So What, You Are a Theatre Critic Now Too?

Vol. 1 Issue 6

So this week I have a lot more to write about. I’m currently sitting in some German bakery/café in the Village having just gone to see a play called “In the Yellow Hour” down the street from here. The whole thing takes place in an apartment in New York, while the outside world is run by a authoritarian regime that has bombed all the major US cities and released some kind of infectious diseases killing almost everyone. There are only a handful of characters in the play, most of the story focusing on the main character, a 30-year-old female named Ellen whose husband has been missing for 53 days. Around the middle of the play we learn that her husband was picked up about 15 minutes after leaving the apartment, taken prisoner, and tortured in ways best left described by the actors.

I appreciated every character in the play and felt they served their purpose. For example, in the opening scene a deranged tramp enters the apartment, obviously uninvited. Ellen shoots him. He sits in the corner of her apartment dead for the next thirty minutes of the play. I thought this was nonsense at first. Why did she not drag him onto the hallway? Why did he not start to smell?

Later another man arrives. This man was privy to Ellen’s husband’s death and torture. The recently arrived man is in terrible shape. I think he had been castrated. He brings a letter from Ellen’s husband Paul written to console and explain. Unlike a movie where a narrator could simply have read the letter while some kind of symphonic background music played over a cheesy faux-emotive montage, in theatre, this would be has been truthful artistic suicide. This is where the director’s use of the dead tramp was excellent.

Ellen learns of her husband’s death, and so in a self inflicted hazy Demerol induced vision the dead guy from the corner comes back to life figuratively to read a letter Paul wrote to Ellen before he died, but most importantly he was reading it to the audience. It was done so tastefully that I’m sure I’m going to steal this technique in my own writing. I don’t want to be a playwright, but it’s definitely what I do best. I know, poor me. I really need to go see more theater. If it were the only damn thing I did in this city, I mean aside for work, school and ramped drinking, I would be much more satisfied. I’d rather be a theater and film critic than a writer of theatre or film. Let me know what you think of my criticism.

The set design was great, and for me one of the best parts of the play. The single room was ruinous with parts of the roof collapsing into the apartment itself. Exposed electrical wires, single light bulbs, broken glass and windows, just filth in its essence, exposed everything. The focal point of the room was a bathtub, which served as a kind of lifeline to sanity and life itself. Here was the rarity in this post-apocalyptic New York: hot water. The bathtub served as the station for the play’s closing scene where Ellen, who wants a baby more than anything, sits across from a newly acquired houseguest, a fourteen-year-old boy saying, “We are the glimmer of hope. We are about to change the world.” Why she wants her own baby so badly we do not know. Maybe philanthropically, just to continue the human race, or maybe raging hormones? The weirdest part is that she had traded a different baby, one that she had acquired earlier in the play, for this fourteen-year-old boy. Why didn’t she just keep that baby? We don’t know this.

For anyone that may wonder what the whole DrumGod thing has to do with this blog, it’s because yes, I am in a band, and yes, I play drums. In Brooklyn this is pretty much standard resume of every white middle-class male. I do like to think our band is pretty decent, but we take forever to produce new material. We are perfectionists that hate everything, so if we think something is un-amazing we throw it out; however, we have just finished recording the drum tracks for 5 new songs. 5 songs that took 1.5 years to write and 3 months to record and they are pretty effin good, and I don’t’ say this lightly. I hate my own playing, but I pulled it off somehow on these tracks. We’re still working on the rest of the arrangements. Judging by our current pace, the new tracks will be out by Spring. If anyone wants to know the name of the band they’ll have to ask in the comments. Still trying to drudge some up (comments that is).