Tendencies

"I simply have to take over
I know I know exactly what they need."

-- Galinda, in "Popular," from Stephen Schwartz's Wicked

--

I am in Heath, Ohio, which is near Newark. It is east of Columbus. And this Super 8 motel is one of the best I've seen, with its doors on the inside of the building. The carpet is maroon. The bedposts, anchored to the wall with screws, are painted to look like dark mahogany. So is the bureau.

The shows are in Newark for the next two days, so this is home for the next two nights. I feel drained and sullied, like a dirty sink. It's the same feeling I used to get when I relented and smoked after weeks or months of quitting. It was hard for me to get up this morning, and so I opted for sleep over bathing. Then, because of an odd mix of annoyance and caffeine, I decided to make the three-hour drive through the April showers and flurries. We listened to musical theatre soundtracks while leftover winter sledge pelted the windshield. The drive made me tired, and the frigid storm made me bleary.

But that's as fleeting as the sleeting. I have a new (to me) car on the way, and the apartment I looked at last night is super swanky, and super affordable. And if I move in by early May, I can get a few more bucks deducted from my monthly rent; it all depends on the whims and plans of the tattooed bootlegger who lives there now.

--

Saw some good friends over the weekend, and saw one of the best onstage comedies of my life on Saturday night: The Foreigner, playing at the Playhouse in the Park. I usually feel a bit disgusted by the productions there, just because it's pop theatre, full of fancy lights and trapdoor scene changes, highly-paid actors and their expensive insincerity, all the pomp without the grandeur. But this show, despite all that, was good: quick, original comedy; new moments and honesty; and the only use of the trapdoor was called for in the script and made perfect, tasteful sense.

Above all, sincerity. That is the one thing that can make or break a show. A sincere theatre is the best. It is too humble to be pretentious, too truthful to be fake, too refined to be pathetic. It should crackle and simmer, the beats as inevitable as clocks ticking.

When it happens in the here and now, even the most ancient stories will dazzle, and the most contrived of scripts will entertain.

It is a rare thing, and wonderful. A good play is hard to find.

To paraphrase Anonymous, no one knows how old Theatre is, but it is old enough to know better.