30 April 2020 Thursday

[KathyB]

Something positive for today: My accountant did my taxes and showed me a draft of them.

Something not-so-positive: everything else that has to do with taxes, including how much money I owe to both the state and the IRS. When I get my stimulus check (who knows how long that will take), it's going right around back to the US Treasury.

I am up to episode 4 of season 2 of Succession. I'm finding it very good, but not spectacular, which is actually a good thing, because I won't feel obligated to subscribe to HBO for season 3.

[scenicdesign71]

Succession isn't blowing me away either, though I'm certainly not not enjoying it, and it's early days: so far I've only watched the first four episodes of season 1.  But my mom, unexpectedly (even to her), has plowed through both seasons with great enthusiasm, so I'll probably stick with it.  (HBO Now's free viewing period ended today, but I could still sign up for another free week of it at some point before HBO Max comes online later this month).

I finally started watching Richard Nelson's Apple family plays, after missing both their Public Theater runs and subsequent PBS airings.  In preparation for the new installment that streamed on Wednesday night, I watched the first two plays on PBS's "Theater Close-Up" site, but didn't have time to watch the latter two.  (And haven't even begun Nelson's Gabriel family trilogy, which I'd also like to catch before all of these plays go away at the end of this weekend).

After lazily avoiding them for the past decade, I really enjoyed the two Apple plays I've watched so far, as well as the Zoom episode the other night, a lot more than I'd expected to.  When the tetralogy originally premiered, one play per season between 2010 and 2013, I found myself a little wary of its up-to-the-minute topicality: each play opened on the night it was set, with current headlines informing script tweaks right up until opening. It sounded potentially gimmicky and, to be honest, potentially pretty opaque to someone like me who reads relatively few political headlines (and even fewer full articles) -- to the point of awkward muteness, especially back then, whenever current events arose as a conversational topic.

I also feared that the plays might stand or fall on our willingness to spend time with, and smugly adore, characters who sounded (from a distance, through blurbs and reviews) tailor-made to flatter the sensitivities of the typical Northeastern American theatergoer: white, middle-aged or older, well-educated and culturally-privileged and socially-liberal and assiduously politicall-aware and solidly middle-class (at least) and still somehow pleased to think of themselves -- despite the occasional nagging (and ever so comely) ambivalence about doing so -- as folksy everymen and -women.

Of course, white, educated, liberal middle-aged gay men such as myself aren't exactly a rare commodity among New York theatre audiences either.  And I've certainly known my share of intelligent, sincere, highly-aware and generally likable leftish exurbanites like the Apples.  But despite the demographic overlaps, I feared I might find these plays insufferable: I imagined a family of late-baby-boomers earnestly discussing, and performing, their precious "humanity" for us and each other in exquisitely-humble ersatz-Chekhovian tableaux of daily life upstate... and, in my mind's eye, the whole thing quickly came to seem spectacularly skippable.

Actually, as it turns out... well, either I really am hopelessly embedded not-too-far from the squishy center of Nelson's target audience, and therefore more unambivalently pro-Apple than I imagined, or else he's a far better playwright than I was giving him credit for being (though you'd think I might have bothered to remind myself how much I admired the last play of his that I saw, Franny's Way, almost twenty years ago).  Probably both of those factors pertain; I really was impressed by Nelson's writing even as I was watching yesterday; his Chekhovian aspirations are not, as it happens, misplaced.  Also, the cast is sublime.  But whatever the reason, in the end, I found myself as touched and beguiled by the Apples -- and, more to the point, as genuinely interested in getting to know and understand them -- as the playwright could have hoped.  The first two plays gave me sufficient grounding for Wednesday's livestream of What Do We Need To Talk About?, but I'm eager to go back and catch the third and fourth plays -- and to meet the Gabriels, too -- over the next couple of days.  At ten hours remaining (plus perhaps another hour to re-watch WDWNTTA after properly finishing parts 3 and 4), it'll be a nice binge.

I also want to see NTLive's Frankenstein, which I never managed to catch in the cinema.  But that one will remain up until next Thursday (May 7), so there's still a bit of time.