Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "talent"
Failure: A Love Story
One of those magical L.A. nights. My kind of magical L.A. night, anyway. It was Kim's birthday yesterday, and she wanted to go to a play, as she often does, and I'd heard about this one somewhere, from one of my trusty someones, so off we went.
The theater was pay-what-you-can, a 99-seater in a building with all the romance of an Airstream in the middle of a park along the nowhere stretch of Olive Avenue west of the 5. We wouldn't even have found it--it was around back, behind the volleyball gym at the community rec center--if a couple ringers (maybe one of the search parties the theater troupe probably sends out) hadn't steered us onto the path.
But we did find it. And we paid what we could. And so the four of us got to spend the evening watching another twenty of the thousand or so most talented people on earth take an astonishing script by a playwright entirely new to me and blow most of the Broadway productions I've ever seen straight out of my memory. How even to describe it? "Our Town" in Chicago with talking clocks and escaped parakeets and a python named Moses? All I can say for sure tonight is, this was "Stoneface"-at-Sacred-Fools good. So sad and so funny and so relentlessly inventive in its staging, its (occasionally self-conscious but unfailingly winning) wordplay, its sheer joy in living,and making art out of living. Worth the price of admission--whatever you decide that should be--for the song about hating Johnny Weismuller alone.
I think tomorrow's the last night. Angelenos, if you don't go, you'll be sorry. And these people and this production are worth every penny you can give them.
The theater was pay-what-you-can, a 99-seater in a building with all the romance of an Airstream in the middle of a park along the nowhere stretch of Olive Avenue west of the 5. We wouldn't even have found it--it was around back, behind the volleyball gym at the community rec center--if a couple ringers (maybe one of the search parties the theater troupe probably sends out) hadn't steered us onto the path.
But we did find it. And we paid what we could. And so the four of us got to spend the evening watching another twenty of the thousand or so most talented people on earth take an astonishing script by a playwright entirely new to me and blow most of the Broadway productions I've ever seen straight out of my memory. How even to describe it? "Our Town" in Chicago with talking clocks and escaped parakeets and a python named Moses? All I can say for sure tonight is, this was "Stoneface"-at-Sacred-Fools good. So sad and so funny and so relentlessly inventive in its staging, its (occasionally self-conscious but unfailingly winning) wordplay, its sheer joy in living,and making art out of living. Worth the price of admission--whatever you decide that should be--for the song about hating Johnny Weismuller alone.
I think tomorrow's the last night. Angelenos, if you don't go, you'll be sorry. And these people and this production are worth every penny you can give them.
