Christmas = black bean sauce, serious theater
We do love being tourists in NYC after Christmas. After escaping our roots and pretending to be Jewish* with a lovely Dec. 25th** dinner of salty-spicy shrimp, yu-shiang eggplant and whole fish in black bean sauce at East Ocean City here in Boston, we jumped on the train to NYC Saturday morning. Went straight to the TKTS booth at South St. Seaport and got reduced price tix to August: Osage County. Deeply satisfying dysfunctional family drama. Our seats in the front row stage left put us about 5 feet from the actors for some of the scenes, which was intense. Scenes in the attic were pretty hard to see but it didn’t matter. 3.5 hours of melodrama flew by.
Now want to find more plays by this Tracy Letts person. It’s so hard to keep up, especially when people younger than I am run around winning Pulitzer prizes. I suppose I should get used to that.
Image: Anti-Christmas card from Apoplectic Press.
* The boyfriend not pretending exactly – while mother’s family Christian (Scientist), so not Jewish to the Jews, he is, as he reminds his daughters occasionally they are too, Jewish enough for Hitler.
** Jews at least have Chinese food and movies. We poor atheists don’t even have that tradition. I despise Christmas. 2 years ago, I tried escaping to Buddhist Bangkok, only to find that they play Western Christmas carols on the streets there. Horrifying. Someday will start successful travel agency offering special tours to someplace with no Christmas of any kind, but where??
Aurelia’s Oratorio – it’s the real thing (art)
Victoria Thierrée Chaplin and her daughter Aurélia Thierrée are amazing. If you are in the Boston area, go see Aurelia’s Oratorio at the American Repertory theater before it closes Jan 3. Such a pleasure. Funny, beautiful, sad. Also excellent for children, older people (we had grandma in tow, she loved it), and foreign guests because no words that matter, it’s all physical theater. Boyfriend sat down in foul mood from snow, forgetting something, worry that his senile mother would ask questions loudly throughout performance, etc. Within less than a minute after the lights went off and Aurélia began, he was ecstatic.
It reminded me of how much I cherish real performances by talented people. It’s so important. And it makes me so sad that audiences at Amrep are always mostly rich old white people (like us) Who else can afford it?
And now I’ve just learned by Twitter that Harold Pinter has died. Sad.
“One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.” Harold Pinter
Image: from Amrep.org
