*possible spoilers*
I just got back from tonight's performance (which also featured a brief, interesting talk-back with Deavere Smith and Leonard Foglia). When the play works--which is quite often--it's some of the strongest material that she has ever presented. Her depiction of the late Texas Governor Ann Richards had the audience in stitches. She also offered a vignette about the matron of a South African orphanage who had lost many of her charges to AIDS--extremely moving. I was on the verge of tears as she recounted the story of a little girl who packed a suitcase the night before she died to join her mother, already dead from AIDS for six years, in the afterlife. Other parts drag, or didn't seem particularly well-connected to the tenor of the piece, but overall it's a very worthwhile evening of theatre. And Smith, as always, is a magnetic performer.
At the talk-back, Smith mentioned that this play has been in gestation since 2000, when she was invited to spend a semester as a visiting professor at the Yale School of Medicine, and that she interviewed over 300 people in total--settling on twenty-three specific interviewees in the end.
ETA: Although the house looked pretty full tonight, my friend and I had no problem getting $15 student rush an hour before the curtain. Great seats, too--third row, on the aisle. Totally worth it.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Updated On: 9/17/09 at 11:14 PM
