There’s something exhilarating about watching great actors perform.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like watching Michael Jordan sink a basket with tenths of a second left on the clock, or watching Jeff Beck wring notes from his guitar.\u00c2\u00a0 Surrounded by mediocrity, our eyes bug out when we’re exposed to brilliance.<\/p>\n
Everybody wants us to settle for mediocrity.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s good enough.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes money.\u00c2\u00a0 Everybody else is happy, why aren’t you?<\/p>\n
"God Of Carnage" was on the periphery of my vision.\u00c2\u00a0 Theatre takes place in New York.\u00c2\u00a0 By time the production gets to Los Angeles the buzz is gone and so are the stars.\u00c2\u00a0 But in this case, the stars came back.<\/p>\n
Marcia Gay Harden overacts in the beginning.\u00c2\u00a0 But then she crosses that line from well-behaved to I don’t give a fuck and we’re riveted, because we’ve all been there.<\/p>\n
Jeff Daniels will forever get a pass from me because of his wonderful performance in "Something Wild", going from someone who can’t be honest with himself to one who rises to the occasion, after deciding to let go and go with the flow, which is so difficult for those of us who grew up saddled with the expectations of our parents, going to college and getting a good job and doing what we should do instead of succumbing to temptation.\u00c2\u00a0 But Mr. Daniels is only great here.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas the other actors transcend.<\/p>\n
Like Hope Davis.\u00c2\u00a0 When she blossoms near the end of the play, drunk on rum, with long arms and legs extended, you’re exposed to the inner life of those who are so busy toeing the line that we have no idea who they really are.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, alcohol helps, but unlike Meryl Streep, we don’t see Ms. Davis acting.\u00c2\u00a0 She has become the role.<\/p>\n
And then there’s James Gandolfini.\u00c2\u00a0 Arguably the biggest star of the ensemble after the triumph of "The Sopranos", the best drama ever made for television.\u00c2\u00a0 At first Mr. Gandolfini is so busy playing against type that we’re disappointed, but when he finally explodes and lets go we’re frightened the same way we were in that Mafia show.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re just not sure of his limits, we’re just not sure he’s going to color inside the lines.<\/p>\n
Gandolfini claims he’s a Neanderthal.<\/p>\n
This is after Daniels says his son is a savage.<\/p>\n
The piercing of the veil to honesty is striking.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s when art touches us.\u00c2\u00a0 When it speaks a truth that normally goes unspoken.<\/p>\n
There’s that playful moment when Ms. Harden and Mr. Gandolfini are making fun of the other couple, imitating them.\u00c2\u00a0 If you haven’t been here, I feel sorry for your relationship.\u00c2\u00a0 Your spouse should be a co-conspirator, someone on your side who you can laugh at the absurdity of life with.<\/p>\n
But then it all becomes so complicated.\u00c2\u00a0 Spouses switch sides.\u00c2\u00a0 Enemies become friends.\u00c2\u00a0 Convention is cast aside and truth is revealed.<\/p>\n
But the truth that scared me most emanated from Mr. Gandolfini’s lips.<\/p>\n
It’s in reaction to his wife’s description of him.\u00c2\u00a0 Ms. Harden says:<\/p>\n
\n"I live with a man who has decided once and for all that life is synonymous with mediocrity. It’s very hard to live with a man who’s walled himself up in that notion, who doesn’t want to change anything, who never gets excited about anything."<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nLife, ain’t it a bitch.<\/p>\n
Mr. Gandolfini’s character is a wholesaler.\u00c2\u00a0 Of household goods.\u00c2\u00a0 When he embellishes his identity by making reference to a fictional employee in Secaucus we’re reminded not only of the lies we tell to boost our status, but that we need to do so because inside we’re insecure.\u00c2\u00a0 Furthermore, you wake up one day and ask if this is it, is this why you struggle, for what? To be miserable every single day?<\/p>\n
Then Mr. Gandolfini says:<\/p>\n
\n\n"Children soak up our lives, then they blow them apart. Children lead us to disaster, it’s like a law of nature. You see these young couples, laughing all the way to the altar, and you think they don’t know. Poor bastards don’t know a thing. They’re happy. Nobody briefs you in the beginning. This army buddy of mine is going to have a kid with his new girlfriend. I say to him, a kid at our age, what are you stupid? You got ten, fifteen good years left before you get cancer or have a stroke and you’re going to saddle yourself with a fucking kid?"<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nWhew!<\/p>\n
Nobody tells you that marriage is misery.<\/p>\n
Then again, nobody wants to admit that life is so terrible you just don’t want to go through it alone.\u00c2\u00a0 All the petty losses, if you can’t share them with someone, if you can’t blow off steam, you’re unable to carry on.\u00c2\u00a0 Same with the triumphs.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s truth in that cliche that life’s victories have no meaning if you’ve got no one to share them with.<\/p>\n
Then you die.<\/p>\n
A friend of mine died.\u00c2\u00a0 We weren’t best buds, but we knew each other and he was barely sixty and ultra-rich but it didn’t matter, the Big C got him.\u00c2\u00a0 Seems that sometime after fifty, maybe a little bit after sixty, the Big C looms in everybody’s life. No one escapes.<\/p>\n
Makes you wonder about the time you spent in the sun and the food you ate and the air you breathed but it’s too late, those cells are mutating and you’re struggling to stay alive, even though only moments before you weren’t sure life was worth living.<\/p>\n
You see we’re all drowning.\u00c2\u00a0 And when we realize this we want to shed baggage, cut commitments and rise to the surface. We’re gulping for air, we don’t want to be brought back down.\u00c2\u00a0 We want to have hope, we want to believe.<\/p>\n
But it’s hard to have hope.\u00c2\u00a0 In a world where when you’re in school everybody tells you what to do, and thereafter no one gives a shit.<\/p>\n
How do you make sense of it all?<\/p>\n
Through art.<\/p>\n
Tickets were not cheap, but it costs more to see a hit musical act and the venues are bigger and it’s all business and too often soulless.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas theatre, which is nearly ignored in America, can touch your heart and stay with you for days, because of the truth involved.<\/p>\n
I’m sure it’s great to be a star.\u00c2\u00a0 Whether it be movies or music.<\/p>\n
But it’s really about the performance.<\/p>\n
And the performance is all about the underlying work.\u00c2\u00a0 The play, the songs.\u00c2\u00a0 No matter how great you are, if the words are substandard, you fail, even if you get paid.<\/p>\n
But when the script and the delivery align, not only do the actors soar, but the audience too.<\/p>\n
I was soaring last night.<\/p>\n
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There’s something exhilarating about watching great actors perform.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like watching Michael Jordan sink a basket with tenths of a second left on the clock, or watching Jeff Beck wring notes from his guitar.\u00c2\u00a0 Surrounded by mediocrity, our eyes bug out when we’re exposed to brilliance. Everybody wants us to settle for mediocrity.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-theatre"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-168","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4224"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4226,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224\/revisions\/4226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}