two days, two plays

Jackie

In 2008, I drag Alexander and my mom to a play at the Centerville Library on the Cape.  It sounds interesting:

Actress Robin Lane will perform her one-woman show "An American Original: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis" at 7 p.m. at the Centerville Library, 585 Main St. The show covers Jackie's first encounter with John Kennedy, her wedding day, her years in the White House as well as her life after her husband's death and her remarriage to Aristotle Onassis.

We leave at intermission.  I think it is then Alexander declares he hates theater.

But the former First Lady fascinates me, so when I see that a new Jackie play is opening in New York (much better than a Cape Cod library), I buy a ticket.

From the controversial pen of Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, flows Jackie, an intensely theatrical dissection of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and the myths surrounding her well-coiffed veneer.

This one-person play sounds promising, though I still can’t find anyone else who wants to see it.  The play opens to an abandoned, decrepit swimming pool.  An interesting setting for a play about a fashionable First Lady.  The excellent actress playing Jackie (Tina Benko)  enters the stage from a hole, dragging mannequin corpses labeled Jack, Bobby and Ari.  Three smaller mannequins are also dragged around, representing Jackie’s three dead babies.  The play is about Jackie’s inner life, and her imagined musings.  I am not intellectual enough to appreciate the play’s experimentation, though I do appreciate the actor’s talent.  I leave unsatisfied.

The Flick

On Saturday I meet Jill to see a new play at Playwright Horizon's called The Flick. Before entering the theater, the ticket-taker tells us the play is performed in two acts, and each act is 90 minutes.  Already I’m concerned. 

The play begins.  Music plays.  The music is presumably playing over ending credits of a movie we can only imagine.  We stare at an empty stage.  The ceiling is stained.  The seats are frayed.  There is gum on the undersides of a chair. Popcorn lies scattered under the seats.   This goes on for five minutes that feel like thirty.  Then, two characters playing ushers enter.  They say little, and begin sweeping the floor of this rundown theater.  They are collecting all the spilled garbage.  Not much happens.  I think about the errands I’ll run after intermission.  Oh, and I need to remind Alexander about getting his bus ticket home next week.  I think of other things I want to do. This play is killing me.  Can I PLEASE leave? I want to scream.

Toward the end of act one, two characters go up to the control booth where one teaches the other how to be a 35 mm projectionist. This goes on for five to ten minutes, while the audience sits and watches them interacting through a tiny window in the projection room (there is no audio). Can this play get worse?  Yes, is the answer.  Next, we watch two characters watch a movie we cannot see. This goes on for about 10 minutes.  One of the characters turns out to be depressed and suicidal.  He is only 20 and a college student.  That’s it, I’m outta here.

Finally, one hour and 45 long-minutes later intermission arrives.  Jill stays; I don’t.  I am so happy — free at last.