Quite the intense experience, and impressively funny as well. Andrew Garfield is great. I don't think I had a favourite scene, but the one scene - across its 8 hours or what have you across the two consecutive Tuesdays on which we watched it - during which that thought flitted across my mind was the one where Prior and Harper meet for the first time 'in person' (it's actually their second encounter, counting the previous one on 'the threshold of revelation'), which I think was because they're the two most sympathetic dreamers of the play.
Also, I now better understand the bits of "Fialta" (from Bobcat) which are concerned with the play. Such as:
Also, I now better understand the bits of "Fialta" (from Bobcat) which are concerned with the play. Such as:
Stadbakken was going to be given the most expansive part in the play, the part of the dying Prior. And Indira was the angel, of course. Sands had made wings. If I hadn't loved Sands before the wings, I would have now, for they were made of the feathers and down of creatures that had to be imaginary - white and brown and long. Picture her in the dewy morning coming off the hill to wrestle down a figment, tear off its feathers, later affixing them with glue to bent clothes hangers and panty hose straps, and there you have Sands and everything about her.
Sands and Groovy played the parts of Louie and Joe, respectively, two gay men. Their interpretations of men were hilarious - strangely deep throated and spliced through with their ideas of gayness, which were like streams of joy running through.
I played a luminous, heartbroken, and uptight woman whom Joe had abandoned. I took her husband's rejection of her quite seriously, tried to imagine exactly how it would feel as I swished in my housecoat along the floor of the commons.And (although re-reading it now, I realise that, deliberately or otherwise - both are plausible, and if the former, it adds another layer to the narrator's flawed memories of his time with Sands - the line about perfectibility is misattributed to Sands as Louis, when it's actually Joe who delivers it):
And then the play began. Reuben narrated to Stadbakken what came before: love, disappointment, the crude beautiful drama of sex, Sands and Groovy vamping at love, Sands carrying on like a girl making fun of a boy making fun of a girl, with a painted mustache. She was so ridiculous and beautiful, I thought I might die. Beyond the play, the day darkened. The backdrop was the icy arms of trees, the lift of starlings against the falling sun, the day dying. When Indira's part came, we had to shout for her. She was in Utopia, arguing on her cell. She hung up the phone and came in. She began to cry as she delivered her line, which gave her part a weird veracity: "Heaven is a city much like San Francisco - more beautiful because imperilled." We carried on for a few seconds, but then realized she actually was crying, standing there.
"What's the matter?" Sands asked.
"My father, he's sick. They just told me. I have to leave tomorrow."
"Oh no!" Groovy said. And we all murmured. I looked over at Reuben. What will you do now, Reuben? What display now? What will spill out of you now? He stood so still, as the heartbroken always do, and then he went to her. He touched her wing, the safest, least intrusive part.
"Let's continue," Indira said.
And so we did.
"Since you believe the world is perfectible you find it always unsatisfying." This was Sands, as Louis. And then she kissed Groovy, as Joe. They kissed, as men kiss. I staggered inwardly. And the play wound through its tragedies easily until Stadbakken's final, deathbed lines. "You are all fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: more life." Behind his head thousands of bird took flight. He raised his arms, though dying. He loved the play, you could tell. The wind howled. And then he stood up to go hug Indira.(w/ Cass and trang)
