I’m very, very pleased to report that Mrs. T is getting better, slowly but—it appears—surely. Two weeks after her release from New York-Presbyterian Hospital, her stamina is gradually increasing and her spirits are quite good. It helps greatly, of course, that she’s (A) not dead and (B) back in our New York apartment again. She spent the better part of a month in a pair of windowless intensive-care units in which the doctors and nurses, competent and caring though they were, seem to have gone out of their way to wake her up whenever she fell asleep. As for the food…well, we’ll skip over that. Things are much nicer at home, where we can sit on the couch together, watch movies, and dine on home cooking, some of it prepared by the two of us and some by a neighborhood friend.
So far Mrs. T hasn’t felt up to leaving the apartment for anything other than follow-up visits to her doctors at New York-Presbyterian, but we’re planning a visit to our Connecticut farmhouse, where we’ll drive around the countryside, open the mail, and enjoy the quiet pleasures of being elsewhere. We’ve also scheduled an October visit to Philadelphia’s Penn Transplant Institute in order to resume the process of getting her listed for transplant there (she’s already listed in New York).
My own life, which was turned upside down when my beloved spouse was taken ill without warning in Cape May last month, has started to right itself. I’m seeing friends and going to shows again, and later today I’ll be taping the latest in an occasional series of podcasts in which Titus Techera and I talk about films (we’re discussing Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground). As for Three on the Aisle, which has been on a brief hiatus, Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are recording a brand-new episode next week.
To the countless people who sent their good wishes to the two of us, we are and will always be grateful beyond words. You warmed our hearts at a time when the world looked dark. Yes, we still have a long, unpredictable slog ahead of us, but we are both full of hope.
David Staller is best known as the artistic director of Project Shaw, a series of semi-staged concert readings of the 60-odd plays of George Bernard Shaw that he has presented monthly in Manhattan since 2006. But he has also directed fully staged off-Broadway versions of several Shaw plays, including the Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2012 revival of “Man and Superman” and a 2016 production of “Widower’s Houses” mounted in collaboration with the now-defunct TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, both of which were not merely excellent but exceptionally memorable. Now Mr. Staller has taken on “Heartbreak House,” one of Shaw’s most challenging plays, with altogether extraordinary results.
Unlike the other “Heartbreak Houses” that I’ve reviewed, all of which were essentially traditional in approach, this version, which runs for a coruscating two hours and 40 minutes, is a conceptual staging, one whose ingenious framing device intensifies the effect of Shaw’s text instead of smothering it. Inspired by a wartime performance of the play in which Hermione Gingold took part during the London Blitz of 1940, it is set in a theater basement that has been lined with sandbags and turned into an air-raid shelter. As the sirens howl, the occupants of the theater take cover, and the actors who had been performing for them upstairs now entertain their captive audience by improvising a version of “Heartbreak House” using the props stored in the shelter.
