Archives for December 31, 2018

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that Mrs. T’s chronic illness has put us through the wringer of late. Among other things, she spent two weeks in a Connecticut hospital in November (we ate our Thanksgiving dinner there). Since then, we’ve shuttled between Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia, seeing doctors, going to occasional shows, and generally doing our damnedest to keep our heads as far above water as possible.

Alas, Mrs. T blew a pair of gaskets on the night after Christmas. The first one, a middle-of-the-night gall-bladder attack, forced us to drive to the emergency room of the smallish hospital one town over from our place in Connecticut. Then, a few short hours after the ER doctors there got her pain (which was appalling) under control and sent us back home to rest up, she suddenly and unexpectedly went into what is known in polite parlance as a respiratory crisis.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I nearly lost Mrs. T that afternoon. Fortunately for us both, I kept my cool and did the right things in the right order, and before long—though it seemed like a hell of a lot longer—she was resting more or less comfortably in the intensive-care unit of UConn Health Center’s John Dempsey Hospital. I’m sorry to say that she’s still in the hospital, but greatly relieved to be able to report that her condition is now stable and that she is slowly but surely improving.

Around the same time that all this was happening, ArtsJournal updated the system with which its bloggers, myself among them, make and edit their postings. Talk about lousy timing! Not only was I unable to take even a couple of hours off to master the new system, but I was far too busy to write any new postings, much less figure out how to encode them. I didn’t even have time to upload “teaser” postings for my Wall Street Journal drama and “Sightings” columns, or for the two December episodes of Three on the Aisle. It was all I could do to get the columns themselves written and filed and the podcasts taped and dropped.

It helped that I’d already uploaded a month’s worth of advance almanac entries and arts-related videos, all of which continued to be posted automatically during my inescapable absence from the blog. Everything else, though, went over the side so that I could look after Mrs. T while simultaneously hitting my magazine and newspaper deadlines. We weren’t able to put up a Christmas tree or exchange any presents, and it’s been a couple of weeks since I last saw any shows, in New York or anywhere else.

This is, as it happens, the second year in a row that God snickered at the elaborate holiday plans that Mrs. T and I had so painstakingly and proudly made. In 2017, we fully expected to spend Christmas on Florida’s Sanibel Island, something that we’ve both wanted to do for years. Instead, she was listed for a double lung transplant at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, meaning that we had to hang up our traveling shoes and wait for the Big Call.

We are, needless to say, still waiting, there not being nearly enough donor lungs to go around. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, though, that there are far worse fates. As I wrote in this space around this time last year:

I won’t try to tell you that we’re not disappointed to be up north instead of down south. Seven winters on Sanibel Island have accustomed the two of us to the snowbird’s life, and we’re still having a fair amount of trouble getting used to the fact that it’s always cold outside. On the other hand, we’re also profoundly grateful, not just on this particular day but on every single day of our lives. It doesn’t much matter where Mrs. T and I are, or what the weather is like: the important thing is that we’re together. What’s more, her doctors tell us that we have a reasonable chance of being together for many more years to come.

All this remains blessedly true.

Yes, I miss Florida terribly, just as I miss my beloved family in Missouri, whom I will be unable to visit again until after Mrs. T has recovered from the surgery that will eventually install a new pair of lungs in her chest. Neither will I be seeing Our Girl in Chicago, at least not in Chicago. What’s more, I’ve had to miss a lot of promising out-of-town shows that I would otherwise have reviewed, and I also had to forgo seeing Barry Shabaka Henley perform Satchmo at the Waldorf in New Orleans (though I gather that he knocked it out of the park). But what of it? It is an infinitely greater pleasure to be able to eat Thanksgiving dinner with your life’s companion, even if you have to do it in a hospital room. We may not have had a Christmas tree this year, but we had each other, and still do and always will. Placed next to that shining reality, nothing else matters in the least.

As for the blog, I’m only just starting to get the hang of the new system. To that end, I hope (not plan!) to spend part of the coming week posting and tweeting teasers to the various columns and podcasts that came out while I was otherwise occupied. They aren’t as fresh as usual, but I hope you’ll still find them readable and listenable.

And now, if I may, please allow me to post, as is my custom, the Ogden Nash poem that I like to share on this date, followed by my customary end-of-the-year good wishes:

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.

Tonight’s December Thirty-First,
Something is about to burst.

The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

If, like me, you have a sneaking suspicion that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, then I hope that the year to come treats you not unkindly, and that your lives, like mine, will be warmed by hope and filled with love—and if you feel otherwise, then I wish for you the very same thing. We all deserve to be loved on New Year’s Eve.

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Mitchell’s Christian Singers perform “Traveling Shoes” in New York in 1934:

In the three weeks that have gone by since Mrs. T’s hospital stays kept me from putting up new postings, I’ve reviewed four shows for The Wall Street Journal. One of them, Signature Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, is still open, and I strongly commend it to your attention.

Here’s an excerpt from my review, which you can read here.

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It was Noël Coward who gave one of the best pieces of theatrical advice I’ve ever heard: “Always come out of another hole.” Regardless of whether Lynn Nottage knows that line, she definitely lives by it. Just three months after “Intimate Apparel,” her career-making drama about the unhappy love life of an illiterate turn-of-the-century seamstress, opened off Broadway in 2004, Playwrights Horizons gave the New York premiere of “Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine,” a saber-toothed satire about a snooty member of the black bourgeoisie whose husband siphons out her bank account and blows town, leaving her busted flat and very pregnant. I well remember how flummoxed I was to discover that the author of a play as bleak as “Intimate Apparel” could also be really, reallyfunny.

Four more full-length plays by Ms. Nottage have come to New York since then, each one different in style from its predecessors and each successful in its own individual way. They have established her as a fixed star on the horizon of American theater, one of our best playwrights and the winner of two well-deserved Pulitzers. Indeed, she’s been around long enough that her older plays are now starting to receive high-profile New York revivals: Signature Theatre is mounting two this season, the first of which is “Fabulation.” I confess to having wondered how funny it would be the second time around. Comedy dates faster than tragedy, and I wasn’t sure how well “Fabulation” would hold up. I needn’t have worried, for this staging, directed with farceworthy propulsion by Lileana Blain-Cruz, is full of comic punch—wrapped, as is Ms. Nottage’s wont, around a hard core of tough-mindedness.

Undine (Cherise Boothe) is a refugee from deepest Brooklyn who once was known as Sharona Watkins. Hers is a tale of unquenchable ambition: She landed a boarding-school scholarship, changed her name, pretended that her unpresentable family had “perished in a fire,” launched a “very fierce boutique PR firm catering to the vanity and confusion of the African-American nouveau riche” and spent the next decade and a half kissing up and kicking down. But then the money ran out, and now Undine, dropped by her hoity-toity pseudo-friends, has been forced to slink back home to the projects, hole up with her folks, return to “my original Negro state” and decide on her next move.

What happens next is, up to a point, predictable, but never too much so….

PYLADES I’ll take care of you.

ORESTES It’s rotten work.

PYLADES Not to me. Not if it’s you.

Euripides, Orestes (translated by Anne Carson)