Archives for June 22, 2009

Mrs. T and I flew to Chicago last week to see Writers’ Theatre’s production of A Minister’s Wife, a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida by Austin Pendleton, the author of Orson’s Shadow, and Joshua Schmidt, the composer of Adding Machine. (If you go to the show, eat at Prairie Grass Cafe first.) I had a cold when we left New York, Mrs. T caught it the day after we arrived in Chicago, and it was raining throughout most of our two-night stay, so instead of lining up at Hot Doug’s and paying a visit to the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, we holed up in a hotel room across the highway from Glencoe, the suburb where Writers’ Theatre is located.
The sun came out long enough on Friday for us to drive to Ravine Bluffs Development, a Glencoe neighborhood that contains six Frank Lloyd Wright houses built in 1915, all of them beautiful, most in good repair, and two for sale. (The second, alas, is being sold “as is,” meaning that it may be bought for the land and torn down.)
We returned to the East Coast the next day and headed in different directions, Mrs. T to Connecticut and I to New York, where I had planned to see Twelfth Night in Central Park. No such luck: Sunday’s performance was rained out, though not before I got soaked to the skin. Tomorrow we meet again, this time to catch Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, one of our favorite summer stops. Then I fly to the West Coast to see shows in Los Angeles and San Diego and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. From there I’ll be on the move more or less continuously until I report to Santa Fe to rehearse The Letter, which opens on July 25.
I get tired just thinking about all those plane rides, though I have something even more horrendous awaiting me in December: I’ll be speaking about Pops on consecutive nights in New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. I’ll also be appearing in Boston, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is in the process of scheduling additional speaking trips to New Orleans, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Be careful what you ask for!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to write a drama column, pick up my laundry, pack a bag, and catch a train. Or is it a plane?
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Here’s a video about Ravine Bluffs:

“When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.”
Anton Chekhov, letter to Maxim Gorky (Jan. 3, 1899)