Hanisha says that more languages a person speaks, the more perceptive they generally are, since they know how to see something through many lenses. She didn't make this up. She is working on her psychoanalysis masters and she was telling me something she has learned.
When I saw online the play TRIBES playing at The Royal Court Theatre, I knew she was the person to take. We snagged some of the last seats in today's house, the last performance with seats before I leave London (tomorrow) for the beautiful north. I hope its beautiful.
This is the video that made me drop all plans to buy tickets to a Saturday matinee:
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The play was amazing. I cried and I laughed and I felt energized. Not just becuase my own issues right now with people are so insignificant compared to what they were going through, but because for me good theatre is a cure-all. Seriously. (So why am I not cured?) And my desire all through high school to take sign language was reawakened. Why didn't I? Well, I chose Stained Glass over it. The only way to take an outside class at Franklin was to replace your sixth period. And that was the one class I wouldn't give up. Then it was STC-2. Then it was theatre at Poly. Then then then. When Sylvia says that the community is so small because the only ones who know sign language are deaf people, I thought of my mom (hi mom!) and her speaking in sign to tourists in Israel. And I thought about the actors playing Billy and Sylvia. And about mom working with the Chicago Theatre for the Deaf as an interpreter and I realized that while I'm most recently on the path to Hebrew, have the best basis and career-driven reasons for learning Spanish, I still really want to learn sign language.
Gabe is in England and she and I went to see DEATHTRAP. on Thursday. I wrote it down to see because I love Jonathon Groff and it got good reviews. The play was AY-MAZING. One of the best I have seen in a while. We got day seats, at a still massively pricey 27 quid, and therefore sat in the front row. My GOD does Jonathon Groff spit so much. Acting with him must be kinda hard when saliva and snot (he was crying) can be seen flying off his face by the front (probably few) rows. Especially when one must kiss him after that. And I would still totally do it. (So hot. So gay.) The play is...well, hard to talk about because it is a murder mystery. It's by Ira Levin, so a win so far. A playwright of murder mystery fame hasn't had a hit in 18 years. He lives with his nervous wife in New England and sometimes teaches seminars. One of his students sends him a play he has written called DEATHTRAP. A five character murder mystery in two acts. It's brilliant and the boy has no idea. No one else has read it and no one even knows he has been working on it. It's a surefire hit, but would Sidney really kill for a hit? His wife isn't so sure she knows him anymore. And the boy, Cliff, could be walking into a terrible deathtrap, carrying his only copy of the play. This we all know. After that, it gets twisted and awesome, and like all good mysteries, nothing is as it seems. It's funny and brilliantly acted and truly is full of many twists and turns and I will admit to screaming at one point (cause if I don't, Gabe will say it anyway). It was superb! I was geeking out over it all day yesterday. I was having normal conversations and yet in my head, it was all I was thinking about. I really envy people like Groff (like Amy Adams) who can play wide-eyed wonder completely convincingly. It is a skill I do not posses.
It's one of those plays that comments on itself cleverly a lot. Because the play and the play in the play are called DEATHTRAP. whenever its brilliance is mentioned, it is obviously about what we are watching at the same time. The two other characters are in the form of the lawyer/friend of Sidney's and the psychic living next door from a foreign country.
So two amazing shows this week. And the amazing keeps coming because tomorrow I leave for about 1.5 weeks of travel up northish. Tomorrow I will spend the day at Hermione's family home in the Cotswolds then go to Bath. Gabe meets me in Bath on Monday for the day then I go to Aberyswyth, Wales to hang with Ashura. Then Liverpool and Manchester and York happen before coming back to London for my final weekend. And this week my feeling of displacement in London has left me feeling kind of like shit. Which has the plus side for all my friends (hi Melaissa) and family (hi mom) that I actually am starting to want to come home. Not fully, obviously, but it's there. I think I will be glad for the "normalcy" and security of it. Whatever that means.
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