I went from having a fairly open couple of weeks in mid-March to cramming in a bunch of things and will be out most of the time until April. Even April is starting to get busy, as I saw several nights that I might stop by Hirut if nothing else is going on. I do hope that most of these nights I can just bike over, assuming that the weather holds and we don't get any significant snow. The Rex hasn't even posted its shows for April, and there will surely be a few things I want to see there.
Anyway, I found out from a blurb in The Star that Assembly Theatre hosts a George F. Walker play called Syndrome. This appears to be a world premiere. (I think Walker has retired his blog and now seems to focus on Substack, so it's harder for me to keep track of his productions.) It is another play about the crisis in urban education. This one appears to be written for teens, so may pull back a little from some of the nihilism of his darker pieces, though several of his recent pieces have ended on an upbeat note. Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing it (and not finding out that I just missed it, as happened to me a few times). It runs through this week at Assembly Theatre, with more info here. Assembly has another play happening in late March into very early April called Anywhere, which was a big Fringe hit in 2018. I don't remember seeing this, though I might have. 2018 was the year I put on my own play at the Fringe (Final Exam), and while I did see quite a few shows that summer at Fringe, my attention was on getting my work up and running. Anyway, Leroy Street Theatre is involved and Cass Van Wyck is directing (she actually played one of the roles during the Fringe run, making me think I didn't go, as I probably would have remembered seeing her). So I think I will go. The actors are actually alternating roles, which is an interesting idea. I guess if I love it, I might try to see it with the roles reversed, but I somehow doubt I'll have the time.
Thurs. I am off to see the puppets of Little Willy at Canadian Stage. This has been on the books (my books) for some time.* If the show is extremely short (apparently there is a lot of improvisation and it can run from 45 minutes to nearly 2 hours!), then I will be tempted to go to Bad Dog for a comedy show that's part of Sketch Fest, though I suspect I won't, esp. as it means backtracking significantly. I am debating between two different comedy sketch shows for Friday night, both over at the Theatre Centre. I wish they had the schedule set up so I could do both, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. I have not booked that as of yet.
Sat. I have to bring my kitten back to the vet for a quick look to see if all went well from her surgery. (I had her spayed. She seems to be recovering quite well. Surprisingly, she has been much more affectionate lately, often trying to sleep next to me when I am crashing on the couch. Just like her brother, she managed to knock her cone off. I'm glad that will be coming off for good on Sat., as I can put the covers back on the litter box.) I have to figure out where I will fit in the gym or swimming, though I am leaning towards going to the gym early on Sat., but I will actually have to commit to getting over on time, and then swimming at Jimmie Simpson on Sunday around noon. (This will work out reasonably well if I can bike, but I see they are forecasting possible snow on Sunday, which would really throw a wrench in those plans.) I don't have a lot planned for the afternoon, but I would like to try to get to some of the art galleries like 401 Richmond and then one or two in Yorkville. I am off to see The Herald at Buddies in the evening, which looks like it should be pretty wild.
Interestingly, I overlooked the fact that had a Bach concert scheduled at Koerner Hall for Sunday, and then overbooked myself with Imm-Permanent Resident at Factory. (I think this was something I had tried to see at Theatre Centre on an earlier run, but it should be a bit more polished now.) They were gracious enough to move the ticket to next Thurs., so that week is starting to fill up a bit now... Then I will need to head over to Dovercourt for the Warm Reading event. (I have the next chunk of my play going up in April, but I will use the time this Sunday to try to finish casting!)
I have written on and off about my new Fringe play. I did a pretty substantial rewrite, collapsing two couples into just one, collapsing this down to 4 scenes (from 8 or so) and elevating one character to be a second focal point. In general, the feedback has been good. While it can definitely still be improved, I feel that this is now something that actors can sign on for without any reservations, which helps me in recruiting the rest of the cast and a stage manager, though I am also hoping the director can help a bit with that...) Interestingly, there is an opportunity to have a script developed by the Coal Mine team, but they only want scripts with 5 actors, and most of what I write nowadays is 7+ parts, so not economical at all! I'm debating doing a deep rewrite on a piece that I wrote back in Chicago called Corporate Codes of Conduct (or sometime Corporate Codes of Contact), but I always really wanted to call it Yellow Fever Dream, though I didn't dare. This is after the second half of the play where the main character is sick and his new Asian girlfriend (that he met through work, as one does, naturally, despite it being against company policy) keeps dropping by. The first half was supposedly all this clever stuff about code-breaking and cryptography, heavily inspired by Stoppard's Arcadia. I think the only way this would work would be to start from him being sick in bed (the way the 2nd act started) and then take anything that actually worked from the first act and have it be these distorted flashbacks. I think this would make it much closer to Miller's Broken Glass, though maybe I am confusing this with a completely different Miller play, After the Fall. (It looks like there is a revival of Broken Glass going on in London right now, but I managed to see this in North York in 2017, though clearly my memory is a bit spotty. I saw Eclipse Theatre doing After the Fall in Chicago even earlier than that, though I seem to not have scanned my program sadly...) I don't really have the time to rework this (with a deadline in early April), but it is a bit of an interesting challenge, so I'll probably at least make the attempt. Famous last words...
I may have mentioned that I did finish up Faulkner's The Wild Palms. It was overall pretty good with a strong focus on people just trying to get by, buffeted by much larger societal forces. Almost none of the plot about the young couple makes sense in a society where abortion is legal (though we will now start getting a bunch of tragic novels about life for women in post-Roe America due to the contemptible Supreme Court justices). Tess Slesinger's novel, The Unpossessed, came out in 1934, beating Faulkner's The Wild Palms slightly to the punch (1939) in terms of being an early and somewhat daring novel in tackling abortion when it was not legal in the US. I'm actually a bit surprised that I hadn't heard more about this aspect of The Wild Palms, though I suppose I wasn't really searching for anything along those lines. I did finally watch Varda's La Pointe Courte, which was inspired by The Wild Palms, though mostly in terms of its formal structure and not much about its story line. I'm now sort of in the final stretches of reading all the core Faulkner. I probably will skip his first novels, as well as Pylon, but later this year I will probably read Sanctuary and the follow-up Requiem for a Nun. At that point, I would only have The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion left to go, and I may aim for 2027 to read the Snopes Trilogy.
I'm trying to watch a few Bunuel films before I need to get them back to the library. Interestingly, I ordered a copy of Diary of a Chambermaid, and the copy I got was from the VPL collection. I double-checked that this was not supposed to be in circulation. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find this copy.** It's not with the French or the Spanish DVDs on the shelves. This isn't one of the ones I had pulled out to watch (and are currently MIA). I think what I probably should do is just pull down all the books in front of the DVDs, and take photos so that I can keep track of which DVDs I have (and start working my way slowly through them, as it is absurd that I own this huge film library and watch so little of it). As it happens, I saw Diary of a Chambermaid at TIFF, so I don't need to watch it immediately, but I want to know where it is in case I want to watch it a second time. I need to watch the other Bunuel films I have borrowed before Sun. when I will be returning everything to Robarts (and possibly donating a few DVDs by Chabrol, Rohmer and Godard (the last one was support to replace a damaged DVD in the TPL system, but they stupidly will not accept it and all donations go into their book sale)).
I did manage to finish the Winterson book but wasn't that impressed by it. Then I moved on to Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor. This is perhaps the most playful Nabokov novel I have read, heavily inspired by Joyce's Ulysses. The early Russian novels have largely left me cold, and I didn't think Pnin was nearly as hilarious as a lot of people do. (The same is definitely true for Amis's Lucky Jim, which I didn't like at all!) I could sort of appreciate Lolita but didn't love it, for sure. But I really am digging Ada. It's quite quirky that this is set in an alternative universe where Russian influence over Alaska and the Yukon and perhaps even further south is unbroken. I have no idea if Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union was directly inspired by Ada, but certainly Chabon is an admirer of Nabokov, so quite possibly this is where the seeds were planted. My march through Nabokov has been fairly slow, but the fact that this novel is on my wavelength gives me a bit more push to keep going. Given that Transparent Things is very short and seems very much in the same vein as Ada, I think I will try to read it in the very near future. I probably am just going to skip Glory. I'm a bit torn between going back to his first "English" novels or just going to Pale Fire, which is probably the most "important" of the novels that I haven't read. I'm not sure I ever will reread Lolita, but I might in my 70s, and, if so, I will read The Enchanter first (which was a "warm up" to Lolita and which has the benefit of being fairly short). I'm going to skip Look at the Harlequins! I suppose there is a reasonable chance I'll try to read his memoir, Speak, Memory someday, but it is quite a low priority.
Anyway, my immediate reading looks like this: alternating between Ada and this book on mega-projects which I promised to review for an academic journal, when I hit Part 2 of Ada, I will take a detour and read Shulz's The Street of Crocodiles, then finish up Ada, Murakami's The City and Its Uncertain Walls (which will probably be overdue from the library by then and I can't renew it any more), O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Shteyngart's Vera or Faith, Nabokov's Transparent Things, Sorokin's The Queue, Offill's Weather, Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets and Reva's Endling. Even this is probably planning out too far (esp. as my reading time on the TTC will be drastically cut by then), but it's good to have a bit of a plan, even if I do depart from it frequently. For instance, if I decide to skim Miller's After the Fall and Broken Glass for good measure...
So that's what I expect to get up to in the next while...
* I briefly looked into switching Little Willy to next week and going to see Tafelmusik's program of Bach cantatas. (And indeed I had a free ticket to a different Bach cantata program put on by the Toronto Consort, but had to give it back because it conflicted with Warm Reads.) But it ultimately seemed to much of a hassle, and I find that I just don't care that much for cantatas. I am possibly going to go to one cantata concert at the Toronto Bach Festival, but that is probably more than enough.
* I finally tracked this down. Yea! One small win against entropy...
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