I was late to appreciate the theatre. At first I saw it only through my high school experience which, like the way I was introduced to Shakespeare, taught me to dislike it.
That lasted until my senior year in college when some friends put on Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Since that was almost precisely where I was intellectually, I was, to say the least, seduced. Next came O'Neill. Any trip to New York was incomplete without seeing the latest production of an O'Neill play.
Though, in the midst of all that seriousness, I had a divinity school roommate who loved musicals. So he roped me into a late night party in Greenwich Village, then arrived around 6 in the morning to stand in line for standing only tickets for that evening's performance of My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. I loved it (a guilty pleasure I rarely confess).
But somewhere in the curve of my life, perhaps when kids came along, tenure pressures ratcheted up, then administrative tasks appeared, coupled with long distance commuting, weekends doing catch up, somewhere in there the theatre stopped speaking to me.
But in recent years, we've done a few and I can hear a whisper or two. |
