So, after just remembering Blindness the other day, I saw in my weekly Time Out that there was a new play adapted from Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize winning novel. I loved this book, and although I had my doubts based on a skimming of the New York Times review (I hate reading reviews and generally never even look at them, unless I know nothing about a show) I bought some tickets to the Sunday night showing.

Long story short, the play was engaging for the hour or so it lasted, but carried almost none of the weight the novel expertly maintains, but never belabors.

The most important thing missing from the equation, for me, was the narrator. His telling of the story, with his many asides and feeling of a regular Joe talking about an extraordinary circumstance, was so amazingly key to the overall mood and accessibility of the work, that omitting him turned the story into little more than a particularly harsh episode of Lost.

That said, I should remember that I did enjoy the show.

And I should, also, remember to check back at the theater at 59 east 59th for the other show running right now called Attic which was adapted from an originally Japanese play about a company that sells tiny attics for people to use for escaping reality.

I had the great fortune to check out Richard Foreman’s latest production “Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconcious Mind Is Dead!” the other night thanks to a friend of mine and I can’t believe how much I loved the thing. I had never been to a Foreman production before. I’m don’t follow theater, so I had actually never even heard of him, although now I wish I had.

Wake Up Mr. Sleepy is a combination of theater, film projection, and sound/music/voice over that “postulates the invention of the airplane (controlled by a horde of baby-doll pilots) as the death knell of the unconscious mind. Foreman is responding to a world in which visionary sages and poets are being replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable and hand-feed them to the public.” Oh, and there are aliens involved! But really, that sort of didn’t matter. Somehow, you could just watch the whole mind bogglingly bizarre show unfold, letting it all wash over you without reading into every last detail.

Out of the five of us that went it seemed as though the three guys at least liked it while the women didn’t. Odd. Did our tiny sampling suggest that women prefer a bit more narrative and traditional structure to their theater?

At any rate, I should remember to check out the next mind expanding Foreman show.

(BTW, the title of this post is something that’s repeated numerous times during the show. Being that I work in online advertising, this really stuck with me. )

Although we rarely go to Broadway shows (or because of this), my lady got me tickets to go see The Vertical Hour for Christmas. We went last Saturday and despite the not-so-hot reviews I’ve read and my sometimes complete dislike for Julianne Moore, I tried to keep an open mind.

The play is basically about the conversations and revelations had by an ex-war correspondent (Moore) on her one night visit to her current boyfriend’s (Andrew Scott) father’s (Nighy) house in a Whales.

I really loved Bill Nighy. He was both sincere and at times hilarious, but unfortunately, I just couldn’t feel anything for Moore’s character. She seemed to beg and plead for the audience to care about her problems and issues, but that may have been part of the problem. She kept saying “I” this and “me” that giving her the appearance of thinking herself so damn important. You just wanted to tell her to get over herself.

In the end, it was a great experience to check out the show and I actually did enjoy myself. I should remember to try checking out some more contemporary theater.

Swung by the Access Theatre last night to check out the intriguing sounding Standards of Decency Project “a program of nine new short plays that collectively challenge the notions of decency and obscenity.” Basically, a bunch of playwrights were asked to write short 10-15 minute plays “that included at least one of these elements—nudity, blasphemy, and violence—in a manner that is fully warranted and justified (that is, that avoids mere gratuitousness or sensationalism), while also intended to offend conventional standards of decency.”

Although the plays ranged from serious to hilarious and artsy to silly, there was a lot of good stuff there. Blasphemy seemed like the favorite of the night with the last piece about three southern girls having a bachelorette party for themselves because the next day they were going to marry Jesus being extremely funny and amazingly well cast. Coming (uhm…) in second was nudity which found nude guys spending an awful lot of time on stage in two of the plays both times discussing religion and a fantastic piece with a boy’s school professor discussing the “three parts of a woman” with an appealing nude, female assistant. Violence was less well presented and the only one which I thought fell flat.

I actually had very low expectations and was going on more of a whim than anything else, but I have to admit, aside from a couple shorts which I could have done without, it was a great little (no pun intended) show.