The first was "Antipodes" at the Signature Theater with Josh Charles.
To be honest, I did not know he was in it, so I was thrilled. AND, I sat front row about 10 feet from him for the whole show. It is set around a conference table with seats on both sides. So in the picture above, I was on the seat side where this picture was taken from. I mean I could touch him.
He was excellent, but the show was less than fulfilling. It was 60 minutes of dialog, 20 minutes of ideas stretched into a 120 minute show with no intermission. It was "about" (if anything) how stories shape our lives. With a "epiphany" that all the stories are over and we should go home and wait for the apocalypse. Yeah, uplifting. And it took 2 hours to get there.
Now, this is Annie Baker, and she is a Pulitzer prize winning playwright, so there is probably a lot I am too dumb to understand, but I don't think I am alone.
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| A Simple Art: A Tiny - GREAT - show. |
Then last night I went to see a tiny show called "A Simple Art". It was a documentary piece about the murder of Father Eric, one of the writer's old teachers.
It was the opposite of "Antipodes". It was fast moving, interesting, silly, heartbreaking and ultimately talked about the stories we tell and why we tell them. Their uplifting conclusion was the opposite of Annie Baker's. We all create our stories for a lot of reasons, and it was important to share them. Apocalypse not mentioned.