When you come across a brilliant detail in a work of fiction, you might wonder, “Where do writers come up with this stuff.”
My guess: They had lunch with my friend Rachel, a brilliant young actress with a voracious appetite for ideas and ironies. Her artistic sensitivities are finely tuned, but she is also of that rare breed so deeply into drama that “experimental plays” and “alternative theater” are far more than punch lines to her. To those of us less attuned, her enthusiasms can appear, well, not to put too fine a point on it, fall-down-and-roll-around-on-the-floor funny. Here’s a description of a play she loved:
A one- man performance, by a mime, in which the mime appears to be struggling and failing to climb a mountain. FOR TWO HOURS.
You couldn’t possibly invent a more vivid image of theatrical hell for the average human than that. It has every form of tedium known to mankind all rolled up into a hyper-dense boulder of get-me-outtahere.
Wouldn’t it be beyond perfect for a Woody Allen vehicle, where his lust for the beautiful young thing forces him to sit through two hours of mimed frustration?
It would serve him right, of course, and that would be the point.
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