The play's not the thing

 



Sun 9/22


I saw the worst theater I’ve ever seen last night, written by a woman who has been called “the greatest and least known dramatist of our time.” In “Mud” a woman irons and encourages her housemates to shape up. And in “Drowning” two severely ugly men sing about a photo of a woman in a newspaper. 


The Times review states … “Her characters live in weird corners of the imagination, where uninhabited desire and grim existential queries abound. It should feel like an honor to be a stranger in her strange lands.” They also published my comment … “I’ve gone to nyc theater for fifty years. These pieces were the worst things I’ve ever experienced and this review astounds me.”   

Comments

Anonymous said…
You go, Paul!
October 9, 2022 at 7:36 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don

Image
Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. He was my big one. We were twenty six when we met. We walked past each other in the Village late one night and both of us turned around. He was wearing a giant parka with a pulled up fur-trimmed hood. Gushing beard, big ugly 70s glasses. I only saw the tip of his nose. For me, it was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the ring pulls on his pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in babysitter. He once wrote on an egg and mailed it. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He grabbed my arm - "wait a minute." He left an antiques store and put a small kaleidoscope in my palm. And thus began our many years of promised land and civil war. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he landed a joke river stone smoother than Carson. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We bled when it shattered carrying it up the marble s...
Read more

As my sister Suzie says ...

  ...  LIFE. It grew into a very sad day this day … began with my computer failing me and calls and calls to Apple and Spectrum and texts and e mails and incorrect passwords and low batteries, recorded voices and stupid stress inducing muzak and erasing everything on my machine and reinstalling and promises bout retrieval and on and on and I lose everything at first except fotos… documents folder is empty ... including my plays and seventeen years of journal ... twelve hundred pages and it feels at first like my memory was erased and then I thought about this year and people losing their lives, and homes and livelihoods and minds, loved ones and so many things more ... and it grabbed hold of me and made me contemplate tonglen. Compassion and empathy. Turn things round. Utilize adversity. Yes, that's the way too proceed but still blue and feeling stupid for not having been more taking care and I go to genius bar at Apple and say to a long haired smart guy with good teeth ... I'...
Read more

Bye

Image
  My old apartment is completely empty ex for an almost empty bottle of Windex. It’s been less than a week since I left it and now it’s unlocked. I like to go down and visit.  There’s something strange and special about an empty apartment. Besides the echo - it evokes a number of things for me. The past, the future, quietude, melancholy, loss, Last Tango in Paris - where Brando and the young French sexpot both check out a beautiful empty apartment and I think Brando rents it and they meet there and have wild sex and he makes her promise to never say or tell him her name and vice versa and it's such a wild fantasy, two nameless people flooring it again and again for good or bad underneath a night skyway in the City of Lights.  
Read more