worry about yourself

I see a youtube video that makes me laugh.  A young girl, about two, is in the back seat of her dad’s car.  She is her car seat, trying to buckle her seat belt.  The dad offers to help, and the young girl tells him to worry about himself and just drive. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A6Bu96ALOw

Tonight I meet Jill in Dumbo to see Mayday, Mayday — a true story about a man, Tristan Sturrock, who suffers a fall, breaks his neck, and fully recovers. The play’s solo actor is also the playwright, and the story he tells happened to him in 2004.  Today he shows no sign of the fall that paralyzed him.  His moves gracefully and energetically around the stage; he has the lithe body of a dancer.

I skim reviews before I see a play to get a sense of what critics say.  After seeing the play, I read the reviews more thoroughly.  I like watching a play unfold; too often critics tell too much.

So I am on the subway coming home, reading the reviews, and am surprised by one I read from Theatermania.

The reviewer writes that the play

“is an exercise in self-indulgence… So much of this show is all about Sturrock and not the larger implications of his condition… To be fair, he does offer thanks to the people around him, almost as an afterthought in the last few minutes of the play.  But this has the same effect as a page of acknowledgements buried at the end of a 300-page self-serving memoir.”

I want to yell at the reviewer.  Hey, the guy thinks he may never walk again. May never feed himself.  May die on the operating table if he chooses not to wear a restrictive halo contraption for 18 months. It’s his story about an injury that changed his life.  An injury that left him unable to move below the neck.  Should he be thinking of others?  Isn’t it okay to be concentrating on himself? Yes, of course it’s self-involved.  But under the circumstances he has a right to worry about himself.  Sometimes that's okay.