“It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.”

Aristotle (paraphased by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda)

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review George Street Playhouse’s webcast of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates. Here’s an excerpt.

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The premise of Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates,” which is being webcast by New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse, is all but infallible. It’s a one-act monologue delivered by Haley Walker (played by Andréa Burns ), a charmingly ditsy, compulsively talkative restaurant manager and single mother of a certain age who owns 600 pairs of shoes, has been on far too many disastrous dates to count, but decides to try again after a long stretch on the shelf. The lights go up on a fluffy bedroom piled high with shoeboxes—Haley is in the middle of a frenzied search for the right pair to wear on the date on which she will be going at evening’s end—and the action, such as it is, consists of Haley’s telling us the labyrinthine story of her life, which includes a climactic skirmish with the Romanian Mafia and the New York Police Department. While that may sound slight in the telling, “Bad Dates” never fails to give great pleasure in the hands of an appealing actor and a solid production team, and Ms. Burns and her George Street colleagues are all that and much, much more….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Bad Dates:

Ginette Neveu plays the closing section of Ernest Chausson’s Poème. This rare silent film footage is synchronized with Neveu’s commercial recording of the piece:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”

Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo

“I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, May 4, 1957

Rudyard Kipling speaks about writing and truth in an undated film clip from the Thirties. This is thought to be the only surviving sound footage of Kipling:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”

Rudyard Kipling, “On the Strength of a Likeness”

From 2005:

I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O’Connor didn’t know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. “We had a busy morning!” she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes….

Read the whole thing here.