Last night I saw Proof, an actual Stage Play, which is starting to feel like a whole species of activity I will have to explain at length and with no real hope of success to my grandchildren –
Me: Well, it was a little like ‘The Real World,’ sweetie, only they wrote everything down first, and all of the cast members had to live in a fake house they build on a stage for three hours.
Child: Now Grandpa, stop telling lies or we’ll turn you in to the Dear Leader!
The play is worth seeing – there’s nothing unusual about it that leaps out at you as a play, if you see what I mean. A small cast of characters, realistically rendered in a contemporary setting, struggling with inner demons etc. etc. But everyone’s engaged in what they’re doing, working hard to make it work – Mary-Louise Parker particularly – and it does work. Despite the familiarity of any number of devices or plot twists (or maybe because of them) I found myself thoroughly involved and engrossed, and while no grreat philosophical point is made, nor poetic transformation of language performed, the very act of the performance left me not a little uplifted. It was warm last night after the snow all day, and calm, and walking back from the train down 6th Ave. at midnight it felt like everything retained the glow that comes from watching people on a stage move through a life that is, despite its obvious constructedness, more real than your own.
Excuse the half-assed Wildean rhetoric – it’s the coffee talking.
Posted by B T at March 07, 2001 09:02 AM