Suddenly recalled my time with dinner theater at the Hotel Syracuse. For a while I lived quite dangerously. 

Men’s Chorus rehearsal last night. Same discouraging music, but a spirited evening among convivial friends, which I enjoyed. There may be a way through this. 

A homeless man entered during rehearsal. I rose to see him out. No aggression at all, he was like a hungry puppy. I felt intense shame that I didn’t have my wallet and consequently no money to give him. Under all the grime– and one missing tooth– he was movie star handsome. How do things happen the way they do?

Email stating that the guy who sat next to me in SC tested positive for Covid. 

 

October 26, 2023

Decent SC rehearsal, much headway with Central European languages. Music is my fourth art, and yet I spend a whole lot more public time on it than the others. I suppose by its nature it’s performance and therefore more public. Sometimes I think I’m good enough at it for it to have been a central part of my life since the seventh grade; other times, not. 

Not getting over rage about attendance at the play. I walk into meetings, scan the room, think, “Why should I be here? You couldn’t even be bothered to come to my play.” M notes that no one is going to see the play at NCS, either. That gives me intellectual comfort, but not emotional. At the Arts Commission meeting I could barely think of anything else. How can you pretend to be interested in the arts? Time will wear this down. I expect.

Early at the river yesterday, pumping out what I recall as two excellent poems. We’ll see for sure when I transcribe them from the notebook. This is a renewal of the times in Syracuse when I wandered the Clark Reservation, stopping, near-ecstatic, to scribble in my notebooks the poems that would become The Glacier’s Daughters. I drive to riverside, sip nasty coffee, and write what had not occurred to me even a second before. Now I am hugely less confident that anybody will care. But, I go on. Glory upon the mountain on the far side of the river.

Planted and mulched daffodils, advertized as “super-giant.” Was able to fertilize them with a surprising abundance of bear scat.

 October 24, 2023

Got a detailed Irish itinerary together for K. She decided she’s afraid of Ireland and will rent a cozy flat in Cornwall instead. Exhaustion.

Departmental

October 23, 2023

The exhaustion/illness I felt was indeed just sadness, primarily-- but not wholly-- the result of attendance at my play. Just sadness, which I suppose is better than actual disease. Mother had this, certain periods of lying down when father was cruel to her. I suppose it’s part of her legacy. One gets over it. I think I’m mostly over it. 

Into the recycling bin goes the box of unused Ben and Angela postcards. Almost all were, in essence, unused.

Party at Cynn’s yesterday, out past the end of Reems Creek. Mountains around her like the back of a scarlet and gold dragon. The English Department Old Guard was there, catching up, howling about the deformations that have rendered our university irrelevant as an institution of higher learning, however it might be a hotbed of momentary politics. I’d forgotten how physically beautiful E is. Elven. 

 

 

October 22, 2023

Jack says of Ben and Angela:

Bravo— stunning performances, thoughtful / joyful / and full of mystery . 

Favorite scene was the one about the rearranged flowers … and the two rehearsed responses.  It felt very intimate at that moment.

Really a fine work!!  Thank you.

 

October 21, 2023

L drove up from Atlanta through many traffic accidents and resultant detours. Dinner at Tupelo Honey (disappointing food, excellent ambiance, right on the street), drum circle, much family talk, finally, hours into the night. The play was the best it has been, K and S like dancers en pointe. The man behind me got every joke and murmured at every nuance. Very gratifying. Tonight is closing night, and I couldn’t bear to be there. Exhaustion, mostly of an emotional nature (unless it’s actually physical, which should be revealed in a few hours) kept me in bed until it would have been difficult to arrive on time. I didn’t want to see another meager house. Everything went splendidly. Nobody witnessed it. That about that.

Afternoon spent rehearsing with chorus. Socially it was pleasant, but there’s nothing in the program that should draw a person out on a winter night. We have done every piece multiple times in the past. Nothing new, nothing adventurous, nothing to suggest Christmas is a holy or miraculous time. I’ll have a Blu-u-u-u-u-ue Christmas----. W-- with the taste of a turnpike diner waitress-- insists that’s what our audience wants to hear.  We think of gratifying our audiences, but never of nourishing them. Of course the poll we all took is 60% to 40% against “serious” music. I look around my life in general and wonder how many times I have to lose the same battles. And why I keep trying.

Rumbling in the sky I took for thunder. 

Blaze of color on the hills. 

 

October 20, 2023

Rainy morning, expecting my sister any hour from the dim and rustling south. I think of that line from “Frost at Midnight.” 

DJ texts that the BeBe was “almost a full house” last night. 

Instead, I attended chorus rehearsal, where it was discovered that our Christmas concert will be exactly those– and apparently all of those– jazz-lite rockin’-round-the-Christmas-tree pop songs that I hate utterly. Unrelenting. And not one hasn’t been on our program before. The only thing even vaguely unique is Friddle’s micro setting of “In the Bleak Midwinter.” When I bitch about doing the same things over and over, somebody (usually WJ) says, “Some people haven’t heard it.” There are plenty of things some people haven’t heard and we haven’t sung. Why not delve into them? 

Turns out we’re meant to have a four hour “retreat” tomorrow to learn this crap. I don’t even have the energy to protest. I am enjoying the process and the company, though, even if the repertoire is useless.. 

Lunch at J’s beautiful house in Haw Creek. Curried chicken salad and an apple cake still in memory making my taste buds tingle. We talked about her idea for a play, a one-woman show, which I thought hugely promising. Her dog would not leave my side. The dog looked anxious, as though he were leaving something out and couldn’t remember what. 

Turbulent days as far as my mental state. Fighting despair on several fronts. Or maybe just frustration. 

Sweet pea vine, bearing flowers of the most perfect pink, endures outside my bedroom window. 

Drinking Limeade by the Autumn River

 

October 17, 2023

Assembled Drinking Limeade by the Autumn River.

Exterminator people came to check the dehumidifier. Long discussion about Tolkien when they saw my bookshelf in the hall. They both loved my house, saying, “it has a nice feel.” 

Jack the dog whom I was happy to meet died after a series of strokes. 

FN said his postcard got buried under other mail and now he’s going to Florida and can’t see the play. It’s always something. 

Half of vestry last night was S sharing her feelings. 

Ken Burns’ documentary American Buffalo is a catalog of atrocities. I wish the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians didn’t so much resemble that between the Europeans and the Indians. We were worse. . . maybe worse than anybody ever.

 

October 15, 2023

Birthday dinner for L. I got sick on the fried green tomatoes, lunging to the bathroom in the dead of night. DJ’s night was turbulent with bears in the alley and opossums hissing in the garage. Bears or vandals spread trash over the street. I didn’t get all of it plucked from the yard this morning before it was time for church. Canon Augusta preached on that bloodthirsty parable about the king who gives a wedding feast. C and E loved Ben and Angela and bought tickets for their daughter. The last performance may be a full house. 

Considering that Jennifer, who pierced my ear in her button store on Wall Street, has been dead for twenty years. 

 October 14, 2023

Have I left the house today? I must have. There are groceries I’m certain were not here yesterday. 

Depression over attendance at the play continues, somewhat mitigated by SS’s assertion that everybody feels exactly the same way. One infers that one should be grateful when betrayal doesn’t happen rather than furious when it does. I look at the ceiling and say, “Filling a tiny room nine times in a town that’s supposed to be so arty doesn’t seem like much to ask.” The ceiling does not answer. 

Rolling clouds that have not yet become rain.

Friday the 13th

 

October 13, 2023

Day 2 of “flu-like symptoms.” 

Giant dreams, the one I remember taking place–again–in a gigantic university, tall, glittering at night with skyscrapers and musical conversations and lights. I walked about listening hungrily to intellectual discussions about this and that, in apprehension that I’d be cast out and only hear common talk from then on. I’d not been to class in so long that I wondered if I still had a job as a teacher, or that anyone would recognize me. I worried that I’d make no friends, but then I fell in with a group of men with a variety of interests. On the night I was fully accepted into the group, we gathered in one man’s yard to test out his flying cabin, a small square house hovering over the lawn. We climbed up in, and sat and talked and drank while the cabin flew through the night. I thought we were flying out over the ocean, but it turned out the cabin was tethered, and went around and around over his yard. I loved looking out the window, where his long property snaked through the neighborhood and came to end in the sand of the beach leading to the sea. 

What’s this anxiety about losing touch with a university? I feel no shred of it waking. 

Achy at waking, but recovered enough by afternoon to garden. Spread much mulch. Transplanted cannas. Planted blue anemone. Hacked bamboo roots.

SS cut the price of Ben and Angela tickets in order to fill the seats. Utterly defeated. Reviews don’t help, word-of-mouth doesn’t help. This time, in order to turn the usual tide, I’d sent out postcards, which means that just about every person I know received a personal, direct, material invitation. It didn’t matter a damn. Never again in Asheville. Even I learn eventually. 

SS opines that times are hard for all the arts.

Trying to help the company’s bottom line, seeing that ticket sales were disastrous, I went to sublime theatre/donate and donated. But the thank-you was from the local arts council, revealing that though I’d accessed what I thought was the Sublime donation page, I had actually contributed to the Arts Council, which I’ve loathed since days gone by. So I tried again, and donated to the right place this time. Got an email from the Arts Council wondering if I’d share what had prompted such generosity. Decided not to tell them it was a mistake. What a terrible day. . . aside from the gardening. Friday the 13th. 

 

October 12, 2023

Brilliant autumn day. Got flu shot and Covid booster at once. Thought it wouldn’t matter, but at the moment I can scarcely move. Tried to do some gardening. Stood in the sunlight leaning on the spade for a quarter of an hour. Quiet long enough that my autumn groundhog revealed his chunky self. 

Cocktails after rehearsal last night. One of us was infuriated that people expressed sympathy for Israel at this horrible moment, considering that Israel has made it hard for the Palestinians for a long time. I realize I don’t have the courage of my convictions, or I would have walked out of the bar and not spoken in that company again. Yes, blame goes to all sides, but how long should that go on? I strike you because you struck me and then you strike me because I struck you. . . . didn’t Athena address that in The Eumenides? It has to stop. It has to stop this time, not the next time, not when all resentments are somehow laid to rest. This time. This time being, by any account, rife with cruelties and barbarities more calculated and deliberate than at any time before. This time. Fairness is not the issue. The balance will never balance, and we have not the wisdom to know when it has. Twenty years ago fairness ceased to be a viable consideration. End it. Now. If justice cannot win, mercy must. If not mercy, then exhaustion. 

What was Hamas’ end game? Did they hope to win? 

Review

 

October 11, 2023

    Reviews from Asheville Stages:

Before any relationship begins, it exists in a state of infinite possibility. Will these two beings, completely unknown to each other, become friends, lovers, nemeses, or mere acquaintances of no further consequence? 

Such a blank slate stands quite literally at the start of Ben & Angela, a new play by Asheville’s David Brendan Hopes, which debuted through The Sublime Theatre & Press on Oct. 5. The stage of The BeBe Theatre usually holds some sort of set or props before a show begins, but here it’s set in its purest black-box form, lit by a warm orange glow.

But Hopes wastes little time in confirming his title characters — played by offstage couple Scott Fisher and Kirby Gibson — as people of momentous import to each other. And over the next two hours, the playwright guides his audience through a richly realized portrait of love and its expression in marriage.

The first act presents a brisk series of vignettes that establish Ben and Angela both as individuals and as a couple. Quick costume changes, coordinated by Kayren McKnight, immediately clarify the time skips from childhood to middle school to high school as the characters meet (and meet cute). 

Both Fisher and Gibson do an excellent job finding a steady arc for their characters through the chronological whirlwind. Ben’s adolescent awkwardness grows into an earnest romanticism, while Angela responds to her troubled childhood by developing a confident poise. As directed by Steven Samuels, their dialogue flows amid the natural pauses and hesitations of youth. They bounce and snap off each other in a way that’s a true delight to watch.

And even though the two are the only ones performing, the stage rarely feels empty. Choreographer Kristi DeVille fills the space with the young couple’s spontaneous dances and an energetic, wordless gift-opening sequence. Samuels’ changes of scene place Fisher and Gibson all over the BeBe’s box.

The pace slows in the second act, and the action becomes a bit more sedate, with much of it coalescing around Ben and Angela’s kitchen table. But those changes feel like natural choices to reflect the reality of an ongoing marriage — of course there should be less dynamism, more routine. The initial flirtation can’t last forever.

Hopes embraces this different stage of life to give each of his characters some beautiful longer monologues. Husband and wife slowly reveal new facets, disappoint each other in different ways, and seek reconciliation in precise, vivid language. However, I did find the second-act script to give slightly heavier weight to Ben than to Angela, creating something of an imbalance for a work so centered on a joint relationship. 

But that’s a minor quibble, especially given Gibson’s skill at developing character through expression and body language while listening to Fisher. And her Angela gets a chance to shine toward the end of the play as she wrestles through a sleepless night (accentuated subtly but powerfully by lighting designer Jason Williams) amid the couple’s darkest challenge.

At once intimate and universal, Ben & Angela will resonate with all who have tried to sustain love over time. I’d wager that makes it a worthwhile night out for just about anyone.     

Daniel Walton

Drama, Romance

*

I, too, noticed the imbalance between the two, but that is somewhat because of the cuts we made in the name of time. Besides, what relationship is equal? 

Symphony Chorus rehearsal last night a near catastrophe. Our leader was away, and finally our accompanist had to seize the reins from a substitute who infuriated us all. The big European guy who sat next to me in the King David oratorio moved up to sit beside me. During the King David he never opened his mouth, and I carried bass2 alone. Last night he sang maybe 10 phrases, all of them operatically lovely, but--. Maybe he saves it for the shower. 

 

October 8, 2023

Dream before waking: I was filling out an application for some sort of art/nature teaching job in the Southwest. It wasn’t right for me, but I  was desperate about my future, having been denied tenure at Syracuse and having no clear prospect of another academic job. Of course, none of this happened, or ever threatened to happen in actual life, but the fear of fear of it must have been deeply embedded. I woke grateful to be so old, with none of these struggles ahead of me. 

Having discovered “Asheville Stages, “ I read, belatedly, a very positive review of In the Assassins’ Garden. 

People asking how the play went, reciting their reasons for not coming. I want to say “Nobody is taking attendance,” but someone probably is. Will try to fight that off. 

Om Namah Sivayah

 October 7, 2023

B writes on Facebook:

i’ve been thinking a lot about yesternite’s production of Sublime Theater’s Ben & Angela.

it was superb of course. 

the cast & crew involved are all immensely skilled, so i knew it would be top tier theater.

but i didn’t know how invasive it would be.

that it would crawl into my psyche as it has.

the story has no plot. it is driven solely by characters.

and since David Hopes created those characters, they are highly watchable.

witty, heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and silly.

and real…. so very real.

it was Angela that really got into my brain.

i understood her. at times i have been her.

and while i have never had a Ben in my life, i have started every relationship trying to figure out “why me?”

why would this person spend so much time and energy trying to make me smile?

to make me happy?

why would they be so kind and sweet and generous to me?

what did i do that would make them think i deserve any of this?

of course, the story of my life is much darker than Angela’s.

she’s the one you want to watch, not me.

because there are no Bens in my world.

once the “not-Bens” finally convince me that i am worthy…. they turn on me.

i become disposable to them.

always made to feel like i have done something wrong.

pointedly and repeatedly treated like my presence is unwanted….

and then lied to and gaslit so i think it’s all in my head.

and all i can think is “why me?”

what did i do that would make them think i deserve any of this?

while i know i will never be treated with kindness as more than just a trap to break me….

i do want to see that happiness for other people like me.

Ben & Angela definitely made my son and i laugh and cry a lot during the show last night.

today it’s been making me cry…. but that’s just me.

my son is still laughing, and we are both still in awe of everything we experienced.

i hope you have the chance to experience it too.

❤ 

Downtown again last night for Ben & Angela, the performance at least as suave as opening night’s. Again parked at distance and wandered about, autumn rain sharpening the experience. Italian white at the Times Bar, which has operated for six years without my noticing. M and M, R and E at the theater last night. Before the lights went down, M and I moaned about the decline of UNCA, and the apparent demise of the English department as a viable instrument of instruction. Little selfish Trumps replicating themselves and toddling out to poison the world. Stopped to listen to karaoke on the way back to the car. The bartender was rude to me, later came back to apologize that he had broken glasses in the dishwasher (or something like that) and had been distracted. I should not have let solitude–even isolation–take control of my evenings. I’ll blame the pandemic, though I’ve always leaned a little toward the hermit’s cave. 

Theater not full last night, not even nearly. Sleepless with the realization that I have dedicated my life to pursuits– the kind of poetry I write, the kind of plays I write, the kind of stories I want to tell, the kind of paintings I paint– almost calculated not to have an audience. Walk out on the street where hundreds jostle looking for a good time. Bad karaoke in one bar with surly waiters attracts more than have yet seen Ben and Angela. It has to be all right, as nothing can be done. 

Dreamed that the sun poisoned skin on my left temple had turned to cancer. Don’t actually know that it hasn’t.

Hamas attacks Israel from the Gaza Strip. I thought I had something to say about this, but one shrugs and keeps silent in the face of the purely ruinous. 

Ben and Angela

 

October 6, 2023

Opening night for Ben and Angela the best, the most elegant, the most nearly flawless opening night I’ve had outside New York. Everything the director and the actors did worked. Every choice was–even if other than what I would have done–right. Choreography, stagecraft, perfect. Even attendance lay within tolerable parameters. I usually think about 3/4 of the way through any play of mine “this is too long!” Did not think that last night. I’ve always prized clarity in writing (maybe above all else) and in acting, and I was proud of the clarity of both the script and the production. I wondered, is it too clear? Is it not thick enough? If so, can’t be helped. Probably nobody but me would worry about that. 

S and K were beyond perfection, in that they were at once cuter and subtler and more believable than I’d imagined them. 

Parked at some distance from the theater (beside First Baptist) to avoid the downtown mess and give myself some exercise. The stroll reaffirmed what a glad and bright little town this is, full of happy people enjoying their evening. Also, because I passed twenty restaurants, it assured that I would be starving through the whole show, which turns out to sharpen the senses. Makes me want to make excuses to get downtown more often, though you can eat and drink only so much and just wandering around looks peculiar. Took a gigantic piss on the oak across from the UC of C, downtown being too well lit for such a thing. 

 October 5, 2023

Worst night last night. Worst day yesterday: all in the mind, but that’s enough.

 

October 4, 2023

Woke to frantic horn-honking, realized it was a motorist trying to hurry a flock of turkeys across Lakeshore. 

Morning spent stuffing Stewardship  envelopes at church. Got to pet Jack the dog. 

So far, a three-losses-of-temper day, and there are hours left. 

 

October 3, 2023

SS reports a sudden great leap in performance of B&A. Excellent news. I must subconsciously have been more anxious about that than I admitted. If this flops I feel that I’ll probably give up actively seeking stage production. After the universe sends so many signs you reluctantly begin heeding them.

Brahms at night, to put things in perspective. 

 

October 2, 2023

Woke, sat by the river and wrote nothing. Assumed feeding the crusts of my sandwich to the fish would be the highlight of my day. Dug up spent sunflowers, cultivated, and planted three (I saw by the packing light, shockingly expensive) tree peonies. Sun poisoning affected me so fast and harshly that I consider I may never again be able to work in full sun. Maybe a good sun block. 

Pride

 

September 30, 2023

Evidence of more ursine mischief last night. As this point it’s just planters pushed off terraces and the like, teenagers cavorting after dark.

Morning and afternoon it was Pride in Pack Square. Blazing blue, hot as summer. The sun poisoning I got in Sligo has not and perhaps will not go away. After a very short period of exposure the skin of my head and face feels and looks burnt, painful and sickening, like someone had thrown hot grease from the stove. I had a cap on, but the sun crept under the cap. As for our performance, it may be the most fun I’ve ever had on a stage. People danced in the open space in front of us. I was happy. 

In the midst of our Pride appearance, big M began shouting instructions in his truly disturbingly loud voice: “Make two lines! Remember where you were! Get in line now!” I wonder how he imagined we survived the 25 years before his arrival. What we needed was one more bossy queen. 

Three different people asked for directions and information early on Pride Day. I reflect now that the advice or information I gave them was wrong in every particular. 

September 29, 2023

AVLGMC rehearsal last night packed, our largest number in years. Because of my truancy, we did two pieces that I’ve never seen before, and will perform them at Pride Saturday. M behind me was doing the Lady GaGa by heart, and mostly doing it wrong, but he sounded good. Not my place to say anything. S screams critiques at us while we’re singing. Not only rude, but inaudible.

Cute furnace boy in the cellar doing whatever they do for a “tune-up.”

Closed my Wells Fargo security lock box after sixteen years of not using it once. Thought I’d put my jewel collection in it. Nobody’s knowing it exists is probably security enough. 

Diane Feinstein is dead.

Trump facing trial for business fraud in New York. This is an unexpected bonbon, hitting that evil man in the only place that really hurts him, the wallet. 

Apparent uncertainty from the stage of the BeBe. Difficult to know what is meant by what is said.

 

September 27, 2023

As production nears, I hunted in my journals for previous mentions of Ben and Angela. This is from October 3, 1999. Last Century:

Converse College is doing Four for the Gospel Makers and Ben and Angela’s Romance as reader’s theater this coming Saturday. If one of them wins their contest, it will be done as a mainstage production. About that I forbid myself any hope, lest the disappointment be worse than it needs to be.

Then, from October 10:

Drove to Converse College yesterday for Theater Converse/ Scriptwriters of South Carolina 5th Annual New Play Festival. I gave myself too much time, and arrived early, to watch the campus fill up with proud papas and elegant mamas for parents’ day. I had forgotten that Converse is a women’s school; the boxy femininity of the place added an air— how to say it without deepening a cliche?--that was gentle, airy, safe, sweet. The conference itself was filled with that atmosphere I had forgotten since I had stopped attending such things: the innocent asininity that attends on too much confidence, the most talk from the least able, awkwardness and unexpected excellence, all with a gentle unconsciousness that made it, if exhausting, funny rather than horrible. Steve Willis from Greensboro thought he was going to be the star of the show. He was doing a “presentation”-- which turned out to be his bragging on his many accomplishments— in the afternoon, and he had just come off a run with John Glines in New York. I latched on to him and his lover, though, because they were friendly and, even when mutually bragging on Steve’s brilliance, interesting. Another cliche— gay men being the life of the party. His play was almost unbelievably boring, but had just won a prize at some festival in Savannah. I never cease wondering what goes through peoples’ minds. My Ben and Angela’s Romance was the second play on the bill. The actor playing Ben had not showed, so the director of Steve’s show was pressed into service, and the result was that, though Angela, one Chris Freedman, was subtle, intelligent, excellent, Ben was a dud, as well as being way too old, and, as he’s half the show, it was a half a debacle. Added to that was the fact that my director was either stupidly literal-minded or had deliberately tried to sabotage the show. It was all, I thought, awful. When it came time for the playwright to speak--a period in which Mr. Willis went on for an easy twenty minutes--I could barely find a thing to say, except for the obligatory thanking of cast and crew. I was so frustrated. If I hadn’t had another show later that afternoon, I would have left. 

There was another playwright from Asheville. Her play was called Merlin, the Mountain Medium, and was so unbelievably bad that, again, I wondered what the theater people were thinking, or if the array of scripts they had received was really so abysmal, or if they thought the sittin’-and-spittin’ genre of ignorant mountain folk doin’ ignorant and boring things needed representation. During her talk, the playwright explained that the play came from the need to confront grief at the death of her dog. 

Four for the Gospel Makers came on in the afternoon. I unclenched then, finally, for the direction was intelligent, and though my actor, Keith Turner, took some time to warm up, he was attractive and fully adequate. Lest I appear like one of those people I mock for their self-delight, I will keep to myself the fact that the play moved me deeply. It was as though it were not mine at all; I was listening to catch every word, learning, discovering, dreading, at some points, weeping. The emotion in me afterwards was the knowledge that it, as least, is a great play. I was satisfied. The conference had given me what I needed. When they asked me afterwards where the play had “come from,” I flatly could not answer them. It sounded like I was being evasive or “arty,” but I really didn’t know how that had gotten into my mind.

During the reception, when they announced the winner of the contest and the play that will be presented as a mainstage offering in May, it was Ben and Angela’s Romance. This surprised me as much as it must have the others, though the conference director had emphasized that choice would be made based on the script and not on the performance. It was not the play I had enjoyed most--that had been Learning the Alphabet by Liza White--though perhaps I was too pretzeled up inside over the production to enjoy it. I left happy. Walking to the car I sang “Green Grow the Rushes, O” all the way through for the first time in a decade. 

Then, from the production:

May 11, 2000

The highlight of the week was traveling to Converse College in Spartanburg, twice, to see the production of Ben & Angela’s Romance. It was one of those experiences that was better than one expected. I sat in the dark, weeping briefly opening night, for relief, for sheer joy. Everything could have been much worse. Some things could hardly have been better. D played Ben. Danny is so beautiful that the sight of him skewed my impression of the play, which turned into a fantasy of our lives together, tender and sexual, out of which I could not fully rouse myself. I thought of him all the way home, and could not sleep for thinking of him once I got home. The second play, Packing Up the Past, the English premiere of the work of a famous Spaniard, Sebastian Junyent, was so self-congratulatingly bad and so long, that after 2 ½ hours, after I had dozed all that I could doze, I came as near as I ever have to standing up and shouting, “All right! That is enough!” It is a mistake to put the exit on the other side of the stage, so that one cannot escape. Nice reception afterward, (exactly the same food as the reception in the same place in October) during which I was praised almost enough to suit me, and during which D suffered my attentions in a way that seemed welcoming, physical and affectionate. I smile thinking of all the things which might have been on his mind-- respect, delight at premiering a play and meeting the playwright, who had just praised his performance, maybe a little artistic veneration--which were not precisely what I wanted. 

Ellen joined me Thursday night, and liked the play, though questioning, as I did, certain directorial choices. It was lucky she could see through the technical disasters, some of which had the actors on stage saying their lines in the dark, or by the light of a flashlight someone from the audience seemed to have trained on them. Even with that, it was very good. Slipshod Asheville makes me forget the difference well trained actors can make.

The minute one crossed into South Carolina, the air smelled of honeysuckle.

*

The sky looks like rain. All my bulbs are in (for the moment) so I’m praying for rain.