The loss of a loved one tears a permanent hole in the fabric of our existence. We learn in time to look away from it and walk around it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The past, good and bad alike, is with us for as long as our memories are with us—and who in his heart of hearts would truly want it to be otherwise?
“I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.”
A scene from My Favorite Year, directed by Richard Benjamin, written by Norman Steinberg and Dennis Palumbo, and starring Mark-Linn Baker and Jessica Harper:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast of Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play. Here’s an excerpt.
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George Street Playhouse is webcasting “It’s Only a Play,” Terrence McNally’s seven-actor farce about what happens at the party immediately following the Broadway premiere of a play that turns out to be awful in every conceivable way (though the particulars of its awfulness are shrewdly left to us to imagine). First performed in 1982, “It’s Only a Play” finally made it to Broadway in 2014 in a revival starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick that ran for 274 performances. It was, needless to say, Messrs. Lane and Broderick who filled the seats, but I’ve since reviewed a 2016 staging by Florida’s GableStage that proved that McNally’s play needs no stars to shine.
This production, directed by Kevin Cahoon and taped to broadcast-quality standards in an empty theater at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, is as delightful as its predecessors. Not only are Mr. Cahoon’s staging and the cinematography and editing of Michael Boylan exemplary, but every other element of this production is first-class, including the cast, all of whose members take care of comic business with contagious zest….
“Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”
