Theater
Last Thursday I went to see Rozenstein and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Folgers Shakespear Library theater. Partly, I really wanted to check out the theater (it’s so close to us) and partly I was curious about the play. Did not know anything about it, pretty much, and it felt like a gap in cultural knowledge. Of course, I could have watched the movie version, but I figured, hey, theater going is a different kind of experience.
To sum up, the play was interesting but harsh, and the audience was, as ever, rather aged. The two main leads were interesting, but the meta-metaness kinda got to me, a little. When the playwright is navel-gazing, then the experience of watching makes you a voyeur, and at certain points you get the sense that you’re the necessary but obnoxious fool, and that the theater people would be much better off if they didn’t have you to worry about. Like, the paucity of the content of current theater productions is the audience’s fault, ditto the actors’ financial paucity, ditto their performance skills. But maybe I’m just being too sensitive. As for my friend Andrea, she was disappointed by the ending. (I thought it went hand-in-hand with the rest of the play.) Nevertheless, I do still like the *idea* that the play is based on. Just wish it wasn’t so entirely vicious, fatalistic, and self-involved. Perhaps because I wasn’t in the mood for that just then. Tom Stoppard was 25 when he wrote it, which makes sense. It’s full of a young person’s flippant dismissal of real feelings. I’m maybe either too old for that, or not old enough yet.
To sum up, the play was interesting but harsh, and the audience was, as ever, rather aged. The two main leads were interesting, but the meta-metaness kinda got to me, a little. When the playwright is navel-gazing, then the experience of watching makes you a voyeur, and at certain points you get the sense that you’re the necessary but obnoxious fool, and that the theater people would be much better off if they didn’t have you to worry about. Like, the paucity of the content of current theater productions is the audience’s fault, ditto the actors’ financial paucity, ditto their performance skills. But maybe I’m just being too sensitive. As for my friend Andrea, she was disappointed by the ending. (I thought it went hand-in-hand with the rest of the play.) Nevertheless, I do still like the *idea* that the play is based on. Just wish it wasn’t so entirely vicious, fatalistic, and self-involved. Perhaps because I wasn’t in the mood for that just then. Tom Stoppard was 25 when he wrote it, which makes sense. It’s full of a young person’s flippant dismissal of real feelings. I’m maybe either too old for that, or not old enough yet.