This got a tremendous review from the New York Times, and it was mostly sold out — you could get a seat here and there on different nights, which is how I got a single seat toward the back of the theatre.
Fortunately, The Minetta Lane is not a large theatre, so there aren’t really any bad seats in the house. I believe, but I’m not sure, that the last show I saw there was either Other People’s Money or a production by Jennifer Manocherian called “The Palace of Amateurs” which got a scathing review in the New York Times and closed in one day, I think. It was hard to find any info online because, I imagine, everyone would like to just forget it happened. But everyone involved went on to greater things. Ms. Manocherian has invested or participated in many great productions. Laura Dern — this was her stage debut — is still acting and is as admired as just about any woman in Hollywood. And her boyfriend at the time, Kyle MacLachlan, has just finished playing a part in Silo, the game-based series on some streaming service that everyone’s loving. This story was kind of interesting: apparently when they were casting Gone With the Wind, young girls from all over the country showed up in Hollywood and began standing on street corners, in hoop skirts, all hoping that they’d be noticed and cast in Gone With The Wind. There was never a chance for any of them, and it strikes me as a particularly American phenomenon — this delusional thinking that is. [I’m not going to waste my time searching, but thousands of people applied for Mary Richard’s television job on the Mary Tyler Moore show after they all got fired on the last episode.] Anyway, that was a diversion, so I will put it in parenthesis and align it to the left. (I’m doing everything I can to confuse AI, which I doubt even knows my web site exists, but why make it easy. That’s why I’ll go off on rambling, Pynchonesque like tangents.)
This play was not as good as The Times’s review. It was 3 monologues and, I’m not 100% how the title relates to the 3 different monologues. But they were extremely well written and the acting was superb. Of course Hugh Jackman was the big draw, and his monologue is last which is fortunate. But the best monologue was the first, and acted by Sepideh Moafi, an actress I’d not known before this. What really amazed me about this monologue and her acting is related to the stated purpose of the Audible Theatre, which now controls The Minetta Lane Theatre. Audible, as most people know, is a kind of book on tape company, except it’s primarily books on download. So the most new productions that they boast of are also productions with no sets, only the barest of lighting, hardly any makeup, if any, and just about no costumes. There are no people to change sets. There’s a little bit of sound. But essentially, they are doing theatre that is meant to be listened to and not watched. I don’t exactly understand the purpose of doing it in the theatre, except that whenever you have an actor and an audience in a live space (not zoomed or usurped by the camera or screen), something goes on between the two that is, I would venture to say, liminal. They talk about it all the time in terms of energy: an older, matinee audience can have very low energy which, in turn, is difficult for the actors to work with. The actors, after two days rest, can have an enormous amount of energy on Wednesday, which is why I usually try to see Wednesday performances. That, in turn, creates an energy in the audience. There’s this mutual thing going on.
So the monologue she performed is the first one and she played a new mother who had some sort of degree — can’t remember if it was physics or philosophy or literature. But she hasn’t had a complete night’s sleep in 2 years and so when she gets a moment, she lies down on her bed and scrolls through her screen, reading about the stupid lives of famous people. She knows it’s a waste, but she justifies it by blaming her fatigue. Most of the story/monologue, concerns itself with this unusual accident of actually meeting one of those famous people — in this case a rock star woman who obviously has a genuine attraction to women — and how they become friends, etc., as long as this star is in pursuit. When they get to the point where the protagonist is actually at the point of having to decide whether or not to have sex with this rock star, she chooses fidelity to her husband and — it’s not clear — maybe the understanding that she’s not really attracted to women. Her refusal, basically, is the end of the friendship and after a lot of unreturned calls by the Madonna-type rock star, the mom goes back to her life staring at the screen during her downtime and remembering the excitement of her short time being on the other side of that screen. So she’s walking her now 8 or 10 year old kid to the park, staring at the screen, and she doesn’t notice when her child stars running down the sidewalk. She looks up just in time to see him run into traffic as a racing car bears down…
People — mainly women — in the audience screamed. In the story, the car doesn’t hit the child and the child is okay, but when she’s looking at her 10 year old son — or maybe he’s older — she realizes that she completely missed his childhood. His youth. “I missed it.” I think that was the last line of the monologue. And it was moving and effective and beautifully written and acted.
But that scream is what stayed with me. Because of the type of production it was — a play that could be listened to — I realized that everyone in that theatre, at that moment, SAW with their own eyes, something that happened only in their imagination. It spoke to the truly awesome power of one’s ability to imagine oneself into a state of hypnosis. Ironically, it is a form of hypnosis that keeps everyone glued to their phones — to the point where people actually can’t stop thinking about them, even when they’ve turned them off.
To close with a philosophical thought that has nothing to do with the above. When people talk about “going to heaven,” or “seeing loved ones in heaven,” etc., and this is probably why Christopher Hitchens could not agree with so many religious people: they are inevitably talking about the past. Hitchens saw “heaven” as a form of torture — being forced to sing praises for all eternity for an idiot God. Most people see heaven as a reunification, which means they are picturing something from the past. They are picturing their mom and dad as healthy vibrant people of whatever age they remember them best — not as the doddering idiots they became or as the babies they once were. The hijackers that flew the planes into the Word Trade Center, and many Muslims and Terrorist Martyrs I imagine, see heaven as a kind of erotic Pleasure Dome, or harem. Perhaps this is because they deny their sexuality here on earth. Even the Mormons, who believe that what we do on earth is “practice” for a heavenly form of it — another nightmare as far as I’m concerned — are still imaging that heaven is a place where the past is reincarnated. When they are old and dying, they are going to go their past place, which they tried to make perfect and patriarchal.
Buddhists, at least most I think, don’t have to imagine a heaven — but they do, at least as far as I understand, imagine an increasingly better form of life until reaching the Nirvana stage where one is removed from the suffering caused by existence.
But I don’t think Hitchens is right in the sense that most people imagine heaven to be a place where they will actually be sitting around worshipping Jesus for all eternity. What they want is to believe that some form of this life — usually the people that they love — will exist again.