Friday, January 13, 2017

A Very Long Day (July 2012)



Tonight I went to see "Long Day's Journey Into Night" starring David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf. Had cheap tix but I got to the Box Office and they said 'we can move you to the 2nd row, orchestra. Would you like that?' Um. Yeah. Duh. So I sat close enough to see the wig lines around Laurie Metcalf's temple. Close enough to get spat upon. Close enough to be weeping like a baby. This was undeniably one of the best pieces of theater I have ever seen in my life. And afterwards, I was walking around the neighborhood looking for something to eat and ran smack into Laurie Metcalf on the street and babbled at her "you were...I mean...I'm so sorry to bother you, but you were...devastating, amazing...thank you for your performance" and she was so nice and smiled under her knit hat, tiny as a slip of paper she was, and I felt like a gurmy drama student. But my soul was stirred and I was wandering alone in London, just wanting to grab onto someone's arm and stop them and say "did you SEE that?" Do you know the play? It's devastating. Long. And bleak. And there are these moments in it that just brought me to almost choking. The moments of each character confessing or realizing that they are all reaching, or were reaching, for some big awesome truth something larger than what is there in reality, some DREAM, that failed them. Each of them were wrecked by the realization of the failure. To me: that is communion. WE all have that. The thing we want that we lose or we never reach. Perfection. Andrea Del Sarto, wasn't that the poem by Robert Browning? "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?" (sounds like a graduation speech). But that's the tragedy of life and it just tore through me tonight. IN a way that was both completely depressing and completely uplifting.


And then, I had to eat and drink some wine. Quickly.

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