I've been sleepy all week. I suspect it's because I've been making an effort to go to bed at a sensible hour and get plenty of sleep. This always happens. Whenever my body gets a taste of sweet, sweet slumber, it gets greedy and starts demanding more, leaving me feeling drowsy and listless throughout the day. I described this situation to a friend once, and she advised me to listen to the body when it's trying to tell me something. But frankly, I don't really care what the body has to say. It spends most of its time doing stuff like growing pubic hair and producing poo. This is a source worth listening to?
My mom came to town for a visit over St. Patrick's Day weekend. When she got back home, she posted to Facebook a photo she had taken of me standing next to the Chicago River dyed green. One of her friends left a comment that said, "LOVE THE HAT!"
Apparently, the character Will Horton on Days of Our Lives is a gay. If, like me, you haven't watched the soap regularly since the mid-1990s, allow me to refresh your memory: Will is the son of Sami and Lucas--though at first, there was some confusion over the boy's paternity because Sami was leading everyone to believe that Austin was the father so that she could steal Austin away from her sister, Carrie. Sami is evil, you see. (She's still on the show, by the way, and she's still played by Alison Sweeney, who also has a primetime gig making fat people cry on The Biggest Loser.)
In any case, Will Horton has grown up--at the accelerated rate of all soap opera children--and discovered that he's gay. When he told his grandmother, Dr. Marlena Evans (played by the ageless Deidre Hall), she responded by quoting Lady Gaga.
Well done, Days of Our Lives. I kind of wish it had been Victor Kiriakis, but you can't have everything [via AfterElton].
Books
READ: Sarah by Robert Gottlieb [a breezy little bio of Sarah Bernhardt].
COMING UP: Oscar Wilde, Frank Kermode, Racine.
Plays
SAW: Show Boat (Lyric Opera of Chicago), The Doyle and Debbie Show [I laughed my ass off].
Movies
SAW: Project X.
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
MINE: The Trip [two hours of UK comedians Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon eatin' and riffin'].
KITO'S: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
THIS WEEK'S THEME: Road Trips.
Music
LISTENED TO: Darondo, Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions [a previously unreleased collection of mid-1970s recordings from a Bay Area soul singer]; PJ Harvey, Let England Shake [a powerful bunch of war-related songs].
Television
WATCHING: Community (NBC), 30 Rock (NBC), The Simpsons (Fox), Bob's Burgers (Fox), The Good Wife (CBS).
ON DEMAND: Eastbound and Down [the latest series I've decided to watch from start to finish. Previous entrants in this category: The Wire; Upstairs, Downstairs; and Parenthood].
Current Interests
Rick Santorum, Latinos, animals, musicals, Madonna, Obama, same-sex marriage, attractive men, books, Chicago, the Internet, reproductive rights, movies, TV, Mitt Romney, Chick-fil-A, travel, the 1990s, Sarah Palin.
Fool's Four
THE LAST FOUR SHOWS I SAW AND LIKED:
1. The Doyle and Debbie Show.
2. Show Boat.
3. FML (Steppenwolf for Young Adults).
4. The Fisherman (Stage Left Theatre).
Flashbacks
ONE YEAR AGO: "I wouldn't have thought that the way to get to 90 is to adopt the diet of a college-age pothead."
TWO YEARS AGO: "Follow these simple steps, and maybe someday you too can be a freelance play reviewer who has to take a dead-end office job to pay the rent."
THREE YEARS AGO: "Links to my favorite Sincerest Form of Flattery Week entries."
FOUR YEARS AGO: "I think I can--I think I can--I think I oh fuck, what's the point . . ."
FIVE YEARS AGO: "The One Where They're in a Chinese Restaurant and Then There's Paper Everywhere."
SIX YEARS AGO: "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls."
&
"Coffee cups white with disremembered pain."
Glitter
ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Urban Theater Company's Fucking A and Prop Thtr's Drumming in the Night are in this week's Chicago Reader.
In his review of Calixto Bieito's production of Camino Real at the Goodman Theatre, The New Yorker's John Lahr points out that the director has excised from the show a prayer that playwright Tennessee Williams puts in the mouth of a whore called Esmeralda. "It might be considered Williams's mission statement," Lahr writes, "and the finest of his monologues." But you won't hear it in Bieito's staging, perhaps because it has no place in his brutal vision. Here it is.
God bless all con men and hustlers and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on the street, all two-time losers who're likely to lose once more, the courtesan who made the mistake of love, the greatest of lovers crowned with the longest horns, the poet who wandered far from his heart's green country and possibly will and possibly won't be able to find his way back, look down with a smile tonight on the last cavaliers, the ones with the rusty armor and soiled white plumes, and visit with understanding and something that's almost tender those fading legends that come and go in this plaza like songs not clearly remembered, oh, sometime and somewhere, let there be something to mean the word honor again!
I've been enjoying the unseasonably warm weather we've been having. I would enjoy it more if someone could assure me that it is indeed unseasonable and not just the way things will be from now on because humankind has screwed up the planet. I mean, if I had wanted to live where it's 80 degrees in March, I would have moved to Miami. But I didn't. Because for starters, have you seen people who live in Miami? I don't have that kind of time to spend at the gym.
The past few days have even smelled like summer--that salty-sweet blend of sweat, metal, and ice cream starting to turn. To encounter this aroma so soon in the year feels unsettling and unnatural. I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but on the other hand, it's entirely in my nature to do that.
ELSEWHERE:
My review of The Artistic Home's Tea and Sympathy is in this week's Time Out Chicago.
This is the first entry I've written for this blog since the 14th--meaning that my resolution to post something here every day in March has failed. An Internet outage at my apartment during the middle of last week started the hiatus; a visit from my mother over the weekend prolonged it. For what it's worth, 14 daily entries in a row constitutes a new record. So . . . that's something?
(It's nothing.)
ELSEWHERE:
My short review of Commedia Beauregard's Bard Fiction is in this week's Chicago Reader.
What bothers me about Calixto Bieito's production of Camino Real, now onstage at the Goodman Theatre, is not the violence, sex, and violent sex that has sent other audience members scrambling for the exits. I'm a big boy; I can handle it. What bothers me is the violence done to the playwright, Tennessee Williams, and to his work.
I don't just mean the way Bieito drags Williams into the proceedings as a character in his own play, presenting him as a pill-popping, booze-vomiting mess. I mean the way the director willfully misunderstands and misrepresents the author. Bieito wants us to see the nightmarish happenings in his Camino as a portrayal of the darkness inside Tennessee Williams, a man who struggled with loneliness, depression, mental illness, and substance abuse.
But the thing is--and this is something manifestly clear in all of the playwright's work--darkness wasn't the only thing inside of Tennessee Williams. There was compassion and tenderness and poetry in there, too. And it's these qualities, in conflict with the world's harshness and cruelty, that give his plays their power and their music. But you'd never know that from Bieito's production, whose unrelenting ugliness leaves no room for anything else.
FML: How Carson McCullers Saved My Life (Steppenwolf for Young Adults). A coming-of-age story without the usual coming-of-age cliches. Sarah Gubbins's script sensitively handles anti-gay bullying--even if it fails to capture the terror of the experience. Through March 18.
The Fisherman (Stage Left Theatre). The real class warfare in this country is waged by the rich against everybody else. Jayme McGhan's heartbreaking play imagines a working stiff who tries to even the score. Through April 1.
Hit the Wall (The Inconvenience). Ike Holter's thrilling evocation of the 1969 Stonewall riots, brought exuberantly to life by director Eric Hoff. I think every performance is sold out but maybe you can finagle tickets somehow. Through April 22.
Shakespeare's R and J (Idle Muse Theatre Company). Four schoolboys escape their strictly regimented lives by acting out Romeo and Juliet. Andrew Lund is really sweet as the heroine and Curtis Jackson makes a swoon-worthy Romeo. Through March 18.
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Goodman Theatre's Camino Real is in this week's Chicago Reader.
Here's an excerpt from a diary entry I wrote on today's date 20 years ago. I was 12.
3-12-92
Spring Break is just around the corner, and the Thompsons will be going on maybe 2 trips. First, we'll be going to my grandparents' house (maybe!).
Second, we'll be going to the beach. The Destin, Florida beach, that is. And just like almost every trip we go on, this one will have its fair share of mishaps.
All of this and more, included in the next few entries.
What is this, a commercial? Did I really write a promo for the anticipated wacky spring-break adventures I would be chronicling in my own diary? I think maybe I watched too much TV.
ELSEWHERE:
My review of Right Brain Project's The Fall of Man is in this week's Time Out Chicago.
