(no subject)

[xinjinmeng]

:
A double-bill at the Teatro del Risorgimento: Beckett's Fin de partie and Sartre's Huis-clos, both in the original lingua Franca. How delightfully miserable!  I got some sour looks from some of the other theater-goers for giggling at every other line, but how can you not laugh?  The casting was inspired, using the same four actors -- the comparisons between Clov and Valet are inevitable.  Afterwards there was wine and cheeses (and thallium salts, they do think of everyone) and it was delightful to squawk like some Algonquin refugee about this and that and the other thing.  The actor who played Garcin and Hamm let it drop that he'd seen my performances at the Orpheum; I divine from his guarded language that he had severe criticisms, which frankly only endeared me all the more .  His calves were exquisite, too -- what they might look like on a four-poster bed in my own Second-Empire room.  I must work on controlling my expression -- a smile that looks coy when you stand at 1步 can look rather menacing when you stand at 1引.  

It was all I could do to get myself home and dispense with all technique.  The rude fantasies of one, of two, of three, of four ... angry, self-centered people struggling to feel something other than their own choler, taking their frustrations out on each other and upon myself.   Goodness gracious, the romantic in me ponders living an entire powerless life if it would just conclude with a climax with a passion inversely proportional to the lifelessness that permeated everything before.

I may go see the plays again, or I may not.  I am denying myself any exhibitionisms -- as delightfully naughty as they may sound, I would regret them for years afterwards -- and if that actor's stentorian "Eh bien, continuons ..." is spoken in my presence, I may not be able to restrain myself.

Comments

[frostbytepb.livejournal.com]

(Out of character, I envy your ability to whip out this sort of prose.)

[(Anonymous)]

It is a mark of our hard-fought decadence that, regardless of the homeliness of the character, the actor is always expected to strike an attractive figure. I should not be so gauche, then, I suppose, as to take your compliments personally.

Second Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Empire)? In this dry, repetitive architecture we see the embodiment of my unspoken criticisms. It decorates itself, but repetitively; it celebrates itself, but immodestly; it represses itself, but insincerely. Above all, it's complexities are all skin-deep. Grant me in-stead the piled elaboration of the Jacobethean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobethan) parapets and arches, the shameless indulgences there-in, or the stern and sincere restraint of the Tudorbethan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudorbethan_architecture). I need no waffling between the two aesthetics.