Sundry

Updates when I feel like it, or when I am so compelled.

15 May 2024

Self care, as a regular theatre-goer, would be bringing along a cushion to each theatre known to be ergonomically inconsiderate to the bony-behinded community. I am one such gluteous minimusian, for all my hip thrust reps and protein powder breakfast lacings. I put it to you as an incontrovertible statement, not a proposition: there is simply no such thing as a comfortable wooden chair. I look to any hard-surfaced seat and know that, as magical and transporting as any ensuing experience may be as viewed from that posterior platform, it will also involve great personal suffering.

Always the problem. How to accommodate bodies and hold minds in a space.

7 May 2024

Thinking about the differences between the pan-fried review and the long-marinated review. Wishing I had the magic brain juices that would turn my cheap fried takes into elegantly seasoned ones.

15 April 2024

Never was a theatre kid, never watched Glee, have the lung capacity of a molerat in need of a strepsil, and shrink from #irl drama. What’s the ratio between introverted and extroverted theatre critics, I wonder?

Perhaps this preoccupation that I have, that has its essential final form in response-writing, is just an excuse for staring at humans and trying to understand their behaviour in a controlled environment. But also (I think about this a lot): trying to describe something as it is (according to your own perception and experience-driven truth) is so difficult. I mean, it is so impossibly hard to fix things in one’s own understanding. Anything at all! Language tries, but it always fails. It is that earnest, futile, heroic, absurd act of trying that makes it worthwhile though, for me at least. That impulse to pin down or paint an experience through words and thereby give it meaning. That frustration, that epistemological crisis, is probably what first put me onto reviewing.

13 April 2024

You know you’re at a certain kind of play when, midway through, you hear the crinkling of an elderly audience member unwrapping a lozenge. That sound goes on forever.

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Is gender-swapping in classic texts anything to make a big deal of anymore? It can be interesting, but it can also be illogical and arbitrary.

Marianne’s Streetcar Named Desire in the series Friends From College.