Ah, what a fabulous city I live in, what a fabulous line of work I’ve chosen: 3 great plays, 1 great week.
God’s Ear: Ordinarily, a play about parents grieving for their dead son while struggling through layers and layers of repetitive, endless dysfunction would have been too heavy for me to enjoy. However, the plot was fairly lost on me because the play was very non-linear and 90 degree angle sleek, where my emotions need slightly more linear, over-stuffed softness to be truly engaged. Stripped of emotional entanglements, I could concentrate on the language of the play, and its cadences and puns and lists of cliches were mezmorizing.
Days later, I found myself talking in the rhythm of God’s Ear.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: A great night of theater, with legendary actors speaking legendary words. I saw the movie with Paul Newman, and this production, which was Tennessee Williams’ original play, was much better than the censored version.
Two Men Talking: Just 2 men on a stage, talking about their own lives growing up in South Africa, their coincidental reunion as adults in New York City, and their deep friendship. There’s heaviness here because one of them is HIV+, but the overall tone is light. It’s less theater and more pure storytelling, with no set design and an ever-changing script.
The whole genre of storytelling has always appealed to me on a primitive level. If I focus just so, I can pretend I’m some cavewoman sitting around a fire, listening to a story about the big hunt.
