When you come across a brilliant detail in a work of fiction, you might wonder, “Where do writers come up with this stuff.”
My guess: They had lunch with my friend Rachel, a brilliant young actress with a voracious appetite for ideas and ironies. Her artistic sensitivities are finely tuned, but she is also of that rare breed so deeply into drama that “experimental plays” and “alternative theater” are far more than punch lines to her. To those of us less attuned, her enthusiasms can appear, well, not to put too fine a point on it, fall-down-and-roll-around-on-the-floor funny. Here’s a description of a play she loved:
A one- man performance, by a mime, in which the mime appears to be struggling and failing to climb a mountain. FOR TWO HOURS.
You couldn’t possibly invent a more vivid image of theatrical hell for the average human than that. It has every form of tedium known to mankind all rolled up into a hyper-dense boulder of get-me-outtahere.
Wouldn’t it be beyond perfect for a Woody Allen vehicle, where his lust for the beautiful young thing forces him to sit through two hours of mimed frustration?
It would serve him right, of course, and that would be the point.
Thomas, m’boy, your latent Philistinism is raising its clueless head. I can imagine that play being riveting, with the right script and the right actor (think Bill Irwin.) Moreover, I know Rachel and she knows theater, and if she says it’s good, it almost assuredly is.
I’ll bet you would have similarly ridiculed, sight unseen, a play accurately described as “Two bums waiting for a friend who never shows up. Not much happens in the meantime.”
Furthermore, I have just been told that my comment is “awaiting moderation.”
I object to being “moderated.” As you well know.
Wait a second. I know Gene Weingarten. I mean I KNOW Gene Weingarten. And there is no freaking way that Gene Weingarten would be sitting in a darkened theater for 120 MINUTES, each ticking by so slowly it seemed like an eternity, while some dude in mimeface pumped his knees and waved his arms and fake slipped and slid up and down an invisible mountain, UNLESS someone was holding a large caliber handgun to his temple. If it were only a .22, he’d take his chances and bolt out of there.
This is all about your respect and admiration for Rachel. Admit it. Has nothing to do with your own true sensibilities.