Let's go see a play

Last evening Jessica took me to the school play put on by the students at the school she works at. The evening's entertainment consisted of two one-act plays, one by the middle schoolers and one by the high schoolers. The middle school kids came out first and did a play called 'The Miser' which, according to the playbill, was adapted from Moliere by Roland Reed. They did a good job considering how young they all are and that the middle school drama class is doing the play twice with two completely different casts. A difficult task. The children should be commended for doing such a good job under such obvious stress.

The high school class did the play "The Poet and the Rent" by David Mamet. They were superb. These young people were very professional in their presentation of this screwball comedy. In fact, their performance was better than the script which, in it's attempt to explore the nature of art, was too self conscious. I like it when a drama breaks down the barrier between the performers and the audience but Mamet took it too far for my tastes. Since I am unfamiliar with the play I don't know how much liberty was taken with the text. But the actors were fabulous. They threw something into the play which I thought was very clever. In the middle of a scene a cell phone was heard to ring off stage right. Someone answers it and over the laughter of the crowd you hear a voice say "He's onstage." The person who answered the phone then calls out to one of the actors onstage who then stalks offstage and has a angry conversation with "mom." While he is doing that the actors who are left onstage pretend to be emabarrased. After the call ended the actor came back out and the scene picked up where it left off.

The play took place in a building in Concord called Old Courthouse Theater which is not actually in the old courthouse as the previous link explains. It is a grand old building nonetheless and had the same lighting fixtures as hung from the ceiling of Holy Rosary Catholic church where I was indoctrinated as a child.

It had been a very long time since I had been to play before last night. Each time I go to a play I thoroughly enjoy it. I then remind myself to support local theaters like the Charlotte Repertory Theater and the Children's Theater of Charlotte. I did go see a performance at the Charlotte Children's Theater a few years ago when I was a student at UNC-Charlotte. A classmate of mine was performing in a play about the Nazi war crimes trials. This classmate was 16 years old and going to a university. He took an assload of classes, acted in two plays in one semester and was one stressed out little monkey. I remember one of my instructers, Malin Pereira, said of him that it was intimidating to instruct someone 'innately more intelligent than you are.'

I saw in Lee's blog that he published a poem. Here's one:

My Indecision

I saw him on the race track
sticking his car beside two,
should have let off the gas
let them stay ahead for a lap.
Instead his left front in the grass,
he shoots up the track
like a puck across the ice.
Chaos, bruises, tears, regret.
"I know they're going to blame me"
says the driver to the interviewer,
"but if you look at the replay closely,
I had no choice but to do nothing."

A website you waste your time and god's

What does google think of shit? Try googlism and see! They claim it's zany and madcap comedy. The Marx Brothers were zany and madcap. This is merely amusing and good for a chuckle or two.