Cookies and Karenina

May arrived in the midst of a (typically) theater-heavy week. In a lovely turn of events, I attended the first two shows this week as an observer, not a critic. It’s always nice to watch a production without clutching a pen, although I often find myself taking mental notes.

First off, on Sunday afternoon I saw Neal Zupancic’s new play The Tragedy of John (produced by Theatre of the Expendable, at the Studio Theatre at Theatre Row), featuring my multi-talented pal Nathan Brisby.

As I entered the theater, the actor playing John (the excellent and inert Liam Joynt) was firmly entrenched on one end of a couch—comfortably slouched, gnawing on Cheetos, staring at the TV, and pretty much defining the term “couch potato.”

It was a nice, emblematic touch by director Corinne Neal for indeed, it seems that John’s central downfall is his inability to both physically move or to develop real, meaningful relationships. Although his friend Amy (who has taken refuge in his apartment after a devastating and abusive marriage) attempts to draw him out, he stays mum about the unspoken tragedy (two years earlier) that reduced him to this state.

When his friend Steve (my friend Nathan) arrives for an evening of guy movies (Blood Sport is on tap), he brings along Julia, the new girl he is dating. Julia, he tells John, might very well be “the one,” although it is clear from her arrival that there are more promising sparks between her and John than her and the rather oblivious Steve. Let’s just say that Julia eventually finds her own persuasive method for getting John off the couch.

The Tragedy of John is a living room drama and, at times, rather intriguing in its exploration of contemporary relationships—most of all, the myriad ways that truths are told, secrets are disclosed, and information is meted out between people. Cookies appear in various forms (baked by various people; thrown by—and at—various people) and they are an apt (and edible) metaphor for this often catastrophic series of conversations.

This all sounds a bit sitcom-esque, and the play does get off to a rather patchy and episodic beginning. Many of the opening scenes barely got moving before the lights went to blackout, drenching the stage in darkness and depriving the audience of getting into the rhythm of the material. It wasn’t until much later (in a 90-minute production) that I began to feel connected to the piece.

I always wonder if this tendency to write clipped scenes is a result of our attention-deficit MTV generation; I also began to think about the punctuation of theater. Much depends on how (and when) a playwright chooses to end a scene. True, when I saw the play I was also finishing up Lynne Truss’s witty and educational punctuation book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, so I did have semicolons on the brain more than I usually do. But for whatever reason, during the first five or six rapid blackouts, I cocked my head to the side in confusion. This play—and these performances—deserve a finer-tuned (and punctuated) narrative.

Nathan told me that Zupancic wrote the play after overhearing a comment about a “lazy face.” Apparently, the indolent person in question couldn’t even be bothered to form his face into the appropriate expression. If anything, The Tragedy of John examines the perils of inaction—and betraying your friends, and generally being a lazy sack of a person. Which is not a bad thing to preach against, when you think about. I just wasn’t quite sure what it was rooting for.

As many of you know, it’s always thrilling to watch a friend perform. If you’ve heard Nathan sing, you can testify to his stunning vocal prowess, and I relished the opportunity to watch him in more dramatic (and non-singing) mode. Pay attention to those performers who are both good singers and good actors—there’s a deft musicality that informs their work, even when they don’t sing a note. Nathan turned that on as he channeled explosive anger in a vicious argument—so much so that I couldn’t even giggle when he ran into the wall as he stormed out.

Monday night Don and I went to see Ten, a play reading at the Public Theater produced by Second Generation (2g) in celebration of its tenth anniversary season. The staged reading featured ten (get the theme?) short plays by Asian American playwrights and performed, for the most part, by Asian American actors.

It was a mixed bag of an evening, writing- and acting-wise, but we both enjoyed Carla Ching’s The Further Adventures of the Little Goth Girl, which chronicled the coming-of-age of a young girl taught to fear strangers by her overbearing Chinese mother. Our friend Qui Nguyen (of the ribald Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company) contributed a hilarious exploration of Asian Accents in the Key of Sucky Sucky. In his typically irreverent and entertaining style, he constructed a newscast that reported on the death of “pidgin English” among the younger generations of Asian Americans.

A few reading recommendations:

On Monday I had the opportunity to hear Michael Lindsay (Professor of Sociology at Rice University, my alma mater) talk about his new book, which Oxford University Press will be publishing this fall. Faith in the Halls of Power investigates how evangelicals have moved into high-powered positions in business, politics, and Hollywood. Lindsay interviewed 360 people (from Jimmy Carter to Kathie Lee Gifford) about their faith and how it figures into their careers. It sounds like an intriguing book, and Lindsay was an incredibly engaging and lively speaker. I especially enjoyed his story about a CEO in the Houston oil industry who invited him to lunch at the Four Seasons and then expected Lindsay to pick up the check. When you make millions of dollars, it seems that your sense of entitlement can trap you—faith or no faith—into thinking graduate students make more than their $12,000/year stipend. After paying for the $160 lunch, Lindsay reported months of subsisting on peanut butter and jelly.

On Tuesday nights I volunteer at a local cancer hospital where I visit patients to give them some much-needed distraction. Last night I spoke with a delightful woman who had just begun to reread Anna Karenina. She told me that she was eager to see how she would experience it now, with more maturity in hand. (“As a teenager, I read it as a romance,” she confided.) I replied that we could probably read anything romantically as teenagers. But it is fascinating to consider how our experiences of books change as we change. Food for thought. In any case, I’m putting Anna Karenina on my “to read” list.