25 September 2019 Wednesday

[KathyB]

It feels like a Monday. However, it's the fourth Wednesday of the month, which means (in addition to street sweeping) that I get to drive all the way across town during rush hour to go to a meeting. It takes me about an hour to get there, and 35 minutes to get back. Woo-hoo!

[scenicdesign71]

This week is going soooo slowly.  Though Monday and Tuesday were both quite light workdays, the sitting-around-waiting for something to do actually made them feel much longer, and while today was a bit busier (and therefore seemed to pass more quickly), I just cannot fathom how tomorrow can possibly not be Friday.  After spending today in the shop, tomorrow I'll be back at the same filming location where I spent Monday and Tuesday, once again waiting around -- this time to restore any scuffs, nicks, bumps or scratches our camera crew may have left on the existing paintwork.  Then on Friday I'll be back at the shop, where we'll be starting the next episode, and it already sounds like there'll be plenty to do.

This evening, on a random whim, I went to Playwrights Horizons to see a new play in previews, which happened to feature Michele Pawk.  Onstage in character, she looked disconcertingly like Blythe Danner, but when I glimpsed her afterward as she was leaving the theatre, she looked as glamorous as ever.  Unless I'm forgetting something, I don't think I've seen her onstage since Cabaret in 1998... can that really have been more than 20 years ago???  (Since then, she's had a son who is now of voting age... impossible).

The play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, was a messy but fascinating dive into a single night in August 2017 among four young alumni of a tiny conservative Catholic college in Wyoming, one of them the daughter of a beloved professor (Pawk) who's just been named college President.  The performances were all excellent, but for me the most interesting thing was hearing a range of conservative-Christian viewpoints on the current state of America, dazzlingly articulated while also tied firmly to character and to the specific relationships between characters, and presented with zero condescension.  The playwright, Will Arbery, grew up in precisely this milieu, and while his script isn't flawless (running over two hours, even at a decent clip, with no intermission, it could use a bit more shaping and pruning: in particular, while the final curtain arrived not a moment too soon, I'm not sure he's really solved the ending), its apparent refusal to pander to a presumably-liberal audience was what first piqued my interest in seeing the play, and it certainly delivered on that account.