Last night was one of those what-a-great-town-this-is kinda nights. My friend Evan and I started out at the Laura Pels [B] at 7:30PM seeing Roundabout's gorgeous production of Glass Menagerie, then headed over to the Westway Diner [C] where we met Andrew after his own performance for a quick dinner, then walked a block and a half to the Laurie Beechman Theatre (underneath the West Bank Cafe) [D] to catch Jackie Beat's show. Actually, I left something out. The evening started at 6PM when Evan and I threw down a couple of shots of Quervo at Happy Hour at Posh [A], a cute little gay bar whose name is apparently meant to be ironic. (In the Alanis Morissette usage, of course.)
All of it -- tacky gay bar, Judith Ivey in a classic Tennessee Williams masterpiece, greasy diner food and completely inappropriate and wildly irreverent drag humor -- was within easy walking distance. How great is that? Here's a little map of our trajectory to drive the point home. (Just think of this as a little bloggy Powerpoint expression.)
It got me thinking, actually about a lot of things. We lament the death of old New York -- the New York of, frankly, characters like Tennessee Williams himself: outsiders, outcasts, misanthropes and gender-benders. And, of course, much of it is gone. Jackie Beat took a moment in the show to lament (to great comic effect) the fact that every time she plays a venue it seems to close. She rattled off just three of many that I know I miss: Fez, The Cutting Room and The Zipper Theatre. So there's no doubt that NYC has changed.
But it was also somehow perfect to see Jackie's show after having seen Glass Menagerie, which, let's face it, is essentially Tennessee Williams' love song to the outcast. Both the character of Tom (who in this production is probably more overtly Tenn himself than in any other I've seen) and his sister and his mother don't fit in and never have a hope of ever doing so. The tragedy of his mother Amanda stems from her desperate yearning to do just that: fit in.
A friend of mine once had a temp gig assistant editing the journals of Tennessee Williams and I remember her reading to me from the galleys. One line sticks in my memory, although I'm sure I'm botching it. But it went something like this.
Home at last after another 6 hours of futile pursuit of love in all sorts of places one would never in a million years expect to find it. Oh well. I expect in spite of myself, I'll be out doing it all over again tomorrow.
Apologies to Tenn for my paraphrasing, but you get the point. He and Jackie Beat and all the rest of us outcasts have a lot more in common than we might imagine.
In one of the high points of Jackie Beat's show last night, she sang a re-interpretation of the old Mac Davis song, "In the Ghetto" which she turns into a tribute to the long-lost gay ghettos of the 20th Century. Dripping with irony (the actual kind, not the Morissette brand), she turned to the audience after finishing the song and added, "Well at least, soon, we'll all have the right to marry. " And the point was not lost on anyone sitting in the Laurie Beechman. We may be assimilated, we may be marginally accepted but... what have we lost in the process?
Perhaps we'll never know.
