Two and a Half Plays

Apropos nothing, other than rummaging through some old files from long-dead computers, I present this memento from 2003 celebrating my achievement at catapulting my Geocities website (“Web Site”) to the top of Google’s search results for my own name:

Take that, Dominic Pettman and your self-replicators

Nothing nearly so momentous has occurred in the past few weeks. Following the primary voting schedule is a bit like peeling back the doors of a particularly slipshod advent calendar: some days nothing comes out at all (unless you count Marco Rubio’s “landslide victory in Puerto Rico” – kudos to Rubio for ensuring his official podcasting team don’t exceed the bounds of plausible upbeat narratives and end up just looking embarrassing now) and then on other days a whole Super Tuesday’s worth of states come tumbling out. To mix metaphors, it’s The Archers Omnibus Edition of primaries, and I watched the continuing rise of our new jackbooted overlord Trump in the fine company of Randi, AJ and some Mexican food. Think of it as a political statement.

No one was a great fan of Trump at Kevin’s (temporary) leaving party, either. Which is damned odd, because there were a bunch of people there. So since none of my twenty and thirtysomething urbanite friends have a good word to say about Donald Drumpf, I’ll conclude that it’s all a mirage and move on to my sedate theatre review section:

Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip – after winning free tickets to a show at the Harris Theater [sic] for Music and Dance, I scoured their programme to find the least dancey thing in the schedule… or at least, the least exclusively dancey thing. Trip the Light Fantastic, a light-hearted skewering of buzzword-soaked organisations through the ineffectual committee meetings of a group of (somewhat rubbish) aspiring superheroes, fit the bill nicely. One of the biggest laughs of the night came from a joke about the uselessness of a Masters in the arts: you know this sort of crowd.

Interrogation – the first half of this play is an intense murder-mystery, building up the tension through a skilled cast of misfits and potential sociopaths. Unfortunately, I don’t know how any of this resolves in the second half, because it proved slightly too intense and I wasn’t confident of making it through without losing all vision (this happens to me…) and adding some unnecessary extra drama of my own. But it’s really annoying, because this is the first time that I’ve actually really liked what I was walking out of, and I want to know what happens next…

Othello at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater [sic, again] – I fucking love Othello. Partly because I studied it enough that I don’t have to work to understand everything that’s being said, partly because Randi mistakenly prefers Hamlet and I don’t want to give ground, but mostly because Iago is the greatest villain ever created. My one complaint with the play is that he gets his comeuppance at the end, because I like to imagine that he spends his life drifting from place to place, worming his way into the lives of noble people and then blowing them apart just to sit back and watch the fire burn. Plus, whenever Roderigo appears, I hear Mr. Buchanan booming “THICK! THICK! THICK!” in my head. I realise that I’m reviewing Shakespeare here, which is not really necessary at this point, but it was a good adaptation (even Randi agreed with this) which did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for this eternally relevant play.

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